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.

Every Day Is Yom Kippur

A few weeks ago, I got an email from a writer named Adi Elbaz. She'd just finished Yom Kippur a Go-Go and wanted to talk to me. Could she do it? And could she do something with it?

She just wrote a really, really sweet piece about my book. It's here. This is just a bit of the awesomeness contained:


Lonely (Wo)man of Faith in a Modern World

In many ways, Yom Kippur A Go-Go  is the story of Hava Aaronson, or me as a 12th-grader: the story of to-thine-own-self-be-true-ing against the odds. And the odds are even stronger when you purposely seek them out, as Roth does: when you consciously make yourself a stranger in a strange land, no matter how appealing its social ethic. Because Roth’s story of religious tribulation takes place, almost entirely, in the anything-goes wastelands of San Francisco’s Mission District, where, as an Orthodox Jew, he—not the chick doing performance art with her own menstrual blood—is the freak. 

Read the rest >>

We also had a pretty intense email interview. I'm not sure if she'll use it for something else, or I might ask if it's ok just to put up here.