Illustration by Abhi Love is a hard thing to explain. It’s incredible how much there is in love, that it can mean many different things. No matter where you are, or who you meet, love will always cheer you up. It’s like seeing a rainbow on a cloudy day, you know, when you see many clouds and you think the world looks gloomy when suddenly, a strike of light jumps through the clouds and you gasp so hard. This is a feeling that’s rare to experience, and this blog will talk about my thoughts about this wonderful emotion. As we all know, love truly cannot be explained well. While some people find love as a relationship between two or more, others see it differently. I personally find love to be having an awesome time with someone, and just enjoying life. Love doesn’t always last forever, and sometimes, love can only be for a few minutes or even seconds! How my mind interprets love is that love is easy to go through, but hard to find. What I mean by this is that once you start forming a bond with someone, it is really easy to start a relationship full of love, but finding that specific person you like so much is something that has been hard for me to find for over five years! I think the most common start for love is your parents. Most parents will always protect their children, and take care of them at all costs. This for me is true love. This is something that happens once in a blue moon, and any free time I have at home, I always say in my mind, “Thank you God for this world, thank you for my parents and thanks for the life you have given me.” Some people though, don’t really enjoy love as much as they should. Most people think love is a “girl loves boy” relationship. However, this is not completely true. While love can be a boy and girl having a bond, it can also just be good old memories and fun. I fear people these days are too picky about love, and they just dismiss the whole idea of love and focus on becoming popular instead. But you have to understand, love for me is simply this: Love: When One Is Experiencing Joy And Happiness This is very simple, and that’s how it should stay. Being too narrow about how you define love is that it closes you from experiences that could be awesome. If you continue to always be choosy about what love means, it makes me (and others) feel that you’re closeminded. I am by no means saying you need to come up with a very clear definition for love because love can be many things to many people. All I am saying is there are many ways to show love, and many things to love (people, animals, nature, God etc.) Love is a beautiful thing to behold, and one shouldn’t be too judgmental about it. There is a saying that expresses what I mean here. It is “The best love is the kind that awakens the soul; that makes us reach for more, that plants the fire in our hearts and brings peace to our minds.” To put it simply, this quote is saying the best love is the kind that makes us happy, wanting more of it, and makes us feel peace inside our hearts. One shouldn’t be ungrateful and mean over what we have. God has given us an amazing life that is beautiful, like the gorgeous ocean and the wonders hidden deep inside it. No one man should judge or define love. Love (just like in the quote) also means peace. A person doesn’t fight to bond with someone, and I’m sure everyone knows that. The reason I am telling you this is because some people like to force someone to love them by arguing with them right in their face. I can relate to this because I have a little brother, and he thinks I am his hero, but he always tries to argue to get my attention. This isn’t how people should find happiness. I have tried it myself with one of my friends in school. I sent her a card, always hung around her, and thought she would want to be my friend. She started to like me, and really bond with me, but inside my heart, I felt guilty and ashamed of myself because I thought I had “forced” her to like me. As you already see from reading this blog, love is many things. It’s like exploring the entire Earth! You can’t possibly go through every inch of this planet, but you can still explore it. Love is quite the same. Before we talk more about love, I would like to say this to all the bullies out there. I won’t judge if you’re a bully or not, but I will tell you this. Look inside your heart, and look close and deep. See if you are doing the right thing, and ask this simple question, “Will this make me better? Will I be happy after all I have done?” I won’t criticize you, but please understand that question, and it’s way more important than you think it is. I can go on and on about love, but I don’t think I can explain everything. To put it simply, I wrote this poem: Love is a light shining in the night, love can be wonder and comets at sky. Who needs war when peace can shine free, and who needs bullies when bystanders can go and help thee. I can’t go judge and do whatever I want, but fighting through school is worse than a creepy night. Love can be here, love can be there. Love is something to explore anywhere.
Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists
Shouting at the Rain, Reviewed by Vandana Ravi, 12
“We’re like tea bags. In hot water, we just get stronger and stronger.” These two sentences from Shouting at the Rain by Lynda Mullaly Hunt echoed in my mind for days after I read them. The memorable simile seemed to sum up the essence of the book – and, ultimately, of life. I was impressed, enchanted – and when I realized that the words came from a twelve-year-old kid like myself, I was under the spell of a new favorite character. Delsie McHill dislikes surprises; that’s why she loves tracking the weather, so that she can always be ready for what’s coming. But one summer her life is beset with unexpected changes. She has always lived with her kindhearted grandmother in Cape Cod, but now she begins to look at her life with new eyes and wonder why her parents abandoned her. A newcomer causes her to question the game-show-loving, tag-sale-shopping, quiet life which she and her Grammy lead. Most painfully, her best friend is growing away from her, and she is left suddenly and starkly alone. Luckily, Delsie has plenty of friends and neighbors who – although she doesn’t realize it – comprise the “normal” family she longs for. And through her experiences, Delsie finds out that people aren’t just what they seem on the outside – they are made up of the layers of history within. The thing that makes Shouting at the Rain so satisfying, yet intriguing, to read is that – unlike with many other books – the main idea is never confirmed in one climax paragraph, but hinted in small ways throughout the story. Finding one of these keys to the theme is like discovering a hidden gift, giving the reader a feeling of accomplishment which isn’t easily found in most middle-grade books. However, clues like the description of a boat whose top coat chips away to show a rainbow of different-colored paint layers underneath, or the main character’s obsession with Strong Shoulder jars, cannot be connected to the main theme with absolute certainty because there is never any validation: novels don’t have answer keys. Despite this, one of the joys of reading is the search for meaning beyond the obvious, and the author of this book is adept at providing this pleasurable literary treasure hunt. Another thing that impressed me about Shouting at the Rain is the author’s use of the “show-not-tell” writing tool; in other words, the art of showing a character’s emotions through their actions. Strikingly, not once in the book did the author give away any character’s feelings in a single word, but painstakingly described physical actions: staring at shoes, standing straighter, bouncing on toes. More than once, I had to stop reading and consult my knowledge of human body language – what are people feeling when they avoid someone’s gaze? And do shining eyes actually entail tears? The writing style of Shouting at the Rain forced me to rethink what I took for granted about how a person’s mental state correlates with their actions. In a way, it reshaped the way I look at the world. That is the power of books, and why I enjoyed this one so much. “In hot water, we just get stronger and stronger.” This is a truth that applies to everyone. Shouting at the Rain brought it to life for me, as it brought to life many other truths, skillfully woven together into a story I’ll never forget. Most of all, Shouting at the Rain reminded me of how magical a good book can be, and I hope it does the same for you. Shouting at the Rain by Lynda Mullaly Hunt. Nancy Paulsen books, 2019. Buy the book here and support Stone Soup in the process! Have you read this book? Or do you plan on reading it? Let us know in the comments below!
