This week is our last of the YA Cafe Summer Book Club sessions and we’ll be discussing Sweethearts by Sara Zarr.  I can’t believe the summer went by so fast!  Feels like just this morning we were announcing the book club idea and now we’re on our last book.  But don’t worry, Ghenet and I have lots of fun things planned for YA Cafe in the fall so stay tuned for more adventures in teen literature.

The Book Club Discussion posts will go up this Friday on both iggi&gabi and All About Them Words.  As always, you can share your thoughts in the comments or share a link and post your response on your own blog.  Also, don’t forget to join in the conversation on twitter, using the hash tag #YAcafe.  Here are a few discussion questions to get discussion going.

1. Did you find that the cover and title represented what the story was really about?  How so or how not?
2. What did you think of the story structure with the past revealed in short chunks?  Did you find it effective?
3. How did you react when you finally found out what happened to Jennifer and Cameron in the past?  Was it surprising?  Scary?
4. Secondary characters play an important role in this book.  Which secondary character resonated most with you and why?
5. How you define yourself is a central theme in this story.  Jennifer goes through great pains to redefine herself as Jenna.  Have you ever had the experience of redefining yourself as someone new?  What was it like?
6. What did you think of the ending and how it’s not a typical love story?

Can’t wait until Friday!  In the meantime, if you haven’t read Sweethearts, get your hands on a copy and read it!

This might come as a surprise for some of you, but I’m obsessed with math.  Seriously.  In college, I took Number Theory, Topology and Abstract Algebra just because it sounded like fun.  It was.  The summer between junior and senior years, I got a used Graph Theory textbook and in my free time taught myself the material, for kicks.  Oh, and to this day, my favorite T-shirt has a picture of a Klein bottle on the back with the word “mathematics” in absolute value signs underneath.  (Ha ha!  Get it… absolute mathematics?  Like the vodka ads…)

But it wasn’t always like this.  When I was in grade school, and even for most of high school, I hated math.  I couldn’t wrap my mind around arithmetic that could be just as easily solved by plugging numbers into a calculator.  It all seemed so pointless.  There was no beauty, no artistry to it.  Or so I thought.

What I didn’t know in middle school was that just because you couldn’t add and divide numbers in your head, it didn’t mean you were bad at math.  In fifth grade, I was the “slow” kid in the math class.  The one who never got called on because by the time I figured out the answer, someone else had already raised their hand.  When the teacher did call on me to give me a chance, she would get frustrated at how long it took me to get the answer and call on someone else.  I thought I was the dumbest kid in the world.

But then one day, we had a sub–an awesome teacher who didn’t waste our time with fractions, decimals and other inane topics that seemed so unbelievably important to our regular teacher.  Instead, this teacher taught us about the Fibonacci sequence, the Golden Rectangle and different types of infinity.  Everyone else was bored and rolled their eyes, but I stayed late after class to ask more questions.  That was the day I started realizing that math and arithmetic are two completely different things.  Maybe I couldn’t multiply numbers the fastest in the class, but I could see the beautiful patterns and mysterious ratios that made math wonderful.

Which brings me to the point of this post.  I know there are some moms and dads out there who read this blog, and others of you may not be parents but probably have kids in your lives.  I’m also betting that at least a few of you know kids who are convinced they hate math (just like me in grade school.)  Worse yet, they might even have crossed the line from hating math to thinking that they stink at it!

If that is the case, you must get this book: Eat Your Math Homework by Ann McCallum and illustrated by Leeza Hernandez.  This is the book I wish my parents had gotten for me when I was a kid.  It takes abstract math concepts and without dumbing them down, illustrates them with food activities.  How awesome is that?

One fun way to use this book is to throw a math-themed party and use the recipes in this book for the food.  My favorite recipe, of course, is the Fibonacci snack skewers!  For party entertainment, present some math riddles and math puzzles and have kids work together to figure them out.  Books like Raymond Smullyan’s The Lady and the Tiger are chock-full of awesome puzzles and challenging riddles.

Lots of kids go through life feeling like they’re bad at math, but they’ve never actually had a chance to experience math for real.  And that makes me sad.  I was one of those kids, but I was lucky because that fifth-grade sub and then a number of professors in college, opened my eyes to how amazing and beautiful math can be.  Not all kids are that lucky.  And that’s where books like Eat Your Math Homework can help.

What about you?  Do you have a heartbreaking math story to share?

OK, today’s post is going to be a short one, but I wanted to share some awesome free things that are available for writers for this week only.  Yes, that’s right.  FREE.  As in, it costs you $0.00!  How awesome is that?

So, for free awesome thing #1, we’ve got WriteOnCon.com which is an online conference for writers of children’s literature.  This includes everything from picture books to middle grade, to YA.  Does that mean that non-children’s book writers may not attend the conference?  Of course not!  As I understand it, the more the merrier.  The only caveat is that the speakers and agents presenting at the conference are all in the kidlit world, so writers of adult fiction wouldn’t necessarily find agents to query at this event.  But there’s still tons we can all learn about publishing and writing, even if kidlit isn’t your genre.  The dates for the conference are August 16-18 and all you have to do is go to the website.  To see the schedule of events, click the link.

Free awesome thing #2 (I know, could it get any more awesome than a free conference?) is free books!  Writer’s Digest is doing a Back To School sale and they’re giving away a bunch of writing eBooks for free.  All the books look fascinating but the two that I had to snap up for myself were The Portable MFA in Creative Writing and Robert’s Rules of Writing.  This sale only lasts this week, so click right over and grab some free books.

I’m sure you know of other writers who like free stuff. (Who doesn’t, right?) So share the wealth and spread the word!

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!