Maybe you remember my post of my “Bizzare Bookshop” puzzle earlier? Here’s a picture of it; it is now hanging on my bedroom wall.
This bookstore really is bizarre, lots of weird things lying on the shelves, and all the titles are puns on classic stories!
I also had two more puzzles to complete. I love puzzles almost as much as I love books, so to be able to do puzzles of books is a-m-a-z-i-n-g for me! Ravensburger makes the best puzzles, ever. And believe you me, I have done my fair share of puzzles.
The next one is finished, and hanging on my bedroom wall. This one is “World of Words”. This took less than a week.
World of Words, 1000 pieces
The one in progress is “Sanctuary of Knowledge”, which is taking me already two weeks….I did this one last year and one of my girls took it and put it in their room. Fair enough. I have just really been struggling to sit down and work on this: holidays, back to work, MBA classes started……
Sanctuary of Knowledge, 1000 pieces
And the toughest, but my favorite Ravensburger puzzle? “The Last Supper”. A very close friend of mine from church bought this for me and my girls. 3000 pieces. Took us all 6 weeks to complete it but it has been hanging on my kitchen wall for over two years and I love looking at this. Every. Single. Day.
Wrote: The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951, as well as 3 other novels, including short stories that appeared in The New Yorker. He was drafted into the Army and served from 1942-1944. He was hospitalized after suffering a nervous breakdown after the war. Mr. Salinger lived a very private life, last published a book in 1965, and gave his last interview in 1980.
Odd Fact: Mark David Chapman, the man who assassinated John Lennon, was found with a copy of the book at the time of his arrest and later explained that the reason for the shooting could be found in the book’s pages.
Quote: “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.” ― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
The Catcher in the Rye
I have to be completely honest and say I have never read this book! I am ashamed to even say that, but I guarantee after reading the synopsis of this book, I will own it before the weekend is over.
So our little friend What-the-Dickens is finding himself in a messy situation. He is hell bent on finding McCavity, a huge white cat that tried to eat him. It’s the first living thing he saw, and he is bound and determined to find this McCavity, give her a gift, and ask to be her pet.
Sounds reasonable to me.
So on his journey, he manages to be adopted by an out-of-tune rust-throated grisset (a bird of some sort). She snatches him from the ground, but when her babies won’t eat him (they prefer worms of course) she plops him in her nest with the others and flies off to find food for all of them. As timing would have it, What-the-Dickens peeks over the edge of the nest and sees McCavity walking past the tree. She sees her lost dinner, and up the tree she goes. The birds fly the nest, and What-the-Dickens falls out, discovering his webbing helps slow him down from a fall. Once again, he has lost sight of McCavity, and he’s off again, searching for this cat so he can be her pet.
At what is the start of his career as the Tooth Fairy, What-the-Dickens passes the zoo, and an enormous lion with a toothache, knowing it must be a relative of his beautiful McCavity. Not knowing the lion is drugged up on morphine for his surgery the next day to remove the tooth, What-the-Dickens tries to find out if he knows where McCavity might be, ends up in his mouth, and discovers the infected tooth. Surely this huge cat will help him on his way if he removes this tooth, right?
So remove it he does, lucky to not be eaten, and getting no further help, heads off with the tooth as a present for his future owner, and the start of a career under his belt.
What’s up next for What-the-Dickens? Hard to say, but surely there is more trouble heading in his direction!
The original winner of this book never contacted me. It’s full of great recipes and a back story and I would love to give this book to someone! Interested? Let me know in the comment section and I will draw a name this Saturday and send it on its way!
Are You Familiar With Gregory Maguire? Have you read Wicked? If you have, then you’ve read Gregory Maguire. Being a huge Wizard of Oz fan, I have of course enjoyed all of the books in the Wicked Series (Except the last one, I haven’t read that yet). Gregory Maguire has a way of taking common fairy tales that we are all familiar with, or other stories we think we know, and giving them his own unique twist; taking you on a journey you never expected.
Do you like Cinderella? You want to read “Confessions of an Ugly Step-Sister”.
How about Snow White? Then you would love “Mirror, Mirror”.
“What-the-Dickens” is a story about the tooth-fairy. It revolves around Dinah Ormsby, her older brother Zeke, their 2 year old sister Rebecca Ruth, and their just showed up on their doorstep distant cousin Gage. There isn’t a definite time frame, or year that this book seems to be set in. The back story on the family is the parents disappeared, Gage shows up. On page 5 we read that “the Ormsby’s were trying the experiment of living by gospel standards, and they hoped to be surer of their faith tomorrow than they’d been yesterday”. This is also a family who lives with no cable television, internet service, or visits to the mall.
