At ALA Annual in Washington D.C. - Day 3

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Hello everyone, Otrell L. I. McDaniel here. In case you’re wondering why I’m doing the blog today and not Kelley, today she got a little exasperated with us and how much of the blogging she had been doing. She originally wanted Tess and Kayla to do the blog instead, but I volunteered in their place. Now onto today’s story….

Today we got up very early (5:30 AM) and met with Cynthia Lord, author of Rules (Scholastic, 2006), a book about Katherine, a teenage girl, living life with David, her autistic brother, and Jason, a disabled, mute friend of hers. A book we (Tess and Kayla and I) had recently read. We had breakfast at a Starbucks near our hotel.

After breakfast, we went straight to the exhibit hall, splitting up into pairs (Kelley and I and Tess and Kayla). Kelley and I managed a sweep of three-four rows of exhibits, getting signed books and photographs with Jeff Kinney, author of Diary of a Wimpy Kid (Amulet Books, 2007)

and Walter Dean Myers, author of Autobiography of My Dead Brother (HarperCollins, 2005)

while Tess and Kayla zoomed through apparently the entire hall, managing to fill up each of their empty suitcases before we left the exhibit hall for a luncheon to celebrate author Lois Lowry’s new Margaret A. Edwards Award for The Giver (Houghton Mifflin, 1993), where we were served lunch and were given free copies of The Giver.

After the ceremony, we were given a free hour before we left to escort our prizes back to our hotel, which we used to interrogate the comics section of the hall. We captured many rare books, as well as learning very sadly, that the fifth Unshelved collection was not yet available for sale, only for preorder. We soon ran out of time for the exhibits, and left to cart our treasured haul home.

Barely after returning to the hotel, we left for Mitali Perkins’s book launch party for First Daughter: Extreme American Makeover (Penguin, 2007).

On the way back we chose to split up; Kayla, Tess and I returned home to rest, while Kelley chose to go back to the conference, also telling us for the first time today that we were on our own for dinner. We survived long enough for Kelley to return home though, and so endeth another exciting day for our group in Washington.

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