How to use this Page

Title: Salt to the Sea
Author: Ruta Sepetys
Published: 2016
Source: Local Library

Summary: As Germany is losing WWII, four fates converge on the road to one of the greatest maritime disasters you've never heard of.

First Impressions: Wow, this was harrowing. Alfred's sections especially made me want brain bleach.

Later On: We hear so much about World War II, but it's often about the American homefront or the Holocaust. Sometimes you get the British homefront. If you get a perspective on Germany or Eastern Europe, it's usually a Nazi or someone struggling to deal with a Nazi in their family or close friendships.

This shines a light into the everyday life of the citizens of Nazi Germany and the occupied areas. Each character has secrets that unfold gradually and converge with others in unexpected ways, showing the many and varied effects of war on the average person - from Emilia, pregnant and alone, to Florian the unwilling hero, to Joana, just trying to survive, to Alfred, a supremely deluded and unlikeable person.

The disaster looms, more so because the reader is probably going to have little to no idea how it actually happened. Some might even be taken completely by surprise (although the human mistakes that led to it are well-documented in the story).

It's not a happy ending for everyone, (did we expect anything else from this time period and this author?) but it's a slice of history that's valuable to hear.

More: Unshelved
Kirkus
Spoilers, probably, but:  Military History Online's page on the sinking of the Wilhem Gustloff

Add a Comment

This is a solid list that we're not budging on from last month! Our hand-picked list from the Best Selling Young Adult books listed on The New York Times includes both Glass Sword and Red Queen, by Victoria Aveyard.

Add a Comment

We’ve collected the books debuting on Indiebound’s Indie Bestseller List for the week ending Feb. 7, 2016–a sneak peek at the books everybody will be talking about next month.

(Debuted at #1 in Young Adult) Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys: “World War II is drawing to a close in East Prussia, and thousands of refugees are on a desperate trek toward freedom, almost all of them with something to hide. Among them are Joana, Emilia, and Florian, whose paths converge en route to the ship that promises salvation, the Wilhelm Gustloff. Forced by circumstance to unite, the three find their strength, courage, and trust in one another tested with each step closer toward safety.” (Feb. 2016)

(Debuted at #6 in Children’s Fiction Series) The Lunar Chronicles: Stars Above by Marissa Meyer: “The enchantment continues…The universe of the Lunar Chronicles holds stories – and secrets – that are wondrous, vicious, and romantic.” (Feb. 2016)

(Debuted at #12 in Hardcover Fiction) The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel: “In Lisbon in 1904, a young man named Tomás discovers an old journal. It hints at the existence of an extraordinary artifact that—if he can find it—would redefine history. Traveling in one of Europe’s earliest automobiles, he sets out in search of this strange treasure.” (Feb. 2016)

Add a Comment

Perhaps the biggest perk of being in the book business, and of having lovely author friends, is that I sometimes get to read highly anticipated books early.

But today is the actual launch day for both Ruta Sepetys and Kelly Simmons, and so we need a little right-now hoopla.

My thoughts about Ruta and her book, Salt to the Sea, are here, in this vlog.

My thoughts about Kelly and her book, One More Day, are here, in this blog.

My love and congratulations and best wishes to you both!

Add a Comment

Our selection of hot new releases and popular kids' books has a lot to offer!

Add a Comment

I have not vlogged for years. I'd forgotten how. Also, the technology has changed. Plus, I'm old and weary. Please forgive all of that.

Because the only thing that matters is that I've just read the third novel by Ruta Sepetys, Salt to the Sea, a powerful historical novel about refugees, friendship, and a terrifying trek toward the world's greatest maritime disaster.

My thoughts are here.

Congratulations, Ruta Sepetys. 

Add a Comment

How glorious it is to receive books from loved friends, and loved writers. The third Ruta Sepetys novel, the already-much-acclaimed Salt to the Sea, is here. And I can't wait to read. You'll hear more from me on this once this veil of supreme busyness passes.

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Young adult author Ruta Sepetys and her publisher, Penguin Young Readers Group, will host the 3rd annual Out of the Easy essay content. The winner will receive $5,000 in prize money towards the college of his or her choice.

