A Whale of a Picture Book
I don’t get a lot of pictures books sent my way here at Beatrice, but I heard that Mac Barnett, one of the directors of 826LA, the Los Angeles outpost of Dave Eggers’s creative writing centers for children and young adults, had collaborated with Adam Rex on something called Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale Problem, and I was intrigued enough to check it out. I’m so glad I did: Imagine a particularly excellent McSweeney’s item, geared towards a precocious eight-year-old. With illustrations that are just as smart and sly.
The deadpan humor is fantastic; frankly, I think grown-ups may well wind up loving this book more than kids—but I’m not suggesting that kids won’t get a kick out of it. They’ll love the silly pictures, and if they don’t laugh at all the jokes when you read it to them, well, give ’em time.
15 July 2009 | read this |
Catherine Jinks & Her Slacker Vampires
Australian novelist Catherine Jinks recently came to New York on a bit of business and a bit of holiday, so when Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, one of the American publishers for her YA novels, invited several journalists, children’s librarians, and book bloggers to meet her for lunch, I took the opportunity to ask her about the origins of her latest novel to be published here, The Reformed Vampire Support Group, which turn out to have nothing to do with a certain quartet of novels about dreamy not-so-adolescent bloodsuckers…
I’m looking forward to reading this novel, but I actually started with one of her earlier books, Evil Genius, which reads like a sly, subversive parody—and not just of Bond supervillians, but of that whole Harry Potter mode of storytelling that lovingly traces every step in the development of the special child destined for greatness. Only in this case Cadel Piggott is a genius hacker, and he’s being groomed to take over the world because his mentors believe ordinary people are too stupid not to ruin things if left to their own devices. I’m about a third of the way through, I can’t quite figure out where it’s going next, and I’m looking forward to finding out.
13 July 2009 | interviews |
Our Endless and Proper Work is my new book with Belt Publishing about starting (and sticking to) a productive writing practice. 
