Claire Hennessy's Blog, page 26

Book-review post!

Catching up on some reviews of grown-up books read at the start of this year…

Nora Roberts – Local Hero

I’ve really enjoyed what I’ve read of Nora Roberts. This is one of her earlier books, so much more straightforward romance than romantic suspense, but still lovely – the story of a single mother and the comic book writer neighbour who moves in upstairs and bonds with her kid. A quick but pleasing, comforting read.

Dave Lordan (ed.) – New Planet Cabaret

This collection of new work from emerging Irish writers is well worth picking up – many of the pieces are quite short, so there’s a huge variety of work here, including stories and poems from Colm Keegan, Kerrie O’Brien, Erin Fornoff, Dave Rudden, Sarah Maria Griffin, Elizabeth Reapy, Nuala Ni Chonchuir, Michael Naghten Shanks, Rob Doyle, Jessica Traynor, and Alison Wells, among others.

Susan Choi – My Education

Affairs and academia. So, you know, the usual. This is a story of the two professors – a married couple – that our heroine has affairs with, and is full of gorgeous (if sometimes a tad overwrought) passages and observations about love and intimacy, as well as growing older. It took me a while to get through it – I was definitely aware of its length – but it is a good book.

Chelsea Handler – Are You There Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea

This collection of essays from comedian Chelsea Handler left me, honestly, a bit cold. She comes off as just a little too (unintentionally) offensive to be likable, and isn’t funny enough to make up for it. I was surprised because I’d heard great things about this book, but it was certainly not for me.

Sarra Manning – It Felt Like A Kiss

The latest from Sarra Manning features characters from Unsticky, though its focus is in on art buyer Ellie and what happens when the truth is revealed about her parentage. Her father is a rockstar who’s never wanted anything to do with her – but now the story’s been sold to the press and all eyes (including her father’s family’s) are on her. Enter David Gold, whose job it is to control the situation – and who Ellie will, of course, end up falling for. The love story element is not especially original plot-wise, but anyone who’s read Manning’s work will be aware of just how delicious her love stories are. There’s also plenty of pop culture commentary here – particularly in relation to how the media handles the story – which is always territory Manning handles well. A most enjoyable read.

Clodagh Murphy – Some Girls Do

Speaking of enjoyable reads… Clodagh Murphy! Her fourth novel focuses on a girl named Claire (so I was predisposed to like this one) who is a demure bookseller by day and a sex blogger by night. When a London editor declares his interest in developing her blog into a book, she worries that he’s expecting someone sexier and more knowledgeable – someone who hasn’t made it all up. As things progress with him – both publishing-wise and romantically – she recruits the help of a friend-of-a-friend, Luca, who’s great in bed but doesn’t do relationships. Again, relationship-wise, you can see/hope where this is going from the beginning, but it’s still very much a satisfying read. (I did want more sex in there – the moments they have are terrific but there are definitely aspects that could have been developed, and more conversations had about sexy things also – but I suspect that’d veer it towards ‘erotic fiction’ territory, rather than a romantic comedy.)

Chris Binchy – Five Days Apart

College students Alex and David are best friends – until Camille comes along. She’s the girl David can’t quite make a play for but desires, and the girl confident, always-gets-what-he-wants Alex gets. It’s not quite a love story; the dissection of the friendship between these two guys is really what’s going on here. The tension that unfolds, alongside the coming-of-age as David begins his first ‘real job’, is well played out – lots of moments and almosts and reflections and self-deprecations that are sometimes funny but also shrewd.

Fairytale retellings & International Children’s Book Day

Today is International Children’s Book Day, and there’s a whole bunch of events going on today – see here!

IBBY Ireland have also launched a new resource website, Imagine Nations.

And finally there is a shiny fairytale retelling collection from Irish kids’ writers available for download here, including a story from yours truly, and some terrific retellings by Deirdre Sullivan, Anna Carey, Dave Rudden, Sarah Webb, Sheena Wilkinson, Ruth Long, and others.

Fairytale retellings! So shiny!

Book-review post!

More book reviews! Two 9-12s, one new adult, one YA.

Jeff Kinney – Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Hard Luck

Latest Wimpy Kid is a quick, fun read, as ever. Things aren’t going well for Greg ever since Rowley, of all people, acquired a girlfriend, but he’s determined to turn things around, with the help of a Magic-8 ball to consult whenever a decision needs to be made. There’s plenty of snark about how-life-is-in-series-fiction, school policies, and family interactions. Delightful.

Ann M Martin – Family Tree #2: The Long Way Home

This is the second book in Martin’s quartet about a family throughout the twentieth century. I wasn’t as crazy about Dana as I was about Abby – but I loved seeing the characters from the first book grow up and change as the years progressed. Basically, there’s so much stuff here that happens to Abby, but viewed through the unsympathetic lens of her daughter, and I would have adored to get her viewpoint a bit more. Sigh. But Dana’s ambition is certainly fascinating, and the details about publishing and the art world and school just suck you in. Looking forward to reading the third book. Set in the 1980s, which is apparently historical fiction now (yikes).

