Author Interview: Anne E. Johnson

I'm pleased to have author Anne E. Johnson stopping by today for an interview. Anne is the author of the recently released MG novel Ebenezer's Locker.

WS: What three words best describe your MG novel Ebenezer’s Locker?

AJ: Exciting. Funny. Spooky. 

WS: In one sentence tell readers why they must read Ebenezer’s Locker.

AJ: If you love a ghost story with an unusual twist, and you like a fast and entertaining read with quirky characters, this book is for you. 

WS: Now using as many sentences as you’d like can you tell us a bit more about Ebenezer’s Locker?

AJ: A century ago, Corbin Elementary School's building housed Dr. Ebenezer Corbin's School for Psychical Research. A couple of old spirits are still wandering the halls. It's up to sixth-grader Rhonda Zymler to find out what they want.

 The more Rhonda digs, the more perilous her task becomes, and to complete it she must take two trips back in time. This story blends the realities of an economically-challenged modern American town with supernatural elements. What Rhonda finds not only gives her life a sense of purpose, but changes the fortunes of her entire town. 

WS: What inspired the story behind Ebenezer’s Locker?

AJ: When I was a kid, I loved Judith Spearing's novelGhosts Who Went to School. I wanted to to write my own book about ghosts in a school, but from a unique angle. So I made the ghosts the spirits of psychics who've come back to deal with some unfinished business.

WS: Grab a copy of Ebenezer’s Lockerand answer the following:

·         Favorite chapter?

AJ: Chapter 7, "The Spirit Hand," in which Rhonda and her friends have a seance with the neighborhood psychic. 

·         Favorite page?

AJ: Well, it's e-book only, so there are no page numbers! But my favorite passage is the speech by Tallulah (the psychic) when she gets all worked up about the various tricks some fake psychics use to pretend they're communicating with the dead.

·         Favorite character?

AJ: Tallulah Radley, the eighty-year-old psychic. She's spunky and powerful, despite her frail old body. And she knows everything about the history if communicating with spirits, and she has strong opinions about the right and wrong way to do it. 

WS: What writing projects are you working on now? Any plans for an Ebenezer’s Locker sequel or more stories about Rhonda?

AJ: In terms of books for kids, I'm just starting work on a new historical novel. It will take place in 1608, in the city of Mantua in Italy, and it will involve music and a mystery. And, yes, I do have plans for a sequel to Ebenezer's Locker.

WS: In Ebenezer’s Locker your character Rhonda must deal with ghosts…do you believe in ghosts? What famous ghost would you love to have an encounter with?

AJ: I do believe in ghosts, although I don't usually think of them as being so separate from our own minds as those in Ebenezer's Locker. In other words, our imaginations and memories are a part of the existence of ghosts, but that doesn't make them less real.

If by "famous ghost" you mean "ghost of a famous person," I'd love to talk to the ghost of Plato, the Ancient Greek philosopher, to really find out what life was life back then. If you literally mean "famous ghost," then I'd choose Jacob Marley fromA Christmas Carol. I've always wished he were in more scenes of that story. 

WS: Rhonda must also travel back in time (so cool!)…if you could go back in time (or in the future) where and when would you go? What would you do there?

AJ: If I were sure my time machine functioned well and could get me back to the present when I needed it, I would visit medieval France or England, just to hear the music from that era played live. But it was a rough existence, especially for women, so I probably wouldn't want to stay long.

WS: Fill in the blanks:

1.    I’m really awesome at ______.

AJ: Making cupcakes! Seriously! 

2.    I’m embarrassed to admit that ______.

AJ: I have a really hard time spelling "broccoli." (I always look it up.) But I do like to eat it, so it often shows up on my grocery list. 

3.    My favorite MG book is ______. 

AJ: Adam Rex's The True Meaning of Smek Day. 

4.    If I could live inside one made-up world I’d choose ______. 

AJ: The town where Willy Wonka's chocolate factory is. 

Q10. If you were to bake an Ebenezer’s Locker inspired cupcake what would it look/taste like and what would you call it?

AJ: This isn't as much of a hypothetical question as you might think. I had another book, a science fiction novel called Green Light Delivery, release recently, and for the launch party I actually made three types of cupcakes, inspired by the three main characters!

For Ebenezer's Locker, I would make a cupcake called Ebenezer's Surprise. It would look weird, maybe creepy, on the outside, but have a delightful, surprising filling. Let's say a chocolate cupcake with vanilla frosting dusted with cocoa powder (looks like dirt), and piped in shaky handwriting with the number 176 in frosting as close to gray as possible. But inside would be a perky lemon creme.

Thank you so much Anne for answering my questions! It's always great to meet another cupcake enthusiast :)

Connect with Anne: Website / Twitter / Facebook

Anne E. Johnson lives in Brooklyn. Her children’s short fiction can be found in Stories for Children,Spaceports& Spidersilk, Knowonder!, and elsewhere. Her middle-grade paranormal mystery novel, Ebenezer’s Locker, is now available from MuseItUp Publishing. She is also awaiting the release of a medieval middle-grade novel, Trouble at the Scriptorium, by the end of the summer. You can learn all about Anne at her website, AnneEJohnson.com.

