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If a kid fails to specify "pony" as the desired birthday present, then absolutely you can give them a copy of The Ninja Librarians instead!

6/14/2017

(And now I can sign a bookplate for the lucky pony-less kid and sent it your way)

One of the nicest things some friends and family have been doing for me and The Ninja Librarians is giving the books as birthday presents for kids not forward-thinking enough to make clear requests for ponies.

Thank you!

Birthday party bound folks have often asked me to sign the books, or attempted to render-vouz with me in order to get the deed done. Sometimes we’ve succeeded in meeting up in time, sometimes not. Such exciting gambles have not been an option for more distant book-buyers.

Enter….the signed book plate! I’ve now got some adhesive plates printed up that I can dedicate to any kid who is about to get a Ninja Librarians book as a gift. Just e-mail me the poor pony-less child’s name, and an address to which the plate should be sent. (It can be yours if you’re giving the book in person, or the child’s if you ordered the book from Amazon or like, and it’s going straight to the child)

Just stick the plate onto the inside front cover, and voila….signed book….

Thank you again for supporting me as an author, and for helping the Ninja Librarians and their intellectual freedom message get around.

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When The Big Chill Is Not Achieving The Big Chill

4/14/2017

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I graduated from college thirty years ago, and twice a year, every year since, I’ve been sent a request to submit a precis about how my life is going to the “Class Notes” section of its Alumni Review.

I’ve never responded.

I could say I haven’t responded because I could never find stamps during the first decade, didn’t do the internet the second, and took the whole third to master the “flagging” option on e-mail messages, but (and I’m pretty sure you saw this coming), I’d be lying.

I’ve never responded for the same reason I’ve never gone to a reunion, or the hundreds of alumni social events that take place in small and large cities across the U.S.: I didn’t create deep friendships in college.

I liked many of my fellow students, and loved my idea of plenty of others. I shared laughs, interesting conversations, classes, team locker rooms, political events, and parties with this and that person. My poor hook-up choices and drunken excesses were in the normal range. But as graduation approached, it became clear that something somehow had gone terribly wrong. I hadn’t made a solid circle of college buddies. I hadn’t even managed a nice minimalist triangle.

Dropped off for my first year of college the month The Big Chill was released, I knew how things were supposed to go. Dancing to its soundtrack for four years alchemized the theory into certitude.

By the time of graduation, I should have been part of a tightly bonded coterie of six or seven people who had grown close through shared adventures, mishaps, a series of attempted pairings, misunderstandings, make-ups, troubles, triumphs, and at least one act of grace. These people would be part of my life forever more. We would help one another through every heartbreak life hurled at us, and want one another to survive and thrive as much as we wanted that for ourselves. We’d have intimate knowledge of one another’s vulnerabilities and never exploit them. We’d show up for every wedding and divorce, go on group vacations, spoil each other’s children, and just generally spit-take the hell out of life together.

Instead, at the end of my four years, my fellow students were, for all intents and purposes, strangers to me. I had managed, if you don’t count my boyfriend of two years, to create exactly zero enduring friendships, let alone a magical circle of them.

As I waited for my best friend from high school (telling!) to come up and spend “senior week” with me on the emptying campus, I remember wistfully watching groups of tightly-bonded friends getting choked up at their partings, and wondering how I’d become an outsider in the midst of so much intimacy.

Was it a personal failure? Was it circumstances? Was it my tendency to yodel when stressed? Was it just the gorgeous meaninglessness of a cookie crumbling? I’ll tell you what it definitely was not: A reason to trouble myself over submitting updates to “Class Notes”.

Yet when the sixtieth request hit my inbox today, I stared at it for a good long minute, and then began to type a response.

