Question of the Week #2

Happy Monday and Welcome Back to the Area Wide Book Battle's second Question of the Week! We had a great first week participation and I hope you are all enjoying this year's books.

So here is this week's question...

In which book does a character's broken leg swell up so much that his boot must be cut off?

Don't forget to provide the correct title and author in your answer, and the name of your school. Also your comment will not show up until Friday.

If you have any problems leaving a comment you can email your answer to me at areawidebb@gmail.com

And the Answers Is....

Excellent participation for our first question of the week. I understand a few of you might have had some problems, and I apologize for any inconvenience you might have experienced. It does help if you follow the blog, and don't forget that the comments do not show up till Friday in order to prevent other schools from seeing your answers. 

 Question of the Week #1

In which book do neighbors help build a room without being asked?

And the Answer is....

Bull Rider by Suzanne Morgan Williams

and the winners are...

Oakville Middle

Hillsboro JH

Washington Middle

Ladue Middle

Hazelwood Central

Cross Keys Middle

Rockwood South Middle

Bernard Middle

Hixson Middle

Hazelwood Northwest Middle

Hazelwood North Middle

Congratulations to all the schools who correctly answered the question this week. Look for a new question every Monday.

2012 Question of the Week # 1

Welcome to the first Question of the Week for 2012.  

The idea behind this feature is to help all the teams competing in this year's Area Wide Book Battle to practice with sample questions from the books on the list. 

The school correctly answering the most questions will be announced and awarded a prize at this year's competition. So make sure you stop by once a week and provide your school's answer.

It's easy to  participate. Just leave a comment giving your school name, the title of the book, and the author. If you have any problems with the comments you can also email your answers to  areawidebb@gmail.com.  Be sure to leave your answer before Thursday at 11:59 PM. 
While the comments have been disable from viewing,  I will be able to see them.
 

Answers will be provided on Friday, and the schools who correctly answered the question will be announced.

This week's question is:

In which book do neighbors help build a room without being asked?

Feature Book of the Week #11 The Last Thing I Remember by Andrew Klavan

FEATURE BOOK OF THE WEEK

THE LAST THING I REMEMBER

BY

ANDREW KLAVAN

Charlie West just woke up in someone else's nightmare.
He's strapped to a chair. He's covered in blood and bruises. He hurts all over. And a strange voice outside the door just ordered his death.
The last thing he can remember, he was a normal high-school kid doing normal things--working on his homework, practicing karate, daydreaming of becoming an air force pilot, writing a pretty girl's number on his hand. How long ago was that? Where is he now? Who is he really?
And more to the point . . . how is he going to get out of this room alive? (Publisher's summary from Goodreads)

AUTHOR'S GUEST POST

What Is A Tough Guy?  

by Andrew Klavan

I am what is sometimes known as a “tough guy writer.”  This, I’m sorry to say, does not mean that I’m a tough guy who is also a writer.  It means I’m a writer who writes stories about tough guys. 

Well, okay, you may say, but what does that mean?  What is a “tough guy” exactly?  And that’s a good question, because a tough guy is not what you might think.  For instance, a tough guy is not someone who is so big or so strong that he wins every fight.  In fact, sometimes, it’s only when someone loses a fight that you find out how tough he really is!  Also, a tough guy is not someone who is never afraid.  After all, who is tougher than a guy who does what has to be done even when he is very much afraid?

So what is a tough guy?  To give an example from my books, I think Charlie West, the hero of the Homelanders series, is a tough guy. In the first book in the series, The Last Thing I Remember, Charlie goes to sleep in his own bed one night—and wakes up strapped to a chair being tortured by terrorists.  Bad news!  Charlie isn’t stronger than the terrorists—obviously, or he wouldn’t be strapped to the chair.  And Charlie isn’t fearless—he’s scared out of his mind!

But Charlie is honest and he’s determined.  He’s honest because he doesn’t kid himself about the situation.  He doesn’t say, “Oh, maybe if I’m nice to the terrorists, they’ll be nice to me.”  He knows the terrorists won’t be nice to him no matter what he does.  After all—duh!—they’re terrorists!  And he doesn’t say, “Oh, maybe if I just wait patiently someone will come and rescue me.”  Someone might rescue him—it’s possible.  But it doesn’t make much sense to wait around and find out.

