When You Google Yourself....

...it's like being one of those chickens in Skinner's box. You know, teach a chicken that in order to get a piece of corn, it has to peck a little lever. Peck, corn, peck, corn. But then you start only rewarding SOME of the pecks.  Peck, peck, peck, corn. Peck, corn. Peck peck peck peckpeckpeckpeckpeck CORN. It turns out that the way to make the chicken peck the damn lever pretty much full time is to only very rarely reward it with corn.

I'm like that with Google when I have a book coming out.

Yep.

Google, "The War That Saved My Life." Just like I did yesterday. And the day before. And possibly the day before that.

I like to know what people are saying about me on Goodreads, even though many books I despise get good Goodreads reviews. I want to know if I've been mentioned on any blogs, particularly that red-headed kid I met at the Andersen's Conference who sweet-talked me out of one of my last ARCs by promising a review I haven't found yet.

I want corn.

Yesterday? ALL THE CORN, BABY. CORN CORN CORN.

It was awesome.

Here's the link, so you know I'm not making it up.  And then I'm just going to go ahead a quote a chunk. This is so much fun, it'll make up for all those kids on Amazon.com who think I'm long-winded and boring.

Though the catalog copy compares this to Lois Lowry’s brilliant Newbery Award–winning Number the Stars (Houghton Harcourt, 1989) I think this is really more akin to Michelle Magorian’s Guardian Award–winning, and deeply moving Good Night, Mr. Tom (Harper, 1981) which also tells of an abused boy, an evacuee, who is healed of emotional and physical abuse through the kindness of the old man in whose cottage he is billeted. The war details are ample and intriguing—just the thing for someone like me who heretofore got all her details of the 1940 evacuation of Dunkirk from the 1942 movie Mrs. Miniver. That said, this is a truly terrific novel and a wonderfully satisfying read. (Here’s a recent review in SLJ for more plot details.) For me, the act of reading this book brought me back in time to the mid-late 1960s when I inhaled one Newbery Award–winning and honored historical novel after another. This book has that same immersive impact. The War That Saved My Life has already garnered quite a few stars. It deserves it. Have you already begun your own 2016 Newbery Medal short-list? Start with this one

Oh, yeah, baby. Have a nice day!