Eligibility is limited to high school students in the 11th and 12th grade. Participants must write a three-page piece in response to this Charles Dickens quote: “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”

Follow this link to learn more about all the rules. A submission deadline has been set for May 30th.

Add a Comment

In my blog for An Awfully Big Blog Adventure back in December, I shared a list of some of my favourite teen and young adults books that I'd read in 2014. You can read that blog here - Favourite Teen/YA reads of 2014. Commenting on the blog, David Thorpe asked me an interesting question – why were those books in particular on my favourite reads of the year? His question made me wonder if there was something that linked the books, a shared theme, a particular voice, or a genre. I looked at the list and at first thought: no, the books are all very different. Some of them were written in the first person present, others in the third person past; some had a male POV, others a female. Many of them were set in different parts of the world, or in an alternative world, or in a different time.

All the books in my list are richly diverse in terms of when and where they are set. Most of them are set in different countries, from Denmark to Ireland, Germany to the USA, and  I think that’s part of their lure for me. Many of the books are set in a different time or era: from the 19^thCentury to a version of the future, or even a parallel time.

Some of the books are fairy tale like. The Hob and the Deerman reads like a wonderful fairy tale and reminds me of all the fairy stories I read as a child. I would happily invite a Hob to come and share my home. Jonathan Stroud’s Lockwood and Co, is set in London – but although the places in the book may be familiar to a Londoner, it’s not quite like the London we know. It’s beset by ghosts and ghouls that only children have the ability to see and deal with. So, when darkness falls, the adults lock their doors, leaving the child agents to do their work.

It was just as I finished reading Out of the Easy by Ruta Sepetys at Christmas, that I realised there wasa common thread between all the books in my list. Out of the Easy is the story of Josie, the daughter of a prostitute in New Orleans in the 1950’s. It’s a book that I would definitely include in my list of favourite teen/YA reads of 2014.

It is the fact that they are set in a different time and place and sometimes in a different world which sets these books apart, and I think that’s what I love about them. All the writers beautifully evoke their setting, so that by the time you’ve finished their book you come away feeling as though you really know that place.

It’s not only the variety of world settings or time they’re set in that set these books apart for me, but also the variety in the lives of the characters. In both of Tanya Landman’s books, Buffalo Soldier and Apache, the main characters are girls: one is a black slave and the other is an orphaned Apache. If I had a teenage daughter, I would be recommending them to her. (Luckily I have nieces to whom I can recommend books!) But my teen son has no problem with books where the main character is a girl, and is interested in reading both.

Here’s an unashamed plug for libraries - it’s National Libraries Day on February 7^th. Events are happening in libraries across the country from Friday 6^th into the following week. If you have a minute, check out the link here to see what’s going on in your local library.


Here’s the hashtag for National Libraries Day on Twitter #NLD15
Or share a library #shelfie
Follow @NatLibrariesDay on Twitter and you’ll know what’s going on.




So the books are there – if you can find them or have been made aware of them. I’m hoping 2015 will be even more richly diverse in teen and young adult literature. I’m sure I’ve missed a few great reads in 2014, so please feel free to leave your recommendations in the comments. And I’d love to hear what makes a book stand out for you.

My website
 
Twitter

Add a Comment

In today's New York Times, Alexander Alter writes of the increasing number of "adult" authors who are reconfiguring their history books for the younger, still-book-buying crowd (or for those who buy books for them). She writes:

Inspired by the booming market for young adult novels, a growing number of biographers and historians are retrofitting their works to make them palatable for younger readers. Prominent nonfiction writers like Ms. Hillenbrand, Jon Meacham and Rick Atkinson are now grappling with how to handle unsettling or controversial material in their books as they try to win over this impressionable new audience.

And these slimmed-down, simplified and sometimes sanitized editions of popular nonfiction titles are fast becoming a vibrant, growing and lucrative niche.

A Charmed Life

Here breathes a solitary pilgrim sustained by dew

and the kindness of strangers. An astonished Midas

surrounded by the exponentially multiplying miracles: my

Yucca and Cactus in the Chicago World Exposition;

friends of the spirit; teachers. Ah, the bleak horizons of joy.

Light every morning dawns through the trees. Surely

this is worth more than one life.