Esme Taylor – All I Want For Christmas

Keris Stainton turns her hand to NA – I am fond of her YA so wanted to try this out, and it’s definitely worth checking out. A lovely Christmassy novella featuring love, sex, friendship and family – it’s a quick read but not superficial. Enjoyed it.

Christa Desir – Fault Line

Read this book. Read it. It is astonishingly, astonishingly good and heartbreaking and uncomfortable in places. It’s the story of a teenage boy, Ben, whose girlfriend Ani is raped – and what happens afterwards. Their own burgeoning relationship is portrayed wonderfully – she’s tough but not a cliche, and he’s a decent guy without being sickly sweet. When the event happens – and it’s made public, in a ‘what that slut let those guys do to her at that party’ way – it is awful and unbelievably authentic. Ben wants to help, but doesn’t know how – he also has a lot of anger about it, towards a number of people – and Ani’s response is to try to prove none of it matters by hooking up with more guys, to start to see herself as an object. There are no easy answers here, and it’s a really intense read, and I highly recommend it.

Book-review post!

Oh, so much catching up to do on books I have read in the last… several months. Let’s get started!

Anne-Marie Conway – Forbidden Friends

For 9-12s, this is a story about two girls whose families are bound together by an accident that happened years ago. When they meet on holidays, they have no idea of the secrets they’re about to uncover… cue ominous music. Told from dual perspectives, it does a good job at getting inside both their heads and exploring their concerns. Would be interested to read her other books.

Meg Rosoff – Picture Me Gone

Latest Meg Rosoff is dreamy and quirky, focusing on a watchful and precocious twelve-year-old girl on a road trip with her father to find a friend of his. The adult world is filtered through her sensibilities and it does that very unusual thing in YA of being about a younger character who benefits from being read by an older reader (see also: Emma Donoghue’s Room and John Boyne’s The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, which are not YA but work in a similar fashion). Not much happens, but it is a lovely read.

K.A. Tucker – Ten Tiny Breaths

New adult. Kacey’s haunted by the deaths of her parents in a car crash, and has run away with her younger sister – she’s old enough now to take care of them both. She’s tough – for which read: dysfunctional – and she doesn’t let anyone in. So why does hot new neighbour Trent get to her so much? And as they get closer, it becomes clear he has secrets of his own… (dun dun DUN!)

This was a good read, but formulaic enough – I have yet to be wowed by NA.

David Levithan & Jonathan Farmer – Every You, Every Me

Oh David Levithan, how you love the collaborations. This is a blend of text and photo and it’s about this girl who is no longer around, and we’re left wondering why…

Shocking confession: I was not mad about this. Obviously there are gorgeous bits in it, it being a Levithan book, and there are some cool typographical things done that work really well, but there was nothing overly surprising in there and it lacked some of the loveliness of his other books.

Julie Halpern – Have A Nice Day

Sequel to Get Well Soon, which I adored. Anna’s just out of the psychiatric hospital and back in the real world, dealing with all the issues there – I loved this thematically but was less adoring of its execution.

Maureen Johnson, John Green & Lauren Myracle – Let It Snow

Three novellas by three YA writers of joy. I’d read work from all these writers before. I was underwhelmed in the extreme. They’re fluffy holiday stories – competent but not ‘wow’ worthy in the way that I’d expect from these guys. And also no redeeming cheerleaders whatsoever. Meh.

Right. Next book-review post I promise there will be something gush-worthy instead of ‘ah yeah, sure it’s grand’.

Some things of joy

January can be gloomy. Here are some delightful things to help alleviate said gloom:

#1. ‘Let It Go’ from Frozen, which is possibly the most joyful thing I have encountered since Tangled. It has everything! Everything! Sisters, snow, innuendo, musical numbers, plot twists aplenty, acts of true love thawing frozen hearts… I adored it. And I am a huge fan of Idina Menzel, and Kristen Bell too, so that helped.

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#2. Speaking of… Veronica Maaaars! I loved the TV series – that first season in particular is just extraordinarily good – I am so excited about this movie. I may have a VMars Kickstarter backer t-shirt, yeah.

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#3. So I have not yet seen most of what has aired of How I Met Your Mother‘s final season, but I just had to check out the 200th episode (credit sequence above), ‘How Your Mother Met Me’, and it is both a thing of joy and of heartbreak. Oh, Cristin Milioti.

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#4. To cancel out the heartbreaky moments of #3, another song from Frozen. Sure why not.

