Brainstorming 2014

[evil_plotbunny]

The Exchange at Fic Corner 2014 Schedule
May 11th - Brainstorming Post will open.
May 26th - June 7th - Nominations
June 8th - June 14th - Vetting
June 15th - 25th - Sign-Ups
June 27th - Assignments Sent Out
September 1st - Deadline for Stories
September 6th - Collection Goes Live

Got a favo(u)rite kids or YA book or series or story you want other people to write for or request? Want to know if you're "the only one" who ever read that one particular book or who loves that certain character?

Go forth in the comments and pimp your favo(u)rites.

ETA: Some helpful brainstorming links provided by elf and a few added by me.
Newbery Medal list
Links to other Youth Awards from ALA including the Batchelder (translation) and Belpre (Hispanic/Latino). Scroll down for links to the Coretta Scott King (African-American/Black) and Printz (YA) The Notable Books lists linked in the sidebar are also of interest.
Juvenile Series and Sequels
from the MCPL database (looong list.)
Goodreads Top 100 Middle School Must Reads from Goodreads
Obscure:
A List of Series and Sequels for Juvenile Readers. Compiled in 1915. (Edith Nesbit is included. And Lewis Carroll. And Dumas was apparently considered youth reading.)
Mary Crosson's "Plain Jane" Series List. Public domain (pre-20s) children's and teens series available on the web.
Girls Series Books 1840-1991. List only, hosted at the Kerlan Collection.
Diversity in YA's booklists. Thematic multicultural/ethnic/sexual lists of recent YA novels compiled by the blog owners.

Comments

[jadelennox]

No ideas, just kermitflailing.

[marginaliana]

Yay! Looking forward to it.

[morbane]

I'm definitely nominating some of the same things as last year. For example, selections from below:

The Hounds of the Morrigan - Pat O'Shea

The Pirates' Mixed-Up Voyage - Margaret Mahy

The Changeover - Margaret Mahy

The Twenty-One Balloons - William Pène du Bois

Various things by Isobelle Carmody

Various things by Diana Wynne Jones

Various things by Robin McKinley

:D

I'm also thinking this will be my push to finally read Will Grayson, Will Grayson and the Darkangel Trilogy.

[sirvalkyrie]

Ha! I've been working on this since last year.

Ever After High by Shannon Hale
Supergirl's Cosmic Adventure in 8th Grade

[graycardinal]

A list of obscure-ish favorites, revamped and re-annotated from what I posted last year:

Guns in the Heather, Cape Cod Casket, and The Sly One (Lockhart Amerman)
1960s. Jonathan Flower's father is a spy; Jonathan and his friends occasionally run into mysterious situations that either overlap with his father's cases or end up requiring secret-agent panache to resolve. Amerman manages the difficult trick of making these both highly amusing and genuinely suspenseful.

Tom Swift series #4 ("Victor Appleton")
Early 1990s. The second series ("Tom Swift Jr.", with gold spines to Nancy Drew's yellow and the Hardy Boys' blue) is probably the most famous, but my favorite iteration of Tom is the 1990s Archway paperback revival, in which Swift Enterprises has moved to southern California, there's a newish extended cast (with decently written girl characters), and the plots are actually pretty high-grade classic SF. This iteration also gave a solid to earlier continuity, and produced a pair of Superthrillers co-starring the Hardy Boys.

Meanwhile, Back at the Castle (Hope Campbell)
1970. A somewhat eccentric family buys a tiny island in the St. Lawrence, and discovers that the US/Canadian border goes around the island -- on both sides, such that it's arguably not in either nation. So they set up the independent republic of Great Mosquito Island; comedy and political silliness ensues.

Diana Winthrop mystery series ("Kate Chambers")
1983-84. Six slim paperbacks, featuring unusually well-plotted "teen sleuth" puzzles and a large extended family. "Chambers" turns out to have been a pen name for Nicole St. John, who wrote as "Norma Johnston" among several other pseudonyms.

Terror Wears a Feathered Cloak (Thelmar Wyche Crawford)
1969. I didn't realize this was part of a short series till quite some time after I first came across it (and had no trouble reading it as a standalone). Teen adventure in Mexico; our heroine, Carol, is part of a group that gets tangled in conflicts involving a present-day archaeological project and a classic lost city populated by old-school Mayans. I've often described this as "Elizabeth Peters lite"; I recall it as well plotted and much more believable than the premise suggests.

The Ice Ghosts Mystery (Jane Louise Curry)
1972. This is what one might have gotten if Madeline L'Engle had written a "Happy Hollisters" or "Bobbsey Twins" mystery -- lively family interplay, hair's-breadth suspense, and a clever science-fictional suspense thriller plot. Curry is better known for fantasy (I also really like The Sleepers, a modern-Arthurian yarn that compares favorably with parts of the Dark is Rising sequence), but this may be my very favorite of her works.

Go to the Room of the Eyes (Betty K. Erwin)
1969. Modern (for its time) kids' treasure-hunt adventure with clever clues and a more-than-usually-realistic Seattle setting. I remember liking both the plot and the family.

The Night of the Solstice (L. J. Smith)
My favorite of L. J. Smith's books; I've enjoyed virtually everything she's written (though I think the Vampire Diaries series may have run its course even without the TV series' influence), but Solstice and its sequel, Heart of Valor, strike me as her most intriguing and best-written material, right up there with Jane Louise Curry and Susan Cooper.

Planet Builders series (Robyn Tallis)
1980s. Ten-volume paperback series; YA sci-fi featuring a large ensemble cast, an interesting colony world, and a slew of excellent writers behind the Tallis name (including Sherwood Smith, Mary Frances Zambreno, and space-opera geniuses Debra Doyle and James Macdonald). A rarity: while the teens are the stars, the grownups are surprisingly well-rounded.

The Amazing Vacation (Dan Wickenden)
Entry kentry cutry corn, apple seed and apple thorn.
Wire, briar, limber lock, a witch and griffins in a flock.
We fly o'er hill and over plain; we fly through sun and wind and rain.
We even fly when it's sleeting or snowing, so Open Sesame -- let's get going!

1956. A brother and sister step through a magic window into the Country Without a Name. Adventures ensue, involving a porpentine, long-simmering conflicts, puns, and the unexpected solution to a long-standing family mystery. This is roughly contemporary with Edward Eager's books, but it's pitched a bit differently (perhaps for an older reader) and feels slightly more modern.

Danny Dunn series (Jay Williams & Raymond Abrashkin)
1956-1977. (I just looked up those dates; d*mn, that's impressive.) Science fiction adventure for middle-graders in which action and science get equal emphasis. Danny is much more the smart suburban kid than Tom Swift, and the adventures are mostly a bit tamer, but the Dunn series is much better at general sense-of-wonder niftiness.

[graycardinal]

Oy, and I get to nominate just four of these?

Cue the tearing of hair on this end of the process.... :-/

[crantz]

Nancy Drew, 'cause heck yes Nancy. Can we specify original and new Nancy?

The Dark Lord of Derkholm series by Diana Wynne Jones

First book, Dark Lord of Derkholm: Getting out from under the thumb of a man who's turned your entire world into a magical, blood-filled theme park.

Second book, Year of the Griffin: Griffin goes to wizarding college. <-- I desperately need more of this.

The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex

Plot: Gratuity Tucci writes the story of what happened after aliens invaded earth and took her mom. She is also a rockstar, drives like a NASCAR driver, and is super smart. According to her. Gratuity is an amazing protagonist and I wanna read more of her.

The Bromeliad Trilogy by Terry Pratchett

Nomes live fast lives. Some nomes live outside. Some nomes live inside and don't realize there's an outside. Then they meet. Then the inside is going to get torn down and this is what happens next. I love the nomes, and the ending of the series leaves a lot of options open.

The Johnny Series by Terry Pratchett

Stuff keeps happening to Johnny: His videogame turns out to be real aliens that need saving from humans, he can see the dead, and he goes back in time to stop a bomb from blowing up his whole town. It's an early Pterry series, but one I really enjoyed. I'd love to see more of it.

The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke

A private detective is hired to find two missing boys. What he finds is a group of children led by a young 'thief lord', and magic. One of my favourite books in the world.

Igraine the Brave by Cornelia Funke

Igraine wants to be a knight. Her parents are wizards. So what do they do? They make her a suit of armour. Then a crisis strikes and Igraine has to save the day. So much adventure potential for Igraine!

I was gonna suggest Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo, but the most perfect fic for it was posted last year that satisfied what I needed.

[evil_plotbunny]

*dons librarian hat*

Smek for President by Adam Rex will be out later this year.

[crantz]

OMIGOSH

[morbane]

Second book, Year of the Griffin: Griffin goes to wizarding college. <-- I desperately need more of this. - Yes! I got a lovely fic for this for my first Yuletide, but that was long enough ago that I'd be very tempted to ask for it again.

[evil_plotbunny]

I missed this in my first pass.

Nancy Drew options would include original editions, revised editions (yellow spine), and all the various newer series with subtitles (Girl Detective, Clue Crew, etc.)

[seekingferret]

Because I want someone to offer it this year...

The Grounding of Group Six is about a bunch of kids sent to boarding school by their parents. Sounds boring, right? The twist is that the school has been hired to send the kids out into the woods and kill them!

Instead, they suborn the instructor/assassin sent to kill them and end up hiding in the woods, having sex with each other and the instructor, and doing massive amounts of hard drugs. Pretty typical children's novel, really.

[orintheus]

Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson. The novel follows the story of the Bradshaws, a family who depends on the father, Truitt Bradshaw, and his crabbing/fishing business on his boat, the Portia Sue. Truitt's two daughters, Sara Louise and Caroline, are twins, and Caroline has always been the favorite. She is prettier and more talented, and better at receiving more attention not only from their parents but also from others in the community.

Silverwing Series by Kenneth Oppel. When Shade Silverwing breaks an age-old law, looking at the sun, the owls burn down Tree Haven and the bats migrate to Hibernaculum where they rest for the winter. Along the way, Shade meets Marina Brightwing who helps him throughout the series. They also confront their nemeses, Goth and Throbb, cannibal bats who are part of a group calling themselves the Vampyrum Spectrum, Zephyr, a bat that can see past, present and future, and Scirocco, a bat who wants to be Human.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid Series by Jeff Kinney. The books are the journals of the main character, whose name is Greg Heffley. Befitting a child's diary, they are filled with hand-written notes and simple drawings of his daily adventures.

Also I'd love to rec His Dark Materials.

[bring_me_sugar]

I was loosely considering nominating the Kid TV Series by Barbra Adams but I can't find a wiki link for it :/ It's about a group of high school kids who are part of their school's AV club and the wacky hijinx they get up to.

[seekingferret]

Oh, man, I bet I still have a copy of Can This Telethon Be Saved hidden somewhere or other.

[bring_me_sugar]

Ahh, I have a copy of that novel, too! It was my favorite from that series.

[souljelly]

I was so excited about this exchange last time it was on, but didn't have time to sign up - super pleased that I spotted it over on fandomcalendar. :)

I'd love to see fic for the GONE series by Michael Grant, it has a fantastically diverse cast and is an action-packed and addictive read.

Just going to throw out there; Mary Poppins, the works of Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton, the Uglies series by Scott Westerfeld.

[consumedly]

I've no idea who or what to pimp, but I'm so so very exited to see that there is going to be next round!! ^_^

[nocowardsoul]

Thief Errant series - Elizabeth Bunce
American Girl series - Kit, Samantha, Felicity, Rebecca
Sally Lockhart - Philip Pullman
Bloody Jack - L. A. Meyer
anything by Karen Cushman
Fly By Night - Frances Hardinge
The Traitors' Gate - Avi
The Seer of Shadows - Avi
Beyond the Western Sea - Avi
Knight and Rogue series - Hilari Bell
Westmark - Lloyd Alexander
Pirates! by Celia Rees. Because they should have been lesbians, damn it!
Freckles/A Girl of the Limberlost - Gene Stratton Porter
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm - Kate Douglas Wiggin
Orphan Train Adventures (starts with A Family Apart - Joan Lowery Nixon
The Gift of Sarah Barker by Jane Yolen