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Lizzie Skurnick

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female

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June 2009

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Lizzie Skurnick's Blog

I Guess I Was Ready

Remember* this entirerecitative about the Gift of Magic cover I could never find, no matter how often I scoured used book tables on Sixth Avenue, so much so that I actually thought it was possible I was going crazy?

My best friend had it in her room the entire past year, having no knowledge of my search, meaning to give it to me.

A Gift of Magic

BEHOLD the true cover of A Gift of Magic! Which Loi...

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Published on November 26, 2010 16:15 • 104 views

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Books by Lizzie Skurnick

Average rating: 3.58 · 753 ratings · 230 reviews · 5 distinct works

	Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading by Lizzie Skurnick (Goodreads Author), Laura Lippman (Goodreads Author), Meg Cabot (Goodreads Author) 3.58 avg rating — 653 ratings — published 2009 — 3 editions	My rating:
	Alias: The Pursuit: A Michael Vaughn Novel (Prequel Series #5) 3.59 avg rating — 68 ratings — 4 editions	My rating:
	Alias: Shadowed (Prequel Series #12) 3.45 avg rating — 40 ratings — published 2004	My rating:
	Girls' Life Big Book of Friendship Fiction 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings — published 2004	My rating:

* Note: these are all the books on Goodreads for this author. To add more, click here.

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Lizzie is Currently Reading

Lizzie Skurnick is currently reading:

Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife

by Francine Prose

bookshelves: currently-reading

My rating:

Aug 18, 2009 12:35pm

Lizzie Skurnick is currently reading:

Going Away Shoes

by Jill McCorkle

bookshelves: currently-reading

My rating:

Jun 28, 2009 06:36am

Lizzie Skurnick is currently reading:

The Loved One (Modern Classics)

by Evelyn Waugh

bookshelves: currently-reading

My rating:

Jun 27, 2009 07:39am

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Lizzie's Recent Updates

Lizzie Skurnick added the Goodreads iPhone app

May 09, 2012 11:46am

Lizzie Skurnick gave

to:

Bigger than a Bread Box
by Laurel Snyder (Goodreads Author)

My rating:

May 30, 2011 07:52am

Lizzie Skurnick liked Maria M. Elmvang's review of Shelf Discovery:

" An incredibly charming book! Not having grown up in an English speaking country, I'd read depressingly few of the books mentioned (only 18 in total, actually), but I have my own list of Teen Classics I've Never Stopped Reading, so though I might n... "
Read more of this review »

Feb 20, 2011 10:16am · see review

Lizzie Skurnick added:

Noah's Wife
by T.K. Thorne (Goodreads Author)

My rating:

Jun 24, 2010 07:20am

Lizzie Skurnick took the Never-Ending Book Quiz

questions answered:	1
correct:	1 (100.0%)
skipped:	0
best streak:	1
questions added:	0

Apr 11, 2010 07:49pm · beat her score

Lizzie Skurnick liked Lori W's review of Shelf Discovery:

" I really liked this book. I loved reminiscing about old favorites (hello Judy Blume, Cynthia Voigt, and that old favorite, Summer of My German Soldier!), remembering books I wanted to read but never got around to (if only Goodreads existed when I... "
Read more of this review »

Apr 11, 2010 07:48pm · see review

Lizzie Skurnick said "yes" to attending the event: Launch event: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot - MC'd by Jad Abumrad of Radiolab

date: February 01, 2010 07:00PM
location: McNally Jackson Books, 52 Prince Street, New York, NY, The United States
description: Book for sale day before publication date at this launch event. Free & open to the public. Skloot will discuss & sign her new book. Event MC'd by Jad Abumrad of WNYC's RadioLab. Rumor has it, members of the Lacks family will be there too.

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The firs...more Book for sale day before publication date at this launch event. Free & open to the public. Skloot will discuss & sign her new book. Event MC'd by Jad Abumrad of WNYC's RadioLab. Rumor has it, members of the Lacks family will be there too.

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—more than 100 Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, & the effects of the atom bomb; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, & gene mapping; & have been bought & sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia—a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, & voodoo—to East Baltimore today, where her children & grandchildren live, & struggle with the legacy of her cells. Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists began using her husband & children in research without informed consent. The story of the Lacks family—past & present—is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, & the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.

