“I’m grounded for two weeks or until my dad learns that ‘funk’ is not a bad word.”
“You’re my friend Katie, but we just don’t fight enough to be best friends.”
“Everything about girls make me really really nervous. I flunked my algebra test because algebra has the word ‘bra’ in it!”
Tee hee hee!! Teenagers on the loose or in most places, American teenagers on the loose.
Pour tears of solitude, happiness, sorrow in the cauldron, put into it chopped, crushed pieces of hope, add to it the spice of unrequited love, variegated essence of parental feelings, camaraderie, realizations, better tomorrows and you have a soup.
Embellishing it with the chicken that died in an accident while crossing the road in his zeal to prove that he wasn’t a chicken and you get a chicken soup .
This is all that is in the best selling ‘diary’; lip smackingly titled Chicken Soup For The Teenage Soul.
Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen , best selling co-authors and motivational speakers, along with a delightful lady, Kimberely Kirberger who works passionately for the teens, bring to the teens, by the teens and for the teens, this collection of stories based on teen experience, lessons learned and unlearned.
Without being too sobby, preachy or boring ,this book brings to fore certain gestures one should perform religiously in one’s life. They can be congregated under the several Titles in the book.
1.ON RELATIONSHIPS:
‘If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love.'
Stories on broken hearts, true love, crushes…which to a large extent won’t appeal much to an Indian teenager whose primary high skool ambition remains scoring high grades and getting a good college education. The opposite sex remains taboo in terms of open interaction in fear of a vicious attack on one’s character….
:-D “Kenny hasn’t spoken to me in 6 months, he won’t return my calls and he goes out with all my friends. Do you think I should break up with him?”
2.ON FRIENDSHIP:
‘Each friend represents a world in us, a world not possibly born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born’
Stories on friends who see you through difficulties not just from a distance but by walking alongside you. A girl Claudia whose friend Donna’s parents did not approve of her, shaved her own head to stop people (she was a say-it-on-the-face girl!!) teasing Donna because of her bald head as a consequence of chemotherapy.
3.ON LOVE & KINDNESS:
‘If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty give him something to drink’ The Bible
One is about this ugly duckling who longed for a valentine,but in vain. When she grew up, like the proverbial swan, she became beautiful and to her own two boys she gave extra money to gift an anonymous valentine to the least attractive girl in class so that she is at least happy.
‘One kind word can warm three winters.’
4.TOUGH STUFF:
‘The human spirit is stronger than anything that happens to it’.
A boy, who wanted to say ‘I love You’ to his father puts off saying it because he is a bit embarrassed and thinks it needless, is devastated when the next day he sees his dad in a position of not caring about anything i.e dead.
‘It is such a secret place, the land of tears’
5.ON FAMILY:
‘Family…a group experience of love and support’
A girl contemplates suicide becos nothing is working out in life and she doesn’t see a future in her writing career but she rethinks her decision when her step father gifts her a blank diary with just this words scribbled ’I believe in you’.
:-D “You mean dad started out as a date!!!??”
And there are more such stories under
LEARNING LESSONS
MAKING A DIFFERENCE
GROWING UP
The book simply sums up to just one thing that All Sorrows Can Be Borne If You Tell A Story About Them.
The book, though irrelevant at times for Indian teens, touches the heart when you see arrogant teens suddenly dropping to their knees to help a stranger to his feet or people looking back at their teen years and ruminating on the pearls of wisdom their elders dropped.
A good book, to be read in bits and pieces. No story lasts more than 3 pages yet gives more than that to think about.
For those broad shouldered grown ups who see through their wrinkled eyes,the world go round, caught up in a whirlwind, this book will remind them of a time when the world was flat and speed was a tortoise race…
For the teens,its like suddenly listening to the feeble crunching of sand beneath your feet,and realizing that besides the sea, the sand too has a voice….
Happy soul searching and memory lane trotting!!!!
