DBRLTeen

It’s time for us to plan for another great Teen Summer Reading Program!  Do you have any suggestions for us?  Please take our short survey by clicking this sentence!

Mrs. D. is always happy to hear from authors about her little reviews, and here is what M. H. Herlong had to say about Mrs. D.’s review of The Great Wide Sea in a private and personal email communication which Mrs. D. will now share with the planet: (Mrs. D. believes privacy is overrated, unless it involves her own…)

I DID enjoy the review.  In fact, I loved it.  I was especially pleased to read your discussion of Dad’s coping problems and your comment that we all need to learn to forgive.  I enjoyed your comment about your own sailing misadventure.  You might be interested to know that when the cover of the book was first prepared, Chrysalis was portrayed as a ketch.  I explained that this was like writing a book about a thoroughbred and putting an Clydesdale on the cover.  You might also be interested to know that I know that the moment depicted on the cover is one that no sailor would allow himself to get into and that no one could survive.  Sails up in that kind of weather?!?  No way!  Sailing INTO that kind of wave?!?  Impossible!  Still it makes for an extremely dramatic painting.

Having relinquished Ben, Dylan, and Gerry to the world, it is wonderful to hear when they are well received.

- M. H. Herlong, in a private and personal email to Mrs. D.

Mrs. D. is grateful that M. H. Herlong (may we call you “M.”?) graciously declined to point out the error in Mrs. D.’s review, where she referred to the sailboat Chrysalis as a “yacht” – it was, of course, a sloop, as Mrs. D. just learned from the author’s website.  Mrs. D., wise and knowledgeable as she is, is not too old to learn new things, and neither, dear readers, are you.

The difficult thing about making a family work is deciding who gets what they want – the parents or the children?  15-year-old Ben is settled into his own life and looking forward to getting a car when he turns 16, but as so often happens in young adult novels his mother has recently and unexpectedly died.  When catastrophes happen in life the young expect adults to know how to cope, but as Mrs. D. is sure you know adults are really just people like you and often can’t cope any better than you can.  Ben’s father is devastated by his wife’s death, and hatches the scheme of selling the house and taking Ben and his brothers (Dylan, 11, and Gerry, 5) on a year-long sailing trip through the Bahamas.  Perhaps this will help him forget and move on.  All three boys hate the idea, but as you probably also know parents sometimes just won’t listen.

To make matters worse (this is a young adult novel as Mrs. D. mentioned before so matters always get worse) their father suddenly disappears (yes, disappears, it’s quite surprising) from their yacht in the middle of the Carribean, leaving Ben and his brothers to face life-threatening situations on their own.  You’ll learn the things that can go wrong on a sailboat from this book, and goodness knows there are a lot of them!  Ask Mrs. D. to tell you sometime about when she was caught in a monsoon off the Seychelles in her 30-foot ketch - she hasn’t been quite as fond of mizzenmasts since!

Ben finds himself facing great danger because of the selfish decisions of his father.  How can Ben ever forgive him?  Mrs. D. recommends The Great Wide Sea, by M. H. Herlong, because we all need to learn how to forgive.

Check out the author’s website at www.thegreatwidesea.com!

Good manners – pass them on…

YALSA, the Young Adult Library Services Association (teen librarians), has just announced their 2009 Top Ten Books for Young Adults.  What is a young adult?  Well, if you’re 12 or 13 up to 19 or so you are.  (We librarians call you “young adults” instead of “teenagers” so you’ll like us better.)  Here is the list, with links to our catalog for the titles we currently have:

• It’s Complicated: The American Teenager, by Robin Bowman – we don’t have
• Waiting for Normal, by Leslie Connor.
• Mexican WhiteBoy, by Matt de la Pena – Yea!  Click here to read our review.
• Bog Child, by Siobhan Dowd.
• The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins.
• Ten Cents a Dance, by Christine Fletcher – we don’t have
• Baby, by Joseph Monninger – we don’t have
• Nation, by Terry Pratchett – it’s also a 2009 Printz Award Honor Book.
• Skim, by Mariko Tamaki & Jillian Tamaki – we don’t have
• The Brothers Torres, by Coert Voorhees.