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As a reader and frequent book store browser, I devote a degree of judgment towards book covers while downing an uppity-caffeinated beverage. When picking up an unfamiliar title, the presentation of a book is as important as appearing professional for a job interview. The book’s cover art introduces the reader to the story. Elements infused within the design, illustration, or photography heavily contribute towards the overall presentation and appeal. In fact, there are many times when a reader cannot recall the title or author, but is able to conjure a description of its cover. Once in a while, roles reverse and the consumer influences the cover. These titles become branded by the cover art due to momentous success i.e. Eragon, Twilight, Harry Potter. However, most titles receive a new makeover as the book transforms from hardcover to paperback to reprints, thereby creating a high expectation towards packaging.
Book cover art is a fine art as it attempts to attract its targeted audience. Those of us connected to the bookworld have a high regard for the efforts invested in printing high quality book covers, especially when we are booktalking titles to teens. Attractive and varied covers help us entice readers to expand their reading preferences. For publishers to package two different products with the same illustrations gives the impression of an impetuous company undermining current ethical standards. Whether copyright has been breached is not the immediate issue, rather consumers expect that their personal dollars are purchasing a unique product. To hinder the dystopian possibility that one day there may be several different titles displayed next to each other featuring the same cover art, please voice your opinions in the comments.
 How does one celebrate the life, or rather death, of the undead? With the popularity of series such as Twilight, Vampire Kisses and Blue Bloods, throwing a vampire party is a great way to get teens excited about reading. But where to begin? In my mind, every successful party includes cake. And what better variety of cake to serve at a party devoted to blood suckers than red velvet? Even if you don’t have the budget to purchase a bakery cake, you can find red velvet cake mixes and mix it up yourself. If you are ambitious, there is a recipe in the February 2008 issue of Shojo Beat for a Vampire Knight Valentine’s cake that looks like it would be yummy anytime of year. Another option would be making cupcakes and then allowing each teen to decorate as they see fit with darkly colored sprinkles or icing. If you have access to Halloween cookie cutters, you could also decorate cookies in the shapes of coffins, tombstones, bats, or spider webs.
Music can also contribute to the success of a party. Stephenie Meyer has already done a lot of the work for us when it comes to selecting music for a vampire themed party. Begin with the playlists that can be found on her site and expand from there with additional music from those bands. The website allmusic.com can help you find other artists. Simply search for an artist and it will give you their influences, followers, and similar acts. Songs such as “Vampires Will Never Hurt You” and “Early Sunsets Over Monroeville” by My Chemical Romance and “Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)” by Concrete Blonde add an appropriately ghoulish atmosphere. Try having teens come up with their own vampy mix to share.
 A few simple activities can tie the whole thing together. You could either make a quiz on general vampire lore or create separate quizzes for individual books, using each book as a prize. The most fun thing for the teens who are into vampires, is to make them a vampire for a day. Your local community theatre might have a volunteer who would be willing to come in and transform them into vampires. We had a staff member give people vampire bites on the neck using eye shadow and liner in shades of red, brown, blue and purple for appropriate bruising around the wound.
In my community, the majority of teens who love vampire stories tend to feel like they are alone in their interests. They are teens on the fringe, sometimes into the Goth and Emo scenes. Celebrating one of their passions can show them that they are not as alone as they think, and give them the chance to be outsiders together.
Opening Photo: be careful / Originally uploaded by girl interrupted. jess
Posted by Sarah Granville
My Alt. Teen Services post is a day late. I guess that’s an improvement on last month when it was a week late. I’m going to blame it on indecisiveness this time. I spent most of yesterday trying to come up with a good topic. There’s so much to think about and talk about these days when it comes to teen services, so much in the world impacting a teenagers life and so many librarians trying to figure out the best way to help them. I was pretty much set on writing about how neat it would be to have a Teen Yoga program at a library, however, while crunching on my Grape Nuts early yesterday morning my husband thoughtfully reminded me that November 11th was Veterans Day, something which had completely passed me by. My husband has good reason to be paying close attention to this particular holiday. His nineteen year old cousin was killed a mere three days into the invasion of Baghdad in April of 2003. We were newly weds at the time, young adults ourselves and it was the first time I’d ever seen him cry. Suddenly a yoga program seemed like a very trivial topic.
