Augusta Scattergood's Blog, page 13

Congratulations to one of our #TrueFriends

Teachers, Parents, Librarians of readers fifth grade and up. Or thereabouts.
Are you still searching for that perfect book for holiday giving?

If she loves a great heroine, if he's read every single Harry Potter book, if they're fans of magical settings and a hint of romance, look no farther than this terrific tale.







Here's what her publisher's website has to say.
(I love the twisty-turny part!  There are many twists and turns and all sorts of side trips, near misses, dangers-  and of course fun- for Maggie along the way.)



And everybody knows what smart book pickers those folks at the Texas Library Association are, right? They just named THE MAGIC MIRROR to their Long Star Reading list. You can find the link to the books for grades 6-8 right HERE.

Congrats, Susan Hill Long. Those Texas librarians are right!
Such a good book! 

It's Monday again

And what are YOU reading?
I hope you've taken a big bite out of your TBR file, along with that turkey sandwich.

This is my stack. I'll never get through it! It's toppling over!



But over the Thanksgiving weekend, I finished at least two of them, and they were so good.

1. Be Light Like a Bird, by Monika Schroder. Lovely story for young readers who like their action with heart. I read this as an ARC when it first came out but now our library had a copy sitting on the new book shelf and I just had to check it out. The words seem the same but it was delightful to savor them this time around. (True confessions- I don't love reading books as rich as this one on my Kindle. I'm sure I missed something. )




2. Liberty by Kirby Larson.

I'm only peeking into this, gently, because I bought it as a gift and am trying to keep it gift-like (is that a word?). 
I loved the other two in this series and so far, this one may be the best yet! World War II. New Orleans. That dog!

I'm also reading a few ARCs, courtesy of the publishers and NetGalley, which you may have noticed in my tottering To Be Read stack. I'll save those to share when I have more time to think about them. 

Happy Reading, and I hope you all had a restful, thankful-for-your-blessings weekend.


http://www.teachmentortexts.com/#axzz4RJ4M3IFu

Traveling and Musing

It was a funny time to be traveling around, talking about books. I think Ann Patchett said it best in her recent blogpost, which you can read HERE.

And talking about books like mine seemed like a relatively important way to help kids figure out their worlds. Just before my visit to SQUARE BOOKS JR. in Oxford, MS, the fabulous folks there tweeted this about my visit:



So I think I'll share a few photos from my week going "home" to Mississippi and let them speak for themselves.


The event at Square Books Jr. The table that greeted me!



My friend Frieda Quon stirred up the Chinese community and they came! 
And my family, they came!
We had some really great conversation afterwards at Boure on the Square in Oxford.
Thank you, Frieda. Thank you, Jane and George.




My sister donated a copy of MAKING FRIENDS WITH BILLY WONG to the Batesville library, where I met the very smart and enthusiastic new librarian, a recent transplant from New Jersey!




And of course, we ate.



The obligatory stop for fried chicken, turnip greens and the like, and boiled peanuts- at the local gas station.

Lunch with family after my event at the Friends of the Bolivar County library event.
(where nobody took a single photo?)
Thank you to all the people who came and asked great questions.
And to my friend Lonnye Sue for inviting me!
Airport grocery for barbecue. My past life is on the walls...


If you are ever in Cleveland, Mississippi, home of all sorts of attractions like a GRAMMY MUSEUM, be sure to stop in at the Train Museum (HERE's the link). 
My brother, sister and I donated our dad's "train doctor" certificate, and they have it on display!







The opening line in my new book, MAKING FRIENDS WITH BILLY WONG, mentions a 3-cent stamp.
I had to take this photo!










A beautiful drive to Memphis, through the Mississippi Delta. And all good things must end. Thank you to all the friends and family who hosted me, showed up for my signings, and helped with everything!


PS: Cotton used to be baled like this.


 I guess these are mostly decorative these days.
As a wise southerner once said, (I paraphrase and I think it was either Willie Morris or Dave Barry) Someday Soon all we ever knew about the South will be inside a big book on a coffee table in a Brooklyn brownstone...



If you haven't had enough of my trips home, CLICK HERE for a previous post, with photos.
And a little more about the train that once came through my hometown. You may have heard of it? (The City of New Orleans)  :)

Thank you, Mighty Girl

One of the best places to find great books, if I do say so myself, is the Mighty Girl website.
 And I have nothing to do with the MIGHTY GIRL folks, but I love their book selection.

Imagine my surprise and delight to see they've said lovely things and included MAKING FRIENDS WITH BILLY WONG on their list of books about friendship.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE LONG, INCLUSIVE LIST.
( Including new novels by my friends Donna Gephart and Shannon Hitchcock.)


