TGIF Impressions!

Happy Friday (finally)!



How good is this guy? It doesn't seem real. Credit to Stephen Duncan for finding this and sharing it on Facebook.

Susan Quinn at Project Mayhem

I'm hosting my dear friend and critique partner Susan Kaye Quinn over at Project Middle Grade Mayhem today.

Did you know she was an actual Rocket Scientist?

You did? I guess that makes sense. She's even more famous than me.

Anyway, please stop by, and check out her great guest post about her new Middle Grade Novel, FAERY SWAP, and about Warrior Faeries and Math Magick. In it, Susan shares the book trailer, and an awesome virtual author visit video she made, in which she shares a lot about her scientist and engineer past, and how the magic of mathematics inspired her to write FAERY SWAP.

Blogging Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith Finale

I just finished my second read through of GRASSHOPPER JUNGLE, my favorite YA novel ever. I finished it in the bathroom at work, where I had to nab some toilet paper to dab at my eyes before walking back out to my desk like a little bitch.

The ending is beautiful and poetic and perfect.

The parts I finished were called: NEVER LOOK FOR ICE CREAM IN A SPERM FREEZER • A REAL CONCRETE IOWA THINKER • NIGHTTIME IN EDEN • THE FINALE OF SEEM • THE SUNSHINE BORES THE DAYLIGHTS OUT OF ME • THE RIGHT KIND OF CIGARETTES TO SMOKE JUST BEFORE YOU KILL SOMETHING • THERE ARE NO CUP-O-NOODLES IN EDEN • RAT BOYS FROM MARS, AND AN UNFORTUNATE INCIDENT INVOLVING AN INFLATABLE WHALE • THE BATTLE OF THE DEL VISTA ARMS • THE END OF THE WORLD • PICTURES OF ROBBY AND SHANN • THE INTERGALACTIC BUG COPS • ENOLA GAY AND BEAU BARTON'S BONER • THE BATTLE OF KELSEY CREEK BRIDGE • GREAT BIG JAR • [REDACTED]

The greatest line I've possibly ever read in any novel comes from the part titled THE FINALE OF SEEM, which (the part title, not the line) is partially paraphrased from a real dynamo of an Iowan rhyming poem, The Emperor of Ice-Cream, by Wallace Stevens.

The line is:

"It is the strangest machine: pencil and paper, paint and wall; medium, surface, and man. The machine stitches all roads into one, weaves every life together, everything."

In case you can't figure out what's going on here (it would be difficult without the context of the book, I'm sure) what Smith (or really Austin, but it's meta) is describing here is the matrix of story. The machine, the codex, the method, the form, the idea, the need for story.

And he's describing it in a breathtakingly beautiful manner, don't you think? I certainly do.

From painting in blood and berry juice on the walls of caves to publishing bits and bytes onto little plastic digital decoders, man has always needed story. Story comforts us in the night. Story prepares us for danger. Story heals wounds. Story makes us fall in love, forgive, hope, dream, fight and fuck, and laugh and cry, and live and die with meaning.

Austin Szerba understands story. He knows that everything is connected. Austin records history. He sees that it mostly repeats itself, except for getting dumber and dumber. Austin tells the truth, and he realizes that the truth is all we need.

I hope you enjoyed this series. I certainly enjoyed writing it, even if the best part was just reading the book in a different manner than I did the first time, and thinking about it as deeply as the hectic bullshit of my life allowed me to.

The winner of a brand new hardcover copy of this book was Michael Offut, so please email me your address when you see this, Mike. As for the winner of the other copy and the t-shirt from Amy's giveaway during the tour, I believe she will be contacting you through whatever address you entered into the Rafflecopter.

I probably won't be blogging for a little while now, so take care of yourselves.

Blogging Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith Part 10

This will probably be my second to last post in this series. I am almost finished with the book. Since my last post, I've read these parts: ROBBY THE THEOLOGIAN • SATAN AND THE PASTOR • SERIAL KILLER USA • LOOKING FOR WIGGLES • CONCERNING THE BISON, AND FREE WILL • POPULATION EXPLOSION • EVERYTHING A GUY COULD NEED, AND THE TWO BEST ROCK ALBUMS EVER MADE • THE BLOOD OF GOD • WANDA MAE'S PINK BOWLING BALL • RULES ARE RULES, BUT THE BRAIN ROOM IS NOT PARTICULARLY BRAINY

I didn't write down any great lines from this part of the book. Not because there aren't any (there are), but maybe because at this point the story is moving forward at such breakneck speed, and so much is happening, and so much is falling apart around Ealing, Iowa, I just didn't have any single lines stick in my mind.

Grasshopper Jungle Release Tour and Review

Title: GRASSHOPPER JUNGLE

Author: Andrew Smith

Genre: Fiction | YA | LBGT

Release Date: 2/11/14

Sixteen-year-old Austin Szerba interweaves the story of his Polish legacy with the story of how he and his best friend , Robby, brought about the end of humanity and the rise of an army of unstoppable, six-foot tall praying mantises in small-town Iowa.
To make matters worse, Austin's hormones are totally oblivious; they don't care that the world is in utter chaos: Austin is in love with his girlfriend, Shann, but remains confused about his sexual orientation. He is stewing in a self-professed constant state of maximum horniness, directed at both Robby and Shann.

