Ever since my daughter Winnie was born three years ago, I’ve been struggling with princesses. Well, with princesses and with all that seems to come along with them. The emphasis on beauty, the focus on being desired/getting married, the assertion that girls can’t (or wouldn’t want to) do the same things as boys. And, the …
Dear Friends, January rocked. We got to see 60 girls at our winter reunion, 134 girls signed up for summer camp, and 225 new families took part in our Real Parents, Real Daughters workshop series! When we weren’t teaching or working on new programs we were taking in some amazing new resources for supporting the …
Last summer I did a lot of thinking and blogging about the awesome-ness that is summer reading. What could be better than walking around with a book tucked under your arm, on the look-out for a sunny place to sit a spell? Summer reading happens on the beach, on planes, in hammocks, in the park, …
I have a love/hate relationship with princesses. I love them out of nostalgia. As a child, my cousin, sister, friends, and I spent many afternoons at the public pool swimming around pretending to be mermaids. We were all Ariels – a legion of them – singing, undulating our “tails,” and whipping our long, wet hair …
Young Adult Fiction – YA, to those of us in the know – is all the rage right now. With Suzanne Collins’ Mockingjay recently released and following in the age group-transcending footsteps of Harry Potter and Twilight, everyone seems to agree that it’s okay for a grown-up to read a kid’s book. Even the New York …
If you’ve spent any time among the Young Adult fiction shelves at your local library or bookstore, you’ve most likely heard of Sarah Dessen. It’s hard to miss the work of this prolific writer. Two of her books – Someone Like You and That Summer – were turned into the movie How to Deal starring …
The Newbery Awards were announced just a couple of weeks ago, and The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly was named as a Newbery Honor book. I’d already intended to read it, despite the fact that there is nary a mention of vampires, secret anarchist districts, or, even, romance. However, it is a Young …
I’ve been reading a book called Girldrive: Criss-Crossing America, Redefining Feminism by Nona Willis Aronowitz and the late Emma Bee Bernstein. In the book, Nona and Emma, two young feminists, recount their recent cross-country road trip. The goal of their trip was to meet with more than a hundred women—most of them young women—in order find out what women think about feminism. The book is a beautiful and thought-provoking narrative collage of interviews and photos, interwoven with pieces of feminist history and thoughts from the road. The book’s innovative format—it reads like a magazine, or like a blog really—makes it easily accessible and fun to read in both short bursts and for long periods of time. To me, the book makes feminism come alive: every interviewee has her own take on feminism, which demonstrates both the flexibility and the vivacity of the concept and movement.
It’s no secret that I’m a Twilight fan. The books allowed me to joyfully indulge in cheesy, fluffy escapist fantasy. And the movies are no different. The first movie in the Twilight “saga” was enjoyable the same way campy b-movies are enjoyable. The effects were bad, the makeup was bad, the script was REALLY bad (er…. “spider monkey?”). It was low budget, and it showed. I giggled my way through it.
This time around, the producers understood what they had in hand: a money machine. So, they threw a little budget at it, changed the director and… voila! New Moon is a very different kind of movie. The special effects are great, especially when the werewolves come on the scene, and the dialogue is actually funny in parts. I mean, on purpose.
One reason I love reading historical fiction books is that, every once in a while, you get the magical feeling of a character stepping out of her time, reaching out across the pages to whisper her truths in your ear, and the amazing thing is that the two of you could be sisters. It’s like meeting someone at a party who has a completely different background than you but with whom you instantly connect and see eye-to-eye. Only in this case, it feels even more magical because the person with whom you have so much in common is actually a figment of some author’s imagination and you wonder, “How on Earth did she know?? How did she get what is going on in my head right at this moment?”
