5/22/2023 0 Comments How to Catch a Biker by Ana Ashley![]() ![]() ![]() Kaitlin McGaw : We know the power that a story can have in a child’s life, just like a song. What inspired you to write it? What can readers expect? ![]() Tell me a little about your new book, You Are Not Alone. Encouraging words invite readers to love their beautiful selves, celebrate their identities, and use their voices against hate, You Are Not Alone asks us to step up for each other and have each others’ backs, no matter what. But always remember: you are not alone! Based on the Grammy award nominated hip-hop group Alphabet Rockers’ empowering song, Not Alone, this uplifting picture book reminds kids that they always belong. It can be scary to feel like you’re all on your own, especially in the face of prejudice. When I say something is unfair to me, but it’s fair for you, what does that make it? This empathetic and inclusive picture book empowers kids to love themselves and their identities, stand up to hate, and have each others’ backs no matter what. Today we’re pleased to welcome the Alphabet Rockers (Kaitlin McGaw and Tommy Shephard) and Ashley Evans to the WNDB blog to discuss their picture book You Are Not Alone, out January 11, 2022! We previously revealed the cover here. ![]()
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5/22/2023 0 Comments Midnight in austenland![]() Here she puts a spin on Northanger Abbey. In the first story, Hale played off Austen's Pride and Prejudice. The reader learns more about Charlotte's past as she tries to understand herself in an ongoing dialog with her Inner Thoughts. Hale tells the story in a sort of pendulum swing fashion between the past and present. When the opportunity to take a vacation presents itself, the travel agent suggests Austenland and Charlotte, who has only recently read Jane Austen's works, books the trip. She is successful in business but feels alone and like a failure because of her divorce. ![]() In this new book, Hale keeps the setting and some of the background characters including Mrs Wattlesbrook who manages the place, Colonel Andrews, who interacts with the visitors like a Disney Character at the parks, and Miss Charming, a perpetual guest at Pembrook.Ĭharlotte Kinder is a divorced mother of two. If you wander back to July 2011 on author Shannon Hale's blog, squeetusblog, you will find her posting a bit about being on the movie set. The story was picked up by Twilight's Stephanie Meyer who is producing Austenland - the movie which is in post-production according to IMDB. I savored the concept of a place like Disneyland for Austen lovers, hence the name Austenland. Hale's first book Austenlandwhich I reviewed (here) in 2007 was entertaining Jane Austen fanfiction. ![]() ![]() I'm afraid I am a sure-sell when all things Jane Austen. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Congress now mimics Modi other parties pray for a miracle. Bigotry has been ennobled as a healthy form of self-assertion, and anti-Muslim vitriol has deluged the mainstream, with religious minorities living in terror of a vengeful majority. Indian democracy, honed over decades, is now the chief enabler of Hindu extremism. Since 2014, the ruling BJP has unleashed forces that are irreversibly transforming the country. India is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. After decades of imperfect secularism, presided over by an often corrupt Congress establishment, Nehru's diverse republic has yielded to Hindu nationalism. ![]() ![]() ![]() Spitting on his hands and preparing to go back to work, he tried to summon a wry smile. ![]() Still panting from his recent exertions, he tried to quieten his rasping breath, the better to hear. Into the profound silence of the forest at midnight came a sound that should not have been there. ![]() Carmina Burana: cantiones profanae, Author’s translation ![]() ![]() ![]() But, instead of checking out that book, I decided to read his latest one, Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits, after hearing it get talked about on one of the podcasts that he was on. His writing on Cracked, and his appearances on the Cracked podcast, are often my favorite additions to the community, and I was really enamored with his first novel, John Dies at the End. That book was a lot of fun, and I really need to get around to reading its sequel one of these days. These writers have honed their comedic chops, and story-telling abilities on Cracked and then have created some really inventive and hilarious novels. And, for the most part, they’ve had great success. ![]() ![]() So of course I’ve been really excited to see some of the early writers from the site branch out and try their hands at novels. The site’s blend of information and comedy was exactly what I was into, and I adored learning things from the site. When I was in high school the site was kind of everything I loved. I’ve mentioned on the site before, but I have a real fond place in my heart for the writers of Cracked. ![]() 5/22/2023 0 Comments Asterios polyp comic![]() ![]() He adores shoes, for example, that are devoid of decoration, ignoring the question of whether or not they hurt his feet. Everything according to him is defined by its opposite: things are either functional or decorative, right or wrong, and he instinctively tends to choose the former over the latter. An insecure sculptor (Mazzucchelli creates a lovely visual metaphor by drawing her as constantly a hairsbreadth shy of the spotlight) she initially finds herself charmed by Asterios' forthright, assured demeanor, but it isn't long before that confidence gives way to arrogance and sours their relationship.