There's a new issue of Eclectica Magazine up today (we are celebrating our 10th year online!) and although I haven't had a chance to read much of it yet, I do know everything going on in the Review Section, so I thought I would send you there first.
We have four reviews of new poetry books, several literature reviews and a couple of great interviews. (The one with Dara Horn has convinced me that she and I were separated at birth - we loved all the same YA literature growing up.) Scott Malby looks at some lit sites and also reviews An Unreasonable Woman - the book that will make you look at the plastics in your house with a whole new level of revulsion (and hopefully convince us all to do something about tour dependence on the nasty stuff.)
I have a lot of YA reviews as well as a semiannual look at picture books. I also have an essay on recent Arctic exploration books. This was prompted by my long interest in northern exploration (I'm such a geek) and also the weird coincidence that Booklist would send me two books set in the Arctic for review last winter. I thought they were both fantastic (Afterlands & The Ice Museum) and really wanted to write some more about them. I already had a couple of books on explorer Elisha Kent Kane and his wife, the mother of the American spiritualist movement, Margaret Fox. (Or was she his wife - that's a question historians still can't answer.) So it all worked out to put these books together in an essay about why Arctic books rock. (Sheila Nickerson's Midnight to the North rounds out the five titles - oddly enough she wrote this biography a few years ago about a character who appears in the novel Afterlands).
It's just all about bookish coincidences around here, people.
Anyway, I really enjoyed writing about the Arctic books and I hope that folks like reading the essay as well. As for the YA books I reviewed, well there's a ton of picture books so I won't list them all here, and six novels: Dream Merchant, The Boy Who Ate the Stars, Pond Scum, Tequila Worm, Defining Dulcie, & A Higher Geometry. Of all of these, The Boy Who Ate the Stars is probably the one you have heard the least about, and it's just lovely.
That's all for now - and blogger still sucks!
