Sarah Prineas is one of my favorite children’s fantasy writers. She writes like a great watercolor artist, painting vivid pictures with spare and economical prose that makes every syllable count. It’s a perfect style for the kind of book Prineas specializes in: tales of mystery and magic deep enough to satisfy readers of all ages. Her Magic Thief series is absolutely fantastic fantasy; such a great read that I ripped through the whole trilogy in under a week and immediately went looking for more.

Happily more has now arrived!

Winterling is aimed at slightly older readers but written in the same clean, fluid style as Prineas’s earlier books. And it has a kickass girl hero. And it mingles this-worldly mystery with other-worldly magic in a dark and brooding setting that calls to mind of one of my very favorite childhood series: Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising books.

So what more do you need to know? Great book. And it’s free to the lucky lucky winner!

Here’s how I’m going to run the giveaway:

1. You pick a number between 1 and 245.
2. I quote you a line from that page of the book.
3. Then I employ a random number generator (aka, my four-year-old) to pick the winning number.
4. If two people are equally close to the winning number, we’ll just make the random number generator do his thing again until we get a winner.

The Random Number Generator is currently obsessed with Very Large Numbers, so there should be no problem getting him to pick a passel of ‘em; the only challenge will be getting him to pick something smaller than a googol….

Deadline for picking your page number is 5 pm Monday December 12th. So have at it!

1. Well over 3000 Occupy protesters have been arrested nationwide. I don’t think our vagrancy and jaywalking laws have gotten this good a workout since the Civil Rights era.

2. Several cities, not content to wait until people actually do anything to threaten public order before cracking down on them, have actually imposed curfews. Seriously. Curfews are now considered a legitimate response to peaceful protest. Even if you don’t’ support Occupy Wall Street, you ought to stop and think about that for a moment. Because personally the only time I can remember anyone talking about a curfew in North America was in The Hunger Games.

3. The docile public acceptance of the idea that “well, of course people aren’t allowed to sleep in public parks” is in itself a significant statement about the state of our civil liberties. I remember a time when it was an outrage in New York that the police were rounding up harmless homeless people and shipping them out of town instead of letting them sleep on park benches. And I remember when the new park benches appeared — you know, the ones with bars on them so you can’t sleep on them. But now all the park benches look like that and rounding up homeless people is just part of the job the NYPD do to keep the shopping districts nice for the tourists. Taking care of tourists trumps taking care of our own now. Just like the almightly dollar trumps real human beings in need. Or real human beings exercising their free speech rights. That’s not the New York I grew up in. And I’m not willing to let that piece of history go down the memory hole without a fight.

And one final thought that should scare anyone who cares about the future of our democracy silly — even if you don’t support the occupiers:

We now live in a nation where a corporation’s free speech rights include making unlimited anonymous political campaign donations, but citizens’ free speech rights do not include peaceful protest in parks paid for by our own tax dollars.

Complete listing of upcoming events at www.inquisitorsapprentice.com, but here’s a quick rundown of the New York events:

Thursday, October 13, 7pm: “Before and After Harry Potter: YA, SciFi, and Fantasy.” Center for Fiction Conference on Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea Trilogy (Mercantile Library, 17 E 47th St between 5th Ave & Madison Ave, NY NY). This conference (and the panel) are incredibly cool. Among other reasons because the other panelists are Holly Black, Cassandra Clare, Delia Sherman, and Justine Larbalestier. Kewl!!

Saturday October 15, 5:30 pm: I will be autographing books at New York ComiCon with illustrator Mark Edward Geyer. We will be handing out free books! And Mark has promised to bring cool art stuff too. At NY ComiCon, the Javits Center, NY NY.

Sunday October 16, 1-3 pm: “Thrills, Chills, and Magic” (Books of Wonder, 18 West 18th Street, NY NY.) Mark will also be at this panel. And other panelists include Chris Grabenstein, Terry Castle, and Sam Ita.

