Monthly archive for November 2012

Here Where the Sunbeams are Green with Helen Phillips

By on November 16, 2012   /   Author Interviews  

Today we welcome Helen Phillips to the Mixed-Up Files! Her novel, HERE WHERE THE SUNBEAMS ARE GREEN, just released on November 13th. Her official bio: Helen Phillips grew up in the foothills west of Denver with her three siblings. When she was eleven, she lost her hair due to the autoimmune condition alopecia, which was pretty hard at the time, but now she thinks there are some major advantages to not having hair (no shampoo in the eyes, for one). Soon after she lost her hair, she (like Mad) made a New Year’s resolution to write a poem a day, a practice she continued for more than eight years. Helen attended Yale University and went on to earn a master of fine arts in fiction from Brooklyn College. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, artist Adam Douglas Thompson, and their child.

About HERE WHERE THE SUNBEAMS ARE GREEN: Mad’s dad is the Bird Guy. He’ll go anywhere to study birds. So when he’s offered a bird-tracking job in Central America, his bags are packed and he’s jungle bound. But going bird tracking in the jungle and disappearing completely are very different things, and when the Very Strange and Incredibly Creepy Letter arrives, Mad can’t shake the terrible feeling that her father is in trouble. Roo, Mad’s younger sister, is convinced that the letter is a coded message. And their mom is worried, because the letter doesn’t sound like Dad at all. But Mad is sure it’s a sign of something sinister. The only way to get to the bottom of it is to go to Lava Bird Volcano and find their dad themselves. Though they never could have imagined what they’re about to discover. (from IndieBound)

I loved that Madeline and Ruby are a sister team. Ruby, the younger sister, often comes across as the fearless leader. How does Madeline gain the courage to ultimately save her family from the evil corporation La Lava Resort and Spa?

Mad’s journey from scaredy cat to heroine is in a sense the central journey of the book. When push comes to shove, Mad has plenty of inner resources—it’s just that push has never come to shove until now. A lot of the struggle has to do with how she perceives herself; she has to overcome considerable self-doubt. All along she gives herself less credit than she deserves. She’s intelligent and creative and big-hearted. But in comparison to Roo, she feels weak and wimpy and un-magical. At the same time, Roo’s courageousness is what inspires Mad in the climactic scene.

Speaking of La Lava Resort and Spa, it purports to be an eco-friendly resort while it’s actually hunting the Lava-Throated Volcano trogon [a type of bird] to extinction for use in a stay-young cosmetic. What inspired this type of villain?

I thought it would be interesting for a place that seems like paradise to have a very dark underbelly. It was a fun writing challenge to depict the sinister qualities of such a gorgeous, “perfect” location. Moreover, as someone who attempts to tread lightly on the earth and buy green products, I’m fascinated/horrified by the trend of “green-washing,” in which companies falsely claim to be environmentally friendly and market their products as being greener than they actually are, taking advantage of well-intentioned consumers like myself.

Madeline and Ruby’s father, the Bird Guy, is thrilled to discover the Lava-Throated Volcano trogon is a Lazarus species. This was the first time I’d heard of a Lazarus species, where a species thought to be extinct is rediscovered. Is this based on a true story? How frequently are Lazarus species discovered?

I write about this in my Author’s Note: in the early 2000s, my dad showed me a newspaper article about a recent sighting of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, otherwise known as the “Lord God Bird” for its spectacular appearance. Declared extinct by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in the 1990s, it had supposedly been sighted in its former territory, causing a flurry of excitement in the ornithological community and inspiring a great search effort. Unfortunately, none of the searches for the Lord God Bird has proven that it still exists. Even so, this tale stuck with me, a tiny bright spot amid the disturbing news about the ever-decreasing biodiversity of our planet. It seemed as magical to me as the sighting of a unicorn or dragon. For years I knew I wanted to write a book about the thrilling possibility that a species believed extinct might have managed to survive. There are some wonderful examples of these so-called “Lazarus species” (Lazarus, in the Bible, was raised from the dead). The Bermuda Petrel, a bird believed extinct for 330 years, was found alive on small, remote islands. The Lord Howe Island stick insect, believed extinct since 1930, was rediscovered beneath a shrub on the world’s most isolated sea stack. The Monito del Monte, a marsupial believed extinct for eleven million years, was revealed in a thicket of Chilean bamboo. These are just a few from the intriguing list of thirteen Lazarus species on the Mother Nature Network site. Wikipedia also maintains a list of Lazarus species.

One thing that stands out in your story right away is how strong the rainforest is as a setting. How much research did you do to make it come alive?

