Katie here. I want to take a moment to introduce my good friend and writing partner, Amy Grossklaus. Amy wowed us with the excerpt of The Defiant last month. Now she is back with our first ever picture book review. Welcome, Amy!


Guest review :
Since the earliest days of storytelling, fairy tales have provided readers with wonderful characters and enchanting settings that capture both young and old hearts. But while they are wonderfully creative, fairy tales have also cast a pall over the concept of what it means to be a “stepmother”. That is why Tami Butcher’s My Bonus Mom: Taking the Step out of Stepmom is so refreshing. It attacks this stereotype head on and debunks the myth that all stepmothers must be cruel.

Let’s be honest, as kids we all shivered when the evil stepmother locked Cinderella in the basement just as Prince Charming arrived with the glass slipper. We gasped when the twisted stepmother of Snow White convinced her to chomp into the poisoned apple. There was even an episode of The Brady Bunch, for those of you older than forty, which played off the idea of the wicked stepmother. So it is refreshing to finally read a children’s book that puts the idea of being a stepmother into a much more realistic and caring light.

In rhythmic verse, My Bonus Mom tells the story of an eleven year-old girl learning of her parents impending divorce. It follows her emotional ups and downs as she begins to navigate this new life, and hits on one of the most troubling aspects of divorce: when a parent finds new love. While frightening at first, she learns this new person isn’t there to compete for her parent’s affection, but can actually become a “bonus” in her life. A wonderfully refreshing approach to a subject that is so topical today.

I highly recommend this engaging children’s story as it instantly grabbed me by the heart. Butcher’s heartfelt prose addresses every child’s fear in this daunting situation. The story does not gloss over the hardships children encounter like days away from Mom or Dad, and worries about being replaced in a parent’s heart. Rather, it honestly deals with the realities of the situation and shows how something positive can come out of a negative situation.


LINKS
My Bonus Mom on Amazon and Barnes and Noble
Official website for My Bonus Mom
My Bonus Mom on Facebook


About our guest reviewer, Amy Grossklaus:  
After working and writing in the advertising/public relations field for over fifteen years, Amy now focuses her time completely on fiction writing. Currently editing her second manuscript, she tries to balance her time between family, freelance consulting and community service work. She currently has a blog which chronicles her experiences as she navigates the publishing industry as a new writer. 


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Katie here. I wanted to introduce Jackie Krah, one of the members of my group from the New York Pitch Conference. I was immediately drawn to Jackie when I saw her reading Taran Wanderer, one of my all time favorite books. I grew to like her even more as a member of my peer group on Author Salon. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Jackie Krah. 

                     The YA Conundrum
                         by Jackie Krah

To write YA or to not write YA – that’s the freaking question.

I have asked myself this question time and time again. I never start  a new piece with the goal of producing YA, yet it just keeps happening with every project. My twenty-five-year-old spunky protagonist suddenly decides she’s actually sixteen (shooting me the “well, duh” look for not seeing it sooner). My eighteen-year-old work-in-process tries not to pout as she glances over her shoulder at the coming-of-age tale she would like me to stop ignoring. And the men? They look at me with their smoldering eyes and beg me not to shove them into adulthood before they’ve had their fun as teens. 

Damn them all.

My reasons for avoiding the genre like a literary plague of locusts are simple … YA books are stupid. The regurgitated themes within the fantasy genre alone drive me mad. Clearly, boys must be dark and brooding to be attractive. Girls must spend a seventy-five percent of their internal monologue brooding about the brooding boy. And(gasp!), what if she’s dumped? That should require at least several chapters of moping with the inability to proceed with life like those of us in the real world.

Working as an editor for Lytherus.com, a website dedicated to news and the review of all things science fiction and fantasy, I had the great experience of being able to attend the 2011 Book Expo of America in New York City. Publishers suddenly became my friends, shoving piles of books into my arms for review on the website. When my colleagues and I got back to the hotel room and sorted out the books, I was astounded over the consistency on the back covers. A shocking majority sounded something like this: “Jane Doe is new at school, just trying to fit in, when something remarkable and paranormal happens surrounding a man that is GQ magazine attractive and with whom she feels an inexplicable connection.”

