Welcome to the Stone Soup Honor Roll! We receive hundreds of submissions every month by kids from around the world. Unfortunately, we can’t publish all the great work we receive. So we created the Stone Soup Honor Roll. We commend all of these talented writers and artists and encourage them to keep creating. – The Editors Scroll down to see all the names (alphabetical by section), including book reviewers and artists. ART Sierra Elman, 13 Julia Xu, 13 MEMOIR Vinay Batra, 13 Jacob Jiang, 10 Josephine Scott, 11 POETRY Madeline Male, 14 Eleanor Yue, 8 STORIES Beatrice C. de Baca, 9 Teresa Cheng, 11 Reese Fujikawa, 12 Victoria Huang, 10 Hoyeon Koo, 9 Seth Nealon, 11 Emilee Sung, 11 Nolan Wei, 7 Natalie Yue, 11
January/February 2024
Highlight from Stonesoup.com
From the Stone Soup Blog She Needed Me and I Needed Her: “The Summer We Found the Baby” The Summer We Found the Baby, by Amy Hest, is a realistic fiction novel set in Belle Beach, New York, during World War II. The book’s main characters are Julie, age eleven; Julie’s little sister, Martha, age six; and their neighbor, Bruno, age twelve. The trio finds a baby abandoned on the steps of the Belle Beach Library and Julie decides to keep it as her other little sister. Julie writes, “I’m the one who found her. A real, live baby girl, and I saw her first. I saw the basket . . . I just wanted to hold her awhile. I didn’t mean to take the baby.” (Page 3) The main objective of this story is for the trio to find the mother of the baby and reunite the baby with its family. I found this book to be special because the author writes from several perspectives. The book also depicts how families are coping with loss and exemplifies how the characters fill gaps in one another’s lives and hearts. Each chapter of this book is written from the perspective of a different person from the trio. As I progressed through the book, my vantage point alternated between Julie, Martha, and Bruno. This is a very engaging style of writing because the story is not filtered through the voice of only one character. Instead, there are multiple points of view, and the reader develops a broader understanding of the other characters’ intentions and feelings. As we cultivate empathy for the people in the book, we understand their emotions better. This makes the book more intriguing and hooks the reader in from the first page. “Six. I’ve been to six of them altogether. Six memorials on the beach. All because of the war,” (Bruno, 109). I found this book absorbing because many characters in the story are struggling with loss of family members and uncertainty about the war and its outcome hovers over the book’s action. For example, the Ben-Eli family worries about their eldest son, Ben, at war in Europe, and they hope each day for a letter from the frontlines. Meanwhile, another family in the community loses their son in battle. In addition, Martha and Julie are continuing to cope with the passing of their mother, who died in childbirth. This attention to loss is intriguing because I learned from the characters’ struggles and better understood how humans confront and persist despite fear and grief. You can read the rest of Sydney’s piece at https://stonesoup.com/post/she-needed-me-and-i-needed-her-the-summer-we-found-the-baby-reviewed-by-sydney-kesselheim-11/. About the Stone Soup Blog We publish original work—writing, art, book reviews, multimedia projects, and more—by young people on the Stone Soup Blog. You can read more posts by young bloggers, and find out more about submitting a blog post, here: https://stonesoup.com/stone-soup-blog/.
January 14th in Asheville. Year 2023.
No one is awake, and the silence is so absolute that you can hear the universe rearrange itself outside my window. It is blue-gray and a moth-eaten blanket of snow barely covers everything. The wind whips whistles whines ROARS. It is the bleak midwinter, and I the only thing alive. I lift the blind and the trees rise up like the petrified bodies of so many crones from times past. They dance a ballet with the windsong— paying homage to the ashy blue sky. The snow falls and is still falling turning the world to something no one will ever know. How frightened were our ancestors when this storm broke above them? Did they think the sun had forsaken them? Had it? The wind stills. The concert is over, at least for now. I feel the sun begin, quietly, to rise. A door closes downstairs, and the day begins.
