THE MEME PLAGUE and Series Extras!

This week is the launch of Angie Smibert's THE MEME PLAGUE! It's so exciting to have another League member's trilogy finished! It feels like just yesterday that we started here, launching our debuts!

One of the coolest things about Angie's series is the extras. I've always loved how she has real-world things associated with her books.

For Memento Nora, she has tons of extras, including the free first chapter, teacher and classroom ideas for creating comics, and discussion questions.

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MEMENTO NORA (Marshall Cavendish, April 1, 2011)

(This book now has it’s own website:www.mementonora.com. Pop over there for more info on inspirations, activities, and a cool educational project underway very soon.)

Nora, the popular girl and happy consumer, witnesses a horrific bombing on a shopping trip with her mother. In Nora’s near-future world, terrorism is so commonplace that she can pop one little white pill to forget and go on like nothing ever happened. However, when Nora makes her first trip to a Therapeutic Forgetting Clinic, she learns what her mother, a frequent forgetter, has been frequently forgetting. Nora secretly spits out the pill and holds on to her memories. The memory of the bombing as well as her mother’s secret and her budding awareness of the world outside her little clique make it increasingly difficult for Nora to cope. She turns to two new friends, each with their own reasons to remember, and together they share their experiences with their classmates through an underground comic. They soon learn, though, they can’t get away with remembering.

READ THE FIRST CHAPTER:

Memento Nora Chapter 1 (PDF)

TEACHER / LIBRARIAN RESOURCES:

Please see the Memento Nora website for the following:

• Memento Nora Project – (Now closed, but you may be able adapt materials to your classroom or book club.)
• Resources for creating comics.
• Low-tech challenge.
• Science of TFC.
• Inspirations for elements of the book.
• Discussion questions.

For The Forgetting Curve, she's got all the same, cool things. What better way to get your reluctant readers into reading than by enticing them with comics? It's awesome--and Angie's series lends itself to that so nicely.

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THE FORGETTING CURVE (Marshall Cavendish, Spring 2012)

Aiden Nomura likes to open doors—especially using his skills as a hacker—to see what’s hidden inside. He believes everything is part of a greater system: the universe. The universe shows him the doors, and he keeps pulling until one cracks open. Aiden exposes the flaw, and the universe—or someone else—will fix it. It’s like a game.

Until it isn’t.

When a TFC opens in Bern, Switzerland, where Aiden is attending boarding school, he knows things are changing. Shortly after, bombs go off within quiet, safe Bern. Then Aiden learns that his cousin Winter, back in the States, has had a mental breakdown. He returns to the US immediately.

But when he arrives home in Hamilton, Winter’s mental state isn’t the only thing that’s different. The city is becoming even stricter, and an underground movement is growing.

Along with Winter’s friend, Velvet, Aiden slowly cracks open doors in this new world. But behind those doors are things Aiden doesn’t want to see—things about his society, his city, even his own family. And this time Aiden may be the only one who can fix things . . . before someone else gets hurt.

READ THE FIRST CHAPTER:

Forgetting Curve Chapter 1 (PDF)

TEACHER / LIBRARIAN RESOURCES:

Please see the Memento Nora Series website (www.mementonora.com) for the following:

• Memento Nora Project – (Now closed, but you may be able adapt materials to your classroom or book club.)
• Resources for creating comics.
• Low-tech challenge.
• Science of TFC.
• Inspirations for elements of the book.
• Discussion questions.

With the final book in this trilogy, Angie's done it again. She's got resources for "Maker Spaces" -- places where you can take something and "make" it into something else. This is something Winter, Aiden, and Lina do in THE MEME PLAGUE. Angie's done it again!

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THE MEME PLAGUE (Skyscape, August 13, 2013)

It begins with the name JONAS W. on the side of a cardboard coffin—right before the funeral procession blows up. Then it’s the whisper in the back of Micah’s head: Your father betrayed his country. You can’t always trust your own brain. Not when you have one of the mayor’s mandatory chips in your skull. Micah knows that the chip developed by TFC (the corporation that runs the Therapeutic Forgetting Clinics) does more than just erase unpleasant memories—it implants new ones. The MemeCast warns citizens to “fight the hack.”

Micah and his friends have each lost something—a parent, a relationship, a home, maybe even their own identities as they remembered them to be. But together, they can make sure some things are never forgotten.

