Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer

Miranda is just a regular old high school student when the unthinkable happens: a meteor hits the moon, knocking it closer to the Earth.  This causes dramatic changes in weather patterns.  Tsunamis, volcanoes and earthquakes hit all over the world.  The temperature climbs, and then becomes terribly cold.  With no electricity, and no food coming in, Miranda's family struggles to stay alive through the winter, as their stores of food steadily dwindle.  They try to cling to hope that things will get better, but no one is sure if they will.

This was very interesting.  And I liked it.  It was different from other disaster books (and movies).  Usually, something large and dramatic happens (meteor hits the Earth, massive earthquake, alien attack) and our hero is called on to do something heroic and save people, and at the end of the book we know that things are going to be OK.

This was quite a bit different.  Life As We Knew It is written through Miranda's journal entries, and she's recording her daily life, which is not exciting.  Not exciting at all.  She isn't doing anything big and heroic, and neither is anyone in her family, aside from surviving day by day.  She writes about being scared and sick and frustrated and feeling trapped.  Learning that people she knows have died, having people she cares about leave in the hopes of finding something better.  It's just daily life in extreme circumstances, and it was really compelling.  She's dealing with huge issues like finding enough food, but she's also a teenage girl and she fights with her mom about little things and wishes the boy she liked hadn't had to go away.

As I neared the end, I was really wondering where Pfeffer was going to leave us.  It didn't look like it was going to end with a big happy conclusion and everyone being saved, and I'm glad.  That would have felt wrong after the realism of the situations Miranda describes.  I got closer and closer to the end, and it didn't seem to be coming to any kind of resolution.  I think it ended the best way it could have.  There wasn't really an end point.  They made it through the winter, good.  Now they have to keep on living and hope that life will improve.  An excellent look at survival.

I'm unsure about the science, however.  First of all, if a meteor hit the moon, you wouldn't be able to tell that the moon was closer to the Earth right away, right?  Because, you know, the moon is far away and it takes a while for light to get to our eyes, etc.  The moon effects the tides, so tsunamis seem reasonable, what about the other stuff?  The volcanoes and so forth?  And would they lose all electricity for that long?  I have questions, I need a scientist.

Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi

Nailer works as a Ship Breaker.  He scavenges copper and other metals from wrecked ships.  Life is very hard in the Gulf Coast region, especially for Nailer who not only must do dangerous work but also then go home to his drug addicted and abusive father.  After a terrible storm that leaves many of the workers on the beach dead, Nailer discovers a wrecked clipper ship.  Inside he finds a rich girl, Nita, who promises him great rewards if Nailer can get her back to her father.  Nailer decides to take the risk in the hopes of a big payoff, but his father finds out about Nita too, and now both Nailer and Nita are on the run.

Ship Breaker won the Printz Award this year.  I didn't feel very strongly about the Printz Award this year.  I did last year.  There were several books I thought were absolutely amazing and wanted them to be recognized.  They weren't.  I was disappointed.  But this year, while I read a number of very good books, I wasn't totally blown away by anything, with the exception of Monsters of Men, the third book in the Chaos Walking series by Patrick Ness, which did not get recognized.  That series is amazing, why did it not get more attention?

News

Child and adolescent psychiatrist Harold Koplewicz talks about what makes kids love dystopia fiction.  From The Huffington Post.

Philip Pullman defends libraries.  From FalseEconomy.org 

More news on The Hunger Games movie.  It's scheduled to come out March 23, 2012.  From The Wall Street Journal.

Oh dear.  Jennifer Love Hewitt is going to be directing a movie adaption of Wait Till Helen Comes.  My 5th grade teacher read this aloud to us.  Don't mess it up, Jen, or Helen will get you.  From The Hollywood Reporter.

The entire cast of Eclipse has been nominated for a Razzie.

Diversity in YA Fiction

Look what I have discovered!  Young adult authors Malinda Lo and Cindy Pon have started a blog to promote diversity in YA fiction.  They will feature books that include diversity and do a roundup of books each month.  Both Lo and Pon have new books coming out shortly, and they will be going on tour together and have invited a number of other authors who have written books with diverse characters to join them.  So hop on over and check out their web site.  I think this is going to be fabulous.

