On A Chris Haughton Kick Today. Cannot Wait For His New Book, Goodnight Everyone,  in The Fall.

H! Alia here.

I’m holding an OMG-I’m-going-to-TRY-to-read-all-these-books-this-weekend reading party by myself for these books in time for the American Library Association (ALA) Youth Media Awards on Monday morning! These are just a few of the books being considered RIGHT NOW in secret meetings by the Newbery Committee…

Follow this link for a live webcast of the awards on Monday (8am) and info about every award up for grabs!  

These awards are where they announce the Newbery, Caldecott, Geisel, Pura Belpré, Printz, Sibert, Odyssey, Stonewall, Coretta Scott King, Schneider Awards and more…That’s a lot!! And I’m SO EXCITED for it.

Also, the ALA Midwinter Conference is underway in Boston. Ah a land of Book Talk, ARCs, F&Gs and cool people…

Teachers! Holding Mock Caldecotts and Mock Newberys are GREAT ways to get your kids excited about reading. Woo!

Yay for books! Yay for book awards!

The War In Our Stars

Kylo Ren: It's a metaphor

Kylo Ren: you wear the scary breathing mask but you don't actually need it to breathe

Claire here!

Okay, so I have recently finished the lovely Kate Hattemer’s new YA novel The Land of 10,000 Madonnas.

It is about a group of 5 teenagers sent on a quest to Europe as a dying wish from their friend and cousin, Jesse, who died of a heart defect nearly a year previously. It is beautiful, sad, funny, bittersweet, and sometimes slightly gross. The gross factor is mostly due to Ben’s penchant for smoothies for every meal which sometimes include unusual choices for a liquefied meal.)

Kate’s sophomore novel reminded me a little bit of Maureen Johnson’s 13 Little Blue Envelopes. But I suppose that is more for the similarities between their teenaged characters going on trips across Europe after losing a loved one. I find Kate’s characters more real and relatable than Johnson’s. Cal, Trevor, Ben, Lillian, and Matt aren’t meant to discover some great and magical cure for their grief and then fall in love. They are and have been grieving. They deal with their grief on a daily basis and in myriad ways. And they are only beginning to come to terms with Jesse’s death. As teenagers, they are often prickly in their mourning, and don’t always agree. And like many teenagers I know, they do not say what they mean and feel immediately or clearly to each other. Hattemer’s portrayal and the perspectives she offers from her characters is one of her strengths in this book. They aren’t special in any extra way, they are normal, and they have been dealt a tragedy. And they react and exist accordingly. 

The book did take me a little while to get through, but that is in part because I tend to be a distracted reader and also this is a book that will make you think and reflect.  This is a novel that will be a good cathartic read. Hattemer made me tear up more than once while I was reading, but she brought me out on the brighter side at the end. I will be recommending this to fans of David Levithan, Maureen Johnson, Ava Dellaira, Emery Lord, and even John Green readers. I think that Kate Hattemer is going to be an author to keep an eye on and a voice to be heard in YA in the coming years.

Release date is April 19th 2016. I highly recommend it. And if you can, get it from a bricks and mortar bookstore or the library!

A Diverse Reading List For The Holidays: Because representation matters. We’ve gathered some of our favorite authors and characters from 2015 who speak from just a few of the myriad perspectives humanity has to offer. (Don’t see what you’re looking for here? Send us a chat!)

Taking Flight by Michaela DePrince

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehesi Coates

Negroland by Margo Jefferson

City of Clowns by Daniel Alarcón & Sheila Alvarado

Half-Resurrection Blues by Daniel José Older (@danieljose)

The Book of Phoenix by @nnedi Okorafor

Speak Now: Marriage Equality on Trial by Kenji Yoshino

Everything, Everything by @nicolayoon

The Wrath and the Dawn by Renee Ahdieh (@rahdieh)

The Architect’s Apprentice by Elif Shafak

The Girl at the Center of the World by Austin Aslan

Becoming Nicole by Amy Ellis Nutt

Beyond Magenta by Susan Kuklin

A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk

All Our Names by Dinaw Mengestu

The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami

Peruse all of our holiday lists here!

Wolf by Wolf by Ryan Graudin

Man oh man oh man oh man OH MAN OH MAN.  This book was ammmmaaazzzziinnnngggggg. So good. Wow. Five stars. Fiver.

Let me break it down for you.  So let’s pretend that Hitler and the Axis powers never actually lost WWII.  IN FACT, they won and slowly began taking over the world, filling it with death camps and just lots more death.  Enter Yael. She and her mother were taken to a camp, and Yael became the subject of some extremely nasty German experiments. Unfortunately for the Germans, the experiments that were just supposed to change the pigment of Yael’s skin to that trademark Aryan White actually gave her the ability to skinshift, i.e. the ability to change all aspects of her appearance.

