Into the Woods (charcoal) by Ivory Vanover, 12; published in the May/June 2023 issue of Stone Soup A note from Laura Moran Greetings all, Happy spring and happy 50th anniversary of Stone Soup magazine! I hope you are all enjoying the May/June issue of Stone Soup as much as I am. As we approach spring and temperatures slowly climb in the Northeastern part of the United States, where I now live, I realize my seasonal preferences seem to have inexplicably shifted! Where I used to prefer summer, all vibrant colors, warm earth, and stepping outside without a coat, I now prefer the cooler months. Lately, I even favor the rainy, overcast days to the sunny ones. Perhaps it’s because my 14-year-old daughter tends to faint easily in warm weather and bright light, or perhaps it’s simply because I’m a homebody, and the rain affords a better excuse than any of the other weather events to curl up with a good book or the latest edition of Stone Soup! Or maybe it’s because, in the grips of climate change and alarming shifts in weather patterns, we didn’t have much of a winter this year. In any case, my daughter and I are reveling most in the spring rain. Sometimes we feel like we’re in a secret rainy-day club and need to conceal our preference for clouds. As she shared with me on a recent sunny day when the morning light streaked across her pillow to rouse her, “Everyone says it’s a beautiful day…well, I think it has a big nose!” Whatever your weather preference, you will be enchanted by Amber Zhao’s “Salt,” depicting Maroochydore and surrounding areas on Australia’s Sunshine Coast. Through strikingly vivid prose, Zhao renders the force and beauty of the natural world in its many incarnations. She writes: “That molten gold sun that traced a trail through the churning sea. The sea’s long, sorrowful moan threading into my sleep. The salt that crept into sandals, into sofas, into floorboards, into everything.” Read it, and the other gorgeously descriptive pieces in the latest issue of Stone Soup, and you will be transported. Speaking of being transported…another way to achieve this state, as Emma described in last week’s newsletter: visit the library! Please join us in honor of Stone Soup’s 50th anniversary in May and Library Week 2023, in our special fundraising drive to bring Stone Soup to more libraries across the world. In Refugee Project news, our current pen pal exchange with young people in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya is currently underway. Our batch of fourteen letters successfully reached London, from whence they were brought to Kakuma Camp by our partner organization, My Start Project. We now anxiously await our return letters. To read more about Refugee Project initiatives, and our aim to unite young refugee artists and writers with our broader Stone Soup readership, please check out our recent publication in Zocalo Public Square. Warmly, Share the gift of Stone Soup with your community. Donate a subscription to a library of your choice today! A gift from us to you: half off annual print subscriptions! We wouldn’t be celebrating fifty years of Stone Soup were it not for all of our wonderful supporters like you. Thank you! As a small token of our gratitude, we’re offering half off annual print subscriptions for the entire month of May. Use code happy50 at checkout and read the magazine 100% written and illustrated by kids since 1973. Subscribe to the magazine! Celebrate Stone Soup’s 50th Anniversary with us! Stone Soup turns fifty this May! Join us Saturday, May 20 at 11 a.m. Pacific time at our Open House and Giveaway for an update on the company from Editor in Chief and Executive Director, Emma Wood; brief readings from recent magazine contributors; and an open discussion about what Stone Soup has meant to you and your family or classroom. Winners of the giveaway—which includes an annual subscription to Stone Soup and a one-on-one writing consultation with Emma Wood among other great prizes—will be announced during the live event. Register for our Open House and Giveaway Stone Soup is published by Children’s Art Foundation-Stone Soup Inc., a 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit organization registered in the United States of America, EIN: 23-7317498.
