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Ismini Vasiloglou

The Other Side of Luck, Reviewed by Ismini, 12

Una is a princess secluded from the city. Her mother passed away giving birth to her brother when she was young, and her father neglects her, treating Una as an afterthought. Julien’s mother also passed when he was young, but he and his father have a bond beyond love. However, Julien struggles to get by with the little they make foraging for raw ingredients in the forest, especially since his father’s sickness began. After his father is wrongly imprisoned, Julien searches for the rare Silva flower to present to the king and earn the funds to pay for a lawyer. When Una learns of the contest her father has announced to find the silva flower, she sees a chance to prove herself and escape from her dull, humdrum life.  Ginger Johnson’s The Other Side of Luck embodies the unforgettable experience of escaping from reality into another world. With Johnson’s elegant prose and robust sensory details, I felt as if I were living the lives of the main characters Una and Julien. The Other Side of Luck takes place in a simple fantasy world, and the story seems almost cliché at first glance, but it is far from. Ginger Johnson weaves a powerful story about the importance of family and making the most of even the worst circumstances. This book is jam-packed with solid and eloquently put life lessons. In such a constantly changing world filled with so much violence and complexity, it’s often difficult to find a moment of peace or simplicity. The Other Side of Luck encompasses escapism at its finest, and the plot and the characters are easy to follow. The details paint a vivid picture, and Johnson’s sensory descriptions feel so real I couldn’t help but believe I was walking through a forest on the outskirts of a fantasy kingdom, seeking out the Silva. Her descriptions of the various sounds plants make and her descriptions of the specific scents of emotions seemed to manifest within my reality. Only 240 pages, The Other Side of Luck is a quick and exciting read suitable for ages 8 – 100 that is sure to please.  The Other Side of Luck by Ginger Johnson. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2021. Buy the book here and support Stone Soup in the process!

Rubble

In the summer of 2017, a horrific earthquake hit the Greek island of Lesvos. In the summer of 2017, my family’s village, Vrisia, was reduced to a terrifying pile of fractured, falling buildings and rubble. My memories of Vrisia are damaged and seemingly random, like the items salvaged from the catastrophe-torn buildings. I remember the hedgehog we found on the side of the road that we squirreled away to our garden, my six-year-old hands wrapping tightly around its small, odd-looking body. The hedgehog’s spiky parts weren’t pointy enough to prevent me from hugging him close to my chest. When he escaped from our garden, I nearly cried. I remember the local museum and the preserved shell of a Pinta Island turtle inside. The turtle’s ancient shell seemed impossibly large. The majestic relic of the extinct breed of Galapagos island turtles seemed too foreign to comprehend. My only thought then was that I might strap it to my back and become a turtle myself. I can vaguely recall a Playmobil toy set of Antarctica. There were plastic glaciers that came with a basin you could fill with water. My sister and I played with it for hours. I’d attach the polar bear and penguins to the glaciers and she’d attempt to create a waterfall with the cups of water we were supposed to use to hydrate ourselves. By the end of our playing, we had thoroughly drenched each other. I remember our house. The porch and the tree-like vines that crept above it in a canopy, the unassuming blue door wedged between two other buildings that led down to our home, the room we would sleep in, the color of its walls—all of these things feature prominently in my attempts to reconstruct our Vrisia through memory. Five years and one earthquake later, we’ve returned. The house is still damaged even though my grandmother has been rebuilding these past years. She and my aunts live in Athens, an hour’s flight or an overnight boat ride away from Lesvos. My dad took us on a tour of the village yesterday. It’s strange to stare at a place almost totally changed and have your mind confront you with your younger self’s muddled, distorted, and fragmented memories.  “This is the mini-market we would send you to buy groceries from,” he says, pointing at a few bricks surrounded by weeds. A memory flickers in its wake—seven-year-old me walking to the market with her twin sister, her younger sister scuttling behind on her four-year-old feet. The rush of happiness felt at the independence. The old grandmas sitting outside that greet us as we pass. “This is the house of a few of our old friends.” He gazes solemnly at a doorframe standing on its own, surrounded by dead grass and covered in dust. I can imagine a younger version of myself rushing past it on her way to the town square. “Here is the church.” The door bears a bright red spray-painted cross, a marker indicating that the building has been destroyed so much that the best course of action is to tear it down. Each place has a spray-painted cross in green, yellow, or red. Green is the most infrequent of the colors, meaning that a building has suffered little or no damage and is safe to inhabit. When a cross is yellow, there is a severe need for repairs. But the church, one of the primary sources of hope and inspiration in this village—destroyed. We continued to walk. One house resembling a Jenga tower before its collapse had us staring in awe. The front wall was missing, and you could see the slanted, falling floor and all the broken furniture covered in dust and debris. A car honked behind us, and we hurried out of the road. The man drove by, warning us to stay away from the houses—most of them could collapse at any moment.  The situation is surreal. I feel like a piece of my identity is crumbling under my shaking fingers and before my petrified eyes. The repairs on our house are done, but we overlook a view of rubble. A bustling village that once housed nearly two-thousand now might be occupied by fewer than two-hundred. There are no open restaurants, most of the houses still need to be torn down or require severe repairs, the local school is damaged, so children are being taught in tiny container houses, and the earthquake destroyed the village’s two factories. Around the world, natural disasters are increasing. Scientists may not have found solid connections between climate change and an increase in earthquakes, but they have found that climate change causes an increased amount of other natural disasters. Central and Northern Europe recently suffered from intense flooding. California suffers from an ongoing drought. People are dying. The effects of humanity’s carelessness are manifesting. After witnessing the destruction nature can cause firsthand, I have only been made more aware of the gravity of our situation. Right now, we can save ourselves. It’s up to the youth to try to heal the Earth before it suffers irreparable damage. It’s up to us to stop our homes from turning into rubble.

