Tomorrow, When the War Began by John Marsden

It had been Ellie and Corrie’s idea, going bush for a few days over the Christmas holidays. They gathered some friends and supplies, went camping, and returned to find their homes deserted, their families missing. A fax Ellie finds at Corrie’s house seems to confirm the group’s worst fear: Australia has been invaded by a foreign army. The country is at war.

The fax from Corrie's dad tells them to go bush again, and, living in the country, Ellie and some others in the group do have the skills they need to survive. After a few harrowing trips into town to do some reconnaissance and check on their homes, they head back out to the place they had been camping when everything went down. But soon they feel the need to do more than just survive. They want to fight the invaders.

John Marsden’s Tomorrow, When the War Began, the first novel in the Tomorrow series, is absolutely riveting. It’s told by Ellie, elected by the group to write down what has happened as a way of “telling ourselves that we mean something, that we matter. That the things we’ve done have made a difference. I don’t know how big a difference, but a difference. Writing it down means we might be remembered.” (p. 2)

Ellie tells us from the beginning that she is recounting events in chronological order and we know from the back cover that the country had been invaded during the original camping trip, so I did not feel impatient as I read this first part of the book, waiting for the action to begin. And there is a lot of action. Marsden writes in a style that is immediate and accessible, making Tomorrow, When the War Began a fast-paced read, exciting and full of tension. Chilling, too, in how realistic and plausible everything seems, how people are forced to change, and with a lingering sense of fear as the group can only hope that all their families are still alive, held with the rest of the town in the Showground. That their actions will make a difference. That they will all survive.

Cross-posted at The YA YA YAs. A film version of Tomorrow, When the War Began is currently in production.

The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza, by Eugene Ostashevsky

High school is usually the first time we get our hands on post-Dr. Seuss, post-Shel Silverstein, "grownup" poetry: your Walt Whitmans, your E.E. Cummings-es, your Robert Frosts. They're all great, of course. Of course!

But you don't usually get the *really* good stuff until college or later--and that's if you're lucky. By the really good stuff, I mean hilarious and surreal and culturally contemporary poetry like The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza. You know, poetry about things that really matter, like rap battles and epistemology and peeing dinosaurs.

My girlfriend loves poetry, which I don't particularly--or haven't since college, with a few exceptions, like periodic Rilke and Mark Strand obsessions--but I know that there's a lot of great poetry on our bookshelves at home. Sometimes I accidentally read some of it, and that's what happened with The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza.

I picked up this slim book just because it looked cool, and I started reading in the middle, at a poem called "Infinite Recursor or the Bride of DJ Spinoza," which begins

The bride of DJ Spinoza
has an absolute cleavage
like that between natural numbers and Aleph-null

and quickly ends up in a refrain that goes "cause I got more rhymes than Joseph Brodsky/I got more rhymes than Leon Trotsky/Brodsky/Trotsky/Brodsky/Trotsky/La--là" then is immediately followed by the stage direction "She comes down and drop-kicks him in the head."

I was hooked. I can't get over how this stuff manages to be simultaneously so funny and so brainy. The poet, Eugene Ostashevsky, flips back and forth constantly from academic to slapstick, making jokes involving philosophy, pirates, mathematics, hip-hop conventions, historical references, and just stupidly goofy humor. How can you not love poems like "The Origin of the Specious" and "Myopia Is Youropia"? There's even a "Peepeesaurus" character, the star of a series of poems that he wrote as a gift for his three- or four-year-old nephew, who "as all children, or all boys do, he went through this very penis-centered stage, which coincided with a dinosaur-centered stage." (Pause, audience bursts into laughter.)

Through all of this--while mixing in French and Latin and Russian--Ostashevsky somehow pulls together some pretty heady (not to mention intellectually acrobatic) meditations on the nature of... well, everything. Love and life and logic and even conversations with God. But maybe that's not too surprising, since DJ Spinoza is obviously based on Baruch Spinoza. Clearly, even if for some inexplicable reason you don't want to read this book, you need to be *seen* reading it if you're hoping to pick up someone as cute and brainy and weird as yourself.

