BEA Day 2 Report

The second day of BEA started with the Adult Book & Author Breakfast. Stephen Colbert hosted it and was hilarious of course. My favorite quote from him was that BEA was “the lollapalooza of reading quietly to yourself.” The authors who spoke at that breakfast were Junot Diaz, Barbara Kingsolver and Jo Nesbo. I enjoyed all of their talks, especially Jo Nesbo’s. He was really funny which I didn’t expect. Neither did Stephen Colbert – check out this video of Colbert being interviewed after hosting the breakfast: Colbert Interview

After the breakfast, I hit the show floor to scope out the exhibitor booths. Luckily BEA had a handy mobile app, BEA Mobile, that included a map of the convention floor and lists of all the exhibitors and author signings. The best thing about it was that I could add just the events I was interested in to the My Agenda function and just refer to it to know when I needed to be somewhere. I didn’t get to meet all of the authors I wanted to because some of them had ridiculously long lines. There are very few authors that I’ll wait in line for an hour or more to meet!

I was thrilled to meet Shannon Hale. She was autographing copies of her new book Princess Academy: Palace of Stone. It’s the sequel to the Newbery Honoree Princess Academy and will be released on August 21. I haven’t read Princess Academy – the main reason I wanted to meet Shannon was to gush to her about how much I loved The Actor and the Housewife. She said she loved that book too and that it was really hard to let go of Felix and Becky once the book was finished. I told her I felt the same way; I felt like they were my friends and I was sad to leave them when the book was over. I asked her if anyone had approached her about making a movie out of it and she said no. Someone needs to because that book would make an awesome movie! After our little chat, she signed my book, “To Rachel, who would be friends with Felix. Shannon Hale.” Now I love her even more.

One book I picked up that I’m excited about reading is The Diary of B.B. Bright Possible Princess by Alice Randall and Caroline Randall Williams. It caught my eye because of the black girl on the cover. Now that I have an African American daughter, I’m more tuned into how unfortunately rare it is for a person of color to be on a book cover and I’m always happy when I do see a cover that has a person of color on it.

The blurb on the back sounds intriguing: Thirteen-year-old orphan Black Bee Bright (B. B. for short) is funny, quirky, precocious, and adventurous. But B. B. has a secret. She’s captive on an island in “the middle of very tropical nowhere” because she’s forced to hide her true identity as a royally born princess from her parents’ enemies in Raven World. B. B and cool clothes, but she can’t escape the island until she passes her Official Princess Test and undertakes a dangerous journey alone to the East side of the island, where eight princesses must help her discover what it truly means to be a princess.

I chatted with the lady from Turner Publishing working in the booth about how much I like the cover and so forth and she gave me a copy of the book even though it wasn’t a title they had brought to give away. I thought that was really nice of her. It’s due for release in September 2012.

I picked up many other books – so many that I had to drop off a load at the Fed Ex kiosk before noon! And I thought I was being pretty selective about the galleys I chose. Hopefully I can get many of them read and reviewed soon – I hope they are all as good as they look!