“Skloot’s book is wonderful—deeply felt, gracefully written, sharply reported.” –Susan(less)

Jan 30, 2010 07:45am

Lizzie Skurnick is currently reading:

Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife
by Francine Prose

My rating:

Aug 18, 2009 12:35pm

Lizzie Skurnick made a comment on her review of Best Friends Forever

"Glad to see this book pulling positive reviews from all sectors. Why women get no credit for writing delightful books you can't put down, I'll never k...more "

Aug 13, 2009 09:27am · see review

Lizzie Skurnick gave

to:

It's Beginning to Hurt: Stories
by James Lasdun

read in August, 2009

My rating:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

My LAT review:

In the literary realm, much attention is paid both to the dramatic windup and the brutal aftermath when a character's life goes off track. But not enough writers make time for an equally important psychic process: the unpleasant twinge...more My LAT review:

In the literary realm, much attention is paid both to the dramatic windup and the brutal aftermath when a character's life goes off track. But not enough writers make time for an equally important psychic process: the unpleasant twinge that signals the great calamity to come. Such forebodings are the specialty of the poet and novelist James Lasdun, whose third book of stories, "It's Beginning to Hurt," shows us again and again that the world doesn't end with a bang but simply keels over with the merest tap.

Lasdun's characters are moneyed sophisticates whose problems, likely as not, unfold in the rarefied landscape of the sumptuous country house. There's the recent divorcée rusticated to her ex-husband's charming cottage; a Citroën-driving son who gets lost on the way to his father's wedding; a husband on vacation consumed with his wife's stock picks; a man so envious of his friend's sexual prowess on a trip to Greece that he realizes his marriage is over without actually cheating on his wife.

Given the proper soundtrack, most of these situations could fit smoothly into your average Hugh Grant romantic comedy. But Lasdun has his sights set on problems money has never been able to solve. Take "Peter Kahn's First Wife," a devastating story about a jewelry salesgirl who falls in love with the man who, on a near-yearly basis, has her try on his glittering purchases for a succession of wives. It sounds like a role built for Doris Day, but when the character finally decides to end her abusive marriage to pursue this passion, we are sobered by Lasdun's portrait of their failure to connect with each other, the willful blindness with which we stumble though our lives.

In "Caterpillars," Lasdun takes that idea a step further. A woman watches silently as her boyfriend cruelly berates his son on a hiking trip, then is unable to help when the child has a dangerous allergic reaction. Repulsed and fascinated by her mate's anger, the girlfriend tries to make sure the boy is safe. But Lasdun subtly lets us know that in fact her fruitless mission is -- and will thereafter be -- to save the father.

Like the settings of his stories, Lasdun's pointed prose is deceptively delicate, concealing a real sliver of malice beneath. In "The Half Sister," a guitar teacher observes that a woman's face is "very strange -- large and oval, with a propitiatory quality, like a salver on which certain curious, unrelated objects were being offered up for inspection." It's a startling image, even more so when we learn she really is being served up: as a candidate for a wife.

Or take "An Anxious Man," in which a man's worry over his wife's inheritance manifests itself in the fear that he has lost his wife and daughter. After they turn up, he flirts with another woman at a dinner with the neighbors. "She caught his eye, giving him a sly, unexpected smile. Then she placed the living lobsters on the grill. Joseph had never seen this done before. The sight of them convulsing and hissing over the red hot coals sent a reflexive shudder of horror through him, though a few minutes later he was happily eating his share."

It's the ability to delude ourselves that Lasdun keeps coming back to, knowing it can lead only to a more horrible moment: when we realize that we should have noticed sooner how we were going wrong. (That's perhaps truly clearest in "The Old Man," where a fiancé has the dreadful realization that he's about to marry a murderer.) Most moving is the moment in the title story when a man recalls with despair his mistress dismissing him: "Marie never asked him to leave his family, and he had regarded this too as part of his luck. And then, abruptly, she had ended it. 'I'm in love with you,' she'd told him matter-of-factly, 'and it's beginning to hurt.' "

In this marvelous, masterful collection of such unexamined moments, that minor character is the only one who ever sees it coming.

Skurnick's memoir of teen reading, "Shelf Discovery," was published in July.

Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times(less)

Aug 13, 2009 09:25am · see review

More of Lizzie's books…

Quotes by Lizzie Skurnick

“Now, suddenly, I was the kind of girl who felt true physical pain when asked to put down a book at the dinner table, who asked friends over and ignored them to finish Island of the Blue Dolphins for the fifth time.”
― Lizzie Skurnick, Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading

7 people liked it

“I was amused and surprised by the odd, visceral details that returned to me with each work: Pa bringing the girls real white sugar wrapped in brown paper in Little House in the Big Woods, Sally J. Freeman having a man-o-war wrapped around her foot (who even know what a man-o-war was?), Claudia choosing macaroni at the Automat in From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. These strong, charged images that have never left me - they're often stronger than memories I have of my old life.”
― Lizzie Skurnick, Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading

3 people liked it

“I was amused and surprised by the odd, visceral details that returned to me with each work: Pa bringing the girls real white sugar wrapped in brown paper in Little House in the Big Woods, Sally J. Freeman having a man-o-war wrapped around her foot (who even know what a man-o-war wa?), Claudia choosing macaroni at the Automat in From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. These strong, charged images that have never left me - they're often stronger than memories I have of my old life.”
― Lizzie Skurnick, Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading

1 person liked it

See all Lizzie Skurnick's quotes »