And, you know, I feel like I have to stress this because it's *poetry*, but... it's really funny. But don't take my word for it: I liked reading better than listening, just because I wanted to keep re-reading parts of it, but you can hear Ostashevsky read much of the book at a performance at Bowdoin College.

The Book of the Dun Cow

Before you run screaming, let me assure you this is not a kid's book. Yes, it has a chicken on the cover. Get over it. Yes, it's a talking chicken. Again, get over it. It's an allegory.

I'm not a big fan of allegories. I don’t like Narnia, because I felt like the author cheated me by disguising a Christian allegory as a fantasy series.I also don’t like Pilgrim’s Progress, because the author didn’t bother to disguise his Christian allegory at all.

And yet, one of my favorite books is a Christian allegory. At least I think it is. It’s been disguised just the right amount. And whatever else it is, it's also an exciting story. It‘s Walter Wangerin‘s “The Book of the Dun Cow,” a barnyard tale of cosmic dimensions and eternal ramifications.

You don’t hear much about it, but when it came out in 1978 The New York Times proclaimed it “The Best Book of the Year.”


There’s a rooster and a dog and a cow, of course, but there’s also the big stuff:

“For in those days the earth was fixed in the absolute center of the universe. It had not yet been cracked loose from that holy place, to b sent whirling -- wild, helpless and ignorant -- among the blind stars.”

Inside this world, God has locked away Wyrm.

“He was in the shape of a serpent, so damnably huge that he could pass once around the earth and then bit his own tail ahead of him…. He was powerful, because evil is powerful. He was angry. And he hated, with an intense and abiding hatred, the God who had locked him within the earth. And what put the edge upon his hatred, what made it an everlasting acid inside of him, was the knowledge that God had given the key to his prison in this bottomless pit to a pack of animals.”

The animals don’t know this, but in the course of the story they will find out and we shall see if God chose wisely when he picked a rooster to hold back the mighty Wyrm.

So, this barnyard is more than a barnyard. And this book is more than a barnyard tale. AND more than just another allegory.

Echoes of Bradbury and the summers we all miss

In a pre-Civil Rights small Alabama town, a 12 yr old boy finds his life thrown into chaos when a strange murder haunts his father. Monsters and mysteries of all sorts, including of the human variety, make this a book you'll never tire of.

When I want to become younger, a boy again, there are a few books on my shelf that transform me, take me back to an age when I believed anything could happen. Boy's Life by Robert McCammon is one of them.

McCammon, who has written some terrific horror novels (Stinger, Swan's Song), has taken every kid's daydreams, sprinkled them with a few nightmares, and bound them between a cover to create Boy's Life. I'm glad Pocket has reprinted this terrific book. Go read it. Now.

What, you want more details? Fine.

In Zephyr, Alabama, the year is 1964, and 12-year-old Cory Mackenson one day helps his father with his milk route (yes, once upon a time people actually delivered milk as opposed to cows hidden in the sub-basements of your local supermarkets). Father and son watch a car drive straight into the (rumored) bottomless depths of the local lake with the driver still inside. Cory's father dives in to rescue the driver and comes back to the surface alone. He admits to Cory that the driver was naked and handcuffed to the steering wheel.

The memory of seeing the body in the car begins to eat away at Cory's father bit by bit as he tries to figure out who was responsible and why did this murder happen.
And Cory, who had never known what Evil with a capital E was, begins to learn. This is Alabama before the Civil Rights Movement, and several characters in the book are connected with the Ku Klux Klan. But don't think the book gets preachy about desegregation. No, McCammon is a better writer than that.

Mystery not enough? Oh, there's more.

In Zephyr, like childhood, magic lurks at the edges of our vision. In these pages readers meet Old Moses, an immense gator prowls the river, the last surviving triceratops, wrestlers who bear an uncanny resemblance to moviedom's most famous monsters, spirits of the dead, and the greatest bicycle a kid could ever own. Ray Bradbury could not do better. And hasn't.