Maybe it was because the request’s wording seemed to telegraph a naked-kitten anxiety about the relevance of “Class Notes” in the shading jungle of social media connectivity. Maybe it was that with every year that passes, I find that the people we have the luck to stand in line with at convenience stores, or count as our friends, or remember even as faint echoes grow more gaspingly beautiful and precious. Maybe because I’m an inveterate look-backer and fool who in general can’t help but pick at the past’s missed or botched opportunities for intimacy.

Though I have the strong suspicion I will be shouting out the refrain to Christine Lavin’s “What Was I Thinking!” tomorrow, I sent my response off:

There have been and are kids and dogs, too-soon deaths and undeserved gifts, books read at three in the morning, laziness among geysers, fierce whirring on stationary bicycles, smoke and sweat, thrills and tedium, wasps in the kitchen, kitchens in the sun, and poems lying all over the place to be picked up just for the cost of bending. Plus other stuff. Bills of lading and fool’s errands and such. One leprechaun. I think.

But enough about me. I remember so many small odd things about so many of you beautiful souls I had the privilege of at least brushing clumsily up against, if never getting to deeply know. I wish I’d been more able to appreciate and engage with your honey-cut supernumerary charms. It’s my fervent wish that you’re all doing splendidly, by whatever measure is yours.

I think it’s a lament. I hope its not a disguised brag. It’s possibly passive agressive. It’s probably an attempt to manipulate affairs so that my e-mail box will flood with messages expressing similar regrets, perhaps featuring me personally, so I can eat them like chocolates. I want it to be a burst of love.

But I want a lot of things.

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Three Reasons to Read "The Ninja Librarians: Sword in the Stacks" with Your Book Club...

4/6/2017

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Reason One: For Fun!

A New Jersey kid who wants to wield a sword against villains -- (modernity mod-shmernity), a magical library connected to dozens of centuries, secret entrances, Roman Baths, rampaging aurochs, Petrarch's Library's thousand rooms, ancient roller-skates for zinging through them, warrior lybrarians with a "y", a pack of apprentices trying not to die, insufferable anti-suffragists, fashionably dressed camels, Dorris's guts, Marcus' conniving heart, Ebba's common sense (in the absence of distracting animal life), betrayals, besottedness, beseechings, Greek rhetoric gone awry, and a star-shaped stone that in the wrong hands will allow the Foundation to steal reading and writing from the world.

Reason Two: Springboard to Interesting Questions About the Notion of Intellectual Freedom

Why have the ninja librarians devoted their lives to protecting writers who get into trouble for expressing their opinions and ideas? What does it mean to be a supporter of intellectual freedom? Is life better when people are afforded intellectual freedom? Worse? Is it ever dangerous for words to be spoken? To speak them? Why does speaking out take courage. How about listening? There are discussion guides available for both books which focuses on these questions. Here is a link to the Sword in the Stacks Discussion Guide: .

Reason Three: The Author Is Happy to Skype with Your Book Club

"The Author". That's me. So fancy!..Talking to kids about these books is one of my favorite things to do. Once your club has read one or both books, I'm happy to arrange a Skype visit with your crew to answer questions about the books' characters, plot, the history woven into the fantasy, intellectual freedom themes, as well as the experience of writing these books, and writing in general. You can contact me at jsdowney@earthlink.net to arrange a time. I don't charge for book club Skype visits, but I do ask as a courtesy that club members, if at all able, purchase books to read, rather than borrowing them. Please give me at least a month's lead time for Skype requests. Thank you!

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Out Loud: Review of THE NINJA LIBRARIANS: SWORD IN THE STACKS audiobook in Sound Commentary

11/6/2016

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Alright! I admit it! I wrote more or less a zillion characters into SWORD IN THE STACKS. Even Jim Dale might have blanched at the dramatic personae list, but narrator Laurel Merlington was more than up to the challenge. If you haven't yet had a chance to read SWORD IN THE STACKS, you can let Ms. Merlington bring it to life on your next long family drive....you know, like when you're traveling over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house or to Great Uncle Felix's or wherever you go for turkey....or turducken....or cranberry-stuffed tofu balls...

