We have a house guest this week.

This is  ‘s African hedgehog, Hermione.  Our Dumbo rats, Chester and Guy, are being kind enough to share their basement rec room with her this week so daughter can babysit while Marjorie is away.  Don’t worry…they have separate cages, though we did take them out to let them sniff one another tonight.  I imagine it went something like this:

Hermione:  Rats? I’m sleeping in a room with rats?

Guy: Bonjour! (Guy is French Canadian…We bought him from a breeder in Montreal.)  Do you live here now? You’re cute, but you’re prickly.

Chester: Are there any more carrots?

1. It looks like we may (fingers crossed) be going to Costa Rica for a week this summer. 

I have wanted to visit a true tropical rain forest for as long as I’ve known they existed, so I’m downright giddy about this.  In addition to spending some time in the Sarapiqui River area, we’re thinking about a couple days near the Arenal Volcano.  If you’ve been to either of those areas, I’d love to hear a little about where you stayed & what you thought.

2. I hit the 30,000 word mark on my new MG novel this week and can see the end from here.  It’s a distant and still-hazy end, but still…it’s in sight.

3. We are halfway through our latest read-aloud at the Messner house and love this book:

Debut author Jaqueline West has won our hearts with an old house, funny mathematicians, talking cats, enchanted spectacles, and magical paintings. What’s not to love?  I’ve been reading from the ARC I picked up at a convention this spring, but THE SHADOWS: THE BOOKS OF ELSEWHERE will be released soon.  It’s due out June 15th from Dial.

4. I am not feeling particularly good about this.

The Common Core Standards for education released this week leave a lot to be desired, in the opinion of this teacher and parent. While there are certainly some fine and important goals laid out — and you can read all about them here — what concerns me most is what’s missing. There is nothing, in all the many pages and bullet items, about creating an appreciation for books and stories, about writing in order to understand who we are and how we fit into the world around us, and understanding the power of language to make that world better.  Call me crazy, but I think that stuff is important. It’s why I am an English teacher. (Contrary to popular belief, most of us are not in it for the comma rules.)  Also missing on the list of examples of literature for grades 6-8 is any book published after 1976. The concept of revision, happily, is included in the standards, and I hope the authors of this document take that idea to heart and do some revising of their own.  We need to do better than this.

5. Since I don’t believe on ending on a negative note…it is almost summer, and that is a happy note indeed. As much as I love my classroom and students, I am also quite fond of those two months of reading, writing, traveling, hiking, kayaking, and family breakfasts on the deck. Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Yesterday, I signed a big stack of book plates and mailed them off to New Hampshire for an exciting reason.

THE BRILLIANT FALL OF GIANNA Z. has been named to the Great Stone Face Award list for 2010-2011!

That’s New Hampshire’s children’s choice award for kids in grades 4-6.  It’s named after a rock formation that actually collapsed back in 2003.  Here’s a before-and-after image.

http://www.lessignets.com/signetsdiane/calendrier/images/mai/3/Old_Man_of_the_Mountain_overlay_275.jpg

See the face up there? Even though the old man himself is gone, I love that the award is named after him, and I especially love that so many new readers in New Hampshire will be meeting Gianna and Zig.  You can see the full list of Great Stone Face nominees here.

So back to the book plates… Kathleen, a pretty amazing New Hampshire librarian, emailed me last week to ask if I’d help her with a tradition. At her end-of-the-year celebration, she rewards kids who have read all or almost all of the 25 Great Stone Face books for that year with a book from next year’s list. She chose GIANNA Z. to get the kids started on next year’s list and asked if I’d sign some bookplates to make the copies extra special.  (They went in the mail yesterday, Kathleen!)

And finally, a few of you asked me to post a photo of the E.B. White Read Aloud Award…which, as it turns out, doesn’t photograph all that easily because it’s actually a perfectly clear, crystal book engraved with the award and my book title.  But I tried a few options, and the photo turned out best outside.

Even on a rainy day, it makes me smile!

I think I may have been the only bookish person in the world heading to New York City on Friday of the holiday weekend, after BEA was over, but it was a great, quick trip all the same. A few quick Tuesday-morning highlights before I head off to school…

1. I got to meet with my agent, the wonderful and funny Jennifer Laughran, who did not want her picture taken. Instead, I will show you what I had for dessert at our little rendezvous.

2. My husband somehow managed to get tickets to Glee Live at Radio City Music Hall.  Even with six teenagers screaming in my ear from the seats behind us, it was fantastic – such talented performers.  "Defying Gravity" was my favorite.

3. We spent some time exploring Greenwich Village, had dinner at Lupa (order the gnocci if you go), and wandered around Washington Square Park, where many kinds of artists were enjoying the night, too.

And later on…

4. A highlight of the trip for me was meeting up with my publisher Emily Easton at the Flatiron Building, home of Walker/Bloomsbury. 

