I read You're Welcome, Universe

 This week's novel is You're Welcome, Universe, contemporary YA by Whitney Gardner.

Julia finds a slur about her best friend written on the school wall, and she covers it up with a graffiti mural.  When her best friend snitches, Julia gets kicked out of Kingston School for the Deaf and has to go to a mainstream school, where she is the only Deaf kid.  She tries to get through it by putting up street art by her new school, but soon she finds that someone is adding to her murals, showing her up.

I loved this book.  It's just great.

I liked how being Deaf was a fundamental part of Julia's character.  She talks about how useless music is, and she points out all the micro-aggressions she faces.  Dialogue has words blanked out when she's not able to read people's lips.  She critiques people's Sign Language grammar, and her own written English grammar is so bad/she doesn't try in English class that they put her in an ESL class.  I felt like I was learning something, and after looking at some reviews, it seems to be an accurate portrayal of being Deaf.

At the same time, I felt like I was learning just as much about street art.  She talks about making and using stencils, about picking colors, about picking a place to put up a mural and how she moves quickly and unnoticed.  Her terminology and slang usage make her sound just as much of an expert on art as she is on being Deaf.  And I think that's where the real magic of this book is.  It's not educating me about deafness, it's showing me a person who is an expert in many things that I don't know enough about.  I was excited to read about all the parts of her personality, and in that way her deafness wasn't romanticized, exploitative or turned into a very special episode.

Add to it that Julia was not a model minority.  She held grudges and didn't forgive easily.  She's rude because she worries about making friends.  She's a really well rounded character, and it was fun to spend time with her, even when she was being unreasonable.

I read Save the Date

This week's novel is Save the Date, Contemporary YA by Morgan Matson.

Charlie's sister is getting married this weekend, and all four of Charlie's siblings will be home for the event, which is taking place in the backyard of their childhood home before their parents sell it.  Meanwhile, Charlie's mom's wildly popular and long running comic strip, which focuses on their family is coming to an end the same weekend, and they're all going to be on Good Morning America the day after the wedding.  Also meanwhile, it turns out the wedding planner embezzled a lot of money, messed up reservations, and then skipped town, so everything is a mess.  Charlie is going to do her darnedest to fix it all and give the family the best weekend ever.

I found this book frustratingly slow.  In a book full of wedding high jinks and family drama explosions, it should not have dragged.

But lets focus on the positive: this had fantastic dialogue.  The family is huge, and add to that when fiances and girlfriends and the substitute wedding planner and neighbors and extended family wander in.  Everyone's voice is distinctive, which is impressive with such a large cast, and helps the crowd scenes make sense.  Parts are honestly funny.  One of the brothers brings a girlfriend without telling anyone that he was going to, and every time she enters the conversation, it throws off the beat that the rest of the family has established.  This means that Matson was able to set up a rhythm to her dialogue, and break it apart with a pin-pointed strike.  I was also impressed with one brother who shouts random jokes in the middle of conversations, and yet the rest of the family keeps talking around them.  His interruptions did not disturb the flow, and I was able to follow along.

Very cool.  Really well done.

I read Emergency Contact

This week's novel is Emergency Contact, Contemporary YA by Mary H.K. Choi.

Penny starts college at UT Austin, eager to get away from her over-excited mom.  Sam is a baker at a coffee house, who is not handling his girlfriend dumping him, and is especially not handling it when she announces that she's pregnant.  When he has a panic attack on the street, Penny--an expert on panic attacks--helps him home.  She demands text updates about how he's doing, and calls herself his emergency contact.  They start a friendship via text that they both desperately need.

I read this one because it's set in Austin.  Not only do I love to see things that acknowledge Austin, but I'm writing a novel set in Austin and I like to see how other people do it.  I was pleased with the way it captured parts of the city.  Aside from name dropping sometimes, there are paragraphs that work to give a sense of the setting.  They're generally short and scattered chapters apart, and what I found interesting was that instead of relying on description, they dealt more with how the characters felt.

