The Suburban Strange by Nathan Kotecki. Houghton Mifflin Books for Children. 2012. Reviewed from ARC from the author. Buy it from IndieBound or Powell’s (affiliate links).

Celia Balaustine is entering her sophomore year of high school, but it’s her first year at Suburban High. She’s all set to spend the year trying to be as invisible as possible, with only her sketchbook for a friend, when fellow artist Regine takes her under her wing and introduces her to a clique called The Rosary. The members of The Rosary are interested in dark alternative culture, including literature, fashion, and music. They pride themselves on being different from the other kids in their school. But as different as her friends are from the rest of their classmates, Celia can’t help but be drawn into the school’s drama as young girls begin to be gravely injured on the eve of their sixteenth birthday. She wants to stop these incidents from happening, as well as protect herself from becoming the curse’s next victim. But can she?

My relationship with the author:

Before I jump into telling you what I loved about this book (and there’s a lot), I need to tell you how it came to my attention. My former supervisor Emily (whose old job I now hold) contacted me and told me that her friend was having his first book released soon and would love to get a big name to be present at his book release party, and she knew I had connections in the YA lit world and thought I might have some suggestions. After some back and forth, Emily and Nathan and I sat down for lunch so he could pick my brain for my expertise as both a kidlit blogger and a school librarian (by training if not position). Over the course of the conversation it came out that we are both seekrit goths, me coming at it more from the fashion angle and him from music, with both of us crossing over into the other interest some. I confessed my lack of education on the music part of things, and he assured me that he could fix that. So, yes, I do have mix CDs that serve as, essentially the soundtrack for this book. Yes, the author treated me to lunch since I am helping him with publicity. Yes, I felt like it would be good if I liked this book.

So know all of that, because I don’t want to deceive you about my relationship with this book.

What I loved:

• Celia's friends in The Rosary are darkly glamorous. They discuss music, art, and literature in ways that some reviews have suggested aren't realistic for teenagers, but as a former high school teacher, I found this eminently believable. Kids are into all sorts of things, and some of them are beautifully pretentious. Mostly they grow into pretentious but self-aware adults, the kind of people I like to spend time with.
• This book has a gay couple in the most stable relationship in the whole book. And it's not a huge deal. They're just a couple, who both happen to be guys. And they're probably two of the most fully-realized characters in a book full of interesting people. They're my favorites.
• The curse has a component whereby girls who are virgins seem to be the only targets. This leads to a lot of frank but not vulgar discussions of sex, its importance, when you should do it and who you should do it with. I think books that model this kind of conversation are far preferable to those that ignore it or make it all gross.
• The members of The Rosary are immensely studious. Yes, they do party at Diaboliques (described in Colleen's review as a fairytale goth club and I can't put it better than that) until three in the morning, but they also encourage Celia to do her homework as soon as she gets home from school.
• There's a romance in here that is a slow burn, which is exactly my kind of thing (both in my own love life and the stories I like to read). There won't be any flailing and crying, "I love you, but also I want you to be my dinner!" here - the obstacles to romance are external reactions to internal circumstances and I kind of love that.
• The decadence of description of the clothes, atmosphere, music, and Celia's emotions. I spent a good chunk of this book being a little sad that I didn't have a tightly-knit group of goth friends to shepherd me through school. (I had a tightly-knit group of diversely-interested friends who were wonderful, but I was one of only two of us you could categorize as goth, and not at all aware of it as a genuine subculture rather than just a cruel label folks gave spooky kids.)
• The quiet menace of the supernatural. You know the whole time that supernatural stuff is going on, but it's not the focus until far into the book.
• The subtle way in which this fits the mold of a classic Gothic novel, going as far back as The Castle of Otranto and Jane Eyre and as recent as Rebecca or even The Thirteenth Tale.

