Clementine and the Family Meeting - Review and Giveaway

Thought for the day:

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” ~Kurt Vonnegut~

A gift for my writer friends:

 Here are a couple of links I think you will find valuable.

Interview with teens on what they want in YA lit: http://authoretc.blogspot.com/2012/11/be-not-afraid.html

Good article on what children should read: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/what-should-children-read/?ref=opinion

How some famous writers work at their craft: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/11/20/daily-routines-writers/

For my fabulous giveaway, the winner is Barbara Watson! (Cue the fife and drums!) Barbara, I will be sending you a copy of Lone Bean. Barbara is also a writer and offers editing services, and she’s very good at it. I speak from experience. You can read her blog and check out her editing services by clicking HERE.  I have another giveaway for today, so stay tuned.

Recently, I won a book in a drawing on Jennifer Rumberger’s blog. She is a children’s author and reviews middle-grade and picture books every week on her blog. Click HERE  to visit her blog. It’s worth your time. I won a copy of Clementine and the Family Meeting, a very cute early middle-grade book by Sara Pennypacker, and sat right down to read it when it arrived.

Clementine is nearly ten years old, but life isn’t easy right now. The “Family Meeting” sign is up at her house, and she is pretty sure the meeting is going to be about something she has done wrong. What she doesn’t know is that her life and her family is about to change big time. At the meeting, Clementine discovers that the big news is that she is not in trouble. The other big news is that their family is going to grow – her mother is pregnant, and Clementine and her little brother will have a new sibling. Clementine is not happy!

“No thanks to more people! Our family is four. There are four sides to a puzzle so we can all work on it at once. Hot dogs come in packages of eight, so we can each have two. At the playground, four is an even number for the seesaws. Four can all be together in the car. Four can be two and two sometimes, and nobody is lonely. Two kids and two grown-ups. Two boys and two girls. There are four sides to the kitchen table, so we each get one. Four is a perfect number of a family.”

The family problem isn’t the only one Clementine is facing. She is working on a science project and her rat has escaped. She has also lost her favorite hat, the one her grandmother had knitted for her that felt like her grandmother’s hands on her head. And to top it all off, her friend Heather, who has already turned ten, is suddenly into make-up and nail polish. Yuck!

Clementine’s family is just ordinary people who live in an apartment, and her dad is the super. This is unusual, I think, these days, to find a book with an intact family that isn’t ridiculously rich or abjectly poor. This book has also great characters, but especially Clementine and her father. She charms and dad is a kick. Clementine isn’t perfect – she makes poor decisions sometimes and great decisions other times. There’s something very old-fashioned about the make-up of the story, yet it is very contemporary. I think kids and those who love reading good kids books will love this story. It is also charmingly illustrated by Marla Frazee. This is one of several books in the Clementine series by Pennypacker, and I’m looking forward to reading more.

Check out other Marvelous Middle-Grade Monday blogs on Shannon Whitney Messenger's wonderful blog by clicking HERE.

You might win my gently-read copy of Clementine and the Family Meeting. I will put your name in my proverbial hat. Link this post on your blog or Facebook or Tweet about it, let me know, and your name will be entered twice.

On the book giveaway, this is for U.S. only. Sorry, but it would be too expensive for me to send books out of the country. But please leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you. Remember, if you have trouble leaving a comment, click on the title of the post and it will give you just this post with a comments section on the bottom. Also, if you haven’t signed up by email, please do. Just look in the upper right-hand corner of this page, pop your email address in, and you will receive an email each time I put up a new post. Your information will not be shared with anyone.           

Take Care of Yourself - You're All You've Got

Thought for the day:

 “The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.”  ~John Steinbeck~

A gift for my writer friends:

 

 Here are a couple of links I think you will find valuable.