Ebenezer's Locker

A hundred years ago, Corbin Elementary School's building housed Dr. Ebenezer Corbin's School for Psychical Research. It seems that a couple of old spirits are still wandering the halls. It's up to Rhonda Zymler to find out what they want.

Ebenezer's Locker follows the adventures of Rhonda, a sassy sixth-grader who's having trouble finding her place and identity. Getting to know these spirits becomes Rhonda's quest. The more she digs, the more perilous her task becomes, and to complete it she must take two trips back in time. This story blends the realities of an economically-challenged modern American town with supernatural elements. What Rhonda finds not only gives her life a sense of purpose, but changes the fortunes of her entire town. 

Purchase: Amazon / Publisher

Teaser Tuesdays (45): The Peculiar

Teaser Tuesdays...is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read

• Open to a random page

• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)

• Share the title and author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Bartholomew Kettle won't live long. Changelings never do. The child of a human mother and a faery father, Bartholomew is a secret, despised by both his races. If the English don't hang him for witchcraft, the faerys will do something worse. So his mother keeps him locked away, hidden from the world in the faery slums of Bath.
But one day Bartholomew witnesses a mysterious lady kidnap another changeling through a shadowy portal, and he realizes the danger is closer than ever before. Changelings are surfacing in the rivers, their bodies empty of blood and bone and their skin covered in red markings. A powerful figure sits in the shadows, pushing the pieces in place for some terrible victory. When a sinister faery in a top-hat begins to stalk Bartholomew's steps, he knows it's his turn. Something is coming for him. Something needs him. But when you're a changeling there's no where to run...

The Peculiar

Stefan Bachmann

9/18/12

Greenwillow Books

MY TEASER

Mouths pressed up to his ears, whispering in small, dark voices. A tongue, icy wet, slid over his cheek. And then there was only pain, horrid searing pain, tearing up his arms and eating into his bones. He kept down his screams just long enough for the room to begin to flit away into the spinning shadows. Then he shrieked along with the wind and the raging wings. (ARC, pg 57)

ARC Review: Drain You by M. Beth Bloom

TITLE: Drain You                              AUTHOR: M. Beth Bloom PUB:HarperTeen                                 PUB DATE: 7/24/12 FORMAT: ARC, 400 pages SOURCE: from pub for review

Every night I'd lie there in bed and look out at the hills behind our house, listening. I knew there'd be consequences.Actions meant reactions. Sunrises meant sunsets. My fear was too permanent, lasting longer than eyeliner, something I wore every day and didn't wash off.Quinlan Lacey's life is a red carpet of weird fashions, hip bands, random parties, and chilling by the pool with her on-and-off BFF Libby. There's also her boring job (minimum wage), a crushed-out coworker (way too interested), her summer plans (nada), and her parents (totally clueless). Then one night she meets gorgeous James, and Quinn's whole world turns crazy, Technicolor, 3-D, fireworks, whatever.But with good comes bad and unfortunately, Quinn's new romance brings with it some majorly evil baggage. Now, to make things right, she has to do a lot of things wrong (breaking and entering, kidnapping, lying, you name it).There's normal, and then there's paranormal, and neither are Quinlan's cup of Diet Coke. Staying sane, cool, in love, and alive isn't so easy breezy.

THREE FIVE WORDS: Haven’t I Read This Before?

MY REVIEW: Drain You by M. Beth Bloom has such a cool cover and intriguing premise that I went into expecting a chilling, refreshing vampire story. What I got was a predictable, trite, hot mess of a story!

Quinn Lacey’s life isn’t exactly exciting, even if her BFF is the daughter of a famous rockstar. She thinks her summer will be spent at her boring job at the video store, hanging by the pool, partying with her BFF, obsessing over music, avoiding her clueless parents and keeping her way-too-interested co-worker at bay. But then she meets handsome, mysterious James and her summer suddenly becomes anything but boring. Quinn and James fall for each other fast, but James comes with a lot of baggage…the kind of baggage that could get a girl killed. James is a vampire and he isn’t the only one in town. When her BFF Libby becomes entangled with a group of dangerous vampires, Quinn must try and save her, but her plans are thwarted when James leaves for her own good. Thank goodness James’s cute, helpful brother Whit comes to town. But James isn’t gone for long and the whole gang finds themselves in danger.

Drain You certainly has its entertaining elements (good music, a fun time period setting and a cute boy in tortoise-shell glasses), but it also suffers from a tired storyline, flat characters, eye-roll inducing romance and a lackluster plot.

The exact year that this story takes place is never given, but there are enough clues and details given to deduce that it takes place in the mid-late nineties. As a child of the 90’s myself, I really liked the fun flashback to my own early teen years. Quinn is quite the music lover and there’s some really awesome music discussed and lyrics used throughout the story. I also think that this time setting has the potential to create a refreshing vampire story because it takes place before the big “vampire trend” in pop culture, allowing for a more gritty and less romanticized story than we’re used to in YA…unfortunately, this doesn’t happen.

