Candor, Candidly

Candor, by Pam Bachorz.    This was the book that we chose as "the book" for our Teen Tech Week 2010 activities.  A co-worked discovered that Pam offers presentations through the Skype an Author Network, which we took advantage of, and she was totally awesome!  I clicked randomly on some of the other authors signed up for the network, and very few of them seem to do free visits, or, if they do, the visits aren't more than 10 or 15 minutes.  Pam talked to us for about 20 minutes, and then she did 15 minutes of Q&A.  Even though most of the kids hadn't read the book yet (sorry, Pam), they were very interested in what she had to say, and they asked some fairly intelligent questions about how she came up with the book, the town she used as inspiration, and her writing process.  She invited all the kids to friend her on Facebook and when they promptly did, she was totally awesome and immediately sent them replies to say hi.  She's also created a website for her mock town, which the kids really liked.  You can tell she really cares about her work and the kids connected to that.
Pam was very engaging and very easy to listen to; she told a lot of great stories and expressed herself very clearly.  If you're looking for someone to talk to your teens, I totally recommend her.  Yeah, Pam!
(A word about Skype: surprisingly easy to use, no big software download/installation, totally free, and you don't need a webcam or microphone: you can use the chat feature while your co-caller shoots video and voice at you.)

As to the book, I really enjoyed it.  I wasn't as emotionally engaged as I've sometimes been with a book, but the plot was very interesting and that kept me going.  I felt bad for Oscar, but I wasn't really sympathetic like I need to be to really feel for a character.  The writing was very good-- no fragments, proper comma usage, no swears-- but I'd like to see the author develop a stronger voice.  This is certainly a very good novel, especially for the first published work by an author.  I think she is one I'll be keeping an eye on.