Archive for October, 2010
Yesterday I blew my hair dry for the first time in, I dunno, twenty years, in an attempt to replicate the salontastic look my beloved stylist gave me after my haircut last week. My own attempt was semi-successful, not as fabulous as Stephanie’s handiwork, but not bad. This was a dry run for KidlitCon on Saturday. Next week I’ll be right back to my regular lazy air-dry.
Later in the day I had to make a Target run, and when I came out it was pouring. San Diego saves all its rain for one afternoon a year, I think. This was that afternoon. As I dashed to the car, I could practically feel the frizz reasserting itself strand by strand. Sproing!
Our neighborhood isn’t build for torrential rain. The gutters were miniature rivers. I braced as I forded a temporary creek on my own street, feeling like Pa Ingalls guiding the horses across. As I turned into our driveway, I saw a baseball go sweeping past in the current. Our baseball? I didn’t think so, but it looked like a perfectly good one and seemed a shame to let it wind up in the storm drain. I pulled into the driveway, threw the car into park and jumped out into the rain. The ball was already floating past my neighbor’s house by the time I caught up with it. I leaped over the raging river of the gutter—and splashed down in the street in water an inch past the hem of my jeans. Shoes, soaked. Socks, sodden. Sleek salon hair? Utterly demolished, replaced by a dripping tangle.
That’ll learn me!
Heading into a busy season here!
October 23rd, Minneapolis, MN—KidlitCon 2010. I’ll be discussing Blogging the Backlist with fellow panelists Jen Robinson, Charlotte Taylor, and Carol Rasco of RIF.
(And after KidlitCon, the incomparable Kathy Baxter is treating me to a visit to Mankato, stomping grounds of Maud Hart Lovelace, and maybe, possibly, if we can work out the logistics, Walnut Grove as well! Plus? I get to spend the night with Margaret and family.)
November 15th, 7pm ET—I’m joining Book Club Girl and Mitali Perkins for a radio interview about Carney, Winona, Emily, and all things Maud.
November 20th, 3pm—this one’s for San Diego locals. Betsy-Tacy Re-Release Party at Reader’s Inc bookstore in La Mesa, CA. Come see me!
January 8th—ALA Midwinter here in San Diego. Mitali Perkins and I will be signing books at the HarperPerennial booth.
Plus also? I’ve been holding onto some booksy news which I’ll have leave to announce very soon. Did I mention I got back to work last spring? After a longish hiatus following our move here? I’ve got some exciting (to me at least) things bubbling and can’t wait to be able to tell you all about them.
Dawn reviews Carney’s House Party and Winona’s Pony Cart at She Is Too Fond of Books:
The Foreword, by Melissa Wiley, looks at character development and assesses how Wiley herself has been impacted by these books. She says that she hopes her daughters “will become … the heroines of their own lives, facing life’s challenges with Carney’s integrity, Betsy’s determination, and Winona’s sense of fun.”
Related: Carney and Winona are in the building
October 15, 2010 @ 6:35 am | Filed under:
Books,
Family We’re having an October that feels like a proper October–which is to say, like an East Coast autumn, with lovely brisk weather. It’s not a typical San Diego October, which is usually a crispy month here, not a crisp one. Santa Anas gusting hot and dry. Wildfires. Brown lawns. Jack-o-lanterns turning to mush on the front stoop. I think October is the one month of the year when the rest of the country has us beat in the weather department.
I haven’t heard much Halloween chatter around the house yet. Rose mentioned it once, morosely, having just realized that she won’t be able to eat most of her favorite kinds of candy this year because of the braces. She did say she wants to dress up as Bast, the Egyptian goddess, this year. Beanie hasn’t decided yet. I haven’t decided what kind of candy I’m buying yet: my big Halloween decision.
Speaking of Egyptian mythology: Rick Riordan’s The Red Pyramid went over well with my three oldest. As did his new book, The Lost Hero, which hit the stores on Tuesday (same day as Carney, Winona, and Emily) and hit my kids’ eager hands about ten minutes later. The girls enjoyed watching Rick’s livecast on release day. He’s such an engaging speaker.
My CYBILs reading continues apace—though my tally lags way behind many of my fellow panelists, some of whom have already read 25 or 30 books. Or even more! Amazing. Today’s the last day to nominate titles, if you haven’t yet. Sherry made some suggestions for my category, YA fiction, if you’re stumped.
All sorts of delicious reading going on around here these days. I’m trying to keep a list of picture books and other stories I read to Rilla and Wonderboy. In the past week, more or less:
Shark vs. Train
Miss Suzy
Madeleine
Bedtime for Frances
Miss Nelson Is Missing
The Moon Jumpers
and yesterday we started My Father’s Dragon
That’s all I can remember right now.
