I Love You Too, 3rd Person Narrative

Did you know that third-person narration is the most common narrative mode in literature?

As someone who mostly reads MG & YA literature, I found that surprising. It's my observation that a lot (maybe not 'most,' but a lot) of YA books these days are written in first person. And we like that. First persons have "authentic" voices, they make the characters seem more real, and they're more interesting than third-person narratives. Supposedly.

Third-persons, on the other hand, can be limiting. I've seen a lot of reviews where the chief reason for not liking a book is because the story was told in a 3rd person narrative. And that's fine, if that's your prerogative. I guess I don't need a book to be told in 1st person only in order to relate to the characters, or in order for them to seem real to me. It's kind of a bummer when I see this narrative mode dismissed for not being as cool-sounding or authentic as first-person. And as someone whose MS is written in third-person format, I'd hate to think that my story may be passed aside because my "character's voice" isn't strong enough or authentic-sounding. But that's a writing point. As a reader, I have to say that I usually love third-person narratives and am a little "iffy" on 1st persons.
A first-person narrative can be amazing and add a whole new dimension to a story, if the reader likes the narrator's voice. My favorite narrative voice to this day is Percy Jackson of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. On the other hand, the deciding factor between loving a book and...not exactly loving, has often been the voice of narrators not quite so endearing, like my personal experience with Katniss from the Hunger Games series (especially Mockingjay), Lily from Forgive My Fins, Bella from the Twilight series, and (though I liked the book as a whole), Ari from Darkness Becomes Her. In all of these cases, I got a little *too much* character attitude that, perhaps, a third-person style would have quelled. This is all my opinion.

So what is the real purpose of this random, meandering post? To declare my love and admiration for this popular and classic storytelling mode, and to offer up some of my favorite/well-known examples of effective, non-limiting books (that still managed to have three-dimensional characters!)

The Artemis Fowl series - Eoin Colfer
The Books of Bayern - Shannon Hale
The Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis*
The Chronicles of Prydain - Lloyd Alexander*
The Great Tree of Avalon series - T.A. Barron
The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
Holes - Louis Sachar
The Hollow Kingdom - Clare Dunkle
The Keys to the Kingdom series - Garth Nix
The Looking Glass Wars trilogy - Frank Beddor
The Mortal Instruments series - Cassandra Clare
The Redwall series - Brian Jacques
Sabriel - Garth Nix
The Septimus Heap series - Angie Sage
The Theatre Iluminata trilogy - Lisa Mantchev
Uglies - Scott Westerfeld
The Wondrous Strange trilogy - Lesley Livingston**
A very recent debut,
Nevermore - Kelly Creagh
And lest we forget,
The Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling

I tend to think, light-heartedly of course, that if third-person narratives were a good enough storytelling mode for J.K. Rowling to use, they're good enough for any future writer! Or reader.
So live on, third-person, whether limited or omniscient. There's just something enticing about your style.
Your fan,
Amelia :D

Progress Report: MATCHED

I started Matched about two months ago, and as of right now I just hit page 100.
I think I'm going to have to put this one back on my shelf and come back to it after a little while.
It's a bummer that I can't seem to concentrate on it, but in all honesty it hasn't really been holding my interest, and I've had to read about 10 or so pages at a time, every once in awhile. I don't want to get really specific, just because this isn't technically a review and I don't want to say anything "official" sounding without having finished the book first.

I will try and get back to it in the summer time, after I've read through the books I have to review and all the upcoming sequels that are about to be released!

What did you guys think of Matched? Yay or nay?
And has there ever been a book you've had to put down and revist later?

Review - THE YEAR WE WERE FAMOUS

The Year We Were Famous - Carole Estby Dagg
Genre: YA Historical Fiction
# of pages: 243 (ARC)
Published by Clarion, Harcourt
Releases TODAY!

