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Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Cookbooks conjure summer's flavors

It's summertime, the living is easy, and so is cooking and entertaining with seasonal recipes and dining tips from these new cookbooks. USA TODAY looks at what's cooking from popular chefs.

The Book of Burger

by Rachael Ray

(Atria, $24.99)

The author: Cookbook author, syndicated TV star and Food Network TV personality

Seasonal recipes: 5-spice pork burgers with warm mu shu slaw; "Smoke and Fireworks" bacon-wrapped chipotle burgers' portobello burgers with spinach pesto.

Summer yum factor: Nothing says summer like a burger cooked on the grill, and as Ray often says "How good does that look!"

People's Pops: 55 Recipes for Ice Pops, Shave Ice, and Boozy Pops From Brooklyn's Coolest Pop Shop by Nathalie Jordi, David Carrell and Joel Horowitz (Ten Speed Press, $16.99)

The authors: Founded People's Pops in 2008. They live in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Seasonal recipes: Rhubarb & elderflower; apricot & lavender; cantaloupe & Campari ice pops.

Summer yum factor: Not for just kids, these high-end "popsicles," fruity, sweet and frozen, are the definitive summer time treat.

Martha's American Food: A Celebration of Our Nation's Most Treasured Dishes, From Coast to Coast

(Potter, $40)

by Martha Stewart

The author: Celebrity author of dozens of best-selling books on food, gardening, decorating and entertaining.

Seasonal recipes: Classic potato salad; creamy cole slaw; chicken-fried steak; grilled chile-citrus turkey breast

Summer yum factor: Stewart offers a chapter called "All-American" and divides the rest of the book into regions — Northeast, South, Midwest, Southwest and West — with recipes enhanced with seasonal fruits and vegetables.

I Love Corn

by Lisa Skye

(Andrews McMeel, $19.99)

The author: Skye field-produced the Discovery Channel show Go Ahead, Make My Dinner

Seasonal recipes: Fresh corn gazpacho; fresh corn ice cream; grilled corn Mexican style.

Summer yum factor: Celebrities including Daniel Boulud and Martha Stewart contribute. Lots of practical tips, too: "When buying corn, look for ears that feel plump."

Lobster! 55 Fresh & Simple Recipes for Everyday Eating

by Brooke Dojny

(Storey, $14.95)

The author: Dojny also wrote Dishing Up Maine and The New England Clam Shack Cookbook

Seasonal recipes: Mini lobster rolls; seashell lobster pasta salad with lemon-dill cream; grilled lobster with basil-lime butter.

Summer yum factor: Can't get to the beach? Evoke the seaside at your backyard picnic with the sweet meat of what Drojny calls the "cardinal of the ocean."

The Hamptons: Food, Family, and History

by Ricky Lauren

(Wiley, $40)

The author: Photographer and artist, wife of designer Ralph Lauren; this is her fourth book in what she calls her "personal lifestyle" genre.

Seasonal recipes: Dylan's sunshine salad with mango dressing; shrimp and scallop burgers; pasta with Hamptons summer vegetables.

Summer yum factor: Does anything say summer more than Southampton, Amagansett, Montauk and East Hampton? Lauren takes you there.

Edible Cocktails: From Garden to Glass — Seasonal Cocktails With a Fresh Twist

by Natalie Bovis

(Adams Media, $17.95)

The author: AKA the Liquid Muse, she's a mixologist and co-creator of a line of pre-bottled organic cocktails called O.M.

Seasonal recipes: Cilantro-cucumber vodka collins; basil grass lemon drop; Caprese martini.

Summer yum factor: Cheers for teaching how to plant a "cocktail garden" from "seedling to first sip" and use fresh farmers' market ingredients.

The Gardener & the Grill: The Bounty of the Garden Meets the Sizzle of the Grill

by Karen Adler and Judith Fertig

(Running Press, $20)

The authors: These barbeque queens have appeared on the Food Network and Better Homes and Gardens TV.

Seasonal recipes: Char-grilled baby summer squash pizza; flame-licked tomatoes on the stem; grilled gazpacho.

Summer yum factor: The authors' mantra: "Let's grab our garden trowels and our grill tongs and get busy."

