A page-turner: "12.21" by Dustin Thomason

Back in the 1990s, I studied Biology and read Michael Crichton medical thrillers for escapism... and I also met a very nice boy who had been friends with my best friend from childhood.
We all wound up in college together, and that nice boy and I took some pre-med requirements together. He went on to med school, but that wasn't all-- he also wrote a best-seller called The Rule of Four with another friend, Ian Caldwell. Yowzah! That's right, I can say I knew Dustin Thomason when.

This summer, Dusty's first solo book came out, and it's a terrific medical thriller with history, romance, and plenty of drama! 12.21 features a long-lost Mayan codex, a mysterious and devastating outbreak, and a race for a cure that kept me turning the pages. I'd write more, but I'm pretty tired from staying up late to read...

If you've been craving an edge-of-your-seat medical thriller, let me recommend 12.21 by Dustin Thomason-- a great book by a great guy. 

"Goodbye for Now" by Laurie Frankel

As an independent bookseller, I take great pride in introducing readers to books they might not have found by themselves. One of the challenges of handselling is coming up with a bookseller-to-customer-pitch that conveys exactly why I think this particular book will be the right fit for this particular reader in their current reading mood.

I’m thrilled to make reader matches for Laurie Frankel’s Goodbye for Now (on sale August 7th) because I think it’s just the kind of unexpected delight so many of my customers rely on indie booksellers to recommend. But because I love this book so much, I want it to find an audience beyond just the curious readers who come into my store. As much as I like to feel indispensable, it would feel even better to know I helped this book get the chance it deserves on bookshelves around the country.

Its gorgeous cover will definitely draw readers in, but I offer this little tutorial on “How to Handsell Goodbye for Now” in hopes that all my bookselling brothers and sisters will help a wide, receptive audience discover this wonderful novel. We all know how enthusiastic readers and word of mouth can push a book to the bestseller list! I think this has the indie-driven hit potential of The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein and Wild by Cheryl Strayed.

Here are some of the leading questions I might ask to determine whether a customer will love Goodbye for Now as much as I did:

“Are you interested in a story that sucks you in and feels like a light read but also has lots to ponder?” The writing and characters make the reading effortless, but the story has such depth that readers will want to linger.

“Did you like The Art of Racing in the Rain?” 
Because really, who didn’t? But, between us, a book about a dying dog, race cars, and a true love who dies of a brain tumor doesn’t sound like any easier a sell than a book about true love, start-ups, and ever-lasting life through technology, does it? They’re both great books! It’s all in how we set expectations and convey our enthusiasm.

“Are you in the mood for a contemporary novel with romance, a Seattle setting, and technology?” 
Our store is located near Microsoft, Google, Adobe, and many other tech companies. Frankel captures the start-up culture and programmer/user/sales dynamic so perfectly, many of our readers will connect through their life experience.

“Did you like Set This House in Order?” 
Matt Ruff’s Set This House in Order is one of Queen Anne Books’ backlist stars and one of our favorite book club recommendations. Like that novel, Goodbye for Now appeals to both men and women and uses technology in the plot to delve deeply into emotions.

“Can you imagine a book that reads kind of like a mix between John Irving and Mary Shelley/ William Gibson and Jodi Picoult, but has its own distinct heart and voice? Sound good? It is.” 
Goodbye For Now has the charm, quirk, and sad sweetness of The World According to Garp matched with the science-has-its-consequences drama of Frankenstein. Like Gibson’s novels, it convincingly ponders the impacts of technology in near future, and like Picoult’s, it raises ethical questions that pack a punch, all while giving you characters you don’t want to let go. How are those for mash-ups? Pretty darn amazing, I think.

To sum it all up, I’m very excited to sell Goodbye for Now, and I hope others are, too! 

Booksellers, publicists, reviewers, readers, bloggers: if you want to talk to me about it, let me know; it would be my pleasure. 



For your further Frankel edification:
Laurie Frankel's author site, complete with a hilarious book trailer. (Watch for fingerpuppets of Einstein talking about an Adam Sandler movie, Virginia Woolf going into the drink, and more.)
My recommendation of Goodbye for Now for Queen Anne Books.
My recommendation of Laurie's first novel, The Atlas of Love, for Queen Anne Books.

The shortlist for the 2011 PNBA Book Awards, which includes The Atlas of Love.

Music to listen to while you read "Ready Player One"

One of my favorite books of the summer so far is Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, a book I've described to people as a scifi book version of "The Goonies" filled with video games and tons of 80s trivia...

