My daughter, Ilsa, who’s 14, loves dystopian fiction, and is not averse to a little romance mixed in. As someone who grew up in the 70s and 80s worrying about communist invasions and gulags (I had a very vivid imagination), this mystifies me—at her age, I hated the thought of creepy Societies watching my every…
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It was a dark and stormy night. I was 12, recently moved 1200 miles from home, lonely, having a hard time making friends at my new junior high school. I was sick a lot that year and my mother, knowing what a hard time I was having, was patient with me, letting me stay home…
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Written on
January 22, 2012 by
Nancy
Barbara Houghteling is co-partner of Birthday Keepsakes, an online baby keepsakes website. When she came up with the idea for a personalized storybook, her daughter Jana, then a senior in high school, read her mom’s verses and decided she could do better. The Houghtelings worked with an artist to create the illustrations that accompany the…
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