GNF: The Stephanie Edition

Happy Good News Friday!

It's been one of those weeks--loved ones in the hospital, a sick dog, financial woes--so I really really needed it!

I've got some early reviews of Ballads of Suburbia to share!

I've been waiting on pins and needles for these to start coming in because in some ways this book is even closer to my heart than I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone. They are like my children so I don't really love one or the other more, but Ballads was a lot more trouble to raise so to speak, and yet I'm really pleased with how it turned out and I hope it reaches a lot of people, so I've been dying to see how people respond to it. So far so good....

There is a Booklist review that I don't think has actually run yet so I don't have a link, so I'll just post it, which I hope is kosher:

Kuehnert follows her strong debut, I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone (2008), with an intensely real and painfully honest novel of high-school anxiety. Kara enters her freshman year without her best friend while her parents are on the verge of divorce. Her antidote for stress? She cuts herself. She bonds with the eccentric new girl, Maya, who shares her love of Manic Panic hair dye and the Ramones, and starts hanging out at Scoville Park with other troubled teens, including Cass, who drops acid to cope with her mother’s mental illness, and Quentin, who is hooked on heroin.

The punk-rock clique spends weekends relieving their pain with copious amounts of sex, drugs, and booze, and weekdays writing in a notebook titled “Stories of Suburbia,” a collection of what Kara calls “ballads” meant to shatter the myth of a quiet, safe suburbia. The dramatic climax borders on excessive, but with a slew of multidimensional characters and a heavy dose of authentic teen angst, Kuehnert nails the raw vulnerability of teendom and delivers a hard-hitting and mesmerizing read.—Annie McCormick

Then blogger Steph Su posted about it, calling it "A book you all should read." It seems I sort of rendered her speechless. Which is a good thing. That's the kind of impact I was striving for ;)

So I hope this is a sign of good things to come for Ballads and of a better week to come for me personally :)

Also if this gets you interested in reading Ballads, there is a sneak peek of the Epilogue (which is technically the first chapter) on my website and then of chapter 1 (which is actually the second chapter in the book) on the Simon & Schuster website. So all and all that's the first 20 pgs for you to read.

What is your good news this week?

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