Soo...no book reading for me this week because (as some of you may already know) - I became a daddy!


My wife's water broke at 1:10am on 4/17/12 - a full month ahead of schedule.  Contractions started a few minutes after. We headed to the hospital and I managed to keep the car inside all the important lines. By the time she got her gown, the doc was surprised to find she was fully dilated and head was descending already. Suddenly, they rushed her into the room and had her pushing the second we were through the door. 


At 3:05am, a healthy baby boy came out, named Evan James Ballou.
19"6lbs. 10oz
Ten fingers, ten toes, and a healthy everything else - even so young (think about if he'd been the full term - a 9 to 10 pounder - yikes!)


Just because I've got a captive audience...here are some pics. 

Yes, my wife is always this photogenic. Makes me sick too.

And, seriously, if there's any doubt he's my kiddo - this should squash it.

This is the second installment of Oliver’s dystopian trilogy, following last year’s DELIRIUM, taking place in a world where love has been labeled a disease.

The story follows Lena after she’s escaped into the wilds, and is told in alternating timeframes, Then and Now.

While I enjoyed Delirium very much, PANDEMONIUM was a faster, more thrilling read for me. Lena comes into her own, finding conviction and strength as she deals with Alex’s death, and she becomes a rebel with a cause. Her character growth in this novel is wonderful to watch.

Oliver is a gorgeous writer, and her prose is finer than ever here. Finally, be forewarned: the ending delivers a cliffhanger that is as steep and shocking as they come.

I had the honor of being on a panel with Lauren this past weekend in New York City. It was incredible to hear her read from this book.

If you liked DELIRIUM, you’ll love this sequel. Highly recommended.

I recently read a YA thriller that had a great mystery, a touch of paranormal and fun romance, with some deeper undertones.  SLIDE by Jill Hathaway is a quick read that will pull you along as Vee navigates murder, first love and loss, while dealing with her terrifying ability to "slide" into someone else's head and an incident from her own past that continues to haunt her.  I really enjoyed this book, and I can't wait for the next one.

From Goodreads:

Vee Bell is certain of one irrefutable truth—her sister’s friend Sophie didn’t kill herself. She was murdered.

Vee knows this because she was there. Everyone believes Vee is narcoleptic, but she doesn’t actually fall asleep during these episodes: When she passes out, she slides into somebody else’s mind and experiences the world through that person’s eyes. She’s slid into her sister as she cheated on a math test, into a teacher sneaking a drink before class. She learned the worst about a supposed “friend” when she slid into her during a school dance. But nothing could have prepared Vee for what happens one October night when she slides into the mind of someone holding a bloody knife, standing over Sophie’s slashed body.

Vee desperately wishes she could share her secret, but who would believe her? It sounds so crazy that she can’t bring herself to tell her best friend, Rollins, let alone the police. Even if she could confide in Rollins, he has been acting off lately, more distant, especially now that she’s been spending more time with Zane. 

Jill also has a great blog you can check out here.

Not everything in the town of Remarkable is remarkable, even though the terribly interesting and even more terribly talented people won’t admit this to just anyone.  It has a very dull post office, for instance, and it has a Coffeebucks that sells coffee that is very good, but certainly no better than the coffee served at any other Coffeebucks in any other town.  And then there is Jane, who is a very unremarkable girl, ten years old, of medium height, with eyes of no particular color, and hair that is not quite brown enough to be called mousy.  


Jane is the only student in town who lacks the talent to enroll in Remarkable’s School for the Remarkably Gifted, and therefore she’s the only one who goes to the regular public school. But when the nefarious Grimlet twins join Jane’s 5th grade class, she soon finds herself on a series of adventures involving an out-of-control science fair project, a pirate captain on the run from a mutinous crew, a lonely dentist with no patients, jelly with artificial preservatives, and a newly constructed bell tower that endangers Remarkable’s most beloved inhabitant: a skittish lake monster named Lucky.  


It is up to Jane, in her own modest style, to stop the science fair project, rescue the pirate captain, befriend the dentist, eat jelly, and save Lucky the Lake Monster so that Remarkable can remain the remarkable place it has always been.  Along the way, she learns that gifts and talents don’t always bring happiness, and that sometimes being ordinary has its advantages.  From Foley's website.

This synopsis, though terribly interesting, does not do this remarkable novel justice.  REMARKABLE is replete with fascinating characters, quirky insights, delightful wordplay and Foley's brilliantly light-hearted voice.  Weeks after reading it, I still find myself chuckling over Captain Rojo Herring, the Grimlet twins and the idea of perfect dentistry.

And thinking about Jane.  Who represents all of us who have felt unnoticed or outshone, and inspires us to look past our own ordinariness to see we are all capable of great things and deserve to be the focus of our own stories.

This week is our usual book blog and we've opened it up to include any book, no matter the genre, that we've read recently. I decided to feature an adult book, BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP. I read some of the reviews and comments for this book and the topic fascinated me. My grandmother suffered from Altimezer's desease before she died. Watching her memory disentigrate was heart breaking, but also brought up so many questions in my mind about how memory functions in our brains.

While the story is captivating, I also admire the author's craft. The content of the story makes for a very difficult writing structure. How do you write from the first person perspective where the main character can't remember anything that has happened before, but the reader can? Reading the story with the mindset of a writer AND a reader makes for a fascinating exercise.

From the author's website:

Christine wakes up every morning in an unfamiliar bed with an unfamiliar man. She looks in the mirror and sees an unfamiliar, middle- aged face. And every morning, the man she has woken up with must explain that he is Ben, he is her husband, she is forty-seven years old, and a terrible accident two decades earlier decimated her ability to form new memories.

But it’s the phone call from a Dr. Nash, a neurologist who claims to be working with Christine without her husband’s knowledge, that directs her to her journal, hidden in the back of her closet. For the past few weeks, Christine has been recording her daily activities—tearful mornings with Ben, sessions with Dr. Nash, flashes of scenes from her former life—and rereading past entries, relearning the facts of her life as retold by the husband she is completely dependent upon. As the entries build up, Christine asks many questions. What was life like before the accident? Why did she and Ben never have a child? What has happened to Christine’s best friend? And what exactly was the horrific accident that caused such a profound loss of memory?

Every day, Christine must begin again the reconstruction of her past. And the closer she gets to the truth, the more un- believable it seems.

P.S. All of the Muses will be speaking this Saturday on a panel for the SCBWI CA Northcentral Spring Spirit Conference. If you're there, please stop and say hello.