All posts tagged: teenagers

Musings & Meanderings: A Curious month, January. Derek T. Freeman on BUILDING UNSTOPPABLE SELF-CONFIDENCE IN TEENS, purging, writer self-care, hybrid writing contests, workshops, retreats, more

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By Leslie Lindsay A curated newsletter on the literary life, featuring ‘4 questions,’ reading & listening recommendations, where to submit, more Leslie Lindsay|Always with a Book ~MUSINGS & MEANDERINGS~ Hello 2023, Friends! January is a curious month. Is it a coming or a going? New and fresh or letting go of the old? I struggle with this every year. In the Midwest, it’s cold. I don’t feel like opening doors and windows to ‘let in the new year,’ likewise for ‘spring cleaning.’ It’s not really spring, either–anywhere. Maybe we ought to rename it ‘New Year Cleaning?’ This year is off to a rough start. When I put it in perspective, it’s not so bad…but let’s just say it’s not flowing like usual, mostly in a personal sense, but a few professional hiccups, too. I’ll get through it! Here’s a little secret: raising kind humans is hard work. Being a kind human is hard work. We’ve got lots of ‘firsts’ happening–all in one week! Sweet Sixteen, college acceptances (and indecision), first jobs, a trip to the …

LESLIE LINDSAY, AUTHOR OF SPEAKING OF APRAXIA, talks with her 15-year-old daughter about what it’s like to be a teen with resolved CAS 2/2

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By Leslie Lindsay  Leslie Lindsay, author of SPEAKING OF APRAXIA (Woodbine House, 2020) interviews her 15-year old daughter, Kate, about growing up with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS).  ~APRAXIA MONDAY|ALWAYS WITH A BOOK~ A Mother-Daughter Conversation about CAS Part 2 of 2 Now available in an updated, second edition, SPEAKING OF APRAXIA: A Parents’ Guide to Childhood Apraxia of Speech (Woodbine House, December 2020), is an award-winning resource on Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS). Eight years ago, when Leslie Lindsay, former Child & Adolescent Psychiatric R.N., and mother to a daughter with CAS—now resolved—couldn’t find any parent-friendly books to help her child and family with CAS, she wrote one. This updated, well-researched, and comprehensive work provides readers the benefit of her experience and perspective. It covers: introduction to speech, language & listening explanation of CAS what to do when you suspect your child has CAS getting a speech evaluation meeting with a speech-language pathologist getting the CAS diagnosis possible causes diagnoses related to CAS speech therapy best suited for CAS complementary & alternative approaches activities & …

National Book Award-winning and NYT bestselling author Jacqueline Woodson’s RED AT THE BONE, about family, history, ambition, and a teen pregnancy

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By Leslie Lindsay  Beneath the trouble, lies a very powerful and poignant tale about race and class, ambition, and more. RED AT THE BONE is destined to become a classic.  ~Wednesdays with Writers: SPOTLIGHT!~ The thing with ‘classic’ literature is that it is typically polarizing; that is, not everyone is going to love it, there will be themes that make readers squirm, that make us uncomfortable. Classic literature does that. That’s exactly what we’ll find in this bestseller from Jacqueline Woodson, RED AT THE BONE (September 17 2019). Told in a forward-and-backward momentum, Woodson tells the story of two African American families from different social classes who come together because of a teen pregnancy and the child it produces. We begin with a sixteen-year-old’s coming-of-age party in somewhat contemporary (2001) times. Melody is that baby from sixteen years ago, when her mother was an unmarried pregnant teen. Adoring relatives look on, but what we don’t know is the pain each of them has carried. “In less than 200 sparsely filled pages, this book manages to encompass issues of class, …

Astonishingly Gripping, Hugely compelling, and so good–Shari Lapena is back with a new thriller set in an upper middle class neighborhood about teenage boys breaking into homes, plus the rhythm of writing, not plotting, more

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By Leslie Lindsay  Suburban noir, paranoia, and murder. No one does it better than Shari Lapena in her fourth book, SOMEONE WE KNOW. INSTANT UK SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER NOTABLE BARNES & NOBLE JULY 2019 PICK Shari Lapena is among a rare breed of prolific women thriller writers. Each book is fabulous, hitting the New York Times bestseller list. In fact, her first thriller, THE COUPLE NEXT DOOR (2015) was on the list for twenty-three consecutive weeks. Her second book, A STRANGER IN THE HOUSE, sealed her fate. She knows what readers want. And last year’s summer hit, AN UNWANTED GUEST was a nod to Agatha Christie’s AND THEN THERE WERE NONE, which had me re-thinking whether I should bring that book with me to a little inn on the coast of Michigan. I did, anyway. Clear your calendar for about 18-24 hours, because this book will be wholly consuming. It could easily be read in one sitting, but those of us who feel obligated to sleep or let the dog out, go to work, or …

Small towns, changing seasons, finding oneself, going back yet moving forward–Susan Bernhard discovers this & more in her debut WINTER LOON

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By Leslie Lindsay  A coming-of-age tale of one young man’s family tragedy about resilience, family secrets, dysfunction, and forging a new path.  WINTER LOON is a beautiful as it is stark. Debut novelist Susan Bernhard turns a graceful hand to an emotionally harrowing and highly dysfunctional family using the weather and the natural world as a backdrop. Through the retrospective lens of Wes Ballot, we follow along as his childhood comes to a dreadful end when his mother is drowned in an icy Minnesota lake. Wes is left with his drifter father, who, for the moment isn’t really around. At 15, Wes can’t be left alone in the family’s abandoned cabin in the woods, and so he is shipped off to live with his maternal grandparents in Montana, who aren’t too thrilled he’s there. Grandparents Ruby and Gip have remained embittered and cold to one another–and the world–what’s worse, Wes is forced to live in his mother’s old bedroom, still decorated as if she were 15 and living at home. But she’s dead and Wes misses his …

Writers on Wednesday: Gilly Macmillan on the challenges of a sophomore novelist, finding inspiration from real-life, getting to the truth in fiction, never tiring of new ideas, and more in her domestic thriller THE PERFECT GIRL

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By Leslie Lindsay  Last year, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Gilly Macmillan burst onto the scene with her critically acclaimed and Edgar-nominated debut, WHAT SHE KNEW.  She returns this fall (William Morrow, September 6 2016), with THE PERFECT GIRL, her second hypnotic literary domestic psych thriller.  Set in Bristol, in the southwest corner of England, a beautiful young piano prodigy (Zoe) is living a privileged Second Chance Life with her blended family, consisting of her mother, step-father, step-brother (also a pianist) and new baby (half) sister, Grace. Lurking under the surface, however are some dark secrets Zoe Maisey and her mother are harboring. Though she has a genius IQ and can play the piano darn well, moments from the past continue to haunt both she and her mother, events so tragic the mother hasn’t even told her new husband–demanding Zoe to do the same. But the cat is out of the bag fairly early in the book when someone from Zoe’s past shows up at performance at a local church.Twenty-four hours later, …