The march during the day was peaceful. But afterwards craziness. A Fox News crew has been maced in the face. Numerous protesters were maced and night sticked. I saw several videos of people getting beat up and at least one cameraman with the occupy wall street media team had what looked like a broken nose, allegedly because the police kicked him in the face for saying “I am not resisting.”

Links for all this in my twitter feed from the last several hours. I tried to retweet everything that looked important in order to have some realtime record of what was happening. For anyone interested, some of the best tweets were coming in from several journalists with the march listed here.(sorry, went back to put this link up and the page has changed, so I’ll try to get their names up in comments below….)

Chris Moriarty’s The Inquisitor’s Apprenticeis the first volume in a fantastic new historical young adult series that takes place in a turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York where magic is the key to power and the infamous robber-barons of the age have cornered the market on enchantment … Moriarty’s plotting is just fantastic, and the story itself manages to tackle difficult issues of race and class and politics without ever slowing down. Period ink illustrations by Mark Edward Geyer complete the package, giving the whole thing a deceptively lightweight, pulpy feel. It’s a great magic trick, a piece of misdirection that makes a book that’s full of weighty material zip along like a quick adventure tale. This is one of those incredibly promising first volumes that makes you hope that the writer’s got plenty more where it came from.

Nice! And the comments are interesting too. If someone’s giving out magic wands that work as advertised, I definitely want one!

Here’s a link to the Huffington Post coverage roundup, which I’m including because they documented the New York Times’s weird headline switch over the course of the day. Also, the Guardian is asking anyone who was actually on the bridge to post eye-witness accounts of the entrapment and kettling.

And once again, here’s a recap of the links I posted last week for donating to Occupy Wall Street:

Global Revolution is the best place both to watch live feed from Zuccotti Park and to donate to keep it going. Scroll down the page below the streaming feed and you’ll find a list of donation links to keep the live streaming going:

http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution

The media team at Liberty Park has said on air that while their online donations pages are definitely going to be useful in the long run, they’re having a lot of trouble accessing them for immediate funds. If you want to help with immediate needs for bedding, camping supplies and just plain cash, you need to send either nonperishable items or a money order (no checks!) to the nearest UPS store. Make money orders payable to Occupy Wall Street and send them to:

Occupy Wall Street
UPS Store 118A
Fulton st #205
New York, NY, 10038

Next, here’s a list of local businesses that will deliver to the protesters at Zuccotti Park is here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/11aEYlrHbWsYw9UFLmnR3V62NRdN0EtN5aVFJs_YXbg8/edit?hl=en_US

And finally, the New York General Assembly (one of the several organizations involved in the protest) also has a links page for people who want to donate:

http://nycga.cc/donate/

Good luck Occupiers! Many of us who can’t be there are thinking of you and supporting you! You’re doing great work. And with a little more help from the NYPD like you got this weekend, this should really take off!

1. I grew up in a neighborhood full of NYPD families. I know these guys. Thirty years ago they could make a decent life for themselves, buy a nice house, afford to have their wives stay home, send their kids to college and retire comfortably. Now most of them are strapped to the limit with both spouses working two jobs and overtime, struggling to pay their mortgages in one of the most expensive cities in the world … but still too rich to qualify for financial aid and send their kids to college without dipping into their amazing shrinking pensions. They’re working for Mayor Bloomberg, the man who brought them the City Time scandal and the ‘Christmas Bonus’ pension steal. And the police union has spent much of the last decade locked in an insane wrangle with the city over bans on transfers out of the department and withholding of personnel records to prevent officers from leaving the force to move to departments that pay more reasonable salaries! Frankly, what younger cops on the force are putting up with is nothing short of outrageous.

