The inaugural Book Mail box launched yesterday, and there are only a few dozen left! Get yours now – they’ll be gone tomorrow.
Waiting for a YA version? Join the waiting list. It’s coming in July!
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Ride the nostalgia wave with our new tees featuring Clifford, Brown Bear, and more of your childhood faves in sizes for the whole family.
Have you ever wondered what wine would pair perfectly with your favorite book? Diane McMartin can help with that. The Certified Sommelier and author of This Calls for a Drink! will be pairing wine with select other Book Riot Live speakers’ books and hosting a discussion and reading with them on Friday, November 11, 7 p.m. at the Strand’s Rare Book Room. Tickets are live now, and include admission to the event, refreshments, and a $15 gift card to the Strand Bookstore!
This Week’s “What’s Up in YA?” newsletter is sponsored by A Fierce and Subtle Poison by Samantha Mabry:
Some say she grants wishes. Some say her touch kills. One boy is drawn into her enchanted world.
Seventeen-year-old Lucas lives in Puerto Rico, where he’s grown up hearing stories about the cursed girl, Isabel. When letters from Isabel begin appearing in his room the same day his new girlfriend disappears, Lucas turns to Isabel for answers—and finds himself lured into her strange and magicalworld. But the more entangled Lucas becomes, the less certain he is of escaping with his own life. Nova Ren Suma, bestselling author of The Walls Around Us, calls A Fierce and Subtle Poison “a breathtaking story in which myths come to frightening life and buried wishes may actually come true.”
In light of June being Pride month, and more, because there’s a whole lot to think about in the wake of the horrific tragedy at Pulse in Orlando, I wanted to take the opportunity to do something a little bit different for this week’s YA newsletter. Rather than share my own commentary or do a massive round-up of links, I thought some power would come through instead allowing others to share their support for and of the LGBTQ+ community.
I asked librarians, booksellers, educators, and anyone else who has seen or built a book display for Pride month to share an image or two with me. The response was unbelievable. From huge, elaborate displays to acknowledgements in smaller, tighter spaces, seeing how people support the LGBTQ YA community leaves me a little brighter, fuller, and more whole. In a world where there is so much darkness and hurt, it’s powerful to see these tiny acts. It might not feel like a book display does a whole lot, but if the response to this newsletter alone is any indication, small display after small display after small display through hundreds and thousands of libraries and bookstores amounts to something much bigger.
The LGBTQ+ community is shown on our shelves. Is seen in our displays. And is cared about.
Below are all of the displays I’ve received via email. I’ve included commentary from those who have sent in the images, too. These displays get books moving, as well as encourage readers who might not be part of the LGBTQ+ community to take an interest, to learn, and to develop a healthy sense of empathy for the people who live right alongside them.
If you are in the position of being able to develop book displays or book lists or share YA books with young readers, I encourage you to consider revisiting these books, sharing them how you can, and displaying them not just in June (or October for LGBTQ month), but year round. Incorporate them into your book recommendations, into your regular reading rotations, and be willing to talk, to share, and to advocate on behalf of the stories and the young people who sometimes can’t find the way to do it for themselves. It’s through these books they can better develop the language. . . and their sense of belonging.
Amy Diegelman’s display at Vineyard Haven Public Library, Vineyard Haven, MA.
Nicole Harris found this display in the Chesterfield County Virginia North Courthouse branch over the weekend: “I was so happy to see it there along side the YA new releases since teens flock to see what new books are available.”
My name is Emily and I’m an editor with a small publishing company here in Halifax on the east coast of Canada. I wanted to share this display from Halifax Central Library. I don’t believe they’re all YA books, but it’s so pretty. 🙂 (The sign at the top says “Happy Pride Month!”)
From Lauren Gibaldi: I work at the Alafaya Library (part of the Orange County Library System) and this is the display I made for our YA section. Like I said, most books have been checked out (yay!!!), so I’ve had to replenish daily. I’ve had it up since June 1st and we haven’t had one complaint. Fun fact: None of the Above went first. Second most popular were f/f books.
From Deby Fry: This is ours for the Gum Spring Library in South Riding, VA. We’re a part of the Loudoun County Public Library system in Virginia. The day I put it out, I heard a group of girls gathered around a table talking about some of the books they’d already read and loved, and they picked up a few to take home!
