Chicken Soup makes for a tastier book.

Whats interesting to me is that in the introduction to this book the Author seems so proud to have this amazing compilation of teen written work. This idea is not new. Chicken soup for the teenage soul has been around forever. The stories in this book seemed incomplete and often times lacked information that would have aided in understanding the point. I was actually excited to read the book RED because I thought it would be a lot like the Chicken Soup books. I was sadly mistaken and pretty disappointed. I had a very difficult time paying attention to the stories. A few of them were touching and very insightful and I really appreciated the authenticity of the actual teens using their own writing to express themselves. I just felt like this concept had been done before and it was done better by a different author. I felt like a few of the stories would make really good novel plots. It would have been a good assignment for us to imagine one of the short pieces into a full length novel. I felt like the girls were really whiney and would probably look back at what they had written and smack themselves in the forehead in shame because OMG the teen years are so trivial in the grand scheme of things. Most of these girls whine and moan about things that wont even matter to them ten years down the line, and the stories that did have some substance were so short it was hard to really understand what the girl is feeling. All in all I felt that RED will get sold back as soon as the final is over, but my Chicken soup books will forever own a spot on my self.

if at first you don't succeed....

If I was going to write a novel based on my own adolescence it would be pretty dull. I might focus a little on how I wish I had paid better attention and gotten better grades in high school. Other then that I didn’t have any kind of extraordinary experience or any kind of message to portray. It was only after I turned twenty that a good story began. I would probably write a novel on the last years of my adolescence and the first years of my supposed “adulthood.” It’s my belief that kids today don’t actually leave adolescence at twenty. I know I didn’t. My story starts at age 19 when I got engaged. I thought I was so grown up. I had moved into a new house with my fiance, and was setting up house and going to school. Everything seemed fairy tale perfect. I got married a week after turning twenty-one. Life was great for about a year and then everything fell apart. He cheated, and suddenly I was 22 and about to be divorced. Life kinda sucked at that point. I spent a year going out and partying with my friends while the divorce proceedings were happening. It was an extremely time in my life, but I did have an insane amount of fun also. The divorce was finalized and I got a crappy office job, and a cute apartment. It was tough because I was not really prepared to do everything on my own. I had to pay bills and manage money, and while it might not sound so sad it was a tough time for me. I didn’t really have a support system. I learned a lot in the years between my 21^st and 25^th birthday’s. I tried out a bunch of jobs trying to find what I wanted to do with my life. I was a receptionist, a flight attendant (which could be a story of its own), a daycare teacher, and a veterinary receptionist/attendant. I might not have a story that reveals some great truth or insight, and my story never had a terrible tragedy although it was an extremely difficult time for me. The moral might be that you have to have many different experiences in life to really find yourself, or maybe that it’s important to stay positive because this to shall pass. In any event my novel would certainly never be a best seller, and definitely not turned into a movie. It may not be a compelling story, but it’s all mine.