“Tree Library,” watercolor by Li Lingfei, 10 (Shanghai, China). The cover of our July/August 2019 issue. A note from William Have you read our summer book review issue? Please subscribe. We offer print-and-digital combinations or digital only. Stone Soup is published monthly between September and June with a combined July/August issue, making 11 issues per year. This week’s newsletter illustration is also the lovely cover illustration for the combined summer 2019 special book review issue, “Tree Library.” The illustration is by Li Lingfei. Stone Soup fans will have noticed a few of her works appearing over the past couple of years. Editor Emma Wood has saved this one for a while—after all, what better cover could we have for an issue filled with reviews by our young writers? I had planned on writing about the age-old link between reading and writing and between being a writer and also a critical reader, but Emma beat me to it. Also a first in this summer 2019 issue, Emma has written a powerful essay about critical reading. I include here the opening of that essay. To read the full work, please follow the link to the current issue posted to our Stone Soup website. Emma writes: “In addition to being editor of Stone Soup, I am also a university instructor. When I teach creative writing, I like to tell my students that the most important part of the class is not writing but reading because reading will you teach you how to be a writer.“As you sit there, eagerly turning the page to find out what will happen next, you are also taking in sentence structures, vocabulary, pacing, and the many other features that make up a poem, a story, or a book. On top of this, you are learning about what kinds of books have already been written. If you want to be a writer, it is crucial to learn about the history of the genre in which you want to write. All writers build on the work of other writers . . .” Read the rest of the essay here. Many of you, like my own daughter, are beginning to move beyond books written for kids and young adults. I am so excited and pleased that Emma selected a review of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for this issue. As many of you will know, Frankenstein is a morality tale about science and technology getting out of hand—about the unexpected consequences of revolutionary breakthroughs. The whole mess the world is in with Facebook, YouTube, the Internet in general, and “fake news” can be described as “a Frankenstein’s monster.” Something technological and scientific got out of hand, as with the storyline of Frankenstein, which Valentine Wulf reviews: the creator, Victor, runs away from what he has created, which makes everything so much worse. In many ways, the many creators of the Internet and the social networks that have become such a destabilizing force globally, like Victor, ran away from their creation, letting a monster develop from what had been good. Frankenstein was published 201 years ago! Like all great literature, it is great because it has something to say to every generation. This profoundly wise book, one of the most famous books of all time, was written by a young woman. Mary Shelley was 19 when she wrote this book and 20 when it was published. We have many Stone Soup writers who are exceedingly proficient at age 12 and 13. Read Valentine’s review, and read the book. If Frankenstein isn’t right for you this year, then check in with it next year. It was written by a teenager. If you ever run into anyone who tells you you need to be older to be a serious writer, just remember Mary Shelley and what she accomplished with her teenage imagination. William’s Weekend Project The project for today is simple. Go to the current issue. You can read four free articles in a month, or you can subscribe. So, please read Emma’s essay on critical reading and then at least three of the book reviews (or two book reviews and the one movie review or a poetry review–you get the idea, read three!). If you are a subscriber, then read the entire issue if you haven’t already. Then, predictably, I’d like you to write a review of your current favorite book or movie or poem. We normally publish reviews as part of the Stone Soupblogs. We are happy for one-off reviews and even happier when one of you commits to being a regular reviewer. Start with this one review—you will have good models to inspire you—and when it’s done, send it Stone Soup. Until next week, Contest and partnership news We’re in the final weeks for our current contest: finish writing that book! Keep working on your entries for our summer contest: book-length writing in all forms and genres by kids aged 14 and under. The extended deadline for entries is Aug. 21, so you have more than two weeks left to work on perfecting your book, whether it is a novel, a collection of poetry or short stories, a memoir, or other prose. There will be three placed winners, and we will publish all three winning books in various forms. Visit our contest page and Submittable entry page for full details. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com. Do you read for that transported sensation, where it seems you are in the book? Twelve-year-old Nina Vigil’s book review suggests that Dry, by Neal and Jarrod Shusterman, evokes this type of feeling. Told from different perspectives and grappling with a (sadly) relatable problem, Dry gets heartily praised by Nina. Read her review here. From Stone Soup July/August 2019 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley Reviewed by Valentine Wulf, 13 (Seattle, WA) Before I begin this review, I want you to think of everything you think you know about Frankenstein. What comes to mind even when I think of Frankenstein is the classic depiction from the old horror movies. The insane doctor with a German accent screaming, “It’s alive!” as lightning lights up the sky and
Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists
Dry by Neal and Jarrod Shusterman, Reviewed by Nina Vigil, 12