Fast forward ten years, and Yael has found the perfect opportunity for revenge. Every year the Third Reich hosts a cross-continental motorcycle race to commemorate their great victory, and the prize is an audience with Mr. Adolf Hitler himself.  Yael only has to enter the race as Adele Wolf, the only racer and person Hitler has ever let close to him, win it, and then kill Hitler.  Easy Peasy!

Unfortunately killing Hitler is not as easy as that, especially when Adele’s older, overly-protective brother Felix enters the race, along with past love interest Luka–two people who know Adele PRETTY well.  WOWWWW.

Let me further break this down for you:

Alternate history!

Sci-fi skinshifting!

Super attractive love interest with murky past!

Hunger Games-like competition that pits teens against one another at the expense of their safety and lives!

Knife fights, and fist fights, and gun fights, oh my!

Death

Basically everything you could ever want from a YA.

ALSO let me just say that Yael is the most badass girl I have ever encountered.  She puts Katniss Everdeen TO SHAME.  She’s super complex, cares a lot about people, and has trained to KILL HITLER. idk what else you could really want.

I am also going to add that I have an extremely awful habit of reading the ends of books before actually finishing them (I am fully aware that this is shameful bye). I did that while reading this book. I WAS STILL COMPLETELY BLINDSIDED BY THE ENDING.  Don’t ask me how that happens, idk.  And predicting endings is kind of my job (editor over here y’all). Surprise endings don’t really happen for me anymore.  But this IS an alternate history with skinshifting and motorcycle races, so what really could I have predicted lol

Read this book. It’s amazing.

~Melissa, Book Wench

Image Credit: Kristin Kemper

My name is Marita. I won’t tell you my last name. It would be too dangerous.

That’s right, children. Gather round for Anifesto, part one of three. GET EXCITED, Y’ALL. So, a little background: When I started writing my review for Front Lines, I ended up just talking about Animorphs for about ten paragraphs. I eventually realized how ridiculous that was getting, so I cut most of it and saved it on my computer, where it somehow ballooned into a thirteen-page diatribe. That’s how that happened.

Anyways, on with the show.

Anifesto, Part 1

Alloran: The stupidity of kindness. Charity to potential enemies. You're a fool, Seerow. A soft, sentimental, well-meaning fool. And now my men are dead and the Yeerks are loose in the galaxy. How many will die before we can bring this contagion under control? How many will die for Seerow's kindness?

For people whose lives are empty and meaningless, Animorphs is a middle-grade series consisting of sixty-four books. It’s about five kids who take a shortcut home from the mall and end up stumbling upon a crashed alien spacecraft. Out crawls a wounded alien (an Andalite, to be specific; War Prince Elfangor to be more specific). Before dying, Elfangor explains to them that a silent infiltration has been happening right under their noses: the body-snatching brain slugs known as Yeerks are slowly trying to take over the planet and enslave humanity and their hometown is ground zero.

Elfangor then breaks the Law of Seerow’s Kindness (basically the Andalite’s Prime Directive) and gives these kids advanced alien technology that allows them to morph into any animal they touch. They then proceed to use this power to wage a guerrilla war, desperately trying to hold off the Yeerks until the Andalite fleet can arrive and save the planet. Along the way they pick up Ax, a young Andalite cadet with dreams of glory (and Elfangor’s baby brother). Adventures ensue.

But that’s like describing Les Misérables as the story of a guy who steals some bread. In terms of intricacy, this is a Lord of the Rings-level series. These books span dimensions and galaxies and billions of years. And in retrospect, it is far, far too sophisticated to be considered just a children’s book series.

There are flaws, so let’s just get them out of the way right now. The middle part of the series was ghostwritten and as a result, the books are a bit uneven. The less said about the choose-your-own-adventure Alternamorphs, the better—at least they’re not canon. There’s minor continuity issues, but that is almost to be expected over the course of sixty-two books as the series finds its legs. The Helmacrons were hilarious and fantastic, but completely and utterly pointless. What was that entity in #41? All we’re left with is it stating that humans will require more study (wtf?). And what the ever-loving hell was up with the Nartec?! Just…why?

But even for its faults, this series is epic. Absolutely awesome. Practically unparalleled.

It’s about a fictional war between two alien species that humans got caught in the middle of, but the fact that it is a war is never forgotten. There are casualties and sacrifices, and it hurts.

Rachel: You worry about me? What do you think you’re going to do? Jake, you're a leader now. You make life-and-death decisions. All the time. You've learned to do that. And you've learned to use people. You use them for their strengths and their weaknesses. Worry about me? Like when all this is over you'll go back to being a mediocre basketball player and a decent student?