Reflecting on a Fault, a personal narrative by Ismini Vasiloglou, 12

Ismini Vasiloglou, 12 (Atlanta, GA) Reflecting on a Fault Ismini Vasiloglou, 12 It is always so very effortless to start. Ideas jumble around my head in whirlwinds, forming a cacophony of inspiration and infectious excitement. They fill my mind with a buzzing need I cannot ignore. To pick up a pencil is to breathe, to eat. It is an instinctual, primitive impulse, an irresistible temptation which I dare not resist. To pick up a pencil is to live. Yet things are not quite so simple. I paint an image of perfection, harmonious cooperation between pen and mind that does not last. As sentences form in my head, they struggle to ink into existence. My fingers feel weighty as my mind races past my poor, struggling fingers that can only type so fast. It is the tortoise and the hare, but in this story, the hare never sleeps; he only moves faster and faster until he stops and swerves in another direction. Half-finished stories sigh in silence, abandoned for new ideas. They sit lazily in their Untitled documents, waiting for fragments of a lost dream to return to me. They wait to be shaped and molded and typed on a page into a story worthy of the name. Only I am too afraid to steal the reins from the procrastinating beast which has conquered my world. I watch my characters silently sleep in their half-filled pages, weeping at their unresolved conflicts. I watch my settings sink into despair as they are overrun with my neglectful weeds. This is my fault. I know. Despite my teachers’ and parents’ beliefs, I do understand; my mind is a realm entirely within my reach. I can, technically, finish a story, but I can’t seem to fight my own laziness. This beast, this nemesis, was spawned from my very soul, and it is almost impossible to defeat oneself. Procrastination is a far more powerful enemy than any superhuman storybook villain. I know, I know, there are no excuses; there are no rightful reasons for my actions. Words have given me a chance at wings, but I have taken them too quickly without helping them to fully form. Now all I have is an extra weight on my shoulders as I fall asleep each night. It is not right to say there is a beast or a tortoise and a hare. There is only me. We all have our own self-imposed struggles and this is mine: an inability to finish, to see through long-term projects. And my failures affect others, too: the princess who has yet to escape her ivory tower, the citizens whose dictator’s cruel regime still reigns unchallenged, the captain lost at sea, doomed to never again set foot on land, and all of the other tales I have deserted so quickly that not a word of them was written, not a paragraph or a single page. However, I have come to a simple, comforting conclusion; my progress will not be instantaneous, for I cannot change overnight. I can, however, start small. I can start by finishing this reflection, just one letter, one word, one sentence at a time. This is me. Imperfect, flawed me. But I can grow. I can change—I am still malleable. I can take these wings words have lent me, mend them from their broken, unfinished state, take flight and soar.