Sold by Patricia McCormick

Lakshimi lives with her family in Nepal.  Her family is very poor, and her stepfather cannot work and squanders most of the family's money by gambling.  Lakshimi dreams of going to the city to work and being able to send money home to her family.  She thinks her chance has come when her stepfather arranges her to leave her village.  However, it turns out Lakshimi has not been sent to work as a maid to a wealthy women.  She has been sold into prostitution.  Thirteen-year-old Lakshimi faces horrors she never dreamed of, as she tries not to lose hope of someday obtaining her freedom.

This was absolutely heartbreaking.  I was becoming very upset while reading it.  Lakshimi is just a character, but her story has happened to far too many real little girls.

Illegal Book Downloading

I have to say I haven't given a whole lot of thought to the illegal downloading of books.  It's certainly a problem with music, and has been for some time.  But somehow, I just didn't think about book downloading.  And it seems I'm behind the times because it's certainly an issue, and it looks like writers and publishers and going to be locked in the same battle that recording artists and their distributors have been for years.

This came to my attention when I read a post on Bookshelves of Doom.  It was a link to a post from Saundra Mitchell's blog entitled "'Free' Books Aren't Free."  I suggest you read it.  Mitchell makes the case that because there are upward of 800 illegal downloads of her book, Shadow Summer, a week and only about 10 hard copies purchased a month, her book will be going out of print and she has made very little money off it and won't get any royalties out of it.  That certainly sucks.

However, a post from Gravity's Rainbow argues that while that does suck, the issue is publishing companies not understanding how people want to read books, and how people want to read books isn't available, and therefore people will keep right on illegally downloading.  This is of course the same with the music downloading debate.  It's a losing battle.  Why not meet the people where they are?

An article from Wired from May 2010 asks whether the introduction of the iPad caused illegal book downloads to jump.  This article claimed that book downloading was a small issue, down only by a few "geeky" individuals.  It seems that in a little more than half a year it's become more widespread.

You Killed Wesley Payne by Sean Beaudoin

Dalton Rev is a hard-boiled, er, teenage who's just transferred to Salt River High, the most corrupt high school around.   Cliques rule the school, teachers expect to be bribed, and of course the cops are crooked.  Dalton is searching for the killer of Wesley Payne, who was found dead and duct taped upside down to the football goal posts.  The case has been ruled a suicide, but Wesley's sister has brought Dalton in to find out the truth.  Relying heavily on his knowledge of Lexington Cole mysteries, Dalton attempts to find Wesley's killer, locate $10,000 that's gone missing, and end the clique wars.  All while trying not to piss off his mother too much.

This was OK.  I didn't love.  This might be because like the day before I read this, I'd re-watched The Sting.  Man, the movie is amazing.  It is so good.  It all comes together so mind blowingly well.  Can anything ever live up to it?  The answer is no.  And while it's more about con artists, not detective, it's in a similar style and it's just so well done.

I had a hard time buying in to this.  Salt River High is a place where there are people shooting off the roofs into crowds of kids, the principal, secretary and teachers are all excepting bribes from the students.  There are three million different cliques that are constantly beating the crap out of each other.  You have police punching kids in the face.  And it was done in that noir style, but the world of cops, detectives, murderers and prostitutes with hearts of gold felt really forced in the world of high school.

I also found the plot confusing.  Dalton is suppose to be finding out who killed Wesley Payne, but then he's also suppose to find the money that went missing from the principal's safe, and then he gets pulled into this whole clique war thing.  The clique war thing is really what I really was having trouble following.  Why did The Balls and Pinker Casket feel like they needed to take each other out?  Why did Dalton feel he needed to fake a deal between the two of them?  That part felt weak to me.

There were some things I didn't see coming, which I enjoyed.  You always need to have some surprises in a mystery.  People who were actually secretly working for other people the whole time and so forth.  And the Clique Index complete with flowchart at the beginning of the book was excellent.  I also loved the ridiculous titles of the Lexington Cole mysteries Dalton would refer to, which got more and more ridiculous as the book went on.  Just to give you a taste: Fjord of the Flies and Ten Stories up on the Windblown Ledge of Desire.

You Killed Wesley Payne comes out on February 1st.