Jennifer Lawrence is Katniss. Katniss Everdeen. From the Hunger Games. The one with grey eyes, olive skin, dark hair. Okay so she reads blond. Makeup will fix that. Still, this is sixteen-year-old Katniss. The one who seemed pretty darned clueless about the feelings of two hunky male counterparts vying for her affection. Well, okay. Ms. Lawrence is obviously a good actress. I believe she can act

I live in a basketball town (home of the Gonzaga Bulldogs). Even though I don’t speak ESPN, March brings NCAA talk into conversation. I usually offer up a ‘Go Zags’ and try not to reveal my lack of basketball aptitude. This year however, with dishonorable acts and honor code violations buzzing around the twitterverse, I have tuned in more than usual. In January, University of Washington senior

They may not be as plentiful as vampire novels, but there are enough YA titles modernizing Jane Austen to keep a girl busy. I wonder, can the modern protagonists truly fill Elizabeth Bennet's leather slippers? This is the question I'm using as an excuse to indulge in a mound of Austen homages. My reading list (so far) includes, Posh and Prejudice by Grace Dent, Prada and Prejudice by Mandy

My son is getting ready to graduate from high school. He just learned his classmate - a young man he's known since third grade - is getting ready to be a dad. The classmate is a big Teddy bear of a kid. Sweet, well-meaning, outgoing.  Teddy should have known better, no doubt about it. He's eighteen. Maybe Teddy's mom and dad didn't explain things well enough to him, I don't know. What I do know

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Tell all the Truth but tell it slant -- Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth's superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind --

On a recent High Maintenance Soccer Day (defined by me as a day requiring over one hour of driving solely for the purpose of youth soccer), my son and I took the three hour tour to Omak, WA (that’s six hours RT).  The upside of long soccer drives is that in Washington State, the landscape varies and it’s mostly beautiful. The drive to Omak is gorgeous – rolling wheat fields that look like ocean

Somewhere in the synapse building play I did as a child, I missed the activities that develop an ability to understand sports. I get sports on a fundamental level - ball must pass barrier - but most aspects of the games confuse me. How does one justify ever calling illegal use of hands in football, especially considering the ill-mannered placement of the QB's hands at the start of play? I mean,

I'm going to a wedding 2,000 miles away. Getting there has required using Expedia, the site the garden gnome advertises, and the one Capt. Kirk endorses. It’s taken 4Ever because I procrastinated until the wedding hotel was full, then had to locate an alternate hotel in the correct part of a downtown I’ve never visited. God I miss travel agents. Oooo, I really miss them. During my freeflowing

I read Forge, by Laurie Halse Anderson, without having first read its predecessor. While the book definitely made me want to read Chains, Forge stands on its own. Curzon's fascinating story of soldiering in Gen. Washington's army doesn't need  introduction. His backstory is neatly handled with a few well-placed asides and recollections. He's a solid and likable character in harsh circumstances

Relief costs tax payers 15 times more than Preparedness, but we voters don't reward politicians who prepare, we reward those who send in relief. Ugh. My kids were in NOLA building houses last summer. They drove through neighborhoods that looked as though the hurricane happened weeks ago, not years ago. 

Spoilers below. In my little corner of the universe, Mockingjay’s ending upset a few people. The adolescents I live with regularly argue about discuss their reading among a group of friends. The group rarely agrees on anything, but they formed an unusually tight alliance in opposition to Mockingjay on two plot turns. Last spoiler warning – look away now. #1 Prim’s death - Alma Coin’s

Spoilers? Yup. My rating: 5 of 5 stars I began Mockingjay with trepidation. I loved Hunger Games, but while Catching Fire kept me invested (okay, maybe even a little over invested) in the characters, it fell short of HG’s mark. I felt CF shorted Peeta in the characterization department, gave clues to the Tributes about the rebellion that left both the Tributes and the reader (this reader

Is it me, or does my city's mayor fit the description of Alma Coin?

I spent last week in Twilight territory, visiting the cold, damp West Side of  Washington State. At the Seattle Art Museum, my sons toured the Kurt Cobain exhibit (Verdict: "That guy was depressing as hell."), while my daughter and I took in, Behind the Scenes: The Real Story of the Quileute Wolves. Not surprisingly, there was nary a werewolf nor any shirtless eye candy in sight. The Quileute

NPR listed it’s Top 100 Killer Thriller books around the same time the NYT reported a study that found any reading, Britney Spears bios to Junie B. Jones, is good for kids. As I rather smugly doubted the benefit of reading any book, I perused the NPR list. A number of those scary books comprised my summer reading when I was young. Just after my 6th grade year, my impossibly large family took a

My rating: 4 of 5 stars Reading How to Hold a Woman by Billy Lombardo, was like running a skewer through the heart. This artfully told series of stories shows the unraveling of a loving couple after the loss of a child. Because details of the tragedy aren’t revealed until the end, I found myself frustrated not knowing what happened to their barely teenaged daughter. However, withholding that

Poor Peeta. The Hunger Games fanart by Inknose.

Mick Jackson, Emmy-nominated director of the HBO movie, Temple Grandin -  "On the face of it, it's a story about an autistic woman who can't bear to be hugged by her mother and who grows up to invent better slaughterhouses. You try pitching that in a meeting." (Favorite line - Clothing store clerk asks Temple how she likes a new outfit. Temple: "It doesn't itch.")

Melissa Wyatt wrote a seriously great post arguing Gale over Peeta. I lean the other way, although the Peeta-Gale Problem is a conundrum to me for two reasons.         1.      Gale has so little stage time we don't know him well. We readers are left making assumptions about his character based on just a few scenes, and in Catching Fire, he's unconscious a fair part of the time. (Hmm, am thinking

Play the I Write Like game. I put in two paragraphs of my novel and got, I write like Stephen KingI Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!followed by two paragraphs from the blog to get, I write like Charles DickensI Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!Flattery will get you everywhere. I love you, you crazy little internet ap.

 ...  The Peeta Problem. Something I've given far too much thought to myself, so I had to reply: Yeah, but...Great post. The Peeta-Gale Problem is a conundrum to me for two reasons. 1. Gale has so little stage time we don't know him too well, and 2. Peeta's cunning has been underwritten. He couldn't survive unless he excelled in the Outwit department. His intelligence is clearly there, but not

Boom! by Mark Haddon My rating: 4 of 5 stars Seventeen years after The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime author Mark Haddon, launched his middle-grade Gridzbi Spudvetch! with a fizzle, he updated and revised the work into Boom! With a tongue in his cheek, Haddon follows Jimbo and his best friend Charlie through an outlandish kidnapped-by-aliens adventure featuring schoolteachers

My rating: 3 of 5 stars In Food, Girls & Other Things I Can't Have, Andy Zansky is facing sophomore year with parents arguing through an unfriendly divorce, his best friend eager to team for Model UN - a NSG (no sex guaranteed) activity, a mad crush on a pretty new girl, and the scales tipping past 300 pounds. With a masterful mix of humor and anguish, author Allen Zadoff describes how it feels