Online Photo Editing

If you need a place to quickly touch up a photo before you send it to all your friends, check out Picnik. This is a brilliant site that lets you pull pictures from your computer, a website, Yahoo, Flickr, or a webcam and then edit them. You can fix colour, red eye, resize as well as play with fun effects. After you have tweaked the picture you can save it back to your computer or send it to a website or add it to your Flickr account or even print it. And it's free! (well so far) Go ahead, play!

Sold by Patricia McCormick

I want to tell you that you must read this book. I want to tell you that it will change the way you feel about sharing your room or having to eat leftovers again tonight. I want to tell you that reading this book will change the way you think about your everyday life. All of that is true, but reading this book will also show you things that are so painful that most of the world likes to pretend that they don't exist. Sold is the story of thirteen-year-old Lakshmi who is sold into prostitution by her step father. She has been living a subsistence life with her mother and younger sister in a hovel in Nepal. When she is sold to an "Auntie" she thinks she will be working in the city as a maid and this will allow her to send money home to her mother. Instead she is sold to a brothel in India with bars on the windows. She is broken and left without hope as her body and mind are abused night after night. She snatches brief moments of peace through friendships with the other women in the brothel, but these friendships themselves are dangerous because it leaves her with something more to lose. The story is written in prose poetry. The shortest chapter can tell of indescribable pain in short blunt sentences that leave you feeling breathless and afraid to turn the page. The author based the experiences in this book on interviews with some of the thousands of girls and women sold into the sex trade in India.

March Teen Advisory Board Meeting

We will be meeting on March 15th so those of you heading out of town for Spring Break can finnish your packing the next week. Please bring your agenda items along. At the last meeting we made up a list of potential donors for the Summer Reading Club. I'm hoping that some of you bring your artistic talents along and create the posters for next month's creative writing workshop. If you have any questions call me or send me a note.

Red Kayak by Pricilla Cummings

Red Kayak is a powerful book about the choices we make and the consequences of them, about friendship, families and the power of sadness. The book reads like a mystery in some ways and the story is gripping even if you figure out what is happening before the author gets around to telling you. The story is about Brady, a thirteen year old boy whose family's livelihood comes from the river. When new neighbours buy up the farm next door and build their mansion on the hill there is some resentment in the community. A malicious prank gone wrong has tragic consequences that ripple through all of the families involved and Brady has tough decisions to make regarding his role in the events. This is one of the books nominated for the YRCA Middle Division. I think it was a great read (I ditched chores to finish the book) and would highly recommend it.