Alabama Author Award Winners

Part of my favorite part of professional service is getting a sneak peek of which books will be honored by association awards. In December, the Alabama Library Association approved its author awards in four categories: Adult fiction, nonfiction, teen and children's books. I spent part of a January afternoon reading the youth winners.

Every Day After by Laura Golden (2013)
2014 Alabama Author Awards Winner -- Children's
I heard Golden speak about her debut at the Southern Festival of Books, but didn't seek it out -- I think I was a little turned off my the Mirette-esque cover art. But, actually, the narrator is going into sixth grade, considerably older than the image suggests. And it's quite a read. Golden uses evocative language to bring us into the world of Lizzie Hawkins, a place replete with rough-hewn overalls and lye soap, with layers of clay caking her too-small red shoes. The plot centers around missed mortgage payments, an absent father and a mother that might as well be. Lizzie takes in mending, opens her home to boarders, does every little thing to keep the wolf from the door, The scene where Lizzie sells her heirloom locket is not for the jaded. It's Golden's well-considered sensory details which make Lizzie's story Bittersweet (like Lizzie's small town), instead of just bitter. Her language evokes some of our best Southern storytellers.

See what I mean?

Dirty Little Secret by Jennifer Echols
2014 Alabama Author Awards Winner -- Teen
What is your years of playing bluegrass with your sister for years at music festivals had become a dirty little secret, as she sheds her past to prepare for her recording label debut?  It's the summer between high school and college, and Bailey is supposed to be laying low while her sister's album is being promoted. When she finds some simpatico bandmates -- including  a hunky former football player, a Buddy Holly-lookalike who's also headed to Vanderbilt -- who appreciate her fiddle-playing, it might be time for her to rethinking abandoning her musical dreams. This one is "new adult" in that it a little sexy, but these kids are playing gigs at bars on Broadway, so perhaps it's not surprising. The Nashville geography and landmarks are well-done, too. It actually reminded me of one of my favorite books of all time, Them That Glitter and Them That Don't, by Bette Greene.

Alabama Library Association Annual Conference

This week, it will be my tremendous pleasure to catch up with my colleagues from around the state at the Alabama Library Association Annual Conference. Last year was the beach - this time it's Birmingham.

I'm especially looking forward to seeing Deborah Wiles, whose really innovative novel Countdown was awarded the organization's Alabama Author Award for children's literature. (Confession: until the awards were announced, I did not realize she was an Alabamian!)

At the Thursday morning Youth Services breakfast, I will be introducing my good friend Beck McDowell, whose book This is Not a Drill will be published by Penguin this October.

My presentation, just after the breakfast, will focus on using social media to track what's going on with YA authors and big trends in YA. It will feature a skype-in from the amazing Myra McEntire (whose Hourglass blew me away, and I keep hearing the upcoming Timepiece is even better!).

Ya'll come!

Regional favoritism

I first heard of Nanci Kincaid when I was at library school in Tuscaloosa. They held some of her papers there, one of my classmates told me, and she used to teach there, having been married to one of the assistant football coaches. I read her novels and stories immediately and loved her work so much that I reviewed her next two novels for our local paper, but Eat, Drink, and Be From Mississippi languished on my wish list for quite a while. When I finally got a copy, I was guilt-riddled for having left it so long.

The book is about siblings who leave Mississippi for California for college, but cannot abandon the folkways of home. There is heady stuff about Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, young men being maimed in Iraq, and gun violence in inner cities. Kincaid now divides her time between California and Hawaii, but it is the Mississippi scenes which sing. The passage where Truely's father watches his son's football practice from the sidelines will feel familiar to almost any Southerner. And there is the most accurate description of the concept of money in many people's lives in this part of the world, a perspective I fear few enjoy today:

"Before meeting Hastings, neither Truely nor Courtney had ever known anything at all about money or the people who had it. Like most Mississippi kids, they had dreamed dreams that had little or no significant financial dimensions to them. They thought of money the same as they did weather -- necessary in some form, unpredictable, volatile enought to wipe you off the map at any given time. Truely and Courttey has little interest in money, peoople with it, or ways to get it."

The later parts, the ones with Arnold, have some uncomfortable elements. Kincaid reminds me of Ellen Douglass in her ability to get at the complex relationships between people, particularly when clouded by race or issues of servility and civility. Truely and Courtney take in Arnold and look after him,but it's more a commentary about their empty California lives than his neediness, and it's nothing near as neat and self-congratulatory as The Help. I am still gaping at the number of otherwise reasonable adults who don't see anything wrong with that book.

I do take issue with the publisher's promotional materials, jacket copy, and the Publishers Weekly review. Arnold is NOT from Mississippi. He is from San Diego, and only knows of Yazoo City second-hand from his grandmother. Kincaid suggests a shared culture, but does not pursue it. This is California she is writing about, after all.

