#prh

[hollymbryan]

Blog Tour: Top 5 Reasons to Read PLAN A by Deb Caletti!

Welcome to Book-Keeping and my stop on the TBR and Beyond Tours blog tour for Plan A by Deb Caletti, which is OUT TODAY! I've got all the book details for you below, along with my top five reasons to read this latest Caletti contemporary.

About the Book

title: Plan A author: Deb Caletti publisher: Labyrinth Road release date: 3 October 2023

A sixteen-year-old girl’s road trip across the country to get an abortion becomes a transformative journey of vulnerability, strength, and above all, choice. From the acclaimed author of A Heart in a Body in the World , this is both an achingly tender love story and a bold, badly needed battle cry about bodily autonomy and the experiences that connect us. Ivy can’t entirely believe it when the plus sign appears on the test. She didn’t even know it was possible from . . . what happened. But it is, and now she is, and instead of spending the summer working at the local drugstore and swooning over her boyfriend, Lorenzo, suddenly she’s planning a cross-country road trip to her grandmother’s house on the West Coast, where she can legally obtain an abortion. Escaping her small Texas town and the judgment of her friends and neighbors, Ivy hits the road with Lorenzo, who, determined to make the best of their “abortion road trip love story,” has transformed the journey into a whirlwind tour of the all the way from Paris, Texas, to Rome, Oregon . . . and every rest-stop diner and corny roadside attraction along the way. And while Ivy can’t run from the incessant pressure of others’ opinions about her body or from her own expectations and insecurities, she discovers a new world of healing and hope. As the women she encounters share their stories, she chips away at the stigma, silence, and shame surrounding reproductive rights while those collective experiences guide her to her own rightful destination. Content Warning: Abortion, harassment, assault, rape, trauma

Add to Goodreads: Plan A Purchase the Book: Amazon | B&N | Bookshop.org

About the Author

Deb Caletti is the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of over twenty books for adults and young adults, including Honey, Baby, Sweetheart, a finalist for the National Book Award, and A Heart in a Body in the World, a Michael L. Printz Honor Book. Her books have also won the Josette Frank Award for Fiction, the Washington State Book Award, and numerous other state awards and honors, and she was a finalist for the PEN USA Award. She lives with her family in Seattle.

Connect with Deb: Website | Instagram | Goodreads | Facebook

Top 5 Reasons to Read

It's Deb Caletti. Isn't that enough?! I read and reviewed A Heart in a Body in the World when it released, and I *still* think about it to this day. She writes YA contemporary like no other.

I don't think there is any topic more relevant and urgent to the lives of young women than abortion -- the right to healthcare, the right to make one's own choices, the right to control one's own body.

The mother in this book is strong and amazing and supportive, and it was wonderful to read such a present and powerful parental character in YA.

The trip across country that Ivy and Lorenzo make is whimsical and fun while also leading to Ivy figuring out more who she is and what she wants. It may seem weird to have the trip to get an abortion be like this, but when reading you realize it makes perfect sense.

Perhaps my most favorite aspect of the book, and my top reason to read it, is the character of Lorenzo. Ivy's boyfriend not only supports whatever choice she wants to make, he calculates the travel route that takes them through all the "world cities" between Paris, Texas and Manhattan Beach, Oregon -- from Lima, Oklahoma to Naples, Utah to Rome, Oregon. He knows how desperately Ivy wishes to see the world, and he wants to give it to her, making my heart completely full.

While this isn't a traditional review, I do have to say this is a 5-star book for me for sure. I want to put it in the hands of every teen reader I come across -- and parents, too! It's beautifully written and empowering, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

Thank you so much to the publisher, author, and TBR and Beyond for the early copy of the book and for having me on tour!

[kuwtsussexes]

The World Central Kitchen Cookbook includes a Lemon Olive Oil Cake recipe from Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex.

[pianostrings]

Social commentary on Roald Dahl controversy aside, people buying into the cultural outrage by running out to buy the ‘current’ books thinking millions of editions will disappear overnight.

