March 2012 ~ I Write for Apples

I had the opportunity in the fall to read my first ARC- an Advanced Reader Copy- of Seeing Cinderella by debut author Jenny Lundquist. It was a fun read and I loved getting to know the characters. I’m including a synopsis below, but all you need to do is take a look at the cover and know that it’s a book about middle school and magic glasses. Smile Can you imagine what you could do with those?! While there is a lighthearted tone to the book, Ms. Lundquist also deals with real issues like friendship and secrets.

It’s available now on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. You can even get it on your Kindle or Nook!

So, if you have a young reader in your life, or if you enjoy a good read yourself, this is a good one to check out.

Congratulations to Jenny Lundquist!

From her website . . .

Seeing Cinderella: Calliope Meadow Anderson is terrified to start seventh grade. Not that the summer has been so great— her overachieving best friend, Ellen, is slipping away, her parents’ marriage is falling apart, and to top it all off, she has to get glasses the day before school starts. Life isn’t going too smoothly.

But things get unexpectedly weird when Callie meets her wacky optometrist and receives a pair of glasses so ugly they make braces and headgear look cute. But pretty soon, Callie makes a freaky discovery. Her glasses have magic powers: they can read people’s thoughts (and she’s pretty sure they repel boys, too).

Callie uses her new glasses to navigate middle school life and learns things she never knew about the people around her. That overachieving Ellen isn’t so super confident, after all. That neither of her parents are who she thought they were. That it’s a good idea to make sure your crush Knows Your Name before you spy on his thoughts. But when the glasses show Callie that Ana Garcia—a new student from Mexico and Callie’s Spanish tutor—has become a real-life Cinderella in her uncle’s house, she has to make a choice. Will she stay in the shadows and hide behind her magic glasses, or step out of the background and stand up for her friend?

We've all watched reruns, in whatever order they happen to be on TV. If you watched all seven seasons of Melrose Place (though few of us will admit it), you can probably jump right in and figure out what's going on in any given episode. Whether you were a Seinfeld fan from the beginning, or you simply know the characters, any episode from one to 180 will have you laughing. Does that same ring true for a movie series?

When it came to deciding what order of Star Wars we'd show our son, we were divided between the way we watched it (4,5,6 then 1,2,3) and chronological order (1-6).

Turns out it wouldn't be either.

When our son started getting interested in Star Wars, we weren't sure he was ready for the movies. So instead, he asked Daddy to tell him the whole story and then proceeded to ask A LOT of questions. Why did Anakin become bad? Who trained Obi-Wan? What is the Dark Side?

As fate would have it, Episode One, The Phantom Menace, recently came out in the theaters in 3-D, so we took him to see it, twice! He was ready to watch the next one, but I wasn't convinced that two and three were appropriate just yet. So he watched Episode Four, A New Hope. (Movie one for us old timers out there.) Number five seemed like a bit too much, so we let him move on to Episode Six, my favorite, Return of the Jedi.

For those keeping track, that crazy order is Episode One, Four, and Six. Hmm, that wasn't in the original plan. But, it turns out he didn't care much, because he knew the story, the characters, the beginning and the end. He jumped right in and it worked out fine.

How would you show a youngster the Star Wars movies?