Editor’s Note: The following review is review is co-written by Ben Frost and Jackson Ohle-Kot. In our opinion The Hate U Give is a great book for young and old readers. It shows the story of Starr Carter, a young high-school student growing up in Garden Heights. She is leaving a spring break party when her unarmed friend (Khalil) is murdered by a white police officer. This begins Starr’s hunt for justice. Jackson likes this book because Starr is split between worlds. She goes to school at Williamson High, which is located in a rich white neighborhood. She doesn’t feel like she can bring her other friends into to her home or the rest of Garden Heights, but most of all she can’t tell her other friends about Khalil. Ben likes this because book because it shows a different perspective on the community within Garden Heights. It shows the kindness, the craziness, and the intricacies of Garden Heights. It shows the life of gang members, family members, business owners, and much more. “This is a very interesting book that I would recommend to anybody.”It poses an interesting challenge for Starr’s uncle who is a police officer. He feels like he should be loyal to the police but does not support their decision to protect the shooter. He also gets in a fist fight with the officer that shot Khalil, and gets put on leave. She ends up being tried as a witness in front of the grand jury, where she testifies for the murder. We feel like it would be a major spoiler if we tell you what happened in the ruling so, we are going to leave that to you. The rest of the story is very interesting and we would not want to ruin it for you. In conclusion, it shows a hostile police department that tries to twist her words when she is being interviewed as a witness. However her family trained her and told her to NOT let them speak for her. We have noticed that most books will show the police as the “good guys” but in this case, the police originally committed the murder, and continue to lie on everything from live TV to evidence, saying that they found a gun and drugs in Khalil’s car. It shows what they will do to save themselves, and we praise this book for that unique perspective. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. Balzer + Bray, 2017. Buy the book here and support Stone Soup in the process! Have you read this book? Or do you plan on reading it? Let us know in the comments below!
Saturday Newsletter: April 27, 2019
Illustration by Thea Green, 13, for the story “Penny’s Journey”, Published November/December 2005 A Note from William Rubel I came back from Kenya to my home in Santa Cruz, California, to find that spring had finally arrived. We had had such a wet—and for us, cold—winter! I hope that all of you are enjoying a lovely spring. My garden is lush with foliage and alive with flowers. But it is not a normal city garden. It is a wild garden, a garden of wild plants. I pull out all the grasses, but otherwise I let the wild plants grow—“weeds,” as some call them. Water a weed garden, and nature presents you with a paradise! Wherever you live, even in the most built-up parts of a built-up city, you will find beautiful flowering “weeds.” For this weekend’s photography project, I’d like you to go out to your garden, if you have one, and also to take a walk in your neighborhood. At this time of year you will find flowering weeds wherever there is dirt—including in sidewalk cracks. Use your phone or camera to draw out the beauty in the dandelion and in the other wild plants you find. Perhaps your day looking at urban weeds will convince you to let them into your garden as I have! If you take a photograph that you feel is especially good, please submit it to Stone Soup so Emma can consider it for publication. Thank you! I’d like to say something about the poem “Some Days,” which you will find as the last entry in this newsletter. The poem asks questions about something that is really, really important. It is a poem that explores a question that those of you who have not yet reached university will be able to study when you are there: How is identity constructed? You are a girl. You love pink. Why? Were you born loving pink, or do you love it because ever since your mother’s baby shower—which means before you were even born—everyone around you associated you, a girl, with the love of pink. We can all agree that a dragon is a fiction—a made-up creature. In her poem, Olivia seems to ask whether our identity as boys, girls, men, and women might not also be something of a fiction, like the dragon. Thank you, Olivia, for making us think. Until next week, Focus on poetry for the final days of National Poetry Month! To celebrate National Poetry Month, we are offering a discount on the wonderful Stone Soup Book of Poetry, a collection of 120 poems published in Stone Soup between 1988 and 2011. Pick up print copies at 25% off, and eBook editions at half price in the Stone Soup Online Store through April 2019. And, for more poetry ideas, don’t forget to visit the Academy of American Poets’ website—in particular, check our their “Dear Poet” initiative. Just click on their logo below: Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com. New blogger Oishee Sinharay urges us to take animal abuse seriously: “When people abuse animals, they often forget that animals, no matter what kind, are living, thinking, beings.” Read