Here you go, folks — another review written by my savvy 16-year-old sidekick, Katrina Van Amsterdam.

Deadline
by Chris Crutcher (Harper Collins/Greenwillow, September 2007)

Deadlines aren’t just for tedious homework assignments and stressful work projects. There is a deadline that, at some time or another, we all face: death. Some live in fear of that deadline for their whole lives, while other learn to appreciate life while they are living. In Chris Crutcher’s Deadline, Ben Wolf is told that he has a fatal case of leukemia and opts not to tell anyone, on the grounds that he wants his last year to be a “normal” year. Through football season, a quest to show up a bigoted history teacher, and some surprising new relationships, Ben lives his last year as any old 18-year-old with a terminal disease.

Crutcher touches on weightier issues in this novel – child molestation, to name a significant one. But, as always, he adds an element of athletics (football, in this case) for those of his readers who are avid sports fans. For the reader who doesn’t fancy football, have no fear – Crutcher makes his discussion of the sport very reader-friendly!

Deadline is one of the best books I’ve read in quite some time. It makes you laugh; it makes you cry; and it touches you in a place where most “teen fiction” novels fall short. If nothing else, you will come away with an invaluable lesson: to live life as if you have all the time in the world, while realizing that you might only have one day left.

For your entertainment, I thought I’d alert you to the fact that the oh-so-talented illustrator (and soon-to-be author!) Noah Z. Jones has recently added a new "Almost Naked Animal" to his wacky "Almost Naked Animals" website. They are worth checking out, as is Noah’s star. See it there, rapidly rising? Go, Noah, go!

Ah, the things you’ll find on the web these days — everything from almost naked animals to almost corrupted horses.

P.S. Noah and his wife are expecting a baby in September, but they’re keeping their name choices top secret until the little guy’s/gal’s arrival. My best friend’s perfect two year-old son is named Silas. My new 10 year-old neighbor is named Milo. Kristen McLean’s perfect little sweetpea is Lola. Heard any other good names lately? I am personally NOT shopping around for one (would hate for those rumors to circulate…), but if YOU are, I recommend taking a peek at The Baby Name Wizard by Laura Wattenberg. Unlike most baby books, this one’s not about the meanings of names so much as their trends. Beside each name is a little popularity chart, enabling you to see which names had their heyday in a previous decade, which names are on their way out, and which names have never been a blip on anyone’s radar. You’ll also find a description of each name’s personality or historical significance, suggestions for siblings’ names, and colorful name categories like "Porch Sitters" (e.g. Agnes, Luetta, Floyd, and Norbert) and "Surfer Sixties" (e.g. Dionne, Randi, Kurt, and Vince).

Continuing the "marriage" theme I began earlier in the week, I’d like to share the fact that Tuesday was the 69th wedding anniversary of my grandparents, Olin and Evelyn Morris. My grandfather’s 92nd birthday is two weeks away, my grandmother will turn 91 in August and, yes, you read that right — they’ve been married for a whopping 69 years. Today I found myself thinking about the incredible range of books they must’ve seen and read and loved in that time. Sitting down to type this blog entry, I’m also thinking about how much more accessible reading material (in forms both actual and "virtual") is to all of us today than it was in 1938 when my grandparents tied the knot.

Earlier I called my grandparents at their home in Lincoln, Nebraska to talk to them about these things and ask if there was one book that stood out in their minds as having been important or meaningful to them at some point during their 69 years of marriage (and counting). My grandfather, as would probably be true for most Americans of his generation, named the Bible, citing the importance of church events in their lives throughout the years and their continued volunteer work today with their local Presbyterian church.

My grandmother, a voracious reader, former teacher and one-time school librarian, named Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. She said she read it soon after they were married (it was published in 1936 and won the Pulitzer in 1937). "Oh, I just wept over it and cried over it!" When I asked if my grandfather reminded her, at the time, of Rhett Butler, she laughed and sighed, saying, "I think he did a little bit. Your grandfather is quite poetic, and he can be rather romantic too!"