**I’m going to talk about the basic overall storyline so there may be spoilers**

The story in this book follows a very predictable and overused storyline: loner/not-really-popular teen girl meets mysterious hot guy, they fall in love, she finds out he’s a dangerous vampire/werewolf/angel/shifter/fairy/alien/mer/unicorn/cupcake-in-disguise/etc., she loves him too much too care, they get hot and heavy, he leaves for “her own good”, she is comforted by the sweet-always-there BFF-guy but is too in love with the “bad boy” who left to love the good guy until one day she actually realizes that Hey! Maybe my sweet, caring, respectful BFF would be an awesome boyfriend, but of course by then the first guy comes back and ruins that smart line of thinking and then a bunch of other stuff happens, usually a bad guy or two show ups and the hunky boyfriend must save the heroine, and finally the book ends…

Whew (did you read that in one big breathe because I did while writing it?!) Yeah, we all know the plotline well and Drain You follows it closely and doesn’t really add anything new or original to shake things up or set it apart. While reading this book I just kept thinking I’ve read this a hundred times before. The names and settings may have been different, but the song is the same.

The predictability of the storyline could have been ignored if the main characters were engaging, likable and well-developed. Most of them aren’t. Quinn’s characterization and development were kind of all over the place in this book. I actually really liked her in the beginning; she was snarky, witty and flawed and damaged in an intriguing way. But, instead of growing throughout the book she actually regresses until, by the end of the book, she’s a selfish, thoughtless, needy, whiny, dependent, pathetic puddle of our once-likable heroine. And why does this happen? One word: James.

James- the mysterious, hot, too cool for school vampire. James is not a sparkly, vegetarian vampire (which is a good thing); he’s a bloodthirsty, human draining vampire. He kills people just to keep himself fed and as a reader I needed a reason to like him despite this, a reason to believe that Quinn’s love for him is ok despite his murderous ways. This reason never appears and to makes things worse James is a flat, dull, barely developed character. He’s there (being slightly creepy and stalkerish), then he isn’t, then he is, and I could have cared less about him the whole time.

And the romance between these two is unbearably insta-love. There is absolutely no development or evolution to their relationship; they go from strangers to so in love lovers quickly. Too quickly. And after the two share a night of intimacy, James decides that he must leave for a little while, for her own good *insert me rolling my eyes*. But his absence does bring my favorite character into this picture…

Whit, James’s brother, is the one shining gem among this group of dull characters. I loved Whit’ humor, his glasses, his taste in music and movies, his compassion and thoughtfulness. Whit quickly becomes Quinn’s new BFF and for a brief time he brings out the Quinn I liked in the beginning of the book.  

The antagonists were equally disappointing. From the premise, I was expecting a horde of bloodthirsty vampires, when really all we got is four, preppy, asshat vampires. Did they do “bad guy” things? Sure. Were they intriguing or exude a captivating villainy? Not really.

There’s a definite tension between these baddies and our heroine and her boys, tension that does lead to a climatic event, but there’s very little action. And the conclusion is quite abrupt and left me very confused and let down.

I must mention a few other things that either confused or distracted me:

·         *The overuse of the word like. This words was, like, used in, like, every other sentence of, like, dialogue…I’m not exaggerating. It got to the point where I had to skip over this word because I couldn’t stand to read it anymore.

·         *James, Whit and their sister Naomi all wear a gold chain with a small gold cross and Quinn mentions these often but no explanation as to their significance is given.

·        * The author often spends an entire page or two just describing what Quinn is wearing.

·        * The lack of parental…anything? Quinn stays out all night and walks home alone at night after work and her parents are totally okay with this?!

·         * Quinn is a music buff and lover but she doesn’t know who Robert Plant is or recognize Led Zeppelin lyrics…not cool >_<

·        * Diet Coke! Quinn drinks SO much Diet Coke; seriously, she’s drinking a can almost every three pages or so. By the end of the book, even my bladder was full and I had nothing to drink.

And then there are several excerpts I want share:

·         “Empty windows of nothingness punctuated by meaningless details involving totally mundane nonevents.”…I know break-ups are hard, especially when you’re a teen, but this is just way too overwrought and dramatic for me to take Quinn seriously.

·         “My pocket was empty. My heart was emptier.”…sounds more like a country song than something a teen would say.

·         “I couldn’t sleep until I eventually fell asleep…”…umm, thanks for that clarification?

MY FINAL THOUGHTS: Drain You was too predictable, too trite, too full of insta-love and lackluster characters for me to truly enjoy it. If you’re looking for an exciting vampire story then this one isn’t for you.

MY RATING

Find the author: Goodreads / Facebook / Twitter

Purchase: Amazon / Barnes and Noble

M. Beth Bloom is a musician, video artist, and writer. Her fiction has appeared in StoryQuarterly and Dave Eggers's Best American Non-Required Reading series. She lives in Los Angeles.