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Does Your Family Have Gift Giving Traditions?
Gal's family in Margaret Dilloway's The Care and Handling of Roses with Thorns is not really your typical happy family. They aren't unhappy but there are divisions and strife. The two sisters do not...
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Would You Give a Friend a Kidney?
After Gal learns to open up and well, stop being such a grump, she finds herself being befriended by people in ways that she had not imagined. When Gal opened herself up to not only friendship, but to...
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Do You Travel By Map?
When Linwood Barclay's Trust Your Eyes opens, we meet a man who is exploring New York City street by street. He wants to see the whole city, or at least as much of it as possible, before he has to move...
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Do You Look Up?
In Linwood Barclay's Trust Your Eyes lives are charged by the simple decision to look up. Had Thomas not looked up from the street view in the online map, they never would have discovered a crime. Had...
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The Vulnerability Hangover
In Brene Brown's Daring Greatly, she talks about what happens after you allow yourself to be vulnerable. She says, with a little help from Leonard Cohen, "often the result of daring greatly isn't a...
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Who Do You Trust?
It seems only appropriate to talk about trust when discussing Linwood Barclay's Trust Your Eyes. The characters in the book not only have to decide whether or not they can believe what they see on the...
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Would You Report an Internet Crime?
A lot of time is spent in Linwood Barclay's Trust Your Eyes in deciding whether or not to report what appears to be a crime. The question as to whether or not there even was a crime loomed large. While...
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Vulnerability and Shame in the Workplace
As we've discussed, feeling vulnerable is hard and frequently scary. The vulnerability hangover? It sucks. When I was reading Daring Greatly I was very wary of what Brene Brown was going to say about...
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What Would You Do if Technology Failed?
One of the things I found most intriguing about Ally Condie's Matched is how technology is approached in this new society. At one point Cassie says that the Society is in part a reaction to the...
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Plan B Parenting
In no other area of my life have I found myself as deeply vulnerable than as a parent. And that's why -- when my daughter was very young -- if you judged my parenting, I would jump down your throat....
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A World Without Creativity: The Hundred
When I read Ally Condie's Matched there were a lot of things about the Society that kind of blew my mind. When the old world broke down, the Society that rose from its ashes decided that there had...
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What Would You Do If You Couldn't Fail?
Brene Brown's Daring Greatly made me think a lot about failure. When we make ourselves vulnerable we open ourselves to a lot of things, some good and some positive. One of the things that we make...
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Where Do You Find Confidence?
Confidence takes many forms. We can have confidence in our abilities. We can have confidence in our personal relationships. Most of all, we can have confidence in ourselves. In Diary of a Submissive,...
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The Perfect Match
As one might expect in a novel named Matched, there's a whole lot of matching going on in Ally Condie's fictional world. Cassia's meals are a perfect match for her. She gets matched to the job that is...
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Magic Pills
Have you ever wished that there was a magic pill you could take that would just make everything better? A pill to make you happy? A pill that would nourish you so that you didn't have to eat? Those...
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Using the Internet to Find Your Community
The process of finding your community has changed a lot since the internet came into being. It used to be that we'd have to head out in our actual physical community and attempt to find the people with...
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Using Texts To Strengthen Your Relationship
I firmly believe that technology had changed how we do relationships. When we are apart from our loved ones we don't just have to rely on phone calls and letters. We have emails, social media, and yes,...
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How Do You Recharge?
Sometimes, we all need a little time to recharge. We each have our own way of doing that. Sometimes we do it alone. Other times we call upon our friends and loved ones to help us recharge our...
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Friends Help Make Breakups Bearable
I don't think there's really any way to say it except this -- breakups suck. Whether you are prepared for them, are the person doing the breaking up, or if you are blindsided by them, they just simply...
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What Does Service Mean to You?
As I've confessed, I'm not one for making life maps or vision boards. That said, I really appreciated how Kate and David Marshall's new book, My Life Map: A Journal to Help Shape Your Future, made me...
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