Monica Hughes (News Only To Me)

Monica Hughes is dead. It's unlikely any of you have a clue how much I liked her books, because I haven't seen a copy of Invitation to the Game or Keeper of the Isis Light since I left middle school, though I always checked the used book stores, always in the wrong places. I'm coming to realize the power of public libraries late in life, but the synergistic might of Google, Amazon and Inter-Library Loan is still hitting home, usually when I recall semi-obscure authors like Hughes. Doing attitude tracebacks picks up Isis as an early formative influence that I'd love to go back to. Yes, it's kids SF, but if you start lobbing "just kids SF" titles at me, you eventually get a patchwork story of my entire life since the local library and the only book store in town were in the same shopping complex. (The library has since moved twice, and the book store closed when I was still a kid.) You can go from Isis to KSR's Mars trilogy quite easily, and from there to some really terrible English paper topics, and then I can entertain you with my writing disasters for at least a quarter of an hour. There is a reason I have a fluffy livejournal and fell into a career field that don't tell you about the writing bits until it's too late.

Because I am in mourning that Hughes will never write anything again, and because Hughes was a YA writer, I am ILLing every book she's ever written all the easy to spot SF/F: the Isis trilogy, The Golden Aquarians, and Invitation to the Game.