Convinced? You should be. If this book is not already on your night table waiting to be read then you're missing out in of the greatest reads. Ever.

What I adore about this book is that it offers all of us the chance to recall that greatest summer of our life, before we get too old to see wonders, when your friends meant the world to you, and your father meant even more.

Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd

Ever wondered what would happen if a Klingon and a Jedi fell in love? How about a Comic-Con throw-down between Jedi and Klingons? Or what if a captain of the cheerleading squad needs a crash course in geekdom? The answers to these questions are in the short story collection, Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd. Authors Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci edited the book and gathered a great group of teen authors and graphic novelists for this collection.

I'll have to admit I have mixed feelings about the current use and connotations of the word geek and how it is treated in popular culture. So when I saw my library's new copy of Geektastic, I thought, "Great, yet another medium disingenuously dealing with geeks so that they can actually just make fun of them." Okay, so maybe I'm a bit cynical. The cover, however, was too great to be ignored, so I gave it a try and thoroughly enjoyed it.

There is a great range of stories here. From humourus to angst filled, the stories in Geektastic are quite enjoyable and are respectful to those they write about. Seeing the list of authors that includes M.T. Anderson, Scott Westerfeld and John Green, I should not have been worried in the first place.

Black and Castellucci start the book with Once You’re a Jedi, You’re a Jedi All the Way. A Jedi and a Klingon wake up in bed together. The story is told from each perspective and includes the awesome convention brawl.

One of Us by Tracy Lynn tells the story of head cheerleader Montgomery K. Bushnell who pays the four members of Springfield High's Genre and Nonsense Club to instruct her how to impress her boyfriend. They do this by teaching her about the important things in life including Star Trek, Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings.

My favorite was Barry Lyga's The Truth about Dino Girl. Katie is into dinosaurs and wants to be an archeologist. She processes high school and her crush of the very popular Jamie like an archeologist and eventually prepares to enact revenge on one of her rivals.

In addition to all of this coolness, Hope Larson and Bryan Lee O'Malley illustrated a bunch of fun comics throughout this collection. This is a smart look at geek culture by several accomplished writers.

Skeleton Creek

Two years ago I would have rolled my eyes if someone had put Patrick Carman's Skeleton Creek in my hands. The "multi-media" content (that is, videos and text combined) would have made me an instant skeptic. I probably would have labeled it as gimmicky and shelved it without a moment's pause. Now that I am much more technologically enlightened, only a tiny bit of skepticism lurked as I started reading (watching?) this book a few days back. I was actually pretty excited to see how the video / text concept worked out. All it took was one video installment and I was hooked. Kind of made me wonder if even the purest, most traditional bookworm can't be seduced by a little film.

Privacy is a religion in Skeleton Creek. For Ryan McCray and his best friend Sarah Fincher, it's always felt like everyone in town had secrets. For instance, why was their town's name changed to Skeleton Creek and why is there a secret society known as The Crossbones? In the past, the town was connected to the now bankrupt New York Gold and Silver Company and the teens are certain that an abandoned dredge, once used to mine gold, is at the center of the mystery they feel permeating the Creek. So they investigate the dredge one night and an accident leaves Ryan with a serious broken leg and also results in both of their sets of parents forbidding the two to see or communicate with each other for good. But neither of them can forget what they saw, or think they saw, that night. Ryan writes all that he remembers in his journal and Sarah continues to stay in touch with him through vlogs that she sends to him, which include footage of their night at the dredge and other film that she takes as she continues looking for answers. As the friends get closer to some kind of truth, they have to ask themselves, should they return to the dredge and face what they think is inside, or stop asking the questions that might lead to the worst kind of accident imaginable?


So, the big question is whether or not the video/text format works. On the whole, I'd say it does. You'll wait more than 20 pages before the first video installment, and I'll admit that I was itching to get there. In fact, I think the whole package could have easily handled more video without seeming to cross the line into more film / less book territory. The videos themselves are relatively simple, much of the action taking place either in Sarah's room or in the woods and the dredge. Of course, the clips set in the forest around the dredge do a whole lot to add to the fright factor, the handheld camera style reminiscent of Blair Witch, with the same breathless narration happening throughout. It was, in a word, fun.

