5/24/2023 0 Comments Precept in wonder![]() ![]() Keep calm and carry on! -some saying from World War IIĮveryone in the world should get a standing ovation at least once in their life because we all overcometh the world. If you can get through middle school without hurting anyone’s feelings, that’s really cool beans. ![]() Hamlet, Shakespeare JULIAN ALBANS’S PRECEPT Henry Joplin MAYA MARKOWITZ’S PRECEPTĭon’t try too hard to be cool. Justin Bieberĭon’t be friends with jerks. Now quiet, they’re about to announce the lottery numbers! -Homer Simpson SAVANNA WITTENBERG’S PRECEPTįlowers are great, but love is better. If you really want something in this life, you have to work for it. POSTCARD PRECEPTS CHARLOTTE CODY’S PRECEPT Oliver features numerous children as main characters. ![]() Just follow the day and reach for the sun! -The Polyphonic Spree, “Light and Day” Charlotte tells Auggie that she was in the schools play the previous year. Sapphoĭo all the good you can, By all the means you can, In all the ways you can, In all the places you can, At all the times you can, To all the people you can, As long as you ever can. What is beautiful is good, and who is good will soon be beautiful. ![]() It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers. (Fortune favors the bold.) -Virgil JANUARY No man is an island, entire of itself. Confucius DECEMBERĪudentes fortuna iuvat. When given the choice between being right or being kind, choose kind. ![]()
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![]() Now there is nothing seemingly original about some of the aspects of Zita the Spacegirl. Fortunately, if you look in the right places you’re bound to find something new and interesting. For every The Secret Science Alliance there are twenty cheapo faux mangas ready to clutter up my library’s shelves. In fact, far fewer really worthwhile comics for kids come out than you might expect. The market simply doesn’t exist to satiate their perpetual GN hunger. Whatever the title, they devour these books in less than an hour and come hounding me for more. I can hand them Robot Dreams or Ghostopolis or Rapunzel’s Revenge, it doesn’t matter. Like a number of American children in the 21st century, these kids have an overwhelming palate for good graphic novels. I run a bookgroup for kids between the ages of 9-13. Zita the Spacegirl – Book One: Far From Homeįirst Second (an imprint of Roaring Brook / Macmillan) ![]() ![]() ![]() For the next twelve months, the Nazis would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons and destroying two million homes. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. On Winston Churchill’s first day as prime minister, Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. ![]() ‘Every time Churchill took to the airwaves it was as if he were injecting adrenaline-soaked courage directly into the British people … Larson tells the story of how that feat was accomplished … Fresh, fast and deeply moving.’ New York Times A startling, gripping portrait of what it was like to be alive in Britain during the Blitz, and what it was like to be around Churchill. ![]() 5/24/2023 0 Comments Brick lane by monica ali![]() ![]() She sees an article about the concert that her sons have organised in Hyde Park, commemorating the decade of her ‘death’. She fulfils her fantasy and ten years on, living in a small town in the United States, she flicks through magazines searching for pictures from London, for a glimpse of her old life. My princess is a fictional character, based on Diana. That is the story that I decided to write in my new novel, Untold Story. But just as ordinary girls only become princesses in fairy tales, it would take a fairy tale to turn this princess into an ordinary woman She dreamed of moving abroad, as though running away would magically give her the ‘normal life’ she craved. ![]() No wonder, then, that Diana had frequently fantasised about escaping her life. There was a moment, in his funeral oration for his sister, Diana, Princess of Wales, when Earl Spencer referred to her as ‘the most hunted person of the modern age’. Icon: Princess Diana was well-loved for her intriguing mix of glamour and vulnerability ![]() 5/24/2023 0 Comments Leather and Lace by Rebel Carter![]() ![]() Share your experience and rate this audiobook. A writer of both contemporary and historical romance fiction, Carter is an exciting new voice in the romance genre.Ĭurrent rating: Overall: 0.00 out of 5 Performance: 0.00 out of 5 Story: 0.00 out of 5 Your rating: Overall: 0 out of 5 Performance: 0 out of 5 Story: 0 out of 5 Her books are packed with passion, intriguing and dynamic characters, and plenty of steamy scenes. Rebel Carter is a romance novelist from Colorado, USA. ‘ New Girl in Town’ is a passionate romance novel from exciting author Rebel Carter Will the decade between them force them apart, or is age really just a number? Sparks fly between the pair right away and the connection between them is intense – there’s just one problem. And hold on a second, surely she's misreading the signs because this gorgeous guy can't be flirting with her.here, in the middle of a snowstorm. He's handsome and charming alright, but also has an annoying habit of calling her "sweetheart". Things start to look up however, when help arrives in the form of Grant St. Less than 24 hours after leaving sunny California, Aurora is stuck in a blizzard on a perilous mountain road wearing little more than her hot pink sandals and wondering whether this was such a great idea after all. When Aurora divorces her abusive ex, she is daunted by the prospect of starting all over again at 37 and decides to move to small-town Colorado to be closer to her best friend. ![]() 5/24/2023 0 Comments Oh my gods by tera lynn childs![]() ![]() Add the romantic island setting, snappy dialogue, boys as handsome as Adonis, a few conniving (but ultimately harmless) villains and a protagonist who is a hard-core athlete as much as a girl who squeals about the possibility of a date, and together they make an