I grew up in a small upstate New York town—not entirely unlike the one in my first novel, The Stalker Chronicles—so I’ve always been fascinated by the things we small towners do to pass the time.  In Jamestown, as teenagers, my friends (oh, let’s be honest, my two friends and I) drove around aimlessly, gossiped constantly, and ate daily at either Perkin’s or The Taco Hut.  The eating and the driving were really just excuses for gossiping, so sometimes I think all I did when I was a teenager was talk about other people, and hope and pray that somewhere, someone, hopefully in the next booth over, was talking about me.  Like most Americans, and any woman who spent any time in a high school, I know a lot about gossip.  High schools are kind of like small towns anyway—the bad food, the petty intrigues, and the small spaces.  Also, I read Us magazine, which makes me a total, um, expert.

If you were at all like me in high school (and I certainly hope to spare you that humiliation), you spent a lot of time being either made fun of or flat out ignored.  I was tormented for having a bad perm, for playing the clarinet, for falling off of a rope in gym class, and for revealing that I liked a certain guy—you know, your usual high school stuff.  But the powerful, beautiful people mostly ignored me—in my school they were football players, football cheerleaders, starting basketball players, one rich tennis champion, and two or three girls from the swim team.  Aside from these occasional moments of torment I often felt invisible.

So when I started to think about the protagonist of my first young adult novel, Cammie Bliss, I realized I was interested in the intersection of the highly visible and the totally ignored.  Cammie, who is defined almost entirely by her reputation as a “stalker”—someone who is relentless in her pursuit of love, who continuously humiliates and embarrasses herself to get the attention of boys, and who routinely goes “too far”—feels both very visible and of totally no consequence.  The head cheerleader, Kristi Day, whispers something about her when she passes in the cafeteria, but it’s a second in a cheerleader’s life, a throwaway moment.  It’s not like she really sees Cammie, and yet she gets something right.  Cammie feels this—and she wants it to change.  She wants to be known for the right reasons, so when a new boy moves to town—Toby—she thinks she has a shot at becoming a better person.

I am also really interested in embarrassment.  I wrote my dissertation about Seventeen magazine, which is basically a catalogue/history of embarrassment for girls—both self-inflicted and culture-induced.  I think we’re all too hung up on feeling embarrassed all of the time about the stuff we do—having periods, going swimming, talking to people we think are cute, wearing clothes, stalking on Facebook—so I wanted to write a book about a girl who is pretty comfortable humiliating herself, who maybe has a bit of a humiliation addiction.

by Jay Clark

Fresh off my first ever *starred* review for my debut novel, The Edumacation of Jay Baker, I was riding high last week.  Then, at a party over the weekend, I ran smack-dab into a Debbie Downer.  After filling me in on the horrible reaction she’d had to this year’s flu shot, Debbie asked how “the whole book thing” was going.  Trying not to rock back and forth on my heels like the little boy I still am, I told her about my review.  She nodded noncommittally, then asked how I’d feel when I got a crappy one.

“Fine,” I said stiffly.  “Gotta take the good with the bad, you know?”

Squinting her eyes, Debbie did not appear convinced.  She’d seen how paper-thin my skin was only moments earlier, when she’d made fun of my “John Mayer” hair and I’d gotten defensive about it.

“But it’ll be really hard, you know?” she prodded, pretending to be sympathetic.  “Spending all that time on something and then having people judge it.  I mean, I couldn’t do it.”

I was tempted to agree wholeheartedly, facedly, and assedly.  Instead, I clutched my stomach and said, “Have to run to the bathroom.  I’ll be right back.”

I never came back.  But you know what came my way this week?  The not-so-great review Nostradebbie had predicted.  Cue the “Wah-waaaah” trumpet noise.

It was more of a mixed review, really – a lot of good-not-great stuff about my tendency to overwrite and insert jokes where they’re—pa-dum-pum!—not needed.  Wait just a second, I thought.  Did my mom write this?  In other words, it was nothing I hadn’t heard before.  But still.  I’m human.  My robot operation isn’t scheduled until 2041.  And if I had my choice between sticks & stones or a big flaming pile of words, bring it on, Rock of Gibraltar!  Oh, what the heck – let Debbie & the Gang have their say, too.  I’ll just shield my body underneath a pile of magazines (the one with my starred review) and, of course, steel-infused copies of The Edumacation of Jay Baker.