Gag.

I was determined that working in a genre of such themes would give my own writing cooties. But, whether it’s my young-at-heart outlook on life (probably not) or that certain areas of my brain have not developed since sixteen (more likely), my stories kept pushing me in this direction. So I decided if I was going to start writing YA, I had to prove myself wrong (and that, as usual, turned out to be embarrassingly easy to do). Like most grown-ups, I was a teenager once. What did I like to read back then?

I re-read books that made a big impression at the time – Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness, Robin McKinley’s Beauty, Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain. I dealt with dragons with Patricia C. Wrede and I laid the dead to rest with Sabriel. And I thought to myself – man, YA used to be awesome!

Now I am catching up on the current young adult market and I have a confession to make: I might have been a tad judgmental and presumptuous. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve thrown several books aside because I couldn’t take the narrative. I also found myself completely sucked into others. Scott Westerfeld, for example, is amazing! Then there’s The Hunger Games-- a story about a girl surviving a desperate situation purely on tenacity and willpower--yes, please. And (most shocking of all) I totally didn’t hate Harry Potter like I was so determined.

So it turns out that my current book is a young adult novel after all. I guess I should have seen it coming. Like a teen it constantly argues with me and consumes all my resources as it continues to grow, but also like the age group of its readers, it is full of potential, optimistically eager, and ready to make a name for itself in the world if just given the right amount of love and support. My education may still be in the catch-up stage, but the lesson has been learned. Don’t judge a book by its genre.


Jackie Krah is a "yinzer" living in Pittsburgh, PA where she received a M.A in Communication from Duquesne University. By day Jackie is a Communication Specialist and Technical Writer for a federal agency within the CDC. By night she gets to satiate her hungry pen as a Managing Editor for Lytherus.com, a blog dedicated to reporting news, interviews, and reviews and on all things science fiction and fantasy. 

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We are proud to invite Yvonne Lieblein to the Underground for our second Emerging Author post. Yvonne is a writer en route to finding a publisher for The Wheelhouse Café, her novel with a musical soundtrack. She shares poetry via her website, www.theversevault.com, and recently launched a blog, www.yvonnelieblein.com.  Today, Yvonne will be conducting a series of interviews with an emerging e-publishing company. 

At the end of this post, we will include the pitch that Yvonne gave to editors at the Algonkian Pitch Conference. If you enjoy Yvonne's writing and want to read a sample of her novel (and a clip of the soundtrack), please vote for her in the 'comments' section of this blog post. In order for your vote to count, you must have an email subscription to the Underground.

“Leap, and the net will appear.”

A neon flash of this John Burroughs quote kept coming to mind as I interviewed Cerro Chato Publishing founder John Nicosia and the authors of his company’s first two releases, Michael Kirkbride  {Deep Scratch in the Vinyl – Nov. 2011} and Jason Hefter {Hump Day – Feb. 2012}.

Sure, neon is an unlikely way to envision words of wisdom from a literary naturalist, but the juxtaposition of down-to-earth and modern is apropos when it comes to these three recent additions to the literary landscape. Each has taken a leap, veering off their respective career paths to venture into new territory. And now, fueled by a shared belief that publishers and writers can actually work as a team, they’re creating books for an audience they know exists. 

For me, getting to work with Carolyn Arcabascio was a dream come true. On The Moon Coin, we worked from a master list of scene options, with Carolyn picking out scenes she liked and making sketches. For the prologue, Carolyn drafted three options. All three were great, but two in particular were spectacular. I first went with option 3 (one of my scene suggestions). I think we spent more time on this sketch and subsequent color drawing than on any other piece. But it never seemed right. At the eleventh hour, I asked Carolyn how hard she’d hit me if I suggested scrapping the thing and instead going with the pinky promise scene you see below (one of her scene suggestions).  Carolyn responded: "There would be no hitting involved!" and told me it wouldn't be a problem. You sure can't ask for better than that.