Have a sad 1940s (loosely based on) Eleanor picture.

I have some very specific ideas about how I want my new project to look and this is kind of getting there but hasn’t /quite/ made it. Though I’m not sure if that’s just because I haven’t spent enough time adding detail or if it’s because there’s a concept or decision or something I haven’t got ~right~ yet. Hmmmmmm.

Editing to add:

I think maybe I was mostly just missing detail. This feels much closer to my imagination.

(And yes, you will see it when it’s done. I realise I still haven’t posted my last project. That’s coming sometime.)

Reposted from http://ift.tt/1NbjxaP.

writersrelief:

iincolore:

Bon likes to read with me; she’s cute.

The best kind of plot bunny.

Eleanor & Park: very popular with bunnies.

Reposted from http://ift.tt/1pdZ7yK.

“The girl looked at Eleanor like, Are you kidding me? And Eleanor looked back like, I know, right?”

– Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park

Reposted from http://ift.tt/PMoITs.

infinitebooknerdz:

This is based on the quote I posted a while ago. It I one of my favourite book quotes from the book ‘Eleanor and Park’ by Rainbow Rowell. I did edit the photo myself, the centre photo is from the cover but, I’m sorry, I don’t know who drew the other picture, I found it on google. Anyway, I hope you like it.

Reblogging to add the source for the (wonderful) original art you used to create this: It’s “How it all started”, by IzziBelle.

http://ift.tt/1ipwwXj

Reposted from http://ift.tt/KJYbTZ.

I did not, but it makes me very happy, as it always does when someone I’ve voted for actually wins. :-)

Heh. And in looking at Goodreads’ Best Young Adult Fiction for 2013, I see that second place went to Fangirl.

Clearly it’s Rainbow Rowell’s world. The rest of us are merely privileged to live here, and occasionally get a new book of hers to read.

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/68907894012.

justeverythingelse:

oh my glob this is so adorbs like i can’t even

Reblogging to add the source: This is How it all started by bellemrdch (IzziBelle on deviantart).

As an aside, I understand how Tumblr, and youthful net culture generally, is all about repurposing and remixing and grabbing and ripping and making something new without regard for stuffy old ideas like intellectual property and copyright. But the tremendously talented people who make beautiful fan art like this are making it out of love. They give it away for free. The least you can do, it seems to me, is keep their name on it.

And yeah, sites like weheartit are built around people reposting things without attribution. But it’s not that hard to find the original, and then you save everyone else who looks at your post from having to do that themselves, should they want to know more.

End rant…

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/65619308973.

Panel on censorship, YA lit, and kids’ right to read:

Rainbow Rowell is going to be participating in a panel on censorship at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul this coming Tuesday night. Given the recent history of bullying adults trying to restrict Minnesota teens’ access to her book Eleanor & Park, I wish I could be there in solidarity.

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/65294132899.

Sarah Says: Eleanor and Park – A Review:

call-me-elphie:

Since finishing this book I’ve been experiencing an empty feeling, I wanted more, I wanted the book to go on forever or at least have a sequel. It was such an incredible book that I didn’t want it to end.

Park was my favourite character in this. I feel he put up with so much when it came to Eleanor, he was patient for the most part and did try to be understanding. It was nice to get the story from his point of view as well as Eleanor’s as if it was just from her point of view I’d be dying to know what Park thought of the strange red headed girl!

Every now and then I got annoyed with Eleanor. Her overreactions really drove me mad, I wanted to shout at her, tell her to just accept that Park liked her and that she was being ridiculous but then I saw myself in her insecurities so I let her be. 

Of course she had been through so much crap in her life so that explains the way she was but I couldn’t help but wish she just accepted how much Park loved her and enjoyed it whilst she could instead of worrying.

From reading the first few lines of the book it’s obvious it doesn’t have the happy ending I wanted it to have but I admit it ended so much better than I thought, there was a glimmer of hope that they’d one day be together again.

I’d love for there to be a sequel! I want to know what happened to Eleanor’s Mum, sister and brothers and I guess even Richie though I hate him. I want to know if Eleanor and Park ever meet again, I hope they do, in my mind they do.

I definitely recommend this book but make sure you start it when you have a lot of free time as once I started this book I couldn’t put it down until I was done with it! It’s absolutely amazing.

“I just meant that… I want to be the last person who ever kisses you, too…. That sounds bad, like a death threat or something. What I’m trying to say is, you’re it. This is it for me.” 

Attention: Sequel. Sequel. SEQUEL.

*ahem*

sequel

Thank you.

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/63959434973.

