Wednesday, August 06, 2008

What is Brendan Halpin reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Brendan Halpin, author of How Ya Like Me Now and Forever Changes, both novels for young adults; the novels Dear Catastrophe Waitress, Long Way Back and Donorboy; and the memoirs Losing My Faculties and It Takes a Worried Man.

One book tagged in Halpin's entry:
The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics, which is packed full of twisted tales of terror and is a ton of fun. Horror comics are comfort food for my brain; I suppose it's best we don't look too deeply into that.[read on]

About Halpin's Forever Changes, from the publisher:

5:30 a.m., Brianna Pelletier gets ready for her daily pounding. As she lies on the couch, her dad beats her chest, then her back, coaxing the mucus out of her lungs. The pounding doesn’t take care of everything. Brianna’s held out for a long time, but a body with cystic fibrosis doesn’t last forever. It doesn’t matter that Brianna has a brilliant mathematical mind or that she’s a shoo-in for MIT. Or even that her two best friends are beautiful, popular, and loyal. In the grand scheme of things, none of that stuff matters at all. The standard life, lasting maybe seventy-five years, is no more than a speck in the sum total of the universe. At eighteen, and doubting she’ll make nineteen, Brianna is practically a nonentity. Of course she’s done the math. But in her senior year of high school, Brianna learns of another kind of math, in which an infinitely small, near-zero quantity can have profound effects on an entire system. If these tiny quantities didn’t exist, things wouldn’t make the same sense.

Funny, tear-jerking, and memorable, the author’s second novel for teens introduces readers to an extraordinary girl who learns that the meaning of forever can change, and that life – and death – is filled with infinite possibilities.
Visit Brendan Halpin's website.

Writers Read: Brendan Halpin.

--Marshal Zeringue