By observation I would say that the books playing second to the Bible in my grandfather’s life have, without doubt, been the complete works of Louis L’Amour, Max Brand and Zane Grey. I’ve rarely seen him without a yellowed, dog-eared Western within arm’s reach — usually one he’s reading for the umpteenth time. My grandmother’s reading tastes are harder to classify, as she’s devoured books of every conceivable fact and fiction over the years, paying particular attention to the books sent to her by (who else?) her loving grandchildren.

What literary gifts does one send to their nonagenarian grandparents? Because they’ve lived some of the same histories he writes about so eloquently, I’ve made Richard Peck fans out of mine, sending them books like A Long Way from Chicago, The Teacher’s Funeral, and recently a signed copy of Peck’s newest book, On the Wings of Heroes, which my grandfather (a WWII veteran) couldn’t help but appreciate. Patricia MacLachlan’s Sarah, Plain and Tall stroke a note with them when I first sent it, several years ago. And being bird-lovers, they both fell in love with one my non-fiction favorites, The Race to Save the Lord God Bird by Phillip Hoose. It seemed to excite them almost as much as the annual arrival of the Sandhill Cranes.

Of all the books I’ve ever sent them, though, the one my grandmother mentions the most often is one called Leaning into the Wind: Women Write from the Heart of the West edited by Nancy Curtis, Gaydell Collier, and Linda M. Hasselstrom. The beautiful piece by Rose Kremers that begins this anthology also comes to mind for me a lot, specifically in thinking about the hardships my grandparents have managed to endure in their 90+ years — years that weren’t always kind, against a landscape (physical and political) that wasn’t always hospitable. Rose concludes her two rich paragraphs about pain with an image of perseverence. Using the metaphor of roots struggling to find a hold in hardsod, she says it’s "a simple thing after all, to anchor, to stay. It just takes a leaning into the wind."

Last week I posted my rather "serious" thoughts on BEA. This week I thought I’d post a completely ridiculous BEA-related musing: What if my friend Tim had decided to host his Saturday wedding at the Javits Center? Sure, his forthcoming book might be about the Black Death, which hardly seems like a wedding-appropriate theme, but I think a BEA wedding would nevertheless have boosted his book sales. Complete absurdity = publicity = sales, no?

Here’s what I’m picturing:

The wedding venue: Either the Boyds Mills Press booth, as Front Street is Tim’s publisher, or (to accommodate a larger crowd) one of those seating areas where you can watch cooking demonstrations and the like. In either case, finding an aisle would certainly not have been a problem.

The guest attire: Wedding-themed badge holders

The wedding party: Costumed characters, which are never in short supply at BEA

The music: Compliments of Putamayo, which is always present at the show and has a grand reputation for partnering well with booksellers

The reading: Publishers could have competed to have their ARCs featured during this portion of the service.

The officiator: I think David McCullough might have made the best choice out of this year’s BEA attendees, but Stephen Colbert would also have been memorable in this role… Any other nominees?

The recessional: Did anyone give out promotional rice packets this year? Maybe birdseed? Those might be the only two promo items I didn’t see. Surely SOMEONE did bubble stuff.

The reception: Take your pick of any number of publisher parties that could easily have accommodated our crowd of wedding-watchers. A Spiderwick reception might have been cool. Then again, Holiday House sounds like an appropriate place for a wedding reception.

The favors: All the swag your commemorative totebags could carry.

The vehicle whisking the bride and groom away: the Harry Potter Knight Bus, naturally.

What pieces of the BEA wedding puzzle am I missing? You tell me. (No, really, tell me. I’m getting a genuine laugh out of this, which will continue until someone decides this is actually a great publicity stunt and DOES get married at BEA, at which point I will cry for ever having shared this ridiculous idea!!)

Looking for a chuckle or, better still, a guffaw? Try your darndest not to laugh at the comic that explains the origins of the Center for Cartoon Studies. I stumbled across it last week while writing my post about Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow.

If you want to zoom closer to the comic or to see it with a bit of color, visit the history page and download the pdf.

So, I tested a theory last weekend and it proved correct. Whether you spend two, three, or four days attending Book Expo the end result is the same: you go home (or to your friend’s wedding) feeling completely and utterly exhausted. End of story. The reasons you feel this way are as follows: 

1.  You stay up way too late at various author dinners/publisher parties/late-night chats over cocktails with people you see far too infrequently.

