Thursday, September 29, 2011

Hip Hop Parenting - 10 Years Later

Here is a link to the Salon.com articleI wrote 10 years ago after struggling with my son over obscene song lyrics on a CD he wanted to buy with his own money.

Ten years later, access to any kind of music is at the fingertips of my high school students 24/7 on their digital devices of the moment. Times change but my commitment to censorship stays the same.

Sunday, September 25, 2011

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

I couldn't wait to blog about this amazing new novel! The Night Circus is the next big book people are going to be talking about - like Harry Potter and the Twilight series. I had heard the hype, waited for my library copy to come in and read the enraged bloggers talking about how Starbucks got them hooked on the free digital download of the first two thirds of the book. I am happy to say, the hype is merited. The Night Circus transports readers to the most lushly described imaginative landscape that I have visited in years. Only appearing at midnight in an undisclosed European city, The Night Circus is a black and white Victorian spectacle full of illusionists, contortionists and fortune tellers. Protagonists Marco and Celia are raised to compete against each other in a contest only one of them will survive. Their slow building love story is the central focus of the novel, but a whole cast of other performers, revelers and circus orchestrators keep the action - which goes back and forth in time - moving at such a clip that it is hard to put the book down, even though you want the story to last forever. I hate to disclose too much, but this book took me to a new world I didn't want to leave - even though I wanted to finish quickly and start spreading the word. I have to start knitting myself a red scarf, because I am a reveur in "Le Cirque des Reves...The Circus of Dreams"



The Night Circus book trailer