Recommendation Tuesday: All The Rage by Courtney Summers
“You know all the ways you can kill a girl?
God, there are so many. ”
Courtney Summers' new novel, All The Rage, is out today and it's a difficult, important book that you need to pay attention to.
Al The Rageis an indictment of a culture that shames and silences girls when they need support the most, that tells them that they are not valued; this is the culture that creates the Steubenvilles. (Let's be honest, Steubenville is not one place, it is everywhere.)
Romy carefully manicures her nails and applies her perfect lipstick as armor against a community that's rejected her. They rejected her because she dared tell the truth about the sheriff's son raping her at a party. She's a pariah, and people excuse the boy, Kellan, because Romy had a crush on him, because he "had so much going for him," being the town gold boy and all. The narrative in Romy's town is that she ruined Kellan's life by speaking up, and the adults--who should have been supporting Romy--are complicit in perpetuating this narrative.
This is a book that will validate the experiences of many girls, in a world where they often go without the support they need. But it's also a book adults and boys should read. I believe wholeheartedly that empathy can be nurtured and the experience of reading Romy's story and understanding that she could be any girl in any town is one way to nurture empathy for the struggles of today's girls. I fully realize that it is far more difficult in many ways to be a young woman now that when I was 16, 17, 18, 19 in the 1990s.
Beyond the importance of the story Courtney is telling, I wanted to comment on how her writing has developed over the years. She's always been excellent at stripping her stories down to their emotional cores, but in this book--as well as in This is Not a Test--her writing has developed in an impressive way. It's an impressive balance of tight, sparse prose in which no word is wasted. and yet there's also a subtly evocative quality to her writing. It's good stuff.
Find All The Rage at Amazon | Goodreads
Disclosure: I received a review copy from the publisher. Also, sometimes I chat with Courtney about important subjects like the final five minutes of Furious 7 and pizza.
I can't recall who specifically recommended Katherine Center's Happiness for Beginners, but I'm most glad that whomever that was mentioned it--because it's most definitely a Sarah book, despite that it involves **shudder** camping. (UGH!)
Recommendation Tuesday started as a joke and is now an official thing. Basically, this is my way of making Tuesday a little more awesome. If you've got a book to recommend on this or any Tuesday, tweet me at @SarahSMoon or tag me on Instagram @sarahbethmoon and I'll help spread the word.
View all of the past recommendations over here.
I always feel weird recommending a "big" book that's gotten a lot of attention, because it feels like those books don't need me, but the heart likes what the heart likes, you know? In this case, I just finished reading and enjoyed the hell out of Alexandra Bracken's new epic time travel novel, Passenger.
Recommendation Tuesday started as a joke and is now an official thing. Basically, this is my way of making Tuesday a little more awesome. If you've got a book to recommend on this or any Tuesday, tweet me at @SarahSMoon or tag me on Instagram @sarahbethmoon and I'll help spread the word.
View all of the past recommendations over here.
Stephanie Tromly’s first novel, Trouble is a Friend of Mine, packs clever dialog, great characters and a complex mystery into a quick paced and excellent read.
Cordelia Jensen's debut novel first got on my radar thanks to Stasia Ward Kehoe's guest post for our Verse Week celebration this year. While I don't read all the blogs, it seems like it's not received much attention and I'm here to remedy that, because folks, Skyscraping is a special book.
I coined the term "nostalgia lit" on a podcast episode a couple years ago, and I'm generally a fairly reluctant about books set in near history, but Skyscraping is a wonderful example of this particular almost-contemporary setting.
You know all the ways you can kill a girl?
God, there are so many.
Courtney Summers' new novel, All The Rage, is out today and it's a difficult, important book that you need to pay attention to.
Al The Rageis an indictment of a culture that shames and silences girls when they need support the most, that tells them that they are not valued; this is the culture that creates the Steubenvilles. (Let's be honest, Steubenville is not one place, it is everywhere.)
Recommendation Tuesday started as a joke and is now an official thing. Basically, this is my way of making Tuesday a little more awesome. If you've got a book to recommend on this or any Tuesday, tweet me at @FullShelves and I'll help spread the word.
View all of the past recommendations over here.
Richard Corben captures the gothic sensibility and the fears that plagued Edgar Allan Poe in his graphic representation of the great master’s work. Poe’s soulful poem Spirits of the Dead is a fitting title for Corben’s work.
Thy soul shall find itself alone
Mid dark thoughts of the gray tombstone ——
Not one, of all the crowd, to pry
Into thine hour of secrecy.
Recommendation Tuesday started as a joke and is now an official thing. Basically, this is my way of making Tuesday a little more awesome. If you've got a book to recommend on this or any Tuesday, tweet me at @FullShelves and I'll help spread the word.
View all of the past recommendations over here.
Have I ever told you guys what prompted me to pick up my first Courtney Milan book?
Obviously I'd heard of her, but I didn't decide to read one of her novels until one date I was screwing around on Tumblr (as one does) and accidentally tapped on the notes link on the bottom of a Tumblr post from one of the many Australian Shepherd Tumblrs I follow and noticed that the person who'd like the post of a cute Aussie puppy was Courtney Milan. Obviously, this was important information! A quite look at Courtney's Twitter feed told me that yes indeed she shares her life with one of these wacky dogs too. So, I picked up one of her books, even though historicals set in England aren't usually my cup of tea and enjoyed it.
And this, my friends, is why book marketing is such a tough nut to crack.
Recommendation Tuesday started as a joke and is now an official thing. Basically, this is my way of making Tuesday a little more awesome. If you've got a book to recommend on this or any Tuesday, tweet me at @FullShelves and I'll help spread the word.
View all of the past recommendations over here.