With their family home facing foreclosure, seventeen-year-old Clara Estby and her mother, Helga, need to raise a lot of money fast—no easy feat for two women in 1896. Helga wants to tackle the problem with her usual loud and flashy style, while Clara favors a less showy approach. Together they come up with a plan to walk the 4,600 miles from Mica Creek, Washington, to New York City—and if they can do it in only seven months, a publisher has agreed to give them $10,000. Based on the true story of the author’s great-aunt and great-grandmother, this is a fast-paced historical adventure that sets the drama of Around the World in Eighty Days against an American backdrop during the time of the suffragist movement, the 1896 presidential campaign, and the changing perception of “a woman’s place” in society.

Fabulous YA historical fiction! The Year We Were Famous has a lot to offer readers - fun, original story (that just so happens to be a *true story*), thoroughly interesting characters, and highly intriguing chunks of American history and geography. The story is based on the real-life experiences of the author's great-grandmother and great-aunt, who, in 1896, trekked clear across the country (Washington state to NYC) by themselves. The book is set against the backdrop of the American suffragette movement and the famous Bryan-McKinley presidential campaigns.
I wasn't sure what to expect when I began this story - I knew it was a historical fiction, but I wasn't sure how much history would play a part in the story. The further I got into the story, the more riveting it became! I admit to having a Google Images browser up for every place the characters mentioned. I seriously cannot imagine walking over lava fields in Idaho, crossing the Snake River, or braving through blizzards, much less doing it in the late 19th century, with no hotel reservations or ATM machines or, you know, Mapquest. Clara was an especially endearing character to follow, and her mom will charm and entertain you with her wit and determination, though I did find her a little strong and kind of overwhelming, and she seemed almost out-of-place, out-of-setting with her "New Woman" speeches. But still, both characters were well-rounded, and their interactions were entertaining and heart-felt.
I do wish the story could have been a little longer. I know it's not feasible to give each day/location out of their seven-month excursion its own chapter, but Estby Dagg has such a knack for bringing not only history but rich American places to life, I was left feeling full but still wanting more! The passages dealing with the Suffrage movement were thoroughly interesting, and I especially liked them because they reminded me of what I learned in my American West class last year - for example, that women were way more successful getting the vote in western states and territories than in the more "civilized" east, and that Wyoming was the first to grant women the right to vote (Utah had given them the vote, but that was edited out of their constitution when they were admitted to statehood, as a matter of fact).

If you consider yourself even a slight fan of Historical Fiction, or if you just like to keep up with the newest, coolest YA releases, you'll not want to miss The Year We Were Famous!

Final Rating

Check out my interview with the author!
Click here to view the trailer!

In My Mailbox [7]

In My Mailbox is hosted by the Story Siren.

Been a slow couple of weeks, but I did get some good stuff this past week!Received for Review
Awaken - Katie Kacvinsky
Special thank you to HM Harcourt!

Bought
The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
You Are Special - Max Lucado

I had bought Chime (Franny Billingsley)...but after reading a few chapters and being unable to get into it (and then just skimming the rest), I returned it.

Books Read!Just finished
- Re reading Nevermore by Kelly Creagh (favorite 2010 release!)
The Year We Were Famous by Carole Estby Dagg

About to start
Firelight by Sophie Jordan

Interview with YEAR WE WERE FAMOUS' Carole Estby Dagg!

Tonight I am pleased to have author Carole Estby Dagg with us! Her new novel, The Year We Were Famous, comes out this Monday, and I can say that it's one of my favorites of the year!
There is a lot of research that goes into any novel, particularly those in the historical fiction genre. For anyone who's ever wondered, "How do they find OUT all this stuff?" or "I wonder how much of this is true," we have a resident expert to answer some questions!

First of all, welcome to Imagination in Focus! Thanks for being with us tonight. Would you describe your journey researching you family and the historical time-period?

I started with two articles from Minneapolis newspapers rescued from a burn barrel after Great-grandmother Helga died. Even after writing to librarians across the country for more newspaper articles, though, I couldn’t find out much more about the walk itself, so I broadened the research to the places Clara and Helga passed through and the people they met.

There’s danger in being a research person. I can spend half a day researching what kind of compass Eric might have given Clara, right down to finding antique compasses on E-bay and taking notes on the wording on the box of a Keuffel and Esser. I’d guess 99% of my research never makes it into the book in a way that is obvious to the reader, but it helps draw me into that other world. Besides – it’s fun.

