Vega, Denise

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Vega, Denise

(Denise B. Vega)

PERSONAL: Married; children: three. Hobbies and other interests: Fishing, hiking, camping, swimming, watching movies, and reading.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Little, Brown and Company, 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

CAREER: Writer.

WRITINGS:

WordPerfect for Legal Professionals, Version 5.1, creative direction by Donald S. Metz, technical editing by Robert Swanson, CFMS (Jacksonville, FL) 1992.

Groupwise for Windows 3.1 on the Job Essentials, Que Corporation (Indianapolis, IN), 1996.

Groupwise for Windows 3.1 on the Job Essentials Instructor's Manual, Que Corporation (Indianapolis, IN), 1996.

WordPerfect 101 for the Law Office: A Guide to Basic Document Production, ABA Section of Law Practice Management (Chicago, IL), 1996.

WordPerfect 201 for the Law Office: A Guide to Advanced Document Production, ABA Section of Law Practice Management (Chicago, IL), 1996.

Discover WordPerfect Suite 8, IDG Books Worldwide (Foster City, CA), 1997.

WordPerfect 7 for Windows '95 Essentials, Level II, Que E & T (Indianapolis, IN), 1997.

WordPerfect 7 for Windows '95 Essentials Level III, Que E & T (Indianapolis, IN), 1997.

(With Shelley O'Hara and Julia Kelly) Discover Office 97, IDG Books Worldwide (Foster City, CA), 1997.

Learning the Internet for Kids: A Voyage to Internet Treasures, DDC (New York, NY), 1998.

Word Processing for Kids, illustrated by Ryan Sather, DDC (New York, NY), 1999.

Click Here: (To Find out How I Survived Seventh Grade) (novel), Little, Brown (New York, NY), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS: Denise Vega wrote her first novel when she was fifteen, but she would not get a fiction book published until many years later. "I always wanted to be a writer and I always wrote but I started out writing a lot of magazine articles, computer books, and other stuff like that for adults to help keep our family in toilet paper and chocolate chip cookies," noted the author on her home page. After more than a decade writing computer books, Vega published her first fiction book in 2005. Click Here: (To Find out How I Survived Seventh Grade) tells the story of the self-conscious Erin Swift, who thinks her feet are too big and believes the only thing she is good at is working on the computer and writing on her personal and secret Web log. As she starts middle school, Erin is further demoralized when her best friend Jilly is put into a different class. Soon after school begins, Erin also has a confrontation with her childhood nemeses, Serena. Soon Erin begins to adjust and develops a crush for Mark, only to be disheartened when Mark and Jilly begin dating. The girl reveals her inner turmoil's on her blog, only to mistakenly post her entry on her school's Intranet. The posting not only embarrasses her; it also angers Erin's friends, whom she has written about freely.

In a review in School Library Journal, Linda L. Plevak commented: "The characters and situations are believable, and readers will relate to and sympathize with Erin's dilemmas." A Publishers Weekly contributor called the story "a heartfelt book about a girl becoming her own person," while a Kirkus Reviews writer noted that "the blog segments and first-person narration are immediate and funny." Hillary Williamson, writing on the BookLoons Web site, commended the novel "for its excellent portrayal of the self-conscious vulnerability of the early teens, and of a girl growing out of a friend's shadow into her own strength of character." Angela Etheridge called Click Here "one of the funniest, most entertaining novels I have read in a long time" in her online review for the Romance Readers Connection. Etheridge added that the story "will keep all readers laughing and begging for more!"