Though I (sadly!) didn’t get the chance to travel to Central America for research purposes while I was writing the book, I lived in Costa Rica for two summers in high school and college, studying Spanish and doing volunteer work. As someone raised in the arid foothills of Colorado, those first encounters with the rain forest made a huge impression on me, and I drew on that stockpile of rich, quasi-magical images in writing Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green. My creation of the jungle setting got a boost when my brother and sister-in-law spent their honeymoon in Costa Rica while I was revising the book; they sent me about 200 pictures of birds, flowers, foliage, bugs, monkeys, etc. Aside from that, the Internet was helpful in terms of jogging my memory and enhancing the details.

In the rainforest, you describe an umbrella flower that blooms just in time to be a shelter for the rain. Does that exist? And can flowers really grow out of your toes, like they do for Ruby?

I wish! As far as I know, there are no umbrella flowers or toe flowers. But they’re both just believable enough …

What’s next for you?

I’m working on a collection of short stories for adults, and I have the idea for my next book for young readers, which will be set in a post-apocalyptic world.

What’s your favorite middle-grade book?

I have to confess that I adored From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler; now that I live in New York City and actually get to visit the Met, I think of that book every time I step through those doors. Other favorites include Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books. And everything by Cynthia Voigt. And Lloyd Alexander. And C.S. Lewis. And J.R.R. Tolkein. And … well, you get the idea …

To learn more about Helen and her books, check out her website and her book trailer. Leave a comment to win a copy of HERE WHERE THE SUNBEAMS ARE GREEN (US only).

Karen B. Schwartz writes humorous middle-grade novels (and tween and YA) and raises humorous middle-grade kids (one is a tween that thinks he’s YA).

 

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A new page for ravenous readers

By on November 15, 2012   /   Book Lists, For Kids, For Librarians, For Parents, For Teachers  

Has this ever happened to you? Your favorite middle-grade reader has finished reading the latest stack of books from the library.

“More!” your reader says to you. “I want more! Give me more books!”

“Fine,” you say. You’ve already gone through all the book lists and book list blog posts on our site, so you browse aimlessly through your library’s online catalog. “What kind of book do you want?”

“I like sports and I like science. I want girl power. I want it to be funny, but not too hard to read. And it can’t have any of that icky stuff we learned about in Human Growth and Development.”

 

Where do you start?

 You can start here, at our new page, What should I read next?

Although we here at From the Mixed-Up Files of Middle-Grade Authors think we have a pretty good site, there are lots more out there and we all have one goal in common–getting great books into the hands of readers. To help bring the resources of the online middle-grade community together, we’ve collected links to sites that review and categorize middle-grade books. Some are searchable, some are specialized, some are by kids, some are by librarians. Try out the sites and find the sites that are right for you. And if you have a favorite, please let us know so we can add it.

 

Jacqueline Houtman is a very slow reader, and her to-be-read pile is taking over her house. 

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4 Lessons from a Brave New World

By on November 14, 2012   /   Book Lists  

Dystopian novels are a guilty pleasure. For a few hundred pages, readers can lose themselves in a bleak landscape where humans have gone virtually extinct, or where a vindictive government regularly tosses children into a gladiatorial arena, or where most folks remain oblivious to the environmental wasteland just outside their protective city-sheltering domes–or why not all three at once? As horrific as these worlds would be to live in, they are fun for readers to explore for a while before returning to a reality that won’t become genuinely dystopian for at least a couple more election cycles.

I recently spent some time with one of the great-granddaddies of modern dystopian novels, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Actually, considering that book was first published eighty years ago, it literally might have been your great-granddaddy’s dystopian novel.

Huxley was playing against the long-established tradition of utopian novels, based in worlds so idealized and theoretical that not even an English professor could find fault in them. (As an aside, I once thought my professor had an inappropriate crush on The Republic, but it turned out to be platonic. Ha!)

Brave New World wasn’t the first novel to show the dark side of a utopia, but it was an early example and has influenced decades of dark futures that have come along ever since. For that reason alone, it’s worth reading and studying.  The more we learn about our past dark futures, the better we will be able to understand our present dark futures and prepare for our future dark futures.

Lesson 1: Coming of Age Is Even Harder in a Dystopia

A typical coming of age story involves a character who learns valuable lessons, changes and evolves, tests social boundaries, experiences inner growth, and finally finds his or her own special place in the world.  In a dystopian coming of age story, there’s an added difficulty. How do you find a special place in a world that’s completely dysfunctional? Would you even want to?