"That fateful morning she'd told him she wanted to go to the breakfast taco spot before work.  The not-that-good spot on Manor that charged extra for pico de gallo."

I don't know exactly which place they're talking about, but at the same time I do.  Choi gets it.  Some facts are wrong, showing the author's age and the part of town in which she grew up, but it was more accurate than not.

This brings me to the main aspect of the book that stood out for me.  The characters describe people they meet and places they go and food they eat in unflattering terms.  They're vivid and stick with you.  And at the same time, they tell so much about the POV characters who are describing them.  These characters find the worst in things, and you can tell that from the way they describe their tortilla chips.

I Read Wild Beauty

Several weeks ago, I read Wild Beauty, YA fantasy by Anna-Marie McLemore.

For generations, the Nomeolvides girls (5 girls in each generation) have tended the garden of La Pradera with their magical abilities to grow flowers.  The Nomeolvides are cursed to never leave La Pradera and to have everyone they love vanish.  When all five girls realize they're in love with the same girl, they know that their love will kill her, and they offer sacrifices of beloved objects to La Pradera, praying for her safety.  In return, La Pradera returns a mysterious boy to them from the dirt, a boy with no memory of where he came from.

McLemore's writing is so rich, dark dark chocolate, that I had to read slow to take it all in and read only in small bites.  She works marvelous metaphors, that make you stop and appreciate them.

I've heard it explained that the difference between "literary" fiction and "mainstream" fiction is that mainstream fiction focuses on story so the methods of telling that story become invisible and you can forget that you're reading, while literary fiction wants you to notice what it's doing.  Literary fiction presents its structures and uses of language and says, "Look at this and marvel!"  So I think it's interesting that this book has easily accessible characters and plot, which would clip right along like any other YA novel if the language wasn't presented the way it is.  It's a really good way to have literary YA.

New Year!

It's a new year, which is a time for reflection and making goals.  I thought I'd share some of my reflections and goals with you.

• I did not meet my Goodreads goal this year.  I've decided that this is because my goal is too high.  Reading a book a week makes it hard to read longer books.  It also makes it hard when I'm bouncing off a book or getting stuck on one.  Sometimes I feel as if I have to finish it and it's painful.  Sometimes it feels as though if I'm not going to finish it on time for a weekly blog post, what's the point?  So I'm changing my goals this year to reading 30 books, and writing a blog post every week.  I can write about about what I've learned or what I'm thinking about.
• Season 4 is written except for some tweaking.  I plan to record next week or the week after, and start putting episodes up by the end of January.  Season 4 is a little different.  I wanted to tell three longer stories, so I had each of them as four episodes, then I rotated through: story A for epsides1, story B for episode 2, story C for episode 3, and story A for episode 4.  This was a bad idea, because listeners would have to wait 3 weeks for each story to continue.  Also, at the beginning, there wasn't enough evidence that the story would come back, so the episodes just felt unfinished and lacking.  So I rearranged, and season 4 will only have three episodes.  Each episode will be about four times as long as usual, but still, the season will probably feel short.
• Season 5 will go back to basics with monsters of the week. 
• My Firebird novel is finally looking readable after this last edit, and after the current edit, it's looking like it'll be a good book.  I'm hoping to have this edit done by the end of the month, then I need to write the end and some some additional sections that turned up lacking when I started editing.  The writing will be next month, and I hope to have it ready for first readers by the end of February.
• I also want to apply for a scholarship to a writing conference, which is due mid January.  Last year, I answered "Why I want to attend the conference" with an essay about how I was a time traveler and me attending the conference might save humanity.  Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, I didn't win.  This year, I'm planning something equally silly, and I'll share it with you when I hear the results.  I'm hoping it'll become a tradition: I send a weird story in hopes they let me go to a conference for free, or at least someone finds it entertaining.