Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists

2 AM, the red exit sign glows in the corner as we sit on the yellow, rubber floor of the school building. The middle school principal and high school placement director are huddled in their sleeping bags, half paying attention to my reading interspersed with practicing dance combinations. Only two hours ago, half the boys in our class were standing, shirts off, in the doorway of the math classroom. And an hour before that, we sat in the lunchroom eating cold pizza while watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. But here we are now, the four of us who don’t feel comfortable in the classrooms full of cis boys and girls, reading a book with a curse word every two words to the people writing us high school recommendation letters. Sounds surreal? Not as surreal as the plot of Neanderthal Opens The Door To The Universe by Preston Norton. The plot as a whole is pretty simple, a football player named Aaron falls into a coma and gets a List (hereafter referred to as The List) of things to do from God to make his high school a slightly less terrible place and enlists a social outcast named Cliff (nicknamed Neanderthal due to the size of his body) to help complete The List. The first time I picked up this book I was surprised by how odd the plot was, sort of magical realism/bible fanfic (turns out most of the characters are atheists) and even after reading the book, I’m still very confused how anyone could come up with a plot so stereotypical and unusual at the same time. My feelings around this book are quite mixed, hence the four stars. On one hand, the characters are fairly stereotypical; Cliff talks about food all the time as a comedic relief, Esther is just pure evil, Aaron is an arrogant football star who is on a journey to become a better person, and so on. The only character that I found interesting was Noah, the small town’s only out gay kid who was thoughtful in a real way and defied stereotypes (i.e he was not super flamboyant and had an interesting relationship to religion). On the other hand, Norton’s humor was spot on as any teen would understand. Nortan’s passion for sci-fi also took the spotlight in this story with Cliff’s constant analogies and allusions to canonical sci-fi movies and literature. Plot-wise, the book felt forced and almost too coincidental and too perfect in the way each piece of the story fits into each other. Each piece of the list relates to a part of high school life; bullying, annoying teachers, heartbreak, drugs. The book also covers more topics such as suicide, alcoholism, abusive parents, religion, and more which are not often covered in depth in YA literature. I am glad that Norton included these themes because teenagers are becoming exposed to these topics at increasingly young ages and it’s a nice change to not just have perfect small town life or future dystopian worlds be the setting and context for what we read. This being said, some of the exploration of these topics felt rushed as if the whole point of writing that scene was to teach a lesson about the outcome. Overall, I was pleasantly surprised that I liked it. I had fun reading it and laughed a lot (the majority of the books I read don’t involve much laughing. The middle felt a little repetitive but I would still recommend it to lovers of dark humor, sarcasm, sci-fi references, and magical realism who still want some interesting content. Neanderthal Opens the Door to the Universe by Preston Norton. Disney-Hyperion, 2018. 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!

Note: Like our double review of Save Me a Seat, we’re publishing two reviews of Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s classic Shiloh. Enjoy!   Review by Isaiah Brown: Imagine you’re just taking a walk down the side of a river trying to enjoy the scenery. Then eventually you turn around and see a dog. The dog looks lean, hurt and abused and you want to keep it, but you know you can’t because your family can’t afford a dog. What if you then found out that the owner was a mean hunter that cared nothing for his dogs and may of killed one of them in the past while hunting. Knowing this, would you feel powerful enough to stand up to him and try to win the dog over or just return it and let him keep abusing the dog knowing you had the chance? This is what Marty faced in the book Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. He was just taking a walk to find the dog following him. He tried calling for the dog but it just sat there until he whistled. When it came over, he saw it looked hurt and abused and instantly wanted to care for it, though he knew his family couldn’t afford it. Later, he finds out that the owner was a mean hunter named Judd that abused his dogs. So, regardless of what his parents told him, he still made a pen for Shiloh and when Judd came looking for him, he had to lie to him and everyone else about not seeing his dog. After this, his mom found out about Shiloh and they were forced to keep it a secret from dad. Then, a very unfortunate event happened that could end Shiloh’s life in the next day… Shiloh is a very good book and is inspirational because it shows what true love is. It also makes you wonder how far you would go for someone or something and do all Marty did. For example, Marty said that if he were in heaven and saw Shiloh head on his paws, he would run away for sure. This is saying a lot because who would want to run away from heaven for a dog? Marty would, which shows how much he cares for Shiloh. Personally, I think the best part of the book is when Marty finally stands up to Judd to try and win Shiloh over once and for all because it’s one of those “YES or FINALLY” moments in a book. On the contrary, the only thing that wasn’t the best was all the slang throughout the story because in some cases it was difficult to understand the text. The author wrote this book to show what true love looks like and what it means to truly love something. The author shows this with Marty and all he does to keep Shiloh. This includes working for Judd twenty hours of hard labor without a true guarantee that Judd will keep his word and lying to everyone about not seeing Shiloh just so he could keep him. I would recommend this book to anyone that likes strong characters and I would rate it a four out of five because it’s very well written, but it does not have a lot of action. Now that you know about Shiloh, I hope you will consider to read it soon. Review by Eli Naylor: What would you do if a dog that has been abused followed you to your home? Would you give it back to its owner and let it be beaten, or would you keep it so it wouldn’t get hurt anymore? It really changes what is right and wrong and makes you think of what you should do. It would be wrong to take the dog from it’s owner, but there is also a problem with sending the dog back to be beaten. Well Marty, the main character of the story has to face all of this by himself. Marty is a twelve-year-old boy who doesn’t come from the richest of families. He lives in West Virginia in the town of Friendly. One day, Shiloh, the dog, followed Marty home and he really wanted to keep Shiloh, but when he asks his parents to keep him they say no. First, Marty is just a little bit angry, but still very sad. Then, it gets even worse as they find out the dog belongs to Judd Travers. This isn’t bad at first, but then they realize Judd is beating and starving his dogs. This makes Marty’s feelings for the dogs a whole lot stronger. A few days after Shiloh is returned to Judd Travers, he runs away again and Marty finds Shiloh in the forest. Marty was not planning on giving Shiloh back to Judd Travers, so he hid him. He takes supplies from the shed in his yard and builds Shiloh a makeshift pen on a hill on his family’s property. The pen is ok, but not strong enough to keep a deadly intruder out of his pen. This story was one of the most well written stories I’ve ever read in my lifetime. It was described in a phenomenal way where you can perfectly imagine the setting, the characters, and what is going on at the moment. The characters had emotional depth to them, so much so that I actually got attached to them and sometimes think of them as real people. They actually seemed like real people, that is how well they are described. This book was incredible, and, so well written. I would read it again for sure. I would rate this book a 3 out of 5, since I liked the story because it was very well written, but I didn’t like the concept of dogs being abused. I would recommend this book to someone still, but I would make sure they didn’t like dogs too much. It made you think about everything in the world that relates