Afternoon links.
“What bothers me about women’s bodies I see in many comics is that they seem so removed from the woman herself. Their primary function is to be on display for the reader… This is bad not just from a ‘that’s sexist’ standpoint, but from a storytelling one as well.”
- At YA Interrobang: List of the Week: Genderqueer and transgender YA leads.
- At BuzzFeed: 23 Female Cartoonists On Drawing Their Bodies. THIS LINK, THISSSS LINNNNNK. (I pulled the Schrag quote from here.)
- At the Horn Book: Dear Mr. Zelinsky. "Here is the letter, my reply, and a couple of follow-up emails, in which I learned (if I’ll ever learn) how wrong my initial reaction can be, and how good it is to give others the benefit of the doubt."
- Sarah Dessen, at Seventeen: I Thought Dating An Older Guy Was Cool — Until I Sensed That Something Was Very Wrong: "It was so weird. I'd completely accepted her romance with an older guy as normal, even destined. But the idea of T. feeling the same way about me made me shudder. He was a big brother, someone to pal around with. Hearing that he wanted more felt like wading into the deep end. Just like that, you lose your footing, and you're in over your head."
- At PW: 2015 Children’s Choice Book Award Winners Announced.
- New Yorker podcast episode: Women in Science Fiction.
- At mental_floss: 25 Graphic Novelists Tell Us Their Favorite Children’s Books. FAITH ERIN HICKS TALKS ABOUT VESPER HOLLY, YESSSSSSSS.
- At E-Volt: The Boston Teen Author Festival.
- At Nerdy Book Club: Turning Crushed Dreams into Stardust. "I sometimes wonder what would have happened if half the astronomers’ names in those books I read were female. Would I be an astronomer now? Who knows? But that experience taught me a profound lesson about how quickly kids form ideas about what is and isn’t possible. And it taught me how critical it is that they see people like themselves in books."
- At Thought Catalog: The 100 All-Time Greatest Quotes About Cats. "The cat is such a perfect symbol of beauty and superiority that it seems scarcely possible for any true aesthete and civilized cynic to do other than worship it. —H. P. Lovecraft"