Ultimately, it is up to Austin to save the world and propagate the species in this sci-fright journey of survival, sex, and the complex realities of the human condition.

B&N  | IndieBound | Goodreads  | Amazon

This is the truth. This is history.
It’s the end of the world. And nobody knows anything about it.
You know what I mean.

February 3rd – The Midnight Garden

February 3rd – The Story Siren

February 4th – Good Choice Reading

February 4th ^– Bookish

February 5th – I Read Banned Books

February 5th – Jenna Does Books

February 6th – Bibliophilia, Please

February 6th – Escaping One Book At A Time

February 7th – Scott Reads It

February 7th – Live to Read

February 10^{th –} Alice Marvels

February 10^{th –} The Society

February 11^{th –} Lexi Swoons

February 11^{th –} A Reader of Fictions

February 12^{th –} Roof Beam Reader

February 12^{th –} Forever Young Adult

February 13^{th –} The Compulsive Reader

February 13^{th –} Books and Bling

February 14^{th –} Book Chic Club

February 14^{th –} The QQQE

February 17^{th –} JeanBookNerd

February 17^{th –} Ticket to Anywhere

February 18^{th –} Sleep Eat Read Books

February 18^{th –} Read Now Sleep Later

February 19^{th –} Anna Reads

February 19^{th –} Word Spelunking

February 20^{th –} Books With Bite

February 20^{th –} What A Nerd Girl Says

February 21^{st –} Wastepaper Prose

February 21^{st –} LRB – Guest

February 24^{th –} We Are Word Nerds

February 24^{th –} Cabin Goddess

February 25^{th –} Ex Libris

February 25^{th –} Cari's Book Blog

February 25^{th –} A Good Addiction

February 26^{th –} YA Reads

February 26^{th –} The Young Folks

February 27^{th –} Novel Thoughts

February 27^{th –} Fangirlish

February 28^{th –} Once Upon a Twilight

February 28^{th –} Naughty Book Kitties

Andrew Smith is the award-winning author of several Young Adult novels, including the critically acclaimed Winger (Starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Booklist, and Shelf Awareness—an Amazon “Best of the Year”) and The Marbury Lens (A YALSA BFYA, and Starred reviews and Best of the Year in both Publishers Weekly and Booklist).

He is a native-born Californian who spent most of his formative years traveling the world. His university studies focused on Political Science, Journalism, and Literature. He has published numerous short stories and articles. Grasshopper Jungle, coming February 11, 2014, is his seventh novel. He lives in Southern California.

Twitter | Facebook | GR | Website

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Thanks so much to Amy and Kriss (and anyone else involved) who made this gorgeous tour look the way it looks, and for all the other hard work involved. GRASSHOPPER JUNGLE is quite literally my favorite young adult novel, and it's also really pushing the limits toward my all time favorite book. But that's not what we're here for.

We're here for an overall review (and a giveaway, obviously), so maybe I better get to that, eh? I know probably none of you have been reading my series of responding to the book as I re-read it, section by section, but that doesn't really matter. That's an entirely different animal.

So ... without further ado, here is my review.

GRASSHOPPER JUNGLE, which is not officially sub-titled: A HISTORY, is about a lot of things. What does that mean, anyway? About? Well, in my opinion, when you're talking about art, about means ... meaning. Specifically, it means what it means to me.

Well, that sounds simple, but it isn't. Don't worry. That's a good thing. Mainly, to me, this book is about questions. Not only like, what does history mean if we're bound to repeat it anyway, which is obviously an important question man has pondered for some time, but also like: who are we, and what defines us as men and women, boys and girls, cowards and heroes, and sinners and saints and all the spectrums in between? Is it actions? Thoughts? Behaviors? Accomplishments? Asking the right questions? Questioning things in general?

I would argue that's it's all of the above, but I don't have to argue that of all the things I possess in this life, knowledge of self is probably the most valuable. Nothing trumps it. It's not always a nice, easy thing to possess, because I'm a human being, and being a human being is fucking hard sometimes, but it helps to know that I am fragile and imperfect and kind and sensitive and observant and brave.

I am a lot like Austin Szerba.

I am a lot like Robby Brees.

I am not so much like Shann Collins, but I love her anyway.

Austin has a lot of questions. Austin questions himself a lot. He doesn't have a lot of answers, but he does have the truth, and his devotion to telling it is one of the greatest things about his character and about this book. THE greatest thing about both is his love for his friends. I don't know if I've ever had friends as great as Austin and Robby, but I know that if I ever did, I would treasure them.

And ... I hope you don't mind that I didn't really talk about the plot. You can find out about that all over the internet, if you want, but I thought it would make more sense to write a little bit about how much this book means to me, since that too might make you want to buy it.

Which is kind of the point after all, isn't it?