(from The Guardian
by Emma J. Keller)
Is your teenage son camped out in the basement surrounded by pizza boxes and Red Bull, playing video games 24/7 ? Does your daughter lie around ‘reading’ tabloid magazines or watching the Kardashians on her laptop until it’s time to eat when she graciously comes in to pick at the food you’ve spent the day making? Is your fridge completely empty because the TV-watching boy has eaten everything before noon and is now complaining of hunger?
Was your holiday gift-opening tranquility sabotaged by your girl who became enraged that her BFF (who she texted nonstop while opening every painstakingly wrapped item) got the iPad while she’s going to have to make do with an iPhone 5S FOR GOD’S SAKE?
Take solace mums and dads: Gigi Levangie Grazer has written just the book for you.
Seven Deadlies: A Cautionary Tale is a book of short stories set in the Los Angeles Mark Frost Academy, where kids and parents embody every tabloid, reality show or gossip column attribute you know. It’s a view of humanity (if that could possibly be the right word) seen through the eyes of narrator, Perry Gonzales, a 14-year-old Hispanic scholarship student. Perry gets right inside the mansions of her academic peers thanks to her tutoring skills. Like most of the regulars of these homes, she’s a paid Latina. But the joke is, she has something all of these kids seem to lack: brains.
Here she is on the moms at Mark Frost Academy:
I called them ‘cement heads’ (never to their frozen faces!). Botox seemed to be part of their four food groups, along with Restylane, Juvéderm and kale.
“It’s not that kids are dumb,” she says in a line that sums up perfectly what the book is about. “It’s worse, much worse. They’re entitled.”
And that’s the part that might resonate with you, my fellow 21st-century parents.
This is Beverly Hills as opposed to your own neighborhood, so the dads aren’t spared the ridicule either. One of them bounds into the room “wearing one of those biking outfits you see grown men bounce around in … lycra shorts, a cap, tight tank top, metal cleats. Everything splashed in colorful bold, advertising.”
My advice to you over the next few weeks until school restarts is to buy this book for yourself. Announce in a firm tone that you will be off duty for the next few hours, get yourself a drink and pick up the Christmas chocolates. Then disappear and read. This book is the holiday equivalent of an 800 help line.
Gift pairings
There are a few books that go perfectly with the Seven Deadlies. You can give them to your children and start a cheery type of family book club.
The first is the republished 1845 Struwwelpeter in English Translation. Don’t bother to wrap it though, just thoughtfully leave it on your offspring’s pillow when you turn down his bed at night, so he can enjoy the cover.
Younger children might ‘enjoy’ Hillaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children, which you don’t even have to buy. This might make it worthless in the eyes of your mercenary offspring, but is such an act of largess on the part of the Gutenberg Press, I almost wept.
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
If that’s too old-fashioned for them, Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes work well. When I was teaching 6-year-olds I read them his Red Riding Hood just for the hell of it. It includes the lines:
“The small girl smiles. One eyelid flickers.
She whips a pistol from her knickers.”
It was an unforgettable teaching moment.
No comments:
Post a Comment