‘Pin Picks: Eight is Not Enough

It’s YA lit day, kids. I opted to help out our girl Claire today because I have read exactly zero of her favorite books! Really! Even though I always enjoy YA lit, being a human being with feet of sand and heart of candy-floss, to paraphrase Morrissey (not really). But I bet we can still come up with something great, and everyone loves a challenge. Okay! On to your books.

1. Dairy Queen, Catherine Gilbert Murdock — Hey, what a great opportunity to talk about working at the DQ! It sucked. Mostly, I remember this one day, in the summer (obviously), and the line was around the block, and I was making a Blizzard in each hand, because it was no longer my first time at the DQ rodeo, right, and it was so hot, and I was so tired, and I leaned forward and rested my forehead on the cold metal front of the Blizzard machine, and then my boss materialized next to me and said, in this Severus-Snape voice, “if there’s time to LEAN, there’s time to CLEAN.” You like boy-meets-girl books, and unfamiliar-environment-fish-out-of-water books. Right on.

2. Lizard Music, Daniel Pinkwater — Did you follow the story about how they used a modified excerpt from a Pinkwater story to use for reading comprehension on a standardized test? It was about a pineapple. Wait, don’t worry, the New Yorker wrote about it, so read that. You like weird things.

3. The Thirteenth Child, Patricia Wrede — My cousin married a woman who was somewhere in the middle of thirteen siblings, and she could only remember all their names if she said them really quickly in order, like an auctioneer. She has chosen not to have children of her own. I just ordered this book, because I like the idea of blending magic and the Wild West without becoming Wild Wild West. Which was really just weird-steampunk, not “magic,” but maybe that was the problem?

AND, here it is, Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies.

You’ll like it, it’s great. It’s about this dystopian society (weird), and a girl (she’ll meet a boy) who is excited to move on to the next phase of her existence, which is that when kids get to a certain age they cease to be “Uglies” and become “Pretties,” which involves really, really ace plastic surgery and body modification, after which you spend the rest of your life just partying your ass off like you’re Zelda F and the world is your bizarro Baz Luhrmann Gatsby trailer. But then, unsurprisingly, there is a canker in the heart of the rose, at which point your desires for girl-boy and frontier mayhem kick in. There are two more books in the sequence, but you do not have to read them if you don’t want, because you told me you prefer when books are just BOOKS, and you object to this “here is your first free hit of book heroin, call me if you want more” publishing industry thing. Which I respect.

Okay, now you can all talk about the actual books mentioned in this post, and the extent to which you like, or didn’t like them. And also about your working in fast food years.