From Michelle Ross: Here’s a pic of a YA display at the Main Branch of Kanawha County Public Library in Charleston, WV. This pic was taken only a few minutes after I put the display up and someone had already grabbed two books.
I also have free, LGBTQIA+ bookmark printables available to download from my blog here.
From Renata Sancken: I have a Pride display on our digital carousel (that shows on the catalog computers throughout the library). You can view the whole carousel right here.
Both displays above are from Richland Library in Columbia, South Carolina, and the titles were selected by Miciah Bennett and Thomas Maluck.
Danielle Mohlman sent this snap she grabbed of the window display in her local indie, Secret Garden Books in Seattle, Washington.
From Jessica Spotswood: This is the Pride display I made for our teen section – the Southwest Neighborhood Library of the DC Public Library. She writes: “I’m not sure if teens in this neighborhood would feel safe checking them out. But it feels important to me that we have the display and they see us celebrating Pride.”
From Nicole Brinkley: We have two displays at Oblong Books — one at our Millerton store (top) and our Rhinebeck store (bottom).
From Robin Johnsen: Here is the display from the Dyer-Schererville Branch of Lake County Public Library (Indiana). This is just the YA books side. The other side of the table has adult books and kids books.
From Rebecca Speas: Our Pride display at One More Page Books in Arlington, VA. It’s not a strictly YA display, since we tried to put up an array of genres, but we did include CARRY ON by Rainbow Rowell, WONDERS OF THE INVISIBLE WORLD by Christopher Barzak, GEORGE by Alex Gino, and LIES WE TELL OURSELVES by Robin Talley (one of our favorite local authors!)
This display was created by myself and fellow OMP staffer Amanda Quain, and we have already sold a copy of Lies We Tell Ourselves as a gift since it’s been displayed.
From Paige McGeorge at Lethbridge Public Library in Alberta, Canada: I’ve included some pics of our physical book displays, plus a shot of our featured Overdrive ebook collection. They’ve both proved very popular, which is so great to see.
Erikka set up this display at the library where she works.
From Caitlin Kenney: I work at the North Tonawanda Public Library in North Tonawanda, New York, and told my co-worker, Kelly, about your newsletter and she liked the idea, so I took a picture of her Pride display she made for the teen department. She’s had to fill it a few times already, which is great!
Via Ruth Compton: Arlington County’s Central Library in Virginia. Display created by Alex Zealand.
From Becky Canovan: This is the display in the library at the University of Dubuque. She writes, “It was a conscious choice to keep this display small so it fit in our highest traffic area of the summer, next to our printers. We also have the digital sign as part of the rotation on our screen in our entryway.”
From Rosie Bromberg: This is the current teen room display at the Poulsbo Library, part of Kitsap Regional Libraries, in Poulsbo, Washington. Of course, the books didn’t stay in rainbow order for long.
From Vee: I got a chance to make a Pride Display at Addendum Books, so I thought I’d send it your way (top image). I had a SUPER fun time making it. I have the books roughly sorted by genre. 🙂 I haven’t had a shift since I made it, so I don’t know what’s been popular, but every time I pass by the store on the bus the display gets a lot of glances.
I also got to make a resource sheet for the library I work at (Highland Park in Saint Paul)!
Display at the Alameda Free Library in Alameda, California and made by the Teen Librarian, Hallie Fields. She writes, “Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe and Honor Girl were immediately checked out before I could even photograph the display.”
From Sarah Prineas: Attached is a picture of a display that I put together in the kids section at Prairie Lights, an independent bookstore in Iowa City, Iowa. It includes a list of recommended books from a local teen reader, Luke Reynolds.
And here’s Luke Reynolds’s recommendation list:
Recommended GLBT Young Adult Books from Luke Reynolds (West High School class of ’18)
From Molly Wetta: Here are the displays from Lawrence (KS) Public Library. The first one is in the teen zone, the second one is by the welcome desk when you first walk into the building. The YA one has had books fly off of it – I restocked it before taking the picture.
From Robin Brenner at Brookline Public Library in Massachusetts: I put up this display on June 1st, especially to highlight the great variety of newer teen titles that have come out over the past year (although, happily, many of them were already out.) Since I took these pictures, I added a good number of our nonfiction titles as well, and almost half of them are already gone. It’s prominently displayed right outside our Teen Room, near our main elevator, and I’ve been gratified to see so many people checking out the display and grabbing titles.