Meanwhile, Penguin Random House execs:

[booksteacupandreviews]

Pet That Cat!: A Handbook for Making Feline Friends by Nigel Kidd - children's non-fiction about cats

#PetThatCat! is fun and informative #childrensnonfiction about cats with adorable illustrations. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Many thanks @PRHGlobal for free review copy. @quirkbooks #BookTwitter #booksteacupandreviews #Bookreviewer Full #Bookreview ⬇️

[girlwithnoface]

doing interviews for the one job you really didnt want oh what if i died

[mutsukiss]

I'm so fucking bored I miss dog sim games sm but literally none of them are good ahhghhhgghgh

[lilibetbombshell]

[maggotwithanf]

IDW shitcanning everyone's book

[shannon-foraker]

Characters: Michelle Henke, Lester Tourville

Ship: Michelle/Lester

Chapters: 1/1 (Not promising this will never change.)

Summary: But in some, because even cowboys fall in love, the two Admirals fall for each other.

For @really-quite-tremendous

[euqinim0dart]

New book announcement!!

I have the pleasure of illustrating the New York Times obituaries desk's Too Big for History: 10 overlooked icons. My first non-fiction book coming in 2026 and published by Crown/PRH.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Richard Luscombe at The Guardian:

Six major book publishers have teamed up to sue the US state of Florida over an “unconstitutional” law that has seen hundreds of titles purged from school libraries following rightwing challenges. The landmark action targets the “sweeping book removal provisions” of House Bill 1069, which required school districts to set up a mechanism for parents to object to anything they considered pornographic or inappropriate. A central plank of Republican governor Ron DeSantis’s war on “woke” on Florida campuses, the law has been abused by rightwing activists who quickly realized that any book they challenged had to be immediately removed and replaced only after the exhaustion of a lengthy and cumbersome review process, if at all, the publishers say. Since it went into effect last July, countless titles have been removed from elementary, middle and high school libraries, including American classics such as Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain.

Contemporary novels by bestselling authors such as Margaret Atwood, Judy Blume and Stephen King have also been removed, as well as The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank’s gripping account of the Holocaust, according to the publishers. “Florida HB 1069’s complex and overbroad provisions have created chaos and turmoil across the state, resulting in thousands of historic and modern classics, works we are proud to publish, being unlawfully labeled obscene and removed from shelves,” Dan Novack, vice-president and associate general counsel of Penguin Random House (PRH), said in a statement. “Students need access to books that reflect a wide range of human experiences to learn and grow. It’s imperative for the education of our young people that teachers and librarians be allowed to use their professional expertise to match our authors’ books to the right reader at the right time in their life.” PRH is joined in the action by Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishers, Simon & Schuster and Sourcebooks. The 94-page lawsuit, which also features as plaintiffs the Authors Guild and a number of individual writers, was filed in federal court in Orlando on Thursday.

The suit contends the book removal provisions violate previous supreme court decisions relating to reviewing works for their literary, artistic, political and scientific value as a whole while considering any potential obscenity; and seeks to restore the discretion “of trained educators to evaluate books holistically to avoid harm to students who will otherwise lose access to a wide range of viewpoints”. “Book bans censor authors’ voices, negating and silencing their lived experience and stories,” Mary Rasenberger, chief executive of the Authors Guild, said in the statement. “These bans have a chilling effect on what authors write about, and they damage authors’ reputations by creating the false notion that there is something unseemly about their books. “Yet these same books have edified young people for decades, expanding worlds and fostering self-esteem and empathy for others. We all lose out when authors’ truths are censored.” Separate from the publishers’ action, a group of three parents filed their own lawsuit in June, insisting that the law discriminated against parents who oppose book bans and censorship because it allowed others to dictate what their children can and cannot read.

Six major publishers sue Florida over book ban law HB1069.

[adventure-time-news]

Summary of all the upcoming Adventure Time junk we know about!

7th May 2024: Amazing and Awesome Coloring Book

This activity book will be published by Penguin Random House in a few weeks. Source.

===

3rd September 2024: Journey to Ooo

This is another Penguin Random House book. It will adapt two episodes: Dungeon and Fionna and Cake. It is part of PRH's Screen Comix line, which means it will just be screenshots from the two episodes with speech bubbles and stuff edited over the top. Source.