Election Day is coming, and Mayor Mignon is set to be elected to Congress. It’s time to build a new electronic frontier, one that’s not controlled by the mayor and his cronies. It’s time to get out the vote and shake up the system. It’s time to finally sayenough.

READ THE FIRST CHAPTER:

THE MEME PLAGUE CHAPTER 1

TEACHER / LIBRARIAN RESOURCES:

I have a lot of information for teachers, students, and librarians on the  Memento Nora Series website (www.mementonora.com).  The links particular to this book include:

• Maker Spaces
• The Memenet

If you haven't gotten your hands on this series yet, DO IT. Angie is also celebrating the launch of THE MEME PLAGUE with a giveaway! She's giving away the following prizes:
• Grand prize: (1) Kindle (courtesy of Amazon)—the basic 6” display / wifi one.
• (1)Complete set of the series. (MN, FC, MP). Signed if in US; unsigned and delivered through Book Depository if outside US.
• (3) Meme Plague (hard copy) plus swag.

Requirements to enter found on the Rafflecopter widget, and remember to please help out by donating to Feeding America.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Support Angie Simbert's THE MEME PLAGUE launch by donating to Feed America!

You might know that this week marks the release of the third book in the Memento Nora series by the League's very own Angie Simbert, but did you know how Angie is celebrating The Meme Plague's release? By encouraging readers to donate to Feeding America! More on that awesomeness in a moment, but first--- here's a little more info about the books.

This remarkable dystopian series features a world where a group of teens heads underground to fight a system that suppresses independent thought via the Therapeutic Forgetting Clinic, an organization that erases reality and replaces it with phony memories. The Meme Plague continues the series from Micah's point of view, and takes us down the rabbit hole of intrusive government, paranoia, and how to fight an enemy that can change your past at the drop of a hat.

Angie's charity drive for Feeding America ties in really well with her books, because in both the Forgetting Curve (book two) and the Meme Plague (book three), Micah does community service at a food bank. Since he and his mother lived in a homeless village, they know what it's like to have an empty stomach and depend on hand-outs to get by.

Not only that, but Feeding America is a cause near and dear to Angie's heart. When I asked her about her experience with the charity, here's what she had to say:

"A few summers ago--when I was writing book 2--I volunteered at the local Feeding America. I sorted donations from grocery stores and various food drives. And I've always been really impressed with the organization. They take the nonperishable food that might otherwise be thrown out because it's got dings or might be close to its expiration date, and they make sure it gets into the hands of the people who need it. And most of us are one or two major emergencies away from needing their services."

Contribute to Angie's food drive by donating to Feeding America today! According to her donation page, every $1 you donate helps provide up to EIGHT meals to people served by the Feeding America network. ONE DOLLAR--that's all! Angie says, "I hope you'll agree: by coming together, we can help end hunger in America. Give as much as you can -- every bit counts!"

Go to Angie's Feed America donation page here to learn more about donating

Here to learn more about Child Hunger in America

And any of these places to buy The Meme Plague.

And enter here for a chance to win the entire trilogy! 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

We are so excited (for all of us readers and for Angie) that the final book in the series has released. Congratulations, Angie!

The Forgetting Curve

What connects terrorism, memory, and consumerism? Angie Smibert's excellent dystopian series, Memento Nora. In the first book, we learn about a shadowy corporation, TFC, that has set up centers where witnesses to the rampant terrorism plaguing this near-future society can go to swallow a pill and forget--enabling them to resume their oh-so-glossy lives as good consumers and obedient citizens. In The Forgetting Curve, Smibert introduces a new character, Aiden, who has the hacker chops to expose facts that TFC would prefer stayed hidden, and thus takes us deeper down the rabbit hole of this twisted dystopia.

Now, I've argued here before on several occasions that the true subject of dystopian fiction is our current society, not the hypothetical future worlds these novels portray. The Memento Nora series is no different. What makes these books unique among the current bumper crop of dystopian YA and special to me is the connection they draw between terrorism and consumerism. Smibert posits a future world in which services related to terrorism--security and forgetting pills--are marketed directly to consumers, monetizing terror.

Sadly, that's not so different from today's society. We've monetized terror indirectly, consuming prodigiously via our government. The U.S. currently spends roughly $75 billion per year fighting the so-called war on terror. We've outfitted dive teams in Nebraska, funded communication hubs in North Pole, Alaska, and bought thousands of lapel pins in West Virginia. We've spent billions more on private security--at the latest estimate there were nearly 10,000 firms in the U.S. alone providing private security services.

