Intro to Agenting for Children's Books

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My current internship is with a literary agency whose slush pile is quite large. For those who don't know what a slush pile is, it's basically a lot of manuscripts that don't get past first base. They’re the manuscripts that need to be evaluated before getting passed on to the agent. Lately the agency has been swamped with children’s books queries, and I’ve got to decide whether to pass on or reject these manuscripts. In doing so, I've established some solid ideas about what works and doesn't for children's literature and why. 

Working as an intern in an agency has really opened up my mind to the amazing imaginations of children’s books authors. However, these imaginations are not always used to their potential to bolster a manuscript. When I find something is not right for the agency, most of the time it has to do with logical inconsistencies.

Book Review: Gone by Michael Grant

“This school was dangerous now. Scared people did scary things sometimes, even kids. Sam knew that from personal experience. Fear could be dangerous. Fear could get people hurt. And there was nothing but fear running crazy through the school.

Life in Perdido Beach had changed. Something big and terrible had happened.

Sam hoped he was not the cause.”

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If you take the meat of the classic novel Lord of the Flies, add a dose of X Men, sprinkle in a bit of Survivor, and stir in some LOST—your end result will be the literary YA awesome sauce known as Gone by Michael Grant. I guarantee it. Although Grant’s impressive series has not received as much hype as its recent competition on the dystopian battlefront, do not be deceived. This book is so epic it hurts.

A Bunch of Books and More Movies

Dear Readers,

This blog post comes to you as a sample platter rather than a full course. I’ve decided to discuss a little bit of everything, from The Hunger Games to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, instead of focusing on one story this month. It’s good to switch things up sometimes, no? But if you don’t like change, fear not. Next month I’ll be back to singular in-depth reviewing.

The Vow (2/10/12)

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Based on the true story of Kim and Krickitt Carpenter, The Vow is a love story about an amnesiac whose husband tries to remind her she’s in love with him. It stars Rachel McAdams and Channing Tatum, named Paige and Leo in the film. Paige and Leo have been married only ten weeks when they get into a car crash that leaves Paige with no memory of the past few years of her life. She doesn’t remember her husband Leo at all, much to his dismay. Instead of wanting to rekindle their relationship, she becomes interested in figuring out why she’s estranged from her family and what went wrong with her ex-fiancé. Through incredible love and dedication, Leo persists in trying to remind her of their life together. I won’t spoil the end, but it was a sweet flick. However, I didn’t find it to be anything special.

Book Review of Londoners by Craig Taylor

Londoners; The Days and Nights of London Now—As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long for It

www.bookswim.com

A first night in a city is like a blind date; rarely what you expect, and sometimes more than you bargained for. Often, as you dig deeper and explore, it becomes something wonderful and rather untamable. The more you know, the more you realize how little you know. And the courting period of getting to know a city can last a life time.  Each city has its own personality, as any travel magazine will tell you: a conglomeration of all the stories and people that made it and all the cities it was and is and will be. When author Craig Taylor expatriated from Canada to London, he tried to wrap his head around the true nature of the city.  But he realized to do so meant having a dialogue with both London and those who lay claim to it.   So he embarked on a bit of an adventure and five years and two hundred interviews later released his book in an attempt to find a definitive answer to the question: who, or what, is a Londoner?

Literary London: Looking at the Stars

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While I’m still out of the US and unable to update on events going on so close to all of you, I recently discovered over one of my weekends here that London isn’t the only city with immense praise for its authors. A cheap ticket on RyanAir got me a flight over the Irish Channel and into Dublin, Ireland to spend the day. Now, when I first arrived in Dublin, I was hardly expecting there to be anything literature related. Sure, I knew Oscar Wilde’s memorial was located there, but beyond that, I assumed that the city held nothing more. Was I sure wrong.

I got a day pass for the hop-on-hop-off buses that go around Dublin and show tourists the most interesting places the city has to offer. I figured it would get me around to see the city, as well as a few famous churches here and there, pubs, and, of course, the Guinness Brewery. It wasn’t until I looked at the map, however, that I realised that the end of the tour dropped the passengers off at the Dublin Writers’ Museum. Of course, being a WLP major, I was instantly intrigued and couldn’t wait to check out what they had to feature there. I knew Oscar Wilde for sure, which had me even more excited (fun fact of the day: he’s my all-time favourite writer), but I was curious to see who else had a spot in the museum.

Trash Talk: A Review of Lola and the Boy Next Door by Stephanie Perkins

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Last summer, I was told that I needed to read Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins. Everyone said it was an amazing YA romance, but I was skeptical. How was it so different from every other “girl meets boy, girl and boy have complications, girl and boy live happily ever after” story? But it was. There was something unique about the characters, and Perkins’ writing style made the story feel real. She’s like a quirky Sarah Dessen. Her stories are relatable and leave the reader with a happy feeling, but she also creates characters and situations that shy away from the ordinary. So I was thrilled when I found out Perkins wrote a second book called Lola and the Boy Next Door.

Lola is a stand alone book, but two of the main characters from Anna do play a big part in Lola’s plot. Anna and St. Clair work with Lola at a movie theater, but nothing from Anna’s plot is spoiled (unless you didn’t know that the girl got the boy in the end, but I assume you figured that out from reading the title). While the two novels share two of the same characters, its Lola’s turn to tell her story.

Young Adult Fiction Is Creating Communities

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In January I attended my first book signing, and it felt a little bit like a rock concert. Well, to be honest, it kind of was a little bit of a rock concert. John Green, young adult fiction author of Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns, was on tour promoting his new, and now New York Times Best Selling, novel The Fault in Our Stars. The first stop on his trip (called ‘The Tour De Nerdfighting”) was in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Since early 2007, John and his younger brother, Hank, have been regularly updating a YouTube channel called Vlogbrothers where they head a community of ‘nerdfighters’, who fight for the right to be nerdy. Though the tour was primarily to promote John’s new novel, Hank was along as well to play music from his four albums and answer general questions about their YouTube community.