The Fire Island Cookbook

by Mike DeSimone and Jeff Jenssen; foreword by Al Roker

(Emily Bestler Books, $30)

The authors: AKA the World Wine Guys, they are wine, spirits, food and travel writers.

Seasonal recipes: Stacked tomato and mozzarella Caprese salad; grilled sweet peaches; Mike's Caribbean spiced ribs.

Summer yum factor: The book offers meals for each weekend from Memorial Day to Labor Day with a strong focus on seasonal produce.

Cornelia Guest's Simple Pleasures: Healthy Seasonal Cooking & Easy Entertaining

by Cornelia Guest

(Weinstein Books, $32.50)

The author: Philanthropist; founder of Cornelia Guest Events and Cornelia Guest Cookies.

Seasonal recipes: Vegetable carpaccio and stuffed squash blossoms; grilled bread panzanella; grilled corn and avocado salad

Summer yum factor: Guest has entertaining in her DNA: she shows how effortless and elegant entertaining can complement your summer dishes.

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Monday, July 16, 2012

Nora Ephron wrote for more than the movies

Nora Ephron, who died Tuesday at 71, grew up in Beverly Hills as the child of two Hollywood screenwriters and became a screenwriter and director herself. But she began her career as a reporter for Manhattan newspapers and magazines and wrote several best-selling books, including:

Nora Ephron was best known for her witty written dialogue in 1989's By Charles Sykes, AP

Nora Ephron was best known for her witty written dialogue in 1989's "When Harry Met Sally."

By Charles Sykes, AP

Nora Ephron was best known for her witty written dialogue in 1989's "When Harry Met Sally."

Wallflower at the Orgy (Vintage, $15). First published in 1970, this collection of magazine articles and essays was reissued in 1980 with a new introduction by Ephron and again in 2007 after the success of I Feel Bad About My Neck. Wallflower features the young Ephron's profiles of people such as Cosmopolitan magazine's Helen Gurley Brown and Ayn Rand as well as personal essays about food and sex. Because these articles were written in the 1960s, much of the material seems dated and some of the subjects will be unknown to those under 40. But Ephron's introduction about her career as a journalist remains startlingly perceptive today. At the New York Post, she learned to write short, sharp and, most of all, to avoid boring the reader.

Heartburn (Vintage, $14). "Everything is copy," Ephron's mother once said, and clearly her daughter was listening. Published in 1983, Ephron's debut novel clearly draws from the infamous breakup of Ephron's second marriage to Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporter made famous by Watergate and the father of her two sons. In this roman à clef, Rachel Samstat is a cookbook author and seven months pregnant. Meanwhile, her husband — a man "capable of having sex with a Venetian blind" — had fallen in love with another woman. Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep starred in the film adaptation.

I Feel Bad about My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman (Vintage, $13). Published in 2006, this best-selling collection of essays about aging, food and the death of a friend resonated with older female readers around the country. Though written in her trademark witty tone, Ephron takes no prisoners as she debunks the fantasy that getting older is easy or fun. The book also includes wise parenting advice such as: "When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you."

I Remember Nothing (Vintage, $14). In his review of this 2010 collection, USA TODAY's Craig Wilson wrote, "Ephron remembers quite a bit in this entertaining collection of stories about her life so far. Her love affair with journalism. Her two divorces. Her devotion to meatloaf, an entree that New York's Monkey Bar named after her. Yep, Nora's Meatloaf. Just don't look for it on the menu these days. It's been taken off, and yes, she feels a bit hurt by this turn of events. She even vividly remembers her childhood back in Beverly Hills, a childhood filled with movie stars, since her dad was in the business."

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Sunday, July 15, 2012

THE AGE OF MIRACLES

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Saturday, July 14, 2012

THE CHAPERONE

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Friday, July 13, 2012

John Green on why books beat any iPad app

Author John Green, one half of the Vlogbrothers (along with his brother Hank) talked to USA TODAY's Bob Minzesheimer about this summer's choice for their Nerdfighter Book Club —Ray Bradbury's classic novel, Fahrenheit 451— and about the role of books in a digital age.

Q: When & why did you first readFahrenheit 451?