For The Year We Were Famous, I read biographies of the people they met, habits of bears and rattlesnakes, frontier cures for blisters, and the history of women’s suffrage. I found an old atlas with maps of all the old railroad lines and spent weeks establishing a plausible day-by-day route for every mile of their 232-day trek. Besides reading books, I scrolled through microfilm of old newspapers for articles on the presidential race of 1896, and took notes on the ads for corsets, bicycle costumes, bicycles and typewriters. I drove part of Clara and Helga’s route with my daughter and stopped in at a little museum in Rawlins, Wyoming, where I bought a pamphlet about a Victorian-era local woman doctor who became the model for Clara’s ‘someone to talk to.’ I approached the Internet like a treasure hunt, hopping from clue to clue to research relevant trivia like the history of Underwood typewriters, the elevation of the pass in the Blue Mountains, and what the Indian Agent for the Umatilla reservation looked like.

E-bay was another great source research. I bought a rubberized poncho of the type Clara might have worn, and bid on period postcards of the places they passed through. A postcard of Mrs. William McKinley helped inspire the chapter on meeting the president. Another postcard depicting Umatilla twins laced into cradleboards found its way into another chapter.

To get into the head of a young woman of the late Victorian age, I gave up reading contemporary fiction for a year and read only books Clara might have read for school or for diversion. I found dime novels on the Internet, and that that florid writing style influenced how I had Clara write about shooting the brigand in Oregon and demonstrating the curling iron to Native Americans in Utah. All told, I tallied up about six million words of background reading.

I never would have thought of E-bay! Research does seem challenging, but also really fun and informative. What were the challenges of blending fact and fiction?

I didn’t intend to write fiction. I couldn’t find enough facts about the walk itself, thought, so I had to start connecting the dots between known facts with my imagination. It took years to work up to putting words into the mouths of Clara and Helga. They were real people, my Great-aunt and Great-grandmother, and they weren’t still around to defend themselves if I portrayed them inaccurately. But to write about characters anyone would want to read about, I had to ascribe motives and dreams to them. Although I didn’t know what they thought and felt, by reading diaries and biographies of other women of the times—particularly suffragists—I could at least give them the thoughts of the collective New Woman.

Whose writing has influenced you, and who do you like to recommend to young adults?

As an eight or nine year-old, I read most of the Victorian children’s classics: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden, George MacDonald’s Princess and Curdie books, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, Dinah Craik’s Little Lame Prince, and the Fairy tales of Hans Christian Anderson. Besides the Victorians, I enjoyed books with a hint of fantasy, like My Father’s Dragon, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle,series; books set in other eras and places, like the Betsy-Tacy series and Anne of Green Gables; and books which featured braver and more talented children that I could pretend to be, like Posy and her sisters in Noel Streatfield’s Ballet Shoes and the Melendy children in The Saturdays.

Thank you very much for joining me! It's been great to have an author's insight into what it takes to balance research and writing.

Carole Estby Dagg's The Year we were Famous is published by Clarion (Harcourt) and will be released this Monday!

Carole Estby Dagg's website

On Goodreads

The Year We Were Famous @ Amazon

Really exciting trailer!

Hey guys!
Sorry for the absence - I had a really cool thing happen last week work-related (way to get some really cool job experience!), so that's why I wasn't able to upload anything new!

But anyway -
I'm really excited because, in addition to having no less than 6 weeks of school until my undergrad career is OVER, a book that I'm really looking forward to releases next week!

Carole Estby Dagg's The Year We Were Famous is about to make its bookstore debut, and I wanted to share the awesome trailer with you all. Check it out! Add it to your TBR list!
Maybe even PREORDER IT!

My review will be up this weekend, and on Friday, the author (Carole Estby Dagg) will be stopping by Imagination in Focus to answer some questions about her writing journey.
I hope you guys will be here!

Inspirational images: Ode to Color

because sometimes life just needs a little bit of color...