Meow or never jazz taylor5/12/2023 ![]() ![]() Ableism, the intentional and unintentional discrimination of disabled people, exists in many forms, and reading from disabled perspectives can help kids identify ableism, especially if conversations about ableism follow. And it’s just as crucial for non-disabled kids to read disabled perspectives. While there are no middle grade novels featuring a protagonist with POTS (I’m only aware of one book that has a main character with POTS, the YA novel One for All by Lillie Lainoff, which will be out in 2022), I know it would’ve been groundbreaking to see a character like me on the page, especially during the middle school years, when pretty much everything is horrible. ![]() My disability, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), began in 4th grade and steadily worsened into my teen years. While there’s still a dearth of good books available with disabled main characters, it’s getting better. Thankfully, it seems like more and more #OwnVoices middle grade novels with disabled main characters are being published, and this is a trend that I am definitely here for. ![]()
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After ever happy anna todd movie5/12/2023 ![]() ![]() Is ‘A Man Called Otto’ Based on a True Story? How Swedish Author Fredrik Backman Came Up With His Character Stream It Or Skip It: 'Bupkis' On Peacock, Where Pete Davidson Plays Himself In A Slightly Heightened Version Of His Life Stream It Or Skip It: 'Tommy Little: Pretty Fly For A Dickhead' On Prime Video, The Australian Comedian Takes Flight Stream It Or Skip It: 'A Man Called Otto' on Netflix, Starring Tom Hanks as a Stereotypical Grumpy Old Man Stream It or Skip It: 'Spring Breakthrough' on Hallmark Movies & Mysteries Proves We Need More Keesha Sharp ![]() ![]() Stream It Or Skip It: 'Tom Jones' On PBS, A Romance-Focused Adaptation Of Henry Fielding's Novel Is 'Love Again' Streaming on HBO Max or Netflix? Gwyneth Paltrow Recalls "British Press Being So Horrible" After Her 'Shakespeare in Love' Oscar Win: "Totally Overwhelming" ![]() Diana gabaldon5/12/2023 ![]() In the 19th century, the definition of the romance genre was an escape from daily life that included adventure and love and battle. ![]() Because it is, and it isn’t …Ī romance is a courtship story. ![]() Hopefully this season, with all its battles, politics, and court intrigue, helped Outlander shed some of the stigma that comes associated with being a romance story. Gabaldon chatted with Vulture about how Outlander isn’t really a romance, why she shot Rupert in the eye, and how much of her script she had to change on set. Moore likely picked episode 11 for Gabaldon because it matches its source material pretty well in terms of chronology, which would make it relatively easy for her to transform it into a script, “without doing violence to my sense of composition,” she laughed. And while the author has served as a consultant on the show, helping shape what you see onscreen and even making the odd cameo, Saturday’s episode was the first one actually scripted by her. Outlander, the television series, is based on a series of books by Diana Gabaldon (season two is adapted from Dragonfly in Amber). ![]() Spoilers ahead for the most recent episode of Outlander. ![]() The Open Curtain by Brian Evenson5/11/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() (Later, the character looks into the mirror and thinks, “What frightened me was not how the man thrown back so little resembled me, but how he so greatly did.”) In “Mudder Tongue,” a man’s loss of control over his speech (thinking one word, “fishing,” but involuntarily saying another, “gravy”) leads him first to a darkly comic situation of almost speaking in tongues, then to placing a shotgun in his mouth. “Dread,” an illustrated story, chronicles how a man’s obsession with the phrase “He no longer resembled me” portends a fate of self-mutilation. His characters cling to sentences, phrases and words with the intensity that usually accompanies unrequited love. In his new collection, “Fugue State,” Evenson’s stories most often serve as detective-style investigations into the horror of everyday speech. Yet the grimmest turns in Evenson’s writing have always been connected to a singularly modern obsession with language Over a career of four novels and five story collections, he has birthed a distinctive, postmodern style for exploring his favorite macabre topics - amputation, post-apocalyptic landscapes, doppelgangers, “creatures of darkness” and religious bloodshed. Brian Evenson is the Donald Barthelme of psychological horror. ![]() A devil all the time book5/11/2023 ![]() ![]() There’s the spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore, running from the law. There’s Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can’t save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer no matter how much sacrificial blood he pours on his “prayer log.” There’s Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial killers, who troll America’s highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. ![]() Set in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia, The Devil All the Time follows a cast of compelling and bizarre characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s. ![]() In The Devil All the Time, Donald Ray Pollock has written a novel that marries the twisted intensity of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers with the religious and Gothic overtones of Flannery O’Connor at her most haunting. Now a Netflix film starring Tom Holland and Robert PattinsonĪ dark and riveting vision of 1960s America that delivers literary excitement in the highest degree. ![]() Ice by lyn gardner5/11/2023 ![]() ![]() Are the friends doomed to a dastardly death at sea?