The new issue of Bookslut is up and those of you who remember my complaints about YA mysteries will enjoy my column this month which includes several recommendations on that front. Ben Towle's graphic novel Midnight Sun is my Cool Read this time - and for more on Ben and how he came to write this historical drama, be sure to check out my interview with him in two weeks for this year's Summer Blog Blast Tour. I also have interviews with Delia Sherman and Elisha Cooper and lots of other folks are getting their interviews ready as well. The tour is set for the week of May 19th and should be the same awesome round-up of cool literary voices that we enjoyed for last year's Summer & Winter tours.

I also have a review of the amazing nonfiction title Aaronsohn's Maps this month. I can't recommend this history title enough - it has WWI, Palestinians, Turks, Zionists, Lawrence of Arabia and the Jewish Joan of Arc plus Aaron Aaronsohn, the man who might have had the plan to a peaceful Middle East. If you have any interest at all in the history of the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict then this look at the region just as that discord was in its infancy is a must read.

I have not read most of Bookslut yet this week but I do highly recommend Elizabeth Bachner's piece on Syliva Plath. I came to Plath very late - in my thirties - but adore her writing. This is a great look at the writer and what everyone thinks of her readers.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this review of Leonard Marcus's Minders of Make-Believe. I have the book here and will get to it by this fall when I'm sure I'll have much more to say than this reviewer did. (It seems like a poor match between reviewer and book but I might just be reading too much into a scanty critique.)

I've read Gods of Manhattan. I agree with Betsy. I am going to write a more thorough post soon on the matter though because I think there is something important at work here that we should (as readers/reviewers of MG/YA fiction) be addressing. Just for myself though - would everyone please stop writing fantasy where a kid wakes up one day and discovers he's the second coming of whatever? It worked for Buffy only because Joss Whedon created the mother of all back stories and it worked for Harry Potter because the bad guy was dead and he was just supposed to be one more of many many wizards (and he wasn't even the best). But how many books do we have to read where a kid just walks out the door one day and by the end he/she/they are everything and a bag of chips when it comes to saving the town/city/important book/holy grail/or Manhattan. For further evidence, see Triskellion, The Black Tattoo, Endymion Spring and The Alchemyst: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel. When it's done right it's very good; but when it's done over and over just to get the plot moving then really - it's very very bad.

I am putting together the collection of books I plan to read for August's look into political titles (Cory Doctorow's Two Brothers, Walter Dean Myers' Sunrise Over Fallujah, Nick Mamatas and Under My Roof, Paul Molyneau's Swimming in Circles, Bomb the Suburbs by William Upski Wimsatt, Betrayal of Africa by Gerald Caplan, etc. etc). Some of these I might not like enough to review so they'll be dropped but that is the basic plan (And of course a big shout out to David Levithan's Wide Awake.) I did just see this Powell's essay from author Kelly McMaster on her memoir Welcome to Shirley and I thought - man I've got to read that book! Here's the book's description:

Shirley seemed to be doomed from the beginning. Founded by a Vaudevillian huckster who touted it as a seaside haven despite the sand bar that blocks access to the shore, the town has been plagued by one disaster after another — a UFO, a childhood cancer cluster, and a mysterious federal nuclear laboratory in nearby Brookhaven that leaked toxic nuclear and chemical waste into the aquifer from which the residents unknowingly drew their well water.

This is Kelly McMasters' account of growing up in a cursed town and loving it anyway, and of a girl's awakening to tragedy and to a sense of mission. Told in a deliciously engaging voice, Welcome to Shirley balances the bitter with the sweet, the funny with the infuriating, in an unforgettable story of working class Long Island.

PW said it was a bit of a "a tedious memoir of childhood" but I think that makes it perfect for teens. It's a different look at the environmental issues we are facing so hopefully I'll be able to fit it in.

Oh - and Alexandra Fuller's The Legend of Colton Bryant on life and death in the WY oil fields is on the way as well.

It looks like a lot of reading right now, but my June and July columns are done as well as half of August, so I'm way ahead of the reviewing curve. It's all going to be such interesting reading that I don't think I could have resisted it anyway. The feature just gives me a great excuse to get to all these subjects.

Guys Lit Wire is still set to debut on June 1st and is looking lovely. I'm quite excited and hope this site can be the kind of power for good in the world of teen reading that I envision it to be. You will not believe the stuff that the contributors are working on - it is so awesome and impressive and thoughtful. Nobody is coasting over there - it's all going to be great.

Now back to the The Map of My Dead Pilots. I finished writing a bit about Antoine de Saint Exupery's book on flying the mail last night (Night Flight - it's an amazing novella, one of my favorites books on flying). That one really affected me the first time I read it; it is so much like the Alaska I knew (even though the book was set in South America in the 1920s) that it really struck me. I have also written about hauling sled dogs (more on this later) and I'm struggling with a long chapter on a good friend who crashed because of a lot of little reasons that never should have added up to an accident but they did. This is not hard because of the crash itself (he's fine) but because I have to explain how a good pilot can crash. Not so easy to do. Fifty pages by the end of the month though; I never knew I could be so productive.