Sweethearts by Sara Zarr

Hello all!  Just a quick reminder that YA Cafe summer book club will be continuing on August 26th, when we’ll discuss Sweethearts by Sara Zarr.  As always, feel free to post your thoughts on your own blog and share a link in the comments, or just use the comments to tell us what you think!

Starting in the fall, we’ll be back on our regular schedule of YA Cafe posts every Friday and we’ll have some fun new things up our sleeves.  Hope you all are having a superiffic summer and enjoy these last few weeks.  Can you believe we’re almost halfway through August?  Where did the summer go?  Seriously, I want a do-over.

Keep reading, keep writing and keep being awesome!

Welcome Back to YA Cafe, where book lovers can gather and chat about teen literature. I’m your barista, along with Ghenet from All About Them Words.

Each Friday we pick from a menu of topics and share our thoughts on our respective blogs. We’ve also got plans brewing for interviews, events and even some exciting giveaways, so stay tuned! Join the discussion by responding in the comments, on your own blogs or on twitter using the hash tag #yacafe.

You know when you’re reading a book, and you’re about three chapters in, and all you can think is “where is the author going with this?”

Then you get this sneaking suspicion that this author knows what she’s doing–maybe because you’ve read previous books, or maybe because you want to give her the benefit of the doubt. It doesn’t really matter why you keep reading. All that matters is that you’re willing to trust the author and go along for the ride.

And you know that feeling you get when you reach the final chapters of that same book and the author managed to pull off what you thought was impossible and the ending totally delivers?

That was exactly how I felt when I read Carolyn Mackler’s Tangled. Having read all of her previous books I was excited… but also slightly terrified… to read this book. This is a new approach for her, juggling four different point of view characters (two of them are boys!), and telling a story in short spurts rather than one long narrative that spans the entire novel.

I was worried about a lot of things. Like what if it wasn’t really one story? What if it turned out to be four loosely-connected novellas? Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with novellas, but if I’m sitting down to read a novel, I have certain expectations. Like, I need an overarching narrative, however loose that narrative may be. And I want to see the characters grow and change throughout the book. How on earth was Mackler going to pull this off if she was jumping from one character to another and if each character’s story takes place in a different time/place than the other stories?

When I read Jena’s story, my apprehensions grew exponentially. Jena’s character is an archetype we’ve seen in Mackler’s work before (in particular, the protagonists in her first 3 books all have certain similarities to Jena). But the thing that always made Mackler’s depiction of this archetype satisfying in her other books is that, in the end, the smart-but-not-very-popular girl who’s insecure about her looks always seems to learn to accept herself as she is. It’s a message of empowerment that I always looked forward to in Mackler’s work. Needless to say, by the end of Jena’s section of Tangled I was devastated. It felt like the message was: life sucks, and it keeps on sucking.

With each subsequent section of the book, I grew more relieved. At first, I was worried that we would be getting a “grass is always greener” moral and that the point of the book was just to show that even so-called popular kids have problems. But I should have known that Mackler wouldn’t settle for an answer that easy. In the end, this book isn’t just about seeing the other side of a situation or understanding how the other person feels. Really, this book is about reaching out to that other person.

The structure of the book perplexed me at first. We see a lot of “before” and “after” moments with these characters, but we rarely see the actual change. Most of the time, the moment of transformation happens “offstage” between sections and we only get hints of it later on in the novel. Then it occurred to me that this book really isn’t about change. The fact that these characters will change is a given, but what truly matters is how these characters help to transform one another.

It takes a lot of guts to write a book like this, where you have to hope that your readers will trust you to know what you’re doing.  Mackler had gotten really good at writing the smart-but-not-very-popular heroine and suddenly she comes up with Tangled which turns all her previous books on their heads.  Not many authors are willing to break away from their tried-and-true styles to try something new, but Mackler definitely did that here.  And suffice to say, she did so beautifully.

Tangled is an interesting departure for Mackler. While her previous books have mostly focused on one protagonist’s path to self-discovery and acceptence, this book emphasizes the importance of connection with others. In the end, I had nothing to worry about, but worrying actually made me enjoy the book all the more.  I became invested in wanting to see how Mackler was going to pull this off, how she was going to redeem some seemingly un-redeemable  characters.  But she did.

It’s like that car insurance commercial: I should have known all along that I was “in good hands.”