How many of you can say that you read a book that made you thirsty? Few, to be certain; that’s rarely the effect a book aims to accomplish! (And if it did, it likely wasn’t intentional). Yet now I can say that I have read a book that made me genuinely thirsty, on purpose. Dry by Neal and Jarrod Shusterman, is harrowing, thrilling, and feels all too real. Dry begins in a small Southern California neighborhood. Alyssa Morrow, her younger brother Garrett, her parents, and her dog Kingston are living a very normal life. California’s drought is continuing on for longer than usual, but some laws have been put into place in an effort to conserve water. The laws are working, and California is doing fine. That is, until Arizona and Nevada cut off the Colorado River. California has become so dependent on the river that now water is limited to what they’ve already got. And that’s not enough for everyone. As water runs out, friends and strangers alike turn on each other in an effort to survive. When Alyssa and Garrett’s parents disappear, they’re forced to make an alliance with their slightly nutty survivalist neighbor Kelton McCracken. And as things get progressively worse, the trio will need to find other means of getting water, and they’ll pick up some more passengers on their quest. Dry is an addictive story. Once you pick it up, you keep thinking about doing something else, but you don’t want to put it down, and pretty soon you’ve been reading for hours. Not only is it addicting, but it evokes real emotions. You’re so worried about the main characters that it feels like you’re worrying about your best friends. Dry is also very realistic. The symptoms of dehydration, for instance, are described in a way you can imagine, and consistent with science. The public’s reaction to the “Tap-Out” (as it is called) and the following turmoil seems real, like something that could conceivably happen anywhere. The story is told in a form I’d never seen used before. The narration switches between the main characters, but in addition to that, some “snapshots” are included that provide fresh perspectives on the situation in brief moments from different people’s lives. Among those are a news reporter, a family trying to escape on a plane, and a student waiting for airlifted water. The snapshots really broaden the view of the situation as a whole, and it’s nice to have a quick break from the story of the main characters. I would recommend Dry for anybody 12+. I’d recommend it for everyone, but it does have some bad language in it. Nevertheless, it went above and beyond my initial expectations, and it will do the same for even those with the highest of reading standards! Nina Vigil, 12, New York
Saturday Newsletter: August 3, 2019
“Welcome home, sweetie” Illustrator Claire Schultz, 13, for “Welcome Home” by Sarah Bryden, 12. Published January/February 2017. A note from William Book Contest Deadline Extended to August 21 A few of you have asked if we can extend the contest deadline because of busy summers. We can give you all a one week extension, to August 21. If you have already submitted your work and want to keep working on it, then you may re-submit anytime prior to the deadline. The deadline will not be extended again, so keep going and do submit your work as soon as it is ready! Besides working for Stone Soup I am also a writer. Within the next two weeks I have two articles for magazines and one book chapter due. Like those of you finishing up your book for our contest, I am also working hard to meet deadlines right now. I’d like to share with you how I bring the final polish to my pieces. I am a firm believer that the best way to polish prose is to hear yourself read the text. After I consider a work “finished” I let it sit for a couple days and then I read it aloud to myself from a paper copy. As I’m reading I make notes on the pages wherever the reading sounds rough to me. I either work on the rough passage right then or I come back to it when I have finished reading the entire piece. If you haven’t already turned in your submission (whether for the book contest or as a regular submission) here is what I suggest you do. Aim to have your manuscript finished at least one week before the deadline. By finished I mean something that you think is good enough to turn in. Then, let that draft sit for a couple days. Don’t read it. Don’t think about it. Let your mind rest. Then, when you are ready for the final push for perfection, print out your work and go sit somewhere comfortable where you can read it out loud to yourself and note revisions. At this stage you are tweaking your work. All the big editing should already be complete. As you are reading listen to how the prose flows. You are going for perfection here. Does the dialogue all sound natural? Do you stumble over a long sentence, which suggests that it either needs breaking up or that you need more or different punctuation? Listen for sentences that when you hear them aloud just don’t strike you as quite right. You are the author. You will know what you need to do. While this is not the time to re-write whole sections of your work, this can be the time to make slight changes in word choice. This is the stage when I sometimes find myself deciding that a different word will better express what I want to say, or better conjure the image I have in my head. This final revision is very important. It can provide that final gloss that makes the difference between very good and brilliant. Update from Kenya Jane and I returned from Kenya last weekend. We gave the science books several of you sent us to Bonifiace, the headmaster of the Remot primary school in the West Gate Conservancy, near the Samburu National Reserve. To say he was excited to receive the books is an understatement. He spent an hour looking through them with us and has told us that his teachers can’t believe what you gave the school. Boniface told us that the science is the same, of course, but that the way ideas are presented in the books we brought are much more clearly laid out than in their books and will thus be a big help to their teachers and their students. Thank you all again for your help with this. Overall, it was a trip that had unexpected aspects, some of which were not positive. But, as it turned out, the “every cloud has a silver lining” expression was true for us. While what we had gone to Kenya to do did not work out, we had some very positive travel experiences and, remarkably, we found a wonderful computer programmer named Silvia Nyawira who we interviewed at the lodge where we were staying and who we hired for Stone Soup! Silvia just graduated from University in computer science. She is familiar with the programs our website uses and what she doesn’t know she will learn. Welcome to Sylvia! We have a big list of website projects to get her started on. When she has worked through them we will then begin asking you for your website ideas. William’s weekend project Today’s project. If you are working on a book for our Book Contest, then work on that. But, if you aren’t, then I’d like to suggest something very simple for today. At some point, go outside with a writing book and pencil or pen. Find someplace to sit, and then open your writing book and start describing what you see. This is the first of two texts I’d like you to write today. Keep it short–between 50 and 250 words. Think of this text as “pure description.” What do your eyes see? This piece should be in the styhle of science writing or journalistic writing in which the narrator does not reveal him or herself. You might think of yourself as almost mechanically recording what you might see through a camera lens. For contrast, in the second piece I want you to show us what you are seeing through the point of view of a character–it can be you writing from the first person, the “I” voice, or a character you make up, which can be an animal. In this second piece the narrator may have a point of view, and may be part of the scene being described. For example, while in the first piece you might simply say, “there is a
