Parenthetical

A colleague sent me this article from Rethinking Schools: “Save the Muslim girl!”, about the presentation of Afghan and Pakistani girls in modern YA lit. The most popular and critically acclaimed include Deborah Ellis’ Breadwinner trilogy and Suzanne Fisher Staples’ Under the Persimmon Tree, both written by white women and “featur[ing] a young heroine trapped [...]

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…or not, depending on how the contributors read the question. The introduction to the NYTimes article “The Dark Side of Young Adult Fiction” seems to equate “dark” with “dystopian.” This lead some authors to lump Harry Potter and Graveyard Book in with Hunger Games as “dark” books, while others focused on dystopias specifically. It’s a [...]

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I just signed up for the Book Blogger Holiday Swap! I figure it’ll be a fun way to get more involved in the scene, as it were (see how I avoided saying “anything-osphere”? …Oh crap). And who doesn’t like getting a surprise package in the mail? If you also blog about books and like getting [...]

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Way back in the May/June issue, Horn Book published an article called “Eating Reading Animals” about the prevalence of animals in children’s books and what that means for food choices. It was about books! and food ethics! So duh, I wrote a response, but then I never posted it for some reason. So, um, here [...]

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To continue this genre discussion… a couple of weeks ago I attended the Horn Book at Simmons colloquium, where my favorite break-out session was Kelly Hager‘s discussion of When You Reach Me and genre. (Fairly general spoilers.) WYRM (hee) is notoriously, delightfully hard to categorize. Kelly proposed “slipstream” as a genre, based on Bruce Sterling’s [...]

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More on the eternally interesting (to me, anyway) question of genre. A friend posted a review of the movie The Road on her Livejournal, and in comments her friend noted that the book, like the movie, gave no indication of what caused the apocalypse. (Note: I haven’t seen or read The Road, because it will [...]

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This has nothing to do with YA, but it’s hilarious, so I link to Pink Me’s post about picture books with bad metaphors. (Some of them have cows. See what I did with the title there? Yeah, that’s all the clever you’re getting today.)

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Magic is most interesting when it works like a physical weapon: the character is given it (or learns she has it), and has to learn how to use it. It behaves according to rules, and she has to learn those rules in order to use it effectively. In a historical novel, you never see a [...]

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Post-apocalyptic and/or dystopian fiction! It’s: a) pretty much all I read as an adolescent, b) what made the hippie I am today, c) ridiculously popular all of a sudden in YA lit, or d) all of the above? D, obviously. The YA lit world is exploding with talk of dystopias. This article from Publishers Weekly [...]

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That’s right, Parenthetical.net has been synonymous with me for eleven years. That makes internet-me the same age as LiveJournal and the word “blog.” I started my “web journal” as a perpetually single 20-year-old on the day before Valentine’s Day. I was really, really bitter about it. Dear 20-Year-Old Me, this video is for you: (It’s [...]

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