Since my family hadn’t been to the building before, Emily was kind enough to give us a tour that started with one of the slush piles. 

…continued through the editorial, publicity and marketing, art director’s offices, and the room where acquisitions meetings take place. We took a detour by the Bloomsbury/Walker bookshelves-of-awesome, which she let my kids raid…

…and ended in the boss’s office at the tip of the building, which has a picture on the wall to give you perspective…

…and a view that probably makes up for all the stress of being the boss.

My husband loved the tour, too, and was amazed at how busy and full of works-in-progress, books, and papers the offices were. His comment as we took the old elevator back down to the ground floor?  "That whole place looks like your desk."

One more thing happened on the Bloomsbury/Walker tour  – I picked up the E.B. White Award for THE BRILLIANT FALL OF GIANNA Z. that Emily accepted at the ABC dinner at BEA last week.  It’s living happily on a shelf over my desk now and is very, very shiny.  🙂

Thanks to all who visited a bunch of new bloggers to welcome them to the neighborhood at my little online block party last week!  As promised, I put everyone’s name in a drawing for an ARC of SUGAR AND ICE, but things…er…didn’t go quite as planned.

You see, when I asked my daughter what might be a fun way to do the drawing, she suggested that we let one of her pet Dumbo rats choose the winner.  So we put all the names on a blanket on the floor. 

Then we got Guy (rhymes with "tree" – he is a French-Canadian rat) out of his cage and put him down on the blanket with orders to run to whichever post-it note he liked best.

Unfortunately, Guy just milled around for several minutes and flat out refused to pick a winner. Must be he knows what nice people all the entrants are and couldn’t pick just one. So we fired Guy, put him back in his cage and got Chester out instead.  Chester took full advantage of his freedom, not to choose a winner but to dart under the couch. So once we got HIM back in the cage, we went the old names-in-a-hat route.

I know…not very original. But at least it was a fancy hat.

And the winner is…

 , please drop me an email with your mailing address, and I’ll get your ARC in the mail this week. (no thanks to Chester and Guy!)

Dear Indie Booksellers,

I have been thinking all day about what I could write that might possibly express how truly grateful I feel about THE BRILLIANT FALL OF GIANNA Z. winning the E.B. White Read Aloud Award at BEA last night.

First, I thought I’d say thanks for all that you do — for authors and teachers and librarians, for families like mine and kids like my students — every day.  You cheer for our books, help our kids grow into young adults, help our young adults find their places in the world, and make our communities stronger. I was a fan of yours long before I had a book in your stores.

Then I thought might tell you a funny story about where I was – making dinner, still dripping wet from my first lake swim of the season – when my agent called from New York to share the news. 

But the truth is, I can’t even think about this award for too long without getting tears in my eyes. Because reading aloud is a very big deal in my world.

When I was growing up, the youngest of four kids in a busy house, I was always on the lookout for someone who might want to read to me. When my parents, brothers, and sister grew weary, I’d wait in the kitchen for unsuspecting visitors.  As soon as the doorbell rang, I’d run for the bookshelf.  My parents still have photos of a preschool me, bringing piles of books to the table at their dinner parties, hoping to find a reader.

When I became a parent, reading aloud became a huge part of my life again. It doesn’t matter that everyone in our house is an independent reader now; read-aloud time is a treasured part of every day.  Curled up by the fireplace in winter. On the deck by the lake in summer.  And just before bed at night.  I have read the end of CHARLOTTE’S WEB aloud more times than I can count, and never without tears. I have read every word of all seven Harry Potter books out loud – twice – since my kids are five years apart and were ready for them at different times. And my daughter and I were reading Grace Lin’s WHERE THE MOUNTAIN MEETS THE MOON, one of the other E.B. White finalists, the week the short list was announced. I’d picked up a signed copy at Flying Pig Bookstore after Grace’s author visit, when Elizabeth and Josie told me how much I’d love it.  They were right.

In addition to writing books for kids, I teach 7^th graders. I read aloud to them almost every day.  No…they are not too old for read-alouds.  And yes…I do all the voices. We started our school year with Rebecca Stead’s WHEN YOU REACH ME. The kids voted on their next read-aloud by class, so one group listened to Ann Burg’s ALL THE BROKEN PIECES, while two more heard Nora Raleigh Baskin’s ANYTHING BUT TYPICAL and one shivered its way through Neil Gaiman’s THE GRAVEYARD BOOK.  We just finished Laurie Halse Anderson’s CHAINS as a whole team read-aloud, and by the time the last page was turned, Isabel and Curzon felt as real to my students as their classmates.

