Check out this great new review of Rampant, from the independent bookstore Russo’s Books in Bakersfield, CA:
Like most red-blooded girls, I’ve always like horses, and unicorns are an extension of that. Being a mythology buff, I’d bump into unicorns in my readings a lot. And I have to say, that’s where this book really hooked me.
The unicorns portrayed in the book aren’t the sparkly white horses with perfect spiral horns that are the boiled-down and sweetened unicorns popular today. They are based on the historical record of unicorns from around the world. No two unicorns from any region were alike, and that is reflected in this story. These guys are vicious! And yet, somehow, some of them are still quite adorable (like that little stinker Bonegrinder!)
The pacing is excellent, the excitement level is on the ceiling through most of the book, and the characters are completely developed and become like actual, real-life friends. I love Astrid and her cousin, and her mother drives me nuts! Even more than my own mother does! This novel is completely original and different from anything else I’ve read (and I’m ALWAYS reading) and I can’t wait until she writes more– this NEEDS to be a series!
The bookseller goes on to express concern that it’s more a book for older teens, “[especially] in our conservative town of Bakersfield,” but says (bolding original to the text):
Otherwise, this book is so much fun, so different from anything else out there, and so well done, I’d be pushing it into everybody’s hands as a must-read.
Nice, huh? I know there’s been a lot of talk lately about responding to reviews and how it’s always A Bad Idea, but I think the downside of that is that authors might feel afraid of participating in discussions they meant the book to engender in the first place.
Rampant, being a book about virgins with superpowers tied to their virginity, deals with the issues of sexuality, feminism, the commodification of virginity, and how religion, culture, and tradition intersect with modern society and the pressures on a teenaged girl. It has a strong abstinence message. It also has what I’m glad to see this reviewer call “well-written, tasteful, and accurately realistic” discussions by the characters in the book regarding the topics above. I’m proud that I’ve written a book where the female characters are making informed decisions about their choice to remain abstinent. They do it for different reasons, too: some have religious or cultural beliefs that form the basis of their choice. Others want to keep hunting unicorns, an activity incompatible with being sexually active. Some just aren’t ready, or just aren’t interested. All are valid, and it was important for me to show that. As an abstinent teen myself, I was often surprised and put off by the assumption that “only Christians” or “only prudes” or “only insert-descriptor-here” were saving themselves, and if I didn’t have a darn good reason not to, then I should.
For the record, “I don’t want to,” is one of the best reasons in the world. You don’t have to justify it to anyone. Not your friends, not your boyfriend, not your prom date, not that mean girl who put a “V” in Sharpie marker on the door of your locker that everyone could mysteriously translate and make fun of you for. Being a virgin is not an epithet.
I put a discussion of virginity and abstinence in the book because it was something I talked about when I was a teenager, and it was something I was interested in and would have liked to read more books about. Kind of like how I wanted to read more books about women warriors, and ancient Rome, and myths and legends, and really close friends, and kissing boys, and Renaissance art, and all the other stuff I put into Rampant.
Oh, and just in case the bookseller at Russo’s sees this… good news: it is a series! I’m writing the second one now, and it’ll be out in Fall of 2010. We haven’t figured out the title yet, but we have a bunch of finalists.
The BookMaven responds to another one of those tiresome genre snobbery posts. I agree with a lot of it, but I’m not sure she goes as far as I would. So, I don’ have a PHD in Literature, just a lowly BA, but I’m baffled by the attitude that books are some different sort of story, that they are somehow required to only exist on a certain level which is not true for television, film, theater, etc. The BookMaven argues for her early genre snobbery by talking about how she liked to read Poe as bed time stories as a child. Um…. So Poe is thumbs up and Stephen King is thumbs down? What’s the difference, aside from a hundred years?
Poe and Dickens, and Shakespeare, and so many of the writers who are considered the luminaries of the form wrote FOR THE MASSES. In college, I studied Radcliffe and Austen and Behn and Scott and Burney and all those damned scribbling women whose novels were ridiculed by the literary elite of their time. I wrote my college thesis on LOST HORIZON, which Pocket Books likes to fashion “the first paperback.” (It’s not, but it’s a cute marketing ploy.)
Then I read an article yesterday talking about how he’s faced a lot of skeptics, saying the video is “fake”. Here is his response:
I love this guy. What an attitude.