Saturday Newsletter: May 4, 2019
“Illuminated,” photograph by Lara Katz, 14. Published April 2018. A note from William Rubel It is so easy to take a glance and then just turn the page. Photography was invented in the 1840s. Photographers have been recognized as great artists since the beginning of the art form. But it has only been in recent decades that exhibits of photography at museums have drawn crowds that match those of exhibitions of paintings. In newspapers and magazines we become accustomed to seeing photographs as documentary tools. The photograph shows us the subject that is discussed in the article. We glance, our internal voice registers, “Ah, that is what it looked like,” and we then usually focus on the accompanying text. Stone Soup is a literary magazine. The photographs that are included in Stone Soup do not illustrate the stories (though they can partner with them, and add another dimension). They stand as works of art in their own right. Photographs are not composed of words. Words slow us down. It takes a while to read a page. But we can read a photograph in an instant, literally. How many words would it take to describe your house? And then how long would it take to read the description? But it only takes a short glance at a photograph of your house to recognize it. I hope all of you read Editor Emma Wood’s thought-provoking note on reading poetry in the April 6 Newsletter. If you didn’t, then read it now. I promise you, you will find something there that you will remember for a long time. I’d like to borrow one paragraph from Emma’s note: The poet Wallace Stevens once said, ‘A poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.’ What does this mean to you? To me, this means that a poem should operate just on the edges of reason and rational thinking. It should tell me something that I don’t quite understand. The poem should force me to spend time with it, to read and reread it, and, with each rereading, to come closer to my own understanding of it. Lara’s Katz’s photograph, which we published last year, forces you to stay with it. You cannot understand it in a glance. As Emma puts it regarding understanding poetry, it “operate[s] just on the edges of reason and rational thinking.” What is happening to the right of the column? What do we see on the left? And what is the column part of? Is this a doorway? A gate? An arch along a walkway or in a grand building? Is that graffiti or a projection? Is that a face at the top of the column? Eyes in the wall to the right? There is a lot in Lara’s photograph that we “don’t quite understand.” This is a photograph you can come back to for years. Where does this photograph take you? I’ll leave it at that. Once you are done, send us what you’ve written to Stone Soup. 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. In a review written together, Ben and Jackson discuss Angie Thomas’s modern classic The Hate U Give. Read their review to find out why they think the book offers a ‘unique perspective’ of main character Starr being ‘split between two worlds.’ Have you read this book or watched the movie? Let us know what you think! Soohong reviews Coraline by Neil Gaiman (which is another book that got turned into a movie!). ‘Coraline was a very amusing and super enjoyable novel. Though it scared me so much and sometimes gave me nightmares, this would definitely be a book I would recommend to people.’ Read more of Soohong’s thoughts here. From Stone Soup April 2018 The Stone Angel By Julia Lockwood, 12 Photograph by Lara Kaz, 14 The pewter sky hung like a tapestry over the graveyard, dark clouds spilling across it. The clouds boomed and thundered like an angry beast, releasing torrents of water that drenched the gray headstones below. Lightning sliced through the air like a sword, illuminating the world for a second with its violet light. Libby liked the rain. The way it left her honey hair wet and clingy, the way the droplets slid down her cheeks like cool tears. She knelt down next to her favorite grave in the furthest corner of the cemetery. Most of her neighbors grew up in fear of the cemetery across the street, but Libby loved it. Each weekend she would place flowers on her favorite graves, and she loved calculating the ages of the people on the headstones. Libby peered at the grave in front of her. The cool stone of the memorial was cracked and crumbling, with moss climbing up it, filling in the crevasses. A smiling angel stood atop the base of the grave, holding a harp in its chubby hands. The angel’s face had been worn away by decades in the rain, giving the grave an eerie look. Engraved in the podium was the name of the girl who rested there. Here lies Ada Lee Clemmons 1896-1907 Beloved daughter, sister. May her soul rest in peace. “Pretty, isn’t it?” a sweet voice said from behind Libby. Startled, Libby turned quickly to see a girl standing behind her. The girl looked about Libby’s age, with tawny skin and soft coils of chestnut hair. Her cheeks held a slight rosy blush, probably a result of the cold of the rain. But what struck Libby as particularly striking were the girl’s eyes. They blazed blue against her darker skin, as if holding a cold fire inside them. The girl took a step closer to Libby. “It’s sad isn’t it?” She asked. “She was so young. Only eleven, only as old as I am now.” The girl turned to look at Libby, as if noticing her for the first time. “You come here a lot,” she said. It was not phrased as a question, but simply as a statement. “Y-yes.” Libby stammered.