Reading aloud in the classroom holds special magic for kids who aren’t always successful in school, kids who might not have had those experiences at home. A guidance counselor stopped by my room one morning to let me know that one of my kids was having a particularly rough day and probably wouldn’t make it through class. When he arrived, I could tell he wasn’t himself, and he came up to me right away to tell me he was leaving for the study room so he wouldn’t get in trouble.

 “I can write you a pass to go if you want,” I said, “but we’re reading for most of the period because we’re at that good part. Do you want to give it a try and see how it goes?”

 He nodded and went to his seat, and I kept an eye on him as I read. I watched the story change his afternoon. I watched his hands unclench and his face relax, and watched him leave in a better place than he was when he came. And it wasn’t my doing; it was Isabel and Curzon, I think, who made him feel like things might be okay, and it was those funny British soldier wives who made him laugh.  I saw him later in the day, too, and he still seemed to be doing all right.  I wasn’t surprised.  Stories stay with us.  They nurture us, long after the reading is through.

So anyway, indie booksellers, this is my big, long way of saying thanks.  That gold sticker with the spider web means an awful lot to this reader.

 With much gratitude,

~Kate

Even though I planted them years ago, these flowers in my garden always manage to surprise me when they bloom.

Somehow, I never remember that big, bursting, blue fireworks are going to appear, and I’m always delighted.  This is a big, blue fireworks sort of post…because some ideas in life and writing show up that way, I find.

I’ve been kind of quiet about my current work-in-progress because it’s different than anything else I’ve written. It’s a new genre for me —  upper-MG dystopian — and the draft is happening faster than most.  I think that’s partly because of my excitement for the project, partly because the proposal is already with my editor, and partly because using Scrivener for planning and note-taking along the way makes things move along more quickly.

Anyway, I got to a point this weekend where the characters and the plot and the themes were all pushing me to stop for a little while and think…about science and art and where the two intersect.  Should they intersect?  And when we insist on separating the two, do we lose some of the potential for each?

Since I live with a scientist (my husband’s a meteorologist), I asked him what he thought, and his initial reaction was no…art has no place in the science of forecasting.  But what about those times when two or three meteorologists look at the exact same set of data, the exact same numbers and models, and come to different conclusions about what a storm will do?  Might some of that intuitive stuff be considered art?  (He didn’t like this idea much.)  Eventually, we got to the thought that even though there probably is an artistic element at work, scientists always feel safer discussing the numbers.

And then…I was reading a few more pages of ART AND FEAR by Bayles and Orland (thank you, all of you who recommended that recently!) and there in the middle of a paragraph about artists writing about process is a mention of Watson and Crick, the scientists who discovered the structure of DNA and kept detailed journals of their process.  Just dropped into the middle of a bunch of photographers and painters as if it were a foregone conclusion that scientists are artists, too.  Of course they are.

I am still thinking about all of this.   And have requested this book from my library….

…hoping for more fireworks.

In Ellen Wittlinger’s new middle grade novel THIS MEANS WAR, Juliet Klostermeyer is a typical bike-riding, roller skating, candy-bar-eating kind of kid, navigating the changes that always come with growing up. Her parents argue, her older sister keeps kicking her out of their shared bedroom to listen to music and talk about boys with her friend, and Juliet’s best guy friend is hanging out with new neighborhood boys instead of her.  Typical kid stuff.

But the year is 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis is looming large over Juliet’s Air Force base town, and she is afraid. In a voice that is equal parts funny and poignant, Wittlinger captured that feeling perfectly in passages like this one, when Juliet reacts to a news bulletin and speech from President Kennedy on TV:

Juliet had her legs tucked underneath her and her arms wrapped around her chest; she hadn’t moved through the whole speech. "I wanted to watch Mister Ed with Mom," she said, and then the tears began to trickle down her cheeks. It suddenly seemed as if President Kennedy and the Russians and the newscasters had all stolen something precious from her that she could never get back.

And this one…just a few pages later, when Juliet looks to her teacher for reassurance:

Juliet tried to look deep into Mrs. Funkhauser’s eyes to see if she was telling the truth about not being worried. But it was hard to tell with teachers.  They all looked like they had varnish on their faces — it was hard to see if there were any cracks underneath the shine.

(As a teacher, I particularly love that line!)

A contest between the boys and girls of the neighborhood serves as a great way to lighten the feeling of menace for a while, but even that challenge, which starts with things like running races and roller skating, escalates.  It ends up serving as a great allegory for the kind of one-upsmanship that punctuates international relations in this period of history.

Overall, THIS MEANS WAR is a funny and wonderful book that will really give middle grade readers a sense for what it was like to be a kid in October of 1962.  Highly recommended, and it would make a terrific class read-aloud. (Recommendation based on a review copy sent to me by Simon & Schuster)

Now I need to read Deb Wiles’ book COUNTDOWN, also about the Cuban Missile Crisis, which I’ve heard is terrific as well. Sounds like these two would be great paired together with some nonfiction about this period in history!