Just in time for the holidays! We have two great titles to give away!

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Find out more about these great books below!

“Hercules charms readers with humor and honesty…”–School Library Journal

“This fun, slim book has a very interesting premise: a boy who happens to be nicknamed Hercules and who has recently lost his father is assigned twelve tasks (labors) to complete when he goes to stay with his uncle over the summer.” –VOYA

“Proimos fully inhabits the mind and voice of his hero, whose almost mythic journey offers moments hilarious, heartbreaking, and triumphant.” –Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

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Beresford doesn’t remember much about his past or how he came to live in the chutes and crawl spaces of the posh high-rise that shares his name. But when rock star and teen sensation Melody McGrath moves to an apartment on the fiftieth floor, he knows he has to be near her. Although she doesn’t realize it, Melody is threatened by more dangerous forces than her manipulative stage mom and the pressures of life in the spotlight. The owner of the glamorous building has been hiding a fatal secret within its walls, and Beresford puts all his plans at risk. Will Beresford and Melody be able to escape with their lives (and love) intact?

Bestselling author Whitley Strieber makes his young adult debut with this pulsing romantic thriller.

“[A] fast-paced melodrama…”–School Library Journal

“…a combination of music, mystery, and love.” –VOYA

“Strieber, the author of several adult titles of speculative fiction and nonfiction has penned an engrossing YA debut.” –Booklist

It’s time to announce our October titles! We have four great titles to share with you!

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Stick by Andrew Smith
Fourteen-year-old Stark McClellan (nicknamed Stick because he’s tall and thin) is bullied for being “deformed” – he was born with only one ear. His older brother Bosten is always there to defend Stick. But the boys can’t defend one another from  their abusive parents.

When Stick realizes Bosten is gay, he knows that to survive his father’s anger, Bosten must leave home. Stick has to find his brother, or he will never feel whole again. In his search, he will encounter good people, bad people, and people who are simply indifferent to kids from the wrong side of the tracks. But he never loses hope of finding love – and his brother.

Without Tess, byMarcella Pixley
Tess and Lizzie are sisters, sisters as close as can be, who share a secret world filled with selkies, flying horses, and a girl who can transform into a wolf  in the middle of the night. But when Lizzie is ready to grow up, Tess clings to their fantasies. As Tess sinks deeper and deeper into her delusions, she decides that she can’t live in the real world any longer and leaves Lizzie and her family forever. Now, years later, Lizzie is in high school and struggling to understand what happened to her sister. With the help of a school psychologist and Tess’s battered journal, Lizzie searches for a way to finally let Tess go.

  Desert Angel, by Charlie Price

Fourteen-year-old Angel wakes up one morning at her desert trailer home to discover her mother has been murdered by a lowlife named Scotty, who has vanished. Angel has no water, no weapon, but she knows that Scotty, an expert tracker and hunter, will surface soon in order to eliminate her as a witness. She has to run, to disappear, if she is to survive and tell the world what happened. Her flight takes her through a harsh landscape to places she never expected to be, forcing her to trust others for the first time and strengthening her in ways she doesn’t even anticipate . . . until it’s time to take a stand.

The Survival Kit, by Donna Freitas

When Rose’s mom dies, she leaves behind a brown paper bag labeled Rose’s Survival Kit. Inside the bag, Rose finds an iPod, with a to-be-determined playlist; a picture of peonies, for growing; a crystal heart, for loving; a paper star, for making a wish; and a  paper kite, for letting go.

As Rose ponders the meaning of each item, she finds herself returning again and again to an unexpected source of comfort. Will is her family’s gardener, the school hockey star, and the only person who really understands what she’s going through. Can loss lead to love?

by Caragh M. O’Brien

THE TOUR:  These days, a blog tour involves a writer shrinking down to the size of a subatomic particle and whizzing through the internet wires to pop up through other people’s computers, visit for a while, and whiz back.  It’s very high tech and very slimming.  The fact is, a couple years ago, I’d never heard of a blog tour and I had to go look it up in an online dictionary because no paper dictionaries had heard of one, either.

