The Places You Will Go

Fish Out of Water

By DAPHNE LEE

Tots to Teens, Star 2 on Sunday

I’M told that mermaids are the next big (floppy and wet) thing in YA fiction. A rather anatomically inconvenient mythological creature to write about if you ask me. The tail, of course, would be an excellent method of birth control. In fact, it would prohibit sexual intercourse altogether (wouldn’t it? My knowledge of aquatic vertebrate anatomy is practically non-existent) and this would surely meet with the approval of nervous parents and those who promote sexual abstinence among the young.

And what about the settings of these books? Mermaids have restricted mobility and any action would have to take place by the sea, on the sea or in the sea. I’m not sure if they need salt water to survive. If not, then at least these mermaid characters could also hang out in a swimming pool, or bath-tub. At a pinch they might also be propped up in a shower stall with the water running.

In The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen, a mermaid manages to replace her tail with legs and feet, but at great cost. Every step she takes with her new feet, feels like she’s walking on sharp knives. I have always found this story really off-putting because of the extremes this little twit is willing to go through for a man.

What Love Means

It’s a question that fascinates this young adult fiction author — and her many teen fans.

By DAPHNE LEE

AND it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.”

It was this bible verse (Genesis 6:1-2) that inspired Lauren Kate’s Fallen series. The books are about the romance between Lucinda or Luce, and Daniel, a boy whom she meets at a reform school. Daniel, it turns out, is a fallen angel with angelic looks to match.

“When I read the line from Genesis something about it struck me – that such a complicated, tragic sacrifice that could be made for love,” said Kate who was in Kuala Lumpur early this week as part of a world tour to promote the Fallen series. “It sounded like the start to a really interesting love story and made me wonder who that girl could be – why would an angel look down from heaven, see her, a mortal woman, and fall in love with her? Why would he give up so much for love?”

The CILIP Carnegie & Kate Greenaway Children's Book Awards - 2011 Awards

Click here to see the latest press releases about the 2011 award winners.

Monsters of Men by Patrick Ness published by Walker Books Get video and audio from the ceremony, view the Carnegie shortlist or read more on the winners

FArTHER illustrated by Grahame Baker-Smith published by Templar Get video and audio from the ceremony, view the Greenaway shortlist or read more on the winners

 

 

via carnegiegreenaway.org.uk

Posted via email from daphnelee's posterous

Different Seasons

 

From Tots to Teens, 17th April 2011

By DAPHNE LEE

ALLEGRA (Ally to her friends and family) Katz has been playing the piano since she was four. She’s now 13 and belongs to a pre-college music programme at the Juilliard Music School. Her dad is a violinist with a famous quartet, and her mother trained in opera and now sings the blues in jazz bars in Manhattan’s Alphabet City.

Ally’s life revolves around music. She has to practice six hours a day and spends practically the whole of every Saturday at Juilliard, attending various music workshops and classes – theory, chamber, composition, solfege, master class, and her piano lesson proper with the relentlessly demanding and unsympathetic Miss Pringle.

“It felt like the world was passing me by,” says Ally when she can’t make it to her best friend, Opal’s art exhibition. Slumber parties, just hanging out eating hotdogs or watching movies, dating, all the things that most teenagers take for granted have to take a back seat to her music career, or rather making sure that she has music career to look forward to – “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” “Practice.”

Michelle Paver wins Guardian children's fiction prize | Books | guardian.co.uk

Michelle Paver, winner of the Guardian children's fiction prize.

Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

via guardian.co.uk

Posted via email from daphnelee's posterous

The writer Michelle Paver has won the 2010 Guardian children's fiction prize for the concluding volume of her bestselling Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series, Ghost Hunter. Set in an imagined prehistory, the series follows a young boy called Torak, who finds he can communicate with a wolf cub, and becomes his companion.

Still Hungry

By DAPHNE LEE

From Tots to Teens, StarMag

I’M guessing that by now everyone will have read Mockingjay (Scholastic Press, 398
pages, ISBN: 978-0439023511), the third and final book in Suzanne Collins’s The
Hunger Games Trilogy. If you haven’t and you dislike spoilers, stop reading at once.

I always read the final page of books first so I found out right away that Katniss and
Peeta end up together. And that they have two children. Ho-hum. The romance aspect
of the trilogy is the least interesting part of it and readers who focussed on Katniss’s
love life missed the point of the first two books.

A Relevant Read

From Tots to Teens, StarMag

 

I AM reading Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Not re-reading, but reading for the first time. I don’t know how I’ve managed to arrive at my 43^rd year without having read the book, especially when so many around me love it so much.