A: I read it in ninth grade. I remember liking it more than most of the books I read for English class that year, but that's not saying much. I was one of those students who was predisposed to disliking a book simply because it had been assigned to me. These days, I'm a much bigger fan of English classes and critical reading, and one of the reasons we started the book club in the first place was to make the argument that it's pleasurable to read great literature, and to read with care and thoughtfulness, which is why we like doing this over the summer, when there's no school.

Q: Why choose it for the Nerdfighters Book Club?

A: I think it will be really interesting to discuss the themes of the novel — particularly thinking about the ways context and sustained intellectual engagement adds meaning to human life — in a place (the Internet) that is not exactly known for sustained intellectual engagement. Social networks are often home to precisely the kinds of factoids and half-truths that Bradbury worries about in Fahrrenheit 451. Nerdfighters are trying to build spaces online that can foster the kind of thoughtfulness and intellectual rigor that isn't always easy to find online. (Certainly, it is easier to find cute pictures of cats, for instance.) As we often say in the Nerdfighter community, "The truth resists simplicity," and I think Fahrenheit 451 is a great example of a novel that proves more complex and nuanced the closer you read.

Q: Your experiences with schools' summer reading assignments?

John and Hank Green's new Nerdfighter Book Club pick is the late Ray Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit 451.'

A: I loved my summer reading in high school — in fact, many of my favorite books were assigned to me as summer reading. (The Virgin Suicides and Song of Solomon come to mind.) I'm a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that's been with us a long time — and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come.

Q: What do you think about using videos and the Internet on behalf of reading and books?

A: I don't think we should see the world of books as fundamentally separate from the world of the Internet. Yes, the Internet contains a lot of videos of squirrels riding skateboards, but it can also be a place that facilitates big conversations about books. We've seen that for years — whether it's thousands of people (mostly teenagers) choosing to read The Great Gatsby together over summer vacation, or projects like Infinite Summer, in which thousands of people read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest together over the summer of 2010.

There is a lot of talk in publishing these days that we need to become more like the Internet: We need to make books for short attention spans with bells and whistles — books, in short, that are as much like Angry Birds as possible. But I think that's a terrible idea. (It's also, it seems to me, Ray Bradbury's nightmare.)

I think instead writers and publishers and readers need to go to the places where people are, and make the argument that there is great value to the quiet, contemplative process of reading a novel, that reading great books carefully offers pleasures and consolations that no iPad app ever can. And that's what we're trying to do with the Nerdfighter Book Club.

For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

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Thursday, July 12, 2012

New Voices: Author Karen Thompson Walker

Karen Thompson Walker's The Age of Miracles (Random House, $26) is set in a once-placid California suburb facing solar radiation, dying species, failing crops and social disintegration after Earth's rotation slows.

Ramin Talaie

Why it's notable: The book sold for a reported seven figures, and it's been optioned for the movies and has earned early rave reviews.

Memorable line: "We were here."

Quick bio: Walker, 32, a resident of Brooklyn, N.Y., grew up in San Diego. She worked in book publishing while writing her first novel.

Real-life inspiration: "In 2004, shortly after the earthquake that caused the tsunami in Indonesia, I read that the earthquake was so powerful that it had affected the rotation of the earth, shortening our 24-hour days by a fraction of a second. I was really stunned by that news, by the idea that something I had always taken for granted — the steady rising and setting of the sun — was actually in flux."

On the threat of "the big one": "Sometimes I think I might not have written The Age of Miracles if I hadn't grown up in California, if I hadn't been exposed to its very particular blend of beauty and disaster, of danger and denial."

On the popularity of end-of-the-world scenarios: "My own pet theory is that there's actually a certain kind of unexpected pleasure in reading about a world radically altered by disaster. In these kinds of stories, a lot of the ordinary things we take for granted have fallen away — food in the grocery stores, hot showers, the predictable rising and setting of the sun. … As a result, all of the ordinary things begin to look a little miraculous. There's a pleasure in being reminded of the value of ordinary life."

For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

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Book buzz: 'Fifty Shades' by the numbers

By Lindsay Deutsch, USA TODAY

Here's a look at what's buzzing in the books world today:

--The week's hot books: USA TODAY's Bob Minzesheimer gives details on the week's top five new and noteworthy releases, including Gold by Chris Cleave.

