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...isn't much.

Newsweek has a new issue out with Michael Jackson on the cover and a big spread inside on books. I think it is really really cool that they've devoted so many pages to summer reading and included such a diverse selection. It's really quite awesome. But then they had to go and disappoint me. There's a spread of short recommendations on a variety of subjects from a variety of people. For example, Melissa Gilbert recommends Hollywood memoirs, Bob Woodward recommends Political Scandal titles, Patricia Cornwall recommends True Crime and Fareed Zakaria recommends foreign policy titles. All makes perfect sense. But then...Jenna Bush recommends the kids books. She was selected because she was a presidential daughter (?), 6th grade teacher and, of course, wrote the book Ana's Story.

Please just kill me now.

I have to assume that every living Caldecott, Newbery and Printz winner was very busy the day they put this list together because surely - surely - Jenna Bush could not be the first choice. Absolutely pitiful and a huge disappointment. You'll just have to overlook it when you read the rest of the section. (And the bits on MJ are actually quite good as well.)

I'm off to enjoy the weekend - warm temperatures here and no sign of rain. (Although we do hope it shows up next week sometime - it's starting to get pretty darn dry.) I'm supposed to talk to my agent next week on what comes next and I have some ideas but nothing concrete. I just finished a short story that I'm happy about (need to reread it next week to be sure I'm still happy about it, but nothing major needs fixing), and I am outlining a YA novel but the big next thing will be more nonfiction and I'm just spinning when it comes to a subject. I don't now which direction is the best one. Hopefully she will have some insight; we'll see.

Happy 4th of July!

I just finished Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell and I am now both disgusted and totally freaked out. Ed is hosting a round table discussion on this one in the coming weeks which I am a part of so I won't go into too much detail here but really, Shell has done an outstanding job of bringing together all the facets of our need to buy cheap: food, clothing, furniture, etc. She doesn't just talk Wal-mart (in fact she doesn't talk much about Wal-mart at all) but she does talk IKEA and Red Lobster and China and the history of discount shopping in our country (Woolworths, etc.) which is truly fascinating. Beyond all the info though, Shell's writing style is utterly and completely top notch. This is popular history/culture at its finest and after you read it, you will approach every single purchase you make with a high level of suspicion.

We have been roundly manipulated folks, for our entire lives. And while we all kinda know it, you have to read Cheap to really appreciate it. Staggering stuff.

I read a lot of biographies where I think the subject is interesting and wished that I could have been the one to research their life, read their letters, peek behind all the dusty corners of their secrets and mysteries. (I'd give you some examples but the list would be ridiculously long.) It is rare that I read one where I wish the person was my friend however - where I really want to just live down the road, have an occasional burger and maybe take a weekly walk with him. But that's exactly what I thought as I read Ashley Bryan: Words to My Life's Song. It's the coolest book about the coolest artist and I just loved it and I love him. And I want Ashley Bryan to be my friend.

Unfortunately he lives on the other side of the country but maybe we could be pen pals or something.

Ashley Bryan is an award winning illustrator who has had a life of loving art. He has written this book both as a memoir of growing up and as an invitation to visit his current life. It's a very unusual mesh of past and present but it works - and the photos of his puppets and stained glass along with reproductions of his illustrations are fabulous. But mostly it is the joy in which he lives that made me like him so much. It's a picture book bio (58 pgs) but works for any audience interested in the lives of artists, African Americans, and all around cool people. There aren't enough cool people in the world; we should make celebrating them a national priority. (My formal review is up in the new issue of Eclectica.)

Cricket Man by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor strikes me as a book that might not have been published if it was written by a less known author. Don't get me wrong, it is well written and has a compelling protagonist in young Kenny but it just doesn't quite seem to know what it wants to be about and then there is such a massive curveball thrown in the final pages that the reader is left more than a bit shocked. It's one thing to figure out the truth about Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense - which just makes perfect sense in retrospect - and it's a whole other deal to think you're reading a sweet coming-of-age story about a boy learning to follow his instincts and buck authority and then...well....let's just say we've very nearly got a dumpster baby involved and leave it at that.

Cricket Man (the title refers to Kenny's determination to save crickets from drowning in his backyard pool) is for MG readers but it really doesn't do anything to help them with the very issues raised by the ending. And also, having known a family quite closely who went through a similar situation, the emotions of everyone involved don't ring true. It's just too pat for lack of a better word and it also doesn't fit with everything that came before it. I felt like I read the ending for an entirely different book - it's just too suddenly intense. I'd love to hear from anyone else who read it to see what they think.

In other reading news, Dara Torres apparently had bulimia when she first went to the Olympics but managed to medal anyway. She is also very competitive (which makes sense) but I wish her book had been more detailed about her life rather than just her Olympic career and decisions. It's actually pretty short when you consider it covers 25 years. HerStoria sounds like excellent history for girl geeks. The bummer is that it is from Britain so the sub cost is steep ($48 for 4 issues).But there is some decent content on the web site as well. ("Women and Madness" is certainly worth a look.) Andrea Barrett is interviewed in the last Believer - haven't read it yet, but plan to soon.