So what does Charlie do?  He acts.  He tries to rescue himself.  He thinks about what he can do, what skills he has, what powers he can muster.  He thinks about the fact that he has a black belt in karate.  He thinks about the words of a famous man who once said, “Never surrender.”  He looks for any chance—no matter how small—that he can escape from this horrible situation.

And that’s what makes Charlie “tough.”  He doesn’t lie to himself; he uses whatever tools he has to do what he needs to do; and, no matter what happens, no matter how bad things look, he never, ever, ever surrenders.

People like Charlie are the kinds of heroes I like to read about, so they’re the kind of heroes I like to write about too.

And that’s why they call me a “tough guy writer.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Award winning author, screenwriter and media commentator Andrew Klavan is the author of such internationally bestselling novels as True Crime, filmed by Clint Eastwood, and Don’t Say A Word, filmed starring Michael Douglas. Andrew has been nominated for the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award five times and has won twice. His books have been translated around the world. His latest novel for adults, The Identity Man, has been praised by Nelson Demille as “fast paced, intelligent and thought-provoking; a great read!” Television and radio host Glenn Beck says “Andrew Klavan never disappoints…one of the best illustrations of the power of redemption that I’ve ever read.” His last novel Empire of Lies was about media bias in the age of terror, and topped Amazon.com’s thriller list. 

Andrew has also published a series of thrillers for young adults, The Homelanders, which follows a patriotic teenager’s battle against jihadists. The books have been optioned to be made into movies by Summit Entertainment, the team behind the mega-successful Twilight film series.

Andrew is a contributing editor to City Journal, the magazine of the Manhattan Institute. His essays and op-eds on politics, religion, movies and literature have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, The Washington Post, the LA Times, and elsewhere. His video feature, “Klavan on the Culture,” can be found at PJTV.com. Andrew is a frequent media guest on television and radio stations from coast to coast, where he is known for his quick wit, humor and commentary on politics and entertainment. 

As a screenwriter, Andrew wrote the screenplay to 1990’s A Shock to the System, which starred Michael Caine, and to 2008’s One Missed Call, which stars Ed Burns and Shannyn Sossamon. He lives in Southern California.(Author's bio from http://www.andrewklavan.com/about/)

I want to thank Andrew for taking time out of his extremely busy schedule to write such a fantastic post for the 2011/2012 Book Battle. I also hope that those of you who have read the book will read the rest of the book in the series.

Special Announcement

This will be the last Feature Book of the Week until the New Year. Also make sure that you continue to leave comments on the posts. Finally, be sure to watch in January for the beginning of the Question of the Week.  

HAPPY HOLIDAYS 

from the 

Area Wide Book Battle Committee

2011/2012 Feature Book of the Week #10Chasing Lincoln's Killer by James Swanson

FEATURE BOOK OF THE WEEK

CHASING LINCOLN'S KILLER

BY JAMES SWANSON

When actor John Wilkes Booth raced from Ford's Theatre after assassinating President Abraham Lincoln, he began a mad flight that lasted 12 days. James Swanson's Chasing Lincoln's Killer recapitulates the exciting chase through small towns and swamps by drawing on letters, manuscripts, trial transcripts, government reports, and contemporary newspaper interviews. This juvenile nonfiction hardcover displays history as it should be seen: up close and personal. (Publisher's summary from Goodreads)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

 
James L.Swanson is the Edgar Award–winning author of the New York Times bestseller Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer. In 2009 in Newsweek magazine, Patricia Cornwell named Swanson's Manhunt and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood as the two best nonfiction crime books ever.

In 2006, Entertainment Weekly magazine named Manhunt one of the ten best books of the year. Swanson has degrees in history from The University of Chicago, where he was a student of John Hope Franklin, and law from the University of California, Los Angeles. He has held a number of government and think-tank posts in Washington, D.C., including at the United States Department of Justice. He serves on the advisory council of the Ford’s Theatre Society.