Click to hear sample

*Jen Swann Downey. Sword in The Stacks. The Ninja Librarians. Read by Laural Merlington. 8 CDs. 9 hrs. Dreamscape. 2016. 978-1-52000-369-6. Ages 10-13.
This complicated tale of time traveling librarians who are determined to save the world from those who hope to rid it of all things written is certain to entertain fans of fantasy. Based in Petrarch’s Library during present times, young and old travel through magical archways in hopes of finding the powerful missing vials and Petrarch’s precious star. If they don’t, the future will be altered and countless lives will be lost. Popular travel locations in this tome include 1912AD England and 339BC Athens.
There are a myriad of characters in Jen Swann Downey’s book Sword in the Stacks, the second in her The Ninja Librarians series. The youngest character is in her single digits, while the oldest is nearing 100. The vast number of characters would intimidate most narrators, but this reviewer suspects narrator Laurel Merlington thought nothing of the challenge. Her ability to quickly personify each character, regardless of age or dialect, in this ever-changing cast was superb. British, American, and Grecian accents soared, as did appropriate emotional portrayals of both genders. The librarians’ time traveling exploits didn’t slow Merlington down, either. Merlington, an Audie Award nominee, has narrated more than 200 audiobooks for listeners of all ages. Lisa Arnold

Reviewer Lisa Arnold spends her days teaching English to middle school students, her evenings working as a library clerk, and her nights reading under the covers.

http://soundcommentary.com/issue-printer/november-2016

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Parallel Lives: The Worlds of a Writer and an Airbnb Host Collide...

10/10/2016

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It’s Banned Books Week! A Short Guide to Choosing Your Next Perfectly Uncomfortable Read

9/27/2016

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.Woohoooo! It’s Banned Books Week, a veritable high holiday for those of us who oppose the suppression of ideas, and believe in the value of the free flow of information.

As it happens, the stories of whistleblowers, visionaries, humanists, crazy people, and freethinkers throughout history who have expressed their opinions and ideas in the face of ridicule, punishment, threats of violence, and acts of violence, simply and regularly bring me to my knees.

(I’m sorry the other doctors abused you so righteously, Dr. Semmelweis. Thanks for the washing hands idea.)

(I’m sorry they burned your newspaper down Ida B. Wells. Thanks for refusing to shut up about the evil of lynching)

I free speech-ly admit that I am more or less obsessed with intellectual freedom. I read, dream and ruminate about the topic while burning oatmeal and braiding my daughter’s hair all wrong.

So obviously, I think Banned Books Week is a fabulous thing: An entire week set aside for the contemplation of the value of intellectual freedom, and the cost to a society when we smother dissent or silence voices that make us uncomfortable.

Only I’m uncomfortable.

Yesterday, the Guardian carried a story about Banned Books Week. In it, Jessica Herthel, co-author of I AM JAZZ, a picture book about a child who feels that he was born a girl in a boy’s body, had this to say. “I urge everyone to celebrate Banned Books Week by picking up a book that some closed-minded person out there wanted desperately to keep out of your hands.”

No, I’m not uncomfortable with the subject matter of I AM JAZZ. What do you take me for? Boo, I say. Boo on efforts to ban I AM JAZZ or any other book for that matter. Yay for acceptance of and respect for all people whatever their gender identification.

What I’m uncomfortable with is the notion implied by Herschel’s quote that the best way to celebrate Banned Books Week is to read the books that “closeminded” wannabe book banners “out there” don’t want us to read.

If there is a downside to the otherwise glorious event called Banned Books Week, perhaps it has to do with locating the threat to our intellectual freedom in the U.S. at this time, as lying firmly outside of ourselves.

Yes, I support reading “banned” or “targeted for banning” books as an act of solidarity with their authors, and with the people who identify with a book’s characters or value a book’s perspective. I’m not sure, however, that choosing our Banned Book Week reads from a list of books banned by otherpeople is the most intellectually brave thing to do.