2.  Even though you’ve learned this lesson countless times you still get up outrageously early so that you can attend author breakfasts that start much too early given your late bedtime the night before.

3.  Even after you’ve made every effort to pick up as little "loot" as possible, you wind up carting FAR too many books around the trade show floor, on the unforgiving straps of FAR too many totebags.

4.  You smile at too many people, make too much small talk, and pretty much exhaust your abilities to be both charming and professional, at least at the same time.

5.  You process, think, reflect, process, think, reflect, process, think, pass out from exhaustion.

What made this BEA worth all the fatigue were not the moments and experiences I had on the trade show floor so much as the conversations I had with fellow booksellers, with authors, and with publishing folks, mostly at dinners and parties but occasionally at places where we just happened to run into one another. Outside the actual exhibit hall Gareth and I stumbled into a long, delightful conversation with Judy O’Malley of Charlesbridge Press and author/illustrator Susan L. Roth. A Bloomsbury party brought me face-to-face with new celebrity-turned-author Julianne Moore, who seemed able to make delightful conversation with everyone in the room. I talked and talked with Laura Godwin at a wonderful Holt dinner at which I also talked and talked with author/illustrator William Low and author/illustrator Peter McCarty. A Holtzbrinck dessert party afforded chances to chat with authors,  illustrators, booksellers, and publishers galore, and the ABC auction and dinner felt like a who’s who of the children’s book world, with everyone doing (what else?) lots of talking.

Perhaps I need to amend my list of fatigue-inducers above to include a #6: talking. But this year the talking part really was the bulk of the fun.

Here’s what I did NOT like about BEA this year: the almost complete inaccessibility of books in the booths of most large publishers. As I strolled the trade show floor I found it almost impossible to get a sense of most publishers’ lists, because I couldn’t even get near the f&g’s of their forthcoming picture books, if I could even find them in the first place. While, yes, the crowds of people clogging the aisles were part of the problem, I couldn’t help feeling like the booth arrangements themselves and publishers’ decisions about what to feature in those booths were the bigger culprits. Time and time again I found that the only samples available for perusal were on a low shelf behind a table crowded with people conducting business. My options were to either interrupt these busy folks or move on having seen nothing. In most cases, I wound up doing the latter, ultimately walking away with no sense of what books that publisher was happy to be promoting.

The same is mostly true when it comes to novels. While I understand why publishers aren’t carting as many galleys to the show and stacking as many in grand piles within their booths, I have to say that the loss of those stacks ultimately leaves me with a lot less information. What is so-and-so excited about this season? I have no idea, because nothing stood out for me. What midlist author are they hoping to push to the forefront? I couldn’t begin to tell you, unless they happened to be part of special featured programs, like the New Voices one organized by ABC.

This means when you ask me what the "big books" were at the show for me this year, I’ve got almost no answer for you. Unless I happen to have already purchased a publisher’s fall list or happen to have dined with a particular author, I don’t necessarily even know what "the big guys" are selling. As a buyer who meets with sales reps at the store to do my purchasing, this is not a huge problem, but it is a disappointment. More importantly, it’s a missed opportunity. Think of all those frontline booksellers and librarians and people from other publishing houses who interact with customers, with patrons, with friends who have money to burn. They don’t have the sales rep advantage, they don’t have a chance to see the books that aren’t carried by their local bookstore, and they don’t know what they’re missing. These are people who can easily influence the purchasing decisions of their stores, their libraries, their fellow book-lovers. Why have so many of the larger publishers stopped catering to them?

In my head I’ve long had a list of those publishers who excel at making even their "small" books accessible in their large booths. Candlewick’s booth is probably the most bookseller-friendly, because it’s arranged with all of the books up front, where they’re easy to browse. Any meetings in their booth take place in semi-private sections where you don’t feel you’re tripping over them. Likewise, Chronicle Books always has their titles neatly arrayed, making them easy to pull from the wall to peruse. Houghton Mifflin makes clever use of their sometimes limited space by putting their picture book f&g’s in spinner racks. Voila! Browsers in the booth can still see the list, and Houghton folks can still make use of their meeting spaces. At the bottom of my mental list are Scholastic and Random House, who, for all the great, great books they produce, almost never display the bulk of them in their booths, giving me (sadly) fewer reasons to frequent them.