effervescent, fast-paced read. ![]() Now, instead of enjoying a triumphant track season and planning for college. The academy's cliques, for example, include the Zeus/Hera set (into “power, privilege, and partying”), the Poseidon crowd (surfers) and nerds, who descend from Hephaestus (“I think he's embarrassed by them,” one student confides). Read a sample Read a sample Description Details Reviews When Phoebes mom returns from Greece with a new husband and plans to move to an island in the Aegean Sea, Phoebes well-plotted senior year becomes ancient history. Debut author Childs's creativity in manipulating mythology gives an otherwise familiar plot a fun, fresh update. The twist: it's Plato's Academy, now filled with the descendants of the Greek gods and goddesses. Phoebe Castro's plans for her senior year undergo a radical makeover when her widowed mother returns early from a Greek vacation, engaged to a man she's just met and determined to whisk Phoebe off to the tiny Aegean island of Serfopoula, where her future stepfather runs the academy that Phoebe will attend. ![]() 5/23/2023 0 Comments Thunder dog by michael hingson![]() Paired for twenty-one months, man and dog spent that time forging a bond of trust, much like police partners who trust their lives to each other. When one of four hijacked planes flew into the World Trade Center’s north tower on September 11, 2001, Michael Hingson, a district sales manager for a data protection and network security systems company, was sitting down for a meeting. This is Roselle’s story too.Įvery moment in Michael Hingson’s and Roselle’s lives seemed to lead up to this day. ![]() On September 11, 2001, she saved Michael’s life. “He will never be able to do anything for himself.”įorty-seven years later, a yellow Labrador retriever puppy was born in the whelping unit of Guide Dogs for the Blind in San Rafael, California. “My best suggestion is that you send him to a home for the blind,” the doctor continued. When the Hingsons switched on a light or made silly faces, Michael did not react. Their six-month-old son, Michael was a happy, strawberry blond baby boy, healthy and normal in every way except one. George and Sarah Hingson looked at each other, devastated. ![]() 5/23/2023 0 Comments The houseguest book amparo![]() and her eyes perceived a faint shadow beneath the door. yes, there wasn’t the slightest doubt, that’s what it was, they were coming closer, closer, slowly and steadily. Strange sounds, unidentified creatures, and the buried returning to life throughout Dávila’s narratives.Īt nearly six in the evening she heard a light rasping sound, something dragging itself across the floor, barely touching the surface she sat still, without breathing. ![]() The monster in the basement is alive and well in Dávila’s “Oscar,” but it’s the details of the pharmacies and doctors that make this story resonate with modern readers, eliciting fears of madness that cannot be conquered by contemporary medicine. He had been shouting for hours, howling, ranting, breaking everything within reach in the cellar, furiously shaking the padlocked iron door, throwing the furniture against it. One of the medicines he took, which calmed him down quite a bit, had run out at the pharmacy, and the doctor had substituted another that had little effect on him. On that day, the sixth of August, Oscar had been unbearable since sunrise. ![]() ![]() Dávila, whose stories feel both timeless and timely, accomplishes this distress by blending well-known horror tropes with real-world details. The Houseguest by Amparo Dávila, translated by Audrey Harris & Matthew Gleeson, is a collection of stories so haunting and so tinged with the surreal that it reminds the reader of the pleasure of being scared. ![]() 5/23/2023 0 Comments Black indian shonda buchanan![]() ![]() Tracing the arduous migration of Mixed Bloods, or Free People of Color, from the Southeast to the Midwest, Buchanan tells the story of her Michigan tribe-a comedic yet manically depressed family of fierce women, who were everything from caretakers and cornbread makers to poets and witches, and men who were either ignored, protected, imprisoned, or maimed-and how their lives collided over love, failure, fights, and prayer despite a stacked deck of challenges, including addiction and abuse. ![]() ![]() Beautifully rendered and rippling with family dysfunction, secrets, deaths, alcoholism, and old resentments, Shonda Buchanan's memoir is an inspiring story that explores her family's legacy of being African Americans with American Indian roots and how they dealt with not just society's ostracization but the consequences of this dual inheritance.īuchanan was raised as a Black woman, who grew up hearing cherished stories of her multi-racial heritage, while simultaneously suffering from everything she (and the rest of her family) didn't know. Black Indian, searing and raw, is Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club and Alice Walker's The Color Purple meets Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony-only, this isn't fiction. ![]() 5/23/2023 0 Comments Deathinvenice![]() ![]() The attempt to “Greekify” the games of the boys, with Britten’s hooting countertenor and librettist Myfanwy Piper’s stilted language, strikes me simply as distasteful, despite the fact that Aschenbach is punished and suffers death for his “love” at the opera’s end. Never comfortable with sexuality of any sort, in his operas Britten either avoided the subject entirely or portrayed it as a corrupting influence, destroying innocence. Attempts to turn this work into a sort of homosexual manifesto also won’t wash. That said, this opera always has struck me as a comparative failure, in which Britten misses what Thomas Mann himself described as his parodistic, grotesque intent. Britten’s last opera contains some astoundingly beautiful and arresting music: the arrival in Venice, the passage describing the writer Aschenbach’s view of the sea, and of course the haunting, pentatonic percussion music of the boy Tadzio. ![]() |