Welcome to Buzz Worthy News where the stories are awesome and not at all well-written. Need your YA industry news? Never fear, Kate Copeseeley is here to give it to you straight.

In this week’s Buzz Worthy News: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them has casting news, Game of Thrones has a newcomer, Andrew McCarthy is writing YA and the controversy surrounding the Christian romance debacle continues. All this and more in this week’s Buzz Worthy News.

Buzz Worthy News is Cuddlebuggery’s weekly news post bringing you all the best information about the book and blogging world, particularly for the venn diagram of people who overlap between the two. For new releases and cover reveals of all the best Young Adult fiction, check out our Tuesday post: Hot New Titles.

Fantastic Beasts Casting News

If you’re like me, and sulking over the long wait you have till this movie comes out, at least there is comfort in the form of casting news coming out every other day.  First up, Jenn Murray and Ezra Miller:

Irish actress Jenn Murray and American actor Ezra Miller have joined Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

While reports suggested earlier this week that Miller was cast in Fantastic Beasts, the latest reports again name him as a co-star.

Miller aside, the latest person to join Fantastic Beasts is Jenn Murray who, according to The Wrap, will “share scenes with Miller’s character, who’s a rival of sorts to Newt Scamander.”

No other details about the two characters or their relationship to one another were shared today, but it sounds like Miller’s character will be a second rival to Newt (the first is Jacob played by Dan Fogler).

The other news is super exciting! Colin Farrell is joining up as well:

Farrell will play Graves, a wizard that Newt Scamander (Redmayne) meets in New York. The story centers on Newt’s adventures in the secret community of witches and wizards as he attempts to document magical creatures. The events of Fantastic Beasts take place 70 years before Harry Potter reads Newt’s book in school.

This movie cannot come soon enough!

Sources HERE and HERE

Game Of Thrones Season 6 Newcomer

At least some characters in the TV show are going to be the same as the book’s.  And it looks like they’re doing casting for those characters right now.

Legendary actor Max von Sydow is joining Game of Thrones season 6, and unlike another recent casting, we know exactly who he’ll play.

Sydow has joined the sixth run of HBO’s Game of Thrones as the Three-Eyed Raven, a character who last appeared in the season 4 finale and was played by a different actor (Struan Rodger).

The character was lurking in the shadows during the first and third seasons.

Now, if I remember correctly, this dude is grown into a tree, so I will be interested to see if they stay true to Martin’s vision.

Source

Andrew McCarthy Writes YA

Looks like Andrew McCarthy isn’t just interested in acting anymore, as he has signed on with Algonquin Young Readers to write a book called, Just Fly Away.

“Just Fly Away” centers on a 15-year-old girl in suburban New Jersey who learns that she has an 8-year-old half brother living in the same town, a discovery that leads her to question how well she really knows her family. The book, written for young adults, is scheduled for publication in the spring of 2017.

Though “Just Fly Away” is Mr. McCarthy’s first attempt at fiction, he has already made inroads in narrative nonfiction, as a travel writer and an editor-at-large for National Geographic Traveler.

Elise Howard, the publisher of Algonquin Young Readers, said in a statement that she was taken with the characters and voice in Mr. McCarthy’s novel, which she called “an original and timeless story that involves family, friendship, and first love, and what happens to all of them when one is turned upside down.”

Well, color me intrigued.  Will definitely be interested in seeing what comes of this.

Source

Holly Black Signs Deal For New YA Trilogy

Well, this is good news for me at least, having just finished The Darkest Part Of The Forest earlier this year (and having LOVED it).  Holly Black just signed on to write a trilogy with Little, Brown Books.  Yippee!

The first book in The Folk of Air Trilogy, The Cruel Prince, will be published in the winter of 2018, with two still-untitled books to follow. A digital novella is also included in the deal, in addition to the three print and e-books.

“This series will delve deeper into the strange, glittering, malicious courts of Faerie than I’ve gone before,” Black says in a release. While The Darkest Part of the Forest introduced readers to the faerie world, The Folk of Air Trilogy will bring that world a step closer. This new series, according to the publisher, focuses on “a young human girl who witnesses her parents’ deaths and is forcibly taken to Faerieland with her two sisters—one faery, one human—where she will grow up and one day fight to gain power.”

OMG, this is going to be fantastic, I can tell already!

Source

Kim Kardashian’s Book Is A Flop

Looks like the publisher who took on Kim Kardashian is regretting that decision like a hangover from bad tequila (just supposition on my part).  Because her book is doing bad.  How bad?  This bad:

Kim Kardashian has 41 million Instagram followers, but RadarOnline.com has learned that her online popularity didn’t translate into huge sales for her book of selfies, Selfish.

But reps for Nielsen Bookscan told Radar exclusively that so far, it has only sold 32,000 copies. That represents just 0.8% of Kardashian’s Instagram fans.

Guys, it has about 210 ratings on goodreads (just for sake of comparison).

Tyra Banks book Modelland, as horrendous as it was, as 2000ish ratings.  In other words, they aren’t kidding when they say nobody, but nobody is buying this thing.  And the ratings have not been kind:

“A poor tree died for this!” Tracy Young wrote.

User Angela called it a “waste of money!”

“This book seems like it was made with absolutely no thought, consieration, just for money!” she wrote.

It still sold better than Kendall and Kylie Jenner’s sci-fi book, though. 😀

Source

Christian Romance Creates Controversy With Subject Matter

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https://twitter.com/bibliogato/status/628748947469795328?refsrc=email&s=11

https://twitter.com/bibliogato/status/628749141015965696?refsrc=email&s=11

Not only did this book take the Jewish story much celebrated and honored, but it mixed it into a love story with the type of man who mostly likely tortured, abused, and killed other Jews.  As salon.com puts it:

The offense isn’t that Christian retailing’s 2015 best-selling award winner appropriates a fundamentally Jewish story and airlifts it into the teeth of the Holocaust — it’s that it misunderstands the story it’s appropriated on a very basic level.

By collapsing those two characters into a single SS-Kommandant, Breslin conflates two crucially distinct questions — “Can people who stand by while others do evil in their name be redeemed?” and “Are those who commit atrocities capable of redemption?” The former can be asked of the entire German population, after all, whereas the latter is limited to those who abandoned their humanity in the name of a failed ideology.

And that is the book’s most glaring offense — the suggestion that an SS officer who personally participated in the extermination of the Jewish people can be redeemed, but that a Jew caught in the awful whorls of history can’t even survive unless her faith is supplemented by the Christian faith.

So what they’re saying is someone entered this book and RWA writers are the ones who chose it as a finalist.  It reminds me a lot of the controversy over the Hugo awards this year.  You can’t ban certain content from the contest, but the members themselves can rise the book to a higher level or let it fall by the wayside.

In this case, the book did not win in either of the categories it was nominated for.

Sources Here and Here and Here and Here

Interesting Links:

What One Author Learned By Querying Under A Man’s Name

Theory About Dumbledore In Deathly Hallows

Amazing Fanart With HP Characters As Different Races (another link)

Ada Lovelace As A Female Computer Scientist

What  We Can Learn About 1960’s Female Authors