“I Never”: Geektastic, ed. Holly Black and Cecil Castelucci, Little, Brown. 2009
“The best stories in this anthology are the ones that force their kid protagonists to align their fantasy lives with reality. In pieces from New York Times bestseller Cassandra Clare and Nebula Award winner Kelly Link, the stories get at the emotional heart of gamer meet-ups, when online friends meet in person for the first time and are faced with the difficulty of knowing what’s real and who’s truthful in a world in which everyone is pretending to be someone else. “When we were first getting acquainted online, we sent flirty photos of ourselves to each other — I’d take a picture of my elbow and send it to him, and he’d respond with a photo of just his left eye, or the curve of his ear. I couldn’t have put a picture of his face together in my mind, but I knew he had a scar on his right thumb, and a spray of freckles across one cheek, light as powder dust. . . . Now that the rest of him is filled in around the edges I am amazed — he looks just like I thought he would,” writes Clare in “I Never.” — The Los Angeles Times