From Quirk Books (who gave us all Pride & Prejudice and Zombies) a title I've requested for an upcoming column on maps and travel: Lost States by Michael Trinklein: "Everyone knows the fifty winners but what about the hundreds of other statehood proposals that never worked out? Lost States is a tribute to such great unrealized states as West Florida, South California, Half-Breed Tracts, Rough and Ready, and others." It includes the story Transylvania that Daniel Boone proposed, the Gold Rush territory of Nataqua and how South Jersey wanted to secede from North Jersey.

This is the kind of trivia that is a big winner with boys in particular (and map nerds like myself of any gender) so I'm looking forward to it.

Two excellent sounding novels from the Coach House back list:

Lemon by Cordelia Strube: "Figuring the numbers are against her, Lemon just cant be bothered trying to fit in. She spurns fashion, television, and even the mall. She reads Mary Wollstonecraft and gets pissed off that Jane Eyre is such a wimp. Meanwhile, the adults in her life are all mired in self-centredness, and the other kids are getting high, beating each other up in parks, and trying to outsex one another. High school is misery, a trial run for an unhappy adulthood of bloated waistlines, bad sex, contradictions, and inequities, and nothing guidance counsellor Blecher can say will convince Lemon otherwise.

But making the choice to opt out of sex and violence and cancer and disappointment doesnt mean that these things don't find you. It will be up to Lemon if she can survive them with her usual cavalier aplomb."

Amphibian by Carla Gunn: "But although he seems to know absolutely everything about the animal world, what he doesn't know is why his granddad had to die or why Lyle the bully always picks on him or why his parents cant live together. He misses his grandad terribly, and he hates to see his grandmother the only person who understands his eco-worrying so sad. He misses his dad, too, and wishes he could see him more, and that the separation didn't make his mom so lonely though he sure doesn't like her talking to creepy Brent. And things only get worse when Phin's mom, desperately worried about his animal obsession, takes him to see a rather unsympathetic psychologist.

When his Grade 4 class gets a pet frog a Whites Tree Frog from Australia it becomes the perfect focus for all Phins worrying. He can't bear to see Cuddles penned up in a cage so very far from his natural habitat just for the amusement of humans. Its just another example of how cruel and self-centred humans are. And so Phin and his best pal, Bird, are spurred to action."

Coach House is a small press out of Canada and published two books in my December column. So far I've found their books to be very smart, witty and completely unique. I think they offer, in their YA titles, something that teens sick to death of vamps and high school dramarama will find especially appealing.

From Chronicle books for Kids, there is The Space Between Trees by Katie Williams (YA), about teen Enid who "hasn't made a friend in years" and how she plans to "come into her own" but then a murdered classmate's body is found in the woods and Enid's life is never the same. Color me curious on this one. Also, Tortilla Sun by Jennifer Cervantes (MG) about a long summer Izzy spends at her grandmother's remote New Mexico village (we don't see NM often at all as a setting) and Sparky by Beverly Gherman (MG & up) a biography of Charles Schultz.

There can never be enough books written about Schultz.

From Princeton Architechtural Press are two unorthodox sounding books: Bird Watching by Paula McCartney and Cartographies of Time, another title for that planned column on maps. Bird Watching appears to be a nature journal but, "On second glance, however, the birds appear a bit too carefully arranged amid the tangle of brush and branches. An even closer look reveals stiff wire protrusions mounting each bird to its perch, matted tufts of overdyed faux feathers forming wings and splashes of paint creating eyes and beaks. McCartney has activated her atmospheric landscapes by adding synthetic decorative birds purchased at craft stores. This startling revelation has you wondering if the artificial might ultimately be more satisfying than the natural. Part document and part fiction, Paula McCartney's Bird Watching is a fanciful, homespun field guide to a woodland twilight zone where our unconscious need to control nature is indulged and our search for an unattainable ideal natural experience is fulfilled."

That sounds like a lot of fun and I'm planning a column on books with a nature twist at some point (summer/fall) so this will fit in there well.

From Graywolf Press, an interesting sounding essay collection: I Just Lately Started Buying Wings by Kim Dana Kupperman. Here's a bit: "Her episodic “missives” cover territory from the chaos of a frenetic childhood to love affairs, failed and otherwise, to the Chernobyl nuclear accident, to an ocean-crossing search for her family’s Eastern European roots. In confident, lyrical prose, Kupperman leads the reader through a winding gallery—a collection of still lifes and portraits, landscapes of loneliness and love."

[A lot of this post is based on catalog copy from publishers. I realize that make me look like a marketing shill. I am sorry. I have not read these books however and can only provide you with the words written about them that made them sound interesting to me. Feel free to skip away to a site that is offering reviews today instead.]