From Emily Charpentier: The following blog post includes the Pinterest board version of Uxbridge High School’s in-library Pride display and a photo of the in-library display
A member of the GSA asked me to put up a display for Pride Month, though unfortunately, all books are due back for the summer tomorrow, so there isn’t much checking out going on. Definitely promised another student that I wouldn’t take down the Pinterest board so she’d still be able to see the list of books on the display later when she could check some out, though.
From Katelyn Attanasio: Here is the one I put together at Cascades Library in Potomac Falls, VA. It’s located at the front of our teen center and has been fairly popular. The books with gay male characters have been the most popular, but all of the books have been going over well. We also haven’t had any complaints about it this year!
From Angie Manfredi at Los Alamos County Library System, Los Alamos, New Mexico.
From Becky Greer at South Shore Regional Library.
Included on my display are the following books:
Adrian and the Tree of Secrets by Hubert
Alex as Well by Alyssa Brugman
Will Grayson, Will Grayson (in Spanish) by John Green & David Levithan
Openly Straight by Bill Konigsberg
Letters to Our Children: Lesbian and Gay Adults Speak to the New Generation Edited by Larry Dane Brimner
What We Hide by Marthe Jocelyn
Lies We Tell Ourselves by Robin Talley
What We Left Behind by Robin Talley
Cut Both Ways by Carrie Mesrobian
Honor Girl by Maggie Thrash
On The Count of Three by Maureen Johnson
GLBTQ: The Survival Guide for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning Teens by Kelly Huegel
The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily Danforth
Not Otherwise Specified by Hannah Moskowitz
There is also a list of the Rainbow Books with their YA selections: http://glbtrt.ala.org/rainbowbooks/archives/1207
I also put out LGBTQIA bookmarks, with a short list of books in those genres. We are down to 1 book mark, and I have already had to replace a few books like Carry On by Rainbow Rowell and I am J by Cris Beam.
From Chelsea Outlaw, a youth services associate at a library in Kansas.
From Jess Gafkowitz: I’m the new YA librarian at the Sheepshead Bay branch for the Brooklyn Public Library. Attached are two photos of my tiny YA Pride display.
From Tina Dalton: I’m sending you a photo of the YA pride display for the Cuba Circulating Library in Cuba, NY.
From Ilana Soorenko: This Pride display is in the Teen Room at our library, the Queens Library at Flushing. The display was a joint effort between myself and my coworker Christian Arffmann (he actually did the display board, and the choice of books was shared between us). So far, I’ve mostly noticed that the comics (The New Avengers, Zodiac Starforce, Catwoman, X-men) and manga (Princess Jellyfish, Strawberry Panic, His Favorite) have been the items most checked out or returned to the display, but that’s not surprising considering how heavily browsed those collections are in general.
From Kathleen Breitenbach at Hamilton Township Public Library.
From Brandi Fong: Our Pride display at the Peace Dale Library in South Kingstown, RI.
From Andi, children’s bookseller at Foyles Grand Central Birmingham: The top is a display for Pride month, and below is the small year-round section the bookstore keeps of YA LGBTQ+ titles.
From Anna Haase Krueger: Pride display at the Ramsey County Public Library in Minnesota (more adult than YA, but I’m including it anyway!).
From Katie McLain: We have two up at our library: a Pride-specific display & a rainbow colored “I can’t remember the title but the cover was…” display. I set up the Pride display, and my Reference coworker, Priscilla Resendiz, set up the rainbow colored display. These are from the Waukegan Public Library in Waukegan, IL.
From Maria Padian: Pride at Curtis Library in Brunswick, Maine!
Finally, I want to end with the display and related commentary that perhaps will be the one that requires your tissues, if you’re not already there…
And that is how you do it.
____________________
I know I promised a giveaway in this newsletter, but I’m going to hold off until the next issue. Instead, pick up one of the books or two of the books or piles of the books you’ve seen in the displays above and dig into some great reading.
Keep rocking, YA folks. <3
You don’t have to be a kid to love kids’ books, so we’ve added new tees featuring Clifford, Brown Bear, and more of your childhood faves in sizes for the whole family.
Shop now, and a get a water bottle free when you buy any tee! (Just add it to your cart to see the discount applied.)