Here's what they said about my book:


One good friendship can help a Mighty Girl blossom. It's 1952, and Azalea is dreading a summer helping her Grandmother Clark — she struggles to make friends at the best of times, and now she'll spend months in an unfamiliar town. When Billy Wong, a local Chinese-American boy, shows up to help in her grandmother's garden, Azalea is startled that her grandmother encourages her to talk to him. Not only does it turn out that Billy is easy to befriend — a surprise given their different backgrounds and experiences — but Azalea also discovers that making friends with others isn't as hard as she thought it was after all.

It's Monday What Are You Reading?

I love these #IMWAYR posts. 
They're all over the blogosphere!
Occasionally, I join in the fun, too.

So this is my Monday book, and it's a good one. 
No, it's a GREAT one.



I met Karen Cushman for the first time last weekend in Houston at the fabulously fun event, TWEENS READ.
But from my librarian days, I've been a fan. I didn't buy her book there because my suitcase would hardly close as it was. (I pack small.)

Imagine my delight when I realized I actually already own a copy, buried on my To Be Read shelf. Sent by her publisher. 
Thank you, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt books!

CLICK HERE to see what the folks at Kirkus say, besides that it's star-worthy!

Here are some things I love about this book:

The language, oh the language!
"Grayling felt her face sag like an empty feed sack."
That image will be with me a while.

One secondary character, Desdemona Cork really cracks me up.
 
             Desdemona Cork twitched her shawl, and Phinaeus Moon blushed.
             Grayling rolled her eyes. "Can you not leave it for a moment?" she hissed to Desdemona Cork. "Must you enchant everyone?"
             Desdemona Cork pulled her shawls tightly around her. "'Tis not something I do, but something I am."

Yes, the book takes place a while ago, in the days of magic and spells and mice who change into goats. But that Desdemona totally reminds me of somebody I know.

I'll leave you with some words of wisdom, advice the travelers learned on their journey, your thought for the day:

Do no magic you cannot undo.
Perfectly apt for a Halloween Monday, no?

Now rush right out and buy the book, request it from your library, fire up the Kindle, however you prefer to read. You'll totally love this one!

The History We Don't Always Know

  

While researching my own novel, MAKING FRIENDS WITH BILLY WONG, at Delta State University's Chinese Heritage collection, I heard a lot about this story. 

This new book is just out today!



Here's a bit from the publisher's description:

A generation before Brown v. Board of Education struck down America’s “separate but equal” doctrine, one Chinese family and an eccentric Mississippi lawyer fought for desegregation in one of the greatest legal battles never told.

On September 15, 1924, Martha Lum and her older sister Berda were barred from attending middle school in Rosedale, Mississippi. The girls were Chinese American and considered by the school to be “colored”; the school was for whites. This event would lead to the first US Supreme Court case to challenge the constitutionality of racial segregation in Southern public schools, an astonishing thirty years before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision.

The Kirkus review is HERE.

An AMAZON link is HERE.

It's a really fascinating story that happened in Bolivar County, Mississippi. 

Carnegie Libraries

"A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people.  It is a never failing spring in the desert."
                                                               Andrew Carnegie


I love the stories about Carnegie libraries across the country.

You can CLICK HERE to read a bit of the history.

Or HERE FOR A FASCINATING STORY about the secret apartments at the New York Public Library's branches, funded by Andrew Carnegie. 

I grew up near Clarksdale, MS, where a Carnegie Library is still used as a library.


There's a beautiful Carnegie Library in downtown St. Petersburg, a library I frequent occasionally.



If you'd like to visit some of these libraries, there's a state-by-state list HERE.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

Do you follow the It's Monday What Are You Reading blogs?

If not, here's the story. 
I'm going to quote Alyson Beecher here because she says it perfectly:




It's Monday! What are you Reading? is a meme hosted by Sheila at Book Journeys.  Jen Vincent ofTeach Mentor Texts and Kellee Moye of Unleashing Readers decided to give It's Monday! What Are You Reading? a kidlit focus. It is a great way to recap what you read and/or reviewed the previous week and to plan out your reading and reviews for the upcoming week. It's also a great chance to see what others are reading right now...you just might discover your next “must-read” book!

I wish I were better at keeping up with my own reading. I usually have at least two kids' books and one something-else going at the same time. Because I've been traveling, I've also read a couple of airplane books, sadly not worth mentioning. 

Also, I have a library book due tomorrow, which inspired this post. I was going to zip through it this afternoon and blog about it. But I'm not going to talk about that book, which seems to have garnered excellent reviews but fell apart for me 3/4 of the way through.

What I finished last night and LOVED SO MUCH. Sorry, can't help hollering. 






I happened to be at a Highlights UNWorkshop with Meg last month where she received a very special honor and a scholarship in her name. What a treat to sit around the breakfast table (lunch, dinner- Hey, it was Highlights! We eat a lot!) and talk about how she came to write this story.