===

15th October 2024: Adventure Time Compendium Vol. 1

This will be the first piece of Adventure Time merch published by Oni Press, who have taken over from Boom Studios as the main publishers of the Adventure Time comics. The Compendium will collect issues 1 to 35 of the original 2012 Adventure Time run. It's not clear whether or not it will also contain the backup stories from those issues, or just the main stories. Presumably there will be a Vol. 2 at some point collecting issues 36 to 75, but that has not been announced yet. Source.

===

12th November 2024: The Fionna and Cake Compendium

Similar to the other compendium, this will not contain any new stories but will collect existing ones. It will include the original Fionna & Cake comic miniseries, the Fionna & Cake: Card Wars miniseries, and a selection of other comics from across the franchise. Source.

===

March 2025: Adventure Time: The Roleplaying Game

I made a post about this earlier today.

===

2025: Unannounced Oni Press comic series and graphic novels

We have no idea what these are going to be yet! Source.

===

Probably 2025: Fionna and Cake Season 2

We have no release date yet for the second season of this show. It's probably still a while off, as it didn't enter production until after the first season aired. Source.

===

That's everything for now, as far as I'm aware. Stay tuned!

[dovesndecay]

Every time I see a post that hates on booktok and its ilk, I just think about all the marginalized artists who've had to utilize social media to get anyone to read their work because traditional publishing continues to be a cesspool of bigotry and gatekeeping. I think about the early years of self-publishing and how indie artists fought and scraped over the course of years for crumbs of legitimacy.

It's a specific kind of disheartening to be an indie artist that has to constantly see people with little to no personal experience within the wider industry make a lot of shitty comments about the methods they've been forced to use, regardless of the reasons why, to garner even a fraction of the budget, support, and attention that traditional, conventionally acceptable media is awarded without question.

Anyway, if you want to encourage diversity and authenticity in publishing, maybe consider that instead of making blanket statements about the validity of where you heard about a piece of media, you could just support the artists who make the work that you like and ignore the ones you don't.

Tiktok isn't infecting books with Bad Media Cooties anymore than Twitter was 10 years ago.

Hi, I was very active in writer spaces on twitter and its earlier contemporaries back in the day, and I'm very familiar with the rhetoric y'all keep spouting. It's not new, it's not correct, and you look like assholes.

If you don't like something, you don't have to finish it, and you certainly don't have to recommend it.

Otherwise, just say you hate indie artists and go suck PRH's dick so I don't have to fuckin' hear it anymore.

[booksteacupandreviews]

Vampiric Vacation by Kiersten White - gothic middle-grade mystery

Vampiric Vacation by Kiersten White – gothic middle-grade mystery

Vampiric Vacation is fun, unusual, and gothic middle-grade mystery with lovely main characters and interesting mystery. It is an amazing book for middle-grade readers. Vampiric Vacation (Sinister Summer Series #2) by Kiersten White Publication Date : September 27, 2022 Publisher : Delacorte Press Read Date : December 30, 2022 Genre : Middle Grade / Gothic Mystery Pages : 320 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating:…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Private equity plunderers want to buy Simon & Schuster

Going to Defcon this weekend? I'm giving a keynote, "An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification and Throw it Into Reverse," on Saturday at 12:30pm, followed by a book signing at the No Starch Press booth at 2:30pm!

https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=50826

Last November, publishing got some excellent news: the planned merger of Penguin Random House (the largest publisher in the history of human civilization) with its immediate competitor Simon & Schuster would not be permitted, thanks to the DOJ's deftly argued case against the deal:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/07/random-penguins/#if-you-wanted-to-get-there-i-wouldnt-start-from-here

When I was a baby writer, there were dozens of large NY publishers. Today, there are five - and it was almost four. A publishing sector with five giant companies is bad news for writers (as Stephen King said at the trial, the idea that PRH and S&S would bid against each other for books was as absurd as the idea that he and his wife would bid against each other for their next family home).

