Do you recall Sea Monkeys? Those little critters you bought in a packet, added to water, they sprouted to life, and then eventually died when you lost interest and forgot about them? They might be a bit before your time, less flash and glamour than the delights of electronics and the internet. But you have to realise, back in the before times when everything was black and white and people went to school on brachiosauruses in winter uphill both ways, things were a bit more boring. You had to try hard to entertain yourselves.
Sea monkeys! Like monkeys, funny little devils they are, but wet!
What a magical experience, you get to create life out of little more than powder and water!
Now, when you realise you are just pouring fish food, a little thing called brine shrimp, into the water, suddenly the glitz and glam vanishes.
This is what we in the business call a marketing gimmick.
What child would want to get brine shrimp? But if we slap on some kooky pictures of these fish-people looking things on the packaging, market it in comics, and give it a fancy name… now we’re talking.
It’s all a gimmick, a genius, genius gimmick.
Today is “National Sea Monkey Day”, another gimmick that sellers use to sell more sea monkeys. I’m mentioning this because the gimmick of my blog is talking about random topics with the loose veneer of it being some obscure “holiday” that nobody knows about because it’s all a made up gimmick.
People give gimmicks a bad rap, but sometimes there’s nothing better than finding something individual and weird, and just going for it, sticking to the bit. A gimmick can turn something boring and mundane into something exciting and special.
To smoothly and seamlessly transition from talking about sea monkeys to books, you know, the point of a library blog, let’s talk gimmicks not in pets/fish food, but in books.
You gosh darned youths these days, always on your vimeo games. Not you of course, you being the reader of this library blog, you’re good, but youths in general. Maybe it’s because books are too linear, not enough interactivity, things to do. In audio games you can do stuff, lots of different stuff, whereas books… less so. Luckily there is a solution, a way to make books more active. Choose your own adventure books! Flip back and forward through these books, trying to find the best path and make the correct decisions. Good fun.
Romeo and/or Juliet : a chooseable-path adventure / North, Ryan
“What if Romeo never met Juliet? What if Juliet got really buff instead of moping around the castle all day? What if they teamed up to take over Verona with robot suits? You get to decide if there should be romance, epic fight scenes… or robot suits! Packed with exciting choices, fun puzzles, secret surprises, terrible puns, and more than a billion possible storylines, you’ll discover a new experience every time you read it. It’s the first book with an unlockable character. Choose well, and you may even get to the world’s most awkward choose-your-own sex scene.” (Catalogue)
After having multiple versions of the same story in one book, why not have multiple sides of the same story? Two books for the price of one! That price being free because we are a library. The tête-bêche style of books has both sides of the book be the front side, with what story you read depending on which way you orient the book. And yes, we do use the fancioux French word with letters that have hats, because we are scholarly and pretentious. Tête-bêche means “head-to-tail”. Useful information to one-up your friends with.
Replica : Lyra : Gemma / Oliver, Lauren
“Replica is a “flip book” that contains two narratives in one. Turn the book one way and read Lyra’s story; turn the book over and upside down and read Gemma’s story … Lyra’s story begins in the Haven Institute, a building tucked away on a private island off the coast of Florida. But in truth, Haven is a clandestine research facility where thousands of replicas, or human models, are born, raised, and observed. When a surprise attack is launched on Haven, Lyra, or 24, and a boy known only as 72 manage to escape. Gemma has been in and out of hospitals for as long as she can remember. After she is nearly abducted by a stranger claiming to know her, Gemma starts to investigate her family’s past and discovers her father’s mysterious connection to the secretive Haven research facility. Hungry for answers, she travels to Florida, only to stumble upon two replicas and a completely new set of questions.” (Adapted from Catalogue)
But why oh why would we ever stop at just two? Why not have even more stories in one book! Thus, the anthology, a collection of shorter stories all gathered in one book. Sometimes anthologies are written by the same person, but often times they are collaborative works between multiple authors, all pitching in their own piece. Some of them even have a theme, something tying all the stories together, such as this one here, sharing the genre between stories.
Hometown haunts : #LoveOzYA horror tales
“One bite of an apple from a family shrine unearths hungry ghosts. An underground dance party during Covid threatens to turn lethal. And on the edge of a coastal rainforest, a grieving sister waits to witness a mysterious ‘unravelling’. While some of the stories in this wide-ranging collection are straight-up terrifying rollercoaster rides, others are psychologically rooted in our society’s deepest fears and concerns: acceptance and fitting in, love and loss, desire and temptation, and the terror of a world threatened by catastrophic change … and even collapse. From body horror to the supernatural, hauntings to transformations, and the everyday evil of humans to menacing outside forces, Hometown Haunts will have you glued to your chair … until you leap out of it!” (Catalogue)
As nice as different stories are, as nice as connection via thematic thread is, maybe you want short stories more related to each other, more of a single story. This offering here is multiple different perspectives of the same event, all told by different authors. The best of the anthology form and novel form combined.
Violent ends
“Relates how one boy–who had friends, enjoyed reading, playing saxophone in the band, and had never been in trouble before–became a monster capable of entering his high school with a loaded gun and firing on his classmates, as told from the viewpoints of several victims. Each perspective is written by a different writer of young adult fiction.” (Catalogue)
Now onto one of my favourite forms: the epistolary novel! Normally books just have you in one or more character’s heads. Why? Are we suddenly psychically stalking someone? Or sometimes we’re hearing something that someone told someone. But like who cares. Why not instead do some actual stalking. Epistolary novels are told in documents such as diaries and letters and such that have been collected to tell a story. Now why are we reading these people’s stuff….
Don’t ask such silly questions.
Where’d you go, Bernadette / Semple, Maria
“Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she’s a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she’s a disgrace; to design mavens, she’s a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom. Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette’s intensifying allergy to Seattle–and people in general–has made her so agoraphobic that a trip to the end of the earth is problematic. To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence–creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter’s role in an absurd world.” (Adapted from Catalogue)