I would still be pretty much in the dark except for my do-or-die publicist at Macmillan, Kathryn Bhirud (née Hurley), who lined up sixteen unbelievably cool bloggers to interview me on their sites.  The interviews begin next Monday, October 24^th at Mundie Moms, and will progress to different sites, one a day, leading up to the release of Prized on November 8^th.  Interested readers can follow me from blog to blog for a couple weeks, sort of like trick-or-treating from house to house, but not really because there are no costumes or candy and we’re not second graders, much as we might like to be.

The full schedule of the blog tour is listed below, and to add a quirky bit of fun, Rachael of the Book Muncher challenged me to come up with a code that readers could decipher along the way.

THE CODE:

The Prized Blog Tour Code is intended to be a charming amusement, not torture, so if you’re the sort of person who deplores enigmas, please know that it’s quite all right with me if you skip this thing entirely.  It’s really fine.  No one’s ever going to check.

But, if you want to play, try this:

1. On each day of the blog tour, a single letter will be given at the end of each post.  (It will be clearly labeled like this: Prized Code #20: Z.)

2. Convert each letter using the key in the middle of page 201 of Birthmarked.  (If your book is not handy because you’ve already returned it to the library in a trusty manner, the key is also available on my website.

3. The sixteen converted letters will spell out a secret message.

That’s it.  That’s the whole thing.  There’s no extra prize.  You just get the one-time, real-life thrill of deciphering the secret message for the Prized Blog Tour Code and trying to guess what it says as it evolves.  The last piece of the code and the solution will be provided by Rachael in my final stop of the blog tour at The Book Muncher on November 8^th, so you can check if you have it correct.

THE CHAT: On the day the blog tour wraps up and Prized is released (Tuesday, November 8), my blogger friends and I will meet up virtually in an interactive chat on Goodreads.  Here’s what is great: you can join in, too!  We’ll be coming and going all day as we have the chance, quipping and laughing as we’re wont to do, and I’ll be sure to be there in the evening around 9:00 p.m. EST.  Friends, fans, and followers are all welcome to drop in and participate.  If you don’t know Goodreads yet, it’s a free and easy site for book lovers.  You can find us in advance here.

Check back here on MacTeenBooks for info on other bonuses, like “Tortured,” the free e-story that’s coming soon, and be sure to leave a comment if you have any questions or suggestions.  Special thanks to Kathryn, who really has been a dynamo through all of this.

I’m off to practice my shrinking!  May the blog tour begin!

By Andy Marino

In ninth grade I was driven crazy several times a day by the feeling that I was forgetting something. It was as if I’d lost my wallet or neglected to write a paper that was due in an hour – that kind of sudden panic – except it was never triggered by anything so mercifully specific. I’d often have to stop what I was doing to focus on this weird brand of anxiety until it passed.

After dealing with these episodes for a while I realized that determining a cause was hopeless. It wasn’t something I lost or forgot to do, and it wasn’t some vague existential thing, either. It was NOTHING AT ALL, which in retrospect seems totally bananas.

As I grew up these little spells became infrequent and then stopped altogether. It wasn’t until social networking became a pervasive force that I experienced something like that gnawing distraction once again. Except now it wasn’t the sense that I might be forgetting something that was driving me nuts – it was the cumulative effect of the status updates I barely glanced at, the photos I ran my eyes over, the endless bids for online attention.

This is much more complicated than it appears, because no matter annoyed and jittery I get, I keep coming back. It seems that some part of me – maybe the same desolate corner of my brain that used to trigger that nagging sense of forgetfulness – actually cares about all the indignant rants and pictures of food and links to netherworlds of internet weirdness. I am compelled to stay in the loop by an impulse I barely understand. My brain doles out impatient reminders that I haven’t checked my Twitter feed in eleven whole minutes and there is Stuff Happening that I’m missing.

If I’ve recently updated my own status or posted a link or tweeted something, then it’s an even stronger and uglier mental pull, the kind fed by ego and a desire for positive feedback. I assume that 1) I’m not crazy and 2) lots of other human brains work more or less like mine, so it’s not that hard to see the correlation between social networking and daily feelings of self-worth and security. What’s going to happen as technology continues to integrate social networking deeper into human consciousness?