A good post on getting tension into your writing: http://kathytemean.wordpress.com/2012/11/20/tension/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+WritingAndIllustrating+%28Writing+and+Illustrating%29&utm_content=Yahoo!+Mail

On problems seen digging through the slush pile: http://misssnarksfirstvictim.blogspot.com/2012/11/bakers-dozen-observations.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+MissSnarksFirstVictim+%28Miss+Snark%27s+First+Victim%29&utm_content=Yahoo!+Mail

For my fabulous giveaway, the winner is Elizabeth Varadan! (Cue the rabbit to pop out of the magician’s hat!) Congratulations, Elizabeth. I will be sending you a hard-cover copy of The Amazing Harry Kellar. It is a fascinating and beautiful book. Elizabeth is also a writer. Her magical book, The Fourth Wish, is available on Amazon as a paperback or Kindle book. Click the title to be linked to her book. She also blogs. You can read her blog by clicking HERE. There’s always something interesting there to read. I do have another giveaway for today, so stay tuned.

One of my critique partners, JaNay Brown-Wood, and I have been working on a collection of children’s poems for more than a couple of years. We’ve been close to ready to start submitting for quite awhile, but felt it needed just a little more work. It seemed we couldn’t find the time to finish it up and ship it out – until this nice, long holiday weekend. We had a couple of marathon sessions and put it in the mail Saturday afternoon. Wish us luck! I’ve also just finished another draft of my middle-grade and have started submitting it. Fingers crossed. That said, I’m trying to find inspiration for a new project to start. I’ve been feeling kind of wrung out. Maybe there’s nothing left for me to say, I think on some days.

One of the things I’m doing is taking an e-retreat that will at the very least help me stop beating myself up about not having an unending flow of brilliant ideas, but I also believe it will get my creative juices flowing again. You can read about it by clicking HERE.  I think it sounds like a terrific thing to do. If you hurry, you can sign up too.

I also dug out my copy of Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott. Isn't that a great title? You can open to just about any page and find something inspirational or downright funny or thought-provoking. This is what I turned to:

“You get your confidence and intuition back by trusting yourself, by being militantly on your own side. You need to trust yourself, especially on a first draft, where amid the anxiety and self-doubt, there should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and wool-gathering, tramping the hills, walking all over the place. Trust them. Don’t look at your feet to see if you’re doing it right. Just dance.”

Thank you, Anne Lamott. I’m going for a long walk and try out a few dance steps while I’m at it. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?

Anyway, with the holiday and all that work with JaNay and my crisis of inspiration, I don’t have a new review for this week, but I promised you a book giveaway, so here we go. A while back, I reviewed a middle-grade book called Lone Bean by Chudney Ross for the Sacramento Book Review. Here is what I had to say in that review:

Bean was named for a flower, but it’s a big, long name and no one calls her by that name unless she is in b-i-g BIG trouble. She’s starting third grade and can’t wait, even if her older sisters, Rose and Gardenia, who are m-e-a-n MEAN, have to walk her to school. Bean is excited about her new teacher and seeing her best friend for the first time since summer vacation. But her best friend, Carla, seems to have made a new best friend and Bean is left with no one. While Bean struggles with feeling left out and lonely, she also struggles with her mother working long hours and her father, a music instructor, insisting she take up an instrument. In her effort to have someone to hang out with, Bean spends time with Terrible Tanisha, the local bully, and Bean’s mean side shows. She starts getting in trouble, and she doesn’t seem to know how to get back to normal.

Good writing, but it’s hard to cheer for the protagonist who is bratty, mean, and selfish through much of the story. She finally gets her act together, but it’s a long time coming. Little girls may like it though.

You might win my gently-read ARC of Lone Bean. I will put your name in my proverbial hat. Link this post on your blog or Facebook or Tweet about it, let me know, and your name will be entered twice.

On the book giveaway, this is for U.S. only. Sorry, but it would be too expensive for me to send books out of the country. But please leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you. Remember, if you have trouble leaving a comment, click on the title of the post and it will give you just this post with a comments section on the bottom. Also, if you haven’t signed up by email, please do. Just look in the upper right-hand corner of this page, pop your email address in, and you will receive an email each time I put up a new post. Your information will not be shared with anyone.