His other books include the acclaimed photographic history Lincoln’s Assassins: Their Trial and Execution, as well as Chasing Lincoln’s Killer, and adaptations of Manhunt and Bloody Crimes for young readers. James L. Swanson was born on Lincoln’s birthday. (Author's bio from Harper Collins http://www.harpercollins.com/author/microsite/About.aspx?authorid=25032 )

 

 

2011/2012 Feature Book of the Week #9The Potato Chip Puzzles by Eric Berlin

FEATURE BOOK OF THE WEEK

THE POTATO CHIP PUZZLES

BY ERIC BERLIN

When puzzle addict Winston Breen and his best friends head to an all-day puzzle hunt with a $50,000 grand prize, they're pumped. But the day is not all fun and games: not only do they have a highstrung and highly competitive teacher along for the ride, but the puzzles are hard even for Winston, the other schools' teams are no joke, and someone in the contest is playing dirty in order to win. Trying to stop this mystery cheater before it's too late takes an already tough challenge to a whole other level. . . .

Packed with a variety of fun puzzles to solve, this fast-paced sequel will pull readers right into the action from start to finish. (Publisher's Summary from Goodreads)

AUTHOR GUEST POST

Sometimes people ask me how I came up with Winston Breen's name, and the truth is, I don't remember. (Honestly, I wish I knew.) Or people will ask me how I came up with all the puzzles for my books, and the answer is, it's just something I know how to do -- probably as a result of solving a million puzzles over the span of my life.

But then people ask me how I came to write books with puzzles in them, and THAT question I can answer.

I'm friends with a lot of people who, like me, love puzzles. We're all scattered around the country, and so we get to see each other only a few times a year. So when we do get together, large groups of us go out to dinner and catch up. It was at one such dinner, perhaps in 2000 or 2001, that we got to talking about all the things in our childhood that made us realize we would be lifelong puzzle people. We had all played the same video games, and we all loved patter songs like Tom Lehrer's "Elements." We were all madly addicted to Games magazine. We were all a little on the nerdy side. Or maybe more than a little.

And everybody at the table, as a child, had read the same book: "The Westing Game," by Ellen Raskin. It won the Newbery medal in 1979. It's still read and beloved by children today. And somehow -- impossibly -- I had never heard of it. This book that all my puzzle-loving friends had read, I had missed it entirely.

Well. Obviously I wasn't going to let THAT stand. So I ordered a copy the very next day, and read it as soon as it arrived.

It's a fine book. There's a reason it's considered a classic.

BUT... I was expecting something a little different. Because this book had come to me via all my puzzle friends, I thought it was going to be a mystery filled with different kinds of puzzles -- things you could solve as you read along. It's not. There's only one real puzzle in "The Westing Game." It's a doozy of a puzzle, to be sure. But it's only one.

And soon I thought: Well, I could write a mystery with lots of puzzles in it, can't I? I could write the book I had expected "Westing Game" to be! I could write the sort of book that if I had found it on a library bookshelf when I was a kid, I would have grabbed it immediately. Out of another person's hands if necessary.

That was the spark behind Winston Breen, and I'm happy to say that today's puzzle-loving kids ARE discovering him. That's why I was able to write the second book, "The Potato Chip Puzzles," and that's why a third book, "The Puzzler's Mansion," comes out in May 2012. You don't have to solve any of the puzzles as you read, of course -- if you want to skip the puzzles and enjoy the story, that's fine with me. But I'm hoping that even kids who don't like puzzles will stare at one of Winston's challenges... and have that"aha!" moment of solving satisfaction. The same kind of moment that turned me into a puzzle addict a long time ago.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eric Berlin creates puzzles for all ages, from kids to adults (his crosswords appear often in the New York Times). He is a member of the National Puzzlers' League, and enjoys creating puzzle events for schools and other groups. He lives in Milford, Connecticut, with his wife and two children. (Author bio from The Puzzling World of Winston Breen web site)

Thanks so much to Eric from participating in this year's Feature Book of the Week. Make sure you leave your comments about his guest post and about his book.

2011/2012 Feature Book of the Week #9Five Flavors of Dumb by Antony John

FEATURE BOOK OF THE WEEK

FIVE FLAVORS OF DUMB

BY

ANTONY JOHN

The Challenge: Piper has one month to get the rock band Dumb a paying gig.

