We've been neglectful...

Shame on us for not updating the blog in a more timely manner. We mean to, really, we do! It just seems to get swallowed up in our other job duties. I plan to try better this year. Here's to 2014!

Last night, a few former teen librarians met up and watched The Book Thief movie. I had been looking forward in a sort of excited but also melancholy way. How do you get excited to see a movie about being a regular German girl during the Nazi regime? Plus, we all had read the book so we know that the movie should be a Kleenex worthy film.

I was not disappointed. I loved the adaptation. It kept the meat of the book and more importantly, the spirit of the book. The movie does limit the narrator--Death's -- role, but I was fine with that because honestly, Death was a bit of a jerk sometimes in the book. The movie passed one final test for me--did it make me want to read the book? Yes, it did. I want to go back into that world Markus Zusak created with his wonderful array of words and re-live the heartbreak all over again.

Can I just say--I like the German edition book cover (Amazon.com for the image) better than the US edition with the dominoes? And finally, I really want to read Zusak's next book. It looks like it may now come out in fall, 2015.

Next, team building movie outing? Fault in our stars, perhaps?

Please Ignore Vera Dietz by A.S. Smith

So, a few weeks ago, the Youth Media Awards were announced.  These are the awards given out by the American Library association for the most outstanding books of the last year.  The one that really gets teen librarians going is the Printz Awards, for the best teen book of the year.

I figured I pretty much knew who would win the Printz itself -- and I was right.  So I was more interested in the Honor Books.  These are the books that were thisclose to winning the Printz itself. 

The honor books were a lot more surprising than the winner this year, and one, in particular really stood out as a shocker (at least to me.)   Please Ignore Vera Dietz certianly wasn't on my radar.  It came out towards the end of the year, and not many people were talking about it . Color me curious.

Vera has spent her whole life doing three things.  1) Slowly falling in love with her best friend and neighbor Charlie.  2) Fighting her destiny as the daughter of a stripper and an alcoholic.  3) Convincing the world to ignore her.  But when Charlie dies, #1 goes out the window,  and #2 is a lost cause. Vera, vocabulary whiz and full time pizza delivery technician, must deal with a newly acquired drinking problem, a kind but clueless dad, and the ghost of her former best friend, who died for Vera months before he actually died.

You see, Vera knows the truth about Charlie.  How he couldn't fight his destiny, how he died and his relationship with Jenny, a pathological liar and the queen of the school losers.  But telling would put the spotlight on her, something she's always avoided.  Can a girl who's made being ignored an art step up?  And what does the pagoda have to do with any of this?

I really liked some of the elements of this book -- Vera's voice, her relationship with her dad, the flashback structure -- but I'm not sure it hangs together so well.  The "mystery" at the center of the book never really gels, and we never get a really good sense of who Charlie was.  However, I can see teens being drawn to this book, for its bleakly funny world view and its unflinching look at teen life.