2. The mainstream press has been having a grand time making fun of the protesters for being granola-fueled wing nuts, but from what I see they’re handling themselves very well for the most part. Most important, they’re talking to the cops like human beings. They need to keep doing that! Like I said, I know these guys. Maybe the higher-ups can afford to mock the ‘crazy hippies.’ But the younger guys? I’ve been watching their faces all day while the protesters are talking to them across the barricades. And I don’t think they’re very happy about this. This is not what those guys are about. This is not what they believe in. This is not what they signed up for. I really, really feel for them. But I also really hope they go home tonight and take a good long look in the mirror. Or better still, a good long look at their children.

3. The New York Times’s ridiculous ‘protest criticism’ piece had it dead wrong. And The Nation was only slightly better, frankly. Are the protesters disorganized and naive and sometimes silly? Sure they are. But they’ve put their physical safety on the line to show America something. And they’ve succeeded. What they have shown us over the last ten days is that we no longer have the right to peaceful protest.

Think about that last sentence. Really think about it. Today on Wall Street ordinary Americans are being arrested for peacefully assembling in public to air political grievances, mainly pretty reasonable ones like taxing and regulating Wall Street. Stephen Colbert’s parody of the abysmal press coverage of the protest was spot on as usual; the press is more interested in laughing at crazy hippies than discussing what they’re actually saying. But we can quibble about crappy press coverage all we want. The real issue — as obvious as mace in the face — is that there could not possibly be a clearer case of first amendment expression than what these kids are doing. They are peacefully speaking out about political issues. And in case you haven’t been watching the live streaming video … they’re getting the holy living crap kicked out of them. If you don’t think this is a problem, you might want to brush the dust off your copy of the constitution and read it.

And as for me? What am I doing? Well, I started out today wishing I could figure out some way to get down to the city and join the protest despite having an infant and a toddler to take care of. And then I saw that “Granny Brigade” out marching and felt so jealous. I thought: “If only my kids were grown up I’d be down there in a flash!” And then I thought, “Well, why aren’t I down there? This is a peaceful protest. I could go march in it with my kids. Why not? Who’s stopping me?.” But by the middle of the day I had seen so much police violence — most notably the gratuitous macing of three girls who were surrounded by cops, completely detained, and offering no resistance whatsoever — that I realized that as a responsible parent I simply could not put my kids into that situation.

And then it hit me: That is the point.

That’s what this is all about:

Intimidation.

I’m a law-abiding taxpaying citizen who would like to participate in a peaceful protest, and I can’t because I’m afraid the police will hurt my children.

That’s where our country is right now. In a place where a mother with young children can’t responsibly join a peaceful protest because peaceful protest is too dangerous for children.

That’s wrong. In fact, it’s just plain un-American.

Honestly, I don’t care what the kids occupying Wall Street stand for. I happen to agree with them. I happen to be against massive bailouts for ‘too-big-to-fail’ banks. I happen to think we need to re-pass the Glass Steagall Act (something the protesters have repeatedly demanded but that the mainstream press chooses to ignore because it’s not apparently kooky enough to be worthy of air time). I happen to think that a beat cop in the NYPD shouldn’t have to pay more taxes than General Electric or Exxon Mobil. And I definitely agree that we ought to spend more money feeding children and less money feeding Goldman Sachs and Haliburton. But you know what? Even if there were no children in America going to bed hungry tonight, and our schools were well-funded, and Wall Street wasn’t foreclosing on houses and stripping cops’ pension funds, and Elizabeth Warren hadn’t been run out of Washington on a rail … I would still have a problem with what’s happening on Wall Street today. Because the fact that hundreds of obviously peaceful protesters are being beaten up, handcuffed, arrested, and even maced on the streets of my home town? That is a problem. It’s a huge problem. For anyone who actually believes in democracy it’s a goddamm dealbreaker.