If you know me, you know I love me some Goonies, but add references to "LadyHawke" and just about every TV show I watched in my formative years, THEN layer on the quest and romance, and you'll understand why I had so much fun reading this.

The other night, we were listening to a mix of music from the computer, and I heard the perfect song to read Ready Player One to: "Tuff Enuff?" by ShitRobot. No big surprise that I adore anything by anyone who would call themselves ShitRobot, but their songs make the perfect soundtrack to a supergeeky, superfun novel! Makes me want to put on a vintage Atari t-shirt and boogie around the house.

(Check out "losing my patience" on their site, too... awesome.)

Nerdy side note: 1985 was a good year for movies... Back to the Future, Weird Science, LadyHawke, Goonies, Legend, Teen Wolf, Better Off Dead, Clue, Fletch, Young Sherlock Holmes, and Real Genius all came out in 1985 according to imbd. Holy ShitRobot!

"Putting Makeup on Dead People"

That title got your attention, right? Mine, too, but maybe not for the same reasons (unless you are my sister!) You see, our maternal grandfather owned and ran a funeral home, and our uncle now owns and runs it, so a book about a teenager who wants to be a mortician is right up my alley.

True tale:

Before my grandparents went out for a big night on the town while my mom was growing up, my grandmother would lie down on the kitchen table so my grandfather could apply her party makeup. He couldn't do it unless she was very still and prone (a.k.a. pretending to be dead). So I knew I had to read Putting Makeup on Dead People by Jen Violi from the title alone.

Here's why YOU have to read this book, too (whether your my sister or anyone else):

This is a hilarious, beautiful, meaningful coming of age story. The main character, Donna, lost her father several years ago. Her brother has been away at college, her mother doesn't understand her, and she feels invisible at school. During her senior year, she realizes that the only place she really feels comfortable, the only place she really connects with people, is at the local funeral home. So she approaches the owners and asks what it takes to be a mortician.

One of the brothers who runs the funeral home explains that the main qualification for the job is "loving the whole person." This really resonated with me. It's a perfect lesson for a teenage girl who is trying to learn to love herself, but it's also such a comforting thought to anyone who is grieving. You can interpret the whole person as the good and the bad, the living and the dead. It reminds me of a meaningful zen story Richard Farr told me about Buddhist appreciation: that when we love someone, we love them partly for their beautiful fragility, that when we love someone completely, we love who they are, who they were, and who they will (or will not) be, like appreciating the teacup as something crafted by someone, as a lovely object to hold, and as something which will break some day and no longer exist except in our memories. (Apologies to everyone for my mangling in the retelling.)

That went on a long tangent, but suffice to say that this book has it all: Donna's hilarious and honest voice, tender flashbacks, wacky relatives, pagan rituals, great friendships, and even sexy romances! It's a teen read, but I think it would also make a good summer read for adults.

Summer reading recommendations for middle schoolers

This week I had the great pleasure of speaking about some of my favorite books to try to help the middle school students at St. Anne School get even more excited about summer vacation. I know some of the students there-- and I know they are voracious readers. (Shout out to Max M. and Sam M., if you ever find this blog!) The challenge for me was to find a mix of books that would be pure pleasure, appropriate for really smart middle schoolers, sophisticated enough for the students but not horrifying to the parents.

To start off, I asked how many had read The Hunger Games. As I suspected, the majority raised their hands. So my first grouping of books was for readers who loved that series. They're dystopian books with plenty of action but also heart-pounding relationships.

Enclave by Anne Aguirre

Divergent by Veronica Roth

I Am Number Four by Pittacus Lore

Fever Crumb by Philip Reeve

Dark Life by Kat Falls

Then I said, "If you like all that and a side of fantasy..."

Incarceron by Catherine Fisher

Eon by Alison Goodman

Mistwood by Leah Cypess (especially if readers liked Graceling)

(bonus: all these books already have sequels published!)

Next, I asked who was traveling internationally over the summer. I suggested that one way to travel the world without needing a passport or having to pack was to pick up some realistic books about other cultures:

To Timbuktu by Casey Scieszka and Steven Weinberg (nine countries including Morocco, China, and Mali)

Words in the Dust by Trent Reedy (Afghanistan)

Tall Story by Candy Gourlay (London, the Philippines)

If, like me, you like a clever con:

Heist Society by Ally Carter (I tried to convince them that, despite the cover, it's fiendishly clever fun that boys-- especially ones who've seen Leverage-- would love, too. I don't know if I convinced...)

