It's OK, my BOOKS are my friends

Jodi Picoult is NOT a kids-in-peril author!

My usually-reliable NYT magazine had a LAME article about Jodi Picoult, who (they say) is "the most visible and dedicated practitioner of a subcategory of contemporary genre fiction that might best be described as the literature of children in peril." Uh, no.

Now, I would like to think I KNOW from kids-in-peril authors. And JP is NOT among them. The whole point of kids-in-peril lit is that it's about the KIDS, and their own problems, their own consequences, their own resourcefulness. JP's books are all about the PARENTS (even the NYT admits it) and the myriad ways they can suck at their parenting. I would like to propose that we give JP the category "There's So Many Ways To Screw Up A Child" and let her be the figurehead for that. But keep off my favorite genre.

12 Raining Twilight Coast

Robyn Hitchcock

Please leave the moon alone.

I recently finished The Dead and the Gone, the cheery sequel to Life As We Knew It. Both are stories of What Happens After catastrophic climate change caused by an asteroid crashing into the moon and altering its orbit. With the increased gravitational pull from the moon being closer to Earth, enormous tides flood coastal areas, volcanoes erupt, ash causes mass crop failure ... and then to top it off there is a flu epidemic.

the dead and the gone

Susan Beth Pfeffer

What I took away from this is that my emergency box is WAY understocked (in both books the entire second half

Exodus

is essentially rationing canned goods gotten through smart planning or corpse robbing) and that -- again -- I am total zombie fodder. I thought it was both wise and maybe cowardly to make the environmental disaster something external and both unlikely and unavoidable (an asteroid) instead of the much more likely global warming scenario (a la another YA disaster novel where the flood is totally man-made). But then these would have been different, more political novels, instead of survival tales. And please! Nothing is going to crash into the moon any time soon, so we're fine, right?

Wait, what's this I hear from NASA? They are planning to crash a huge satellite into the moon? And "the resulting debris plume is expected to rise more than six miles"?

Well then. Looks like I'd better find my can opener.