--'50 Shades,' 23 ways: If you stacked up all copies of Fifty Shades of Grey, the pile would be 51 miles high. Or you could fill 12 Olympic swimming pools with all of the copies sold. Publishers Weekly tackles the best-seller in 23 fun statistics.

--All-American books: Feeling patriotic this July 4th week? The Daily Beast gives Independence Day books suggestions for people of all different viewpoints.

--Barnes on books: The Sense of an Ending author Julian Barnes writes about his bibliomania and defends physical books and bookstores on The Guardian.

--The vest plot: Jennifer Weiner pokes fun at The Marriage Plot author Jeffrey Eugenides and his infamous Broadway billboard vest with an ad for her new book,The Next Best Thing.

--Poet memoir: Pulitzer Prize-winning poet laureate Natasha Trethewey will write a memoir to be published by Ecco in 2014.


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Wednesday, July 11, 2012

HEADING OUT TO WONDERFUL

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Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Nerdfighter book club raises temperature on 'Fahrenheit 451'

Long before John Green became a YouTube star and a best-selling novelist, he was assigned in ninth grade to read Ray Bradbury's classic novel, Fahrenheit 451, set in a world where TV reigns and books are burned.

Brothers Hank, left, and John Green's first two summer book club selections drew a combined 800,000 YouTube views. By Elyse Marshall

Brothers Hank, left, and John Green's first two summer book club selections drew a combined 800,000 YouTube views.

By Elyse Marshall

Brothers Hank, left, and John Green's first two summer book club selections drew a combined 800,000 YouTube views.

Green, 34, recalls that he liked it "more than most of the books I read for English class that year (including Romeo and Juliet), but that's not saying much. I was one of those students who was predisposed to dislike a book simply because it has been assigned."

These days, he's "a much bigger fan of English classes and critical reading," and he's eager to argue that "it's pleasurable to read great literature and to read with care and thoughtfulness."

Tuesday around noon ET, John and his brother Hank Green, the wisecracking VlogBrothers who post video blogs, will announce on their YouTube channel that Fahrenheit 451 is this summer's reading for their Nerdfighter Book Club aimed at teens.

(Nerdfighters do not fight nerds. "They fight for nerds," Green says, "for intellectualism, for the life of the mind." It must be working: Their channel, youtube.com/user/vlogbrothers, has 231 million views of its weekly vlogs on a variety of topics.)

Green, whose novel about teens with cancer, The Fault in Our Stars, hit No. 4 on USA TODAY's Best-selling Books list in January, is looking forward to discussing Bradbury's themes — "the ways context and sustained engagement add meaning to human life in a place (the Internet) that is not exactly known for sustained intellectual engagement."

John and Hank Green's new Nerdfighter Book Club pick is the late Ray Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit 451.'

Social networks "are often home to precisely the kinds of factoids and half-truths that Bradbury worries about," he says. But while the Internet "contains a lot of videos of squirrels riding skateboards, it can also be a place that facilitates big conversations about books."

John, who lives in Indianapolis, and Hank, 32, a singer/songwriter who runs an environmental website (ecogeek.com) in Missoula, Mont., each will post two vlogs and written comments in response to comments from readers.

It's their third summer book club: Their videos about The Great Gatsby in 2011 and Catcher in the Rye in 2010 drew more than 800,000 views combined.

Green says they chose Fahrenheit 451 after Bradbury's death last month at 91 when they read that he had sold fewer books in his lifetime than the erotic FiftyShades of Grey trilogy sold in the last month, "which we found sadly funny."

For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

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Monday, July 9, 2012

ROME: An Empire's Story

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Sunday, July 8, 2012

THE OCEAN OF LIFE: The Fate of Man and the Sea

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SUPERMAN: The High-Flying History of America's Most Enduring Hero

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Saturday, July 7, 2012

Cover art revealed for J.K. Rowling's new book

By Carol Memmott, USA TODAY

Today we get our first look at the cover art for The Casual Vacancy by J. K. Rowling, one of the most anticipated novels of the year. Little, Brown will publish the first adult novel by the celebrated author of the seven Harry Potter novels on Sept. 27.