The Animorphs constantly struggle with the ethical implications of their actions—whether saving the planet is worth losing their humanity, whether the lofty ideals they’re fighting for are actually worth dying a gruesome, bloody death, and whether it’s okay to write off the lives of a few people to save the lives of many. They routinely lose sleep over the deaths they fail to prevent and even more so the deaths they cause. They struggle with switching between normal high schoolers and elite paramilitary warriors. They deal with serious PTSD and constant nightmares. This is, at heart, the story of six children who are thrown into a war they simply aren’t prepared for. Their only choices are to become soldiers or die.

Over the course of the series, each character is slowly broken in their own unique way:

Cassie: No. It's wrong. I won't. I don't want to judge you guys, but you're talking about strategy and risk like this is some computer game. Like there aren't others involved. Have you forgotten that we're supposed to be in this to save lives?

Gentle, kind Cassie would rather heal but must learn to hurt. Because she is uncomfortable with physical violence, she ends up deeply hurting people in more subtle ways. She parleys her natural empathy into unparalleled manipulation.

Rachel: I'm ruthless at times. But even I have enough sense to know the words “we have to win” are the first four steps on the road to hell.

Perky blonde gymnast and fashionista Rachel discovers that she likes killing far too much, and must fight to control the darkness lurking within her.

Tobias: I’m a predator who kills for food. And I’m also a human being who...who grieves, over death.

Tobias is the neglected kid from the wrong side of the tracks who’s never felt like he belonged anywhere. When he becomes trapped in the body of a red-tailed hawk due to a morphing mishap, he becomes progressively more isolated and lonely, in the end severing any ties with humanity.

Marco: Sorry, fighting a guerrilla war against parasitic aliens has amped up my already rampant paranoia.

Marco, who’s already lost his mother to the invasion, becomes suspicious and cynical and all too willing to accept collateral damage.

Ax: I was an Andalite, all alone, far, far from home. Far from my own people. Except that sometimes your own people are not just the ones who look like you. Sometimes the people who are your own can be very different from you.

Ax, the stranded young Andalite, begins to see the army he once idealized for what it is—less noble heroes safeguarding freedom for the universe, more arrogant military superpower power trying to undo its biggest mistake at any cost. Over the course of the series, he becomes more and more torn between his own people and his adopted planet.

Jake: The power made us responsible, see. Without the power, the knowledge would have just been a worm of fear eating up our insides. Bad enough. But it was the power that turned fear into obligation, that laid the weight on our unready shoulders...Power enough to win? No. Power enough to fight? Ah, yes. Just enough, little Jake, here is just enough power to imprison you in a cage of duty, to make you fight...

And Jake, the fearless leader, is haunted by the people he couldn’t save, including his brother Tom. He struggles with the knowledge that it’s not the good guys that win, it’s the ruthless ones. He has the literal weight of the world on his shoulders. His ragtag team of misfits is not humanity’s last line of defense. They’re humanity’s only line of defense.

Image credit: Claire Hummel

The real strength of Animorphs, as with all good sci-fi and fantasy, is that it uses fantastic settings and characters and circumstances to explore very real and important issues. Through the various interactions between alien species and the motivations driving various groups, the series dissects a lot of what happens in the real world (and why it happens) when different races, creeds, and political forces clash. By exploring elaborate worlds that parallel real life, the reader can examine the nature of things like inequality and stereotypes and dehumanization, but free of the historical and emotional baggage that keeps a lot of people from confronting those issues—which is of course the true value of fantastically unreal stories like this.

Marco: You Andalites. You people have a tendency to destroy what you want to preserve.

There’s a lot of great commentary on colonialism. In the end, the Andalites and the Yeerks are both colonial empires wearing very different masks. The Andalites have no need to expand, and yet their arrogance and superiority led them to benevolently enlighten the Yeerks and inadvertently unleash the parasitic slugs on the universe in the process. Stopping the Yeerks is their penance. The Animorphs eventually learn that the Andalites aren’t with the humans, they’re just against the Yeerks. If need be, the Andalites will destroy Earth to keep the Yeerks from winning. Not to mention their scociety encourages rampant sexism and ostracism of any deformed or disabled citizens, which casts them in a distinctly Nazi-ish light. Just because the Andalites present themselves as the ultimate good guys doesn’t make it so.

Aftran: We aren't all the same. See? You believe the Andalite propaganda about us. According to the Andalites, we're nothing but evil slugs. We don't deserve to be free, flying around the galaxy. We're just parasites.

The Yeerks, on the other hand, are severely overpopulated and completely helpless without a host. They didn’t choose to be parasites. They’re not truly evil, they’re just fulfilling the role evolution gave them. Is it really so wrong that they’re desperate to see and hear and touch? They just want a place in the universe, and if no one will make room for them they’ll carve out a home by force. As the Yeerk Aftran points out, “What choice do we have? Back to the Yeerk pools? Back to our home planet, with Andalite Dome ships in orbit above us, waiting for one of us to rise from the sludge, then blow us apart? Leave the universe to the almighty Andalites and the species they happen to like?”