The Deal: If she does it, Piper will become the band's manager and get her share of the profits.

The Catch: How can Piper possibly manage one egomaniacal pretty boy, one talentless piece of eye candy, one crush, one silent rocker, and one angry girl? And how can she do it when she's deaf?

Piper can't hear Dumb's music, but with growing self-confidence, a budding romance, and a new understanding of the decision her family made to buy a cochlear implant for her deaf baby sister, she discovers her own inner rock star and what it truly means to be a flavor of Dumb.

AUTHOR GUEST POST

AND SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT

Hey there, Book Warriors! A huge thanks to all of you for including me in your battle plans. I can’t wait to meet you on May 8^th next year! I’ll be the one who isn’t Heather Brewer :)

If you’ve been reading all the posts, you may have noticed that authors sometimes take long and winding paths to getting published. This is not unusual. It’s really not even surprising. We’re the sum of our experiences, and the more experiences we have, the more we have to draw from when we write.

But what’s just as interesting to me is that we all take different paths to becoming readers too. Some of you may have been devouring books for years, while others may only now be discovering the joys of reading. If you’re in the latter group, then you’re just like me.

When I was a middle school student in England in the 1980s, a lot of the books felt terribly similar. There was always a little (non-violent) adventure, some wholesome friendships, contented siblings, and at least one or two fluffy puppy dogs (because no English family is complete without a fluffy puppy dog, apparently). To be honest, these books didn’t exactly excite me, and so I pretty much gave up on reading altogether. I was what librarians and teachers call a “reluctant reader.” Sad, but true.

Then, when I was 13, my English teacher handed me a copy of “The Outsiders” by S. E. Hinton. It blew my mind! Suddenly I wasn’t reading about other well-adjusted English kids, I was reading about gangs in an Oklahoma high school. The language felt raw and real. Everything moved along at breakneck speed. I was hooked.

At the time, I didn’t know that Susan Hinton wrote “The Outsiders” when she was only 16 years old. She was writing from her own experience. But the key thing is that her experience was not the same as mine. “The Outsiders” removed me from my world and put me in hers. It made me view the world differently.

And that is why I read and write books. I want to constantly rethink what the world is, and what it might be. I want to see a familiar scene through the eyes of someone I’ll never be. I don’t have much in common with Piper Vaughan, the narrator of “Five Flavors of Dumb”—she’s a girl at a co-ed US high school, whereas I went to an all-boys school in England. She’s deaf and has little interest in music (at first, anyway), whereas I’m hearing and have Ph.D in music. But seeing the world through her eyes allowed me to think about music from an entirely new perspective. It taught me a lot about deafness. And it reminded me how important communication is to everyone, hearing or not.

As you read the books in the challenge, think about how they change your view of the world. And if you feel inspired to write you own book, go for it!

One last thing: If a book gets you really fired up, please tell your friends about it. If you think one of the challenge books will appeal to a friend or family member, check it out from the library and put it in their hands. Share the gift of your favorite books. Who knows—maybe you’ll change someone else’s

 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Antony John is the author of young adult novels Busted: Confessions of an Accidental Player and Five Flavors of Dumb (winner of the American Library Association’s Schneider Family Book Award). His novels Thou Shalt Not Road Trip and Elemental are forthcoming from Dial/Penguin in 2012. A native of England, he graduated from Oxford University with a degree in music, and received his Ph.D. from Duke University. Now he lives with his family in St. Louis, Missouri. Check out his website: www.antonyjohn.net. 

First, I want to thank Antony for taking time to participate in the Feature Book of the Week.  And in case you missed it in his opening comments, the Book Battle Committee is very excited that Antony  

WILL BE JOINING US THIS YEAR AT THE BOOK BATTLE!!!! 

Enjoy his book!  And Happy Thanksgiving!

2011/2012 Feature Book of the Week #8Priscilla the Great by Sybil Nelson

FEATURE BOOK OF THE WEEK

PRISCILLA THE GREAT

BY

SYBIL NELSON

Meet Priscilla Sumner, an ordinary seventh grader with extraordinary gifts. As if middle school isn’t hard enough, not only does Priscilla have to fight pimples and bullies, but genetically enhanced assassins trying to kill her and her family. Armed with wit, strength, and a genius best friend, Priscilla must defeat the Selliwood Institute, an organization dead set on turning children into killing machines.

