One of the hardest things to do is to unlearn. To completely reset everything you’ve ever learnt and to replace it all with new ideals. Realizations that, as hard as they are to understand, have the capacity to change your life forever. In The Troubled Girls Of Dragomir Academy, 12-year-old Marya Lupu finds herself caught in the middle of a struggle between her parents and the town of Torak, her peers at the mysterious school she has been sent to, and everything she starts to unravel inside of it. In the kingdom of Illyria, every boy has the potential to become a sorcerer, to hold invariably large amounts of magic. Our protagonist, Marya Lupu, however, has spent all her life in the shadow of her brother, Luka Lupu, who, solely because of his gender, has caused his conservative family to glorify him to an agonizingly large extent. Marya, no matter how much she longs to be more than a helper, or more than a documenter of history, has always been told that she was meant for this by her parents. When she accidentally manages to ruin Luka’s test for magical ability while also talking back to a sorcerer of high position, she gets sent to the Dragomir Academy for Troubled Girls, a secretive school for girls with supposedly distressing pasts to turn over a new leaf. While Marya starts to find her way around the school’s ways while also starting to make new friends in the Rose Hall, the threat of the Dread, a deadly fog-like force that went from town to town to devour its people—the result of the magic of the witches of Kel (according to High Count Arel, one of the sorcerers from the sorcerer’s guild, a group dedicated to fostering magic to the boys in Illyria and protecting its citizens from the Dread)—starts to make its way closer to the Academy. She starts to explore the secrets of the academy and its deviously rich founders, and slowly the puzzle pieces of an entire hidden past start to fall in place. Stuck between her teachers, her newfound family, and an unexposed fourth wall of magic, will Marya navigate through the murky waters of Dragomir Academy to finally figure out what the magic of Illyria truly is meant to be? There were a lot of things that stuck out to me in this novel, one of them being the foreshadowing and core messages tucked inside the vivid characters of the story. Marya’s character arc consists of her learning to unlearn everything, to use conscious thought to analyze everything she has ever learnt before coming to a conclusion. One of my favourite characters, Mademoiselle Lucille Bandu, is a Master Weaver and one of Marya’s earliest influences. She helped her look past the stereotypes Illyrian society placed upon her and kept in contact as long as she could during our protagonist’s time at the academy. The world-building and magic system were well developed without being confusing; all the characters in the story got their own character arc without being left behind. My most favourite thing about this book was how the magic itself was introduced. It made use of the characters and plot lines to elevate its significance, and, rather than being specific, it was introduced as a life form, an abstract default of sorts that existed all around them, thought of as you’d think of a particularly beautiful natural environment. When I first finished reading this book, there were so many intricacies to think about that it left my head in a daze for nearly a week. The Troubled Girls of Dragomir Academy is a spellbinding piece of fiction that will leave you thinking about Illyria and its tapestries for a long time after. The Troubled Girls of Dragomir Academy by Anne Ursu. Walden Pond Press, 2021. Buy the book here and support Stone Soup in the process!
Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists
Weekly Creativity #177: Write a conversation on text messages or social media.
Write a conversation on text messages or social media. This could be about an IRL concern or something distinctly online: the point is to experiment with an online format.
Saturday Newsletter: November 6, 2021
Two Weavers | Madeline Cleveland, 11 (Belleville, WI) published in Stone Soup November 2021 A note from Laura Happy November! I would like to start by extending our congratulations, once again, to former Stone Soup contributor, author, and activist, Sabrina Guo, who will today be reading aloud her commended poem “65 Cybele” at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26). This is an extraordinary accomplishment, and we could not be more proud of Sabrina! There is much to report on the Refugee Project. Most importantly, THANK YOU to all who donated to the September fundraising drive. Your generous donations have made it possible for us to continue this work and provide a platform for refugee youth to showcase their abundant creative talents and share their work with the world. Our first collaborative teaching engagement is set to launch with the support of Hands On Art Workshops. Through this collaboration, I will be delivering a writing workshop on Deep Observation to young refugees in Kakuma Camp, Kenya. I look forward to sharing the results of this workshop on the Refugee Project page of our website. To see the full collection of creative works contributed thus far, visit the website here. Now to the November issue. This week I’d like to draw your attention to Sophia Hammond’s personal narrative, “The Read Aloud.” Who among us has not experienced exclusion, humiliation, a soul crushing challenge such as that described in “The Read Aloud.” Sophia’s rich, evocative description brought me right back to a braided second-grade classroom rug and all the various obstacles and joys I encountered while sitting on it! What’s especially exciting about this story is how it captures the satisfaction of overcoming a challenge and meeting it head-on. “The Read Aloud” reminds us that sometimes our salvation comes in unexpected ways through accepting the help of a stranger, or even a classmate, who we’d not yet thought to consider a friend. This weekend, I challenge you to write about a challenge! Tell us about a time you’ve faced an obstacle and how you’ve worked to overcome it. Write about frustration! Write about fear and dread. Write about the freedom that comes with accepting when things don’t come easily, and in finding the help you need to face an obstacle. As always, if you’re happy with what you’ve written, I urge you to share your story and submit it to us via Submittable! Until next time, Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at on our blog! Savarna, 13, wrote a glowing review of James Ponti’s novel City Spies. Check out the latest Book Club Report, which centered around When Stars Are Scattered by Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed. Super reviewer April, 13, reviewed Curse of the Night Witch, first novel in the Emblem Island Duology made famous by #BookTok. From Stone Soup November 2021 The Read Aloud By Sophia Hammond, 11 (New York, NY) There I was, sitting in my second-grade classroom in the School of the Blessed Sacrament. I was in the front of the room, crisscross applesauce on the yellow square of the rainbow rug—my favorite color. I was holding my Charlotte’s Web book. I heard one of my classmates read aloud. I was silently wishing I was the one reading. I looked around the room and saw my tiny gray desk with my pink pencil case on top. Yellow was rather close to the teacher, so I could smell my teacher’s lemon perfume. My teacher’s name was Mrs. Romeo. Mrs. Romeo had long brown hair and brown eyes. She was obsessed with her cat, Obby, and would talk about him every day. She had pearly white teeth and always had a big smile on her face, but she had favorites. I was not one of them, but she liked me. This was one of my worst years at Blessed Sacrament. It was not that I did not have any friends, or that I got bullied. It was because I felt excluded from our class read-aloud. In second grade, I was not a great reader. I struggled to read chapter books. When I was in kindergarten, I was the first one in my class to read 100 books. That was a big achievement for me. In kindergarten, I felt I was the best reader in my class. Why did it go downhill from there? I wondered. Click here to continue reading “The Read Aloud”… 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. 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.