To answer this challenge, authors have come up with a number of alternatives. One popular approach is for the main character to develop so much integrity and inner fortitude that it’s the rest of the world that ends up changing, evolving, and coming of age to accommodate them. The characters are brave, the world is new, so why wouldn’t this “brave new world” outcome appear in a book calling itself Brave New World? I spent the entire book wondering how Huxley would pull off the inevitable downfall and transformation of his dystopia. I kept wondering up until the very last page when–if a book from 1932 gets a spoiler warning, consider yourself warned–our coming of age character kills himself, and the horrific future world of 26th Century London continues unchanged. Unless that part is handled in the sequel, in which case don’t spoil it for me!

Which leads us to…

Lesson 2: Genre Tropes Evolve Over Time

This is probably obvious to everyone else, but I lost sight of it for a while. Most dystopian fiction I’ve read lately has been new and modern, so going back toward the root of the tree really helped me to get a better appreciation for the branches and leaves. While reading Brave New World, I was reminded of George Orwell’s 1984 and other books that bridge the gap and form the trend lines between then and now.

I’d studied 1984 in high school and college, like everyone else in the world, but not in any kind of context. Probably because the professors thought it would seem more impressive and literary if we thought the book descended from the clouds directly into Orwell’s brain. It would have been so much more interesting to see how much 1949’s 1984 was inspired by 1932’s Brave New World, which was itself inspired by something else I’ll have to read someday (We by Yevgeny Zamyatin from 1921, if you’re keeping score at home).

Brave New World is a 1930s dystopia that ends with a character escaping into death. 1984 is a 1940s dystopia that ends with the main character staying alive but surrendering his soul to Big Brother, at least for the time being. A 1950s dystopia, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, ends with the character finding a hopeful solution to someday fight back against his society. Finally the “brave new transformative world” ending becomes common in the 1960s, as in the Tripods trilogy by John Christopher and Logan’s Run by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. Then came decades of further refinement, and the rest is all those branches and leaves I was talking about.

Lesson 3: Dystopias Are Meant for the Ages They Are Written In

Aside from the ending, I was also surprised that this proto-dystopia didn’t anticipate our familiar modern anxieties. The 26th Century world of Brave New World suffered no environmental problems, climate change, religious conflict, nuclear war, mutated supergerms, zombies, killer robots, or technological singularities. Instead, Brave New World reflects the anxieties of the early 1930s: the rise of fascism, the spread of mass production, social conditioning, and the eugenics practiced before the discovery of DNA.

One world war later, we have 1984 with its all-powerful combination of propaganda and perpetual global conflict (“We were always at war with Oceania… We were never at war with Eurasia…”). Oh, and television! There hadn’t been any TVs in Huxley’s 1932 book because there hadn’t been any TVs in 1932, but Orwell sure put them to good use. During the Cold War came dystopias set in radioactive post-nuclear hellscapes, and zombies to represent communism. (Including some where survivors gather in a shopping mall that represents capitalism. What, you thought it was just about monsters?)

To have a successful dystopia, you need to tap into the worries of the day, preferably fresh ones that haven’t been tackled before. Recently, Suzanne Collins successfully combined the Patriot Act with reality TV to create The Hunger Games. Looking ahead, there have to be some even fresher fears on the horizon.

And finally…

Lesson 4: Take Technology Into Account

There’s a device described in Brave New World that functions something like a cell phone, except that it’s ridiculously clunky and only journalists seem to use them. The battery is worn on a belt holster, the transmitter is located in an aluminum stovepipe hat, and a microphone pops out of the hat and dangles in front of the user’s face when in use. It sounds exactly like the car phones we had back in the 1980s! Unfortunately, this is for a story set in 2540.

A common problem in science fiction is that technology outpaces speculation. Captain Kirk’s communicator that seemed so far-futuristic in 1967 is like a toy compared to my early-2012-and-already-obsolete smartphone. Three-year-olds are walking around today with beeping, flashing devices that sing songs and play videos. Captain Kirk would have been amazed!

But having a dystopia can actually solve this problem. In Brave New World, science is controlled by the government. Technological innovation and labor-saving devices are withheld, unless they serve to increase the stability of society. R&D is channeled into better human cloning, subconscious conditioning, better drugs, and distracting sports. In a world such as this, we can assume that smartphones have been considered and rejected in favor of stovepipe hats with dangly bits.  Because the technology is chosen by the society to fit the society, the book holds up internally and remains fairly immune to tech changes even after eighty years. My 2007 book with the click-wheel iPod, on the other hand, not so much.

Those are my lessons from this book. Now go forth and create some brave new worlds of your own!

Greg R. Fishbone is the author of the “Galaxy Games” series of midgrade sports and sci-fi from Tu Books at Lee & Low Books. Visit him at http://gfishbone.com.

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