Archive for June, 2008

I’ve always been into realistic fiction. Fantasy used to bother me no matter what it was… until I read Twilight by Stephenie Meyers. Twilight is essentially your standard love story: Boy meets girl, girl and boy fall in love. But, of course, there’s a twist. The boy has a secret. A secret that puts the girl’s life in extreme danger at all times around him: He wants her blood. The boy is a vampire.

Honestly, if I had never read the book, and I read that description, I wouldn’t be intrigued. Vampires? What a joke. But Meyers provides so much detail that when you’re reading you think the only way she could have written the book is if she had seen the whole thing happen. In fact, there is a small truth in the previous statement. The basic idea of this book came to Meyers in a dream. On her website she describes how she “didn’t want to lose the dream,” so she wrote it down. I’m very glad she did exactly that.

Twilight is followed by New Moon, Eclipse, and the highly anticipated Breaking Dawn. Together they form the Twilight Series. This series was the talk of my high school for the last few weeks of school. Actually, New Moon won the NH Teen Reader’s Choice Award for this year. (This is a vote pooled from teens from grades 9-12.) It pulled in nearly 1/3 of all votes among a list of 13. One of the requirements for this award is that the book needs to be able to stand alone even if it is in a series, so if you don’t like having to read series, that won’t really be a problem (but I bet once you read one book, you won’t be able to help yourself from reading the others).

I highly recommend the Twilight Series by Stephenie Meyer.

Laurie Notaro found fame some years ago when she published a collection of short memoir stories bound under the title The Idiot Girls’ Action Adventure Club. Since then she has published several other memoir collections and one fiction novel. If you like humorous and conversational writing, you will adore Laurie Notaro.

My favorite collection of memoirs is titled We Thought You’d Be Prettier. In this book are tales of Notaro and her husband being attacked by baby spiders, dealing with the invasion of a field mouse and exercising sans corrective eyewear at the Y (and mistaking a group of boy scouts for a group of juvenile delinquents in the process).

Another of her books, titled Autobiography of a Fat Bride takes readers from the beginning of her engagement and through her wedding. She writes about a wedding held at a beautiful location that turned out to be right in the path of an airport’s landing strip! She also writes about the ordeals she and her fiancé went through while they searched for a person to perform the wedding ceremony.

I truly enjoy Laurie Notaro’s writing. The fact that she lives two hours down the freeway from where I live has nothing to do with my affections for her—how could it? We’ve never actually met! When I read her essays and memoirs I feel as if we are having a conversation on the phone or hanging out in a coffee shop trying to out-humor each other. Every one of her books has caused me to laugh uproariously.

This post serves just as much to promote Notaro’s previous work as it does to let you know that she has a new book coming out soon—another collection of memoirs, and I am looking forward to it immensely. What can I say? I like writing that makes me laugh and that feels accessible!

Since the Sex and the City movie opens today, this would be a great opportunity to talk about the book it is based on (Sex and the City by Candace Bushnell), but I haven’t actually read it. So, instead, I am going to talk about another series of books that has a (second) movie coming out soon: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares.

There are four books in the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series, and they tell the stories of the last four summers of childhood (or adolescence) of four best friends who have been together since before they were born. Truly! Their mothers met in an aerobics class for pregnant women. The first book tells the story of the summer before their junior year of high school—the first summer they each will be headed in different directions. The second book tells the story of the next summer, the third the summer after the second—you get the idea.

Without giving too much of the individual plots away—these books are written so well that you will feel as if you are reading about you and your friends’ late teen/early adulthood years. The characters are real and easy to relate to and it is refreshing to read a book for Young Adults that doesn’t make the teenagers sound old before their time. Ann Brashares doesn’t try to use “teenage slang” or any other devices to prove that she understands how teenagers talk. In fact, while you read the first book, you get the distinct impression that the characters are based on people in Brashares’ own life.

It would be easy to write these books off as “fluff”, but they aren’t. These are poignant coming of age novels that tell the story of four very real young women and how each comes into her own.