Add an older brother annoyingly obsessed with Christina Aguilera, mischievous baby twin brothers who could scare the sin off of Satan, and parents more puzzling than a Rubik’s cube in the Bermuda triangle and expect a smoking page-turner! (Publisher's summary from Goodreads)

GUEST POST FROM SYBIL NELSON

            Hi Bookbattlers! Thanks so much for having me this year. I’m so excited for you to get to know Priscilla Sumner, the title character in my Priscilla the Great series. I’ve written a lot of books and she is by far the most fun to write. While I was writing the series, many times during the day I’d have to stop what I was doing in order to jot down something funny I could imagine Priscilla saying.

            So how did I come up with the idea for my feisty little fire-thrower? Well I started thinking about all the problems kids have when puberty comes along. I mean, what does puberty bring besides pimples and confusing hormones? So I thought how cool would it be if puberty brought awesome powers as well. But Priscilla the Great isn’t your ordinary superhero story. Even without her fire-shooting fingers, she is a riveting character. She’s addicted to superhero movies, comic books, and racing bikes down Main Street with her friend Kyle. Plus her school cafeteria has a soft serve ice cream machine which is home to the monthly seventh grade versus eighth grade Ice Cream Challenge (ICC). Imagine being able to stick your head under the nozzle of your favorite ice cream and gorge yourself while humiliating the eighth grade bullies. Awesome!

            While Priscilla is totally competitive in a tomboy kind of way, she is also completely in touch with her feminine side. A major plot point of the book is Priscilla trying to capture the attention of her crush, Spencer Callahan who barely knows she exists.

            On top of all this, Priscilla also has to deal with her quirky family: five-year-old twin brothers who like to throw frozen waffles at her for no reason at all, a sixteen-year-old brother who can’t stop singing Christina Aguilera songs, a father who looks like a professional wrestler but would rather bake cookies and a mother who has never heard of Oprah!

            I wrote Priscilla the Great while I was a high school teacher in South Carolina. I often found my inspiration for characters and situations from my students. In fact, Priscilla is a mix of two my students Ellen and Helen. It’s a complete coincidence that their names happen to rhyme. They weren’t even related. Anyway, I remember Helen would come into class every day with the craziest stories of something that happened to her. Once she shaved her armpits without shaving cream and they burned so badly that she spent the day with her hands tucked in her armpits. I haven’t used that story yet but expect it soon!

            So basically, if you haven’t already been introduced to Priscilla’s great world, be sure to check it out. Soon, she’ll most definitely be the hottest girl you know!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sybil has always had a love of books and writing. During her school years, shed choose a different author each summer and devour their complete works.  Riding public transportation from her low-income housing, she always dedicated Wednesdays to her library pursuits. 

 
Sybil also spent her time jotting down poems and stories in her beloved notebooks. She even won a full scholarship to Washington and Lee University for one of her essays. Though her scholarship was for journalism, she soon lost confidence in her writing and ended up changing her major from English and Journalism to Mathematics and Music Theory.

 
During the years after college, while working as a math teacher at Georgetown Day School, Sybil never lost her love of words. She continued to devour novels in her free time. In all of her reading however, she began to notice that the novels she enjoyed most never contained any black female characters. This observation bothered her.

 

After years noticing the role models (or lack thereof) for black girls in the media, Sybil finally decided to pick up a pen and do something about it. While working as a math teacher at Ashley Hall School in Charleston, South Carolina, finishing her masters thesis at the College of Charelston, she began writing stories poems and novels that featured strong black women. She now attends the Medical University of South Carolina pursuing her Ph.D. in Biostatistics. She continues to write and, to date, has written ten complete novels.

 

Sybil has three books published under pen name Leslie DuBois. Visit www.LeslieDuBois.com to learn more. 

A BIG thanks to Sybil Nelson for taking time out to support all you lovely book battlers. Hope you are enjoying Priscilla the Great as much as it sounds like Ms. Nelson enjoyed writing about her. Make sure you leave a comment to let her know and enter in the Comment Challenge.

