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. FICTION Logan Francis, 12 Mia Goldschmidt, 10 Gary Gong, 9 Eden Kendall, 10 Aria Po, 9 POETRY Nandika Agrawal, 10 Teresa Cheng, 11 Owen Miller Noel, 10 Unni Odman, 10 Ellie Wang, 11 MEMOIR Emma Brandt, 12 Lucas Castro, 9 Joshua Choi, 13 Annabel Feng, 11 Noa Gartrell, 11 Alexander Milone, 11 Rafael Moura, 11 Ezra Park, 11 Zoe Rossides, 12 Jackson Steinberg, 11 Ava Szekretar, 11 ART John Wang, 9
July/August 2024
Highlight from Stonesoup.com
From the Stone Soup Blog An Essay on Outrage Have you ever heard your parents say, “Back in my day, life was so much more difficult. Kids these days are so spoiled”? You would be surprised to know that they were the spoiled hipsters of yesteryear. As long as there have been Homo sapiens, there has been a generation gap and elders frowning upon it. One can almost imagine a geriatric Neanderthal rolling his eyes as his prodigy used the wheel or even before that, a Homo erectus grandfather looking suspiciously at his children living the easy life by using a fire to cook, leaving the good old days of raw meat dinners. From the complaints of Socrates turning young men against the establishment to the small but vocal groups of Boomers on social media, there have been many examples of elderly backlash to changing times. One of the first documented episodes of such outrage goes back to Ancient Greece, from the fifth century BCE onwards. During this time, a population boom and plentiful sustenance inspired philosophers and thinkers to question the world around them. In fact there is a saying, “All that I know is that I know nothing.” The young Athenians were educated to question everything, and this stung the established order. The noblemen condemned this wave of change and even succeeded in poisoning the leader of a major group, whom we know as Socrates, in 399 BCE. But the die was cast, and his doctrine spread under the likes of Aristotle and Alexander the Great. Despite the cry of the previous generations, change was inevitable. You can read the rest of Schamil’s piece at https://stonesoup.com/post/an-essay-on-outrage-by-schamil-saeed-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/.
War in Pieces (Part III)
Misha and his mother flee their war-torn home in Ukraine This is the final installment of Alice Pak’s novella, which we have been publishing over the course of three issues. If you are a new subscriber, you can read the first two installments online in the March/April and May/June 2024 issues. Chapter Four Two weeks slipped by accidentally in a blur of school, TV, and Varya coming over to hang out on the weekends. I barely had time to look around before I found myself standing in the sixth-floor lobby, looking into our half-empty apartment and my mom rolling out a suitcase full of clothes out the door. She sighed and turned to me with a pained smile. “Well,” she said, her voice shaky, “time to say goodbye.” “But it’s not forever, right?” I asked, readjusting the straps of my backpack. “No, of course not,” she reassured me. “We’ll come back one day.” “I already can’t wait.” We stood there in silence for another moment, looking at the living room. The worn gray couch. The pale orange curtains fluttering gently to the air conditioning. The drawings, books, and photos standing on the short coffee table. The smell of strawberries and freshly washed clothes. “Misha? Ho—what’s going on?” I spun around to find Varya, dressed in a rain jacket and boots, staring at me with a lost look on her face. My mom raised an eyebrow at me, frowning. “You didn’t tell her?” she asked. I looked down at my sneakers. Varya scanned my face worriedly as the silence became deafening. “Tell me what?” “We’re leaving,” my mom said in a flat tone, which indicated both her disappointment towards my behavior and her desire to avoid all negotiations. “Leaving?” Varya hesitated, “Leaving where?” “I’m sorry,” I mumbled under my breath. “I totally forgot to tell you . . . we have to return to Russia.” Varya didn’t reply immediately and instead just stood there, hereyes flickering between me and my mom in disbelief. “W-what?” she finally managed. “What do you mean? You mean like . . . forever?” I reached a hand out to her helplessly. “No, no, not forever. Forever is a long time. Just for . . .” “A few months,” my mom picked up for me. Varya’s lip quivered, small rivers of water streaking down her face. She sniffled, rubbing her nose with her sleeve. I felt tears well up in my eyes as well, blurring my vision as my mom shook my shoulder. “I know it’s a lot to take in,” she was saying to Varya, her voice seeming to come from miles away as if I was in one of those dreams where you felt like everything was moving through mounds of sand, “but I promise it won’t be as bad as it seems. Okay? You’ll see each other again before you know it, and I’m sure Misha will have all sorts of new experiences to share with you. This is just a temporary precaution.” Varya sobbed again, nodding shakily. I ran to her and wrapped my arms around her, hugging her tightly. She hugged me back, her fingers digging into my back as if she didn’t want to let go. Her warm breath came out in ragged sobs, and I felt a strange sad cloud come over me like a cold shadow, shielding me from any happiness I had been clinging to before. She finally pulled away after a minute, her eyes still red from crying. “Promise you’ll call me when you can, okay?” she told me, holding my hand in hers. “I will,” I said despite the lump in my throat. I squeezed her fingers. My mom clicked her tongue, checking her silver watch. “Well, I’m sorry to ruin your goodbyes, but we have to get going, unfortunately. I got us a taxi to drive to the furthest outskirts of the town where the bus station is, and they just texted me that they’re waiting for us around the block.” She leaned down and embraced Varya gently, holding her for a second before straightening back up and tucking a stray wisp of hair behind Varya’s ear. “I’ll miss you, sweetie,” she whispered with a melancholy smile. “I already can’t wait to see you again.” “Me too,” I chimed in, wiping a tear off my face. “I’ll miss you so much.” “Bye,” Varya said gloomily, waving after us half-heartedly as the doors of the elevator closed in front of my face. * * * I can’t say anything extremely eventful happened after then. Maybe I was just numb. Maybe I was just tired and forlorn and heartbroken and the entire package. Or maybe there was a small dose of truth in the fact that the entire taxi ride to the train station there was downpouring rain. The train station didn’t make a statement either. In fact, at first I thought that surely our driver was mistaken; he dropped us off at some dump in the middle of nowhere with a couple of empty crates and very few equally empty people, tipped his hat as my mom tipped his change, and drove away as fast as the speed limit on the nearest highway would allow him. I crinkled my nose at the truck that stood several feet away from us. Let me make this clear: it wasn’t a bus. It wasn’t even remotely close to deserving the title of being named a bus. It was a cargo truck at best. Small front cabin where a buff, angry-looking driver sat impatiently chewing a toothpick was roped together with a long black box-looking thing, the door to which was open, and people stood on the ramp, talking hurriedly. On both sides of the truck were bright ads of some cereal company with smiling faces and one too many unconvincing exclamation marks added to make any sense at all. Turns out, we were about to be smuggled across the