two hundred public words 28/30
Aug. 10th, 2010 01:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maeve66Well, that didn't work. Maybe two entries TODAY.
Oh, wow. I just looked at my original list, and there are still SO MANY authors on it I haven't even touched, sigh. 22, at least. That's kind of overwhelming -- they're all authors I really like.
I guess for these two hundred words (no, seriously) I will do the first of a couple of outliers. They're not big in the world of YAF publishing, but I like their stuff a lot.
Joe Cottonwood is a local just-outside-the-Bay-Area author who wrote a YA trilogy in the 1990s, and hasn't done much since, except that he wrote an adult sort of romance called Heartwood about a carpenter building a house in the dot.com-to-bust period. I am not compelled enough by the story line to read it. But his YAF books are quite good. They take place in the fictional town in the Santa Ana (?) mountains, not too far from the Bay Area, and each focuses on one of a trio of friends who live in this dusty, semi-former-hippy, semi former rural semi-dot-com community. The Adventures of Barnaby Boone are about the main figure, a middle school boy whose father is a programmer but shunner of Silicon Valley, and who is sort of painfully responsible for his age. He's a great character. Babcock is about a new friend of his, a fat black boy who loves science and bugs and reading, and who gets a crush on a local girl. There's poetry and it's about first love, and very sweet, as well as occasionally painful. And Danny Ain't is about their friend Danny, who is the bad kid, the kid who skates on the edge of the law, whose dad is an alcoholic Vietnam Vet, who lives in a messed up trailer often with nothing but peanut butter and stale bread. Danny has anger problems, and has an attitude which is the opposite of Boone's overdeveloped sense of responsibility. They're well done studies of character and place, and I liked them a lot. For some reason, the first two are available as ebooks, but the third is not. I don't get that.
Oh, wow. I just looked at my original list, and there are still SO MANY authors on it I haven't even touched, sigh. 22, at least. That's kind of overwhelming -- they're all authors I really like.
I guess for these two hundred words (no, seriously) I will do the first of a couple of outliers. They're not big in the world of YAF publishing, but I like their stuff a lot.
Joe Cottonwood is a local just-outside-the-Bay-Area author who wrote a YA trilogy in the 1990s, and hasn't done much since, except that he wrote an adult sort of romance called Heartwood about a carpenter building a house in the dot.com-to-bust period. I am not compelled enough by the story line to read it. But his YAF books are quite good. They take place in the fictional town in the Santa Ana (?) mountains, not too far from the Bay Area, and each focuses on one of a trio of friends who live in this dusty, semi-former-hippy, semi former rural semi-dot-com community. The Adventures of Barnaby Boone are about the main figure, a middle school boy whose father is a programmer but shunner of Silicon Valley, and who is sort of painfully responsible for his age. He's a great character. Babcock is about a new friend of his, a fat black boy who loves science and bugs and reading, and who gets a crush on a local girl. There's poetry and it's about first love, and very sweet, as well as occasionally painful. And Danny Ain't is about their friend Danny, who is the bad kid, the kid who skates on the edge of the law, whose dad is an alcoholic Vietnam Vet, who lives in a messed up trailer often with nothing but peanut butter and stale bread. Danny has anger problems, and has an attitude which is the opposite of Boone's overdeveloped sense of responsibility. They're well done studies of character and place, and I liked them a lot. For some reason, the first two are available as ebooks, but the third is not. I don't get that.