Dear Wicked: because I knew you, I have been changed for good

When I love things, it is often obsessively. There’s a reason my favourite book of the year was one called Fangirl. I rewatch TV shows I love, revisit books I’ve adored, and occasionally there are musicals I might go see more than once. Or twice. Or more…

I’ve noted my love of Wicked here before, but with its recent (still ongoing) arrival in Dublin, I’ve found myself talking about it a lot more. And the main thing that always comes up is how rare it is to have a musical where the main relationship isn’t romantic and it isn’t about heartbreak – it’s about the friendship between two girls, one who grows up to be a Good Witch, the other the Wicked Witch of the West. The best song in the whole show – ‘For Good’ – is a duet between the two of them, and the most tearjerking moment (okay, one of them) involves their dancing awkwardly into friendship together. I can think of so very things in the media – especially things aimed at adults – that devote that much time to acknowledging that female friendships are hugely significant things, rather than things that either support or get in the way of the relationships with the menfolk. There’s a love triangle in Wicked and while it’s certainly not incidental, the main focus is on the Elphaba and G(a)linda dynamic. We’re rooting for Fiyero and Elphaba to get together, for the smart, awkward, green girl to get her guy, but we’re also rooting for G(a)linda not to get hurt, because even though she’s ridiculous at times, she grows and develops and is someone the land of Oz is lucky to have by the end of the show. The two girls are pitted against each other in so many ways – academically, socially, romantically – and they end as friends rather than rivals. (This is a rare thing. Do you know what else does this, by the by? Legally Blonde. Just sayin’.)

But there’s so much else that I love – the fact that there’s so much story there, the way each song moves the plot along, the way that it addresses issues of truth and good versus evil and propaganda and history. The fact that it itself is fannish – it’s revisiting The Wizard of Oz and throwing in all the little references (“There’s no place like home,” Elphaba tells her sister at one point) that those familiar with the original source text will appreciate. It is the best kind of fanfiction – the sort that makes you completely re-evaluate the original material. The sort that does things with someone else’s characters to make them more layered and nuanced. It’s an incredibly satisfying show to watch.

And it is basically an anthem for the awkward, the quirky, the difficult. Elphaba is snarky and talented and hopeful and above all passionate – passionate in her irritation with and later adoration of Fiyero and G(a)linda, her faith in the Wizard, her desire to save the animals, her frustration that nothing’s working out and that ‘no good deed goes unpunished’. She’s brave and determined and prickly and she gets her very own story after being the villain in someone else’s, and it’s glorious.

This show makes me happy. In part because there are so many people who have changed me ‘for good’, especially so many kind and smart and inspirational women that I know, and it is so rare that we acknowledge that in grown-up life there are significant non-romantic relationships that happen. And in part because it is just so damn pretty.

And, y’know, what use is the internet if you’re not using it to gush over the things you love at least some of the time?

Favourite YA Books of 2013

It comes around so fast… my favourite YA books of 2013.

The list

(in no particular order)

Rainbow Rowell – Fangirl

Robyn Schneider – Severed Heads, Broken Hearts

Deirdre Sullivan – Improper Order

K A Barson – 45 Pounds (More Or Less)

Beth Revis – Shades of Earth

Katie Coyle – Vivian Versus the Apocalypse

Elizabeth Wein – Rose Under Fire

The breakdown

Dystopian/sci-fi: 1.5

Contemporary/realistic: 4.5

Historical: 1

Authors I’d read before: 4

Authors new to me: 3

Trends

- Fewer titles here than usual but more on the ‘read but not published in’ list.

- Contemporary is winning out here. (Counting Vivian as sort of half-contemporary and half-sci-fi.)

- Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl is without a doubt the book I have gushed over the most this year. Except maybe Eleanor & Park. Both of these I plan on rereading very soon.

- The book from this list most likely to make you cry: Rose Under Fire.

- All lady writers. I make no apologies.

Bonus mentions

(read in, but not published in, 2013)

Jenny Hubbard – Paper Covers Rock

Erica Lorraine Scheidt – Uses For Boys

Rainbow Rowell – Eleanor & Park

Amy McNamara – Lovely, Dark and Deep

Past years:

Favourite YA books of 2012, 2011, 2010.

Throwing Bricks (and other stories)

So an anthology of student work I edited over the summer was launched earlier this month – it’s called Words To Tie To Bricks (yes, there is a reason) and is available from various online retailers as well as directly from CTYI. All proceeds go to St Michael’s House.

You can read an article I wrote for writing.ie about how this anthology was compiled (and in which I yammer on about creativity, aptitude, and the workshopping process a lot). The Young Students programme have also put together a collection, Well Seasoned Stories (ed. Jill Moriarty), which is launching this Saturday – again, contact CTYI if you’re interested in a copy of that. Shiny words!

