Losers Is, Weirdly, Popular!

UPDATE: I just found out what exactly "Popular Paperbacks" means. It actually doesn't mean the book is a popular paperback (or a bestseller or anything); it means that the American Library Association thinks that my book should be popular. That's colossal. And kind of better-sounding.

Whoa! Just got an awesome email from the good folks at Scholastic. Thank you, people! It's really amazing that five years after this little neon novel got birthed (oboyo am I old), people are still thinking and talking about Losers.

(And: the other people on the list! Raina Telgemeier, who did the amazing Baby-Sitters' Club adaptations [that are actually brilliant, srsly]! Michael freakin' Northrop!)

Great news! – the following Scholastic titles are included in lists just announced by the ALA, selected at the recent ALA Midwinter Convention in Seattle.

2013 ALA Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults

·         Prom and Prejudice, by Elizabeth Eulberg (A Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults Top Ten Title)

·         Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie, by Jordan Sonnenblick

·         Drama, by Raina Telgemeier (A Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults Top Ten Title)

·         Does My Head Look Big in This?, by Randa Abdel-Fattah

·         All the Broken Pieces, by Ann Burg

·         Born Confused, by Tanuja Desai Hidier

·         Losers, by Matthue Roth

·         Green Heart, by Alice Hoffman

·         Bluford High: Search for Safety, by John Langan

·         Trapped, by Michael Northrup

·         Smile, by Raina Telgemeier

Books for Bullies

I promise, I'm not going to turn my blog into a collection of reviews. There are things I really honestly want to tell you about my OWN life, not some wacky fictional characters in my imagination or something like that.

But Brianna at TeensReadToo.com had really really cool things to say about Losers:

This was a good read. From the very beginning, I sided with Jupiter, of course. It wasn't fair to him that he always got picked on because he wasn't from around there and had a different accent. I loved how he decided to change when he got tired of always being bullied. It made sense to transform himself when he was starting a new high school. Not everyone knew who he was, so he could really be anybody that he wanted to be. I thought that was a really brave thing of him to do.

My fave part: "I definitely think bullies should read LOSERS so that they can understand what the people being bullied are going through - and maybe, just maybe, they'll understand that it's not right."

Amen. And, here -- read the whole dang thing.