two hundred public words 28/30

Well, 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.

two hundred public words 29/30

I guess the solution is to just continue this as an occasional series, once I'm done with today's and tomorrow's entry, which would finish the thirty entries in thirty days challenge. So, for THESE two hundred words (see, I managed it last time), another local-ish author.

Actually, I guess I don't know whether N. M. Caldwell is local exactly. I just know that she was published by Milkweed Press, which is some kind of equal-opportunity-new-authors-not-quite-self-publishing deal, which mostly publishes fiction with a social message. Possibly even a social-work message. That's often a recipe for disaster. In this case, however, it is not.

Caldwell has written two books -- one story and its sequel (as far as I know, these are the only ones) about adoption. They're interesting studies of very withdrawn and self-protective teenage girl who has bounced from foster home to foster home, and how she is adopted into a very self-confident, very STRUCTURED family. The first book is called The Ocean Within, and the second one is Tides. Much of both of the books takes place at the family's strong grandmother's house near the Atlantic Ocean. Maine, quite possibly. Or Massachusetts? I don't remember. In any case, again these two books are a character study of a stubborn and defensive girl. The author doesn't flip the stereotype and transform her into a sweet girl, rescued by unfaltering love, either. She stays prickly and possibly Aspergers-ish, without that diagnosis being raised. And the family is something. They're one of those -- do these really exist? -- families with an extremely well-developed persona, where everyone knows their place and there are traditions and rules and consequences and everlasting parental patience, and firm discipline. Now that I think about it a little bit, it's sort of as if this writer imagined what the ideal kind of a family to adopt someone who's been through an unending stream of insecure foster homes. They're interesting books, though, and I find myself rereading them fairly often, somewhat with the same attitude I bring to Cynthia Voigt's family, the Tillermans. They're not much like my family.