Also make sure you stop by next Monday for a very

special and exciting announcement!! 

2011/2012 Feature Book of the Week #7The Bull Rider by Suzanne Morgan Williams

FEATURE BOOK OF THE WEEK

BULL RIDER 

BY SUZANNE MORGAN WILLIAMS

Cam O'Mara, grandson and younger brother of bull- riding champions, is not interested in partaking in the family sport. Cam is a skateboarder, and perfecting his tricks — frontside flips, 360s — means everything until his older brother, Ben, comes home from Iraq, paralyzed from a brain injury. 

What would make a skateboarder take a different kind of ride? And what would get him on a monstrosity of a bull named Ugly? If Cam can stay on for the requisite eight seconds, will the $15,000 prize bring hope and a future for his big brother? (Publisher's summary from Goodreads)

AUTHOR GUEST POST

Today I was at a high school and one of the students asked me “Why do you write your books?” My answer? – so people will read them. Yes, most writers love language and play with it the same way a star basketball player may practice six ways to do a layup shot. Yes, most professional writers hope to make money and almost everyone likes to be told they are special and their work is good. That just feels great. But the reason I spend a couple of years writing a book is because somewhere in that process I found the story’s heart, the thing that I’ve struggled with in my own mind, the question that I want to think about, and maybe a little bit of my answer that I want to share with readers.

When I started writing Bull Rider it was a story about a kid who wanted to be a bull rider and his mom wouldn’t let him do it. It was simple and the book had nothing to do with the story it became – the story of a family dealing with the aftermath of war. But one of the smaller characters in that first (unpublished) manuscript was Cam O’Mara’s older brother Ben. As I designed the O’Mara family, I needed Ben to be doing something, and being from a small ranching town, I figured he’d join the service as so many young men and women do. And I was writing the book during the height of the fighting in Iraq, and I had a hard time ignoring that if this brother was in the service, he’d probably be in the Middle East fighting a war. That was a really different story from the light one I’d started out to write. But that was the one that grabbed my heart. What if that brother came home injured and fundamentally changed? How would Cam handle that? So I found the heart of Bull Rider and the passion of writing this story for you.

Please know that every author of every book in your library wrote those books to be read. An unread book is like a text message that you don’t pick up or a conversation that you pretend to listen to but really blow off while you play a video game. A book that sits on a shelf doesn’t matter. But when you read a book you connect with the author. You become part of a conversation with someone you may never meet, but whose words may touch you. That’s the possibility, the promise, every time you pick up a book.

I just love knowing that you guys are reading Bull Rider. The things you think about and care about will be the basis for what happens in all of our futures. This is the absolute truth. School isn’t really about getting good grades and doing assignments – although that’s how you get through and on toward what you want to do. It’s about becoming the great people you are intended to be. Every time you read a good book, you not only (hopefully) are entertained, but you get to crawl inside someone else’s head and try on their ideas. You won’t always agree with the author or with each other, but like exercising to get better at sports, reading lots and lots of books will strengthen your own sense of who you are. As an author, a citizen, and a human being, I couldn’t hope for more than that. I’m honored that Bull Rider is on your Truman Award List, is part of the Book Battle and that, for a little while, we may share some thoughts. Enjoy.  

Suzanne Morgan Williams

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Suzanne Morgan Williams is the author of the novel Bull Rider (Margert K. McElderry, 2009) as well as eleven nonfiction books for children. Bull Rider is a Junior Library Guild Selection, is on state award lists in Texas, Nevada, Missouri, and Indiana, and received a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma City and represented the state of Nevada at the National Book Festival in Washington D.C. Suzanne’s nonfiction titles include Pinatas and Smiling Skeleton (Outstanding, Parents’ Council and Best Multicultural Book, Independent Publisher’s Book Award), The Inuit , Made in China, and the upcoming China’s Daughters (Pacific View Press 2011). Suzanne’s work takes her into classrooms and communities across the US and Canada, from Mexico to the Arctic. Visit www.suzannemorganwilliams.com

 

I want to thank Suzanne for taking the time to be a part of this year's Feature Book of the Week and writing a guest post especially for all who will be competing this years.