What I'd like to see more of:

• The school setting as a menace itself. This is definitely present here, but I have hopes that it will be even more present in future books in the series. I was lucky enough to hear Nathan speak to a young adult literature class at UNC's School of Information and Library Science (my alma mater!) and he mentioned that the school itself would serve as a unifying thread throughout the series. I hope he explores the relationship of this place with the supernatural mythology he's building more as the series goes on.
• More supplemental materials (appendices, maybe?) consolidating the myriad cultural references. But I'm a librarian, so it's likely I'll do a re-read and pull together literary and musical references (perhaps even create a Spotify playlist) and share that here.

What I need to warn you about: This book is deliberately paced. There was definitely a point at which I thought, "Okay, I see why the Amazon reviewers complained about it being slow." That said, it's all leading somewhere and it's all valuable. If I were doing reader's advisory, I wouldn't hand this to somebody looking for fast-paced action. I would hand it to somebody looking for atmospheric spookiness.

The big climax and resolution of the mystery are not why you want to read this book. They are of course very important to have, but what’s going to keep you interested is the mood and the world-building. Don’t jump in here expecting a typical suspense thriller. If you ran the numbers, I suspect you’d find mystery resolution takes up a very small percentage of pages or words here. But the supernatural element is woven throughout.

My favorite quotes:

"We're a set of small black shiny beads who string around together, finding beauty the rest of the world has overlooked." (p. 5 in the ARC)

“We’re in high school. Of course we’re egocentric,” Ivo replied matter-of-factly. (p. 83 in the ARC)

Who should read it: I would recommend The Suburban Strange to readers who like books with a lot of atmosphere, a little mystery, and a slow but sustained reveal of supernatural elements.

A review roundup happens when I read a book but either didn’t have the time to write a review or read it so long ago that my memory about it isn’t good enough to write a review. I gather links to other reviews in the kidlitosphere and share excerpts from them. These are reviews of books that I know darkly-inclined young people will enjoy. 

Written in Bone: Buried Lives of Jamestown and Colonial Maryland by Sally M. Walker. Carolrhoda Books. 2009. Library copy. Buy it from IndieBound or Powell’s (affiliate links).

In Written in Bone, Sally M. Walker explores what scientists learned from excavating graves in Jamestown and Colonial Maryland. They book examines not only burial practices, but also the evidence these excavations provide about lifestyles in the Colonial era.

Spooky Factor: Any time the pitch for a book begins with, “So, we exhumed some corpses…” your spooky kids are going to be on board. I myself think it’d be fun to read this, then write an essay called, “What I Learned from Dead People.”

On to the reviews!

A Chair, A Fireplace, and a Tea Cozy:

Did you know that sometimes people used their cellars not to store food but as a trash dump? An archaeologist explains, “people lived upstairs and dumped fish parts and pig parts and chamber pot contents and goodness knows what else down there.”

Imagine that. Imagine dumping that refuse in your cellar. Wouldn’t it smell? How healthy would that be? Why would you do that? And then I thought about Laura Ingalls Wilder and the books where the Ingalls were snowed in for days and days and days. As a grown up rereading the series, I’d wondered, where did they put the trash? Go to the bathroom? Is that why a basement was used as a trash pit? And then… as the chapter reveals… a body was buried in the basement. Treated like garbage. Hidden. Unknown. For hundreds of years, until the secret was revealed. What was it like, to live in that house? To know that body was there?

Stacked:

When I first had heard about this book, I didn't quite know what to expect. I am pleased with this and found myself really fascinated with what archaeologists do with human remains. I think that this book has a huge appeal, both to those interested in history and science, as well as those interested in the all-too-common "something different." Oh, and boys will eat this one up! This is a book about people doing something and it gives boys tools to learn with (I mean, there's also really cool images of skulls and bones, too).

librarian by day:

Colorful pictures and flowing prose explains the process of excavating and studying a grave site, and explains how the details observed and analyzed tells us about life in colonial Virginia and Maryland.

Kirkus:

...profusely illustrated with photos of skulls and skeletons...

In her first #TeachersWrite minilesson, Kate Messner talks about making time to write. This has consistently been a problem for me. I am undisciplined about it, like I’m sure so many others are.