Īsterios, you see, has a narrow, dualistic view of the world. ![]() ![]() ![]() Mazzucchelli intersperses these segments with flashbacks involving his relationship with his ex-wife Hana and how it all went wrong. Salvaging just three items from the wreckage (all of which bear significance - as does everything else in this book), he heads as far away from his old life as possible, and ends up at the fittingly named, bucolic town of Apogee, where he befriends a Malaprop-spouting grease monkey called Stiff Major, his Earth goddess wife Ursula and their son. It all begins on his 50th birthday, where Polyp, a teacher and architect whose designs have never made it past the blueprint stage, seemingly incurs the wrath of the gods as a freak bolt of lightning sets his apartment on fire. ![]() 5/22/2023 0 Comments Revenge by Stevie Turner![]() Lewis, Gilbert, and several other nerds fail to join fraternities, but are able to secure a dilapidated house near campus and repair it as a residence. Dean Ulich designates temporary living space in the gymnasium and allows the freshmen to rush the fraternities. The Alpha Betas, a fraternity that includes most of the Adams football team, carelessly burn down their own house and, urged by Coach Harris, take over the freshman dorms, literally throwing the freshmen out into the street. The film's plot chronicles a group of nerds at the fictional Adams College trying to stop the ongoing harassment by the jock fraternity, the Alpha Betas, in addition to the latter's sister sorority, Pi Delta Pi.īest friends and nerds Lewis Skolnick and Gilbert Lowe enroll in Adams College to study computer science. Revenge of the Nerds is a 1984 American comedy film directed by Jeff Kanew and starring Robert Carradine, Anthony Edwards, Ted McGinley, and Bernie Casey. ![]() 5/21/2023 0 Comments Book blackout marc elsberg![]() ![]() Software programmers trying to figure out how this madness could possibly have happened. ![]() An engineer attempting to save his machinery from permanent damage. It follows several separate characters who are coping with the disaster. ![]() Absolute chaos ensues.īlackout is a thriller that reads like a thriller, with every page describing a nail-biter scene. Entire operations, like nuclear reactors, malfunction and melt down. Without cold storage, food rots in refrigerators, then in supermarkets and in suppliers’ facilities. Radio and television stations go off the air. In a very short time, each European country goes totally dark until, finally, the entire continent is essentially functionless.Įlsberg’s novel takes place in the dead of winter. Blackout’s pandemonium comes after Europe’s electrical grids experience a total breakdown. Blackout does not feature a viral pandemic, but it does imagine similar societal chaos. You probably shouldn’t read (as I did) Marc Elsberg’s thriller, Blackout, while cable news is concentrating on the catastrophic outcomes of a spreading coronavirus. ![]() 5/21/2023 0 Comments The Adult by Bronwyn Fischer![]() ![]() But when it becomes clear that Nora is lying, too, her secrets begin to take an alarming shape in Natalie's life, even as Natalie tries to look away. ![]() Worried about how her floormates will react to news of her relationship with a woman, Natalie explains her absence by inventing a secret boyfriend called Paul she carefully protects the intimate, sacred adulthood she is building for herself. ![]() She begins spending more and more of her time off campus at Nora's home, enveloped by the intensity of her feelings and the version of adulthood she imagines Nora leads. Natalie is drawn magnetically into Nora's orbit. Just as she is trying to find her footing, she meets Nora, an older woman who takes an unexpected interest in her. She reads advice listicles and watches videos online and thinks about how to fit in, how to really become someone. Chatty, confident Clara from down the hall, who wants to be her friend intense, determined Rachel from her poetry class, who is going to be a writer. Everyone she encounters seems to know exactly who they are. An engrossing, page-turning story about an introverted student and the mysterious older woman whose unexpected interest in her sparks an insidious, all-consuming love affair.Įighteen-year-old Natalie has just arrived for her first year of university in Toronto, leaving her remote, forested hometown for an unfamiliar city. ![]() ![]() ![]() The beasts drive him back despairing into the darkness of error, a "lower place" ( basso loco ) where the sun is silent ( l sol tace ). It is now dawn of Good Friday, April 8, with the sun rising in Aries. Sayers assigns the leopard to incontinence and the she-wolf to fraud/malice. According to John Ciardi, these are incontinence (the she-wolf) violence and bestiality (the lion) and fraud and malice (the leopard) Dorothy L. The three beasts, taken from Jeremiah 5:6, are thought to symbolize the three kinds of sin that bring the unrepentant soul into one of the three major divisions of Hell. He sets out to climb directly up a small mountain, but his way is blocked by three beasts he cannot evade: a lonza (usually rendered as " leopard" or " leopon"), a leone ( lion), and a lupa ( she-wolf). The poet finds himself lost in a dark wood ( selva oscura ), astray from the "straight way" ( diritta via, also translatable as "right way") of salvation. The narrator, Dante himself, is thirty-five years old, and thus "midway in the journey of our life" ( Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita ) – half of the biblical lifespan of seventy ( Psalm 89:10, Vulgate Psalm 90:10, KJV). The poem begins on the night of Maundy Thursday on March 24 (or April 7), 1300, shortly before the dawn of Good Friday. Here, Dante is lost at the start of Canto I of the Inferno. Gustave Doré's engravings illustrated the Divine Comedy (1861–1868). ![]() |