“A Lonely Girl” by Sloka Ganne, 9 (Overland Park, KS) Published in Stone Soup October 2019 Illustrating “The Ghost of the Forest” by Carmen Flax, 10 (Liechhardt, Australia) A note from William Thanks to all of you have already started pre-ordering our new magnificent blank journals and sketch books! These make great gifts for students as well as for adults, perfect for your stock of last minute gifts. Order these, along with the Book Contest novels, poetry, and our annual anthologies from our Stone Soup Store. Thank you. I know. It is Halloween! And yet, it isn’t. Like the girl in the illustration for “The Ghost of the Forest,” we are all looking into the Great Unknown! Somehow, Halloween got swallowed by the Fates. Halloween is a time when “spooky” is in. It is the “spooky” holiday. I put “spooky” in quotes because, really, how often is one actually frightened by anything you see on Halloween? There is a house in my neighborhood where the people go to great efforts to create frightening effects — and some years they do succeed in making us jump. For example, one year they had a blow up snake jump out at us from behind a bush. But, there as no real danger and the context was fun. Horror! This last Saturday, in the Stone Soup Saturday Writing Workshop, we worked on horror. What makes horror different from spooky? One answer is the context. Horror is scary things happening within a context of fear. Horror is being forced to go the house with a super smart aggressive snake that is out to get you — AND YOU CANNOT GET AWAY! I’d like to share with you today some of the writing from last week’s class: Horror Stories from the Stone Soup Saturday Writing Workshop. This weekend’s writing project is to write a horror story. A ride on a roller coaster is scary. The drawing, “A Lonely Girl” suggests to me the kind of context in which horror takes place. “The Ghost of the Forest,” below, opens with this evocative sentence: The woods glowed that mildewy night in October as the transparent, lilac-colored figure hovered eerily between dense thickets of elegant dark green pine trees, whose rich aroma curled through the forest.” Give your horror story context that includes how things look, how they feel, and how they smell — all with the purpose of tightening tension so that when your character is confronted with danger we, the reader, feel fear. How to start? Read Carmen Flax’ fabulously evocative ghost story, below. And also, read through the stories posted from last Saturday’s Horror writing workshop. And then, when you have some time to write, set your scene, and go for it! Scary can be a one-off adventure. Horror chills you to your core. As always, if you like what you write, please go to the Stone Soup website and submit it to Stone Soup. Blogging for Stone Soup. Welcome to Sita, one of our newest Stone Soup Bloggers! Sita has just posted a book review of books by Kate Mitford. Sita writes about the way in which the more Mitford books you read, the more real her fictitious world becomes. A well thought out piece. Thank you, Sita. If any of you are thinking you might like to blog for Stone Soup, which can include posting book reviews, contact Sarah at sarah@stonesoup.com. Until next week, Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! What would the pandemic look like to a bottle of Purell? Emily, 9, takes the perspective of the inanimate object in her story “Defeating COVID-19 Together.” Check out all the spooky, unsettling and sometimes terrifying work created at last week’s Writing Workshop, the theme of which was horror. Perfect Halloween reading material! One of our newer bloggers, Sita, writes about how much she enjoys the shared worlds of author Kate Milford’s books. Mia, 13, reviews Chirp by Kate Messner. Read about why she “thoroughly enjoyed” the story about crickets, family, and speaking up. From Stone Soup October 2019 The Ghost of the Forest By Carmen Flax, 10 (Liechhardt, Australia) Illustrated by Sloka Ganne, 9, (Overland Park, KS) The woods glowed that mildewy night in October as the transparent, lilac-colored figure hovered eerily between dense thickets of elegant dark green pine trees, whose rich aroma curled through the forest. The lady waded through roaring black-colored rivers, tearing through the determined barriers of water. She stopped, but only to lean against an ancient, knobbly tree, and let out a choked cry that rears up in your ears only to come rolling into your heart and leave it weeping the purest and most tender of tears for the lost caller. The pale being looked up at the luminous, pearly white moon and flinched, as if something so bright and hopeful had wounded her permanently and forced her to live in such darkness and be so helpless. Suddenly, the figure stood up and slunk away into the shadows where all strange things are called. …/MORE 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.
Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists
Chirp, Reviewed by Mia, 13
Kate Messner’s new book Chirp is a captivating story of a cricket farm mystery, summer camp fun, and ultimately, one girl’s journey of finding the confidence to speak up. Mia is a girl who just wants to forget her past. Luckily, she has plenty of new things to distract her ever since she moved to be near her grandmother’s farm in Vermont. Mia’s grandmother is trying to convince the world that bugs can be tasty food. But Green Mountain Cricket Farm is struggling and not only because business is slow. Mia’s grandmother believes someone is deliberately trying to sabotage her cricket farm. Could her grandmother be right? Though Mia’s parents blame Gram’s suspicions on her recent stroke, Mia is determined to get to the bottom of the mystery. Supported by her new friends from summer camp, Mia taps into her detective side to find out the truth about Gram’s farm. But Chirp isn’t just cricket farms and mysteries. It’s also a story of Mia coming to terms with her own secret. Since her time as a gymnast back in Boston, Mia has been keeping a painful secret that Messner masterfully hints at throughout the story. Near the end, Mia relives the memories and we learn what she has been struggling with the entire time. I cheered when Mia was inspired by another female to speak up and come to terms with the secret. Mia’s character development and the overarching meaning of the book were elements I enjoyed. I really loved watching Mia grow and not just because she shares my name. When we first meet Mia, she is underconfident, shy, and hurting from her big secret. As the story progresses, Mia goes through a metamorphosis, slowly coming out of her cocoon. She makes new friends, becomes stronger at Warrior Camp, and makes business plans at her local Maker Space camp. I loved watching Mia grow from a timid little caterpillar into a bold and confident butterfly. The next thing that really stood out was how the cricket farm setting contributed to the greater meaning in Chirp. I learned for the first time while reading Chirp is that male crickets chirp while female crickets do not. This was so interesting and it tied into Mia’s struggles as a girl in our current society. Chirp’s message to harness your voice to make change was empowering and thoughtful. It was so clever of Messner to juxtapose the message of the book with cricket biology. Although Chirp was a great book I think that certain elements were overly simplified. The mystery element of the story was unrealistic and never helped Mia’s character development. And I didn’t like how the dialogue and other characters were sometimes simplified for the message to come across. Mia was about my age but acted much younger. Finally, there was an absence of positive male characters in the story. Chirp had great female friendships and strong female leaders, but the closest we come to a “good” male character was Mia’s father. It’s important that boys have role models that are also respectful and supportive of women. I think it would’ve been better if Messner included some male characters who were supportive of the book’s feminist message. Aside from the minor flaws, I thoroughly enjoyed Chirp. The valuable lessons of the story make it suitable for anyone, although I would especially recommend it to girls who are lacking confidence. Mia’s journey will empower you to be confident and speak up. Chirp by Kate Messner. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2020. Buy the book here and support Stone Soup in the process!
Kate Milford’s Rich and Realistic Shared World
Kate Milford is one of my all-time favorite authors, and while I love the intricate plots, fleshed-out characters, and how her books read like something out of an Agatha Christie novel, what I love most about her books is the way in which all the books are connected. Many authors set their books in a “shared world,” as Kate Milford refers to it on her website, but Milford’s world is richer and more realistic than most. Her books take place in either the crossroads town of Arcane, Missouri; the Sovereign City Of Nagspeake, near Magothy Bay and the Skidwrack River; or New York City. A few of the books take place in each of these settings, and those books are directly connected by place, but what makes Milford’s novels so unique is that the settings are tied together by characters who move between the places, linking all the books together into her very own universe. As you read more and more of Milford’s books, you stumble upon characters with mysteries you can only uncover by reading other books, or maybe you already know something about a character or place that the protagonist doesn’t know yet because you read about it in a past book. We are introduced to Nagspeake’s smuggling history in Greenglass House, but it is only in The Thief Knot and Bluecrowne that we get a close look at its old iron that as far as anyone can tell, seems to move of its own accord. We find Simon Coffrett in Bluecrowne, but we only figure out what it means for him to be a Jumper in The Boneshaker. We meet Meddy in Greenglass House, but we only realize her amazing capabilities in The Thief Knot, and so on. Every new book you read makes the shared world and the characters that inhabit it feel more and more realistic until readers almost convince themselves it’s real. On several websites, readers have asked if Nagspeake is real, and where it is, and if it’s a good place to take a vacation to, and this striking realism that makes it seem convincing enough to be true stems from the way the shared world digs deeper into Nagspeake (and Arcane) with every book. There are maps of these places, and a tourism website, and countless other things that most people have almost never done with a fictional place. It really goes to show how much the shared world impacts the credibility of the novels, considering that these places are obviously fantasy. There are ghosts, there are magical entities, there are machines in places set hundreds of years in the past so advanced that we don’t have the technology to build them today- and yet people still believe in the possibility of these places being real. The shared world that all of Kate Milford’s books are set in makes the plots more compelling, the characters more relatable, the settings more lifelike, and the books more electrifying.