The assignment that goes with the minilesson is this:

Make a writing plan for your summer and for your school year.

Share:

1. What you found that you might be able to cut out of your schedule or cut back on to make time to write.
2. When you’ll be writing each day & for how long. Remember to be realistic. 15 minutes is fine to start.
3. Where you’ll usually write.  This can be different places on different days, depending on your schedule.
4. Who you told about your plans. Remember, sharing your writing plans with the people in your life helps to make them real and reminds your family & friends to give you that space for writing.

So. Planning time.

1. I spend a lot of time just aimlessly browsing online or watching TV. I think I can probably carve out 15 minutes of that time each day for writing, and as I’ve learned from FlyLady, 15 minutes at a time can accomplish a lot after a while.

2. So 15 minutes is for how long. When? I think it makes sense to do it as soon as my husband is out the door and off to work, in the summer. Once I’m back at work, I might take 15 minutes out of my lunch to do it.

3. Where? I have a beautiful home office that is serving as a storage space right now. In addition to spending 15 minutes a day writing, I’ll spend 15 minutes a day getting the office in shape. Once it is, that’s where I’ll write. Until then, I’ll write at our breakfast (and lunch and dinner) table.

4. I haven’t actually told anybody about my plans yet. I guess I’ll chat with my husband about it when he gets home tonight. And maybe my sister. I tell each of them a lot of stuff.

What about you? Are you making time and space to write?

Like so many folks in the education industry, I recently embarked upon my summer vacation. I was that kid who couldn’t wait to sign up for the library summer reading program, who three weeks into summer was ready to go back, and who loved school/office supplies with a passion bordering on the unnatural.

And I’m not that different as an adult. After all, I am a learning enthusiast, so it follows that if I have more free time, I’ll learn more, not less. Two excellent opportunities came to my attention via Twitter. They’re both low pressure and easy to jump into at any time, which is great as I’ll be traveling for most of July.

The first is Teachers Write!, a virtual summer writing camp for teachers and librarians. Author Kate Messner and a host of her writing friends will be sharing advice, giving challenges, and generally building community. I am about to dive into it all now - 15 days after it officially started.

The second is the Level Up Book Club, a place to read books about gamification and discuss the gamification of education. Gamification is a topic near and dear to my heart and one of the things that drew me to library school in the first place. Should I go back for a doctorate, it would be one of my chief research interests. So I’m jumping into this one - again, late due to loose ends that needed to be tied up at the end of the school year - and will be making my way through Jane McGonigal’s Reality Is Broken over the next week and a half - if I can tear myself away from the next book in A Song of Ice and Fire, that is.

Check these two out and let me know if you’re already participating or if you sign up. See you there!

In Social Media for Social Good, former social media consultant Heather Mansfield, principal blogger at Nonprofit Tech 2.0, provides a guidebook for nonprofits entering the social media world for the first time. Mansfield divides the Web into three eras: the Static Web (1.0), the Social Web (2.0), and the Mobile Web (3.0). She explains the importance and value of online tools in each era, explaining that each builds on the era before it. She also identifies specific tools such as Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube, and gives best practices for using these tools. At the end of the book, she includes “Your Nonprofit Tech Checklist,” a step-by-step map for planning your organization’s social media strategy.

Mansfield provides a wealth of information and enhances her own advice by providing Nonprofit Examples of Excellence at the end of each chapter and a “Google This!” section with recommended search terms for more information and examples. Social Media for Social Good has both breadth and depth. I purchased it to support my work with the Durham Savoyards as we enter our 50th Anniversary year; the time seemed ripe for launching our organization into Web 2.0 and beyond. Mansfield focuses on suggestions that at first glance would work only for large non-profits with the budget to hire a social media manager, but with some tweaking, the work can be spread across a range of volunteers.

