CAMP PLOT-A-WANNA is a weekly 8-part series where Quirk Books staffers reimagine famous authors as pre-teens, stuck together at summer camp. Check out the rest of the posts here. It is also an entirely fictional place. Please don't have your parents drop you off at our offices with sleeping bags.

Memo
To: Camp Plot-A-Wanna Senior Counselors
From: Counselor Sappho

Come now, luxuriant Graces and beautiful-haired Muses.

As you know, this week at Camp Plot-a-Wanna, it was a war of the wits and words as campers went head to head in our traditional COLOR WAR. As the staff amanuensis, I have taken it upon myself to remit this record of Team Scarlet Letter vs. Team Black Beauty as they faced each other for glory, honor, and extra dessert at the dining hall! 

Let the games BEGIN!

Tug of Words
Pull! Pull! Each team grabs hold of an extra-long string of verbiage and yanks until someone bites the dust. Campers Verne and and Bradbury headed up their respective teams (though Camper Rand refused to participate, as such a team activity was not in her individual interest) and gave it a go.

Winner: Team Black Beauty

Arch-remark-er-y
One camper from each team does battle with bons mots and barbed remarks. After a protracted pit of pithiness, Camper Austen razor-tongued the competition to shreds.

Winner: Team Scarlet Letter

Capture the Sentence Fragment
Campers run, jump, and climb in search of one little piece of language. A piece that by itself is not a complete sentence. Camper Stein showed remarkable aptitude for locating untethered, almost nonsensical clauses, bringing her team victory in a landslide.

Winner: Team Scarlet Letter

Egg and Spoonerism Race
Hiss and lear! Campers compete to make the goofiest transpositions without dropping their precious egg. Although it seemed early on that Camper Geisel had a plaster man for success, Camper Carroll was off like a well-boiled icicle and soon dealt the opposition a blushing crow. Judges were moon sixed-up and unable to wronounce a pinner.

Winner: Tie

Plot Hole Filling
Fill in, pad out, and info-dump to get those gaping story gaps plugged! Campers A., C., and E. Brontë did their best to flesh out their stories with extended passages of smoldering yet static exposition, but in the end it was Camper Tolkien who piled up secondary characters, invented languages, and long, almost meaningless digressions into song to fill his plot hole first.

Winner: Team Black Beauty

Story Pitching
Ready, aim, fire! Armed with slingshots, campers do their best to sling their storylines as far as they could into the abyss. Though Camper Woolf started strong with a line drive, her subsequent shots hooked into the Stream of Consciousness and were disqualified, leaving a clear yellow brick road to victory for straight-shooting Camper Baum.

Winner: Team Black Beauty

Winner of Color War 2015: Team Black Beauty!

And they passed by the streams of Okeanos and the White Rock and past the Gates of the Sun and the District of Dreams. Counselors, please treat any and all members of the winning team to seconds of Turkish Delight at the feast tonight.

Hello everyone!

I'm finally back on BookLikes. I would like to say that I'm sorry for being MIA. Due to the sudden death of my grandparents along with summer finals, I have been quite busy. 

But now that I'm back, I will be catching up on reading the ARCS and posting the reviews. 

Happy 4th of July, folks! In honor of the US Independence Day we're sharing quotes from literature about freedom, liberty and independence referring to all life fields.

Remember, be free, be happy.

Long Walk to Freedom - Nelson Mandela 

Nelson Mandela is one of the great moral and political leaders of our time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country... 

1984 - George Orwell

Written in 1948, 1984 was George Orwell’s chilling prophecy about the future. And while 1984 has come and gone, Orwell’s narrative is timelier than ever. 1984 presents a startling and haunting vision of the world, so powerful that it is completely convincing from start to finish. No one can deny the power of this novel, its hold on the imaginations of multiple generations of readers, or the resiliency of its admonitions—a legacy that seems only to grow with the passage of time...

Delirium - Lauren Oliver   

They say that the cure for Love will make me happy and safe forever. And I’ve always believed them. Until now. Now everything has changed. Now, I’d rather be infected with love for the tiniest sliver of a second than live a hundred years smothered by a lie. 

Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History - Rhonda Garelick

Certain lives are at once so exceptional, and yet so in step with their historical moments, that they illuminate cultural forces far beyond the scope of a single person. Such is the case with Coco Chanel, whose life offers one of the most fascinating tales of the twentieth century—throwing into dramatic relief an era of war, fashion, ardent nationalism, and earth-shaking change—here brilliantly treated, for the first time, with wide-ranging and incisive historical scrutiny...  

 A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf   

"A Room of One's Own", based on a lecture given at Girton College, Cambridge, is one of the great feminist polemics, ranging in its themes from Jane Austen and Carlotte Bronte to the silent fate of Shakespeare's gifted (imaginary) sister and the effects of poverty and sexual constraint on female creativity.

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë

A novel of intense power and intrigue, Jane Eyre dazzles and shocks readers with its passionate depiction of a woman’s search for equality and freedom. Orphaned Jane Eyre grows up in the home of her heartless aunt, where she endures loneliness and cruelty, and at a charity school with a harsh regime. This troubled childhood strengthens Jane’s natural independence and spirit—which proves necessary when she takes a position as governess at Thornfield Hall. But when she finds love with her sardonic employer, Rochester, the discovery of his terrible secret forces her to make a choice...   

Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison 

Invisible Man is a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952.  A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century.  The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood", and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.

Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison   

Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez.

Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson   

Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing...

Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin 

Set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin's now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.

Happy Independence Day!

Source and more desserts for 4th of July ->

Greetings from CAMP PLOT-A-WANNA! From our leaves of grass to our softball field of dreams, we provide the ultimate camping experience for the literately oriented. We know that the writing life is a sedentary, solitary, sickly experience, which is why our counselors and staff are trained to gently acquaint our campers with unfamiliar concepts like fresh air, sunlight, weenie roasts, and trees. At CAMP PLOT-A-WANNA, you’ll enjoy the wind in the willows, everyone eats shoots and leaves, and it’s always okay to kill a mockingbird.
 

Facilities

CAMP PLOT-A-WANNA includes all the amenities that a vacationing writer could want. Take a walk in the woods, where the hours will feel like one hundred years of sollutude. Escape from the sound and the fury as you contemplate the sheltering sky while consulting a cloud atlas. When the bell tolls for lunch, enjoy a moveable feast of fried green tomatoes, madeleines, big fish, and perhaps a taste of blackberries or a clockwork orange (note: oranges are not the only fruit). End the day sitting around a pale fire, trying to understand why twilight is so popular (note: the sun also rises).

Special Activities:

• Horseback Writing
• Arts and Crafts:
• - Wallets that are perpetually empty
• - Rejection letter cozy
• - Pencils refurbished from other pencils angrily snapped in half
• - Typewriter ribbon lanyards
• - Erasers rendered from the boiled fat of book critics
• - Writers’ block whittling
• Writer vs. Editor Tug-of-Wars
• Canoeing
• Writing, Revising, Rewriting, "Punching Up," and Redrafting Letters Home
• Bird by Bird Watching
   

Download the full brochure here!

Stay tuned next Wednesday to get your daily schedule and map of camp grounds! 

*CAMP PLOT-A-WANNA is a weekly 8-part series where Quirk Books staffers reimagine famous authors as pre-teens, stuck together at summer camp. It is also an entirely fictional place. Please don't have your parents drop you off at our offices with sleeping bags. 

Hello everyone! 

I am Anne Tilney, writer of Adult and New Adult fiction. I try to dabble in various genres but I usually write satires, fantasy, gothic horror, mash-up, action-adventure, and thrillers. Right now I am working on a paranormal satire with mashup elements called Callous Fate which is a retelling of the War in Heaven through the eyes of Lucifer. If I'm not plotting the various ways to ensure that my characters' lives are filled with conflict and aggravation (after all writers are cruel gods), I can be seen either playing video-games, sporking (detailed, page-by page, snarky critique) of poorly written books, or simply reading a book.

I'm so looking forward to using Booklikes.