more here, but be aware it is an upsetting topic. On Thursday, we published a piece by Abigail Herrington that goes over some interesting traditions that people in Poland have to mark springtime. Read Abigail’s post to find out about Śmigus-Dyngus or “Wet Monday,” and the Drowning and Burning of Marzanna. From Stone Soup, March 2019 Some Days By Olivia Cadham, 11 Some days I am a girl. On these days I like to giggle and play with toys. I wear bright blue clothes and shirts with cats on them. When I feel like a girl, my feelings change. I feel kind and happy. I like being a girl. But . . . There is a downside. My heart is bigger than on other days. It becomes too big for my body. This causes my feelings to mix together, and that results in emotional drama. This doesn’t make me want to be a girl. So . . . Some days I am a boy. On these days I like to be silly and play rough. I wear darker clothes, like blue, black, or red. When I’m a boy, I feel like my body fits me better. Sometimes it’s as if God intended me to physically be a boy, but changed his mind at the last second. I like being a boy. But . . . Sometimes I feel like I’m too awkward to be a boy. I’m not a very sporty person, and I don’t like jokes. This causes me to appear abnormal and too “sensitive.” This doesn’t make me want to be a boy. So . . . Some days I am a dragon. On these days I like to stomp through the hallways and growl under my breath. I wear light clothing on these days so, being a Dutch Angel Dragon, my fur doesn’t overheat. When I’m a dragon, I like to use pronouns like it, they, them, and their. But . . . Dragging around invisible wings, horns, and a tail all day gets exhausting really fast. I get agitated, and sometimes chirp swears (or something rude) in my language. Even though no one can understand, it is not a good feeling to be cursing, even if it’s an accident. This doesn’t make me want to be a dragon. So . . . It’s really quite simple. I make another choice . . . to be Olivia, who is currently a dragon (roar!!!). Read more reflective poetry on our website, Stonesoup.com. Stone Soup’s advisors: Abby Austin, Mike Axelrod, Annabelle Baird, Jem Burch, Evelyn Chen, Juliet Fraser, Zoe Hall, Montanna Harling, Alicia & Joe Havilland, Lara Katz, Rebecca Kilroy, Christine Leishman, Julie Minnis, Jessica Opolko, Tara Prakash, Denise Prata, Logan Roberts, Emily Tarco, Rebecca Ramos Velasquez, Susan Wilky
Reaching Marginalized Communities
About our Spring 2019 Fundraiser Help Stone Soup Expand its Reach Our spring 2019 fundraising drive is focused on raising additional funds to support our programs and partnerships reaching out to kids living in challenging circumstances. All the money raised through this appeal will be devoted to finding new ways to seek out and support the harder-to-reach Stone Soup readers and contributors of today and tomorrow. We want to encourage participation in the world of Stone Soup by children in less privileged circumstances. We are already working on a few initiatives that contribute to this broader goal, and your donations will help us to continue and expand those projects. Reaching a Wider Contributor Base Via Public Libraries We charge a small fee for submissions to Stone Soup, which covers the costs to us of using an online submissions management system and contributes to the staff time it takes to carefully read and assess every single submission that comes in to us–which is what we do. Our individual subscribers have free submissions whilst they are subscribers, and the submission fee is not a barrier to our core readership. However, for many families, a personal subscription to Stone Soup is not affordable, and the submission fee is off-putting or just plain impossible for children living in less privileged circumstances. To help us find and reach a wider audience we want to extend the free submissions benefit to Public Libraries, so that all children who use their local library’s Stone Soup subscription to submit their work to us will be able to do so free of charge. We hope and believe that this public access will help us to help less advantaged young people send us their work, free of any submission fees, for consideration by our Editor. Donate to widen Stone Soup’s reach As well as asking for cash support, we are also devoting all the money raised from sales of a vintage copy of Stone Soup Magazine to this campaign. In a recent re-organization we found a box of 60 copies of a very special issue from our archives–the “Special Navajo Issue” from March/April 1989. The 1989 special issue was comprised solely of short stories, poetry, and artwork by children living on Navajo reservations. Looking at this issue again, we felt it was an inspiring example of the kind of work Stone Soup has done and can do to bring often unheard children’s voices into the open. We have put those issues on sale in our online store, and have committed to putting all proceeds from its sale towards our current efforts to reach marginalized communities. With this money, we can work on more initiatives like our extension of free submissions to Public Libraries. We have 60 copies of the magazine available in our online store, at $15 per copy, and if we sell them all we’ll raise $900 from that alone. You can find and place your order for the issue in our online store. Help us support the writers of tomorrow