But just in case you wonder how the text holds up, I was impressed. Patrick Carman has created a compelling voice for Ryan, who happens to be a gifted writer. Ryan writes in order to make what has happened to him feel more like fiction. The text turns out to be just as moody and creepy as the film. Here's a taste:

There was no nurse or doctor or chalky smell this morning, only the early train crawling through town to wake me at half past five. But in my waking mind, it wasn't a train I heard. It was something more menacing, trying to sneak past in the early dawn, glancing down the dead-end streets, hunting.

Is it spooky? Yep, though I think it would be spookier still at night (I read/watched on a blue sky perfect day and I was still pretty freaked out in places). The acting in the videos is so-so, but mostly decent. Sarah's character comes off quite convincingly, it's the guy who plays the forest ranger who's a tad on the cheesy side. Take a peek at the trailer:



Thank me for reviewing this so close to the release of Book #2, Ghost in the Machine, in October, because Skeleton Creek ends with a cliffhanger to beat all cliffhangers. By the end, you'll rethink reading in the 21st century, if you haven't already - oh, and you won't be heading into any abandoned buildings in the dark anytime soon.

Skeleton Creek is published by Scholastic.

What in the world is Trout Fishing in America?

1) Eventually this is about Richard Brautigan.

2) One of my favorite musicians, Jay Farrar of Son Volt, has a new music project about to drop, and I'm very excited for it. It's called One Fast Move or I'm Gone: Kerouac's Big Sur. He's gotten together with Benjamin Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie and Postal Service to do the soundtrack for a new documentary about Jack Kerouac, specifically the writing of his novel Big Sur. What an incredible line up of talent-- I can't wait to hear what their collaboration has produced.

But, thinking about Jack Kerouac and the Beats? They've always seemed kinda dopey to me. Slack, self-absorbed, juvenile-outrage fueled, consumed by their own disjointed empty otherness... I read On the Road in high school and couldn't seem to care. Which, on paper? Never made sense to me: by all accounts, if you do the math, I should love the Beats.


3) Maybe it was Ernie Bushmiller and Chuck Jones making easy targets of late fifties hipsters, back when those that produced youth culture could easily mock youth itself--Something nearly impossible now that that particular tail wags the giant pop culture dog. Maybe Sluggo and Bugs Bunny instilled in me a general distrust of anything with the Beat label.

4) A good friend of mine once dated the coolest high school chick ever, only it was illegal for him to do so (she was 17 and he was 21--he immolated himself daily over it. Good thing he'd already quit drinking). Anyways, this gal was ready to up and defend the Beats, particularly Diane di Prima, one of the few women associated with the Beats. Thus, my sneer at the Beats broadened-- there's something at heart messed up about a movement so centered around being able to pick up and blow like dust, right? And ain't that a gendered thing? Because when the party moves on, the women are the one's stuck having the babies.

5) For that matter, did Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Ferlingetti, etc. ever wear berets and black turtlenecks? Grow soul patches?

6) That girlfriend's name was Erin. She had a great laugh, was wise way beyond her years. A Bellarmine gal with wicked plans. She was Irish, and the only thing I really remember crystal clear about her was a joke she told. A pun on erin go bragh-- she called herself Erin Go Bragh-less-- which cleaves to memory for obvious reasons.

7) Trout Fishing in America, though the most famous, may not be the place to begin. Remember that about Brautigan, in case I don't get there in time.

8) It was Erin who also introduced me to Richard Brautigan, in part because she didn't know how to explain him. He was Beat-ish, certainly the covers to all his books demonstrate a notably Hippy-dippy, flower-power kind of guy. I can say this because he's the only author I know who appears on the cover of every single book I've every found by him.