Add a Comment

What makes for urgent historical fiction? Having pondered the issue while writing my own backward-glancing novels, I decided to tackle the question for Printers Row/Chicago Tribune and see what some careful consideration might teach me.

I'm grateful, as always, for the privilege of time and space in that wonderful publication.

My piece, which reflects on all historical fiction (which is to say no boundaries between Adult and Young Adult) begins like this:

“There is no real anonymity in history,” Colum McCann writes in the acknowledgments of TransAtlantic,his gorgeous time traveler of a book.

No anonymity. No facelessness. No oblivion.

           

Life is specific, and so is history. It’s emergent, conditional, personal, and absurd.

Why, then, does so much historical fiction land like a brick, with a thud? Why does it hint of authorial Look what I know, See how I found out? Why do so many writers of historical fiction seem to prefer the long way around the heart of the story? Why ignore the truth that the best historical fiction is as insistent as now?

And continues here.

Add a Comment

I found this little girl in Berlin. She was mesmerized by the magic of bubbles. I left her city mesmerized as well, and then one day began to write a novel for it. I called that book We Could Be Heroes. I dedicated it to my editor, Tamra Tuller. It will be launched by Chronicle Books sometime next year, and I've held my breath, as I always do, hoping that it might find its right readers.

I cannot imagine being any more blessed than I am right now, today, by the kindness of two extraordinary readers—two young adult writers who have done so much on the page, done so much for others, done so much to elevate this genre, to prove its power. Thank you, Patricia McCormick and Ruta Sepetys for your words about We Could Be Heroes.

“Beth Kephart is one of my heroes. She’s spun gold out of the language of longing and has shown us how to make room for miracles. We Could Be Heroes –about a boy and girl separated by the cruelest of fates–will inspire any reader to make the leap for love.”
–Patricia McCormick, author of National Book Award Finalists Sold and Never Fall Down

 “An unforgettable portrayal of life and love divided. Kephart captures the beauty and desperation of 1980's Berlin with prose both gripping and graceful.”

--Ruta Sepetys, New York Times bestselling author of Between Shades of Gray and Out of the Easy

Display Comments Add a Comment

Tomorrow my friend Ruta Sepetys will launch her second novel, a book rich with landscape, intrigue, color, and snap called Out of the Easy (Philomel). It's a book that transported me to steamy 1950s New Orleans during a steamy 2012 Philadelphia day. It's a book that people have been talking about for a year, a book that, in recent days, has been featured prominently in every major news journal (with a full-page Entertainment Weekly interview, to boot!). Set to embark on a ten-week tour, Ruta is also launching some pretty cool initiatives, one of which should be of great interest to my young writing friends.

This initiative is nationwide, a Philomel-sponsored scholarship contest that will award one high-school student with $5,000 toward the college of their choice; the participating school will also receive 25 Penguin books. Those interested will want to read Ruta's book and reflect as well on a certain Charles Dickens quote. For details, go here.

In the meantime, I encourage you to embrace Ruta, her stories, and her great big soul as she travels somewhere near you. Her extensive tour dates (which actually extend through the entire year and will take her around the world) can be found here.

Finally, here is Ruta herself, on the making of Out of the Easy.

Add a Comment

This is how it happens:  I write an adult book that Laura Geringer discovers and reads; she gets in touch.  For a year Laura and I talk about how ill-equipped I feel I am to write books for young adults.  A conversation in a Philadelphia restaurant changes everything; I am persuaded to try.  I write what will become several books for Laura, and in the midst of story development, copy editing, cover design, and publicity, I meet Jill Santopolo—utterly adorable, fashion savvy, super smart, wildly well-organized, and Laura's second in command at Laura Geringer Books/HarperTeen, where I will write four books, one of them (The Heart is Not a Size) being Jill's very own.  Then one day Jill calls to say that she is headed to Philomel to join a children's book empire carved out by a man named Michael Green.  I'd really like Michael, Jill says.  She hopes I'll eventually meet him.

(She is right.  And I do.  Facts made true in reverse order.)

