This book seems to be everywhere at the moment. It has been prominently displayed in bookstores since its hardback publication last year and the paperback just came out, causing a fresh wave of publicity. There are posters everywhere I turn, all of them emblazoned with pull quotes from glowing reviews about how exciting, pulse racing, daring, smart and thrilling it is. You’ll see there’s a sticker on the cover there that denotes it is “the only thriller you need to read this year”. Having now […]
Where is the girl,
Where is the girl, who by the boatman’s door, Above the locks, above the boating throng, Unmoor’d our skiff when through the Wytham flats, Red loosestrife and blond meadow-sweet among And darting swallows and light water-gnats, We track’d the shy Thames shore? (From Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis” (1865) , set around Oxford.) More detective fiction! But this time it’s actually from the interwar period–the Golden Age–rather than just being set there. An all-female Oxford college, full of clever, high-spirited girls with enough time […]
Let’s stop telling girls to “be nice”; that’s what makes them into Mean Girls.
I know, it sounds counter-intuitive, but it’s true. It turns them into one of the more difficult types of bully to deal with, a silent one.
My Summer Reading is Humming Along
Every summer I bring home a bag or box full of books from our school library. I spend the summer reading so that I have plenty of recommendations for the kids when school starts back in the fall. My first read for the summer was The Humming Room by Ellen Potter. The description caught my attention when I was doing book orders this past year, and I found a book trailer that caught the kids’ attention when I showed it at school. So, with my […]
Arkham’s descent into madness
I’ve always held the belief that the best batman stories aren’t about batman at all. Arkham Asylum further strengthened my personal hypothesis. On April Fools day Batman gets a call from the Joker, locked in Arkham Asylum. The prisoners have broken out of their cells and are taking the staff and other innocents hostage. Batman can save them, but only if he voluntarily submits himself to the treatment of Arkham Asylum. When he gets there the hostages are let free without any hassle, but the […]
Friendship, Sacrifices, and Loneliness
“My heart hurts,” said one of my students, crouching near her desk, after we finished the book recently. She then asked if she could go in the hallway because her pain in response the story was so acute. Some others had tears in their eyes–the girls visibly so while the boys tried to hide or deny theirs. I had a lump in my throat and waited until I had control over my emotions so that I could formulate my words to speak. In all, I […]
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