Rounding Up The Early Reviews
It's Imperfect Spiral's four-week birthday, the perfect occasion for rounding up the blog reviews for this, my first young adult novel.I won't collect all of them here. That would be obnoxious, right? Or perhaps I should say "more obnoxious," if we start from the premise that all of this self-promotion is obnoxious. . . .
Starting with a couple of reviews by teachers: I love when educators like a book so much they want to share it with their students. So I appreciate what the ReadingJunky (a "multi-layered story of love, blame, and justice") and The Hodgenator ("one of my favorite reads of 2013") have to say about Imperfect Spiral, and you can read their reviews here and here.
Over at Teenreads, Imperfect Spiral "just keeps getting better" with the illegal immigration story line that is layered in with Danielle's and Humphrey's stories, "giving IMPERFECT SPIRAL even more meaning to its readers." And I'm pleased that the KellyVision blog ("I absolutely loved this book") thinks that the novel "would be ideal for book clubs." I agree! Book club participants, invite me to join you for a Skype session. Then there's Kacey Vanderkarr, herself a young adult author, who writes, "The story was so carefully created--it wasn't that the author used distraction to keep the reader from figuring it out. I was just caught up in everything, so every pivotal moment felt right and fell into the perfect spot."
I'll close it out here with National Book Award finalist's Beth Kephart's post about Imperfect Spiral. (Her books include A Slant of Sun: One Child's Courage, Undercover, The Heart is Not a Size, Small Damages, and the just-released Handling The Truth). To my great pleasure, she finds Humphrey "one of the most endearing little boys I've encountered in all of literature. He is big hearted, smart, playful, and still a kid. He is the sure thing, and he is gone." And overall: "Tender, compassionate, big--a book written neither to leverage nor advertise an issue (but to illuminate it)--I recommend Imperfect Spiral to every reader out there." Read the complete post here.Okay, so maybe this all really is too obnoxious. Let me assure you, there are some reviewers who criticize the immigration issue and other elements of Imperfect Spiral. But I don't have to publish links to them, do I?