Few things are as satisfying as starting a book and realizing you’re going to sit there and read it straight through. It is such a wonderful moment where you know this is your life’s purpose for the next few hours and you can measure your next bit of existing by the number of pages the author has handed to you. It didn’t take me long to know I’d be with Aristotle and Dante and Sáenz until the last word. Ari is 15. He’s bored and miserable. […]
Getting on an airplane soon? Maybe skip this one.
I’ve got a ton of nonfiction in a pile next to my bed but I decided I really needed some fiction to take the edge off my anxiety. This wasn’t the best choice. I mentioned this on Facebook and my friends wanted to know if I had fallen down and hit my head because why would I think a Judy Blume book would be calming? I tried to disprove them and then I remembered: Iggie’s House – racism Superfudge – dead turtle Blubber – Mean […]
Trains or Foster Homes?
The Orphan Train Movement was a supervised welfare program that transported orphaned and homeless children from crowded Eastern cities of the United States to foster homes located largely in rural areas of the Midwest. The orphan trains operated between 1853 and 1929, relocating about 250,000 orphaned, abandoned, or homeless children. Two charitable institutions, the Children’s Aid Society and later, the Catholic New York Foundling Hospital, endeavored to help these children. The two institutions developed a program that placed homeless, orphaned, and abandoned city children, who […]
Rapunzel is Going to Eat Your Heart
Once upon a time (as so many of these stories start) in a far off kingdom (where so many of these stories take place), there lived a beautiful young woman named Rapunzel. Rapunzel was raised by Mathena, who rescued Rapunzel when she was seven years old.