I say put your books (or at least sample pages) out where people can see them. I think people are more likely to recommend and sell the books they’ve actually read than the ones they’ve just seen advertised on their promotional totebags, beach towels, and post-it notes.

After much book collecting, wedding watching, and driving in the rain I have finally returned to the land of online living and an over-loaded inbox, which was the recipient of maybe 200 e-mail messages during my six computer-free days. As I attempt to dig my way out, I will ponder the highlights of my 36-hour BEA and begin crafting my Book Expo. recap, which I'll post late tomorrow (Tuesday).

In the meantime, be sure to read the official announcement of the 2007 Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards!

Having had too little time to devote to novels the past few weeks, I've been bingeing on graphic novels — short ones. While eating a bowl of cereal Sunday morning I read Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow by James Sturm and Rich Tommaso (Hyperion, 2007). Already I'm itching for December to arrive, bringing this book with it. That's how anxious I am to put it in the hands of all customers at or over the age of 10.

Contrary to what its title might suggest, this graphic novel is not so much about Satchel Paige as it is about the miserably harsh conditions of life for blacks living under the divisive Jim Crow laws of the American South. Narrating the story is Emmet Wilson, a fictional Alabama sharecropper who once scored a run against the legendary pitcher of the Negro Leagues. Permanently benched due to injury, he now picks cotton under the watchful eye of two vindictive white landowners who would just as soon root for a team called the "Yankees" as show any kindness toward him and his son. Much of the plot hinges on the tension that builds along the racial divide in Emmet's town, but its black and white residents do share one thing in common: an awestruck regard for the pitching talents of Satchel Paige. It's his eventual appearance on their hometown field that brings this story to a heady climax and a powerful conclusion.

Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow is the second book Hyperion has published in collaboration with the Center for Cartoon Studies. Their first joint venture, Houdini, The Handcuff King by Jason Lutes and Nick Bertozzi, was an entertaining and interesting look at one particular stunt in the life of the world's most famous escapologist. I enjoyed Houdini, but not half as much as Satchel Paige. Sturm and Tomasso's collaboration is the real thing: a compelling narrative, a strong voice, solid illustrations, and the perfect pacing to move the story along but keep you, in places, on the edge of your seat. At less than 100 pages, it's a short read, but in the time it'll take you to complete it you'll feel the range and strength of emotions it would take most prose writers twice as long to convey. The last four pages of the book offer detailed notes on what's contained in the story's panels, helping to account for some of the real-world events that informed this story's fictional one.

I love this book. I love its deeply human message and I love the window on American history that Sturm and Tommaso are opening for their readers. Through it we see just how much the sport of baseball and one of its stars meant to a generation of blacks who were barely allowed to play the game of life, let alone win at it.

I haven’t had much time to wrap my brain around the fact that BEA is just a few days away, in part because I’m too busy at work to give it much thought, and in part because I’m going to be missing much of it! Early Saturday morning I’ll be zipping off to Pennsylvania to watch one of my oldest and closest friends, Timothy Decker, tie the knot with his beloved fiancee Mandy.

Tim and Mandy live in a tiny apartment, so they registered for almost nothing, gift-wise. Why ask for gifts when you don’t have anywhere to put them? The trouble is, that leaves guests and loving friends like me all the more stymied.

I imagine this same situation must sometimes confront the loved ones of those of us in the book business. For most readers a book makes a wonderful gift, but for those of us overburdened with reading material, a gifted book sometimes makes a guilt-laden burden. (My secret, pained thought on such occasions: "How many years will it take before I’ll find the time to read this one?") Of course, there are very cool gifts to give book hoarders other than books, but these are sometimes harder to come by and don’t always seem like the perfect fit.