Willing suspension of disbelief

I heard author Ginger Rue speak at the Alabama Library Association conference last spring, where I won a copy of her first novel, Brand-New Emily, by answering literary trivia (and what an awesome way to distribute prizes was that?). Emily is about a girl who decides take the tenets of commercial marketing to heart to increase her popularity and appeal. It was a cute read, and I expected more of the same when I snagged an ARC of Rue’s latest novel at ALA Annual. It's Jump, published by Tricycle Press.

But while Emily is more middle grade, Jump is definitely YA (hooray!). Brinkley, a shallow and selfish cheerleader and star of the school play, has been ordered to therapy because of her nasty habit of tormenting other girls. As Brinkley begins “jumping” into the bodies of her classmates, -- walking a mile in their moccasins, but also bodies, clothes, and lifestyles -- she very gradually learns empathy. 

I felt for Brinkley as she was a product of benign neglect. Her parents throw money at her and give her precious little attention and no real boundaries or consequences. She recounts in one therapy session how, when she and her friend were caught sneaking out in the middle of the night, her friend was grounded for a month while Brinkley’s parents were either unconcerned or uninformed. Her parents are conveniently out of the country for the bulk of the book, so her strange disappearances (and reappearances as other people) are almost unobserved.  I think as many teens have always lived in the same way as Brinkley as have been under the scrutiny of “helicopter parents,” but it is interesting to see a portrayal of parents emotionally absent because of disinterest rather than their own addictions or mental health issues, which seems to be a recurring model in YA.

Brinkley is left in the care of her maid, Talullah, who she ultimately realizes may be the only one with her best interest at heart and, in Brinkley fashion, rewards her with a yellow Tory Burch bag.  In fine style, Rue incorporates many wonderful details about the school’s production of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, with Brinkley playing Laura, despite, as she realized having a much more talented understudy. (Speaking of literary allusion, am I the only one compelled to start reciting Houseman given the author’s name, “With rue my heart is laden…”)

Brinkley takes the transition to other people’s bodies in surprising stride, and develops a new confidant in Miranda, the rather goth theater techie who was her first “jump,” and begins to have her doubts about her best friend Bette.  There are some rather fantastical plots holes. The principal orders her therapy. Hmm, I wish they had that discretion. And the “jumping.” Is it some sort of mystical technique employed by her therapist Irirangi? I went with it. I have mentioned that I tend to like science fiction, which tends towards overly-elaborate explanations for strange happenings, to the willing suspension of disbelief needed to read much fantasy. But this reminded me more of Melvin Burgess’s terrific Lady: My Life as a Bitch, where one individual experiences inexplicable fantastical personal transformation in the midst of an otherwise realistic universe. And of course, this doesn't apply to dystopias, because I'm naturally rather pessimistic, so it all SEEMS all too realistic.

After the bare-bones ARC, I was glad to see Jump's final cover displays Brinkley as she might have experienced her “jump” to Miranda. The cover art, like the ample fashion and pop culture references, could entice girls who might be a little like Brinkley at the beginning to think a bit about their classmates’ lives, their choices and challenges.

Regional reading, post-ALLA

I sat in a on a few classes of something called Recommender Systems at Michigan's iSchool, before it became glaringly obvious, with all the talk of algorithms and databases, that predicting whether someone would like something based on the other things that they liked was a bit beyond me. And Recommender Systems cannot take into account the heady effect of being in the same room with the writer. It has almost been enough to convince me to read Lisa Scottoline, but not quite.

Right now, my place is cluttered up with books from writers I heard about at the Alabama Library Association a couple of weeks ago. I heard Susan Gregg Gilmore at the Southern Writer's Lunch. Of course her debut, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen is brilliant and incredibly sweet, Gilmore had Lee Smith as her grade-school teacher. What an advantage! Extra points for Davidson's department store as mecca for rural Southerners.

It was looking at The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove, Gilmore's forthcoming title which wil be featured in Southern Living in Amazonia, that I found Girls in Trucks by Katie Crouch. In a story too familiar to be comfortable, Tiny moves North and is unhappy. Score one for Recommender Systems.

I heard former school teacher Ginger Rue at the Young Adult Services Roud Table/Children's and School Library Division's breakfast, where I won a signed copy of Brand-New Emily a PR-laden mean girls romp. I thought it was cute, but I'm not sure it strikes the right tone. "I would never sell a diamond bracelet," one of my teens said solemnly, when I book-talked it. Emily's issues may be more typical of middle school.

The Alabama Author Awards introduced me to Martin Wilson's What They Always Tell Us, better than but similar to one of my favorites from last year, Vast Fields of Ordinary. Anyone who has ever spent time in Tuscaloosa will appreciate the fidelity of the locale.

Still on order: Ace Atkins' Wicked City. Because I have grappled with cultural issues related to Phenix City myself.