The good people at Highlights gave everybody a copy of Meg's new book. Honestly, I thought I'd send it to a lovely friend, a teacher in her first job, in New York. Perfect match. I'll still pass along my autographed copy. But I'm so glad I read it first. 

What a book. Mine is now filled with stickie notes! 
Things that will make me think hard about my own writing. 
I adore how she weaves in historical details in. Son of Sam- I'd almost forgotten that. And the great NYC Black-out. The way she makes readers feel their characters' worries and fears- brilliant.

The music, food, lingo. All those fabulous things that don't really matter if you don't get them. It might not even matter if Meg had chosen to leave them out. But they so enrich this book!

I'm delighted to know that BURN BABY BURN has just been long-listed for the National Book Awards. Well deserved. 

I turned the last page of the book this morning, reading the interesting Author's Note. What a truly inspiring read for a writer. As I'm sure it will be for its intended Young and New Adult audiences.

Here's hoping your weekend reading was every bit as good as this book.

Thank you!

Thank you to those of you who've taken the time to post a review of my new book to Amazon, Goodreads, your blogs, etc. 
Authors REALLY appreciate this. 

I was truly delighted to read this thoughtful Amazon review.
Thank you, Jeu Foon:
September 9, 2016Format: Hardcover|Verified PurchaseJust finished reading "Making Friends with Billy Wong". My opinion ... Outstanding! Five out of five stars! Here's why ... (1) Augusta Scattergood got many details of the 50's just right, even down to the then used term "funny books", (2) her depiction of Chinese life in grocery stores was accurately expressed through Billy's prose (a very nice change of pace writing-wise!), (3) I wouldn't mind reading even more about the same summer from each boys' individual perspective (two very interesting characters!), 
(4) I really like that the author used Arkansas as the setting, instead of Mississippi. Mississippi Chinese were and still are a very close-knit group, from having attended Chinese-only schools together, and are well-documented. But the many more scattered and more-isolated Chinese kids in Arkansas (like me) had to attend white schools alone and navigate a difficult daily life between and within both black and white societies (as the author so perfectly describes through Billy Wong’s own writings), (5) Bottom line: this is a very well-told and unique story about the bonds of friendship grown through shared experiences, both good and bad. I truly enjoyed reading this story of Azalea's summer and I expect others will too. 
Thank you, Augusta Scattergood, for writing it. Outstanding! - Jeu Foon (Forrest City, Arkansas 1949 – 1967)

Writing Advice from #TrueFriends, Part 3

You might wonder what on earth would four writers do for four days together.

Do they actually write? Or do they have a gabfest, long walks, fabulous meals and the occasional glass of wine? 

In my limited but excellent experience, all of those things are part of a writing retreat. When Kirby Larson invited us to be a part of her writing world, Barbara O'Connor and I flew in from the East Coast. Susan Hill Long met us at the airport. And off we went to our own cocoon where we worked very hard.

At some previously scheduled point in our writing days, we gathered and talked about our manuscripts. We were at different places in our writing. Kirby and Barbara had a ton of books under their author belts. Sue had quite a few herself as well as experience working in publishing. True confessions, I suspect I had the most to learn. And I soaked in every single word of advice.

On our first retreat, we sent chapters around in advance for critiquing. So Sue put her sharp editor's pen to work. I can't speak for the others, but in my case, I suspect she had to work hard.  Many red marks= super suggestions.

Susan Hill Long, finally, perfectly made me understand what a scene is. 
And how important it is to write in scenes. Okay, I knew that part already. And instinctively, I think many writers do. We probably see our stories in scenes, even if we don't realize it. 
But making it happen is hard work!

Here are her words, verbatim, from her helpful Advice from a True Friend.  Thanks, Sue!

This is important: in a scene, something happens.  
Yes, sometimes we need to set up a quick bridge to get from one thing that happens, one event, to another. And sometimes we need to make time pass. For one reason or another, sometimes the story calls for summary in order to keep moving forward. 

But when we want the reader to notice, to slow down and experience the event with the character, we write a scene. 

From Sandra Scofield's excellent and highly recommended resource THE SCENE BOOK: A Primer for the Fiction Writer, I learned that each scene should have a sort of pivot that I can put my finger on, a point where something changes. The story moves forward, or the reader's understanding of the character deepens, or the plot twists. Especially once I have a down-and-dirty draft in hand, I can look at each scene and ask, How does this scene matter to my story?


 There must have been magic in that ocean air.  
Four books appeared this year. 
We organized a Second Annual Writing Retreat. 
And now we're excited to be a part of NCTE in Atlanta in November, where we'll be on a panel together and talk about how this could work in your world.


 (To read advice from Kirby and Barbara, click back through my previous #TrueFriends blogpost.)