Want to read more about Tangled: check out Ghenet’s response at All About Them Words.  Then share your thoughts with us in the comments or on your own blog.  (Don’t forget to leave a link in the comments so we can check it out!)

Today Ghenet and I wanted to share some discussion points with you for our Book Club discussion this Friday.  We’ll be discussing Tangled by Carolyn Mackler, a fascinating book on so many different levels.  Feel free to answer or not answer any of these questions in the discussion.  Also, if you want more questions to guide your reading or response, check out Carolyn Mackler’s website where she provides a great download of discussion points for Tangled.

Note: These questions may contain spoilers!

Discussion Questions for Tangled

1. In this book, we have four different points of view (POV), spread over four different time periods and several different settings.  Did you like the four POV structure and the jumping across time and place.  Was it successful?
2. The author doesn’t show us complete character arcs for all of the characters but we know through hints in the text that the characters do all grow and change.  Was this technique satisfying to you?  Were you frustrated by not seeing the full character development for each character?  Or did you enjoy putting the pieces of the puzzle together yourself?
3. Who was your favorite of the four main characters?  Why?
4. When we were brainstorming questions for this discussion, both Ghenet and I expressed surprise that the story didn’t all take place at the Caribbean resort.  This blurb makes it seem as though the Caribbean resort is the central setting, but as we all know from reading, this is actually not the case.  What was your response when you realized the story didn’t all take place in the same setting?  Were you surprised?
5. How does each of the characters redeem him or herself at the end of the novel?  Did you find yourself changing your opinion of certain characters as the story developed?

Don’t forget, this Friday we do the Book Club post.  Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments either here or at Ghenet’s blog.  Or post a link to your own blog if you prefer to do a whole post!  Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this intriguing and beautiful novel.

Today we have a fabulous guest post from Olivia Bennett, author of Who What Wear: The Allegra Biscotti Collection, just released in June 2011.  This charming book continues the adventures in fashion of Emma Rose, who is also secretly the hip new fashion designer Allegra Biscotti.  I had the pleasure of reading this book, not realizing it was actually the second one of the series.  And unlike many sequels that often lean heavily on the first book, this one holds its own as elegantly as one of Allegra’s designs.  After finishing Who What Wear (and of course, going back to read the first as well!) I knew I had to get Olivia here at the blog to share a few secrets of how to fashion a story for young readers.  For more information on Olivia or The Allegra Biscotti Collection, please visit the Who What Wear webpage.  Now without further ado, here’s Olivia Bennett with FASHIONING FICTION.

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“She wore a black cotton cardigan–on which she had replaced the plain plastic buttons with marching band uniform buttons–over a white tank top and black, gray, and white camouflage pants from the Army-Navy store and her favorite silver sneakers.”

With the above description, I introduced Emma Rose to the reader in the first book of THE ALLEGRA BISCOTTI COLLECTION. Because ALLEGRA is fiction with a fashionable twist, I felt it was very important to not only show the fashion but to use the fashion as way to describe the characters via what they chose to wear or not to wear. Emma—who later takes on the double life of fashion designer Allegra Biscotti—is creative above all else. While couture and designers matter very much to her, she thrives on the creative (and so the detail about the DIY buttons), does not aim to stand apart from her middle school peers (thus the tank and under-the-radar colored pants), yet is an individual who embraces a special sense of fun and whimsy (finally, the silver sneakers).

Description is what makes a story real, especially for middle-grade readers. It allows the reader to feel as if she is really in Allegra’s design studio or standing by the racks of gasp-worthy clothes lining Madison’s sleek offices. The question often becomes—how much detail to bring to your descriptions.  Allegra is a fashion series so, knowing my audience, all clothes were described in painstaking detail. However, my readers also have a strong desire to create and too much detail would take this almost- interactive process away from them. The key was to give them just enough and then let their imagination do the rest.  Throughout the first two book in the series, I made sure the juicy colors, the weight of the fabric, and the general shape of the garments were vividly described, but allowed by reader to add the little details—buttons, zippers, and all the trimmings.

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Thank you so much Olivia for joining us here at iggi&gabi and sharing your words of wisdom.  Now my questions to all you readers out there: What are your thoughts on giving too much detail vs. not enough?  How do YOU find that balance?  Hint: For an example of how to put this balance into action, check out Who What Wear and The Allegra Biscotti Collection.  Write on!