Author: Hannah Gómez

Hannah Gómez is a former independent school librarian and now works remotely as a librarian consultant/teacher. She also teaches fitness and writes things. She is on Twitter @shgmclicious

2015 Morris Award: An Interview with Finalist Leslye Walton

Each year, YALSA’s Morris Award honors a debut book published by a first-time author writing for teens and celebrating impressive new voices in young adult literature. The award morris_seal_finwinner will be announced at the ALA Midwinter Meeting Youth Media (YMA) Awards on Monday, Feb. 2, 2015. Join us for a live webcast of the YMA Awards press conference or follow I Love Libraries on Twitter or Facebook to be among the first to know the 2015 winners. The official hashtag for the 2015 Youth Media Awards is  #ALAyma.

Tava lavenderoday’s interview is with finalist Leslye Walton, author of The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender. I was so excited to ask Leslye some questions about magic realism…and baked goods, thanks to one of my students!

If you haven’t read the book already, here is the publisher blurb:

Foolish love appears to be the Roux family birthright, an ominous forecast for its most recent progeny, Ava Lavender. Ava—in all other ways a normal girl—is born with the wings of a bird.

In a quest to understand her peculiar disposition and a growing desire to fit in with her peers, sixteen-year old Ava ventures into the wider world, ill-prepared for what she might discover and naïve to the twisted motives of others. Others like the pious Nathaniel Sorrows, who mistakes Ava for an angel and whose obsession with her grows until the night of the Summer Solstice celebration.

That night, the skies open up, rain and feathers fill the air, and Ava’s quest and her family’s saga build to a devastating crescendo.

Congratulations on your Morris nomination! I absolutely loved your book. It was just beautiful! I (and my colleagues and students) were struck by the multigenerational story and how adult the voice seemed. It felt more mature and reflective than your average YA protagonist narrating from a more immediate and younger perspective. Did you always think you were writing YA? Or did you just write and see which publishers were interested?

Originally, The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender wasn’t intended for the YA market. I felt the writing was too lyrical, too chalked full of metaphors for the typical teenaged reader. But after a long, tough road of going-nowhere, my agent, the luminous Bernadette Baker-Baughman, reminded me of all the beautiful, highly literary YA novels out there. After I stopped resisting, I think we sold the novel in a week. Ava Lavender certainly covers some dark and tragic themes—as do so many other great YA novels out there—but it’s also very much a young adult book, and looking back, I wish I had recognized that a bit earlier than I had. Continue reading 2015 Morris Award: An Interview with Finalist Leslye Walton

Midseason TV Replacements – Readalikes, Part II

More new television and more book recommendations for you try! Read on to get the dish on all the recently premiered or upcoming midseason shows. If you missed the first part, click here to see last week’s post.

princess-bride-bookGalavant (ABC) – starring Joshua Sasse
Having recently started, this miniseries mashes up Once Upon a Time, The Princess Bride and Glee and offers a silly medieval-inspired show complete with music and a ton of guest stars. The protagonist, Galavant, is on a quest to regain his true love, stolen from him by a prince. You can catch up with the series online and then watch on Sunday nights.
Readalikes:

  • Avalon High by Meg Cabot
  • The Princess Bride by William Goldman
  • Princess for Hire by Lindsey Leavitt
  • Discworld series by Terry Pratchett

 

 

Continue reading Midseason TV Replacements – Readalikes, Part II

Midseason TV Replacements – Readalikes, Part I

I’m back with more readalikes to match some of the midseason replacements TV networks will be putting out this month and next. Some of the shows I mentioned in my two posts this fall were actually pushed forward and are only premiering this month or next, while others I mentioned have already been canceled. :-( But to the best of my ability, these are some of the new shows you can expect to hit your television soon, from networks to cable to streaming. Check out part two next week.

Fresh-Off-the-BoatFresh Off the Boat (ABC) – starring Randall Park
Based on a chef’s memoir, this family comedy is about a Taiwanese family that moves to the United States and opens a restaurant. It takes place in the 1990s, which will be fun for adults and totally hilarious for teens who view that as nearly as historical as the 1890s. Click to watch the trailer.
Readalikes:

  • Mismatch by Lensey Namioka
  • The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
  • Tall Story by Candy Gourlay
  • Fresh Off the Boat by Eddie Huang

 

 

Continue reading Midseason TV Replacements – Readalikes, Part I

Tweets of the Week: December 26th

If you celebrated a holiday this week, I hope it was a happy one! If not, I hope you enjoyed your day off! Here are some things that had Twitter going this week.

tweets of the week | the hub

Books/Reading/Authors

Continue reading Tweets of the Week: December 26th

Genre Guide: Matriarchy, Magical Realism and Family Sagas

Knossos_fresco_women
Minoan society and theology was matriarchal.

Definition and Background
I recently read The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton (2015 Morris Award Finalist), after having had the ARC on my shelf for months (I’m sorry!) and being begged to by a coworker and about five students. I was amazed by the beautiful writing and loved the story. It also got me thinking a lot about family sagas and how they are such a big part of literature in general, but they don’t seem to appear much in YA. That said, anything that spans generations, like Ava Lavender, should feature and engage adults and teens alike.

Another interesting thing about these stories is that family sagas tend to center around women or follow a woman’s line in a family, when we all know that in general, Serious Literature is about (white) men. And yet books like The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende or Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman get critical acclaim anyway. That is seriously feminist.

Did I mention that these books are also subversive when it comes to how they trick everyone into reading magical realism without complaining that they’re reading genre fiction? Genius, I tell you.

