A collection of Friday awesomeness

First thing's first: Meant to Be has a new release date! Mark your calendars for November 13, 2012. You can read straight through your Thanksgiving holiday, and then buy it for all your favorite readers for the holidays!

Thanks for the great comments and tweets on my post about YA guys with heart. Here's a few suggestions that were added in the discussion

• Noah Shaw, from The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer
• Ky, from Matched
• Luke, from Forgotten (haven't read this yet, definitely going to!)
• James, from Audrey, Wait!
• Ethan Wate, from Beautiful Creatures
• Will Grayson, from Will Grayson, Will Grayson
• Tyler, from Moonglass

Thanks to everyone who chimed in!

The best part of this week was definitely yesterday, when I ran from the train to my apartment in a monsoon just so I could get this out of my mailbox and start reading:

Lola and the Boy Next Door by Stephanie Perkins

It's every bit as good as every other blogger on the Internet said it would be! And the finished product is just gorgeous. I love the colors.

And finally, here's a video of my buddy Hayward Williams, performing an encore at a show he did recently with Jeff Foucault. I've known Hayward for years (he's married to one of my college besties, Kathleen), and he graciously let me steal his name/music to use in Meant to Be (spoiler alert: I thanked him in the acknowledgements, too).

Anyway, his music rules and this cover is awesome.

So enjoy today, this last day of September, and get psyched up for my favorite month, OCTOBER! I'll be eating lots of pumpkin things and planning a trip to New York to meet with some folks in ye olde publishing industry.

REVIEW: If I Stay/Where She Went aka TEAM ADAM!

Last week I noticed a lot of bloggers posting about books it seemed like everyone else had read that they hadn't. Which got me thinking about it on my end. I bought a copy of If I Stay by Gayle Forman about a month ago when I was visiting my mom. I was worried I'd need another book to read if my flight home got delayed, but it didn't, and so I've had If I Stay hanging around on my nightstand ever since. Everyone and their dog raves over it, but it just never jumped out at me to read.

Well, I finished Sarah Mlynowski's Ten Things We Did (review forthcoming on that one, because I really loved it), and I needed something to fill the void between that and the release of Lola and the Boy Next Door. And so on Friday morning, I picked up If I Stay. I read it on  the train ride to get my haircut, on the train ride back, and at lunch. Midway through my meal at Four Bugers, I realized I was going to have to get my lunch wrapped up to go, because I was about the burst into the loudest, hardest sobs of my life.

Because If I Stay is WONDERFUL. I don't want to write a crazy in-depth review, because I think the book really is better if you just sort of enter the world on the first page and get wrapped up in the story. And you will. I finished the book by Friday night, and that was WITH finishing up my copyedits AND cleaning my entire house in preparation for my mom's visit on Saturday!

It was so good, that I hadn't even finished If I Stay yet when I ran out to pick up the sequel, Where She Went. And then I read that in TWO days, and that's while my mom was in town!

The one thing I want to say about Gayle Forman's writing: she makes you feel like you've known these characters your whole life. I don't know how, in about seven pages, she makes you fall so deeply in love with Mia's parents that when the big bad occurs, you can barely hold yourself together. I have never sobbed as hard and as many times in a book as I did while reading If I Stay, and it's 100% a result of the incredibly rich and wonderful characters Gayle wrote.

And the last thing I'll say?

Team Adam. All the way.



Which brings me to the last thing: I now have an Adam-shaped hole in my reading life. I need more of him, or characters like him, which is to say YA guys with some serious heart. Examples? Marcus Flutie, Patrick from Fixing Delilah, Etienne from Anna and the French Kiss, pretty much any of Sarah Dessen's homeboys, especially Dexter, Owen, and Wes.

So, dear blog readers, what books should I read if I want more Adam in my life?! Leave the suggestions in the comments, or tweet them with the  hashtag #YAguys

The Perfect Storm

My copyedits are here. And they're due on Friday.

Luckily, I just bought this:

Which is going to make the work waaaaaaay more fun!

I'll post a better update on Friday, when this is done. Wish me luck!

Mr. Rogers: He Was Not Afraid of the Dark

Today I want to share with you one of my all-time favorite pieces of writing. It's called "He Was Not Afraid of the Dark," and it was written by James Poniewozik. It was initially printed in Time magazine, March 10, 2003. I ripped it out and carried it in my wallet for years, finally putting it in a plastic sleeve and depositing it in a scrapbook. I've never found it online anywhere, so I'm going to type the entire thing out for you, that's how much I love it (please don't get mad at me, Mr. Poniewozik. I just truly love this piece, and can't find anywhere online to link to it).

I have no idea why it meant so much to me, other than the fact that I grew up on Mr. Rogers, and in the days and months after September 11,  2001, I feel, like a lot of my generation probably did, that we needed him. And when he died,  it felt like we lost a huge part of our childhood, and maybe even worried about where our own children would learn all those great lessons that Mr. Rogers taught us, like how they make crayons and how the mail gets sorted and how to be kind, generous people.

So here it is, nearly 10 years later (and 10 years after the day we all wished Mr. Rogers could give us a hug and tell us it would all be ok).

He Was Not Afraid of the Dark

by James Poniewozik

If you remember Mister Rogers as warm, fuzzy, and innocuous as a cardigan sweater, you did not really know Mister Rogers. It is true that Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, which lives on in reruns, was an island of tranquility in a children's mediasphere of robots and antic sponges. And in real life, Fred Rogers, who died last week of stomach cancer at age 74, was evidently as sweet and mild mannered as the kindly neighbor he played on TV. An ordained Presbyterian minister, he didn't smoke, drink, or eat meat, prayed every day and went to bed by 9:30 each night. To cynics and parodists, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood was a namby-pamby zone of pint-size feel-goodism, and Mister Rogers himself a wimpy Stuart Smalley for tots.

But part of what made Mister Rogers' Neighborhood great and unique is that, for all its beautiful days in the neighborhood, it was also the darkest work of popular culture made for preschoolers since perhaps the Brothers Grimm. Mister Rogers was softer than anyone else in children's TV because so many of the messages he had to impart were harder. That your parents might someday decide not to live together anymore. That dogs and guppies and people all someday will die. That sometimes you will feel ashamed and other times you feel so mad you will want to bite someone. He even calmed fears that may seem silly, but to a child are real and consuming -- like being afraid to take a bath because you might be sucked down the pipes. Mister Rogers gently sang, "You can never go down/ Can never go down/ Can never go down the drain."

We are the champions!

Second straight and fourth overall season title for the Wicked Pissahs!

Our  championship trophy is called The Golden Fez, since we bout at Shriners Auditorium in Wilmington, MA. It's pretty cool.

More updates later. Still basking in the big win!