A few years later, I see Jill again, this time at an ALA event, where she slips me a copy of Between Shades of Gray and whispers two words in my ear:  Tamra Tuller.  Jill and Tamra are, by now, colleagues at Philomel, and Tamra edits the kind of books I like to write.  Jill, looking trademark gorgeous, encourages me to read Ruta Sepetys' international bestseller of a debut novel as proof.  I do.  Again, I am persuaded.  Not long afterwards, I have the great privilege of joining the Philomel family when Tamra reads a book I've been working on for ten years and believes that it has merit. Jill has opened her new home to me, and I am grateful.

What happens next is that Tamra moves to Chronicle and I, with a book dedicated to her because I do love her that much, move to Chronicle, too.  What happens next is Jill and I remain friends (Jill and I and Michael and Jessica, too (not to mention Laura)).  Which is all a very long way of saying how happy I was to receive two of Jill's newest creations just a few weeks ago.  Last night and early this morning I read the first of them.  It's called Invisibility, it's due out in May, and it is co-authored by Jill's fabulously successful Philomel author, Andrea Cremer (The Nightshade Series) and the big-hearted author/editor/sensation/Lover's Dictionary Guru David Levithan.

I hear David Levithan—his soulfulness, his tenderness, his yearning, his love—when I read this book. I hear Andrea Cremer—her careful and credible world building, her necessary specificity, her other-worldly imagination.  It's a potent combination in a story about a Manhattan boy whom no one in the world can see.  No one, that is, except for the girl who has moved in down the hall—a girl who has escaped Minnesota with a brother she deeply loves and a mother who cares for them both, but must work long hours to keep her transplanted family afloat.  Cremer and Levithan's Manhattan is tactile, navigable, stewing with smells and scenes.  Their fantasy world—spellcraft, curses, witches, magic—is equally cinematic and engaging.  The love between the invisible boy and the seeing (and, as it turns out, magically gifted) girl feels enduring, and then there's that other kind of love—between Elizabeth and her brother—that gives this story even greater depth and meaning.  The parents aren't nearly bad either (not at all).

What it is to be invisible.  What it is to see and be seen.  What it is to know there is evil in the world and that any strike against it will scar and (indeed) age those who take a stand.  Invisibility is a fantasy story, but it is more than that, too.  It's a growing-up story in which courage, truth-telling, sacrifice, and vulnerability figure large, and in which love of every kind makes a difference. 

Display Comments Add a Comment

I have written many times on this blog about the exquisite writer and human being, Ruta Sepetys.  I am lucky to know her—it's that simple—and the gift of our friendship is a gift that Tamra Tuller, our Philomel editor, gave.  Tamra sent Ruta a copy of Small Damages a long time ago, and Ruta not only lent her voice to this story, but she stayed in touch, sending notes from all around the world as she met with teachers, parents, and children to discuss her international bestseller, Between Shades of Gray—and, later, to prepare us for the February 2013 release of her absolutely lovely second book, Out of the Easy.

Home for Ruta is states away from here.  Life for Ruta is many obligations which she, with all the grace of a true diplomat, seamlessly fulfills.  Still, on July 19th, the day Small Damages was released into the world, Ruta thought to send me a gift.  Enclosed is a little cake, not quite full of taste, but certainly full of love, she wrote.

It had been my son's birthday, and then my husband's.  There was endless corporate work to do.  My party for this little book was two months away.  But there Ruta was, reminding me to take a moment for this book that had consumed ten years of my life and almost (so many times) vanished.  Her cake will always sit among my treasured things, a reminder:  Take a moment.

Today, taking a page from Ruta, I stop to remind us all.

Display Comments Add a Comment

There's a funny thing that happens when you stop writing your own books—when you cool the fever, when you walk the garden, when you do not rise at 3 AM, determined.  Other people's books become your obsession.  Their stories, their words, their worlds.  You grow responsible for understanding.  You yield your empathy, devote your time.  The days are long and hot and languid, and New Orleans wafts by courtesy of Ruta Sepetys, and Haiti, thanks to Edwidge Danticat, and the humor of Haven Kimmel, the confessions of Caroline Knapp, the daughter of a salt god (Ilie Ruby), Cambodia at war (Vaddey Ratner), the very secret life of objects (Dawn Raffel).