This is more of a subgenre than a genre, and this guide is something that could use fleshing out. Reading Ava Lavender whetted my appetite for stories of matriarchal families, but I can’t say that I’ve found many yet. That said, there are many adult authors who may satisfy teens, as well as some stories of young women going off on their own magical realism adventure, possibly to start the first branch of a matriarchal family tree.

Characteristics
As mentioned, these stories tend to employ magic realism elements, and they most commonly come out of traditions that support these notions as par for the course, such as folklore and history from Latin America, West Africa, and the American South. However, that’s not always true, as Ava Lavender itself shows. Often there is a sort of quest or journey involved. Rather than love stories, these tend to be about love lost or love cursed, with an element of destiny attached to that. Family, either born or created, is what ties characters together. Mother-daughter, grandmother-granddaughter, and sister relationships are key. There are some authors who accomplish this type of storytelling through book series, and I’ve noted a few below (you could even count Tamora Pierce’s entire Tortall universe as a big family epic), but in general, I think it’s most interesting when all of these relationships between family members and generations happen in one novel. Continue reading Genre Guide: Matriarchy, Magical Realism and Family Sagas

2014 Teens’ Top Ten: Everything You Need to Know About Rainbow Rowell

The Teens’ Top Ten is a “teen choice” list, where teens nominate and choose their favorite books of the previous year! Nominators are members of teen book groups in sixteen school and public libraries around the country. Nominations are posted on Celebrate Teen Literature Day, the Thursday of National Library Week, and teens across the country vote on their favorite titles each year.

The votes are in for 2014, and the winners have been announced– and we’re featuring them here on The Hub. Today I’ll highlight Rainbow Rowell, honored for her novel Eleanor and Park, and link you to some great interviews, profiles, fan art, and more.

Rainbow in her own words

Rainbow in other people’s art

Eleanor and Park has inspired a wealth of amazing fanart by talented artists. Here are a few examples:

rowell_fanart01
by Simini Blocker

Continue reading 2014 Teens’ Top Ten: Everything You Need to Know About Rainbow Rowell

YA Lit Symposium: Where are the Heroes of Color in SFF?

YALSA_LitSymposium2014Friday afternoon at the YALSA YA Lit Symposium, I attended Where Are the Heroes of Color in Fantasy and Sci Fi?, which boasted quite the list of presenters and participating authors/editor. Led by Sarah Murphy, Kerry Roeder, Angela Ungaro, of The Watchers Podcast, the session started by acknowledging the fact that indeed, there are already quite a few heroes of color in SFF that we can pull out from history, thanks to authors like Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin. But we all know that there aren’t enough, and that’s a shame, especially when movements like We Need Diverse Books prove that we want them. To that end, participating authors Amalie Howard, Guadalupe Garcia McCall, and Cynthia Leitich Smith, plus editors Joe Monti and Stacy Whitman (who joined via video), discussed their experiences in the diverse (or not-so-diverse) world of publishing and genre fiction, especially in YA.

While there is much to say about diversity in YA literature that would take much longer than a simple post to get to, let’s agree that science fiction and fantasy seem especially to suffer from excessive whiteness (and excessive abledness, hetero-ness, etc, but that was not the theme of this session), probably due to the fact that publishers seem to think that characters of color only belong in realistic stories about very specific racialized experiences that are sanctioned by the status quo, like a story about a black person during the Civil Rights movement or a story about a Latino who is crossing the border into the United States. The question of the day seemed to be why there seems to be such resistance to genres that imagine entirely new worlds going on to imagine that people of color might be in them?

The presenters and participants all shared their frustration for the current state of publishing and their passion for changing it. Monti, who will be running his own new imprint, Saga Press, at Simon & Schuster, did not hold back from calling out other publishers’ refusal to change. He noted fighting with someone over a new cover of A Wizard of Earthsea, which failed to make Ged, the main character, black, even though the author has done nothing but insist that Ged is black. Monti noted that “we can’t get to a deeper truth if we ignore half the world…I don’t understand how a school system can be majority minority and publishers think Latinos are niche.” He said he strongly believes diversity will sell, because good stories are good stories, plain and simple. Continue reading YA Lit Symposium: Where are the Heroes of Color in SFF?

Tweets of the Week: October 17th

Last weekend, KidLitCon was held in Sacramento, CA. While not a librarian conference, its focus on blogging, children’s and YA literature, and diversity is incredibly relevant to the work of librarians, and, as many librarians are wont to do, a few of us infiltrated the place anyway. It was also National Coming Out Day on October 11, The Horn Book at Simmons was held on the 11th and 12th, and the National Book Award finalists were announced on Wednesday! Here are some of the top tweets.
tweets of the week | the hub

KidLitCon

Continue reading Tweets of the Week: October 17th

Wilde Reads

Happy 160th birthday, Oscar Wilde! In honor of this most fascinating and talented writer, I’ve rounded up some great YA that definitely owes a debt to Wilde’s work – or his life.

darkerReadalike for The Picture of Dorian Gray
It shouldn’t be surprising that Wilde’s novel would resonate with teens – who doesn’t think from time to time about youth and beauty and the fear of growing old? While Wilde’s novel itself is already great for teens, this book may also resonate with them, and it fits into the popular paranormal genre by making what is clearly a supernatural occurrence in the original Wilde work more blatant:

  • Darker Still: A Novel of Magic Most Foul by Leanna Renee Hieber
    Natalie is mute, but she is observant and sensitive, which is why she is the one who notices that a new portrait of Lord Denbury has a bit too much life to it. It turns out that the young, handsome man’s soul is actually trapped behind the painting, and Natalie is the only one who can access it and help him escape the magic that binds him there.

 

Continue reading Wilde Reads

Tweets of the Week: September 12th

How was your week? Lots happened online. Take a look!

tweets of the week | the hub

Books/Reading