Easier to remember: Rilla’s latest series of drawings. Shark. Unicornshark. Catshark. (That last one’s a princess. Obviously.)
She slipped me a little note yesterday: orange crayon, block letters. COM TO MY TEA PT. So that’s where I’ll be this morning, if you’re looking for me.
October 13, 2010 @ 5:03 pm | Filed under:
Photos 
A very small taste of what I had to say about Caroline Sibley, aka Carney, in the foreword to HarperPerennial’s scrumptious new double-volume edition of Carney’s House Party and Winona’s Pony Cart:
At times her present seems maddeningly full of unanswerable questions—Larry Humphreys is coming for a visit! Will they click, after all these years? What if they don’t? And what is she to make of that happy-go-lucky Sam Hutchinson, who zooms around town unshaven in his Locomobile, recklessly lavishing generosity upon his friends and then, horror of horrors, telling shopkeepers to “put it on the book”? Carney faces each question with frankness and interest, even in painful circumstances. It’s that combination of honesty and enthusiasm that makes Carney one of Lovelace’s most likable characters. She’s a real girl, rapidly becoming a real woman: a woman with integrity and vision, who doesn’t look to others to solve her problems for her, but instead faces them head-on, confident in her own ability to untangle muddled thinking.
Oh, I just love her. There’s lots more—when I get started talking about Carney (and Winona! and Betsy!) it’s hard to stop.
Related posts:
Heaven to Betsy! High-school-and-beyond books being reissued! (Sept 2009)
Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill
The Betsy-Tacy Songbook
Interview with Mitali Perkins, Jennifer Hart, and me about Maud’s books
Betsy-Tacy booksigning at ALA Midwinter
Photos of my visit to the real Deep Valley, as chronicled by Margaret in Minnesota
Interview with Mitali Perkins, Jennifer Hart, and me about Maud’s books
Why I love Emily
A Reader’s Guide to Betsy-Tacy
October 12, 2010 @ 6:19 am | Filed under:
Huck,
Photos 
Okay, you know you get a lot of books when an entire box arrives—a box you’ve been waiting for with a thrill in your heart—and you miss it. Don’t ask me how it happened. It seems Carney, Winona, and Emily landed in the Bonny Glen days ago, and I wasn’t waiting at the station to greet them.
Well, here they are. Could they be any swoonier? No, they could not.
Maud Hart Lovelace’s “Deep Valley” companion novels: Emily of Deep Valley, with a new foreword by acclaimed author Mitali Perkins, and (in one volume) Carney’s House Party and Winona’s Pony Cart, with a foreword by me. Both books contain, in the back, photos and biographical information about Maud Hart Lovelace and (for the first time ever) illustrator Vera Neville by Betsy-Tacy experts Julie Schrader, Amy Dolnick, and Theresa Gibson. That’s Vera’s classic art you see on the covers.
Appearing on the shelves October 12th! As in: tomorrow!
Have you signed up for the Maud Hart Lovelace reading challenge yet?
Not sure on where Carney, Emily, and Winona fit into the Betsy-Tacy series? Here’s a walkthrough.
Mitali Perkins and I will be discussing Maud’s books with HarperPerennial’s Jennifer Hart on BlogTalkRadio, November 15th at 4pm.
October 7, 2010 @ 6:41 am | Filed under:
Books 
Heather Vogel Frederick, author of the Mother-Daughter Book Club series, will be appearing at the Red Balloon Bookshop in Saint Paul to sign copies of her new book, Pies and Prejudice.
“Right before the start of freshman year, Emma moves unexpectedly to England with her family. Her book club friends are stunned. Thanks to video-conferencing, the resourceful girls keep the club alive, and choose Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as their next book. While reading Austen, the girls deal with exciting and not-so-exciting developments in their daily lives. When the girls try to bring Emma home by starting a bake sale, a thriving business is born: Pies and Prejudice. The plan they cook up, however, falls short, and they wonder whether the book club will ever be together again. With facts about Jane Austen and quotes at the beginning of the chapters to help draw parallels between significant characters in Pies and Prejudice and those in Pride and Prejudice, Pies and Prejudice is a fitting introduction to the literature of Jane Austen.”
7pm on October 11th. Visit this site for all the details and spread the word to your Twin Cities friends. I wish I could go! Besides being a terrific writer and Austen enthusiast, Heather Vogel Frederick happens to be as big a Betsy-Tacy fangirl as I am…in the words of the esteemed Kathy Baxter, “she knows what color apple blossoms are!”
I’ll be making a Minnesota trip myself in a couple of weeks for Kidlit Con 2010. I wish the timing had been just a little different—I would have loved to be in Mankato for the Betsy-Tacy Society’s Carney/Winona/Emily book launch party next week, and I’d have loved to visit the Red Balloon to meet Heather! Go ahead, make me jealous!