Nothing is wrong with being safe, of course. But at what cost? In the Memento Nora series, the cost is literally free will. We're certainly headed that way via the curtailment of civil liberties in the wake of 9/11. But there's also an opportunity cost to the terror spending. In the worst year, 2001, terrorism killed fewer than 3,000 Americans. Heart disease, on the other hand, kills almost 600,000 Americans per year. Yet we spend less than 2 billion dollars a year researching heart disease. Does anyone seriously doubt we could save more lives spending to prevent heart disease than we do with the billions spent on terror? The problem, of course, is that there's no profit in preventing heart disease. Food companies, restaurants, and cardiovascular specialists all stand to lose if we take on heart disease in a serious way. Terrorism prevention, on the other hand, makes money for everyone involved.

Your odds of being killed in a terrorist attack in the U.S. are something on the order of 1 in 3.5 million. Would you accept an increase in those odds to, say, 1 in 2.5 million to gain an hour of time every time you board a plane? I would take that trade, and I posit that any rational person would as well. (If I die in a terrorist attack, I lose about 350,000 hours of life, so an added 1 in a million chance of death pro-rates to a value of about 20 minutes. An extra hour for every plane flight will be worth something on the order of 400 hours to me over the remainder of my expected lifetime. No contest.)

My fervent hope is that--like in Smibert's books--we'll wake to the fact that our interests are not being served by this "war" and change things before they get as bad as in The Forgetting Curve. Perhaps protest art will be one important vehicle for change--just as it is for Nora, Aiden, and Velvet.

Introducing MEMENTO NORA by Angie Smibert!

This week is the epic launch of MEMENTO NORA by Angie Smibert! I'm starting off the awesome, and throughout this week, there will be much more to come, with Angie herself wrapping it up for us on Friday, April 1. Which is no joke, because that's launch day!

From Angie's website:

Summary: Nora, the popular girl and happy consumer, witnesses a horrific bombing on a shopping trip with her mother. In Nora’s near-future world, terrorism is so commonplace that she can pop one little white pill to forget and go on like nothing ever happened.

However, when Nora makes her first trip to a Therapeutic Forgetting Clinic, she learns what her mother, a frequent forgetter, has been frequently forgetting. Nora secretly spits out the pill and holds on to her memories. The memory of the bombing as well as her mother’s secret and her budding awareness of the world outside her little clique make it increasingly difficult for Nora to cope. She turns to two new friends, each with their own reasons to remember, and together they share their experiences with their classmates through an underground comic. They soon learn, though, they can’t get away with remembering.

Read the first chapter here!

Dude, doesn't that sound fantastic?

Well, it is. I've read it, and Nora will stay with you for a while. In fact, she's unforgettable. You can participate in an amazing giveaway and check out other awesomeness on Angie's blog.

Other Noteworthy Things:

• It's one of the Junior Library Guild's Spring Selections, and will be their featured book in June. Make sure you get your copy when it hits shelves on Friday!
• As if you're already not excited enough, Angie is having an amazing contest in celebration of Memento Nora. How do you enter? Simple. Each week a blogger will be doing a post in support of MEMENTO NORA (Schedule here) All you do is leave a comment on the featured blog–and on Angie's site. Each weekly comment earns you a point.
• And make sure you click over and check out what's going on at the new Memento Nora website!
• The Memento Nora project is taking place from April - November, with a DIY comic contest. Click here for all the details.
• Connect with Memento Nora on Facebook.

Congrats, Angie! Here's to a successful launch week!

So, who's had a chance to read Memento Nora? Let us know in the comments (no spoilers, please!). Who is going to die by Friday because they can't read this, like RIGHT THIS SECOND?? We wanna know that too.

All I Want for Christmas ... from Memento Nora

Ok. We’re supposed to talk about what cool thing or idea from our own book that we’d like for Christmas.

I’m a little stumped.  I don’t know that I’d actually want the glossy things from Memento Nora.

For instance, there’s the little TFC (Therapeutic Forgetting Clinic) shop on every corner that dispenses Amelioral, the forgetting pill. You tell the man (or woman) in the white coat your darkest memory, pop a pill, and go on like nothing ever happened. You even earn Frequent Forgetting points every time you go.