It makes me twitch to think about all the issues teens have to deal with these days but the one that leaves me most anxious, the one that makes me gnaw on my hang nails and yank at my tangled hair in the morning, is the depressing situation in the Middle East. The past few years has revealed a lot of dishonesty in our government. I’m not here to argue over those issues. I’m here to try and put myself in the shoes of a sixteen year old and imagine what it must feel like to be at the edge of my childhood in a world where you seemingly can’t trust anyone, or look to anyone for honest leadership. All the facts and the falseness, all the broken promises, I wonder, how do they make sense of it all? How does it effect them? Do they even care?
Of course they do. They may not keep up with the news in the traditional way but they do keep up and they do care.
I’m currently reading The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot by Naomi Wolf. Now before you say “Whoa, maybe not such an objective middle-way read”, know that I’m only on page twenty and don’t have much of an opinion on the book other than that it’s helping me learn a lot of WWII history that I didn’t know. There is, however, a quote I read which has been stubbornly sitting at the tip of my brain all weekend. In an attempt to express how fragile our civil liberties are Wolf uses an interesting pendulum analogy:
“Up until now, the basic checks and balances established by the Founders have functioned so well that the pendulum has always managed to swing back. It’s very success has made us lazy. We trust it too much, without looking at what a pendulum requires in order to function; the stable framework that allows movement; space in which to move; that is liberty.”
I read the part about being “lazy” and was reminded of another quote that I read recently in Julian Aiken’s article from American Libraries, Outdated and Irrelevent? Rethinking the Library Bill of Rights. The results of the survey he reviewed indicated that “more than half of our public libraries are not conforming to Article V of the Library Bill of Rights“. Apparently this particular part of our job has simply turned into a cumbersome battle that most librarians are “no longer interested in fighting.” I find something downright scary about “rethinking” the Library Bill of Rights and remolding it to better fit the needs of busy librarians who are unwilling to spend the time explaining Article V to busy working parents.
So, where am I going with this? I’m not entirely sure, this is definitely a very randomly thought out post. Am I saying that we’ve become lazy? I don’t know. I’m not sure you can quantify laziness so lets not even use that word. Maybe we’ve become too cautious. Tensions are high in this country, people are on fire with opinion, who can blame anyone for choosing to remain reticent in the wake of controversy or for choosing precaution over advocacy if it means keeping relations in a community peaceful, not to mention helping to avoid heated disagreements with friends and peers. That route is easier, less stress on everyone, that’s for sure. But I have to admit, the repercussions of that kind of cautious action scares the bejezus out of me. Is it enough that we keep gay/lesbian fiction on our library shelves, yet overlook doing programs or displays to promote those books because we’re afraid of upsetting people? How many of us shy away from doing teen programs that may involve political or religious topics because we worry it might lead to inflammatory discussion or upset parents? I think Teen Librarians need to be careful about choosing the quiet stay out of trouble lets lay low and walk the path of least resistance so we can appeal to everyone route. You may think your appealing to everyone that way but instead you end up isolating your services to a quiet reading room and I say quiet because, well, eventually no one will be there. They’ll be here instead.
I think Younker had it right when he described teen services as “the illegitimate child of public libraries”. It’s unfortunate but true and because of it teen librarians have to expect controversy while on job. They have to anticipate these moments be willing to face them and engaged in them productively. Most importantly, we shouldn’t be afraid to let teens engage in disagreement. When holding a book discussion, don’t gloss over hot topics because you’re worried it may pinch a nerve and start an argument. If you do, you may be missing out on a perfect opportunity for teens to express themselves. Teens love to express their opinion. Let them. While you’re at it let them know what it means to be able to live somewhere where they are able to express their opinion without persecution. Then let them know how fragile those rights are and how easily they can be stripped away from them. Using library services to empower our youth is one way we can help maintain the checks and balances in our society.
We’ve never had a great deal of success with teen book clubs at our library. Nowadays we usually just try to incorporate books into whatever program we’re doing at the time. So I was paying very close attention to the YALSA BOOK listserve last week which was practically on fire with all sorts of creative ideas for book clubs. One in particular caught my eye, the Missing Ending Book Club.
The Missing Ending Book Club idea originated with the Weld County Library in Greely, Colorado. After viewing their presentation at a conference, Janet Good of North Branch Summit County Library was insipired enough to start her own. Janet explained the concept of the book club in a recent write-up in her local newspaper:
“Each reader gets a book with a twist: the final pages stapled off! At club meetings, readers tell how they would end the story, and then find out the author’s take. Besides the joy of exercising his or her creativity, the reader with the best guess gets a prize.”