So I’m sending them money and food, and I’m donating to keep the livestreaming going so that if and when the authorities decide to evict the protesters from Zuccotti Park, the eyes of America will be on them. I wish I could do more. If I didn’t have two very tiny people depending on me to keep them safe I’d be down there right now myself. And I’m still trying to figure out how to make that happen. But in the meantime … at least I can buy them pizza and help replace damaged camera and computer equipment so they can keep the protest on the air. And if anyone else is looking to help, I’ve tweeted out the best links I’ve come up with to do that, and I’ll post them in the comments section and update as needed.

Good luck to the protesters!

And to the cops … c’mon guys. I know, I truly do, what a terrible position you are in right now. And I know that you look at these kids and see kids who’ve had stuff handed to them in life that your kids won’t get … and it makes you furious. But think about that for a minute. Think about your kids. Think about my kids. Think about everyone’s kids. Is shutting down this protest going to make America a better place for anyone except the same people who are busy right now trying to steal your pensions? And if you agree with me … well, there are already rumors going around about cops who aren’t showing up for work. Who says you can’t be one of the ones who just ‘happens’ to be sick tomorrow? There is after all, genuine violent crime out there. So seriously … how many of you can they really afford to fire for not showing up to to protect Wall Street from a bunch of college girls??

NOTE: For anyone who wants to donate, I’ve devoted the first comment below to keeping an up to date list of where to donate. So go to the comments if you can’t make it to New York but still want to help…..

Moriarty … makes her children’s book debut with a fabulously imaginative historical fantasy. Set in an early 20th-century New York City where every ethnic group has its own magic … Moriarty’s novel is chock-full of period detail (both in the author’s confident prose and Geyer’s occasional pen-and-ink illustrations), feisty character dynamics, and a solid sense of humor. It’s a fascinating example of alternate history that leaves the door open for future mysteries.

I have no idea if starred reviews in Publishers Weekly actually sell books. But they do seem to make publishers happy. And these days pretty much anything that makes your publisher happy is good. So We Are Pleased.

You know what I mean. You think you support an organization that seems really great on the surface. Maybe you’ve even been contributing to them for years. And then you actually read the small print and … oops! Like Homer Simpson in the immortal Guatemalan Death Chilies episode, you find yourself standing in a metaphysical phone booth, looking for your soulmate, and saying, “Um, no, I don’t like that. Or that. Or that. And … um …. I-have-to-go-now-you’re-scaring-me!”

But not here. Actually, refreshingly, amazingly, I agree with these two lovely organizations about … well … pretty much everything. And not only that, but they’re actually out there in the world doing something about things I think are important. Way cool! So I just wanted to give a little shoutout to RAC and the Arbeiter Ring.

You get it! You guys really get it!

• You get that prejudice against any minority is bad for all minorities.
• You get that “When strangers sojourn with you in your land … you shall love them as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” [19:33-34]
• You get that helping the poor is our freaking  job … not some kind of special extra credit assignment where the rich get to strut around acting like they’re made of awesome while the poor are supposed to be humbly grateful for whatever their betters deign to give them. (Maimonides covered this rather succinctly back in the 12th century, so I won’t belabor the point.)
• You get that globalization, human rights advocacy, democratic reforms, and process-based labor rights have to go hand in hand if we don’t want to see a race to the bottom on all fronts.
• You get that telling working women in areas where there are no jobs, “Hey, sorry, your lifetime welfare cap is up! If you still can’t feed your kids you’ll need to move away from your family and get a job someplace where you don’t know anyone and can’t afford safe child care!” … is no solution to unemployment at all, let alone a pro-family or child-friendly solution.
• You get that all the ridiculous, bigoted nonsense about “Gay-Marriage-Anchor-Babies-Birther-Obamacare-Secular-Jews-Destroying-America!” is all just the latest in a long list of ploys designed to get people to look the other way while the Robber Barons pick their pockets.

Sniff! Thanks! I love you guys!

By the way, if you want to read the full position statements of the two organizations, you can find them here:

Arbeiter Ring: http://www.circle.org/files%20(PDF)/Resolutions2008.pdf

RAC: http://rac.org/index.cfm?