This isn’t your run-of-the-mill tooth-fairy either. He is what would be called a Skibbereen, or Skibberee. “His arm webs were filmy, nearly transparent, and his skin was suggestible, like water. I suppose his circulation worked on a capillary system; his coloring could shift from pale to dark and many shades in between” (pg. 20). He sounds kind of like a dragon fly to me.
So are you interested? Good. Because I have just started this book, and “What-the-Dickens” (yes, that is his name) seems like he has a lot of trouble coming his way. I can’t wait to share it with you!
Cinderella Ate My Daughter, by Peggy Orenstein. If you are a Mom, Grandma, or Aunt to girls, this is an excellent book with lots of facts and some interesting stories.
This about covers it!
The end of the book was in the time frame of when Tangled was about to be released by Disney (2010ish) so even some of the statistics I am going to share with you may have increased exponentially since the release of this story.
Shocking, almost impossible to believe, statistics:
The Global revenue Disney experienced from their Princess franchise in 2000: $300 million. In 2009? $4 billion.
The percentage of children ages 8-12 who regularly used eyeliner doubled between 2008 and 2010. Doubled. DOUBLED. What in the world is an 8 year old doing wearing eyeliner?
Nearly half of girls between 6 and 9 regularly use lipstick or lipgloss. (I do not know the number surveyed so it is kind of hard to tell you what the halfway point is, but for me I would have to say 1 out of 2 is one too many. My 9 year old uses chapstick. Plain, colorless, flavorless, chapstick).
Age of Barbie target audience when she was released in 1959: 9 to 12 years old. Age of Barbie target audience today (2010)? 3 to 7 years old.
In 2009, 12,000 Botox injections were given to children between the ages of 13 and 19. (I have absolutely nothing to say about this. I am just dumbfounded).
In 2008, 43,000 children under the age of 18 surgically altered their appearance. (HOW and WHY is this even possible? Unless if it is a life-saving, necessary surgery or a surgery to stop a child from being bullied, i.e. noticeable birthmark that gets them teased, the Doctors doing plastic surgery on children who aren’t finished growing should lose their license to practice, and the parents should just lose their parental rights.)
Between 1996 and 2006, the percentage of children under the age of 12 admitted to the hospital for eating disorders rose 119%.
Between 2000 and 2004, there was a 70% drop in the number of female college freshmen listing computer science as their major.
The age at which children express brand consciousness? 24 months.
I know everyone raises their children differently, and dependent on a person’s upbringing, it may be perfectly normal to allow your 16 year old to have plastic surgery. I have just voiced my opinion about how I feel as the mother of 4 daughters, and my intention was not to offend anyone. But I will certainly not ever apologize for the fact that I find it ridiculous and absurd that any girl under the age of 19 would be allowed to have botox injected. Exactly what is going on with your face at younger than 19 that needs to be fixed?
Good Gracious, I pray for strength, knowledge, and always being able to stay one step ahead of these girls I am still raising to be women, in the hopes of not only keeping them safe, but making them strong, intelligent women.
I thought I would have finished this book by now, but I had a change of plans outside of my control this weekend so I am a bit behind my schedule. I am nearly finished and I think one more review should be the end of this story before I move onto the next story.
This book is still as interesting as ever. The author took it upon herself to follow around girls up to the 8th grade, getting a feel for how different a 10 or 11 year old acts now compared with how she herself remembers her and her friends acting at that age. We are raising our children in an environment that is completely different than the one we experienced ourselves. Do you remember when the very first Atari 2600 system came out? When your family got their first VCR, and rented their first movie, likely from the local grocery store because there were no chain rental stores? Remember getting a cordless phone, and you no longer had to wind up the “was-10-feet-but-is-now-35-feet-because-I-stretched-it-to-my-bedroom” phone cord hooked to the phone in the kitchen? My girls will never know a time when there was not a computer in the house. Or a cell phone. Or a DVD player. They have no idea what a cassette tape or player even is.