I highly recommend this book not only for anyone working with a 501(c)3, but also for anyone working in education. The principles are applicable to any organization that relies on external participation and support to succeed at its mission. I think they are especially relevant in the field of education, where providing readily-accessible evidence of the good work we do helps us demonstrate the need for continued funding and personnel support. For example, Mansfield suggests having the Board or staff of your nonprofit create a “Thank You” video for supporters. At a school library, you could have students create a video to thank donors or volunteers. In a classroom, you could create a Flickr pool for your Donors Choose project and post the URL in the project description so donors could follow your students’ progress through the project. Social Media for Social Good provides many more suggestions and best practices that will enhance your organization’s online marketing strategy. Check it out at your library or buy it today!

Social Media for Social Good by Heather Mansfield McGraw-Hill 2011 ISBN 007177081X

Storytime: My 17-year-old brother is a student at an online high school.  (I think it’s TRECA but I’m not 100% sure of that.)  Sometime last spring, my mother described to me a challenge he’d had when working on an assignment in his history class.  The teacher had given him a question of causality: What were the reasons that a particular historical event had happened?  (I can’t remember what event in particular; I think it probably had to do with the start of a war.)  The teacher had instructed the students to “do some research” and “write a paper” about it.  The teacher didn’t provide suggested resources for the research or guidance on the research process.    Without this kind of guidance, my brother  spent hours sorting through Google results and ended up writing an unfocused paper that chronicled every possible cause he could find, rather than a cohesive paper making an argument for a particular cause or related set of causes. I said to my mother, “Well, doesn’t he have a school librarian that he could ask for help on assignments like that?”

“No,” she replied.  “They only just got a case worker for IEPs.”  As a (at the time, future) school librarian, this made me sad.  Since that conversation, I’ve been considering what it would look like for students like my brother to receive library services.

The North Carolina Virtual Public School, as I understand it, operates on a different model than TRECA does.  It is not a full-time academy, but rather provides opportunities for students across the state who might not otherwise be able to take certain classes.  Theoretically, students enrolled in NCVPS have access to school librarians at their home schools and would be able to ask for their assistance.  But, at least in my experience as a middle school librarian, collaboration between the distance teacher and the school librarian is rare and could present significant challenges (mostly due to time constraints; in a world of Skype and GoToMeeting, I think actually setting up the communication would be pretty simple).

For this reason, I think there need to be dedicated virtual school librarians, who work exclusively with teachers and students involved in distance learning.  As of 2009, “not one online high school [had] a school librarian position” (Darrow, 79).  Because of this, we don’t know exactly what such a position would look like.  University libraries, however, provide some promising models with e-learning librarians and distance  learning services.

Based on an informal survey of job descriptions for university librarians serving distance learning students and instructors, plus my own brainstorming based on guidelines like AASL’s Empowering Learners and NCDPI’s IMPACT, here are the services I imagine a VSL might provide:

• collaboration with teachers, either synchronous or asynchronous, to create information literacy lessons embedded in their courses, to assist with the research process, or to provide lists of resources
• consulting with students, to help them through the research process and help them identify relevant and reliable resources
• providing/managing a virtual space where students could create & share their work (blogs? wikis? I'm not sure)
• creating free-standing information literacy lessons for commonly-addressed issues
• participating in classroom discussion fora to answer questions
• holding office hours for virtual reference/unplanned consultations

I'm sure given time, I and the whole world of my librarian colleagues could come up with more.  There's plenty of evidence that having a full-time dedicated school librarian improves student learning.  Isn't it time we served the more than a million students enrolled in online courses?

References

Darrow, R. (2009.) School libraries are essential: Meeting the virtual access and collaboration needs of the 21st-century learner and teacher. Knowledge Quest, 37(5), 78-83.

When you are building a collection and especially if you need to defend your collection against challenges, it is important to take into account the developmental needs of your user base.  This is especially important at the school library, where discussions about what is or is not appropriate can become heated.