Over the course of the last month, I have bought nearly 100 books and others, due out soon, have made their way to me, courtesy of publishing houses and authors.  My triple-stacked shelves in every book-devoted room are officially overtaxed.  Book piles approximate architecture.  Most women get up and ask, What will I wear?  I wonder, upon rising, what to read.

My mind is clear; it is at peace; it is satiated.  I sleep better than I did.  I want less.  I am comforted by books, comfortable around them, and the words I do write these days are reviews and essays, opinion pieces, suggestions.  Short pieces, perhaps 1,000 words a day, that help me put into context those things that I'm learning about language and how it works for others.

It seems enough, for summer.

Display Comments Add a Comment

The dignity of Ruta Sepetys is telegraphed from afar. It's in the books she writes—the international sensation Between Shades of Gray and now (coming in February 2013) Out of the Easy.  It's plain as day in her interviews, her commentary, her web site, her broadcast segments.  And if you ever have the chance to meet her (and I'm lucky; I briefly have), it's all right there in her face.  Ruta isn't a writer simply and only because she wants to be a writer.  She's a writer because she has something to say.

She's a writer, too, who knows the value of deep research—the liberating and liberalizing ways that rooting around in both personal and world history, in the files of the Soviet secret police and the murky streets of the historic French Quarter, in old maps and and the catalogs of Smith College, in the workings of all kinds of watches will, when pondered long enough, when tacked and quilted, generate story.  Research, particularly historic research, can be hard to master and harder to contain.  Ruta makes it look easy.  What she knows never trumps the many things that she imagines.

I spent today lying in a steamy east-coast house, circa 2012, reading Ruta's delectable new circa 1950s New Orleans novel.  Often I forgot just where I actually was as I slid into the dream, drifted in and out of the old bookstore (and the chatter, always smart, about books), had a good old walkabout in the brothel (equal parts gaudy and opulent), and fell in with Easy's seventeen-year-old heroine, Josie.  Josie has found her way despite her mother's poor profession, witless selfishness, and fancy for bad men.  She's a spitfire, an I'll-do-it-myself-er, a girl walking around with a pile of lies but without a dent in her actual morality.  She's the favorite of the wily, big-hearted madam known as Willie.  She's loved by two boys—Patrick, her co-worker at the bookstore, and Jesse, a beautiful boy with a mysterious past—not to mention a whole lot of poor souls who make her tattered life rich.  Josie's mother's on the lam and Josie's in trouble, and there will be murder, mayhem, lies, sacrifice, and choices before this story is through.  There'll be a whole lot of color and New Orleans twang, a rip-roaring cast, and, always, Ruta's intelligent sense of humor, not to mention instructions from Dickens.

Easy, which is a Tamra Tuller book, which is to say a Philomel book, which is to say the product of a remarkable book family headed by Michael Green, sounds spectacularly like then (the details are so right, their webbing-in so clever), but it resonates for now.  It's going to generate a whole lot of book love when it debuts next winter.  

Display Comments Add a Comment

By Bianca Schulze, The Children’s Book Review
Published: July 1, 2012

Here’s the scoop on the most popular destinations on The Children’s Book Review site, the most coveted new releases and bestsellers.

Best Young Adult Books with Galley Smith

Summer Reading List: Summer Sports, Baseball, & the Outside World

3 Kids Picture Books that Teach Good Manners

How Picture Books Play a Role in a Child’s Development

Where to Find Free eBooks for Children Online

---

THE NEW RELEASES

The most coveted books that release this month:

Shadow of Night

by Deborah Harkness

(Ages 18 and up)

Artemis Fowl: The Last Guardian

by Eoin Colfer

(Ages 9-12)

Big Nate Fun Blaster

by Lincoln Peirce

(Ages 8-12)

How to Train Your Dragon: Book 9

by Cressida Cowell

(Ages 8-12)

---

THE BEST SELLERS

The best selling children’s books this month:

PICTURE BOOKS

Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons

by Eric Litwin

(Ages 4-7)

Add a Comment

In the heat of the summer, after a night of hail and thunder clashes, a white package arrives on my stoop.  It's a book that I've been longing for—an early copy of Out of the Easy by the tremendously talented, radiantly successful, and I-know-it-for-a-fact-good-hearted Ruta Sepetys.

