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Archives - June 2009

Interview: Nicole Chaison, author of The Passion of the Hausfrau

Jun 16, 2009

Ah, memories of high school. The people we loved, the people we couldn’t stand, the problems all those people caused for us. Sometimes those problems live on long after the high-school years. Such was the case for Nicole Chaison. When she got the gift of a book by one of her former classmates, she was incensed. It was bad enough that one of her classmates, Bill Romanowski, had gone on to become a very rich and famous football star. But now he had written a book too? (Well, with the help of two cowriters, but still…) Chaison knew what she had to do: She had to finish her own book.

Interview: Rachel Renée Russell, author of Dork Diaries: Tales from a Not-So-Fabulous Life

Jun 2, 2009

Eighth-grader Nikki Maxwell has just moved to a new school, one in which she doesn’t fit and where she definitely feels unwelcome. But that’s nothing compared to what she really wants: an iPhone (something her mother won’t allow her to have yet). As this “dork” makes her way through the travails of school life, writer and artist Rachel Renée Russell introduces us to a lovable character along the lines of Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim. This time, it’s a character for the young-girl set, and the story, while primarily a prose novel, is accompanied by comic art throughout. It’s not a straight-up graphic novel by any means, but it’s a mixture that will appeal to a lot of comics and manga fans. And it’s already a huge hit with its target audience. We talked with Russell about her bestselling creation.

Interview: Jeremy Love, author of Bayou

Jun 2, 2009

At turns gruelingly realistic and dripping with the Southern milieu that flavors its historical roots, Bayou is a rare treat. Fast-paced and gripping, it’s compulsively readable. Dark and foreboding, it’s got an eerie quality that chills the spine. But perhaps most notable is the infuriatingly accurate portrayal of racism and oppression inflicted on its main character, a young girl named Lee, and her father, who is wrongly accused of murdering a little white girl in the Mississippi bayou that gives the series its name.