{"id":4718,"date":"2014-10-16T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-10-16T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/booksyalove.com\/?p=4718"},"modified":"2014-10-15T20:09:41","modified_gmt":"2014-10-16T01:09:41","slug":"dnfs-train-wrecks-and-award-season-reviewer-fatigue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/?p=4718","title":{"rendered":"DNFs, train wrecks, and award season = reviewer fatigue!"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"photo<\/a>

Aspens at Grand Mesa, Colorado, Sept. 2014<\/p><\/div>\n

Sometimes you just need to get away from it all, right?<\/p>\n

But for this avid reader and intrepid book reviewer, the “stepping away for a little while” got a bit lengthier than planned.<\/p>\n

A combination of factors is usually the culprit – simple burnout, outside distractions, and so forth.<\/p>\n

But this time around, it’s been harder than normal to get back in the book recommending groove despite my best intentions.<\/p>\n

Y’all know that I try hard to choose books outside the big bestsellers and copycat stuff for BooksYALove. But sometimes, things just don’t go the way I expect.<\/p>\n

Like when… a book gets noticed by the big wide world before I can craft just the right no-spoilers booktalk to post = Revolution<\/em>\u00a0 by Deborah Wiles, a compelling novel about young people in Jim Crow days during the summer of Voting Rights activists coming to Mississippi.<\/p>\n

Darned if those National Book Award folks wouldn’t wait till I’d finished writing my recommendation before they announced it as a 2014 finalist<\/a>!\u00a0 So I won’t write here about Revolution<\/em>,\u00a0 but will urge you to read it along with Deborah’s post on NerdyBookClub<\/a> talking about how some vital things have hardly changed in Greenwood since that pivotal summer of 1964. (Luckily, I already raved here<\/a> about John Corey Whaley’s Noggin<\/em>\u00a0 which is also a finalist)<\/p>\n

Like when… books that sounded so good, so interesting, and so worth reading turn out to be flops. I have very wide-ranging reading tastes and am very selective about requesting review copies, so I can almost always think of someone I know who would love such-and-such book (not every book is for every reader, of course).<\/p>\n

But a few titles in a row lately have just been flat-out duds, due to writing that needed stronger editing (no, that girl isn’t poignantly introspective; she’s a whiner) or pop references which are already dated. If I knew who’d written the jacket-flap copy on some others, I’d give them a piece of my mind as the book in my hands bore no resemblance to their description of plot, motivation, etc. Yep, I finally have some DidNotFinish titles, despite my best efforts to choose ones worth our time to read.<\/p>\n

Like when… I just can’t turn the page because I know that a character I’ve become emotionally invested in is about to do something incredibly stupid – it’s like watching a train wreck about to happen. A couple of books are waiting on me to be ready for the inevitable outcome – great books, but I’m not yet ready to uncover my eyes and let those characters go and live with their bad decisions. I will, and y’all will get the recommendations of these books, but not right this minute.<\/p>\n

Like when… I couldn’t get to KidLitCon blogger conference this year, so I missed\u00a0my current and new Kidlitosphere friends, all the great discussions about Diversity in YAlit and Kidlit<\/a>, and the refreshed attitude toward blogging that this gathering always gives me.<\/p>\n

Like when… we really are on vacation – watching the aspens turn golden or discovering an orchard stand with heirloom apple varieties is more important than jumping into someone’s fictional world.<\/p>\n

So… a little breather, some homemade apple pie, some visits with family and I’ll be back. My To-Be-Reviewed pile has some dandy books which will be published in winter and spring, and you won’t want to miss them!<\/p>\n

**kmm<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sometimes you just need to get away from it all, right? But for this avid reader and intrepid book reviewer, the “stepping away for a little while” got a bit lengthier than planned. A combination of factors is usually the culprit – simple burnout, outside distractions, and so forth. But this time around, it’s been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[19,98],"tags":[22,82,55,44,49,35,6,61],"class_list":["post-4718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-reflective","tag-behavior","tag-blogging","tag-books","tag-friendship","tag-memories","tag-surprises","tag-travel","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4718"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4718\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4736,"href":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4718\/revisions\/4736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}