Infrequently Asked Questions

Just finished up a load of events for the Children’s Book Festival 2013, many of which included Q&A sessions. Some of the more unusual or oooh-haven’t-heard-that-one-before ones for you, with answers:

Do you like One Direction?

I wouldn’t say ‘like’ and I certainly wouldn’t say ‘obsessively fangirl over’ (mind you, am fangirlish over about twenty bajillion other things) but I do have a couple of their songs on one of my writing playlists.

What is your favourite kind of cheese?

Brie. (Nom nom nom.)

Did your parents encourage you to be a writer or would they prefer you were a doctor or an engineer?

Now this was a very interesting one, especially coming from primary school girls… we talked a bit about this but it came down to the idea that if you’re doing anything creative or a bit outside-the-box I think you need to argue for yourself a little bit more, a lot of the time, because it’s a less traditional path and doesn’t quite come with as many obvious instructions (e.g. follow this officially-approved pattern for training) as certain careers. You need to do a bit more explaining to people about what you’re going to do and what other people in that field have done.

(For the record, my parental units are both very into having work that you love, and supportive, but they are also sensible humans and know that often the trade-off for creative work is the instability and uncertainty that goes with any freelancing gig.)

Who’s the funniest writer you’ve ever met?

Philip Ardagh. He was at the CBI Conference a couple of years back and he was just properly hilarious both when in panel-mode and just for chatting. Also – it is obligatory to mention this – he is the owner of a most magnificent beard.

What’s your favourite movie-based-on-a-book?

For grown-ups it is probably Wonder Boys, and I adore both the movie and book, and for young people it’s The Hunger Games, because I like the way it takes a lot of the key things from the book – but doesn’t try to do everything – and also gives us something extra.

Who’s your favourite Babysitters Club character?

(Had a serious bonding moment over BSC appreciation with one group. It was fabulous.) Mary Anne, but also adore Claudia.

Would you ever write a book about a dog and a cat playing chess?

We will see.

Book-review post!

Catching up on bookish thoughts about ‘everything that is not YA’, so this is a mix of poetry, short stories, commercial fiction, and non-fiction. Quick thoughts!

Marie Howe – What The Living Do

Collection of poems about the author’s brother and his death – some lovely ones in there. (I am useless at reviewing poetry. It is pretty.)

Leanne O’Sullivan – Cailleach

Also poetry! This is a collection based on ideas of and myths about the Hag of Beara, focusing on her as both woman and witch, and has some gorgeous lines and images. The poems can stand alone but are arranged in five sections and do sort of work as a novel-in-verse, which makes for pleasing reading.

Emma Donoghue – Three and a Half Deaths

Four short stories, all linked by death (or almost-death). These are historical tales all based on a kernel of truth, all gorgeously done. (This is available in e-book only at the moment, as far as I know.)

Clodagh Murphy – Girl In A Spin

This is a fun and compelling read about twentysomething Jenny – blonde, gorgeous, and easy to underestimate. She lives with her two best friends, works as a nanny, and is having an affair with a married, ambitious politician. When his marriage breaks up and he decides he wants to commit to Jenny publicly, alongside his attempts to gain more power in his party, his spin doctor (ah, see how that title makes sense now?) steps in – but he’s convinced Jenny’s bad news. There are some fun and naughty elements to this (oh, the men in their costumes…), but there’s also some lovely characterisation, and I particularly liked seeing a character who suffered from panic attacks but wasn’t magically cured by the power of love. Read this on holidays and absolutely devoured it.

Brian Finnegan – The Forced Redundancy Film Club

Never mind book clubs – film clubs are where it’s at. When a group of employees all lose their jobs on the same day, they go for drinks and agree to start a film club, which brings them together even as their lives take on some sharp twists and turns over the next year. I enjoyed reading this, and promptly went and bought…

Brian Finnegan – Knowing Me, Knowing You

… his second book! This time the focus is on a group of friends who haven’t all been together in decades, but promised to reunite if their favourite band ABBA ever reunited for a concert. This (fictional) gig and the lead-up to it serves as the catalyst for these four characters reconnecting and working through some of the challenges their lives have brought – ranging from cancer to domestic violence to failed-pop-star-ness to life-after-gender-reassignment-surgery. Lot of issues, but none of it too heavy-handed; easy reading without being too fluffy.

Robin Hardwick – If You Lived Here, You’d Be Perfect By Now: The Unofficial Guide to Sweet Valley High

This was most enjoyable reading. Based on The Dairi Burger website recaps and new material, it is a snarktastic book-by-book (sometimes trilogy-by-trilogy) guide to the Sweet Valley High series, calling it out on all its ridiculousness. I think it might have benefited from a little more editing to reflect the way these recaps are presented in order, and I wish the Saga books could have been included, but all in all this is a most excellent addition to any 80s/90s-girls-series-fiction-junkie’s bookshelf.