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 Prisha Gandhi, 7 Angelica Gary, 11 Nari Woo Park, 10 MEMOIR Jordana Blumenthal, 12 Riley Brown, 11 Esperanza Santelices, 12 Mattea Spivey, 10 Xuyi (Lauren) Zheng, 11 POETRY Catherine Wright, 9 STORIES Nishka Budalakoti, 10 Miya Lin, 10
July/August 2022
Highlight from Stonesoup.com
From the Stone Soup Blog Goodbye to “Happily Ever After”: A Review of Little Women Grace Huang, 13Skillman, NJ Kind Cinderella lives luxuriously in a castle after enduring her hardships obediently. Gentle Snow White gets saved by the dashing prince because of her sweet personality. Loving Sleeping Beauty wakes up from her slumber with a single kiss. Characters in these cherished fairy tales we’ve grown up with always end up with their dreams being fulfilled—if they’ve been virtuous. Then what explains what happens to the girls in Little Women by Louisa May Alcott? Little Women documents the growth of four very different sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy—from childhood to womanhood. Each sister symbolizes a distinct type of personality, but how they end up in life doesn’t match readers’ initial expectations. By steering us away from our preconceptions, Alcott accurately depicts what life is really like: sometimes unfair and cruel, yet undeniably satisfying. From Alcott, I learned to accept that “happily ever after” doesn’t exist, nor is it ultimately gratifying. My mom had recommended this book to me, but I was hesitant to read it because the story of four girls didn’t initially intrigue me. However, after learning that Alcott’s father, Amos Bronson Alcott, was a friend of Emerson’s and a leader in the transcendentalist movement of the time, I decided to try it. How might Alcott’s feminine perspective of this period add to my understanding? I soon became lost in the intriguing plot, which takes place during the Civil War, and realized that this novel offers so much more than I had anticipated. The hardship the characters had to endure during this difficult period in American life and the complex moral message for women of all ages have had a lasting impact on me. Though they grew up in the same household, the sisters are all quite different, and each is sharply drawn. Meg dreams of ending up in the lap of luxury but is eventually content with something quite the opposite. Jo, a classic tomboy, learns to balance her literary ambitions with tenderness. Beth, an ever-dutiful daughter, willingly resides at her cozy home without any further aspirations, while Amy grows from a pampered little girl to an ardent artist. My two favorite characters are Jo and Amy, despite the fact that they are opposites. Both are ambitious girls, but Amy’s graceful manners are what society valued in a woman at the time, while Jo’s headstrong spirit is often questioned. Even though frivolous Amy almost always winds up better off than Jo, Alcott twists our expectations to ensure that each girl ends up content in her own way. It’s a harsh truth that practicality sometimes wins out over idealism and that being virtuous doesn’t ensure a happy ending. You can read the rest of Grace’s review on our website. 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/.
On an Equestrian Farm [1]
Here I am. Granting you the vision of the wooden chair that we brought from the first living room because we didn’t have enough chairs for the dining room. You see the fake flowers, they will never live real lives, never die. They will never smell like honey, never wilt. They must always watch us, the humans, do the tedious things we do. The sliding door. With the bug screen. Yesterday night we went through that door. Out on the porch, we petted Trevor, who was not our cat. We don’t own the farm, we don’t work on it. We won’t stay at the house. Soon, it will be all alone again. And there will be no footsteps on the staircase. And the painted china will no longer rattle until the next people come. And there is a little footstool with its broken back. With a mahogany top. Polished wood bottom. We do not get splinters on the floorboards. They have been washed, sanded, many times. We see a little cart. Also made of wood, oh pretty wood, and carved in ways that I couldn’t carve. I cannot carve. The ladder in the back moves up and down, the horse has run away, tired of carrying your load of goods. Outside, bright sun, grass to run on, marsh where you can sink, sneakers and all. The horses, they were angry, or they just wanted to scream, neigh, someone, come! And Trevor, ears perked up, hissed at a bird that was too loud, too happy. And yet, Trevor did not move from his place on the porch. He just glared like a madman and settled down, ready to be petted some more. And my mother lounged in a chair, and my father had gone inside with his camera, only to come out again. And the flies were dancing and buzzing, and joining in, and there was some sort of silent party with no music, because the only sounds were the birds and we wanted that. We never wanted it to stop, just wanted to stay, my mother and father with their wine, laughing, me, running, slipping in the wet grass, laughing at the chickens. The chicken that came up the steps with its loud claws, the chicken that greeted me with the call of its throat, the chicken I shied from, the chicken with menacing eyes, and yet Trevor’s yellow eyes were more menacing. And the barn held nothing but chickens and horses, and the occasional cat, of which there were three. Two cats would not greet us, were not friendly. One ran into the bushes, another stayed on the porch, back arched. The calico, and the tuxedo. We don’t have names for those yet. They are not ours, do not want to be ours. We have no ocean in front of our house, yet all of the paintings on the walls are farms, farms with oceans stretching, waking from deep sleeps. Our house, the house that is not really ours, has a dirt road in front of it. No, gravel. We have no forest either. No boat approaching the forest. Why do the paintings lie? Are these real places, or are they just what someone wants to see? One of the chairs has vines engulfing it, yet the vines are just patterns. You cannot feel them. They are not real. There are many doors in the house. And so many closets, with locks that are rusted shut. One closet opened and had a light with a chain so you could turn it on, and a staircase, which led to a ceiling on which you could bump your head. There is nothing to walk towards. And there is a rug in the second living room, which has pretty flower patterns on it, on which you can roll and become the flowers. These flowers aren’t trying hard, don’t have bright pink colors. These flowers are brown, perfect. Emma Hoff, 9Bronx, NY
