I went through high school living inside a bubble. I didn’t have the disease John Travolta had in that TV-movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, but I adorned myself with a defensive see-through shell that helped me survive what are supposed to be the four most tumultuous years of any person’s life. My armor [...]
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Hello readers. So it seems like right now, it’s the holidays, the blogosphere is going to be cooling down. I mean, I know that I will certainly be posting at the Tart less frequently in the coming weeks as I work on holiday-y things like shopping and baking and keeping cats from chewing ribbon off [...]
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So a few weeks ago I posted a review of my new favorite tween novel, REAL MERMAIDS DON’T WEAR TOE RINGS by Hélène Boudreau. I’m so excited to have Hélène here on the blog today to celebrate her launch. That’s right, REAL MERMAIDS comes out today, so I hope you’ll go out looking for it. [...]
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It’s not often that I pick up a middle grade that makes me think of Margaret. I’m talking about Margaret of ARE YOU THERE GOD? fame, of course. I mean, there have been many books over the years that deal with coming of age and first periods and first crushes and all the hormonal insanity [...]
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Dear Teen Me, Right now you are in the closet. Or rather, whenever you tell someone you like Hanson you blush and get a little sweaty and feel weird and hope they don’t make fun of you. And sometimes they do, and you feel defensive and say things like “They are so super talented. They’re [...]
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Okay, yeah, it’s Halloween or whatever. This is a big deal to a lot of people. But some of us are enormous dorks and are getting ready for something else tonight. We are preparing to write epic books in the course of 30 days. We are pouring our guts onto the page without hesitation, with [...]
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Hands down, one of my favorite “grown-up books” of the past year was THE HANDBOOK FOR LIGHTNING-STRIKE SURVIVORS by Michele-Young Stone. It’s a story from two perspectives, that of Becca Burke, a young girl who has been struck by lightning, whose family believes she has imagined it, and of Buckley Pitank, who lost his mother [...]
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Since it’s Suicide Prevention Week here in the US I posted on mental illness at the YA-5 this week. Reposting today is especially important to me, since it’s Suicide Prevention Day. Would love to hear your responses. Here’s the post: Okay, before I get all serious on you, I want to remind you to visit [...]
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So I can’t help but notice that my Twitter feed is full of folks packing up their stuff and hauling their parents to various strange locales to start a whole new chapter in their lives: COLLEGE. College was one of my favorite things ever. I went to Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut, a good [...]
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It’s a question I ask myself every once in a while. Mostly because I’m baffled by the amount of teens and young people who smoke, despite the fact that so many of us have watched our parents and grandparents suffer from smoking-related illnesses. One of my grandmothers has had cancer, and the other has had [...]
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