Janet also includes related snacks and crafts during the program, depending on what book is being read. When their club read The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp by Rick Yancey, the groups craft was to make a sort of self-made coat of arms shield. The snack was mini corn dogs and Coke because that was the first meal the main character Alfred introduced the knight to in the book. She also hands out candy to anyone who guesses the ending of the book correctly. ”I used gold-wrapped chocolate coins that meeting. The prize for the best guess as to the ending of the story was a DVD of Camelot.”
The model of the Missing Ending Book Club can be adapted using a variety of different books. Mysterious would obviously be the easiest genre but any book with a twist at the end will do. If you want to make the program more for older teens then maybe something like What happened to Cass McBride by Gail Giles or Tyrell by Coe Booth would work. At any rate, it’s a fantastic way to jazz up a book club and help teens get a little more excited about reading.
For more information about creating successful teen book clubs, try The Teen Centered Book Club: Readers into Leaders by Bonnie Kunzel and Constance Hardesty.
*The information/quotes about the Missing Ending Book Club at the North Branch Summit Library was taken from Janet Good’s email to the YALSA listserve, with her permission. Thank you Janet. :-)
Books for the Beast
Books for the Beast is a conference at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore on Saturday, October 27. While I look forward to attending, I am disappointed by the required reading. The literature is intended to be the best that YA can offer, but most of the books are terrible or mediocre. I know there are lots of great new young adult books (Twisted, Un Lun Dun, Alabama Moon, Strays, Beige, and An Abundance of Catherines are just a few that I’ve recently read and can remember.) Why haven’t these been chosen? Why are we saddled with garbage like Say it Ain’t So, What Happened to Cass McBride, Jason and Kyra, and Sleeping Freshmen Don’t Lie? Does anyone know how the literature is selected? I suspect it is related to the holdings at the hosting library. It is sad that as young adult literature is receiving positive attention for its relevance and literary merit—comix in particular— a significant conference seems to select such insignificant and poorly constructed novels.
Each participant reads from two of the genres (ten books). The genres include Science Fiction/Fantasy, Historical Fiction, Multicultural, Non-Fiction, Real Life, and Suspense/Horror. My chosen genres are Multicultural and Real Life and I have read a few other choices as well. I have read fourteen of the thirty books and found only a few worthy of positive notice. Cecil Castellucci’s Boy Proof, Sharon Flake’s Who Am I Without Him: Short Stories about Girls and the Boys in Their Lives, Siena Cherson Siegel’s graphic memoir To Dance, and of course Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese are complex, eclectic, and arresting works that transcend demographic marketing.
One of the interesting aspects of the conference is that teens are invited to attend for free and share their perspectives and perceptions on this body of literature written for them. Although YA novels have a clear intended audience, the opinions of young readers tend to be overlooked and discounted in favor of expert judgment. I am looking forward to a small shake-up in the hierarchy.
The conference runs from 9:00-4:00 at the Roland Park Country School, 5204 Roland Avenue, Baltimore, 21210. Speakers include author Gail Giles and Mark Siegel, graphic novel artist and editor. For more information, email beast@prattlibrary.org, call 410-396-5356, or visit the Enoch Pratt Free Library’s webpage
It’s been a while since I have had the time to post, but there have been a number of things that I have discovered about recently, which I would like to share just in case some of you don’t know about them.
The first of these is the Summer Blog Blast Tour, which was organized by Colleen Mondor, the brainchild of Chasing Ray. This tour consists of a number of interviews with assorted children’s and YA authors, which will take place all week on a variety of lit blogs. It kicked off on Sunday with an interview of Gene Yang, the author of American Born Chinese, on Finding Wonderland: The Writing YA Weblog. It will go throughout this whole week and will feature many authors including a few of my favorites like Chris Crutcher, Kazu Kibuishi, and Brent Hartinger. I would highly recommend going over to Chasing Ray for a peek at the schedule to see what authors you like and where you can find their interviews. Also, thanks to Colleen for putting all this together.
 Next I need to mention a phenomenon that I am sure most of you are already aware of, but I just discovered it a few weeks ago so I feel the need to mention it. The phenomenon that I speak of is called Brotherhood 2.0. This is a video blog run by John Green, author of Looking for Alaska, and his brother Hank Green who is the creator of a great environmental technology blog called Ecogeek. The purpose of this vlog is for the brothers Green to avoid textual communication for the entire year and to therefore communicate largely by use of these videos. Every week day there is a new entry and they are all quite hilarious. They also give an interesting view into the lives of these two brothers. This is especially interesting for YA librarians since John is an award winning YA author. You actually get to see some intimate moments detailing his experiences in the world of YA lit. The site has developed an extremely large audience, so I am assuming that many of you are already regular viewers, but if you aren’t you should give it a look. You won’t be disappointed. I would however suggest starting with the early archives from the first week or two just so you have an idea of what the site is about.