2011/2012 Feature Book of the Week #6 The Latte Rebellion by Sarah Jamila Stevenson

FEATURED BOOK OF THE WEEK

THE LATTE REBELLION 

BY 

SARAH JAMILA STEVENSON

Our philosophy is simple: Promote a latte-colored world! —from the Latte Rebellion Manifesto When high school senior Asha Jamison gets called a "towel head" at a pool party, the racist insult gives Asha and her best friend Carey a great money-making idea for a post-graduation trip. They'll sell T-shirts promoting the Latte Rebellion, a club that raises awareness of mixed-race students. Seemingly overnight, their "cause" goes viral and the T-shirts become a nationwide fad. As new chapters spring up from coast to coast, Asha realizes that her simple marketing plan has taken on a life of its own-and it's starting to ruin hers. Asha's once-stellar grades begin to slip, threatening her Ivy League dreams, and her friendship with Carey is hanging by a thread. And when the peaceful underground movement turns militant, Asha's school launches a disciplinary hearing.Facing expulsion, Asha must decide how much she's willing to risk for something she truly believes in. (Publisher's summary from Goodreads)

AUTHOR'S GUEST POST 

Hi Book Battlers! I'm honored to be part of this year's mayhem.

Funny thing about reading: when you sit down to get absorbed in an amazing story, that story seems like such an independent force, like it came into being fully formed and couldn't have existed any other way. Harry Potter, he of the green eyes and lightning-shaped scar, could never have been Henrietta Potter, with two Harley-riding parents and an orange mohawk, for instance. (Although, if I had written it, maybe...)

But the truth is, a story can take a lot of different forms before it sees the light of day. Some stories never manage to see the light of day at all, but the important part is to keep writing. The Latte Rebellion is my first published novel, but I wrote two-and-a-half novels and a whole bunch of short stories before I even started Latte. But it would not have been possible for me to write Latte without having written those novels and stories, without sending them out and getting rejection notes and being inspired and determined to do better next time.

Heck, I wouldn't have been able to write Latte if it weren't for EVERY bit of writing that came before. Even the really, really bad stuff, like the unfinished dystopian cyber-thriller starring a guy with a robot arm, and the angst-filled poems that made me sound like I should be put in a comfy padded room without any sharp objects. Yes, even those fashion magazines for cats that I made when I was a kid, complete with advice columns. (I'm sorry to report that I did indeed write all of those things.)

Fortunately, NONE of that made it into The Latte Rebellion. What did make it into the story, even if indirectly, was the fact that I kept on going, didn't ever give up on writing or let rejection or failure get in the way of how much I love putting words together to create stories. I stayed focused on trying to improve, trying to become a better writer. And my favorite method of trying to become a better writer is to read a lot. In fact, I think I can credit my immense, sometimes out-of-control, love of reading for the fact that I'm a writer now. 

I hadn't planned to be a writer—I thought I'd be illustrating the covers of books rather than writing the stories inside. But even though I still draw, paint, and do other artistic things, I always come back to words. I start the day with reading. (And coffee.) I read as the last thing I do before I go to bed. 

And one of the thoughts that gives me the most joy and amazement is to picture some other book addict, reading under the covers at night before bed, with MY book in their hands--my little story, The Latte Rebellion, about a girl whose moneymaking scheme spirals out of control and causes both havoc and hilarity. If that's you, sneaking in a few more minutes of your book addiction before bed, well, thanks for reading!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sarah Jamila Stevenson is a writer, artist, graphic designer, introvert, closet geek, enthusiastic eater, struggling blogger, lapsed piano player, household-chore-ignorer and occasional world traveler. Her previous lives include spelling bee nerd, suburban Southern California teenager, Berkeley art student, under appreciated temp, and humor columnist for a video game website.

Throughout said lives, she has acquired numerous skills of questionable usefulness, like intaglio printmaking and Welsh language. She lives in Northern California with her husband, who is also an artist, and two cats with astounding sleep-inducing powers.

She earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Mills College in Oakland, CA, a post-baccalaureate certificate in Printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a BA in Art Practice and Psychology from the University of California at Berkeley.

I want to thank Jamila for taking time out of her writing and blogging schedule to talk to us about reading and writing. 

Don't forget to leave a comment about the book and her post.