But it's also bad news for publishing workers, a historically exploited and undervalued workforce whose labor conditions have only declined as the number of employers in the sector dwindled, leading to mass resignations:

https://lithub.com/unlivable-and-untenable-molly-mcghee-on-the-punishing-life-of-junior-publishing-employees/

It should go without saying that workers in sectors with few employers get worse deals from their bosses (see, e.g., the writers' strike and actors' strike). And yup, right on time, PRH, a wildly profitable publisher, fired a bunch of its most senior (and therefore hardest to push around) workers:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/18/books/penguin-random-house-layoffs-buyouts.html

But publishing's contraction into a five-company cartel didn't occur in a vacuum. It was a normal response to monopolization elsewhere in its supply chain. First it was bookselling collapsing into two major chains. Then it was distribution going from 300 companies to three. Today, it's Amazon, a monopolist with unlimited access to the capital markets and a track record of treating publishers "the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/31/seize-the-means-of-computation/#the-internet-con

Monopolies are like Pringles (owned by the consumer packaged goods monopolist Procter & Gamble): you can't have just one. As soon as you get a monopoly in one part of the supply chain, every other part of that chain has to monopolize in self-defense.

Think of healthcare. Consolidation in pharma lead to price-gouging, where hospitals were suddenly paying 1,000% more for routine drugs. Hospitals formed regional monopolies and boycotted pharma companies unless they lowered their prices - and then turned around and screwed insurers, jacking up the price of care. Health insurers gobbled each other up in an orgy of mergers and fought the hospitals.

Now the health care system is composed of a series of gigantic, abusive monopolists - pharma, hospitals, medical equipment, pharmacy benefit managers, insurers - and they all conspire to wreck the lives of only two parts of the system who can't fight back: patients and health care workers. Patients pay more for worse care, and medical workers get paid less for worse working conditions.

So while there was no question that a PRH takeover of Simon & Schuster would be bad for writers and readers, it was also clear that S&S - and indeed, all of the Big Five publishers - would be under pressure from the monopolies in their own supply chain. What's more, it was clear that S&S couldn't remain tethered to Paramount, its current owner.

Last week, Paramount announced that it was going to flip S&S to KKR, one of the world's most notorious private equity companies. KKR has a long, long track record of ghastly behavior, and its portfolio currently includes other publishing industry firms, including one rotten monopolist, raising similar concerns to the ones that scuttled the PRH takeover last year:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/07/books/booksupdate/paramount-simon-and-schuster-kkr-sale.html

Let's review a little of KKR's track record, shall we? Most spectacularly, they are known for buying and destroying Toys R Us in a deal that saw them extract $200m from the company, leaving it bankrupt, with lifetime employees getting $0 in severance even as its executives paid themselves tens of millions in "performance bonuses":

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/06/03/private-equity-bosses-took-200m-out-of-toys-r-us-and-crashed-the-company-lifetime-employees-got-0-in-severance/

The pillaging of Toys R Us isn't the worst thing KKR did, but it was the most brazen. KKR lit a beloved national chain on fire and then walked away, hands in pockets, whistling. They didn't even bother to clear their former employees' sensitive personnel records out of the unlocked filing cabinets before they scarpered:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/09/23/exploring-the-ruins-of-a-toys-r-us-discovering-a-trove-of-sensitive-employee-data/

But as flashy as the Toys R Us caper was, it wasn't the worst. Private equity funds specialize in buying up businesses, loading them with debts, paying themselves, and then leaving them to collapse. They're sometimes called vulture capitalists, but they're really vampire capitalists:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/05/private-equity-buyout-kkr-houdaille/

Given a choice, PE companies don't want to prey on sick businesses - they preferentially drain off value from thriving ones, preferably ones that we must use, which is why PE - and KKR in particular - loves to buy health care companies.

