Sisters Red

Pearce, Jackson. Sisters Red. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010. Print.
[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/8547268]

Booktalk:

"Versteck euch!" Oma March whispered hoarsely, pointing urgently toward her bedroom in the back of the cottage. Hide. Hide now.
...
"Schatzi, my treasures, I won't let him have you!" Oma March murmured under her breath, like a prayer. She dashed for the telephone and began dialing.
"Charlie? Charlie, one is here. Outside," Oma March whispered frantically to Pa Reynolds, the woodsman who lived down the road. "Oh god, Charlie, hurry," she pleaded.

p.4-5

But Pa Reynolds didn't make it in time, changing the lives of Oma March's granddaughters, Rose and Scarlett, forever.

Review:
Everyone was raving about Sisters Red when it came out last year, and I, ever the cynic, figured no book could live up to that much hype. So I skipped it. Even though it's a fairytale retelling of sorts. Even though it's a fairytale retelling of Little Red Riding Hood.

Sometimes I'm dumb.

Luckily, I'm willing to admit my mistakes, so when I overheard someone in the bookstore telling her friend how much she loved this book, I snuck up and grabbed a copy for myself. By "myself" I mean "my library,"* but Sisters Red is a book I would gladly spend my own cash monies on. I loved it, and my gushing while reading has already prompted a holds list, which is pretty unusual for a YA novel in my academic library. Here are just a few of the things I was gushing about:

• Scarlett is so tough. She's deadly with a hatchet and harshly truthful and fiercely loyal and secretly proud of while being secretly self-hating because of her many battle scars. She feels overwhelmingly obligated to do the work that she does, and she's good at it. She's generally kick-ass.
• Rose is so conflicted. She wants Scarlett to trust her to hunt alone, but she also wants Scarlett to need and protect her. She wants to remain half of a pair, but she also wants to break away into a different life. She's got wicked aim with throwing knives, and she holds Scarlett together when no one else can. She's generally kick-ass.
• Silas is quite literally the boy next door. As such, he's managed to win the crushes of both Scarlett and Rose over the years. But he is first and foremost Scarlett's partner; they are a team and they act like one. He also manages to be first and foremost Rose's support. He pushes Scarlett to trust Rose on the hunt, and he pushes Rose to break away from hunting and live her own life. And he does all of this without being two-faced or playing one sister against the other. He totally gets that no matter how much Rose might swoon over him or how much Scarlett depends on him, he will never be able to compete with the relationship Scarlett and Rose have with each other. So he doesn't try.
• The twist that Pearce puts on werewolf mythology is great. They're still totally evil people-eaters (unlike some other werewolves you may be familiar with), but they're not the werewolves of B-rated horror films (or Harry Potter) either. How she weaves the girl in the red riding hood into this mythology made me giddy. She's created a werewolf that is, a lot of the time, victim to his own senses and sensations. In showing how Scarlett and Rose manipulate these monsters, she completely immerses the readers in a rich fantasy: the one that Scarlett and Rose (with help from Silas) nightly create. 
• None of this compares to the twist Pearce has put on the ending of her own story. I thought I had it figured out about halfway through the book, then I lost it, then I figured it out again, but by then things were so complicated that I didn't know how Scarlett, Rose, and Silas were going to pull it off.

Seriously guys, I loved this book. The opening hook worked like a charm, and by the end, I was reading with my heart in my throat. I was so invested in these characters. Pearce's second book, Sweetly, came out last month. I will not be skipping it.


Book source: bought it for and then checked it out from work!


* And, of course, i couldn't just get one book... They'll never let me out with the library credit card again.

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Comfort Reading

My apologies for the radio silence, folks.

I don't want this to be the place where I spill all my troubles, so I won't go into it, but things have been, for lack of a better word, difficult lately. I just haven't been able to make myself sit down and write any reviews. I've been doing what any good raised-by-baptists girl would do. I've been making comfort food. Nothing like mac'n cheese or mashed potatoes or mini chocolate nanner muffins to make bad times better. This baptist upbringing has also instilled in me the need to provide a comfort casserole or lasagna to anyone remotely in crisis.

My kitchen's been busy.

But I've also been reading. In recent weeks, I've read some great books (Dark Parties, Rotters, Texas Gothic), and I'm going to try to make myself sit down and talk about them with you all soon. What's really been taking up my time, though, is the Song of Ice and Fire series (many thanks to The Lost Entwife whose non-spoilery reviews pushed me over the edge into Must Read Now). I've not been able to put them down. Part of this is because these books are great and end with just enough left unresolved that I've just HAD to rush into the next 1000+ page installment. The bigger part, I think, is that books like A Game of Thrones et al. are my reading comfort food. The fantasy part is, unsurprisingly, just the kind of thing to make me feel better, but the combination of fantasy with a medieval or feudal setting just does something for me. I blame the books leftover from my father's Arthurian fantasy phase that littered my childhood. I have one more Ice and Fire book in my possession, and there is another that I can buy after that. But I don't feel the need to read them anymore. I just want to. Which means they worked.

I'll be back to my normal book-reviewing self soon, I hope, but in the meantime, what's your favorite comfort reading?


Links to Amazon.com may be affiliate links for the Amazon Associates program. If you buy something through this link, I may receive a referral fee.