The impulse to ban books arises from a cognitive habit that is near universal of humans: The initial resistance to truly open-minded consideration of belief systems, ideas, theories and conceptions that by their very existence challenge the “obvious” “rightness” and “truth” of our own current views. Many of us are at some times in our lives are made uncomfortable or feel downright threatened by alternative belief systems, ideas, theories and conceptions, and most everyone experiences attachment to favored ones.

So are we really challenging our OWN intellectual limitations and prejudices by reading books that other people “want desperately to keep out of our hands”?

I can’t help but feel that when we get right down to it, wannabe book banners are basically the Amish of thought police, sallying forth to try to control the transmission of ideas in their not-very-speedy horse and buggies (apologies to the Amish).

The people who send letters to libraries, or circulate petitions asking that Huckleberry Finn, Diary of a Part-Time Indian, or I Am Jazz to be taken off of shelves, or not read out loud, seem almost quaint in their methods, and thankfully, the books they try to run down tend (though not always!) to get more well-known, and garner more champions, and more readers, as a result of the targeting.

For instance, as the Guardian story related, though a contingent of parents successfully got a school to cave on doing an out-loud reading of “I Am Jazz”, a quickly-organized alternative read-aloud at a public library in the same town drew an immense supportive crowd.

It could be argued that as a means of challenging one’s intellectual integrity, reading books that someone ELSE wants banned — but that one is entirely comfortable reading— is pretty much the equivalent of shooting hogtied manatees in a fruit-cup-size Tupperware container.

So then what might those of us who want more of an intellectual challenge during Banned Books Week do?

How about we seek out books “banned” only by our own internal “censor”. The one who rolls her eyes, or causes us to experience skyrocketing blood pressure when passing books in libraries or bookstores that espouse “that absurd perspective”, or “that dangerous view”, or by the author we’ve “heard” is a moron?

How about reading a book that challenges a deeply held belief or conception about what we ourselves believe to be incontrovertibly “true” or “false”? Or one that contains the kind of perspectives on political, scientific, spiritual, or philosophical issues that makes our stomachs clench just considering them?

Isn’t that ultimately the point of not wanting books banned? In order to provide ourselves as thinkers with a rich diversity of human perspectives on issues, puzzles, and mysteries? I didn’t always think so.

My first notion about the meaning and purpose of intellectual freedom was based on a more or less complete misunderstanding of the philosopher Voltaire’s thoughts on the matter. I read a one-sentence summary of them (first mistake!) by one of his biographers (Evelyn Beatrice Hall) which is often misattributed to Voltaire as a quote.

It goes:

”I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.”

I took the statement to mean that it was necessary to defend the right of idiots to express stupid, detestable, invalid, or “wrong” thoughts and opinions only in order to guarantee that smart, admirable, valid and “right” thoughts and opinions could and would be protected. Protecting all speech, was the price a society had to pay to create protection for valuable speech. I heartily agreed!

It never occurred to me — ace defender of the right of others to hold stupid, detestable, invalid or “wrong” ideas and opinions — to ask a very important question of my most magnanimous self: What if an idea that I thought inconceivable, ridiculous, or otherwise invalid turned out to contain value or truth? How likely was it that in any moment I was likely to be “right” and able to discern validity and truth in all matters? How would I know if one of my own opinions, conceptions, or beliefs was in some way partly inaccurate or flat out wrong?

As history shows us again and again if we’ll only look, and my older ever so slightly wiser self has come to realize, consensus is no guarantee of ethical or even scientific validity. Dissent is a precious resource. Personal humility about the possible limitations or “wrongness” of what we currently believe to be true and incontrovertible is another.

