Okay.
So, yesterday I took a day off. It was like the end of the world.
This Saturday, I am flying up to San Francisco to help my son move into his dorm at UC Berkeley.
My son is leaving home.
Today, my daughter started her first day at high school.
But, yesterday, Booklist reviewed Stick. I think the Booklist review is probably the BEST review I have ever gotten for any book I have ever written. It is missing one thing, but we'll talk about it later.
I especially LOVE the part about how I take a baseball bat to my sentences.
Here's what Booklist had to say about Stick:
Stick
Smith, Andrew (Author)Oct 2011. 304 p. Feiwel and Friends, hardcover, $17.99. (9780312613419).
Following up a masterwork like The Marbury Lens (2010) can’t be easy. Smith throws readers a curveball with this deceptively quiet yet fascinatingly terse offering about a tall, skinny 13-year-old nicknamed Stick. Born with just one ear, he is used to harassment, though few of his bullies suspect the shocking abuse doled out by his troubled parents. His rock is his older brother, Bosten, a bold soul hiding the fact that he is gay—a powder keg should their father find out. Sentences are nontraditionally arranged—some pages look as if Smith took a baseball bat to them—to reflect how sounds bounce inside Stick’s head: “But some [here, a very long space] sounds don’t get killed easily.” Despite this touch of experimentalism and a final-act road trip dark enough to rival any of Adam Rapp’s, this is a novel saturated with joy, especially when the brothers take a sojourn to a kindly aunt’s beach house and find themselves “playing California.” A smaller work from Smith, but one that sustains his growing rep as one of the sharpest blades in YA.
8 comments:
I really like this review! Is it my imagination or is the reviewer putting down your experimentalism? Kinda hard to tell. Sounds a little sarcastic? Or am I reading into it too much?
Oh, Jessica, I think he likes it even more than he's leading on here.
I'm so glad the reviewer points out the joy and gives Dahlia a nod.
Such a nice review, Andrew. Yee hah.
Niiiiiiiice. That's awesome! I can't wait to read this book.
I haven't even read STICK, but having read both Marbury Lens and In the Path of Falling Objects, I have to say this reviewer has definitely been impacted by your latest work.
And he's (almost) right. You're not one of the sharpest blades in YA. You are the sharpest blade in YA (in my humble opinion, of course).
Thank you very much, Adam and all.
Eh, that baseball bat line is all right ... but that bit about the sharpest blade blows it out of the water.
I just bloom in happiness, I read this!
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