Prejudice and racism (species-ism?) come into play in a big way, and are very much a driving force behind much of the plot. In the Animorphs universe, there’s a ton of stereotypes floating around regarding various alien species. The Yeerks and Andalites call each other “Andalite scum” and “Yeerk filth” at every given opportunity. But of course, the Andalites are honorable and good, a force for truth, justice, and the…uh…Andalite way. The Yeerks are nothing more than a plague on the galaxy, just evil slugs. The Hork-Bajir are seen as sweet, dumb beasts who clearly need a superior species to step in and take care of them. The Taxxons, the only species to welcome the Yeerk empire, are an abomination that should be wiped from the universe. And everyone agrees that the Skrit Na are just plain weird.

Dak Hamee: You almighty Andalites. There is no limit to your arrogance, is there? Well, let me tell you something: We may be simple people. But we don't use biology to invent monsters. And we don't enslave other species. And we don't unleash a plague of parasites on the galaxy, endangering every other free species, and then go swaggering around like the lords of the universe. No, we're too simple for all that. We're too stupid to lie and manipulate. We're too stupid to be ruthless. We're too stupid to know how to build powerful weapons designed to annihilate our enemies. Until you came, Andalite, we were too stupid to know how to kill.

In the beginning, our heroes only incapacitate infested humans while slaughtering infested aliens. It’s a sickening and horrifying realization for the Animorphs that the bladed reptilian Hork-Bajir they’ve been killing are actually gentle herbivores who’ve been completely enslaved by the Yeerks. And the Taxxons, giant carnivorous centipedes, are to be pitied more than feared. The highly intelligent species suffers from a powerful instinctual hunger that drives them to cannibalism. They begged the Yeerks to take control of their bodies in the hopes of finally being free from their hunger (spoiler: it didn’t work).

The harsh lesson the Animorphs learn is that just because an alien species looks, well, alien, they still deserve to be treated humanely. That knowledge has a steep price, though: They can’t give back the lives they’ve already taken, and they can’t stop killing the infested just because they feel sorry for the host bodies.

Controller: Help me. So... I'm cold. Help. Jake: Leave him, Yeerk. Get out of his head. Let him do this last thing as a free human being. Controller: I can't get out. The ears are blocked. Can't get out. Ax: We have to get out of here. They will send reinforcements. Controller: So cold. Just... Can you just get me a blanket or... Ax: Prince Jake. Controller: I'm scared. Does that... Does that make you happy, Andalite? Jake: No. No, it doesn't make me happy.

And to top it all off, there’s the existential quandary presented by the Ellimist and Crayak. As the series progresses, it is revealed that this epic battle for the salvation of the human race is nothing more than a small skirmish between these two nearly omnipotent pan-dimensional beings. The Ellimist is ostensibly good and does not “interfere in the affairs of other species,” but he has no qualms about rearranging someone’s entire existence (usually for the worse, just ask Elfangor) to suit his own needs. Crayak is undeniably evil, and considers genocide a hobby of his. And the Animorphs are trapped in the middle. In the end, none of them stumbled into the war on accident. None of their hardships were brought on by chance. They were pawns in a much larger game the whole time.

Ellimist: Then let us play a game, Crayak. Crayak: There will have to be rules. Ellimist: Yes, there will have to be rules. Crayak: And a winner? Ellimist: That, too, though it will take millions of years. Crayak: I'm not going anywhere. Ellimist: Then come, let us play the final game.

There’s an incredible number of moving parts at work here. It’s as much about political intrigue and betrayal and power as it is about fighting aliens with tigers. There’s a dozen factions at play, all with their own agendas.

The more you learn about this war, the more terrible and complicated it gets. The evil guys aren’t nearly as evil as they first seem, and the good guys aren’t nearly as good. There is no winning this war, or any war, without killing the innocent and collaborating with the guilty.

Ax: War is irrational. Though it is sometimes necessary.

Image Credit: http://veteranfangirl.tumblr.com/

Hi all. I’m JoAnn and, at the tender age of 30, hold the position of Crone in The Book Wenches. I split my work life between managing the operations of the bookstore and being a massage therapist. I split my personal life with reading, gaming, various crafting, and pounding back movies/shows/anime.

I have fairly eclectic reading tastes, but my go-to comfort zone is genre fiction (sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, horror, and romance). I also read a bunch of YA and graphic novels.

I’m a giant nerd so that is my wheelhouse and probably going to be really evident in the bulk of my posts.

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Hurrah for Cincinnati authors! Emily Henry and Kate Hattemer are both on the list!

Made a note on my manuscript while slightly drunk last night, looked at it this morning and all it says is “#foreshadowing”

bork bork

(psst, it tiles seamlessly)