I now champion the protection of “all” speech (obvious “fire” shouting scenarios aside) rather than “tolerate” it. Not as the cost of doing intellectual business, but as a defense against my own limitations as a “knower” and “believer” of things. I now defend the right of all to express opinions and thoughts — even the ones that strike me initially as stupid, detestable, invalid or “wrong”, in order to preserve the maximum sized resource pool in which insight, clarity, or wisdom might lurk.

The Buddhists keep imaginary birds perched on their shoulders to remind them of the transitory nature of life and the imminence of death. I now try to keep one on my own shoulder to remind me to engage with intellectual humility in the realm of knowledge. For the record, she’s a chicken and her name is Sophie, and when I forget to pay attention to her, I tend to end up with bird poop on my clothes. She usually wears a t-shirt that says: “Epoche, this”. It's in the wash at the moment.

As I said, I’m extremely glad Banned Books Week exists. It’s a wonderful opportunity to support those books and voices that are in danger of being silenced. It reminds us that attempts to curtail the free flow of ideas still exist in the U.S. and agreement on the “good” of unchecked intellectual freedom is by no means universal. Wannabe book banners should be opposed, and good on all of us who do oppose book banning.

But I hope those of us who care about intellectual freedom will not begin and end our experience with Banned Books Week by patting ourselves on the back (however softly) for our virtue as individuals who would never attempt to ban a book like those “close-minded people”.

We could take the opportunity of Banned Books Week to put some of our own intellectual rigidities and unexamined certitudes to the test. We could identify one controversial perspective that we find ridiculous, potentially destructive, or otherwise devoid of value, and seek out a book by an author who believes the perspective has value. A book that those who hold the perspective hold in high esteem. No cheating by reading the least accomplished, most terribly presented version of the perspective.

We could each pick up a book that we probably wouldn’t notice if anyone banned.

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Finding the Words: A Dozen Kids' Books About Challenging Authority

9/23/2016

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No. Authority is not always kind, wise and benevolent. Often it is capricious, self-serving, repressive, and murderous.

Teaching kids that challenging authority is possible, ethical and often necessary for justice seems of utmost importance.

I have a post going up today (September 23rd) on the Pragmatic Mom blog.

I wrote it weeks ago. After the murder of Philando Castile by a police officer but before the latest killing of Terence Crutcher. The structural racism embedded in our law enforcement system is firmly on my mind today. http://www.pragmaticmom.com/2016/09/b...

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Oh, You Are SO Going in My Next Book Demon Darling Dog!

8/16/2016

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Top Recent Items My Dog Has Pulled Off of the Counter and Eaten or Attempted To Eat:

1. Box of sugar cubes (Finest Demarrara! For when the Queen visits or one is yearning for a cavity.)

2. Package steel wool (Self help for tartar build up?)

3. Approximately 37 lbs of cheese (I wouldn't resent this nearly as much if he didn't insist on gulping it down without even TASTING it!)

4. Cow's lifetime supply of butter.

5. Ziploc bag of salt (If he'd just SAID he had paw cramps, I would have been glad to massage)

6. Lovely gift-wrapped block of home-made soap which, to be fair, did look an awful lot like cheese.

7. Two solid ottoman-sized Chocolate Frogs from Harry Potter world.

8. Full bag of organic Fair Trade Sumatra coffee beans. (I applaud his ethics)

No. His health did not suffer after any of these adventures. At All. Not even in the least little maybe-this-will-put-me-off-counter-surfing-in-the-future bit.

To be, no doubt, continued.
P.S. I love him.
P.S.S. I'm juuuuuust remembering that I left a jar of pickled herring out.....Got to go!

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There are Book Release Days and Then There Are the Days When Books Are Actually Born

6/7/2016

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Due dates for babies and the day that babies make their beautiful caterwauling ways out into the world rarely coincide.

There is also a gap between the official "release day" for a book, and a much more momentous occasion for an author: The day that an author hears for the first time that his or her book has reached a reader. Not as in dropped onto a doorstep by a UPS driver, or onto a Kindle via magic tech wand waving, but as in REACHED a reader. Found her. Got inside him. Came to life in a reader's imagination.