9)I Feel Horrible. She Doesn't
by Richard Brautigan

I feel horrible. She doesn't
love me and I wander around
like a sewing machine
that's just finished sewing
a turd to a garbage can lid.

10) On paper, when you do the math, I should hate him. Richard Brautigan cares little for narrative clarity, his writing has negligible plot, and sometimes the various pieces of everything we call fiction: character, setting, structure, etc. are all sacrificed for a bewildering yet hypnotic tone, a fascinating piling of metaphor upon metaphor until you don't know what's what anymore. He constructs worlds out of familiar words roped together such that the phrase "Machines of Loving Grace" exists in our language and you're thankful for it, and watermelon sugar is not that at all, but something much much more. And funny! Man, the guy has so much humor and satire going on, but never vicious. He's an incredibly giving writer. Despite the poem above that I quote--what a great first line!--he's never really bitter. His novel The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 is filled filled filled with love. Man his books are brimming with love, an earthy love and I don't mean "tee hee; naughty!" either. I mean he just loves the good body of the world, however that may be expressed, whether it's trout fishing or his beloved San Francisco and all the people in it.

11) There's a kid, well, adult now I suppose, who changed his name to Trout Fishing in America. Legal and everything.

12) My fear is: I just recently found one of the holy grails of comics collecting: Barnaby, by Crockett Johnson. He's the guy who wrote and drew Harold and the Purple Crayon. Anyways, Barnaby is this legendary strip which was collected once back in the forties and again twenty or thirty years later, but that's it. So it's immanently unavailable, a rare thing in these days of Google and Wikipedia and gorgeous, high-priced comic strip reprints. I bought it for 3.50.

Brautigan is like that. He's not really available. I think there may be one collection that's got Trout Fishing in America, The Pill versus The Springhill Mining Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar that's in print. Hell, he's even got a 600 word novel that's never been printed. But I've found this used bookstore where for some reason they've got all these super cheap paperbacks of all his books collecting dust. And I first picked up one because I remembered the name. Then I went back looking for something to spice up my poetry reading. Now I go just for his stuff.

But I don't want it to be out of some collecting, hoarding fever. And every time I get that worry, I sit down with the opening pages of The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Romance, or The Abortion, and his prose just knocks all worries out of my head. Man, what an amazing writer.

13)Band names derived from Richard Brautigan's writing: Trout Fishing in America, Machines of Loving Grace. Watermelon Sugar.

14) He's not really one of the Beats. He wrote and was published mostly in the sixties, but Ferlingetti was an editor and friend, and he's a quintessential Californian writer, which I guess is how the connection is made. Oh, and one of his books is titled A Confederate General from Big Sur. So, diid I stick the landing?

Find these by Brautigan. I would start at your library, but if not, you might go here:
Novels

The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966
The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western

Poetry:
The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster

Who knows what this is:
Trout Fishing In America

How did I get here? Me and the Sandman

When I try figuring out exactly how I ended up writing about heartbroken werewolves and mushroom gods, I can trace the course of this rather odd career choice through twists and turns to two major influences: Neil Gaiman, who wrote the Sandman comics, and my mom, who took the Sandman comics away from me.

Before I wade in, though, I should explain that there are actually two Sandmen in the comic book world. One Sandman’s real name is William Baker. He is a man made of sand. A supervillan with all the powers of sand is pretty much as useless as he sounds, except to point out the kinds of goofy stories I was enthralled with when I was thirteen.

By that time, most of my friends had given up comic books for basketball and french kissing. Honestly, my tendency to get lost in fantasy worlds was starting to become a concern for my parents. But my love of comics and cartoons continued unabashed, to the point that I had–seriously–a framed picture of Captain America on my dresser.

Anyway, when I was thirteen, William Baker briefly turned good and had his own mini-series. That was the book I went into the comic shop to buy. By some divine accident, though, I walked out with a copy of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman instead.

Neil Gaiman’s Sandman has thousands of names. He is the god of dreams and the source for every story ever told. He has existed almost since the dawn of time. He has near-infinite powers but serious problems with his siblings, the personifications of destiny, death destruction, desire, despair and delirium.

