12 Comments

I am sorry this happened to you. Recounted this story to my teen daughters and we discussed it at length this morning. Thank you!

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that's amazing to hear that this made it into your home and with your girls. Teen daughters! Here we go!

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We can never be too prepared, and yet no amount of preparation will ever be enough. I started very early talking to my kids about body parts and acceptable touch, but reading your story has made me realize that I haven't been talking to them enough about this recently. Thank you both for the reminder.

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I hope it helps! it's so good you started early.

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I absolutely love your writing and how exceptional it was to share that story. I look forward to each issue. Just honest and beautiful.

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Thank you so much, that means a lot!

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❤️

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Yeah, now was the time. It's all so complicated and slippery, isn't it?

P.S. Wow I love that original cover (I checked out the one they used).

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me too, way cooler. She loves it too. (Beth is my friend, I'm proud to say). And I don't think I would have ever shared this if it wasn't for her character Alice.

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I see her book came out four full years before Trust Exercise, too.

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So I figured. Looks like a whole gaggle of parents on SS who are mistaking love for anxiety. 'Middle aged moms, here we go!'

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I think both the risks of adolescence and the fragility of its sensibility can be and are, often, overdone. Politicians pandering to parents of teens play on the somewhat neurotic tendencies of those same parents. In fact, most teens are quite capable of making the relatively trivial decisions that come their way by design, mostly to do with consumption of commodities and fashion, but also choosing their gender - a topic of interest only to those who are themselves uncomfortable with the choice they made years ago; the mere fact that chartered banks, those hotbeds of radicalism, have a dozen or so gender categories to choose from when signing up for a credit card tells the entire tale - and with whom they associate. Novelists who pander to the 'parenting' market by regaling them with cautionary tales should be ashamed of themselves. The artist is, also by design, present in our culture to counter the frauds of politics and other institutions, namely family and church, alike, not to align themselves with them. Writers who gain leverage by plotting neurotic narratives have betrayed their own vocation.

Forget Hahn and all those like her. Read something truly radical and future-looking instead. Something that liberates youth and orients them towards vouchsafing what is their future after all, not that of we over-anxious adults. And if we are truly concerned about our youth, we need to focus on real issues; warfare, national rivalries, environment, economy and demographics, not parties and the almost non-existent cult. 95% of child abuse happens in the family, almost all the rest in schools or in organized sports. Not parties, not dates, and certainly not cults.

This is the story of our time and of our future: https://gvloewen.ca/fiction/the-kristen-seraphim-saga/

Ages 14-24 is the publisher's recommendation.

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