I am friends with a couple who just had their sixth and seventh children, premature twin boys that they just got to bring home. Preemies are tough, two of them are tougher, and the five kids they already had, ranging in age from 13 to 2, are a bit of a handful as well. So they already had a lot on their plate when, a couple of days ago, the two-year-old accidentally nearly blinded his twelve-year-old sister with toilet bowl cleaner. She’s healing nicely, but the commonest way for their family to spend evenings during the summer is to watch movies together, and she can’t easily do that now. So another friend and I had the idea to get her some audiobooks. She isn’t much of a reader, but we got her the audiobook of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, and she loved it. I have since given her Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies. I’m trying to find other good, recent YA–focusing on that with an SF bent–that she and her older sister might enjoy, especially that is available as an audiobook. Suggestions are welcome.
Category: YA
As I have suspended my ban on buying books for Love Your Indie Month, I went ahead and picked up a copy of James Kennedy’s The Order of Odd Fish, which first came to my attention after I read a highly entertaining short story on his blog. Last night I read 130 pages of it–about a third of the book–and…I think I’m going to put it down and move on to something else.
It isn’t that the book is bad. It isn’t. In fact, I think that if this book had been handed to me when I was eight years old I would have read it and re-read it, laughing uproariously every time. But while I have a great appreciation for absurdity, I think that to stay entertained these days I need some degree of subtlety or connection to reality. The Order of Odd Fish is a fabulously mad, over the top cartoon. The images are outrageous, but the story just isn’t capturing me. I’ve been reading a lot of books marketed as YA lately. Some, like M. T. Anderson’s books I don’t think I could have fully appreciated when I was young. Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series I find light, entertaining reading that may have seemed more fraught with meaning to me when I was younger, but I suspect I would have related to about the same coming to it at any age. The Order of Odd Fish I think I came to too late to appreciate the way it should be. I will try to get my copy to someone it will have the chance to touch more significantly.
Yesterday I had never heard of YA author James Kennedy, nor his book, The Order of Odd Fish. Today I think he is one of the most awesome people in the world, and his book may be the next one I buy. This is entirely due to a blog post he wrote for no other reason than to celebrate a teenage fan of his work who spoke at an ALA meeting wearing a fish hat. A blog post that is, in fact, a 4000 word short story celebrating his young fan while revealing, among other mysteries, that all of Neil Gaiman’s books are written by bees and the head of the American Library Association goes about clothed in the skin of A. A. Milne. America, Emulate This Man has completely won me over.