Heard of the "surprise billing epidemic"? That's where you go to a hospital that's covered by your insurer, only to discover - after the fact - that the emergency room is operated by a separate, PE-backed company that charges you thousands for junk fees. KKR and Blackstone invented this scam, then funneled millions into fighting the No Surprises Act, which more-or-less killed it:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/21/all-in-it-together/#doctor-patient-unity

KKR took one of the nation's largest healthcare providers, Envision, hostage to surprise billing, making it dependent on these fraudulent payments. When Congress finally acted to end this scam, KKR was able to take to the nation's editorial pages and damn Congress for recklessly endangering all the patients who relied on it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/14/unhealthy-finances/#steins-law

Like any smart vampire, KKR doesn't drain its victim in one go. They find all kinds of ways to stretch out the blood supply. During the pandemic, KKR was front of the line to get massive bailouts for its health-care holdings, even as it fired health-care workers, increasing the workload and decreasing the pay of the survivors of its indiscriminate cuts:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/11/socialized-losses/#socialized-losses

It's not just emergency rooms. KKR bought and looted homes for people with disabilities, slashed wages, cut staff, and then feigned surprise at the deaths, abuse and misery that followed:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kendalltaggart/kkr-brightspring-disability-private-equity-abuse

Workers' wages went down to $8/hour, and they were given 36 hour shifts, and then KKR threatened to have any worker who walked off the job criminally charged with patient abandonment:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

For KKR, people with disabilities and patients make great victims - disempowered and atomized, unable to fight back. No surprise, then, that so many of KKR's scams target poor people - another group that struggles to get justice when wronged. KKR took over Dollar General in 2007 and embarked on a nationwide expansion campaign, using abusive preferential distributor contracts and targeting community-owned grocers to trap poor people into buying the most heavily processed, least nutritious, most profitable food available:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes

94.5% of the Paycheck Protection Program - designed to help small businesses keep their workers payrolled during lockdown - went to giant businesses, fraudulently siphoned off by companies like Longview Power, 40% owned by KKR:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/20/great-danes/#ppp

KKR also helped engineer a loophole in the Trump tax cuts, convincing Justin Muzinich to carve out taxes for C-Corporations, which let KKR save billions in taxes:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/02/broken-windows/#Justin-Muzinich

KKR sinks its fangs in every part of the economy, thanks to the vast fortunes it amassed from its investors, ripped off from its customers, and fraudulently obtained from the public purse. After the pandemic, KKR scooped up hundreds of companies at firesale prices:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/30/medtronic-stole-your-ventilator/#blackstone-kkr

Ironically, the investors in KKR funds are also its victims - especially giant public pension funds, whom KKR has systematically defrauded for years:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/22/stimpank/#kentucky

And now KKR has come for Simon & Schuster. The buyout was trumpeted to the press as a done deal, but it's far from a fait accompli. Before the deal can close, the FTC will have to bless it. That blessing is far from a foregone conclusion. KKR also owns Overdrive, the monopoly supplier of e-lending software to libraries.

Overdrive has a host of predatory practices, loathed by both libraries and publishers (indeed, much of the publishing sector's outrage at library e-lending is really displaced anger at Overdrive). There's a plausible case that the merger of one of the Big Five publishers with the e-lending monopoly will present competition issues every bit as deal-breaking as the PRH/S&S merger posed.

(Image: Sefa Tekin/Pexels, modified)

I’m kickstarting the audiobook for “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation,” a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It’s a DRM-free book, which means Audible won’t carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/08/vampire-capitalism/#kkr

[brf-rumortrackinganon]

Omid said that the pages were cut for legal reasons, and then Harry said he removed because his family would never forgive him, I think Omid's version makes more sense and that Harry lied or wasn't intelligent enough to understand that even if he was willing to risk a lawsuit from his family that probably wouldn't come, PRH wouldn't depend on "never complain, never explain" as their insurance policy

I'd forgotten about that.

Yes, I think Scobie's version is probably true - it was cut for legal reasons.

What I suspect happened*, Harry made claims that couldn't be substantiated or that would require PRH to send the manuscript to the subjects for fact-checking. Legal advised to take it out, so the editors cut it and then Harry decided to use it as a threat/olive branch hybrid.

*This knowledge is based on The West Wing episode where Hoynes is writing a book and advance copies are sent to the staff to fact-check and confirm. I have no idea if this is the real process; I assume it is given how meticulous Aaron Sorkin is with his research.

Also I got the new West Wing BTS book, "What's Next" by Mary McCormack and Melissa Fitzpatrick and I cannot put it down. If you like the show (or might be obsessed with it like I am) or you're into public service, add it to your reading list!