Have you checked the speaker list lately? We’ve got:
4 nonfiction authors
3 science fiction & fantasy authors
3 YA authors
2 comics artists
2 debut novelists
1 mystery author
1 librarian
And we’re just getting started. Check out the speakers for Book Riot Live 2016 and then get your VIP ticket for $40 off.
This week’s Audiobooks! newsletter is sponsored by TryAudiobooks.com.
Have you ever taken a road trip with your family that seemed to go on forever? We all have! Audiobooks can solve that problem by providing entertainment for the whole family. Visit TryAudiobooks.com/family-travel for a free full download and start listening with the whole family on your next car ride.
Hey there readers,
It’s June, school’s out, and we’ve entered PRIME audiobook season: ‘tis the season of summer road trips! We did a lot of these when I was growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s. My family of 7 would squeeze into a Dodge Caravan with a canoe on top and a pop up camper in the back and drive across the country to live in the woods and watch bears eat out of dumpsters. (I have kind of a weird family.) It was also the only time we got to eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
We’d drive straight through for 24 hours or more, and my mom always took the night shift, listening to CDs of old timey radio mysteries from Barnes and Noble. I had yet to discover audiobooks, but I listened to the audio of Disney movies that I had checked out from the public library and dubbed onto cassette tapes while I tried to sleep on top of duffel bags in the trunk. (To this day I can recall entire chunks of dialogue from Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast.)
Flash forward to 2016, and we have so many more listening options. Whatever your vacations family look like, here’s hoping you find some great listens this summer. <3
In the Country We Love: My Family Divided
When she was just 14, Diane Guerrero’s parents (Orange Is the New Black, Jane the Virgin) were arrested and exported to Colombia and she was left on her own in the U.S. Yikes! The biggest surprise for me in Guerrero’s new memoir was how much of her story I could relate to — the ordeals of her family breaking up when she was 14 years old, hopping around between schools, being drawn to the arts, and wrestling with ADHD and depression all resonated deeply with me. It was a powerful reminder that commonalities exist in unexpected places, even between a brown working-class girl who grew up Catholic in Boston and a white middle-class girl who grew up Mormon in Iowa.
Guerrero tells her story with directness, honesty, and personality, and In the Country We Love reminded me of books like Leah Remini’s Scientology memoir, Troublemaker, that aren’t wrapped up in layers of mysterious metaphors, but are so remarkable and told with such candor that they don’t really need to exist any other way. This was exceptionally moving on audio — Guerrero has an authentic and playful voice that bubbles through in her performance, which made for a very lovely listen.
Roald Dahl Audiobooks for Everyone in the Family
One of my pals at Book Riot has been totally stumped about what to listen to on a family road trip with her two preschoolers and husband. They’ve already listened to (and loved, obviously) Kate DiCamillo’s The Tale of Despereaux, which is not an easy act to follow. We all bounced around some ideas — Ramona? Stuart Little? — and then the idea of Roald Dahl came up! With The BFG coming out in movie theaters on July 1, now is the perfect time to brush up on the books, and we’re happy to report that we think they hold up pretty well.
I’m personally a huge fan of the Roald Dahl audiobook collection that came out a few summers ago with fancy actors like Kate Winslet, Stephen Fry, and Chris O’Dowd performing Matilda, The BFG, and all the rest. You can preview some of my favorite clips here!
Stephen King on His Love for Audiobooks
June is Audiobook Month, and we’ve been celebrating by watching Stephen King gush adorably about why he hearts audiobooks: “The more you listen to audiobooks,” he says, “You start again to experience the words as sounds, which is something that you don’t always do when you’re reading to yourself.”
Watch to find out Stephen King’s favorite audiobook of all time, how many audiobooks he listens to per year, why he thinks audiobooks are more suspenseful than print, and how a great narrator is like listening to your favorite music in surround sound. Happy Audiobook Month!
Happy Tuesday! We are well on our way to summer now, and there are tons of amazing new books to bring with us! I’ve highlighted a few of the week’s best below, and on this week’s episode of the All the Books! Rebecca and I talked about some great new releases, such as Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty and Grace.
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by The Girls by Emma Cline.
The Girls is the story of Evie, a woman who is haunted by the summer of 1969, when she was a lonely fourteen-year-old growing up in Northern California. One day she sees a girl at a park, a girl with a gang of other girls who seem free and alive. She is mesmerized by them, Suzanne in particular. She is quickly drawn into their soon-to-be infamous cult and meets the man who is its charismatic leader. As her obsession with Suzanne intensifies, Evie does not realize she is coming closer to unthinkable violence, and to that moment in a girl’s life when everything can go wrong.