When considering the developmental appropriateness of materials in my collections, here are the resources I use:

Stages of Literary Appreciation from Literature for Today’s Young Adults by Alleen Pace Nilsen, et al. (PDF of first chapter provided by the publisher) Nilsen and her colleagues identify seven stages of literary appreciation, from birth through adulthood.  When using this to build or defend your collection, it is important to remember that we retain characteristics from the earlier stages as we grow into the later ones.  For example, in late elementary school, we may want to lose ourselves in the fantasy of literature.  In middle school, we may want to find ourselves reflected in the books we read.  Even though we now want to find reflections of ourselves, our desire for escape and fantasy has not disappeared.

The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Facts for Families.  The AACAP has created an excellent set of resources on a variety of topics of interest to the families of children and adolescents.  At their website you can download a complete set of these resources, search them by keyword, or browse them by keyword or in the order in which they were released.  Two I have found especially helpful are Normal Adolescent Development - Middle School and Early High School Years and Normal Adolescent Development - Late High School - Years and Beyond.

Developmental Tasks and Education by Robert J. Havighurst.  Havighurst identifies six stages of development and tasks that occur within them.  The quickest overview of these is at Wikipedia.

Developmental Assets from the Search Institute.  For a variety of age groups, the Search Institute has identified 40 developmental assets.  These assets describe what children and young adults need to be successful and to avoid high-risk behaviors.  While the other resources have identified characteristics of your students, these identify resources that enhance their lives.  This can be useful for advocacy more generally and for selecting books where characters have and benefit from the developmental assets or do not have them and must work to overcome their situation.

Having these resources available makes it easy to justify the inclusion of works in your collection without having to rely exclusively on your personal opinion or even your professional judgment.

Many thanks to Sandra Hughes-Hassell for introducing me to these resources in her Young Adult Literature and Related Materials course.

 

 

Since I’m now working as a middle school librarian, I feel like what I read is inextricably tied to how I work. Because of that, I’ve imported all the posts from my lectitans reading blog to this blog.  From now on, all reading posts will be made here in the category “Reading.”  I will not make any new posts at either of the earlier lectitans sites.

Here’s a complete list of this week’s interviews:

Monday:

Tara Altebrando at Chasing Ray Shirley Vernick at Bildungsroman Jack Ferraiolo at The Happy Nappy Bookseller Sudipta Bardhan-Quallen at Writing & Ruminating

Tuesday:

Sean Beaudoin at Chasing Ray Neesha Meminger at The Happy Nappy Bookseller Rachel Karns at Bildungsroman

Wednesday:

Sarah Stevenson at Chasing Ray Emily Howse at Bildungsroman Ashley Hope-Perez at The Happy Nappy Bookseller Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich at Vivian Lee Mahony (Hip Writer Mama)

Thursday: Tessa Gratton at Writing & Ruminating Micol Ostow at A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy Maria Padian at Bildungsroman Genevieve Cote at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast Vera Brosgol at lectitans

Friday:

Genevieve Valentine at Shaken & Stirred Stacy Whitman at The Happy Nappy Bookseller Alyssa B. Sheinmel at A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy Matthew Cody and Aaron Starmer at Mother Reader

Vera Brosgol is the creator of Anya’s Ghost, a young adult graphic novel about Anya, a teenage girl who wants nothing more than to be normal. When Anya falls down a well and meets the ghost of a girl who died a century ago, she quickly discovers that her new friend can help her with her social life and her schoolwork. As is always the case, this friendship is more complicated than she initially realizes.

Vera was kind enough to answer seven questions for me for the SBBT.

Why did you choose to create Anya’s Ghost in black and white?

I honestly didn’t think it needed color. Full-color can really add a lot to a story especially when it takes place in an interesting location or fantastic world, but for this particular one I feel like it would’ve been superfluous. The monochromatic palette served the mood of the story, I think. And it would’ve made the coloring take twice as long.

In addition to creating comics and graphic novels, you are a professional animator. In Anya’s Ghost and the art on your website, you create a sense of movement in still images. How do the skills required for comics and animation overlap?