In Unison Spark, logging in is a thought process rather than a few keystrokes on a computer. If the future actually brings us social networking in the form of an enhanced, augmented version of reality, logging off and ripping yourself away from the community is going to feel pretty crappy. That terrible left-out feeling – right now I’m missing something! – is going to be a whole lot more distracting. It won’t be just a bunch of unseen pictures and missed updates anymore. It’ll be a deceleration from the hyperdrive of mass connection to the crawl of being alone.

We’ve got four great titles to share with you today!

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Amplified by Tara Kelly

When privileged 17-year-old Jasmine gets kicked out of her house, she takes what is left of her savings and flees to Santa Cruz to pursue her dream of becoming a musician. Jasmine finds the ideal room in an oceanfront house, but she needs to convince the three guys living there that she’s the perfect roommate and lead guitarist for their band, C-Side. Too bad she has major stage fright and the cute bassist doesn’t think a spoiled girl from over the hill can hack it. . . .

Just Your Average Princess

SlayersDragons exist. They’re ferocious. And they’re smart: Before they were killed off by slayer-knights, they rendered a select group of eggs dormant, so their offspring would survive. Only a handful of people know about this, let alone believe it – these “Slayers” are descended from the original knights, and are now a diverse group of teens that includes Tori, a smart but spoiled senator’s daughter who didn’t sign up to save the world.
The dragon eggs have fallen into the wrong hands. The Slayers must work together to stop the eggs from hatching. They will fight; they will fall in love. But will they survive?

So Silver Bright

Get excited!

Dark enough for you?

We’ve got 4 HOT Fall titles for you to choose from in our End of the Summer? End of the World! Giveaway!

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OK HERE IS THE NEW LINK! ENTRY FORM

Happy March! Hopefully, wherever you are, it is going OUT like a lamb – and you’re getting geared up for Spring!

Here are our new releases. Enter for a chance to win them with our ENTRY FORM (link to come!) on the Macmillan site, and good luck!

Casey and Steven met in Morocco, moved to China then went all the way to Timbuktu together!

This illustrated travel memoir tells the story of their first two years out of college spent teaching English, making friends across language barriers, researching, painting, and learning to be themselves wherever they are.

Casey and Steven are also hilarious and adorable. Check out the blog post Casey wrote about collecting souvenirs along the way.  It’s also hilarious. And adorable!

This is the perfect book to suggest to friends ~ so enjoy it! But make sure you mark it up – you might not see it again for a while if you plan to pass it around.

Plus, they made a video! Here it is: To Timbuktu book trailer

Be careful what you wish for . . .

Mason isn’t supposed to know about the greenhouse—but he does. He isn’t supposed to meet the beautiful girl who doesn’t need food or water to survive—but he did. Now, Mason is on the run with the girl. And the Gardener, the mysterious mastermind of an institution that grows humans, wants them both—dead or alive.

Have we creep-ed you out enough?

“Author S.A. Bodeen has laced this sci-fi-tinged page-turner with thoughtful commentary on world hunger, sustainability, biology and biomedical ethics, plus several high-speed chases and a believable budding romance, and the whole thing works like a charm.” –BookPage

Not feeling the love this Valentine’s season? Get ready – our February Titles will make you swoooon. And if your heart is taken, you’ll still find a reason to pick up one of the books below. Enjoy! And leave your comments for all to see!

Choose from three great titles – read em, review em, and share em with a friend.  A book will last a lot longer than a box of conversation hearts.

Click here to enter to win!

The Young Sherlock series

Death Cloud

Hello ladies! Can we say Bieber fever?? And guys, wouldn’t you kill to know the ins and outs of Young Sherlock’s daringly dangerous affairs? Find it all in Andrew Lane’s brand new series for a new generation of Sherlock fans.  It’s fun! It’s fast-paced!
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She loves you, yeah yeah yeah!

The Girl Who Became a Beatle

OK so here’s the situation. You have this rockin’ band, and you start to dream BIG – well what happens when the biggest dream of all comes true? This is Regina’s story… will she re-write history, and take the Beatles fame forever? Find out!

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Is he a lover... or is he a killer?

Dark Moon

To catch you up to speed, this is the second installment of Steve Feasey’s popular WERELING series.  In this book, Trey, accepting his fate as werewolf, is beginning to defend himself against evil, and learn more about the dark past of his family history. With a love interest in Alexa (come on, it can’t be all beastlings), he must find a way to save her father.