Quiet books aren't the trend right now, but they're still my favorites.
One of the real masters of quiet YA novels is C.K. Kelly Martin, who's been writing for a long time, but is deserving of far more acclaim and attention than she receives. So, it's no surprise that her latest, The Sweetest Thing You Can Sing, is another excellent, subtle novel that fans of contemporary YA shouldn't miss.
Recommendation Tuesday started as a joke and is now an official thing. Basically, this is my way of making Tuesday a little more awesome. If you've got a book to recommend on this or any Tuesday, tweet me at @FullShelves and I'll help spread the word.
Today, Sandra is recommending a book that's straight-up fun, the always-entertaining Jennifer Armentrout's Don't Look Back.
On its surface, Don't Look Back shouldn't be that gripping. The plot is not unique: murder, amnesia, uncertainty, danger and a dark shadow haunts the main character, Samantha Franco. But Jennifer Armentrout’s addictive plotting make this mystery deepens into an unforeseen denouement, an unravelling of a long-held secret.
Well, I got a bit behind on, like, life, so I thought I'd bundle a few months of our recommended reads for you, rather than trying to catch up month-by-month.
I did a bit of re-reading over the last few months, which has been pretty fun. I think I will continue to revisit my favorites as a matter of course, because there's something enjoyable in revisiting a beloved story. We all read The Carnival at Bray for book club right before it was a Printz honoree and we all loved it so much, so if you haven't snagged that brilliant little book, do so!
As always, click on the cover for more information. If we have a review available, it will be noted.
I've been reading up a storm lately, thanks to having been stuck in the house for way too long with that previously-mentioned flu. I hit on some gems, but also landed on some real stinkers.
Here are some quick thoughts on a bunch of them.
Recommendation Tuesday started as a joke and is now an official thing. Basically, this is my way of making Tuesday a little more awesome. If you've got a book to recommend on this or any Tuesday, tweet me at @FullShelves and I'll help spread the word.
View all of the past recommendations over here.
Funny how the last thing we want the world to see is almost the first thing to show.
I could have sworn that I featured Courtney Summers' Some Girls Are on Recommendation Tuesday previously, but alas, I had not. Therefore, I'm fixing that today.
Some Girls Are is a book I read a relatively long time ago, when it came out in 2010 (there were a lot of fantastic contemporary YA novels released that year). This is a tough story, I'm warning you, but one that's extremely important.
We were lucky to recently spend over three hours (!) talking with noted Supernatural expert Courtney Summers. (We hear she writes books too.) We covered a range of subjects from zombies with fashion sense to writing characters experiencing trauma and everything in between.
You can find the first part of this conversation over here, and the second right here--we highly recommend listening to them in order. In this episode, we chat about books, but we spend the bulk of our time talking about television and women's representation, and Justin Timberlake and the 50 Shades of Grey movie trailer.
Connect with Courtney: Website | Twitter | Tumblr | Facebook
If you've not read Courtney's books, two are now available in a nifty bind-up that will have a Justin Timberlake song frolicking in your head for days, What Goes Around.
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We were lucky to recently spend over three hours (!) talking with noted Supernatural expert Courtney Summers. (We hear she writes books too.) We covered a range of subjects from zombies with fashion sense to writing characters experiencing trauma and everything in between.
You can find the first part of this conversation over here--we highly recommend listening to them in order. In this episode, we chat about books, but we spend the bulk of our time talking about television and women's representation in media and the sticky issue of loving something that's at the same time imperfect and problematic.
We were lucky to recently spend over three hours (!) talking with noted Supernatural expert Courtney Summers. (We hear she writes books too.) We covered a range of subjects from zombies with fashion sense to writing characters experiencing trauma and everything in between.
This is the first of what will be three parts of this conversation with Courtney, who we could have talked to all day if we hadn't gotten super-hungry. Look for the other episodes trickling out on iTunes and here on the blog in the coming weeks. (Pro-tip, subscribing on iTunes means that you get episodes a day or two before everyone else.)
Nafiza started this fun hashtag/challenge on Instagram to post a photo of a book we love for 100 days. I've had so much fun picking books to spotlight, so I thought I'd share my picks so far.
You can follow along at the #100HappyBookDays hashtag to see what everyone is sharing.
I could not be more excited to have one of my favorite authors, Elizabeth Scott, as a guest on our latest podcast episode!
Elizabeth's most recent novel is Heartbeat, which all three of us at CEFS have read and loved. It's a unique, emotionally intense, authentic examination of grief and anger that's unlike anything I've read. It's out tomorrow from Harlequin Teen and I really hope you'll check it out because it's one of my favorites of the year already. (While you're at it, you should read Miracle, which came out in 2012 and didn't get nearly the love and attention it deserved--here's my review.)
Note: This is the first in an ongoing series from Sandra, retired high school English teacher and current substitute teacher in the same subject area, discussing the classic novels she taught, their relevance to today's teens and pairings with contemporary fiction.
I taught high school literature for twenty-six years, many of the same books year after year. You’d think they would become ho-hum with a huge yawn after a few years.
No so.
There’s always something new and fresh that first-time readers bring to a text so it stands the test of time—meaning they relate to the characters and situations regardless of era or setting. Some books are simply universal. The Scarlet Letter, which I've written about previously, stands out for the fresh perspectives my students would bring to them each time I taught these books.
It’s all about making connections and drawing parallels.
I recall one student gingerly holding a copy of The Scarlet Letter between her thumb and index finger. The expression on her face was somewhere between horror and admiration as I shared that I had taught, and therefore read, this book every single year.
“What? You’ve actually read this at least twenty times? That’s that’s—I don’t know what is is,” my student said.
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Are you heading to BEA in May?