Parenthetical

I’m spending my day watching Lord of the Rings, extended editions (or as far as I get, anyway). There will no doubt be some Chinese food at some point. I’ve never had a traditional Jewish Christmas — I’m looking at this as an opportunity to explore my heritage. The folks behind Jewsmas would like a [...]

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Carina Chocano’s New York Times article “A Plague of Strong Female Characters” gets at most of my issues with this trope: “Strong female character” is one of those shorthand memes that has leached into the cultural groundwater and spawned all kinds of cinematic clichés: alpha professionals whose laserlike focus on career advancement has turned them [...]

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My initial response to Meghan Cox Gurdon’s incendiary WSJ column is here, but it got crazy long and I decided this topic needed its own post. Ok, so there’s a lot of dark YA lit because teens want to read it — both the Literature and the popcorn. There’s also tons of light YA lit. [...]

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Ok, I’m way late to the party on this one because I was in the middle of wrapping up my school year, but: a couple of weeks ago, Meghan Cox Gurdon wrote a column called “Darkness Too Visible” in the WSJ about dark YA lit. There’s too much of it nowadays, teens are inundated with [...]

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After her best friend Julia’s accidental death, Cass is at loose ends. She hangs out on the edges of the Julia’s theater crowd but feels like she doesn’t belong. Cass only reluctantly agrees to participate when they throw themselves into producing Julia’s final effort, a half-finished musical called Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad. When they [...]

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My friend Rebecca showed me a lovely essay today: “The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re Going to Miss Almost Everything”, by Linda Holmes. It’s about the impossibility of being “well-read” (or well-watched, or well-listened), given the vast quantities of writing, theater, movies, music, and TV that have been and are constantly being produced. It’s sad, [...]

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In February I wrote about Bitch Magazine’s 100 YA Books for the Feminist Reader. A week and a half ago, Arianna of Wandering Librarians and I went to a response discussion at Simmons College (our library school alma mater), entitled “What Is a Feminist Reader?” Here’s her far more prompt write-up. Christy Lusiak, counselor and [...]

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In this month’s School Library Journal, “media theorist” Douglas Rushkoff’s article “We Interrupt This Program” begins: The kids I celebrated in my early books as “digital natives,” capable of seeing through all efforts of big media and marketing, have actually proven less able to discern the integrity of the sources they read and the intentions [...]

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Wow. I’ve had such a ridiculous week that I missed my own anniversary! I’ve owned this domain for 12 years, as of Valentine’s Day. My blog is in 7th grade, which means I should be, like, unfriending Wandering Librarians and writing nasty comments about them to Pink Me. Good lord, 7th grade was dreadful. In [...]

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