If you like historical fiction with loads of action (and some big, out-there twists):

Death Cloud: Young Sherlock Holmes by Andrew Lane

The Wild: Secret Journeys of Jack London by Christopher Golden

And finally, a straight historical fiction novel that was so vivid I felt like I was near the front of the Crimean War with Florence Nightingale:

The Shadow of the Lamp by Suzanne Dunlap

Never Sit Down in a Hoopskirt

Today's fun teen read surprise:

Never Sit Down in a Hoopskirt-- and Other Things I Learned in Southern Belle Hell by Crickett Rumley.

Sakes alive, this chatty, sassy first-person narrative about an Alabama teen-come-home who finds herself a part of the esteemed tradition of Magnolia Maids is a hoot! Jane escaped from the humid, close world of Bienville (and away from painful memories of her mom's death), but after she gets kicked out of the latest boarding school, it's back to the land of sweet tea, gossip, big hair, and frenemies like you wouldn't believe.

The novel will be a paperback original coming out from Egmont USA in June. It is a perfect beach/bus/hammock read.

In the meantime, if this sounds good, be sure to check out my friend Kim's hilarious blog: Stuff Southern People Like.

The Red Pyramid

Rick Riordan's latest, the first of the new series the Kane Chronicles, was a fun read, but somehow I expected more. I loved the use of Egyptian mythology, and I thought the author did a good job using two narrators effectively (and excitingly). However, something about the magic felt too ad hoc for me. This is a big problem when I'm reading fantasy: I need to understand the rules of the world if I'm going to buy into it.

I understand that Carter and Sadie don't know the limits and possibilities of their powers or those of the gods/goddesses/magicians/godlings around them, but as a reader, I have to feel like the author knows. I wasn't quite convinced. Almost-sixth-grader Jack asked me early on, "But how do those shabti work?" I still don't know, and I don't know how pillars of fire or magical caskets or god-channeling pyramids (in Egypt or Phoenix or Paris) work.

This makes me sound very literal and persnickety, but I don't think I am. But the suspense doesn't build for me if I keep thinking, "Well, he'll just pull something out like an avatar hawk warrior. Or a crowd of scorpions. Or a giant sweating crocodile god. Or Elvis."

Did anyone else feel this way about the book? I don't remember the same feeling in The Lightning Thief. Am I just being jaded?

SummerReadingJack

Last week, I asked my rising sixth-grader student if I could share the link to his summer reading blog, and he said yes. So for everyone who has been curious about what it's like to read "Where the Red Fern Grows" and "Uglies" in the summer before you're twelve, here's summerreadingjack!

Reading and discussing with Jack this summer has been a blast. He's been a reading dynamo, and he's also gotten some great writing in. I'm still impressed when I remember how quickly he cranked out a thank you letter to Grandpa as if he were the main character in "Where the Red Fern Grows." Mad skills!

We just started in on a third book, "The Red Pyramid" by Rick Riordan. This was Jack's choice, and I am so thrilled! I've been looking for an excuse to move the first of the Kane Chronicles to the top of my reading stack.

"The Lost Symbol"

Since I had a day to my lonesome, I've been trying to get through borrowed books! I've had this on loan from a friend for a loonnng time... Here's the verdict on "The Lost Symbol:"

Dan Brown, what piffle!

I know this is not meant to be great literature, but-- really? The starry-eyed descriptions of noetic science and the Masons made me laugh out loud. Don't even get me started on the tall, sinister, tattooed eunuch villain... Maureen Dowd picked out some choice passages in her NYT book review, but I still wasn't prepared for the sheer ridiculousness of this book.

Maybe Brown was trying to make Langdon more relatable, but he come off as rather thick in this novel. WHY does he keep willfully ignoring or just plain missing just about every major clue? I guess it's supposed to teach us about the dangers of not believing, the blinders we put on when we only consider what we think we know if verifiable, but UGH, the man is a Harvard professor! And he's supposed to be our hero! Let him come up with something other than MAGIC SQUARES, for chrissakes! (Perhaps I'm jaded, but when one of the big reveals in a Dan Brown book is the same as one in a kids' book published a year earlier, I have to think Mr. Brown is kind of phoning it in.)

I may have forgiven all if the pacing had been right. Brown has kept me going from chapter to chapter with breathless incredulity. Not this time. OK, I'll grant that chapter 9 ended well: "Someone was screaming." That kept me going. But chapter 4 ends with Mal'akh's thought/sentence fragment, "A gift for the one man on earth who can help me obtain what I seek"(p. 20). OOOOH, chilling, right? Then chapter 5 starts off with, "The world's largest and most technologically advanced museum is also one of the world's best-kept secrets." (p.21) This feels like a third grader reporting on the Smithsonian, not a masterful suspense writer toying with his readers. Put the two missteps together in the pages I would hope had been most polished by an author and his editors, and I almost decided to move on to another book.