Anoka County School Board Meeting – Aug 26th, 2013:

theotherelise:

Live and Recorded Public meetings of School Board Meeting for Anoka-Hennepin School District, MN

So this is the school board meeting where some parents pushed for censorship of Eleanor & Park from the schools of Anoka County. You need to click #5 for the public comment part. The first two parents are pushing for removal of the book and punishment for the media specialists who chose it. 

But the third parent speaking on the book was amazing. It was so heartfelt and moving. Thank you to that mom for standing up for all the young people out there who need to see their stories told (and need to read stories that are about people unlike them too). 

Then it gets a bit gross again with a woman calling Eleanor and Park making out “pornography”. I just wanted to point out how important it is to not just get worked up when you’re offense and participate in public forums only in those situations. This mom was great and I am sure her daughter is proud of her for standing up for the right to read.

I loved that part, too. The woman who spoke in defense of Eleanor & Park is Melissa Thompson. Her remarks begin around 14:10 in the video, and end around 18:40, if you want to avoid the hate-mongering that comes before and after.

From Thompson’s remarks:

[Eleanor & Park] does have strong language. But it’s no worse than what is heard regularly in the hallways, bathrooms, and parking lots of any of our secondary schools. While the subject matter is quite harsh at times, it’s real, and speaks to the issues facing many teens, past, present and future.

As someone who grew up in severe poverty and with bullying, I felt a deep connection to Eleanor, the book’s main character. And just because someone’s life isn’t pretty or perfect doesn’t mean it isn’t worthy of representation or recognition. The reality is that many of our students are living in the situation Eleanor finds herself in, and just reading this book can help them realize one, that they’re not alone, and two, that people can and do care.

I also really loved it at the end of her remarks, where she went off script, trying to find an appropriate way to characterize those who would smear the book as pornographic. “It’s… a good book”, she finally said.

It’s worth pointing out that the Parents Action League (PAL), which has led the effort to ban E&P and punish the school librarians who selected it for the summer reading program, has a history of promoting hate. Prominent members of the group were involved in crafting and promoting anti-gay policies in the Anoka-Hennepin School District, where nine students, many of them gay, committed suicide between 2009 and 2011. After advocacy groups brought lawsuits against the district, saying its policies contributed to anti-gay harassment and gender-based discrimination, and after the Department of Justice and the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights began investigations, the district agreed to overturn the policies and make reforms — reforms the PAL continues to fight.

Reading through the materials on the PAL website is fairly depressing. Something that became clear to me in researching their history and watching the testimony against Eleanor & Park is that what they are doing is itself a form of bullying. They wish to silence and intimidate anyone who believes differently than they do. It isn’t just the harsh language in Eleanor & Park that bothers them. It’s the book’s underlying message of hope. Eleanor and Park feel different than their peers. They feel bullied and marginalized. But together they find the means to survive and move forward. It’s a beautiful, poignant, empowering story. And it’s that underlying message of hope that the bullies in the PAL wish to silence.

I loved seeing Melissa Thompson stand up to that bullying. I’m so proud of her.

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/61630030017.

chinchillathumbs:

Let’s not even question it guys. Eleanor wrote “I love you” on the post card at the end. Three words. The three words she had yet to say to him.

Actually, I do question it, at least to myself (though you’re free to believe what you want, of course). I question it because I suspect that my own wishes as a reader might be influencing what I think the three words were, and I don’t see any reason to think Eleanor the character would be guided by what I as a reader want.

They’re the obvious choice, some ways. But E&P isn’t necessarily a book that makes obvious choices.

femmenerd had a different idea that I liked a lot. And Rainbow Rowell has said online that she knows what the three words are, and that she wants to write a sequel, so I hope I they’ll be revealed some day.

Hard not to wonder in the meantime, though.

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/57288286501.

smileyest09:

Just imagine a sequel to Eleanor & Park set in 2000.
Where they’re about 30 finally meeting up again.

SOMEONE ANYONE WRITE THIS NOW

You know that Rainbow Rowell has already said she intends to write that, right? Now we just need to get her to do it.

Rainbow, I know you read the tags. Life is uncertain. There are many mischances in the world. I’m not worried about you so much; I’m worried about me. I seriously want to read that sequel. It would suck not to get that chance.

Not trying to nudge you or anything. I want it to be when it’s right, in the way it clearly was right for this one. But still.

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/57141962454.

XTC, “Love at First Sight”

I bet E & P really liked this song. Given their own relationship history and Eleanor’s views on Romeo and Juliet, I think they would have smirked every time they heard it. And I know it was all mixtapes for them, but my headcanon is that Park couldn’t bear to split up side one of Black Sea, so that tape was that whole side from start to finish.

