I shared this on Twitter, but it’s awesome enough to require additional reposting. Lili Wilkinson, author of Pink, responds on her blog to an article that says, in part: TEENAGERS are not like us. They grunt rather than converse, slouch rather than walk, sleep till noon and their preferred dress is grunge—any black T-shirt featuring […]
One of the blogs I read regularly is Blue Rose Girls, an interesting collective of children’s book professionals including writers, artists, a former librarian, and an editor. The post yesterday said, in part:
Some of you may have seen a video on the blog today. There one minute, gone the next. It was a stop animation of two upholstered chairs doing “the nasty” on a rooftop.[…] I should explain that I put it up because it’s a very cool and artistic video. Artistic creative things get my artistic creative juices flowing. I make books by being inspired. Enough said.
But someone complained that it wasn’t appropriate for a children’s book blog, and so it came down.
There’s another brohaha brewing on the interwebs about Margo Rabb’s essay in The New York Times about her book being labeled as YA, and the assumed stigma that comes along with it, quoting a number of writers of both adult and children’s books. Justine Larbalestier wrote about the “stigma”, disagreeing with many of the points Rabb raised. I think it’s telling that she picked authors like James Patterson to quote, which seems an easy agreement to her point, especially since the Times has written before about Patterson’s horror at the sales of his books when they were shelved only in the teen section.
Even in LA, I’m still getting good news! Thank goodness for wireless, that’s all I can say. It’s how I was able to read this wonderful five star review for Alyson Noel’s CRUEL SUMMER, from TeensReadToo.
Back from the beach, with a pile of emails and posts to get all caught up on, more reading still to do (although I got through ALL the books I brought with me to read).
