Wait, there's more...

Imitation might be the sincerest form of flattery, but adaptation is right up there with it. Our previous post was about Impossible fan fiction, and this is about a creative trailer by Robin Henry that's available for download on a site where educators can share book trailers.

Thanks to Teresa Schauer, a South Texas librarian, who put the site together and alerted us to the trailer. If you go to the main site and look at the right pane, you can navigate to various trailers categorized by grade level (Impossible is in Upper Grades), and you can find details on every trailer in the spreadsheet in the Documents folder.

Impossible fan fic

Fan fiction is the finest form of flattery: Nancy happened across this take on Impossible the other day.

Nancy at Barnes & Noble in Saugus this Thursday

This Thursday, February 18, Nancy will be making the short drive to appear at the Barnes & Noble on Route 1 in Saugus, Massachusetts.

Things get started at 7:30 p.m., so synchronize your watches. She'll be reading, signing books, and talking about her new novel, Extraordinary, which is due out this fall. It's a great opportunity to get the inside info in advance...

Lasting romance (on the printed page)

Valentine's Day is fast approaching, which has people buying cards and chocolates, making dinner reservations, and planning flower deliveries. But, unlike true love, those things are fleeting. Much more permanent is a novel of love and romance. Laura Delaney lists the top ten Valentine's Day reads for kids in the Idaho Statesman. You'll doubtless not be surprised to find Impossible on the list.

We could simply reread it, but we've made dinner reservations anyway...

Hard copy

It was months ago that Impossible first showed up on the New York Times bestseller list for Children's Paperbacks (The "Children's" designation always sounds odd to me, but we won't quarrel.) And it's been back several times since, on and off. At first, of course, making the list was a thrill, and more than enough reward. As time wore on, however, something was missing. When Nancy dreamt of making the list (and, trust me, dream she did), the image included the actual New York Times, that is to say the off-white, foldable, ink-smudgy hard copy that can pile up so quickly in the entryway. She did not dream in web page form. And a clipping from a hard copy makes a great memento. We like our talismans, even if it does look funny to spell the plural that way.

But one of the quirks of the hard copy form is that not every list is printed each week. The NYT publishes several lists, and one of the drawbacks of the old-fashioned form is that there are space considerations. They may print all the news that's fit for same, but that forces them to make hard choices about what is and isn't fit. And they've apparently decided that their readers don't need to see each and every list each and every week, which is as may be. The result of this for Nancy was that, given the vagaries of timing, her several irregular appearances on the list (up to eight as of this writing) somehow never managed to coincide with those weeks in which the Children's Paperback list was printed up in the hard copy.

Four months later, the stars finally aligned, and there it was! Impossible, in smudgy ink, on the very list of Nancy's fantasy! We quickly purchased a copy, and snagged another from a friend (we read our NYT online -- see previous note on entryways), and voila! We now have it!

Young and In Love

Who? Us? No, no -- Nancy may look young, but I'm still not sure that we qualify. There are plenty who do qualify as young and in love in the pages of the books called out in the post of that title on the School Library Journal. The very first exemplars of the type in the article are none other than Lucy and Zach from Impossible.