Barkskins by Annie Proulx
Barkskins is a glorious, epic, 700+ page story spanning three hundred years, that follows two immigrants in “New France” and their descendants as they travel the world and make use (and steal and ruin) each country’s resources. This is a brutal, often darkly comic, environmental saga by a master writer, and I loved it. (I will admit that being an established Proulx fan may have increased my enjoyment of this novel. Because 700+ PAGES WHUT. But it is her first in over a decade, and so I was wildly excited to read it!)
Backlist bump: The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee
The first in an exciting new trilogy! Captain Kel Cheris, a disgraced captain, has a chance to redeem herself by recapturing a star fortress taken by heretics. Her best hope of winning is the undead tactician Shuos Jedao, who has never lost a battle. But sometimes he loses his mind, like in his last life, when he killed his own army. Cheris must figure out how much she can trust Jedao before the whole siege – and her life – is lost. YAY SPACE OPERA!
Backlist bump: Central Station by Lavie Tidhar
Death and Mr. Pickwick by Stephen Jarvis
I think any book that you read on the beach qualifies as a beach read, so why not an 800-page Dickensian novel about Dickens? (Wait is that meta?) Based on the story of The Pickwick Papers and the beginning of the career of Charles Dickens, this is a delightful novel, full of history and fun – and it’s now in paperback! It will charm your pants off.
Backlist bump: Drood by Dan Simmons
YAY, BOOKS! That’s it for me. If you want to learn more about books (and see lots of pictures of my cats), or tell me about books you’re reading, you can find me on Twitter at MissLiberty, on Instagram at FranzenComesAlive, or Litsy under ‘Liberty’! (OMG I am OBSESSED with Litsy.)
Stay rad!
Liberty
Here are the three big stories in books and reading that broke last week:
Book Marks: A Rotten Tomatoes for Books
LitHub launched Book Marks, which takes the idea of Rotten Tomatoes and applies it to books. Book Marks aggregates and assigns a grade to reviews of books and then averages those grades into a final grade. As you can see in our own deep dive, there are many questions about this strategy, from implementation to reader demand. Is this a service that a meaningful number of readers want? We’ll find out.
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Opens
On Wednesday night, the first preview of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was performed in London. Anticipation for the play is intense and perhaps even more so for the script being published on July 31. Reactions seem to be excited with an underlying strain of wariness, though the sample size is too small to have a sense of what the emerging consensus might be. For those of us who have no shot at tickets for the London production (and that is literally almost everyone), take heart. Rowling said that touring productions will be coming sooner than you might expect.
A New Face of Censorship
As distressing as book banning in schools and public libraries is, it tends at least to be public, discussed, and oftentimes overturned. Last week, a new form of book censorship, or at least new to me, bubbled up into the literary world. Kate Messner had been invited to talk about her book, The Seventh Wish, to fourth and fifth graders at a Vermont school. The day before she was scheduled to appear, she was disinvited, because the school’s principal thought her visit would bring up questions and conversations that the school wasn’t prepared to discuss. The Seventh Wish, as Messner says, “uses magic to explore something many families are afraid to talk about with kids – addiction.”
And not only was Messner disinvited, but the school said that it would return the books it had already ordered. But, thanks to the heroic efforts of local librarians and advocates, The Seventh Wish will be available for students to read, consider, and inconvenience their teachers and administrators with. This specific case is distressing in its own right, but the larger lesson here is that books and ideas are censored, erased, and generally trod upon in a variety of ways that don’t quite rise to the level of “banning,” but are nevertheless hugely damaging. There are tens of thousands of kids out there whose lives are affected by addiction. I don’t think it is too much to ask our schools and libraries to let them see their stories and ask their questions.
My thanks this week to Book of the Month for sponsoring This Week in Books. Use offer code “JUNERIOT” to get 30% off a three-month subscription.
It’s almost here! The first Book Mail box will be available next Monday morning around 12pm Eastern. Set your reminders!
You’re on the waiting list, so we’ll email you as soon as they’re available. Then don’t delay! Quantities are limited, and once they’re gone, they’re gone. See you next Monday.