Live Fast, Die Young, Be Wild, and Have Fun: Chloe Ruan, 13, Reviews Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die
It all started during the summer of 2021, in July. July was for swimming. It was for sleeping in, playing outside, going to the Alamo and the lakes and wherever you wanted because you had all the free time in the world now. It was for getting away with watching TV-14 National Geographic documentaries on sharks (it was Shark Week) and seeing The Little Mermaid II for the first time — both of which I watched in a fit of hazy boredom one otherwise unremarkable morning. July was for falling down a rabbit hole of melancholia and intoxicatingly tragic glamor. It was for coming across the album that will forever be engraved in my memory: Born To Die (2012). I cannot overstate how strange the cover looks even now. The singer seems plastic, with her honey-brown hair set in perfect waves around her symmetrical face and a red bikini top underneath a white collared shirt. Her pink lips are pursed, and her eyelids are crescents of peach-colored skin among mascara-thick eyelashes and carefully-sculpted brows. There’s a barely-discernible car and some nondescript fences and trees in the background. Her name hovers in the cloud-dotted sky in white picket-fence letters — LANA DEL REY, while at the bottom, in smaller letters of the same font, is the album name. It’s breathtakingly beautiful, but it’s always disturbed me, too. I was twelve when I first laid eyes on it that July. She looks like an alien, I’d thought. Born To Die. How do I describe Born To Die? The songs are dreamy and sentimental, bittersweet as summer. But it all feels right. Lana’s voice contains pure, soulful yearning, with an old-Hollywood, American-summer quality and pretty crying notes interspersed with smooth, swooning tones. She often sings about loss and hope, love and abuse, romance, friendship, fame, depression, and mortality. She knows that “sometimes love is not enough and the road gets tough” and that ultimately we were born to die — but she also knows that the streets are paved with gold and that life is capable of being sweet like cinnamon. Born To Die was the first record I ever bought. It was the entire reason I even got a record player. Opening it after returning from Target was like walking through the pearly gates — like unleashing the power of the universe. In some songs she sounds like warm caramel, singing about her love, life, and American dreams. In others, she throws herself into the whole hopeless heartbreak-themed persona — she is, after all, the self-described “gangsta Nancy Sinatra.” She’s Miss Daytona, the scarlet starlet, Elvis Presley’s daughter (she says it herself: “Elvis is my daddy, Marilyn’s my mother / Jesus is my bestest friend”). She sings miserably about how she wishes things were different (“Dark Paradise”), describes her underage escapades at boarding school (“This Is What Makes Us Girls”), and wonders why she’s unhappy even though her life is perfect (“Million Dollar Man”). The album is partially autobiographical, too — in the same way some of Elvis’s last songs (“Moody Blue,” “Unchained Melody,” etc.) express the tragedy and depression that surrounded his final years, Lana sings about the experiences she’s had in her two-and-a-half decades of life. She knows what it’s like to be a rebel — to be in bad relationships, to be so emotionally drained that she just doesn’t care anymore, to be hurt by someone she sees as the Messiah, to have to leave behind everything she’s ever known. To get into trouble a lot, to be taken advantage of, to go through a philosophical crisis at a young age, to get famous when it’s least expected. Come and take a walk on the wild side, let me kiss you hard in the pouring rain . . . you like your girls insane. During the summer of 2021, I was under the impression that I was cursed. All my best friends always ended up moving away and leaving me alone. I missed my people, my childhood. Nothing had been the same since I’d finished elementary school — in other words, I was mourning the past. And in Born To Die, so was Lana. I felt I was the sad queen of a bygone era, of a golden age that everyone but me had moved on from. And Lana felt that way, too. She and I were the same. To me, a little twelve-year-old reminiscing on my old life, Born To Die was everything. It still is everything. It’s summer, it’s love, it’s nostalgia. It’s a reminder of the best time of my entire life. And so there will forever be a special place in my heart for the blessing that is Born To Die.
Turning Red, Reviewed by Tonia Wu, 11
Last spring, as a fifth grader, I watched the movie Turning Red for the first time. I was excited to see this movie because it was written and directed by Domee Shi. Shi was born in Chongqing, Sichuan and later moved to Newfoundland, then to Toronto in Canada. While researching her life, I learned that she watched many Studio Ghibli and Disney films throughout her childhood, inspiring her to be the storyboard artist for films like Inside Out, The Good Dinosaur, Toy Story 4, and Incredibles 2. In 2018, she wrote and directed her first short film, Bao, and in 2022, when Turning Red was released by Disney/Pixar, she became the first female solo director (Brenda Chapman co-directed Brave) of a Pixar film! While watching the movie, I felt particularly drawn to Meilin, a thirteen year-old girl living in Toronto whose life in some ways seems reflective of Shi’s complex international heritage. Turning Red depicts Meilin as she grapples with her identity as a straight-A student desperate for her mother’s approval and her rebellious desire not to seal her wild “panda soul” according to tradition. In the film, the panda soul tradition dates back to Meilin’s ancestors who turned into pandas whenever their emotions ran free. Over time, generations learned to suppress their panda souls through participating in a ceremony for sealing their red panda souls into a pendant or another type of jewelry that could keep the soul locked away. One of my favorite parts of the movie was Meilin’s own ceremony, when the red moon appears to mark this transformational time of her life. First, Mr. Gao, who is a regular guest of these ceremonies, draws a circle into the dust, and then all of the women begin chanting from their hearts. As they chant, Meilin’s body hovers a few feet in the air, and then her soul lifts into a kind of dreamland. From there, she can walk into a mirror that allows her panda soul to separate from her human soul, all while allowing her to return to the real world after the ceremony is over. After that, her soul is supposed to be safe to live in a piece of jade jewelry, but Meilin defies this expectation by deciding not to seal her panda soul into eternity. By refusing not to seal her panda soul, Meilin has the power to unleash her inner panda whenever she isn’t feeling calm, a fact that is made more extreme through anime. The clouds, for example, turn a poofy pastel pink whenever her panda soul is aroused, like when Meilin is angry at her mother or another classmate, and also her eyes mimic oversized anime eyes whenever she sees a boy that she likes. By using anime, the film effectively shows what it is like to be a tween who is not only hyper aware of her surroundings, but who is also warring with her inner demons as she transitions from a child into a teenager searching for social acceptance. Overall, I think Turning Red should be seen as a major accomplishment for Domee Shi, because it both gives voice to her own experience growing up in Toronto as an awkward tween and represents the universal experience of transitioning out of childhood that I think a lot of teenagers can relate to.
