DU has yet another published author

[Freeper]

Wheezy Donating Member (1000+ posts) Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list    Sun Aug-28-11 02:47 PM
Original message
Oh wow...the LA Times reviewed my book today. Squee!
   
(Please forgive the self-promo. The LA Times Book Review is kind of a big deal, especially for children's books, which don't get reviewed much in the big papers.)

Not Just For Kids: 'The Unwanteds' by Lisa McMann
The author colorfully takes on cuts in school arts by creating a world in which creative children are separated from the pack in a classic tale of good versus evil.

By Susan Carpenter, Los Angeles Times

August 28, 2011, 7:00 a.m.
The Unwanteds

A Novel

Lisa McMann

Aladdin/Simon & Schuster: 390 pp., $16.99, ages 8-12

As public school districts across the country get butchered with all the sensitivity inherent to a rusty hatchet, parents are processing the loss in novel ways. Take bestselling author Lisa McMann, who brainstormed the concept for her middle-grade debut "The Unwanteds" after art and music classes were cut from her children's school.

Artistic kids were being punished, believed McMann, who reimagined their punishment as something other than the real-world decline of imaginative thinking. In "The Unwanteds," every resident in the bland, mostly colorless community of Quill is marked as Necessary, Wanted or Unwanted (if they sing, paint or dance), in which case they are shackled, taken to a death farm and forced to face the Great Lake of Boiling Oil.

This annual ritual, or purging, takes place when children have reached the inauspicious age of 13. By then, their parents and other town members have observed each individual's tendencies to determine if a child can stay in Quill, with its "identical houses planted closely together like rows of sweet corn," or needs to be banished...
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More at the link:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-lisa-mc...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x1832917

Here is her book on Amazon,
http://www.amazon.com/Unwanteds-Lisa-McMann/dp/1442407689/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1314568018&sr=8-1

nadinbrzezinski Donating Member (1000+ posts)  Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list    Sun Aug-28-11 02:55 PM
Response to Original message
9. great

Nadin sounds jealous. 

[JohnnyReb]

Boiling them in oil is not healthy...ask Mooch-Shall.

[miskie]

Another DU author injects politics into a place where it doesn't belong. What are the odds ?

[Skul]

I'm sure it will sell like boiled hot-cakes.
To a few other DUmpmonkeys.
Hope there's pictures inside, for them.

[BlueStateSaint]

I'm sure it will sell like boiled hot-cakes.
To a few other DUmpmonkeys.
Hope there's pictures inside, for them.

What it shows is that some of the DUmpmonkeez are more advanced than the others.

[Chris_]

It would be hard to imagine a more depressing place to live than Quill. Not that anyone in the community of Quill would ever imagine anything, of course, or admit to feeling depressed. Imagination and emotion lead to infractions, so the people of Quill have neither.

So it's a 390-page Bouncy Ball.  Awesome. 

Where do these idiots get off claiming artists have a monopoly on creativity and "imaginative thinking"? God forbid their little snowflakes learn a useful trade instead of wasting all their time in art class.

[Duke Nukum]

Sounds like the typical heavy handed liberal agitprop. As for the unwanteds, wasn't it the progressives who at one time were pushing to ban books like The Wizard of Oz from public libraries because they were too imaginative and didn't fit in with the worker drone mentality?

I do believe that imagination is perhaps the most important of the human facilities but leftists usually don't like what we imagine whether it be internal combustion engines or incandescent light bulbs. It seems to be that liberals are the ones at war with the unwanteds, the imaginative creatives.

I believe any of the "unwanteds" have enough imagination to skirt around the rules of any soul-sucking liberal bureaucracy, such as the public school system.

[jukin]

You can imagine anything you want as long as the leftists agree with it.

[dutch508]

So...

She rewrote 1984?

[Chris_]

kestrel91316   (1000+ posts)             Sun Aug-28-11 02:54 PM
Response to Original message
5. Fabulous. But is that review by Susan Carpenter of Susan Carpenter McMillan fame??

Curmudgeoness   (1000+ posts)           Sun Aug-28-11 03:24 PM
Response to Original message
19. That's the way to fight the system. This is a win for you.

[GOBUCKS]

I do believe that imagination is perhaps the most important of the human facilities but leftists usually don't like what we imagine whether it be internal combustion engines or incandescent light bulbs. It seems to be that liberals are the ones at war with the unwanteds, the imaginative creatives.

When they say "creative", they mean "useless".

[BEG]

I'm going to go a tad off topic here:

All three of my children are extremely artistic (and smart too). My son graduated this year from college with an industrial design degree. He is now working for GE. My older daughter is graduating in 2012 and will be going to collage and getting a degree related to "art". Most likely our youngest daughter will also.

Art is not "useless" but all art is not created equal. You have to produce something that other people want. It's what you do with your "art" that is important.  Take mopinko's turd art.  Someone like Mo would expect the government to subsidize her "art", even though it looks like she just took a huge dump and called it "art". Now take my son, he is already (at 22 years old) making a decent living less than a year after he graduated collage using his artistic skills (even in the Obama shit economy). While you have DUer after DUer chronically unemployed, "why me they ask"...it's because they picked college degrees that were "useless" or they are suck ass employees (or both). 

You can't go to an art school (as my son did) and get a degree in basket weaving and expect to support yourself, but the delusional DU think they should. That is way so many over educated DUers are long term unemployed. They wouldn't even think about getting a couple jobs (or more) to make ends meet. They would rather sit on their ass waiting for the right job to come along (or have no intention of getting a job). They also would not think of getting a day job while pursuing their art (that no normal person wants), it's all or nothing for them.

Has anyone counted the number of unemployed DUers with a BS, BA (or BFA), masters or doctorate degree?  I bet they think "the man" is against them, instead of the fact they have a useless degree.

[DumbAss Tanker]

H5, BEG.  You are absolutely on target.  I come from a very gifted family, but everyone's first concern was always taking care of necessities and obligations first, and following their muse second.

[BlueStateSaint]

H5, BEG.  You are absolutely on target.  I come from a very gifted family, but everyone's first concern was always taking care of necessities and obligations first, and following their muse second.

That's exactly how The Heiress is going to be taught, by us.  She wanted to "follow her muse," or something like that, yesterday at 10 AM or so, while Irene's rains were coming in sheets, by telling us that she wanted "to go outside and play in the rain."  We told her that maybe she should play inside and play as if she was outside in the rain.  It worked.

[MoshMasterD]

Dear Wheezy,

Welcome to the exciting world of capitalism for libs.  You aimed for a demographic, used a motif (namely Harry Potter), add subliminal political indoctrination and back masking vitriol, stir it all up and you might be a MILLIONAIRE who WON'T volunteer to pay higher taxes.

[Vagabond]

DUmmie ignorance of history in action.  In the not so distant past, all those folksongs were passed generation to generation and people sung as they worked in their feilds.  It wasn't until radio had the effect of industrializing music changed that.  There still is not a community where people get together and dance, probably anywhere in the world. 

People have worked stone and painted all the way back to the stone age.  The guy that figured out how to make stone figurines of the local deity probably lived pretty well.

I wish DUmmies would get out and look at the world every now and then.  Even if the only result was better bouncies.