I like to throw a little YA/Middle Grade lit into my reading diet every so often, and The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl, by Stacy McAnulty, fit the bill.
My twelve year old daughter actually got to the book first. She said “it was interesting. It was a good story.” Which isn’t very enthusiastic, but I interrupted her from doing something else to ask. She’ll tell me if she didn’t like a book.
I started it weeks after she’d finished it, when I was out of renewals at the library and was afraid I’d have to return it without reading it like I had to do with two other books sitting on my reading pile this month.
Appropriately, I read the first third sitting in a middle school/high school auditorium at one of my daughters’ stage rehearsals for a dance recital.
The image shows the paperback version of Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, by Jon Kabat-Zinn, but I actually ended up listening to the audiobook. The Chaplain recommended this book to me a little while ago. He didn’t say much about it. I just remember him telling me, “you should read it.” Since he doesn’t recommend many books to me and our reading interests don’t intersect much, I took him seriously.
An Extraordinary Union: A Novel of the Civil War, by Alyssa Cole, is an intersectional work: historical fiction, romance, and Black History, all in one place. Bonus? It’s also written by a woman of color.
This spring, I read a blog post about romance novels, which led to another post, which led to another post. The gist of what I read is that more women should give romance a try: It’s written by women, for women, about women, and it’s about what women want. That’s pretty unique in the literary world, and the world in general.
I haven’t read a romance novel since high school, and the few I read then kind of shocked me. I didn’t make the genre part of my repertoire after that. After reading the articles, I felt perhaps I should give this underappreciated area of fiction another try.
Does this post look familiar? I scheduled two posts for the same date last month, and didn’t realize till they’d already gone live. I pulled this one down and rescheduled it. If you’ve already read this post but didn’t request the book from your library yet, consider this your friendly reminder.
Are you intentional about modeling how to deal with negative emotions to your kids?
Society, and our nuclear families growing up, have a big impact on how we process our emotions. Some families have certain acceptable emotions. Maybe it was OK to be angry, but sadness was mocked. Or only certain responses to negative emotions were encouraged. Snarky wit in response to feeling hurt? Cool. Crying? Not cool. Society also teaches us no one wants to see you when you’re angry or sad.
How do we teach our kids to function in a healthy way in a world full of broken people?