Granted, this would be outstanding for true sufferers of Post Traumatic Distress Syndrome.  I even based the pill (and how it works) on current research in PTSD.  So, if you do have PTSD, that’s my Christmas wish for you: to be able to forget and get on with your life. 

For me, though, not so much.

I’d probably like to have Winter’s Garden in my backyard. Fourteen-year-old Winter Nomura builds a Rube Goldberg-ish kinetic sculpture garden behind her grandfather’s converted warehouse home.  It’s how she deals. She throws her considerable energy and talent into transforming junk in something weirdly marvelous.

Here’s Nora’s description of one of the pieces, the Shopping Bag Crab:

“Watch this,” Micah whispered, pointing to the next thing in the garden. It looked like a metal shopping bag lying on its side.

The water started to lap up onto the sand by the bag. Two slender black pieces of metal peeked out of the bag and felt their way to the ground. The feelers or legs crab walked themselves partially out of the bag, and the creature started to pull itself, bag and all, up the sloped walk. Its frenzied back-and-forth motion reminded me of something.

“Are those windshield wipers?” I asked, thoroughly impressed—and unnerved.

He nodded, a big grin on his face.

Something about the jerky, almost desperate crawl of the wipers dragging the shopping bag shell behind them made me uneasy. Then as the whole thing reached the top of its little hill, it stopped crawling, collapsed back into its shell, and slid back down to where it had started. It was like it couldn’t get anywhere with that bag on its back. 

I don’t have drawings (that look good, that is) of all of the pieces, but here are a couple of the inspirations for her sculptures.

This is Tinguely Fountain in Basel, Switzerland. The artist, Jean Tinguely, created this series of sculptures in 1971.



And, yes, this is a Honda Accord ad. For it, Honda put together a Rube Goldberg assembly of parts working together to start the car. (The windshield wiper part inspired the Shopping Bag Crab.)



The dog might not agree, but I think a kinetic sculpture garden would look great on my patio. Now I just need someone with the talent and energy to build it. (And that ain't me.)

Cool art work aside, my question for you guys is would you take a forgetting pill that only erased selective memories? Or, if that's too deep for the holidays, what kind of secret garden would you create if you could build or grow anything?

Angie Smibert
Memento Nora
Marshall Cavendish, April 2011

 

You can find me at:

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Mementos from Nora

This week we're each giving away a prize pack based on our own books.  For Memento Nora, in addition to a few shiny bookmarks and postcards, I'm offering up a few things the main character, Nora, might think are glossy (her favorite word):  a pearly pink iPod cover, some mobile minutes, and a charm bracelet.

The last one needs a little 'splaining, so let me give you a little synopsis and snippet from the book.

In the not-so-distant future, Nora James, the popular girl and happy consumer, witnesses a horrific bombing on a shopping trip with her mother. In Nora’s world, terrorism is so commonplace that she can pop one little white pill to forget and go on like nothing ever happened. However, when Nora makes her first trip to a Therapeutic Forgetting Clinic to do just that, she learns what her mother, a frequent forgetter, has been frequently forgetting.  (No spoilers!)

That evening, Nora’s father gives her a present—a memento—to “commemorate” her first TFC trip:

Dad pulled something out of his pocket. A small, green¬ish blue box that I instantly recognized as being from the best jewelry store, the Tiffany’s downtown next to his office. Inside was a silver bracelet with one charm on it. A purse. It was, I had to admit, very glossy.

He fastened it onto my wrist. I couldn’t help smiling.

“No little girl of mine should have to see what you saw,” he said, full of seriousness. “But the world isn’t a safe place anymore, and I can’t always be there to protect you. So every time you need to forget something bad like you did today, I’m going to buy you a new charm to remind you that you’re still my little girl.”

I know this sounds sweet, but it’s not really, considering what she didn’t forget and what she finds out is going on.

Nora comments later:

Apparently my milestone was an explosive shopping trip. Dad was more right than he knew.

So the prize I’m offering—to save you any such shopping trips this Christmas season—is a charm bracelet full of purses.

 

Not exactly Tiffanys, I know, but still very glossy.

To be entered in a drawing for today's prize pack, leave a comment in this post. One winner will be randomly selected.

To enter the grand prize drawing for all five books, fill out the form below, including a link to your post. You only need to fill out the form once this week for the drawing. Winner will be announced on December 20th.