 

I am now two chapters into Part Two, and enjoying it thoroughly. I am loving Scout, the narrator, especially. She’s six years old at the start of the book, and there is nothing more insulting to her than to be told she behaves like a girl. “Scout sometimes you act so much like a girl, it’s mortifying,” is the sort of thing her beloved brother, Jem, says whenever Scout shows any inclination not to take part in his plans.

 

Jem is four years older than Scout and, as big brothers go, is actually a pretty good sort … most of the time.

 

By the way, I have not watched the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird either, but I’ve been told that it’s a very faithful dramatisation of the book. Harper Lee liked it and became close friends with Gregory Peck who plays Atticus Finch, the kids’ dad (Peck’s grandson was named Harper).

 

The children call their father Atticus, which would be unusual even in the 21^st century let alone in the deep south of the 1930s, where and when conventions, manners and appearances were everything. This is one of the first indications that Atticus is not like most fathers.

 

He is a widower (his wife died when Jem was six) and has raised his children himself, with only the help of a cook and cleaner, a black woman named Calpurnia. Atticus is that most rare breed of parent who actually listens to his children, not that he doesn’t ever lecture them. However, at least he practises what he preaches.

 

Scout mentions that she can’t remember her mother, but observes how Jem sometimes goes off by himself and recognises this as a sign that her brother misses their mother and leaves him alone on these occasions. Like most children, Jem and Scout are often acutely sensitive to and considerate of others’ feelings. They are also frequently tactless, selfish and indifferent.

 

Hot Men of Children's Literature VI: David Larochelle

David Larochelle has the best smile of any author I have ever met.

Actually, I haven't met David but I feel I have. We've emailed and he very generously sent my children an authographed copy of his picture book The End.

David's also written one of my very favourite picture books, The Best Pet of All (illustrated by Hanako Wakiyama).

Absolutely, Positively Not is David's YA novel about a boy who's coming to terms with his sexuality.

To read more about David and his work, go to his website at davidlarochelle.net.

Hot Stuff

By DAPHNE LEE

From Tots to Teens, StarMag

CONSIDERING how excited teenage girls got over Edward Cullen's habit of creeping into Bella Swan's room to watch her sleep (sicko!) while swearing never to have sex with her, they should be in a frenzy over Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mallark chastely sharing the same bed.

In The Hunger Games, both Katniss and Peeta survived the State of Panem's twisted reality-TV event. The blossoming of the young couple's love affair was seen by some as an act of defiance in the face of tradition, rules and tyranny. In Catching Fire, the second book of the planned trilogy, we learn that their victory has inspired rebellion.

Tales of Mystery and Imagination: An Interview with Shaun Tan

From StarMag

Interview by DAPHNE LEE

MOST people tend to associate picture books with simple stories, illustrated with simple, brightly coloured pictures. Of course, those with a more intimate knowledge of this medium of storytelling know that there is more to picture books than just pretty pictures that simply offer a visual description of a straightforward, basic text.

Picture books may deal with complex and difficult themes and subject matter, and this may be reflected in either the text or the art, or both.

Shaun Tan is a picture book artist whose work is definitely more complex than what the average person might expect to find in a alphabet or counting book. I know people who started collecting picture books after they read one of Tan's. The Melbourne-based 35-year-old started his career drawing for science fiction and horror novels. His art appears in picture books written by John Marsden (The Rabbits) and Gary Crew (The Viewer and Memorial) and he also illustrates his own books (The Red Tree, The Arrival, Tales from Outer Suburbia).

Tan's art is striking and detailed, rather surreal in content and style. The richly tinted, deeply unsettling images in The Red Tree manage to convey the idea of that small glimmer of hope that keeps many people going through the worst of times.

In The Arrival, the pictures are sepia toned, alternating between panaromic views and personal studies that relate the story of a man as he attempts to make a living and home in a new land.

Tales from Outer Suburbia is a collection of 15 short ... I hesitate to even call them stories. Some seem like fragments that have no beginning or end. Most tantalise the reader, offering glimpses into strange worlds or strange views of this world.

Tan's father hails from Ipoh, Perak, and met his Australian wife when he was an engineering student in an Australian university. Tan was born in Perth and visited Malaysia when he was a boy but doesn't remember much of it.

Apart from writing and painting, he has worked as a theatre designer, and did concept art for the films Horton Hears a Who and Pixar's WALL-E.