This book will, I'm sure, be as beloved as Ruta's first, the New York Times bestselling, multiple-award winning, translated-into-every-conceivable-language Between Shades of Gray.  I just have a feeling, and besides, this is a Tamra Tuller Philomel book.  We know that that's a formula that works.

I'm all done with my complicated sentences.  I'm going to spend the weekend reading this book.  I'll let you know how great it is, so that you can look for it eagerly in February 2013, when it officially debuts.

Display Comments Add a Comment

By Bianca Schulze, The Children’s Book Review
Published: June 2, 2012

Here’s the scoop on the most popular destinations on The Children’s Book Review site, the most coveted new releases and bestsellers.

Best Young Adult Books with Forever Young Adult

Books for Boys: 5 Funny Kids Books

How Picture Books Play a Role in a Child’s Development

Author Interview: Gary Paulsen

Where to Find Free eBooks for Children Online

---

THE NEW RELEASES

The most coveted books that release this month:

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

by William Joyce

(Ages 4-8)

Bink and Gollie, Two for One

by Kate DiCamillo

(Ages 6-8)

Dork Diaries 4: Tales from a Not-So-Graceful Ice Princess 

by Rachel Renee Russell

(Ages 9-12)

Dragons Love Tacos

by Adam Rubin

(Ages 3-5)

---

THE BEST SELLERS

The best selling children’s books this month:

PICTURE BOOKS

Add a Comment

... featuring the words of authors I love, the kindness of bloggers, my photographs of southern Spain, and my husband's deliberately rough Spanish guitar, for that is the kind of guitar my gypsy characters play.

It would mean so much to me if you shared this trailer with others.

Display Comments Add a Comment

By Bianca Schulze, The Children’s Book Review
Published: May 7, 2012

Here’s the scoop on the most popular destinations on The Children’s Book Review site, the most coveted new releases and bestsellers.

Five Family Favorites with Catherine Newman

Books for Boys: 5 Funny Kids Books

Best Young Adult Books with Andrea Chapman of Reading Lark

How Picture Books Play a Role in a Child’s Development

Where to Find Free eBooks for Children Online

---

THE NEW RELEASES

The most coveted books that release this month:

The Serpent’s Shadow (The Kane Chronicles, Book Three)

by Rick Riordan

(Ages 9-11)

Theodore Boone: The Accused

by John Grisham

(Ages 8-12)

Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons

by Eric Litwin

(Ages 4-7)

The Enchantress (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel)

by Michael Scott

(Ages 12-17)

Add a Comment

The American Booksellers Association (ABA) has revealed the winners of the 2012 Indies Choice Book Awards and the E.B. White Read-Aloud Awards, books that show “the spirit of independent bookstores.” Below, we’ve linked to free samples of all the winners.

In an odd turn of events, brother and sister authors Maile Meloy and Colin Meloy tied for the E.B. White Read-Aloud Award this year.

ABA CEO Oren Teicher had this statement: “After a month of voting by the owners and staff at independent bookstores across the country, we have an outstanding list of winners that reflects the types of books independent bookstores champion best … We look forward to saluting the winners and honor recipients at the Celebration of Bookselling Author Awards Luncheon on June 5 at BEA.”

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Add a Comment

Yesterday at Villa Maria Academy I worked with 42 beautiful eighth graders—building writing exercises out of picture books, collectively pooling words for poems that would have made William Carlos Williams proud, studying some of the many ways that a story can begin.

Schools are supposed to teach many things.  In this classroom love is clearly a curriculum component.  There were future special education teachers in the mix, young women deeply concerned about world peace, students magnanimously enthused about a classmate's striking literary gifts, at least one dancer, and readers who did not need to be introduced to Ruta Sepetys or Kathryn Erskine.  They had found these authors on their own.

At the end of the session one student shared with me her winter project—a report of sorts on THE HEART IS NOT A SIZE, my Juarez novel. She had told my story in her own words and created beautiful accompanying illustrations, and when she got to the page that introduced the little girl whom I had based on the child photographed here, I stopped.  The likeness—the dark hair, the orange sleeveless shirt with the little bow—was so absolute that it seemed as if the Villa Maria student had traveled those dusty roads with us.


I rather wish she had.  I would have enjoyed her company.

Display Comments Add a Comment