I’m actually a story artist rather than an animator, though I went to school for animation.  [K: My bad!]  In college I learned that the part of the process I enjoyed the most was the storyboarding part, so that’s what I went into. I didn’t have the patience for animating! I think animation made me a much faster and more flexible artist - when you have to do thousands of drawings you can’t fuss with them too much. It also taught me how to be efficient in communicating with a drawing. I started focusing less on making a pretty picture and more on telling some kind of story with it. That definitely carried over into my illustration and comics work. I feel like the same part of my brain gets used for storyboarding and comics.

Like you, Anya came to America at the age of 5. A lot of Anya’s concerns over her appearance and behavior are magnified by the fact that she comes from a Russian family. How do you think having this extra level of being different affects common teenage concerns?

It’s just one more thing making life difficult. Anything that makes you in any way different from everyone else makes you a target, and when your skin is bad and your clothes are fitting weird you don’t want to pile anything else on top of that. I didn’t have a hard time about being Russian but I was constantly aware that my home life didn’t exactly match that of my friends, and a part of me definitely wished it did. Of course it depends on where you live. I went to a high school in Brooklyn where there was a huge immigrant population and being from another country didn’t cause problems - at most it just dictated what group you’d be friends with.

While Anya’s worries are common to most teenagers, Anya’s Ghost adds a supernatural element to issues of friendship and peer pressure. What do you think is powerful about using the supernatural to tell this kind of story?

Part of the reason I added the paranormal element to the story was to make it more fun for me! Regular old school drama is all well and good but I don’t really get excited unless there’s something weird or creepy going on. And Emily served as a way to reflect all of Anya’s bad traits back at her, so that she could get a good honest look at herself. That would’ve been possible to do with a non-ghost character but it made sense for me to do that with someone who literally didn’t have a life of their own.

On your website, you feature fan art for other works such as Scott Pilgrim and The Hunger Games. Who are some of your favorite artists and writers? What about their work inspires you?

I’m a big fan of Fred Moore and Earl Oliver Hurst, both of whom drew lovely lady illustrations. Jillian Tamaki is one of my favorite modern illustrators - I love her embroidered Penguin covers and her amazing ink work. There’s a Czech illustrator named Stepan Zavrel who did the most amazing watercolors - I’d love to get some of that looseness into my own work. And I’m friends with some phenomenal artists - Jon Klassen, Chris Turnham, Steve Wolfhard, Emily Carroll… so I am constantly inspired by them. Writer-wise, I really like Haruki Murakami’s books. Before that I read Dracula and Geek Love. Right now I’m working through the Song of Ice & Fire books. I usually want to draw a picture to go along with whatever I’m reading just to get it out of my head!

A lot of your art, such as your collaborative Tumblr blog Draw this dress! and your many circus-themed pieces, draws on vintage imagery. What is it about these images from the past that appeals to you?

I love fashion. I wanted to be a fashion designer when I was little (as well as an animator and a children’s book illustrator and probably a vet or something). Though really I think what I meant was costume design - I love anything that tells a story and clothes can absolutely do that. Vintage clothes tell you about the kind of person who wore them, what their life was like, what was going on in the world at the time… it’s really easy and fun to insert a character into them, which is what Draw This Dress is all about. Modern fashion can be a lot of fun too but there’s definitely more variety if you’re borrowing from the past.

When you were in high school, you created the webcomic Return to Sender. What did you learn from this experience that has helped you in your career?

Haha! I kind of learned what not to do. I did that comic before school and the whole thing was a very fussily-drawn, poorly-planned experiment. I generally knew where the story was going but putting it up online one page at a time was not the best way to do tell it - once a page was up it was up, there was no going back and reworking things to improve the story. Maybe for a comic strip that would’ve been okay but I was essentially trying to make a graphic novel. It reached a point where it had gotten sloppy and I got too busy with school to deal with fixing it so I just stopped. I’m much more careful with plotting now and try to think of a book as a whole, rather than a series of installments. And I stopped using those darn Micron pens!

Thanks, Vera!