Wow, the reminiscing has taken me off task! Back to the story. One observation:
From Cinderella Ate My Daughter (pg 162), by Peggy Orenstein, she noted that “doll sales have declined by nearly 20% since 2005. Girls are casting them aside in favor of online play, which offers even fewer opportunities to go off script. …a quote from a 9-year-old Barbie.com fan: ‘I don’t think I’m good at making up imaginary things; I didn’t know what to do with dolls.’ “ This is a very sad thing for me to admit but I cannot remember that I have ever bought my 9-year-old a baby-doll. Ever. She has had a couple Barbies, Monster High dolls, and numerous Fur-Real Friends animated stuffed pets. The one gift she has consistently asked for, along with 2 of her sisters? Webkinz. You know, the Beanie Baby answer to the internet. They each have several. She was never drawn to baby-dolls, and I never gave her the opportunity to decide if she liked them by just getting her one regardless of her asking or not asking for it.
And a quick observation about social networking, namely Facebook, which has been a troublesome nuisance in my house for one of my girls. Peggy Orenstein points out that “one of my favorite books as a child was Joan Walsh Anglund’s ‘A Friend is Someone Who Likes You’. These days, a better title might be ‘A Friend is Someone You Have Actually Met in Person’ (pg 165). This is in the chapter titled “Just Between You, Me, and My 622 BFF’s”. You know the Facebook pages; the ones where the person has over 1000 friends. This person with 622 friends was a girl in 8th grade, who insisted she had at least met each person on her friends list once. What does an 8th grader need 622 Facebook friends for?
So as I finish up the end of this story, I can definitely say my eyes have been opened to the way I have allowed companies to market to me and influence my decisions. And here I thought it was just my girls asking me for stuff all of the time.
As I am getting further into the book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, by Peggy Orenstein, I am learning more and more how I have been manipulated by the big-and-small name companies who have market segments strictly leaning on girls. Don’t get me wrong. I went more than willingly along for the ride. (Another time I will tell you about my youngest daughter’s foray into Irish Dancing). Reading about the toddler beauty pageants in this book had me seeing what I myself was capable and guilty of.
So, one thing that really reached out and slapped me in the face, was on page 82. “ ’Tween’ girls now spend more than $40 million dollars a month on beauty products. No wonder Nair, the depilatory maker, in 2007 released ‘Nair Pretty’, a fruit-scented line designed to make 10-year-olds conscious of their ‘unwanted’ body hair” (2012, pg. 82). The first thing I thought was that these tween girls must all have amazing jobs to be able to spend that much money, a month!!, on make-up and lip gloss. If only, right? But apparently a lot of moms are doing pretty well for themselves to be able to invest this kind of money in their young girls beauty regimens. My kids are going to deal with whatever supposed unwanted hair they have when they are 10 years old. They are just stuck with it. Sorry. You don’t need smooth legs right now.
I understand that times have changed. Having 4 girls ranging from 21 years old down to 9, I have bought Barbies, Bratz, Moxie Girls, My Little Pony, Monster High Dolls, and every other girlie toy I can’t bring to mind at the moment. But even though times have changed, my oldest still set the precedence that the others will, and do, follow. No one is allowed a cell phone before they are 13 years old. No one will wear make-up other than chapstick before they reach 12. No one will wear clothes that show their midriff, butt-crack, or breasts falling out of a shirt. I haven’t budged on this, and I won’t. Yes, I hear all the time about the 8 and 9 year old friends who have their own cell phones, and I refuse to give one to my 12 and 9 year old. I got by without one; I’m sure they will survive it as well.
Really? Just Really 🙂
So what’s to come? More eye-opening facts of how I have been sucked in to the system. Again; willingly. I like my girls to be girlie, if they are indeed “girlie-girls”. 2 of them are, 2 of them aren’t. If one wants Barbie Dolls to play with, I am OK with that. But if they decide they want a baseball glove and bat instead, I am OK with that as well.
I am curious to see as I continue to read what possible damage I may have done to my girls’ self-esteem!
Happy Friday Everyone! It’s a balmy 1 degree here in West Michigan. I plan on doing a lot of reading under some seriously heavy blankets this weekend!
Today’s Fun Fact:
Harper Lee
Born: April 28, 1926
Wrote: To Kill A Mockingbird
Fun Facts: The only novel she ever wrote, she won awards for it, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Quill Award for Audio book. As a child, Lee was a tomboy and a precocious reader, and she enjoyed the friendship of her schoolmate and neighbor, the young Truman Capote, who provided the basis of the character of Dill in her novel To Kill a Mockingbird. This novel is the only novel that she ever completed.
A Classic!
Can you imagine writing one novel in your life, and having it be this fantastic? What a talent!
Harper Lee is still alive and aside from some legal troubles with the town where her story was based taking liberties on her story for profit purposes, she lives a quiet life out of the spotlight.
booksandopinions.com 