So, here’s the question: What do you give to the people who mean the most to you but need the least from you (at least in terms of tangible "stuff," e.g. reading material)? And here’s my answer: You give stuff to someone else on their behalf.

For a few years now I’ve been making donations to Heifer International on behalf of friends and family members for Christmas and birthdays. In each case they’ve been thrilled and moved to learn they’d given a needy family a flock of chicks, a flock of ducks, a hive of honeybees, or a trio of rabbits. Thinking another charity’s offerings might have a wedding gift more perfectly suited to Tim and Mandy, though, I went shopping for them at Changing the Present, a website that partners with many, many nonprofits to offer one-stop-shopping for all your intangible gift-giving needs. Below are a few examples from their website of reading-related gifts that would make meaningful offerings for those of us with inadequate shelf space. 

Two caveats: 1.) I still think books make an EXCELLENT gift for almost anyone, and I’d be a terrible bookseller if I didn’t think/say so. 2.) Changing the Present’s website does not yet include financial information on these groups, so if you’re concerned about the channeling of your contributions, do some digging. Each nonprofit name below includes a direct link to their website, to help you in that quest.

For $25, you can help CEC ArtsLink build an art library in Russian or Central Asia in your friend’s name.

Your politically active aunt will love that you gave $100 on her behalf, to help PEN American Center free jailed writers or inspire underserved, "aliterate" New York City high school students.

Even if they haven’t yet been awarded a fellowship to the MacDowell Colony, your writer friends may appreciate your paying $10 to cover lunch for an artist-in-residence or $100 to give someone at MacDowell "The Gift of Time." (Oh for someone to give ME a gift of that nature!)

For $50 you can make a book accessible to someone with print disabilities, through the work of Benetech.

For as little as $5 you can give two new books to a needy child by way of First Book, who is also happy to have you fill a child’s bookshelf ($60) or "stock the homes of an entire classroom of children in need" ($720).

Anyone who’s fallen in love with Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible will think it’s the perfect gift — your donating $45 to Women for Women International who’ll use those funds to teach a woman in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to read.

For $75 you can pay a Nepalese librarian’s salary for one month, supporting the work of Read Global and thanking your lucky stars $75 isn’t a librarian’s monthly salary here.

Here’s one more suggestion: Donating $250 will allow Room to Read to educate a girl for one year. They’ll pay her school fees and provide her with a bicycle, a school uniform, a backpack, a daily lunch, a medical exam, immunizations, and mentoring from a Room to Read staff member.

Imagine giving your friend (and a girl somewhere in the world) all that, without taking up an inch of space in their bookcase.

Mark Peter Hughes shared some uber-cool news with the Association of Booksellers for Children's list-serv today, and I am thrilled to be passing that news along!

First let me say that Mark has (as of March 30th) quit his job to write full time. As if that wasn't brave enough, he is currently planning a seven-week road trip with this family to travel across the country visiting bookstores (mostly independents) and promote his most recent novel, Lemonade Mouth, which I've mentioned previously. Here is where we come to the biggest piece of news: National Public Radio has asked Mark to record "audio postcards" during his road trip — "audio postcards" that will be broadcast to the 12 million regular listeners of All Things Considered!!  Wow, wow, wow!  How fantastic is that?!

I know, I know… We could all die from envy on this one, but let me also add this little bit: Mark didn't have connections at NPR who scored this gig on his behalf. Thinking he had an idea that might work well for their SoundClips series, he went to the NPR website, found a "How You Can Participate" phone number, then pitched his idea to their answering machine. A producer called him on his last day of work (!) to hear more. He ultimately concluded that Mark's idea would be better as a series of clips rather than a one-off broadcast, so Mark's proposal and the subsequent sample recording he sent along were passed up through the ranks. Fast forward a bit and… poof! Mark is suddenly recording a series of "audio-postcards" that began with one wildly optimistic phone call.

Soon we will all be listening to entertaining bits of Mark's adventures with his wife, three kids, a rusty old van, and a whole lotta bookstores! Will Mark and his entourage be careening through your neighborhood? Check out the tentative path of his cross-country journey to find out, then e-mail him to tell him the name of your favorite independent bookstore. With any luck he might be able to include them on his tour.