1. Respectable Street
2. Generals and Majors
3. Living Through Another Cuba
4. Love at First Sight
5. Rocket from a Bottle
6. No Language in Our Lungs

So awesome.

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/51438517153.

thingsloversdo:

Kelsey reads: Eleanor and Park

My daughter gave me crap last night for liking E&P so much. She did it by mockingly reciting to her mom, in my presence, a slightly exaggerated version of some of the things I’ve posted about it on Tumblr, then responding to my objection that I hadn’t said THAT with, “that’s exactly what you said.”

I’ll note that my son, who has actually read the book, was present. My son, who can mock with the best of them, did not join in.

I’m no paragon of logic and insight. I’ve just noticed (mostly via embarrassed reflection after the fact) that it’s really easy to fall into the fallacy of thinking:

– Many things in Category A (say, “YA accounts of young romance”) are bad

– This thing is a member of that category

– Therefore this thing is bad

Exceptions and edge cases exist. Having a map is not the same thing as having been there.

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/50731853448.

“Esta es la historia de Eleanor y Park, una historia imperfecta y hermoso, que conquistó mi corazón de forma silenciosa y llena de música.”

–

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/47936836654.

bookishandnerdy:

Upcoming YA releases

This comes out in September this year.

Here is the synopsis:

Cath is a Simon Snow fan.

Okay, the whole world is a Simon Snow fan …

But for Cath, being a fan is her life — and she’s really good at it. She and her twin sister, Wren, ensconced themselves in the Simon Snow series when they were just kids; it’s what got them through their mother leaving.

Reading. Rereading. Hanging out in Simon Snow forums, writing Simon Snow fanfiction, dressing up like the characters for every movie premiere.

Cath’s sister has mostly grown away from fandom, but Cath can’t let go. She doesn’t want to.

Now that they’re going to college, Wren has told Cath she doesn’t want to be roommates. Cath is on her own, completely outside of her comfort zone. She’s got a surly roommate with a charming, always-around boyfriend, a fiction-writing professor who thinks fanfiction is the end of the civilized world, a handsome classmate who only wants to talk about words … And she can’t stop worrying about her dad, who’s loving and fragile and has never really been alone.

For Cath, the question is: Can she do this? Can she make it without Wren holding her hand? Is she ready to start living her own life? Writing her own stories?

Or will she just go on living inside somebody else’s fiction?

Well it’s safe to say I want this book.

I think it’s safe to say all of tumblr should want this book. Am I right? This is what we all want right? lol

I really recommend her books everyone. Eleanor and Park was just released so please go out and buy it!

Warning: Wall of text.

I’m really looking forward to Fangirl. I just finished Attachments, Rainbow Rowell’s first novel, after having previously fallen hard for Eleanor & Park.

I had a few issues with Attachments. The emails between Jennifer and Beth bothered me a little at first, because I got hung up trying to figure out exactly how the conversations looked in-world. If I’d been looking over Lincoln’s shoulder, what would I have seen? Were Beth and Jennifer top-posting their replies? Interleaving responses with quoted material? Was that quoted material being edited out by the author (that is, by Rowell)? How was the security software flagging the shorter responses, if those didn’t include the rest of the conversation?

I quickly stopped worrying about that, because the conversations were so fun. I love romcom movies, and even if I hadn’t known it going in, I think I would have picked up pretty quickly that this was intended as a romcom in book form. It totally feels like an AU version of You’ve Got Mail, which made it funny when the movie was referenced explicitly.

I don’t want to give too much away, but I’ll just say that the other part of the book that didn’t work very well for me was a pivotal scene that makes up much of chapter 88. Once I figured out where the book was going I was really looking forward to that scene. And then… it fell a little flat. One character was being really passive. The other was behaving in a way that was hard for me to understand. The action seemed to be covering a lot of time, and I found it hard to imagine the scene in my head in a way that felt believable. I liked how things ended up, but I’d been expecting something more.

But there was a lot about the book that I really loved. I loved the email conversations. I loved the supporting characters (especially Doris and Christine). I loved the description of working in a publishing operation transitioning from linotype and pasteup artists to computers, because I lived through that transition (at a series of trade magazines rather than a newspaper, but except for the monthly rather than the daily deadline cycle it was pretty much the same thing).

Compared to Eleanor & Park, Attachments took me a little longer to get invested, and left me a little less-satisfied at the end. But like E&P, it had me totally hooked through most of the book, flipping pages and impatient to find what was going to happen next.

I think there’s a really good chance that the rough edges in Attachments were the result of it being Rowell’s first novel, and that the improvements between it and Eleanor & Park were no accident. If that’s true, Fangirl is going to be awesome.

tl;dr: If you liked Eleanor & Park, you probably should read Attachments. And if you like them both (like I do), you should be counting the days until Fangirl.