To sum it up: I was in over my head.


The issue I happened to buy was a retelling of the myth of Orpheus, which I’d never heard before. It told about his journey to the land of the dead, showed him being torn apart by the Maenads, and then his head floating down the river still singing beautiful songs.

An aside: I was reading Samuel Delany’s The Einstein Intersection the day my boss at the ambulance company called and told me I was fired. The Einstein Intersection is a great piece of experimental sci-fi which splices Orpheus’s journey with a futuristic adventure and nonfiction journal entries Delany wrote during his own trip to Greece. I’d never been fired before and wasn’t sure what to do, so I hung up and started reading again. After about thirty minutes, I thought to myself, Well, if you ever want to take a shot at writing your own book, now’s the time to do it. What does it mean that the Orpheus myth appeared at two critical points on my way to become a writer? Only the gods know.

But back to age thirteen: When my mom found Sandman, she sort of freaked. Censoring didn’t come naturally to her. She gave me Twain, Kipling, and Vonnegut, but the pictures disturbed her, for instance this naked and blood-drenched Maenad kissing Orpheus’ severed head, which removed from its mythological context, is pretty twisted.

And also remember I was still pie-eyed enough to think a guy who turned into sand was way cool. (Once, William Baker got caught in an explosion, and the extreme heat turned his body into glass. A man made out of shattered glass is more menacing than a man made out of sand but still lame.) My mom made a judgement call. Sadly for all those puppies I might have nursed back to health as Kristopher Reisz, veterinarian, it was a call that turned me from a spooked by Gaiman’s world to obsessed.

My brother Sean, three years older than me and with infinitely better taste, got interested in Sandman soon after. Swiping his graphic novel versions, I devoured them. Gaiman used his King of Dreams to tell stories about stories. Besides Orpheus, Sandman was the first time I encountered Midsummer Night’s Dream; the kitsune legends; and the original, not-very-nice version of Little Red Riding Hood. And the fact that it was all a little forbidden just added an extra veil of mystery to these truths disguised as myths disguised as truths, to the raw alchemy of storytelling.

There’s no going back now, though. My youthful social awkwardness has bloomed into a nice curmudgeonly streak. I’ve made up some stories of my own, and even been paid for a few. Still, all those kittens I would have bandaged and bottle-fed... sometimes I hear them meowing in my dreams.

(Cross-posted from my blog.)

Amiri & Odette: A Love Story by Walter Dean Myers

Walter Dean Myers is known for gritty novels like Monster and Shooter and Dope Sick and Sunrise Over Fallujah, and for picture book poetry collections like Jazz. This year, he's managed to combine gritty, urban teen themes with poetry . . . and ballet.

Yeah, I said it. Ballet.

See, Myers was much struck with the story of the ballet Swan Lake, which you may know from, say, having seen Billy Elliot or The Swan Princess, if you haven't seen the ballet on its own. The ballet, which dates from about 1875, was based on a variety of Russian and German fairy tales involving a princess (named Odette) who is under the spell of a magical bad guy named Rothbart (German for "Red Beard"), who tries to pair his own daughter, Odile, with Prince Siegfried. Siegfried, however, loves only Odette.

The ballet comes in four acts, but the final act varies wildly:

Act 1: Siegfried must choose a bride at his birthday ball (sounds like the prince in Cinderella, yes?) He heads into the woods and chases some swans.

Act 2: Siegfried gets ready to shoot an arrow at one of the swans, then realizes she is more human than swan. He finds out she's Odette, bewitched by Rothbart to be a swan by day. Love ensues. He wants to kill Rothbart, but if he does so before the spell is broken, it will never end.

Act 3: Siegfried has his ball. Rothbart tricks him into thinking that Odile is Odette, and he pledges his love to the wrong girl.

Act 4: Back at the lake, Siegfried apologizes to Odette, who forgives him. They refuse to be parted, and kill themselves, thereby weakening Rothbart's power so much that he dies OR their love is so strong it overcomes Rothbart, who dies while they live happily ever after OR Odette is stuck being a swan forever and Siegfried is left broken and alone.