Here's a thing about publishing books: When you finish one that you wrote with a built in deadline, there is no time for putting it away for a while in order to have some marginally (if deluded!) better sense of whether the whole dang thing hangs together or is likely to mean anything, or carry anyone anywhere, once it goes out into the world.

Nope. It goes out into the world and there's this yawning water torture chasm of time between the moment the book is available to readers, and the moment anyone actually responds to the book, let alone shares the nature of the response.

And when you've written a book for kids, you are specifically if subconsciously waiting for A KID to respond. For a kid to be sucked in, and feel for your characters, to laugh and go bug-eyed and gasp in all the right places. It's that first kid who reads with gusto and love that turns your wooden puppet into a real boy (or girl in the updated version!) And it's on the day you've heard that it's happened, that your book feels truly born.

I'm so grateful to this reader for taking the time to tabout her own and her daughter's response to SWORD IN THE STACKS a few days ago. Thank you. Yeah, I cried. https://noranydroptoread.com/…/reviews-with-lilah-the-ninj…/

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The Ninja Librarians: Sword in the Stacks - Up On Netgalley, and Ready for Your Advanced Reader Copy Pleasure

4/4/2016

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Cue the kazoos!

Advanced reader copies of THE NINJA LIBRARIANS: SWORD IN THE STACKS, sequel to NINJA LIBRARIANS: THE ACCIDENTAL KEYHAND are now available for download at Netgalley: https://s2.netgalley.com/catalog/book/84009

Now official apprentices of the Lybrariad, Dorris and Marcus have joined their friend Ebba in the immense time-folding labyrinth known as Petrarch's Library for the summer quarter.

Dorrie is eager to do well at her practicums, and prove her worth as an apprentice, but before she can choose between "Spears, Axes, and Cats: Throwing Objects with Precision and Flair” and "First and Last Aid: When No One Else Is Coming", an old mistake she made causes trouble.

The Foundation, once all-but-destroyed by the Lybrariad in the past, now has the means to rise from its ashes, and steal reading and writing from the world. To succeed, it sets in motion a dark plan to increase the power of a cruel figure from the fifteenth century.

To stop the Foundation, Dorrie, Marcus and Ebba will have to burglarize Aristotle, gather information among the suffragists and anti-suffragists of 1912 London, and risk their lives to wrest a powerful weapon out of the Foundation's hands - all while upholding the Lybrariad's first principle of protecting all writing, despised or venerated. If they fail, reading and writing aren't the only things that will disappear.

I cordially invite "professional" readers (stretchily defined as educators, reviewers, librarians or booksellers) to download the ARC of SWORD IN THE STACKS and DEVOUR it.

Should you be inspired to burp up a review after your meal - I'd be grateful!

Early reviews (uh…providing they aren’t abysmal, naturally) can help build interest in a book, and I will be ever so grateful to anyone who takes time out of busy lives, and/or employs a time-turner, in order to share their thoughts on the book with the world. You can review NINJA LIBRARIANS: SWORD IN THE STACKS on your blog, on your website, on Goodreads, on your FB page, on the side of a barn, etc. I'm not picky (see me in my office about skywriting proposals).

If you're not currently registered with Netgalley, here is a link to directions for doing so: https://netgalley.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/articles/52866-what-is-netgalley-and-how-does-it-work

Hope the book speaks to you (without spitting, and not in Martian)! Thank you in advance if you DO decide to read and review. Okay. In bookstores June 7. Let the games begin. : )

Yours,
Jen

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The Locked Bathroom

(And now I can sign a bookplate for the lucky pony-less kid and sent it your way)

Reason One: For Fun!

Reason Two: Springboard to Interesting Questions About the Notion of Intellectual Freedom

Reason Three: The Author Is Happy to Skype with Your Book Club