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/46950362971.

rainbowrowell:

andiree:

I read this scene to my friend, just those two lines—and this is how she interpreted it.

im so sorry i love this story so much really

This should NOT have made me laugh.

And yet it DID.

(P.S. These aren’t the three words.)

Haha.

Okay. Things I know now:

• Rainbow Rowell knows the three words.
• Rainbow Rowell is willing, at least under certain circumstances, to reveal what the three words aren’t.

If only she were an unmonitored daemon, I could write a script to brute-force its way through a dictionary attack that in a decade or two would allow me to figure this out. Yay!

But she’s not an unmonitored daemon, so I guess I’m back to thinking about the book and the characters to infer what the three words probably were, while waiting for the much-to-be-desired sequel that presumably will help resolve that mystery, while no doubt introducing new ones.

That works too. :-)

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/46467330212.

fridaysaturdaysundae:

Warning: Very unpopular opinion about a book everyone is in love with for some reason

Read More

I found Eleanor’s behavior toward the end of the book to be appropriate to where she was and what she was going through as a character, especially after re-reading the book.

The fact that she doesn’t look like a certain kind of standardized heroine didn’t bother me, and I thought said some important things about how hard it can be to stand out as different at that age, but it sounds like I didn’t have the same issues with that aspect of the story that you did.

Her (in the moment) willingness to have unprotected sex probably reads differently today than it would have in 1986. It was a different time, some ways. And for all that she thought that, her actual actions in the story are important to consider, too.

Nothing is going to work for everyone, and just because an opinion happens to be unpopular doesn’t invalidate it, especially for something as personal as someone’s reaction to a book.

My reaction to this book was (obviously) a lot more positive than yours, but I really appreciate your willingness to share your thoughts.

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/46388263948.

awholehandful:

Finished Eleanor & Park! Love. Just love. I will be buying this one eventually.

I need to bring it back to the library tomorrow so someone else can read it and fall in love.

I bought the e-book version (for immediate gratification purposes). And  then I bought the physical book from Amazon, because I wanted to have it in a more-tangible form, and it’s easier to get others to read it if I can push the actual book on them.

But that wasn’t enough to satisfy my sharing impulse. Yesterday I visited the (YA-leaning) little bookstore in town, and chatted with the nice lady who owns it about the book, and ordered a copy through her, and she said she’d order four of them so she could stock it.

Then I checked the online listings, and it turns out that the Santa Barbara Public Library network only has one copy (at the Lompoc branch), and that copy currently has seven holds on it. So when the physical books arrive at the local bookstore next week I’m going to buy one and walk it over to the Carpinteria branch and donate it.

It’s inevitable. Eventually I am going to track you down personally and get you to read Eleanor & Park. You should just save trouble and read it now.

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/45879318661.

persuadedinnocence:

I just finished reading Eleanor and Park. It’s sad, but it’s also cute. I don’t want to give away anything, but for those of you who have read it, did you like the ending? The last line was nice, but the ending as a whole was just kind of blah. It feels like she really just wanted to finish up the book and threw something together.. I don’t know

On my first reading I didn’t really like having to contend with the ambiguity of the ending. I loved so much about the book that I accepted it, though.

I just reread the book, and this time I went more slowly toward the end, working at putting myself more in the heads of the characters. (The first time I think I was kind of rushing toward the end in my desire to find out how the plot would resolve.) And I think I now understand better what was going on in Eleanor’s mind (especially) during the last part of the story, which in turn makes the ending feel more satisfying to me.

For myself, I think the characters ring true throughout. I definitely don’t think Rainbow Rowell was phoning it in toward the end. On the contrary, I think her commitment to a realistic depiction of what it is like to be 16 and in love for the first time, and the way she honored her characters by staying true to that all the way to the end of the story, was a brave choice, and one with a lot of artistic integrity.

The ending was not easy for me as a reader. But I think in a way that was appropriate to the story, which never made things easy for its characters, either.

Anyway, I liked it.

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/45564986716.

“Eleanor & Park” Playlist Insanity:

rainbowrowell:

I always build elaborate playlists when I’m working on a book — but I got CARRIED AWAY on the Eleanor & Park playlists. I made mixed tapes (with two sides) for both main characters.

You can listen to the playlists and read my director’s commentary here. Or you can listen to all my book playlists on Spotify. (There are even playlists for books that aren’t out yet.)

Her annotated playlist really is like having a director’s commentary for the book. If (like me) you’re somewhat desperate to spend even more time in the company of those characters, and to think about what their words and actions meant, and how their creator thought about them while creating them, then guess what? You can.

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/45384674233.