Walter Dean Myers sets this book, Amiri and Odette in the Swan Lake Projects, an urban apartment complex in an asphalt world. Javaka Steptoe, the illustrator, took Myers's idea and ran with it, literally creating collage art on slabs of asphalt and cinder block. His images include original art and the sort of objects one might use in everyday life - I spotted a menu from a Chinese restaurant, actual feathers and some of the real jewelry that Steptoe mentions in his illustrator's note.

In Myers's text, Siegfried becomes Amiri (a version of the Arabic word meaning Prince). Rothbart becomes "Big Red". And Odette? Yeah, she's still Odette. The book, like the ballet, is split into four "acts".

Act 1: His mother says she's having a party so he can find a nice girl to settle down with.

Act 2: Amiri and his friends play basketball in the night:

But on the far edge of this boy-boy dream,
As far as forever, as close as a scream,
There are girl shadows dancing
And one who is glancing

At the muscular form that leaps toward the rim.
He sees her -- she sees him.
A feeling of magic in the air.
He holds his breath,
she smooths her hair.

Act 3: At the party, Big Red sends an unidentified girl in a black swan mask to Amiri; she pretends to be Odette and he pledges his love to her. Odette, who is late to the party (I guess), shrieks and takes off, with Amiri in hot pursuit.

Act 4: Back out on the basketball court, Amiri finds Odette alone, "shivering in the dark". Odette says she's already dead, and only a specter.

"No, I am Amiri," he says.
"And what I see is a sweet promise of tomorrow.
Invent our love, and we will beat Big Red.
Without this hope, we may as well be dead."

Big Red and Amiri duke it out - with weapons - over Odette, and Big Red loses and leaves town as Amiri and Odette end up dancing in the sunrise.

And yes, I just told you the ending, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't have a look at the book, which is, as I've already mentioned, written as a poem. Myers's use of language and fluid approach to meter and rhyme is interesting, and Steptoe's use of textures and rich colors to bring the story alive visually is exciting.

Perhaps my most serious criticism of the story is Myers's decision to call the bad guy "Big Red", because it's a name I can't read without thinking of my favorite cinnamon chewing gum. Putting that aside (which I must do every. single. time. I read the guy's name), I thought this adaptation worked well. It does for Swan Lake what West Side Story did for Romeo and Juliet: brought it forward in time and made it seem fresh and relevant.

Do we really need to win?

As a.fortis mentioned last week, Guys Lit Wire was nominated and then shortlisted for two categories in Book Blogger Appreciation Week (Best Specialized Blog and Most Altruistic). I've been thinking a lot about this over the past few days and how I feel about popularity and blogging. The thing that concerns me the most here is Most Altruistic Blog. Basically, GLW is competing against other sites for the prize of who has been the kindest to others. Everyone in the short list has donated their time to raise money or collect books (as we did in the Book Fair for Boys) to help those in need. And now we are up for an award for our kindness.

And something about that just seems....well, it seems wrong.

I did not remove GLW from consideration in this award because initially I really was touched that folks thought of us. And honestly, I know that being short listed meant that new readers found our blog by perusing the lists and that is good for us - it certainly helps to spread the word on what we work very hard at here. But still. Do we want an award for doing something that in a perfect world wouldn't need to be done at all? Do any of us need to be recognized for helping kids who have little access to books get some?

Not to get all Spike Lee on you, but do you ever need a prize for doing the right thing?

We might very well win this award, I really don't know. But speaking for me, I don't think in the future I will accept GLW being shortlisted in this category and I like to know what everyone else who contributes here thinks. I prefer that folks just buy the damn books when we run the book fair. We put our time and money where our mouths are - and if everyone else would do the same then changing the world (for these boys anyway) would be easy.

There's an award idea - having everyone vote by purchasing a book for one of the causes supported by the shortlisters. Imagine how awesome that prize would be.