Appetite for ‘Chick’ Lit
By Sally Lodge, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 7/10/2008
Sloane Tanen, whose fuzzy yellow chicks have braved life’s vicissitudes in Bitter with Baggage Seeks Same, Going for the Bronze and Hatched!, turns her wry humor to dating anxiety, back-stabbing cliques, gym class and other high-school humiliations in Appetite for Detention, which Bloomsbury USA will release in August with a 60,000-copy first printing. Like her adult titles and her four books for younger children about a chick named Coco, Tanen collaborated with photographer Stefan Hagen on this release.
Before chicks played such an active role in her life, Tanen was pursuing a Ph.D. in art history at Columbia when she realized that she would rather paint than study painters. “I began building dioramas inside boxes, creating scenes that I would then paint,” she says. But she didn’t envision these scenes filled with the birds from the start. “I started putting little iconic Easter chicks in the scenes and began photographing them with a point-and-click camera and making personalized cards for friends.”
But why chicks? “One day I went to the dentist and the receptionist had taped a couple of chicks to her desk. It occurred to me that it looked like they were having a conversation and I thought it was hilarious,” Tanen recalls. People who saw her dioramas had a similar reaction. “These chicks got a universally positive response, which I wouldn’t have expected in a million years.”
When a friend in publishing suggested that Tanen build a book around her scenarios, she was initially skeptical, unable to envision their transition to the page. At the time, she was working in an artist’s cooperative where Hagen occupied the space next to hers. “On a whim, I asked him to shoot some photos of the chicks in various settings on spec,” she says. When Tanen saw his photographs, she became convinced the project could be a book and hired Amy Williams as her agent, who sold Bitter with Baggage Seeks Same to Bloomsbury USA.
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The author was initially hesitant to pose her chicks in the teenage world, insisting, “Older kids can smell out any kind of fraud, and 15-year-olds terrify me.” Yet since Tanen’s father, Ned Tanen, had produced such cult films as Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire, she acknowledges that she had grown up familiar with that world of teen angst. “And of course I remembered my own experiences,” she says. “So I decided to give it a try.” The result, says director of publicity Deb Shapiro, is “what I like to think of as Bitter with Backpack.”
For Appetite for Detention, Cecka encouraged Tanen to create seven individual characters representing different personality types. “I told her to channel her own teenage self and give her humor free reign, touching upon school, parents and peers,” says the editor.
Though Cecka hopes that Tanen will revisit her teenage chicks, the author isn’t sure what her next move will be. “Part of me thinks this may well be the last book,” Tanen says, “but these characters kind of took on a life of their own. So I guess I could see doing another book about them. I always seem to initially say no to things that I then end up saying yes to.”
Appetite for Detention by Sloane Tanen, photos by Stefan Hagen. Bloomsbury USA, $14.95 978-1-59990-075-9
