I’ll be at Micawber’s Bookstore tomorrow in St. Paul at 11 AM to read from Mamba Point. Please come if you can! Come in costume, have some snacks, and see a baby mamba*.
*Byron, in costume.
The group blog From the Mixed-Up Files is giving away up to fifty books. Just go here to nominate your favorite library. You can surprise your school library or local branch with a bounty of middle grade books! There is a good mix of classic and contemporary titles… including Mudville, thanks to Wendy.
Speaking of the group blog, I’ll be presenting on it at KidLit Con 2010 with our intrepid leader, Elissa Cruz. If you’re there, find me and say howdy.
A few people who’ve read Mamba Point have emailed, PM’d, or even come to my house to tell me that the Millennium Falcon is a wingless ship, in reference to the scene (minor spoiler!) where Linus unpacks and discovers that his model ship is broken. I wanted to set the record straight. Not that this will prevent people from bringing it up again, but the truth is that the copy editor on Mamba Point did incredible work uncovering anachronisms and errors in the manuscript, which abounded with them despite the fact I was writing about a time and place I’d actually lived. She circled references to the broken “wing” on Linus’s model spaceship and noted that the Falcon was wingless. I replied that I knew what the Falcon looked like and meant the thing on the front, which, if not a wing, is something that I don’t know what to call, and neither would Linus know what to call it, because both of us are rather casual fans of the movie franchise and neither of us pore over lexicons and maps of Lucas’s universe and know what everything is called. We both call that a wing for lack of a better word, and readers with a mental picture would understand: it’s a structural wing, if not an avionic one.
Perhaps I could have put another sentence where Linus clarifies that it might not be a functioning flight wing, thus rendering moot all Starwarsery issues, but that ship, so to speak, has soared.
“Entertaining and touching,” says the New York Times Book Review, of Mamba Point. Follow the link and scroll down for the full review.