Welcome to the first Carnival of Young Adult Literature!

We are starting with a handful of intrepid bloggers who had great YA posts on hand and were able to get in on short notice, but this carnival will run every month, so if you want to get in next month, head over the carnival page and sign up for reminders!

This month we have four review posts and one opinion post (by some blogger who loves to opine upon the sad state of the world.  )

So without further ado, I give you the first Carnival of Young Adult Literature!

Book Reviews ~ Novels

• When She Woke
  • A novel review posted at Hippies, Beauty, and Books. Oh My!

“First 50 Pages: Can I say hooked? Poor Hannah wakes up in a room surrounded by mirrors, with her skin the flaming color of red. Red for murder of her unborn child. It’s just utterly insane as we read what her character goes through in the beginning of this book. The complete lack of privacy and the humiliation Hannah undergoes is more than enough to make any sane person want to end their life. Somehow, she makes it through her first torturous ordeal, only to face even tougher obstacles.”

• Into the Parallel
  • A review of a novel at Becky’s Book Reviews

“The characters were well-developed, and the premise was fascinating. This book is easy to spend an afternoon with! Robin Brande is a talented writer. She creates characters that you care about, characters that you feel like you know. It never takes me long to get hooked on one of her books, and Into the Parallel was no exception. “

• Two YA Books by Sarah Dessen
  • Two novel reviews at Semicolon

“I read This Lullaby and Lock and Key, and lo! and behold, they turned out to be the same book. Well, they’re not exactly the same, but quite similar in tone and plot. I liked the narrator in Lock and Key better.”

Book Reviews ~ “How To” Books

• Ten Reasons I Heartily Recommend Writing Young Adult Fiction for Dummies
  • A review of a “how to write” book at Teaching Authors

“Deborah wears a variety of Children’s Book World hats – Novelist, Author, Former Editor with Harcourt Children’s Books, Independent Book Editor and Founder of DearEditor, a writers’ advice website, and she obviously donned each one to write this easy-to-understand, comprehensive, hands-on text. Her stated goal in writing the book was to give writers of young adult fiction the tools they need to tell their good stories well. Boy, oh, boy, did she succeed.”

Opinion on YA Themes

• Primetime Porn
  • A discussion of themes in teen girl books at Reading, Writing, and Ruminating on YA Books

“Children today may think they need power because they feel so powerless in this world where the TV news shows splash disaster and sexual abuse and torture into their living rooms night after night….Teen girls have no superpowers, though, and they are more and more often settling for the one power that is readily available. The power to use sex to get what they want.”

This concludes the August, 2011 Carnival of Young Adult Literature. Entries for next month’s carnival must be in by September19th and the Carnival will be posted on September 26th. Sign up at the Carnival website!

Two days only.

Oct. 20-21, 2010

$1.99.

You can read about it here.

Had a little surgery on my jaw on Monday to have a tumor removed. Not a big deal, but pretty painful. And when I’m in pain I can’t read and write. But I can watch videos.

So, as is often the case, there was a silver lining to my cloud of pain. I found a little gem when I was bored and looking around for something to take my mind off the pain.

Two gems, really.

• RC Sproul on Christians and art
• RC Sproul on Christians and literature

Good stuff.

On Writing Well, by William Zinsser, first published in 1976, is one of my favorite books about writing.

Zinsser was a journalist who taught a nonfiction workshop at Yale, but his book should be read by anyone who wants to write in any genre.

I read and loved the second edition. The book has been updated six more times since then. What I loved about his book was his style. In writing about how he approached the first edition, Zinsser says:

I would write from my own convictions—take ’em or leave ’em—and I would illustrate my points with passages by writers I admired. I would treat the English language spaciously, as a gift waiting for anyone to unwrap….

I recall aching over the beauty of the passages he chose, because I wanted so badly to be able to write that well. I also recall loving his voice as he spoke about the passages. I loved Zinsser because he loved winsome words and deep thought and clear communication that moved with grace and beauty and never trudged along in clunky, black work boots.

Now that I’ve read his article on all his revisions, I’m convinced I need to buy the 30th Anniversary edition of On Writing Well.

If you haven’t discovered Mr. Zinsser, I encourage you to give On Writing Well a go.