@Periods: Because I don't see any particular reason to hide it, per se. Also, plenty of kids do have older sisters, and have quite possibly been exposed already. I just find it odd that it's something we consider so taboo.
@Alan: Hee! That's actually quite a nice story all by itself, and a great way to get out there. I'd mail you, but what I'd really want to do is check one out for myself, and I imagine the shipping bills would be enormous. Especially for stuff that's not widely available.
"Proto-Indo-European makes the damnedest words related. It's great. It's the Kevin Bacon of etymology." ~MadrugadaI got some of Zilpha Keatley Snyder's Stanley mystery/adventure books, as I thought they might fit into the type of storytelling I like best - contemporary adventure with a focus on suspense rather than action. I avoided getting The Headless Cupid because it's a Newbery Honor book, and quite frankly, I'm allergic to Newbery. That big bad medal just screams "Boring! Pretentious! Depressing!", even though it sometimes (rarely) appears on books I find genuinely enjoyable.
Anyway, I'm reading through Janie's Private Eyes, and so far, it looks to be slightly Deconstructing the Kid Detective genre. The main character is actually not the lead Kid Detective; rather, his little sister is. And she does have some definite knowledge of what to do - she asked for a chemistry set for Christmas (the Stanleys are very eccentric and have strange hobbies, so this is believable), and used it to get fingerprints belonging to the mailman, who she suspects of murder. And she also secretly placed a tape recorder in a spot that people are known to come to to gossip. She even enlisted the help of a little kid, who's 4, to provide a distraction for the mailman while she checked something out.
And she's 8.
But instead of being portrayed as some sort of super-intelligent Kid Hero like you often see in silly kid stories, she's instead portrayed as not knowing exactly what she's doing. For one, the conversation she secretly recorded - and plays back during a Christmas party (not realizing the speakers were hooked up to where people were throwing the party, and they'd hear the entire conversation) - only recorded rude gossip about neighbors, not murder. And of course, no-one believes her about the murder she's investigating - an elderly man with known health problems who died of his problems, but that she believes was killed.
So far I'm not that far into the book, but it's pretty entertaining. It's fun seeing the Kid Detective deconstructed in such a way that we're shown what might actually if a Kid Detective tried their investigations for real - in other words, chaos ensues, and the Kid Detective looks dumb to everyone else. The book is written closer to YA level, and the main character is really her 13-year-old brother, so rather than see a Kid Detective's exciting investigations, it's more like we're seeing a kid's goofy younger sister's overactive imagination getting her into trouble.
On the other hand, the Stanley books are mysteries, so I imagine a real adventure will show up pretty soon! The back of the book mentions dognappers, and Janie has turned her attention from murder to that, so maybe we'll instead end up with a Reconstructed Kid Detective story in the long run.
edited 27th Oct '10 8:18:47 AM by BonsaiForest
I've read quite a few of Snyder's books, but don't think I've read the Stanley series.
I actually started the page for the ColSec Trilogy, although that's arguably more YA.
And I'm working on acquiring the Prydain Chronicles again.
^ I really liked The Carpet People and The Wee Free Men. I should include them on my list of Pratchett books to reread.
edited 29th Oct '10 7:05:44 PM by Jace
Biophilic bookworm by day, gentleman adventurer by night.Don't forget his other Tiffany Aching books: A Hat Full Of Sky (which was the first Discworld book I ever read) and Wintersmith. They're excellent.
Today I got from the library two (YA, but the young side of YA) books - And Both Were Young, by Madeleine L'Engle, whose Time Quartet books influenced my childhood immensely, and Enola Holmes and the Case of the Missing Marquess, because I discovered Enola Holmes recently and she is terrific - her mysteries are suspenseful and tightly written, the main character is compelling and fun, and I love the research and worldbuilding done for Victorian London. I haven't read either of these before and I'm looking forward to it.
I took out Wintersmith, but haven't read it yet. Haven't read the other one either.
Biophilic bookworm by day, gentleman adventurer by night.I love Bunnicula, and liked the first six Harry Potter books. The Chronicles Of Narnia are something I recently revisited (in my early thirties) as well, and decided that I still enjoy them.