Here's the plot summary for the 512-page novel released by Rowling's publisher: "When Barry Fairbrother dies in his early forties, the town of Pagford is left in shock. Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war. Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils…Pagford is not what it first seems. And the empty seat left by Barry on the parish council soon becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen. Who will triumph in an election fraught with passion, duplicity, and unexpected revelations?"

Chances are The Casual Vacancy will be the runaway hit of the year. Rowling's series about Harry Potter, the boy wizard, was published between 1997 and 2007 and has sold over 450 million copies worldwide.


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Friday, July 6, 2012

'Fooling Houdini': A trick worthy of applause

If you've ever wondered where the rabbit comes from when he's pulled from the top hat, we have a book for you. Card tricks and shell games? Ladies sawed in half? All here.

Alex Stone has been a magic geek since the day his dad gave him a magician's kit — wand included — from F.A.O. Schwarz. He was 5. With that he was off to entertain at birthday parties and bar mitzvahs. He had found his calling.

"Magic is all about nerds playing god with the universe," he writes. "For me discovering the world of magic was like finding my own island of misfit friends, a place where everyone was special in the wrong way."

Stone, who has a master's degree in physics, takes his readers behind the curtain, so to speak. And along the way he weaves in how psychology, physics — even crime — plays into the world of hand tricks.

Who knew, for instance, there's such a thing as the ultra-secretive FFFF - Fechter's Finger Flicking Frolic, the Templars of Magic, the most prestigious group of magicians in the world. Its annual convention is invitation-only. If you get one you've arrived.

You've also arrived if you know when to clap. Most of us applaud at the wrong time, for instance. "Lay people applaud the effects, while magicians clap during the seemingly uneventful moments, when the secret moves occur," Stone writes. "To the untrained eye it's as if the magicians are clapping at nothing."

If you're not that interested in the secretive world of magic, just disappear. But if you're fascinated by odd little corners of society, Fooling Houdini is not only informative, but highly entertaining. Stone has pulled the proverbial rabbit out of the hat.


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Thursday, July 5, 2012

A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING

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Weekend book picks: Three new memoirs

What should you read this weekend? USA TODAY's picks for book lovers include three new memoirs, and the latest novel by Mark Haddon, set at an English country house.

Janet Groth recounts her experience in 'The Receptionist: An Education at the New Yorker.'

Janet Groth recounts her experience in 'The Receptionist: An Education at the New Yorker.'

Janet Groth recounts her experience in 'The Receptionist: An Education at the New Yorker.'

The Receptionist: An Education at The New Yorker
By Janet Groth; Algonquin, 240 pp., $21.95; non-fiction

Janet Groth was a receptionist at the legendary New Yorker magazine from 1957 to 1978. She saw and heard it all.

Groth was the one who had to tell J.D. Salinger there was no office Coke machine. She steered Woody Allen to the right floor. Repeatedly.

And then, of course, there's humorist Calvin Trillin, cartoonist Charles Addams and the painfully shy E.B. White, who hired her. The magazine's eccentricity was not lost on Groth. Lucky for us.

USA TODAY says *** out of four. "Are you a New Yorker magazine groupie? Do you wait every week just to laugh at the cartoons and read Talk of the Town? If so, we have a book for you."

Apron Anxiety: My Messy Affairs
In and Out of the Kitchen|-|
By Alyssa Shelasky; Three Rivers, 260 pp., $14, paperback original; non-fiction

When New York party girl Alyssa Shelasky moves to Washington, D.C., with her busy celebrity-chef boyfriend (Top Chef's Spike Mendelsohn, who is unnamed in the book), the former kitchen-phobe turns to cooking as "Chef's" career heats up and their relationship fizzles.

USA TODAY says *** out of four. "A fresh dining and dating memoir … charming."

Hotels, Hospitals and Jails
By Anthony Swofford; Twelve, 276 pp., $26.99; non-fiction

By Christa Parravani

'Jarhead' author Anthony Swofford tells the rest of the story in 'Hotels, Hospitals and Jails.'

After former Marine sniper Anthony Swofford hit it big with Jarhead, his memoir about the Gulf War that became an acclaimed movie, he had to deal with a new problem: too much money, sex, drugs and alcohol, which nearly killed him.

USA TODAY says ***½ out of four. "Gritty, intense and wrenching."

