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The Coolest Thing I've Ever Seen

Get Ready To Laugh

This is the funniest thing I have seen in a very long time.  LAUGH!

New Maine Magazine

Don't know how I missed this the past few months, but I just discovered a supercool new magazine!

maine

White Picket Fences

When her black sheep brother disappears, Amanda Janvier eagerly takes in her sixteen year-old niece Tally. The girl is practically an orphan: motherless, and living with a father who raises Tally wherever he lands– in a Buick, a pizza joint, a horse farm–and regularly takes off on wild schemes. Amanda envisions that she, her husband Neil, and their two teenagers can offer the girl stability and a shot at a “normal” life, even though their own storybook lives are about to crumble.

Seventeen-year-old Chase Janvier hasn’t seen his cousin in years, and other than a vague curiosity about her strange life, he doesn’t expect her arrival will affect him much–or interfere with his growing, disturbing interest in a long-ago house fire that plagues his dreams unbeknownst to anyone else.

Tally and Chase bond as they interview two Holocaust survivors for a sociology project, and become startlingly aware that the whole family is grappling with hidden secrets, with the echoes of the past, and with the realization that ignoring tragic situations won’t make them go away.

Will Tally’s presence blow apart their carefully-constructed world, knocking down the illusion of the white picket fence and reveal a hidden past that could destroy them all–or can she help them find the truth without losing each other?


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Thank you to Random House for giving me copy of this book to review!

My New Favorite Song

Happy Halloween

Yesterday, I was discussing with a friend what an absolutely ludicrous expression, "Happy Halloween," is.  It would make a lot more rhetorical sense to say, "Horrible Halloween!" or "Ghoulish" or "Scary" or "Evil Halloween!"  You get the drift.

I am supposed to be happy?  That my kids are craving cavaties, that I have 40-year-olds knocking on my door, without costume (unless those are costumes), sneering "Trick-or-treat" in a voice that uncompromisingly promises a trick in the absence of a treat.  I give them licorice in the same type of trepidation that I would pay for mob protection.  I'm supposed to be happy that I can't drive through town without swerving around parentless kids, each darting out in front of me?  I'm supposed to be happy that people are torturing cats?  Toilet papering houses?  Egging teachers' cars?  Are you kidding me?

And you know why people act like this?  Because they can.  Because we encourage it.  Because we give them a holiday that excuses such behavior.  Because we celebrate evil.

An elderly woman I know walked into a convenience store to purchase a juice.  When she reached into the cooler, a hand from inside, reached out and grabbed her hand.  This scared the absolute hell out of her.  She lost her thirst.  She lost the courage to leave her house on Halloween for the rest of her life.  This is just stupid.

It is a stupid holiday.  It is a stupid tradition.  And I'm almost scared to publish this post for fear of retaliation.