Anila's Journey is a sweet story set in historic India that is a slightly more grown-up companion to fans of The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate. Girl naturalists are certainly a good thing to writer about. (Anila will be in my August column.) And in the pantheon of woman travelers to Africa, I somehow missed Kenyan conservationist and filmmaker Joan Thorpe Root but will be seeking out the book on her life and death after reading Donna Seaman's review in Booklist. Wildflower by Mark Seal sounds amazing:

In this riveting portrait, Seal incisively tracks Joan’s affinity for the wild from her birth in Nairobi in 1932 to helping her intrepid father manage Kenya’s first photo safaris, to her risky work with her husband, the innovative filmmaker and infamous daredevil Alan Root. Lovely, shy, and unflappable, Joan did everything from organizing their ambitious expeditions to dancing in front of a spitting cobra so Alan could film an attack. The messy end of their marriage was devastating to Joan, as was the environmental nightmare that engulfed her cherished home and animal refuge on Lake Naivasha, as Kenya’s flower industry consumed and polluted the landscape and poachers decimated fish and wildlife. Joan struggled heroically to protect this precious ecosystem but became ensnared in a net of social crises and crime.

She was murdered in her home in January 2006.

Finally, be sure to check out Amy's book drive for Beth Kephart's new book, Nothing But Ghosts. The drive run through Friday and is in support of a lovely YA title. My formal review of Ghosts will appear in my July column.

[Let's see, I received Cheap from the pub for the round table discussion which is not really a review but still came from the pub. Ashley Bryan, Cricket Man, Anila's Journey and Nothing But Ghosts all came from the pubs. All others are personal acquisitions/or borrowed or books I don't have and have not read but read about!]

Straight out of last week's girl detective discussion, Laurel Snyder introduced fictional character Hope Jones as the girl detective who has not yet been created. We all played around a little in the comments with what adventures Hope could have as a 21st century version of the classic character. But I've been thinking more about the many things that came up in that discussion, about the relatively simple and tame nature of Nancy Drew and the more serious world girls live in today. Is there room now for a serious, hard hitting, intense (but also sometimes humorous) girl detective series? Here's what I think Hope Jones could do:

1. She could live in a state like West Virginia and find herself at ground zero for some of the biggest environmental crimes in the country. She could track illegal logging, look into mountain top removal, seeping/leaking coal slurry ponds, and mine collapses. Hope could be actively trying to improve the health and welfare of the folks in her area, plus butting heads with those who might not see the bigger picture she embraces. Or....

2. Move our budding environmentalist to the heartland and have her deeply involved in farming. This opens up the possibilities of migrant workers and immigration crime (if she was in Florida she could be investigating slavery) and also a look at the dirty underbelly of agribusiness like price fixing and the nastiness in slaughterhouses. (That fallen cow video is going to haunt me for life.) Or...

3. How about Hope is the daughter of human rights lawyers? In this scenario she could travel the world with them and get caught up in their cases (or others she discovers). This introduces the always popular element of international intrigue while also allowing countless plots. You could have spies, or uncover crimes involving governments or NGOs, or track stolen antiquities, or protect endangered animals or rescue teens suffering from human rights abuses. Or....

4. We all know high school is kinda awful. Part of why Buffy was so successful was because Joss Whedon played so successfully with the idea that high school = hell (even without the hellmouth in the library). So how about we set Hope loose in high school to uncover all the darker mysteries lurking in the halls? You could start with a version of the recent Supreme Court case involving the strip search of Savana Redding. Why did the other girl give her up? And why did the administrators think this kind of search of a 13 year old was okay? And what if Savana had fought back? What would be revealed about her, the other girl (or girls), the VP who did it and on and on. This is taking mean girls to a whole new level and a great way to rip off the veneer of "girls just being girls". Beyond that though you have so many other subjects: steriods, rape, theft, cheating on No Child Left Behind and on and on. High school is an endless source of crime when you think about it. (Thank you Veronica Mars!) Or...

5. Laurel threw out the possibility of cyber crimes in our earlier discussion and this one has a ton of possibilities. You could run down crimes across the country via the internet, especially with cyber bullying and this new penchant for uploading videos of teens abusing each other. Honestly when it comes to the internet and technology you don't have to be Cory Doctorow to see that the possibilities here for a teen sleuth really are endless. Or...

6. One subject Zetta in particular touched on was urban crime. This is, as she mentioned, a touchy area because the violence is real and the repercussions monumental. It would not be realistic to send a teen detective in as an avenging angel against gangs but on the flip side, she could be a lynchpin to bring a neighborhood together. In this scenario you set Hope in any number of American cities - Detroit, Miami, LA, New Orleans, NYC and have her battle to save her friends and family. It would not be easy - you would need a very careful writer here - but I think if done right it would be powerful stuff.

So there's six different Hopes, six different ways that a girl detective could prove her mettle in the 21st century world. I'm not suggesting that I have it all figured out here.....coming up with ideas in some ways is the smallest part of writing. But I wanted to show that there are particular ways that the girl detective could use the best parts of Nancy and Buffy and Veronica and be in older teen situations (involving sex and violence) where she works hard to sort out very real and very identifiable crimes. I think it would be critical that she have a supporting cast and life that extends far beyond the mystery plots (this is what I love so much about Saving Grace); that's what truly gives any series its longevity. But overall, the point I wanted to make was that you could do this. Hope Jones could be a powerful character and what she accomplishes could change teen girl readers everywhere.

Four hundred and fifty young women have gone missing in Juarez, Mexico since 1993. It's a dangerous world for teenage girls and that's a fact. Maybe it's time that some small facet of our YA literature reflect that truth - but in a positive, life changing kind of way. A Nancy Drew that matters - can you imagine?

[* Hope Jones the character name belongs to Laurel Snyder, body and soul!]

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