#The talented author-and-illustrator team of Lyn Gardner and Ros Asquith continue the hysterical and exuberant fun in this third and final installment of the early chapter book series about “the nastiest and ghastliest pirates ever to have sailed the seven seas.” The series is perfect for beginning readers who love outrageous, goofy and gross humor in a fast-moving story. But when things go awry, Tat and Hetty become the captives instead, and they’re suddenly thrown into a perilous race against the ocean’s rising tide. Fortunately, once local children Tat and Hetty realize the evil McNastys are responsible for The Good Hope’s disappearance, they devise a clever trap to easily lure the witless duo to their capture. Seizing on their good luck, the pair quickly rid themselves of the ship’s captain and crew, commandeer the vessel and set sail once again to claim Captain Syd’s lost treasure. ![]() Sweaty socks! Squeaky underpants! Just when the inhabitants of Little Snoring think they’ve seen the last of Gruesome and Grisly McNasty, the “repulsive, repellant” pirate twins are unexpectedly - and very disgustingly - expelled from a shark onto the deck of The Good Hope. ![]() The accidental by ali smith5/11/2023 ![]() What is her mother doing? "She is writing and researching about people who died last century again." Astrid is being bullied at school, and the girls have taken her mobile phone, a loss to which she has not confessed: "If her mother and Michael knew this they would literally have kittens." They are there all summer, and there is nothing to do, but luckily Astrid has a video camera, so she has been "taping dawns". (The reader may be wondering how a male critic can be so sure that this 12-year-old girl is accurate - having two sisters, both of whom were once 12, I claim inside information.) We first meet her, stuck in a boring Norfolk holiday home with her mother Eve, stepfather Michael and elder brother Magnus. One of them is Astrid, a 12-year-old girl, whose habits of thought and language are so perfectly pitched and entertaining that she becomes instantly lovable. Ali Smith pulls it off with terrific verve in this novel, which is a skilful exercise in free indirect style: the characters are not first-person narrators, but lovingly distinguished third-person points of view. ![]() Mystery garden coloring book5/11/2023 ![]() ![]() “People are really excited to do something analog and creative, at a time when we’re all so overwhelmed by screens and the Internet,” she said. Part of the apparent appeal is the tactile, interactive nature of the books, which offer respite to the screen-weary. ![]() Basford’s book on Instagram, where he has 1.8 million followers. The craze was kicked off in part, it seems, by a Korean pop star, Kim Ki-bum, who posted a delicately colored-in floral pattern from Ms. Basford has become something of a literary celebrity in South Korea, where “Secret Garden” has sold more than 430,000 copies, she says. “Each page can transport you back to a gentler time of life,” she said of Ms. Rebekah Jean Duthie, who lives in Queensland, Australia, and works for the Australian Red Cross, says she regularly gathers with friends for “coloring circles” at cafes and in one another’s homes. Others have turned it into a social activity. Hard-core fans often buy several copies of her books at a time, to experiment with different color combinations. ![]() King and dragonflies5/11/2023 ![]() ![]() Shining a spotlight on this formation might make it harder for some to feel respected in their journey.)Ĥ) Why does King keep a notebook of things his brother has said in his asleep? ![]() (Eager for their own individuality, these students inadvertently added pressure to their peers at a time when identities are still being formed. Then the gossip mill starts about Sandy coming out as gay. Also, Mikey knows that his own brother is friends with King)ģ) At school, 12-year-old King and his classmates begin to hint about crushes they experience. Mikey may have been at odds with King’s brother, but never wished him dead. _(Perhaps it is true that no one is all good or all bad we are all in the process of becoming someone. Why is Mikey motivated to extend his condolences to King? They are dainty, beautiful, winged creatures that represent transformation and self-realization)Ģ) In chapter one, there is a tense exchange between Mikey Sanders and King with an unexpected outcome. _(dragonflies in this story are nearly angelic. ![]() What characteristics of dragonflies made our author chose them? What do they symbolize? This entry was posted in Julie's DIYs on by Julie Martinġ) King believes his brother has become a dragonfly. ![]() Dreamsnake vonda mcintyre5/10/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Reviewers also praised McIntyre's writing and the book's themes. ![]() ![]() The strength and self-sufficiency of Snake as a protagonist were noted by several commentators. The novel was well-received, winning the 1978 Nebula Award, the 1979 Hugo Award, and the 1979 Locus Poll Award. Dreamsnake also explored varying social structures and sexual paradigms from a feminist perspective, and examined themes of healing and cross-cultural interaction. McIntyre subverted conventionally gendered narratives by rewriting a typical heroic quest to place a woman at its center, and by using devices such as avoiding gender pronouns to challenge expectations about characters' gender identities. The book is considered an example of second-wave feminism in science fiction. The novel follows Snake as she seeks to replace her dreamsnake after its death. The central character, Snake, is a healer who uses genetically modified serpents to cure sickness-one snake is an alien "dreamsnake", whose venom gives dying people pleasant dreams. The story is set on Earth after a nuclear holocaust. It is an expansion of her 1973 novelette " Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand", for which she won her first Nebula Award. Dreamsnake is a 1978 science fiction novel by American writer Vonda N. ![]() |