I liked the movie, so I'm going to look into buying some Percy Jackson books once my current book load is lighter and I can devote some actual time to them.
No breasts/scrotum on that last post. Shit just got real. -Bobby GOh man, out of the blue I just remembered this really fun YA series I read in high school or middle school that I'd forgotten all about.
It's called Not Quite Human. Anyone hear of it?
Anyway, it's about an android who goes to middle school, as his creator/"dad" is naturally into robotics. He of course has to deal with everything from peer pressure to a bully to a girl who has a crush on him, while doing various quirky things that make it obvious that he's a robot. This isn't one of those "robots with human emotions" stories, either. The main character, Chip, really is a robot acting only on programming, which results in him doing weird stuff from time to time, giving literal answers to questions, or very strange answers.
—>Teacher: "Looks like you have a lot of friends, Chip."
—>Chip: "Thanks. My dad wants me to have a lot of friends."
—>Becky (his real life human "sister"): "So does your sister. Stop talking about what your dad wants you to do. It makes you not look independent."
Chip also has pre-programmed "hobbies" as well, and is a member of a band. So he has a social life, which is pretty impressive for not being a living thing. He is able to fit into the band and perform, and he is able to deal with the romantic affections of Erin, the girl who won't stop chasing him.
Chip has a built-in video camera that records the events of the entire day so his creator can watch it and find out what's going on at school, and so on.
But in addition to being a light-hearted Slice of Life story about a middle school robot, it's also, for some reason, a mystery series. Each book has some mystery going on, whether it's a local teenager who's hacking bank accounts, or some criminal who's trying to hack Chip and get him to go on a crime spree, or a gang of hoods sabotaging the band's performance, or something else, there's always some mystery going on that needs to be solved by Becky, with her human reasoning, and Chip, with his robot-like functions and computer-like "brain".
There's also a good amount of humor. Chip's literalness results in trouble a fair number of times. In math class, with a teacher who has a reputation for being very hard, a classmate whispers under their breath that this teacher stays up late thinking of hard problems to torture the class with. So when Chip solves one easily, he asks her, in all sincerity, "how late did you stay up, thinking of hard problems to torture us with?"
And his being a robot hurts when it comes to tasks he's unfamiliar with. After accidentally knocking down cans in a food store that were stacked in a pyramid shape, he's made to stack them again as punishment, but is unable to perform this simple task because he wasn't programmed to think in those terms, so he just stacks them in such a way that they keep falling down, until the store owner gives up in frustration.
It's pretty easy for me to see what I liked about this series. It's got lots of fun Slice of Life moments (always a big plus), mystery elements without being too mystery-oriented (it's not mysteries I enjoy so much as suspense), a clever portrayal of an interesting concept (robot goes to middle school), and the books are fast-paced and pretty light in tone. No angst, no realistic drama, and they're PG in content.
Yeah, sci-fi meets Slice of Life meets mystery with comedy. A pretty neat mixture, and one that worked really well. Am I the only one who's heard of this series? *orders it from Amazon right away*
edited 1st Nov '10 10:15:28 PM by BonsaiForest
Freezair and Bonsai Forest, many thanks for the kind words. I'm not entirely the shipping would be prohibitive if you did order them from Wiley Australia - they're probably glad to get rid of them!
As for the hovercraft - three of the books are about a group of eccentric schoolkids who zip around the world and through time in a steam-powered hovercraft (called SPASM!) and in the process (in theory) teach their young reader about geography, the exploration of the world in reconnaissance times and conservation- I guess they have a whole new genre, "steampunk infotainment!"
^Those sounds like a pretty entertaining books. Especially compared to some of the books and story collections written for my school program that I had to read. Are the books meant purely for the reading class and extend into history and geography, or are they for those classes? Either way, that seems like a good way to get the kids interested in all three of those subjects.
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You know, as long as the storytelling is fun, the learning aspect shouldn't annoy the audience too much. :P Was that your goal? Do the heroes go on exciting adventures, or did the publisher insist on "okay, hurry up and get to the learning"? I like the idea. It would have been cool if the books in my school had those kinds of stories in them.
edited 2nd Nov '10 10:27:33 AM by BonsaiForest
"Steampunk infotainment!" Sounds like something that would be right at home on right after Histeria.
