At first I thought this was a joke, then I only wished it was.  My Beautiful Mommy is a book that tells the story of a little girl seeing her mommy get plastic surgery.  Yes, sweetie, see mommy get bigger boobs, a tighter tummy and a smaller nose and then feel great about yourself.  Almost like a double dog dare, isn’t it?

Well, I’m home after dragging back bags and bags of ARCs, pounds of candy and a boatload of pens and pencils from the exhibits.  PLA was wonderful with lots of sessions that really inspired me, but they weren’t about children’s librarianship or books.  I got to go to the great sessions on library management, and really they were great. 

But when I hit the exhibits, I was all about the children’s and teen books.  The last time I went to a national conference it was ALA a few years ago.  At that time, if you mentioned you blogged it was met with confusion if not disdain by the people at the booths.   That has completely changed, and now if you say you are a blogger you get the ARCs from behind the curtains, the business cards to contact them further, and the small presses are thrilled to see you.  Of course there were a few publishers who still don’t get it.  Harcourt is one of those, though it may have just been the person running the booth.  She informed me that they don’t do ARCs though they had some at their table and I pointed out that I get ARCs and review copies from some of their subsidiaries already.  But she insisted that it was too expensive to send ARCs out to just anyone.  I have to admit I got steamed at that and started to cite my number of hits per day and such.  No effect.  She was done with me.  And frankly, I don’t expect a copy of the one ARC I got her to write my name down for to appear anytime soon.

But I came away from the exhibits and from most booths with an incredible number of books.  Here are the ones I am looking forward to most:

  

Ink Exchange by Melissa Marr (I’ve already started this and if the writing holds through the book this may be better than the amazing Wicked Lovely.)

Playing with Fire by Derek Landy (the sequel to Skulduggery Pleasant)

Looks by Madeleine George.

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow.

Smiles to Go by Jerry Spinelli

Lamplighter by D. M. Cornish

Generation Dead by Daniel Waters

Peeled by Joan Bauer

 

Diary of a Wimpy Kid has a new sequel:  Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Roderick Rules.  The first book has been on the children’s best seller list for 40 weeks and the sequel debuted at #1.  Author, Jeff Kinney has been interviewed on NPR, so you can hear how he came up with the format of the book and how it started out as an adult book idea.  Best of all, you can hear plans for books 3-5!

This Times article offers information and links about Melvin Burgess’ new book and the vlog entries that go with it.  In his new book, Sara’s Face, the main character uses a video blog.  Burgess then decided to create real vlog entries to accompany the book and drive interest in it.  The article, written by Burgess, tells about the issues of converting the vlogs he had written into real ones for the Internet. 

You can check out the vlog entries here. 

The next Christopher Paolini book has been announced!  The third book in the Inheritance series is titled Brisinger. 

The New York Times has an announcement from Scholastic about what they hope will be their next hit series.  The new series is called The 39 Clues and will be a series of 10 books, each written by a different author, but following a single story arc. 

The first book, The Maze of Bones, was written by Rick Riordan.  Gordon Korman has been signed to write book 2, Peter Lerangis to write book 3, and Jude Watson to write book 4.  Riordan is also responsible for the overall story outline. 

The series will have a strong online component as well as collectible cards. 

The Maze of Bones will be released in September 2008 with consecutive books following every few months.