News

It is always a good and nice sign when there is so much press you can’t keep up with it, EVEN IF A GOODLY PORTION OF IT SEEMS TO THINK ONE DOES THIS SORT OF THING IN DEAD EARNEST. In any case, would love to draw your attention to all of these things and as ever am grateful for any attention at all, which is something I should probably bring up with my therapist:

* I had a UNSPEAKABLY fun interview with Kim Alexander of XM and Sirius’s Fiction Nation (that should be wrestled into one of those von und zu constructions) that she’s prepped for here. It will be online next week:

Want to make some instant friends on line at the grocery store or on the bus? Shout out “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” I promise you, you’ll find you’re part of a sorority of women readers. They’ll want to talk about how Judy Blume made getting their periods a little less mortifying, about their lifelong love affair with Calvin from A Wrinkle in Time (the first print boy I ever noticed who wasn’t an elf or an alien), and how everyone, no matter how snottily highbrow, read every single lurid page of Flowers in the Attic.  We read those books with an intensity I don’t think we can reach anymore…

* The very, very funny Anita Liberty did a very, very funny review on the website Book Club Girl:

When I heard about SHELF DISCOVERY from Book Club Girl, I thought for sure that I would be able to match Skurnick’s breadth of knowledge about YA literature from the sixties and seventies. I, too, was a ravenous reader when I was a nubile and impressionable teenager. So I flipped open Skurnick’s book to the Table of Contents, where she lists the titles of all the books that are covered in SHELF DISCOVERY and put checkmarks next to the ones I’d read. Turns out I’m not as well-read in this genre as I’ve always thought. Damn you, Skurnick. I hate having my inadequacies exposed.

* I like how Tablet manages to find the Jew-y Jew angle here to the extent of making sure other readers know I am a bat mitzvah. When other people overcompensate in their project of making sure others approve of me, it frees up my time:

Lizzie Skurnick…does not see herself as following in the footsteps of Rashi or Maimonides. Instead, Farah Fawcett provided a model for Skurnick, or at least for her hairstyle around the time of her bat mitzvah. But in parsing the nuances and resonances of classic young adult novels—including a few Jewish essentials, such as Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret and Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself, Bette Green’s Summer of My German Soldier, and Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family—Skurnick…accomplishes for the preteen literary set more or less what Rashi provided for the Jews’ sacred texts, and a reading guide for a different, but no less perplexed, demographic.

* Ypulse did a really fun and lovely interview with me, then edited it to make me sound almost smart. Grumpy, tired, impatient with everyone, but smart. (At least I didn’t say “their little lives,” which I swear I did in my head):

YP: Do you think that reflected the perception of young readers and young people in general at the time? How, if at all, do you think that’s changed?

LS: I do think reading was generally viewed as a more transgressive activity back then. …Children were meant to be children, and these books showed them learning to assert their independence in an adult world….Today it’s just the opposite. We focus on children so much, I think we have a tendency to optimize them. Back in the day you had these stories about how parents can’t reach or don’t understand children. Now, parents are co-members of the narrative. We have to deconstruct their lives as well.

* And now here’s where I get peeve-y, although God knows a) one should never be peeve-y about one’s reviews and 2.3) a REVIEWER should never be peeve-y about being reviewed, as God knows I deserve what I get. That said, I have held my tongue about all the bitching about how often I say OMG (never, fyi, though there is one omigod) and WTF (ONCE) in the narrative, though I will take this opportunity to put forth publicly that I DIDN’T, and I am as ever bemused that PEOPLE DON’T UNDERSTAND CAPPING IS MILDLY IRONICAL. This thinger from the LA Times, however, cannot stand:

Sometimes Skurnick’s explanations are too loaded with extraneous detail or slowed by efforts at cleverness. Sometimes her writing is just too breathless, sort of like she’s a modern tween who just spotted a Jonas Brother. That said, her enthusiasm is undeniable.

Oh. You know what? I do do that. I also missed this:

humorous musings about plots, characters and significance.

But everyone STOP saying “memory lane” PLEASE. I don’t even like it when people say that in real life.

* Okay, THIS thing from Good cannot stand, then:

Skurnick writes in jaunty, wink-wink prose punctuated with a heavy dose of all caps. It can get a bit cutesy, but the book offers a non-threatening, girlfriend’s-gabbing-over-wine atmosphere of nostalgia for the wistful tween days, when we lay around feeling ugly and fat, reading our first sex scenes. (Ralph shows up throughout the book. You know, that Ralph).

I’m not cutesy! I am jaunty and I wink and I talk in caps, but I am not cutesy! Call me ugly and fat, if you must.

More press is incoming, for which I have planned lengthy posts on black book covers and boy teen stuff, at least 1/45 of which may come to pass. Stay tuned!