“The Cute Book” by Aranzi Aronzo
Hardcover = $12.95 ISBN=9781932234688
Supplies Needed: Photo-copied patterns from “The Cute Book”, various colors of felt, embroidery thread, needles, Tacky glue, a couple of spools of thread, scissors, cotton stuffing
The steps in this craft program may appear easy, but I’ll caution that you’ll need a group of teens who are determined and patient to see this project through to its completion. The animal forms are very small (approx 3″) and those who aren’t easily discouraged will find this activity rewarding. I would suggest making an animal before your program, so that you’ll have an idea of the areas in which teens may need help. In many cases, teens will find their own solutions to sewing situations and will not require assistance. However, there are teens who have never touched a needle in their life and may need guidance. For beginners, I suggest using the simpler patterns of the panda, bear, rabbit, and kitty. The teens who came to this program were very crafty and ranged between ages 12-18. They also enjoyed the idea that during their next creations they might alter their patterns to resemble anime characters, such as Kuro Neko from the series Trigun or Yuki and Kyo from the series Fruits Basket. Don’t worry; if you get a couple of teens who aren’t down with cute, there are patterns to construct a bad guy, kidnapper, and liar.
  
Simple Steps
One: Make supplies available and briefly explain the construction process. Two: Teens cut out patterns and animal pieces. Three: Teens sew on faces and other body parts and stuff bodies. TADA! All Done.
Other titles to consider having available for checkout:
Speaking of things cute and cats, here’s a random idea for leaving ‘MySpace Comments’:
A couple of weeks ago, a friend sent me these links in an email: ICanHasCheezburger and Cute Overload!;) Since then, I’ve been randomly inserting cat pics onto my teen patron’s MySpace comments. This way of communicating usually goes well with teens who already have animal pictures on their MySpace page. Not only do they find the pics funny but many will find humor in the slang accompanying the pics (ex. bird flavr watr hitz da spot). 
A Stuff on My Pet Program Idea is Born
While closing at bn, I came across this book on display titled “Stuff on My Cat: The Book”. As a cat adorer/adorner myself, I put work on pause and flipped through the 160 paged paperback photo collection. These poor and hapless sleeping cats with their devious cat owners have created a fun and friendly E (everyone) rated activity. Whereupon “stuff” is placed upon the cat unawares and “stuff” includes: food, toys, gadgets, clothing, creatures, water, and other misc. items. A photo is taken of the debacle and then submitted. As an instant fan seeking more “Stuff on My Cat” photos to feed my fix, I went home to find web goodies. Horray! There is a Stuff on My Cat website that let’s everyone in on the fun. That is, any schmoe who owns a cat, a digital camera, internet access, and a shred of imagination.
So now I’m thinking “I HAVE to do this with the library teens!” I could get all of my adult friends to help out by taking pics before the contest to use for promoting the program. Only we’ll open the contest to include all pets. And we’ll do it in the winter, perhaps during its tail end, when teens are experiencing the peaks of boredom. And if they don’t have a camera, we will purchase a disposable and allow two pics per teen. And for that month we could frame the pics with some colored paper and print off pet names in wonderful and crazy fonts. Then we could pin them up in the hallway for ALL TO SEE! Hurrah! It will be a wonderful program. Marvelous! Yessa! Now I just need to find out if the teens are interested. I’ve been high-fiving myself over this fun program idea and thought I’d share this for others to steal.
Teen Publishers are using new technologies to promote their products to the tech-savvy readers. Penguin and HarperTeen each launched a summer read web sites that features podcast author chats among other interactive web features.
Librarians might be interested in listening to these podcasts in order to connect with the authors and build upon existing relationships with teen literature. Why not listen to the podcasts to pick-up some interesting factoids that can be used as literature conversation pieces with teens?
Plug into Summer Reading: Author Playlist
This summer read web site by the Penguin group features a music playlist to accompany each novel. The site is equipped with podcasts of authors chatting about characters, music, and the ideas behind the stories.
Listen to:
The Sweet and Sassy Summer of Girls Fiction Podcast
HarperTeen also offers a summer read website with digital author content. From the web site, “Get the inside scoop on 15 fabulous writers of Girls Fiction all summer long. Hear exclusive audio from bestselling authors like Meg Cabot, Louise Rennison, Rachel Vail, Melissa De la Cruz, Jodi Lynn Anderson, and more!”
Listen to:
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