I Wish We Could Go Back In Time And Climb Trees Together Again. I Love You, Vera. I Always Will.

When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.

'East of Eden' by John Steinbeck

Poem by Naomi Shihab Nye, whose father was a Palestinian refugee. From her 2019 book; ‘The Tiny Journalist’

Happy Halloween 2021!  - here’s ‘The Monster Of Her Age’ vibing with other the-story-behind-Horror books 🧟‍♂️📖 and also the 👑, Shelley’s Frankenstein. A meta (sorry 😬) way to engage with the genre if Horror is not your thing, and also if you really want a YA queer kissing book 😘 Also featured are:

🎃 ‘Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction’ by Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson

🎃 ‘She Made a Monster: How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein’ by Lynn Fulton, illustrated by Felicita Sala

What is the feeling when you're driving away from people, and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.

'On the Road' by Jack Kerouac 

“Because without our language, we have lost ourselves. Who are we without our words?”

'Finnikin of the Rock' Lumatere Chronicles #1 by Melina Marchetta

Anna Akhmatova poem

Let me tell you something straight off. This is a love story, but not like any you’ve heard. The boy and the girl are far from innocent. Dear lives are lost. And good doesn’t win. In some places, there is something ultimately good about endings. In Neverland, that is not the case.

'Tiger Lily' by Jodi Lynn Anderson

Every time you look up at the stars, it’s like opening a door. You could be anyone, anywhere. You could be yourself at any moment in your life. You open that door and you realize you’re the same person under the same stars. Camping out in the backyard with your best friend, eleven years old. Sixteen, driving alone, stopping at the edge of the city, looking up at the same stars. Walking a wooded path, kissing in the moonlight, look up and you’re eleven again. Chasing cats in a tiny town, you’re eleven again, you’re sixteen again. You’re in a rowboat. You’re staring out the back of a car. Out here where the world begins and ends, it’s like nothing ever stops happening.

‘Lost At Sea’ by Bryan Lee O’Malley

You will hear thunder and remember me, And think: she wanted storms. The rim Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson, And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire. That day in Moscow, it will all come true, when, for the last time, I take my leave, And hasten to the heights that I have longed for, Leaving my shadow still to be with you

You Will Hear Thunder, Poem by Anna Akhmatova