![]() ![]() ![]() With the chess board in front of her, Annika could enter a space of clear rules and no confusing emotions, and it was at chess club that Annika and Jonathan first met. It was Janice who took Annika to her first chess club meeting, a place that became sacred to Annika. Luckily, just as she was about to throw in the towel and head back home, her compassionate roommate, Janice, took Annika under her wing, helping her to better read and respond to social cues. Yet bumping into Jonathan Hoffman, her college sweetheart, in the frozen food section of their local grocery store sparks hope for something more.įollowing a vicious bullying incident in seventh grade, Annika had been home-schooled, so college life challenged her. Living alone for the last 10 years has pushed Annika Rose, a woman on the autism spectrum, toward independence. ![]()
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![]() ![]() ![]() This sad chapter in history is explored more in-depth in Fur, Fortune and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America and Once They Were Hats: In Search of the Mighty Beaver, but Goldfarb gives a good overview of the scale of the onslaught as trappers caught beavers by the tens of thousands in mere decades. Bison, wolves, and the passenger pigeon are some of the better-known examples of animals that were virtually extirpated (see some suggested reading below), but there was an equally lively trade in beaver pelts. ![]() To understand how we got to where we are, Goldfarb recounts the heydays of the American frontier times, when white settlers fanned out over the USA, killing, trapping, and hunting anything that moved. “ Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter“, written by Ben Goldfarb, published by Chelsea Green Publishing in July 2018 (hardback, 287 pages)Įager mixes equal measures environmental history with reportage on ongoing conservation and wildlife reintroduction programmes. ![]() ![]() ![]() She also did not easily empathize with human characters. My daughter has high-functioning autism, so she struggles with words and reading comprehension and was not very interested in long form stories. ![]() It should also be noted that this series walks a line between opposing war and using violent battle to engage the reader. There are descriptions of cuts and injuries that are tempered for middle-graders, but some sensitive cat lovers could find them too scary. Cats engage in wars and battles, fought with claws and teeth, in which some characters are wounded or killed. ![]() Parallels can be drawn between the clans (which think and feel like humans) and human cultures, making these books an excellent point of departure for discussion about cultural differences and prejudice. All of the books take place in a world of cat characters that belong to different "clans" that have different talents, abilities, and loyalties. If your child is into these books, they offer years' worth of reading to enjoy. Parents need to know that the original series of Warriors books, first published in 2003, has grown to spawn four spin-off series of novels ( The New Prophecy, Power of Three, Omen of the Stars and Dawn of the Clans), as well as other limited series and one-offs. Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide. ![]() ![]() Giselle says, "Holly will always be immune from the damage that infects me. ![]() This is most tragically apparent in the relationship between the two sisters, which is fuelled by their respective obsessions: secrecy and jealousy. History is precisely the way we are implicated in each other's traumas." The quote on the first page is telling: "History, like trauma, is never simply one's own. Ibi Kaslik's first novel takes place, for the most part, behind closed doors: behind the door of a university dorm room where Giselle, the brilliant medical-school student, struggles to maintain her studies while wrestling with anorexia, then behind the door of her room at the hospital as she fights to learn to eat again and confront the past that is eating her, and finally behind the many doors of her home, where Giselle, her younger sister, and their mother attempt to reconstruct a family pulled into fragments by the death of its father and husband.Įach chapter begins with a quote taken from a medical textbook, used to flavour the story that follows. Sometimes a story is so painful that you feel like you've accidentally stumbled upon something you shouldn't have, that you've found the author's private notes by mistake or opened the door on a solitary conversation. ![]() HarperCollins Canada, 244 pp, $19.95, softcover. ![]() ![]() Ware is writing about important and also relatively mundane events in the lives of ordinary people he's writing about eating and sleeping and work and talk and relationship struggles and parenting, the stuff of any novel, and it's also about adult loneliness. ![]() I think the publication of Building Stories is one of the most important events in the history of graphic literature, an instant classic, but it is not all play, and it is not primarily a book for kids. Why a game box, with a game board? To resuscitate, in part, the idea of reading as game, even if not exclusively for "fun" (though it is also about that). ![]() 6/1/12: I just finished this brilliant, brilliant "book" (that comes in a game box, larger than a Monopoly box), with various sizes and colors and shapes of books and magazines and flyers and a children's book and a game board. ![]() ![]() The most sophisticated of these readers profess not to subscribe, as Martha Billips puts it, to a “static, preconceived notion of Appalachian culture” (“Wild” 28): they also endorse something like Fred Hobson’s claim that in Smith’s work, “the ‘mountain people’ are like other people, no more and no less ‘sweet’ or ‘simple’” (29). Seeking markers of Appalachian or Southern distinctiveness, such readers are often delighted with the granny women, coal miners’ daughters, snake-handling preachers, and irresistible fiddlers who populate Smith’s novels, and with her characteristic affirmation of continuities of place and family in the face of significant social and economic change. ![]() ![]() Members of the first group identify themselves as Appalachian or Southern and wish to acclaim Smith as a major Appalachian or Southern writer. HADDOX University of Tennessee Myth as Therapy in Lee Smith’s Oral History TO JUDGE FROM SCHOLARLY CRITICISM, POPULAR REVIEWS, AND THE responses of my own students, the audience for Lee Smith’s novels consists primarily of two groups with distinct, though often overlapping, commitments. ![]() In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: ![]() ![]() And without a sister to carry on the conversation, I just kept going. Giving her a backstory, what she had done today, where she was going now, who she was talking to. I started this habit of narrating the doll’s life. And boys just don’t play well with dolls. I loved dolls–they seemed so interesting!–but playing by yourself, they’re sort of boring. Primarily, I wanted someone to play Barbies and American Girls with. My brothers tended to pair off–two of them, one of me–and I wanted someone to pair off with. ![]() When I was a kid, I always wanted a sister. Sounds amazing! And now, from AC on this week’s theme of knowing when to pack it in: Only the Hood and his band know the truth: the agile thief posing as a whip of a boy is actually a fearless young woman with a secret past. ![]() ![]() Her debut young adult novel Scarlet, a retelling of the Robin Hood legend, released on Valentine’s Day, 2012 from Bloomsbury/Walker.Ībout Scarlet: Posing as one of Robin Hood’s thieves to avoid the wrath of the evil Thief Taker Lord Gisbourne, Scarlet has kept her identity secret from all of Nottinghamshire. Freelance writer, wrapper, hotel concierge, retail flunkie, telemarketer, non-profit board member and personal shopper are just the beginning of the list, but young adult novelist is without a doubt her favorite hat to wear. ![]() AC Gaughen has been a lot of things in her life. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Frank wonders if he’ll ever again see Amanda alive. Amanda wonders if Frank can somehow come to her rescue. There have been quarrels-savage and bloody-deeply relished by the ever-watchful GM. In the meantime, Amanda and her playmates are counting the ways Scavenger has been designed to sow civil discord. Bit by bit, he puts together clues that point him toward a ghost town in Wyoming, Scavenger’s arena. He’s frantic, desperate to find her, senses evil at work. Drugged, yes, conscripted, no, Frank awakens on the site of an abandoned hotel in Asbury Park, N.J., Amanda gone from him. ![]() She’s the lover of Frank Balenger, who shares much of her history, but who, for plot-stirring purposes, has not been pressed into game-playing service. Drugged and drafted is the dauntless, durable Amanda Evert, a young woman with a difficult past (see Creepers, 2005). At the outset, there are five, all brought to the starting line after being drugged and kidnapped. He’s the Game Master, he tells the players, who are not exactly volunteers. ![]() Scavenger, it’s called, and the sought-after prize has been hidden away by a nutcase who sees unmistakable resemblances between himself and God. It’s a dangerous game-fatal, actually-for those unfortunate enough not to win. In thrillermeister Morrell’s 26th, the game’s afoot big-time. ![]() ![]() ![]() The plot trudges along with the refugees, narration shared between Rachel’s and Logan’s indistinguishable first-person, present-tense voices. Logan frets, and Rachel fights grief, guilt and PTSD only in each other’s arms can they temporarily forget their current miseries. But who is leaving creepy notes and murdering refugees as they go? It must-gasp-be someone among them. Logan’s kick-ass lover, Rachel, with the help of Tree People Willow and Quinn (ersatz Native Americans in this bizarre, post-apocalyptic very-near-future), conducts weapons training along the way. ![]() Sure enough, the Commander comes knocking, and they all go fleeing in an unlikely exodus that takes them into the Wasteland. Reluctant 19-year-old leader Logan knows they will soon be beset: by the leader of city-state Rowansmark, whose prized piece of stolen, Cursed One–controlling tech Logan holds, or by the ousted Commander of Baalboden, bent on revenge-or both. Just a scant 157 residents of Baalboden remain after the devastation wrought by the dragonlike Cursed One at the end of series opener Defiance (2012). ![]() ![]() I can’t comment on the first comparison but in terms of the second one… nope, no comparison. It’s described in the blurb as a cross between The Secret History and And Then There Were None. And if that’s your thing, then this is a well-constructed read. ![]() ![]() Inspired in part from visiting the location in which the book is set, this is very much in the vein of the modern unreliable narrator narrative. A body has been found – one of the guests – and the only person she should be able to trust, the local in charge of hunting, is behaving oddly.Īnd if there’s a body, there must also be a murderer…Ī new release from Harper Collins, this is the first thriller from Lucy Foley, who has written three historical novels before this. Three days later, and the manager of the resort, Heather, has a crisis on her hands. And while tensions can run a little high, it’s nothing new between old friends. An isolated group of cottages in the remote Highlands of Scotland. Nine friends who have always spent New Year together have outdone themselves this time. ![]() |