However, I did find this response a bit disappointing, because I learned that the video was not quite as indie and viral as I’d originally assumed. As it turns out (gleaned from Matt’s web page), there was a real, individual “dancing” video made back in 2005. This is it:
Still beautiful, still uplifting. As it turns out, this was also a viral success, though on a far smaller scale. It was such a success that Matt found himself a sponsor in Stride gum company, and talked them into funding another trip around the world where he’d have the opportunity to dance with people who had written him about his first video. Stride no doubt assisted him with access to the more difficult locations (like the weightless jet, the Papua New Guinea tribesmen, the dancing next to the guard in the DMZ, etc.) And thus you got the Hi-def “Where the Hell is Matt” that we all enjoyed last year.
I think it’s an amazing story, and in the end, I don’t care that it wasn’t as “indie” as I’d assumed. It was still gorgeous. Good on Matt for being so creative, and managing to make a living out his silliness. Good on Stride for giving this guy a little money (and it was probably a very little, in the scheme of things) to create such an uplifting piece of art. Good on the people of the world for participating.
I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what I do for a living as art, though perhaps I should, I know that when I’m writing, I want people to be uplifted and transformed. I want their hearts to pound in the romantic scenes, I want them to grow breathless in the action sequences. I want them to laugh and to cry, to be swept away in the story, even if it’s only for three or four hundred pages. And that’s what good art can do. When I watch Matt, I feel something big stir inside me. I want to create that in the reader.
I’m supposed to be blogging at 70 Days of Sweat today. but there is some sort of technical difficulty with my post (Help me, Alison! I’ll be your best friend!) and until that is resolved, you won’t get to hear about my rocking writing outfit (it involves robots).
It’s also officially winter around here, and I hate to whine, considering how hard they are getting it in the Northeast and the Midwest, but holy schmoly, why anyone would want to live out outside the tropics still baffles me. I have entered that period of time where I’m just permanently cold and will be staying that way until May. SB keeps talking about how great it will be when it snows, but…no.
This was a big audience weekend for me. I went to see Amanda Brice dance in The Nutcracker on Saturday night. I don’t think I’ve seen The Nutcracker since I was a little girl, and I never remembered being a big fan. I really enjoyed it this weekend, however, and I think I realized why I didn’t like it as a child. It was because the story was over halfway through the show. They defeated the Mouse King, and then the second half of the ballet was just… celebration? Fun, but boring to a my childhood self. As an adult, I was able to set aside my ravenous need for story and simply enjoy some dancing. (The E.T.A. Hoffman story, by the way, has a whole other act with the Mouse Queen and a quest and it isn’t until the very end that the spell on the nutcracker is broken, but it didn’t leave as much room for dances of sugar plum fairies…)
Then, on Sunday, I watched Live Free or Die Hard (if you like the Die Hard franchise, and I do, and like Justin Long, and I very much do), and then Waitress, which I was really looking forward to, and was really disappointed by (totally lost my sympathy for the main character, which is an important lesson in storytelling), and then Tin Man, which I was also very much looking forward to.
I remain undecided about it. On the plus side, woo, fun! Steampunk! Plus, I’m so intrigued by any vividly imagined retelling of something so a part of the cultural consciousness. Also, having read almost all of the Baum books, I gotta say, this is far from the weirdest thing he ever came up with (the vegetable people living inside the hollow earth might take the prize there), so it’s not that much of a stretch, and I don’t think he would be against any of it. And, Alan Cumming. Plus, they set up the Caine character SO FREAKIN’ WELL (his first name is Wyatt, and I love it!) and that torture was brilliant. Brilliant story.
On the minus side, I think they’ve got a lot of interesting ideas there that they aren’t really exploring, I’m not totally sold on Zooey Deschanel’s choices in portraying DG (is she for even one minute surprised about the things she’s seeing?), and so much of the plot seems to hinge on, whenever they get in a pickle, they know someone, and whenever things are going well, they come across some other invention of Azkadelia’s that is in their way. (“Azkadelia’s vapors?” Come on. On top of her flying monkey tattoos and life-sucking breath and psychic-lion-brain-sucking machine, and brain-removal surgery, and the iron torture device/life-support machine –not to mention that’s plenty enough reason for him to be a “tin man” without needing to resort to calling cops “tin men” and also, why, if he was a cop, did he live way out in the woods…?) Anyway, I am sitting on my hands, waiting for it to come together in the next installment. (Speaking of the next installment, if you’re trying to become the queen of a given kingdom, why would you invent a machine that could destroy said kingdom, as the Mystic man seems to intimate in the previews? Questions…) Right now, I’m wondering if Glitch actually did invent all this stuff for her, which would be a cool twist and character-wise, etc…
Check out this great new review of Rampant, from the independent bookstore Russo’s Books in Bakersfield, CA:
