Blogpost of abject failure

Soooo. Adoring readers. How are you today? Feeling chill? Feeling happy?

...Feeling patient?

Vacations are lovely things. At least in theory. Here in Vancouver we've had a nice two weeks off while the Olympics are in town, free from school, work, or other constraints. Unfortunately a vacation is never quite as long as you want it to be. Now our vacation is nearly at an end, and we return to school/work/real life on Monday morning (woe is us) and Bookslingers? Bookslingers is not quite ready for all of that.

The essence here is that your humble founders, Miss Corene and myself, have just not used our two weeks of Olympic vacation as well as we might have done. Perhaps we were too ambitious. Perhaps fate intervened.

The Bookslingers mascot does not want vacation to be over, either.
( Also, she is a tiger.)

The good news is that all the basic functions of the site are set and working. (Hooray!)

The bad news is that we have not met the minimum number of complete reviews we decided we had to have to officially launch the site. You could call this failure (like me). You could, like Miss Corene, call it delayed gratification.

Whatever works best for you.

So: a postponement. We said we'd have one hundred complete reviews before we launched; we have... well, less than that. For the moment, since school's about to start up again and swallow both of us whole, we hope to run the beta in March. And while it's possible we may launch with only a month's delay (not very possible), we expect to actually launch in May, because let's not fool ourselves: neither of us is particularly good with deadlines. Or rather, we love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

Watch this space.

In Which Miss Corene Goes into Conniptions

So apprently Disney movies is updating Harriet the Spy for the 'aughts.

After viewing this trailer, Miss Corene was found shivering in a corner muttering "Blog Wars? Blog Wars?!?"

How is this television... thing... in any way related to Harriet the Spy? Harriet was a surly, antisocial child who wrote nasty things about people in her notebook to become a better person and work out her anger issues. And now she is a spunky blogger with social skills and a tween-dream wardrobe. 


I AM NOT PLEASED.

Bookslingers Review: Thirteenth Child by Patricia C. Wrede

To the very few people already reading this blog: please bear with us while we test our review label RSS. This just happens to be the only complete review we have so far. ;)

Eff Rothmer is a thirteenth child, which in her world means she's destined to bring doom to everyone around her. Her twin brother, Lan, is the seventh son of a seventh son, which everyone knows means he'll be lucky and powerful. And so Eff's been told her entire life, until one day her parents decide to move the whole family West to the frontier town of Mill City, and everything changes, especially Eff.

Read the Bookslingers Review of Thirteenth Child.

POC Reading Chaaaaaaallenge

The Bookslingers like a good challenge (such as "I challenge you to eat all the pie!") and the POC Reading Challenge seems like fantastic way to show publishers and those in the book industry that we as readers are more than happy to read books featuring POC characters and written by POC authors (Disapproving glare in Bloomsbury's general direction).

We have signed up for Level 5 for maximum reading. However, we have a secret goal of merging this with with the 2010 100+ Reading Challenge and reading 100 YA and JUV books by POC in this year. Overachievers? We deny nothing.

So to keep track of all this reading, we're keeping a list of the books here and eventually linking them with our reviews on Bookslingers.

Happy Reading!

The Bookslingers' POC Reading Challenge List:

1. Maya Running by Anjali Banerjee

2. The Year of the Dog by Grace Lin
3. Cooper Sun by Sharon M. Draper (AMAZING. I want to run out onto the streets shoving this book into people's hands)
4. An Ocean Apart, a World Away - Lensey Namioka
5. The Kayla Chronicles - Sherri Winston
6. A Step From Heaven - An Na (Haunting)
7. Secret Keeper - Mitali Perkins

Wherein Miss Maiar is a genius.

Totally unrelated photo of twee cups

You will notice that here on the Bookslingers Blog (which I just got working yesterday), there has been a fabulous revamp. Feel free to bask in my genius, I don't mind. :)

At some point in the very near future we hope to have the Reviews feed up and running, which will allow us to post a live feed of all recent reviews to the page of the same name on Bookslingers.com. (Since you can't see it yet, you'll just have to trust me.) This is very exciting, as it will allow us to have new reviews show up on the main site without us actually having to post them there directly! \o/

Well, I think it's exciting, anyway.

You are totally alone on this. - Miss Corene

Three more weeks. Still fifty reviews to write.

...we can do this.

I think.