The Red House
By Mark Haddon; Doubleday, 264 pp., $25.95; fiction

Eight relatives, stuck with one another on an eight-day holiday in the English countryside, offer plenty of drama in The Red House, the third novel by Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time).

USA TODAY says *** out of four. "Haddon delivers a story of remarkable complexity, exploring the rich interior lives of his characters."

The Seven Wonders
By Steven Saylor; Minotaur, 321 pp., $25.99; fiction

It's 92 B.C., and Steven Saylor's fictional teenage crime-solver Gordianus is on a tour of the Seven Wonders of the World. This is a younger version of Gordianus the Finder from Saylor's mystery series, and here he solves his first cases accompanied by Antipater of Sidon, a famous and real poet.

USA TODAY says ***½ out of four. "If you're going to tour the ancient world, you could find no better guide than Saylor."

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Wednesday, July 4, 2012

BETWEEN THE LINES

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Jodi Picoult and daughter work 'Between the Lines'

Jodi Picoult, 46, the best-selling novelist (Sing You Home), and her daughter, Samantha Van Leer, 16, have collaborated for the first time on a novel for readers 12 and up. Between the Lines (Simon & Schuster, $19.99) is narrated in part by a 15-year-girl obsessed with a fairy tale and its leading character, a handsome prince who begins to talk to her. Mother and daughter spoke with USA TODAY's Bob Minzesheimer.

Jodi Picoult and Samantha Van Leer, 16, worked side by side on the book, but Picoult "did more of the typing because I type faster." By Adam Bouska

Jodi Picoult and Samantha Van Leer, 16, worked side by side on the book, but Picoult "did more of the typing because I type faster."

By Adam Bouska

Jodi Picoult and Samantha Van Leer, 16, worked side by side on the book, but Picoult "did more of the typing because I type faster."

Q: So it was the high school student, not her mom, author of 19 novels, who had the idea for the book?

Van Leer: At the end of eighth grade (when she was 13), I was daydreaming in French class. And I got to thinking: What's it like for characters inside a book, and what happens to them when no one is reading the book? What if they had other lives? It was like watching a movie that had popped into my head. So I called my mom.

Picoult: I was on a book tour in L.A., stuck in freeway traffic, and I told Sammy, "That's a really great idea." And she said, "Let's write it together." And I said: "All right, but that means we're writing it together. I'm not writing the book for you."

Q: So who wrote what?

Van Leer: We wrote it together, sitting side by side at the computer, talking back and forth. Sometimes we'd get the same idea at the same time. It was a little creepy.

Picoult: I did more of the typing because I type faster, but it was an equal partnership, though I paid more attention to the commas and cleaning up the writing.

Q: Why did it take three years?

Picoult: Well, Sammy has a day job: She goes to high school. We did it during summers and school breaks. We started writing the summer after ninth grade. We edited it the summer after 10th grade. And now she's finishing 11th grade.

Q: Did you disagree?

Picoult: A few times. Some arguments she won. Some I won.

Van Leer: I imagined Prince Oliver would have blonde hair, not black as in the book.

Picoult: And I thought the fairy tale should be told tongue in check. Sammy wanted it to be dark and a bit creepy and scary. I thought we'd try it her way, then revise it. But she was right.

Q: In your novel, Delilah, the obsessive reader, believes Prince Oliver, from the fairy tale, "understood me better than anyone in the world." She dreams about meeting him. Have you ever wanted to meet a fictional character?

Picoult: Mr. Darcy (from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.) What woman isn't consumed by him — from the novel or the film versions with Colin Firth or Matthew Macfadyen? When I was a teen, he was the most crush-worthy man I had ever read about. Every time I'm on a book tour in England, I look for him.

Van Leer: Peeta (the baker's son in Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games), especially if he looks like Josh Hutcherson (who portrayed him in the movie).

Q:Any interest from Hollywood in makingBetween the Linesas movie?

Picoult: Yes. We're close to having it optioned.

Q: And a sequel?

Van Leer: We'd like to do one, but first I have to finish high school.

Picoult: Sammy's next big writing project will be her essays for college applications.

For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

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Monday, July 2, 2012

THE OBAMIANS: The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American Power

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Sunday, July 1, 2012

KILL OR CAPTURE: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency

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