The Lost Art of Reading

Ulin, David L. The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time. Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 2010. Print.
[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/10530802]

Booktalk:

Sometime in the last few years -- I don't remember when, exactly -- I noticed I was having trouble sitting down to read. That's a problem if you read, as I do, for a living, but it's an even bigger problem if you read as a way of life.

p.9

"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear," Joan Didion notes in her essay "Why I Write," and it's no understatement to suggest that this is what the dynamic between a writer and a reader offers from the other side as well. Or it was, at any rate, until the moment I became aware, in an apartment full of books, that I could no longer find within myself the quiet necessary to read.

p.33

Review:
The Lost Art of Reading, which is really a long essay more than a book, chronicles Ulin's realization that he can't find the quiet to read in our plugged in, always on world. With all of the tweets and blogs and google searches and links leading to links leading to more links all with music playing the background, it's an understandable dilemma. It's also not that original. What makes Ulin's account different is the way he draws a parallel between his own inability to concentrate enough to just read and his son's inability to do the same because of classroom mandated annotations. Granted, this is not the main focus of the book, though his son's Great Gatsby assignment is what starts Ulin evaluating his own reading problems. Still, it is what really hit home for me. Two of the five articles I've linked to above are about over-"wired" kids who are so plugged into technology that they can't focus. Everything is an exercise in multitasking. When we finally sit these kids down in front of a great book like The Great Gatsby, why do we make them stop reading on a regular basis? I know, I know, it's so we can force them to analyze all of the similes and metaphors and tone and allusions. And so the kids can prove that they did the reading assignment. But really, why don't we let them just read?

Anyway, I loved this little book. It's full of readerly quotes from plenty of authors. I made a conscious effort to sit and read it in a day (it's roughly 100 pages), just to prove that I could maintain the concentration that Ulin could not. I know; I'm petty. I had no trouble turning off the TV, not checking status updates or email. I wrote down book titles I wanted to look up later on my due date card. And really, it wasn't that hard. Now, I'll be the first to admit that I do most of my reading on the train to and from work when I don't have an internet connection. At home I generally watch TV and at work, when I'm not actually working, I'm still on the computer. It was nice to know that I still have it in me to sit and read an entire book in a day. It's been a while.

Since reading this book, I have noticed that whenever I sit down at the computer to write (and review) I have all of Ulin's multitask-y symptoms. I check my email, check facebook, read articles, read all of your blogs, all with a blogger window or word document untouched in my taskbar. I'll write a sentence, read an article, format the picture for a blog post, check my email. I can't sustain the concentration to write in the way that I did in school or even the way that I do when I read (I don't know how you authors do it!). Ulin says his need to unplug when reading is part of the reason he hasn't switched to an ereader. If he could surf the web in the same device that he uses to read a book, he'd be doomed! Sometimes I feel that way about writing and reviewing. When I was an undergrad, I almost always wrote papers, or at least the backbone of papers, longhand before sitting down at a computer to type them out. I used to do that for my reviews as well, back when I was posting 2-3 a week. Instead now, I have a backlog of books to review that'll last me at least the rest of the month, and I still only manage to post one a week. If only I knew now what I knew then. :)

So, maybe I'll try to unplug a bit more often and get back to writing while Ulin unplugs and gets back to reading. How about you? Is the information superhighway impeding on your intellectual pursuits?


Book source: checked it out from work

Links to Amazon.com may be affiliate links for the Amazon Associates program. If you buy something through this link, I may receive a referral fee.

MLA 7

After working on a new citation cheat sheet all day at work, I figure I should make the switch to the 7th edition of MLA here too.

The only big difference for your average book (the only thing I really cite here) is that you have to add the format to the end of the citation. Also, I'll actually be right when I italicize things, instead of using italics because I like them better than underlining.

The really big difference for everything else, just in case you were wondering, is that MLA no longer requires a URL for anything. I guess they figure that if the rest of the citation is solid, your readers should be able to find your source without a direct link. Google and all that. I'll still give you links for things though. I like them.

If you're trying to make the switch at work or school, either for yourself or your students, check out NoodleBib from NoodleTools. The free version says that it is for "our youngest scholars." It is certainly easy enough for kids to use, but it handles more sophisticated, longer, whatever resources as well. AND it saves everything for you, so you can use it at the computer at the library, the computer at home, the computer in your BFF's dorm room, anywhere with internet, and all of your citations will be in the same place. We're going to be pushing it on our college students in all our library orientation and information literacy sessions.

Have fun with the new MLA everyone! I do not envy you school librarians who have to reteach how to do citations to all the kids who finally got the hang of it last year. At least I can be cranky (and less careful about swearing under my breath) when college students give me the blank stare of death when I try to explain the changes.

Kids say the awsomest things

For a little background, the classrooms in the college library that I work in are being used all summer by a summer camp for smarties. These kids are supposed to be gifted young things who run from the art room to the science room to the computer room all day until someone has the sense to take them outside to run on the grass. For a while we had a camper incident of the day, the most exciting one was The Great Goldfish Explosion (crackers, not real fish). Recently, happily, we've moved on to camper cute quotes of the day.

Yesterday's quote came after the teenagers who chaperone the kids around campus lost a 5yr old. His best friend found him hiding behind a plant here in the library. Here is their conversation on the way out.
Friend: Why did you hide?
Hiding Kid: Because I just wanted to stay here.
Friend: Why?
Hiding Kid: It's so nice in here.
These kids are five.

Today's quote came early this morning. On their way out of the building a group of maybe 7-8yr olds were talking about their schedule for next week. We overheard:
"And on Monday we get computer class first! It's like a dweam come twue!"
Of course, the kid who can't say his r's yelled it out, making it that much cuter to all of us folks who only get to deal with stressed out grad students all summer.

What happens between when these kids stop going to camp (they have kids as old as 12 and the helpers start around 13 or 14) and when they enroll in college? Why can't we even entice them to come into the library with free food? The idea that kids magically stop needing programming when they hit 18 or when they become college students is clearly hurting us here. Have more ideas on the subject? Bring them to the new YALSA interest group for Serving New Adults. I know that I will be.