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!

The Nature Of Unleaving

Lovely posts from Bitch magazine and The Daily Beast today on SD — the former of which made me realize that my father’s verdict on my potty mouth (“Every other word is ‘fuck’!”) was not, in fact, hyperbole. (And he’s a Bronx Jew!)

Reading Shelf Discovery feels like attending a high school reunion and reminiscing about the best of your teenage escapades with a particulary entertaining friend.

via BookPage.com.

Some new lovely reviews: This one in Salon (with commenters noting both that Wrinkle in Time is not for teens and boys should read these books, go forth and live in a world of your making), this one in EW, and this great Q&A from Flavorpill (and kudos to the reporters who have to cut down my chatty meandering–which meets and exceeds that of print–into discrete sentences).

I draw your attention to this one paragraph, which yielded a sigh of relief from a Facebook friend who thought I might be an enormous ignoramus:

FP: Are there any books you purposely didn’t touch? Are there any you read for the first time for Shelf Discovery/Fine Lines?

LS: I’ve stayed away, I’ve noticed now from M. E. Kerr, just because I’ve decided I think probably I like her too much. I was worried I would destroy it if I wrote about it. She wrote this book called Me Me Me Me Me, it’s this fantastic book. I was like, “No way! Can’t touch it!” Or The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More I was just not going near, it’s my favorite book.

Yes. I am not a senseless clod. I am with Kerr and Dahl in mind and heart. I am just not yet ready.

…and one is ALMOST potty-trained. Will try to refrain from making audience clap.

I’m a the Barnes & Noble in Tribeca tonight at 7!

Tuesday, July 28, 7:00 PM
Barnes & Noble – Tribeca
97 Warren St., NY, NY 10007

Link and map here.

Babble wrote a very nice post, “Lizzie Skurnick And Our Obsession With Teen Books . . . In Book Form” on Strollerderby. Point taken on brief essays, which a few other reviews have noted, although sadly you’re going to be hard-pressed to make any book reviewer stop doing anything that makes people want MORE.

I’ve just realized Double X  posted this last week:  Would a man read teen novels like Lizzie Skurnick does?. There are some interesting comments, but more important, what is WRONG with me that I care so little about what men think or do, and especially how they read, ESPECIALLY where this book is concerned? (Is it because this book tour has revealed indubitably that many, many others are going ahead and caring my share for me? Probably.) Anyway, the headline does keep prompting me to want to make a lot of dirty jokes/Mae West asides, like, “Only if he…” dot dot dot. Of course I’m not good at either so all I can do is remind you that “Double X” always sounds very naughty to me also.

Oooo, pretty new NPR!

Marie Howe has an essay in the latest O magazine, Reading Little House on the Prairie With My Daughter, in which she turns, as the wise do again and again, to Ma, Pa, Laura, Mary (AND JACK THE BRINDLE BULLDOG) for how to make do when you’ve lost what you do.

It was a cold winter in New York, bitter cold, stinging cold. The economic downturn had become a recession. Every week brought more news of layoffs and cutbacks. Day after day that February we pulled on layers to go to school and work, then scarves and hats and mittens, and we bent into the wind as we walked toward the river. The Ingallses by that time were living in a shack—blizzards blew across the prairie so hard and thick they couldn’t see out their small windows for days. The girls woke up to their quilts coated with ice. They were starving and weak and broke. Pa checked and fed the animals, Ma made dinner, be it only potatoes, and the girls cleaned up, tended the baby. My own salary was frozen and threatened. I lay awake at night, a single mother, wondering what I would do if…, tossing and waking with worry.

(I have babbled along these lines several times: see my essay “Cold Comfort: In Which I Don’t Even Try to Fight the Metaphor” on The Long Winter in Jezebel; “Buck Up: Life Lessons From Young Heroines” on All Things Considered; and a [popup] clip from a recent Los Angeles Times Book Festival panel in which I talk about how the Little House books were heartwarming, not so much.)

There’s a lot of invisible writing that happens in the world — a fact I know not least because it used to be my primary task, as a lower-echelon publican in the publishing community, to do so much of it. (In fact, it was only after the last of about 9 firings that ended apologetically with, “But we really love your [flap copy/headlines/short reviews/proposals/cover letters/captions/book reports/email subject lines]” that it finally dawned on me that I should perhaps give this WRITING thing a try.)

In any case, I wanted to give credit to two really lovely essays on the book that were written by producers on radio shows on which I have recently appeared. (And let me assure you, my praise here is not at all driven by the fact that I am about to be one’s bridesmaid and the other apparently has a great deck. Well, maybe a little on the deck.) It is famously hard to write your own copy, and I wish I had had them around when I was chewing a pen over my proposal and all other publicity materials, not because they write such great copy but because this copy is so great. PEOPLE: this is how it is done.

The first was written by my friend and bride-to-be Barrie Hardymon of Talk of the Nation:

They are books that girls stuffed in the bottom of their bookbags, the well-handled, much beloved books that chronicled the moral certitude of childhood all the way to the desperate longings and stifled angst of adolescence. [Click for rest]

The second by deck-possessor Cristy Meiner of The Bob Edwards Show:

We re-readers are an often mocked group; I can’t even recall how many times my Mom has said to me, “WHY do you re-read books when there are so many books out there you haven’t read?!” I understand the question, I really do, and trust me, I’m doing my best to get through the hundred million or so that I haven’t read yet. But re-reading a favorite book from my youth is the book equivalent to settling down in a hot bubble bath: I relax and my tired brain sighs happily as I step back into a story I know and love. [Click for rest]

My crowning moment, by the way, was the headline for a piece on Viagra and thinning hair: “Just Say Grow.”

I am #70 on Kindle bestsellers on Amazon!!!!!!!! (Sandwiched between “The Prince” and “A Summer Affair”.) Click photo to witness septuagenarian glory.

I had so much fun doing this podcast with former YALSA (Young Adult Library Services Association) president, the completely delightful Michael Cart, that I barely let him get a word in edgewise. Things we discussed (as broken down by producer Linda Braun):

• Shelf Discovery
• The range of human experience covered in teen novels.
• How teens read and what they get out of reading realistic fiction.
• Books including Secret Lives by Bertha Amos, Jacob Have I Loved, Phyllis Reynold Naylor’s Alice series, and The Dreadful Future of Blossom Culp.
• Reasons why novels for girls and women do not receive the respect they deserve.
• Skurnick’s career & the readership of her Jezebel columns.
• The future of print reviewing and the changing world of reading in electronic and print formats.