I agree with a customer who chatted with me about the book the other day: the architectural tour of DC we get is fascinating, but the plot and puzzles in this thriller just fell flat. And the characters are ridiculous.

I could go on, but I think you get the idea. I was very curious, so I'm glad I read it (quickly), but I'm also really grateful that this is a book I borrowed and didn't buy.

Maybe I'm just bitter that we solved the "Da Vinci Code" puzzles and didn't win the "prize more valuable than gold" of having our names used as characters in this book... but I think I'm glad to have been just a dissatisfied reader of this rather than a fictional participant!

"Crossed Bones" aka "The Tenth Gift"

I just finished a swashbuckling romance (but not the Fabio-cover kind) lent to me by a kind customer. She picked it out of the piles at our galley giveaway and was very pleasantly surprised. It's by Jane Johnston, and the published title is The Tenth Gift I'm going to go on record: I prefer the piratical "Crossed Bones" as a title; the published title isn't explained until most of the way through the book, and it just kept reminding me of slimeball character Michael, the adulterous husband-of-her-best-friend who dumps contemporary heroine Julia. (He gives her an exquisite antique book as parting gift, but then, a-hole that he is, spends the rest of the book trying to get it back.)

The novel has two related narratives: Julia's life in London and Cornwall, and the life of Cat, a 17th century Cornish woman who is abducted by Salee pirates! They are connected through Cat's book/journal and their shared love of embroidery. The dual narrative kind of reminded me of "Julie & Julia" in that the contemporary character's story line was less compelling for much of the book than Cat's incredible journey. Things did get spiced up in today's world, though, and romance blossoms in both.

This was a fun and engaging novel that taught me more about the history of Cornwall, pirates, and the corsair culture. Fascinating and entertaining light fare!

Heist Society: superfun

It may look like I haven't been reading or eating much, but au contraire! I've just been so busy doing both, plus working, that I haven't posted much. Sorry, my three faithful followers. I'll try to be better.

I zipped through teen novel Heist Society by Ally Carter. Delightful con romp. I do love a great art heist! This feels like "The Thomas Crown Affair" meets STORM meets "Ocean's Eleven" with teenagers. Kat comes from a family of cons and thieves-- the classy, awe-inspiring kind. Her billionaire friend/ accomplice Hale frames her to get her kicked out of her first attempt at normal life, Colgan boarding school, but that's nothing compared to the frame job someone has done of her father: a seriously evil man is convinced that Kat's dad stole priceless (Nazi-tainted) masterpieces from his undermoat secure art lair, and Kat has two weeks to return the paintings before dire consequences ensue. Yes, I did write "undermoat secure art lair." There was a mini-sub involved. It's that kind of book-- LOVED it!

My favorite thing about the book was Kat's crew and their clockwork precise planning. I cracked up as the kids threw out ideas of different cons to try, all with hilariously evocative names: "the Ben Franklin," "the Princess Bride" ("But where would we get a six-fingered man on such short notice?"), "Dog in a Bar..." Most of them go unexplained, which makes it even funnier to me.

The globe-trotting adventure is dizzying, the teens are full of hijinks and even some romance, and the whole idea of kids as pros in the heist underworld was just delightful. I hope Carter writes more about Kat and her crew. Kat, don't just go back to Colgan yet, I beg!

The Passage= great summer reading

Justin Cronin's vampire epic fit the bill-- a long, juicy, page-turner to give me that sit-around-and-read-all-day feeling that is what I love most about summer.

I didn't find any printing error in my copy, but I did find plenty to ponder about, gasp at, and predict for the sequel.

Vampire goodness: "The Passage"

I'm reading Justin Cronin's "The Passage." At work last week, we did a line by line, word for word comparison on page 270, the page we thought the publisher had told us contained a printing error that affected the plot. I couldn't find any difference between the first printing that they made us pull and the new copies we are selling now, but I did get completely caught up in the story, just from one page. Now I've committed to a 766-page vampire epic that (I've heard) ends as a cliff-hanger for the sequel... but somehow I just couldn't say no. I enjoy the different styles as the outbreak progresses/time passes, and some of the characters I've already left behind were fantastic. It's not quite as gory or creepy as "The Strain," and I like that over 280 pages in, there isn't any romance to speak of, and there certainly isn't any paranormal romance! I'm definitely in a summer reading mindset.