"Proto-Indo-European makes the damnedest words related. It's great. It's the Kevin Bacon of etymology." ~MadrugadaHeh, the adventurous counterpoint to Histeria. Between a silly cartoon about history, and an adventure cartoon about history, personally I'd take the adventure one. (I never did like Histeria, but my little brother did.)
Heck, isn't that how Histeria kinda got made?
"You have to make something educational!"
"Okay, fine... *grumble grumble* Let's see, what do I actually LIKE? Maybe if I throw in the educational stuff in with the comedy, it'll still count."
Alan23, was it a tough balancing act between getting your storytelling in and the educational elements, or did it come natural to seamlessly blend them together? I'm really curious about your books and what they're like. Is the "INFO" bigger than the "TAINMENT", or vice versa? :P
edited 2nd Nov '10 3:58:42 PM by BonsaiForest
Re: Not Quite Human: The school bully, or at least school roughneck, is accused of stealing the MacGuffin. At one point, the phys ed teacher grabs Chip by the shoulder, and it's mentioned that Chip has to turn around fast to keep the teacher from noticing that he weighs a lot more than a human of the same size. The real thief turns out to be a kid who was pretending to be Chip's friend.
And has anyone mentioned Abarat yet?
I just scored a boxed set of the Pippi Longstocking books at the thrift store this afternoon. I'm more pleased with that than the Douglas Adams H 2 G 2 omnibus hardcover I found at the same time.
Farseer Lolotea, I remember that! I don't know which 2 books I didn't read (the first was definitely one of the ones I missed), but that was one of the ones I read. You really brought back memories there.
I ordered the whole series off Amazon and I'm waiting for them to arrive!
I'll tell you what I found strange about the series - the character of Mr. Duckworth, the gym teacher. So he suspects Chip of everything, which seems a little contrived, but does work to create an unlikeable character. Then in one book, it turns out that he secretly likes comic books, and is embarrassed about it. What the heck? At the time, I just felt that this one character was so randomly designed. The others made more sense, though the characters seem somewhat "simple" and trait-defined, now that I think about it. But hey, it's light fiction, and very enjoyable.
edited 2nd Nov '10 6:47:34 PM by BonsaiForest
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Oh yes, Abarat. I don't think that's been mentioned yet. I'm not sure exactly how I like the books. On the one hand, I'll give Barker props for unlimited creativity with his world. And the illustrations are beautiful, and I love the poems he puts in between the sections, especially the one about Day and Night.
But the second book really kind of disappointed me, especially towards the end, with the revelation of who Candy really is (which felt a bit like a cop-out, an attempt to have her be the Princess reincarnated, but not bring up debates of 'does an unborn child have a soul'?). Plus, the sheer number of people dying got on my nerves.
But you know what kid's book of Barker's I do love? The Thief Of Always. I'd love to write an essay comparing that to Coraline.
Darker and Edgier gone wrong? Yeah, having an important character, or even a minor one, die is one way to shock the readers and change the story significantly. But having it happen a lot, as if the grim reaper is playing with a roulette wheel with character names on it, can feel excessive and arbitrary.
I know I saw at least one series, or some show, where I felt characters died too much, but I can't remember what.
Did Abarat kill off mostly its major characters, or no-name characters for shock value? Did the killing of characters considerably change the plot from the point on at which it'd happened?
edited 2nd Nov '10 9:04:01 PM by BonsaiForest

Even if one student recommended your book to the 120+ demographic, I think it's awesome that your books are used as study material, and even more awesome that one was used as a project! Making hovercraft models and interviewing the characters? How long and complex are your books? Also, what was the educational context for having a story with a hovercraft?
About your experience on how you landed the writing job, we have an expression for that in America: "It's not what you know, it's who you know." I've heard that expression many times, and even seen it applied to the job market! The closest trope we have for it is Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!, which is more or less about it happening in fiction. (Plenty of real life examples, such as Eragon, could afford to be added, as it only has one!)
edited 25th Oct '10 12:34:06 PM by BonsaiForest