thanhtoong0

thanhtoong0

  • Joined: June 24, 2025
  • Articles: 14999

Comment on Reviewed: Watch Me by Tahereh Mafi – Spoilers by best books summary

Really appreciated your honest take on Watch Me! I’ve been both excited and nervous about diving back into the Shatter Me world, especially with James now stepping into a leading role. Your thoughts about him acting more juvenile than expected are interesting — I was hoping he'd bring more maturity to the table after everything his character witnessed growing up. Rosabelle sounds like a fascinating new addition, though, especially with her background and the AI-controlled Ark Island setting. I love how Mafi blends dystopia with current concerns about surveillance and tech dependency — it’s scary how relevant that feels.

Also agree with you on the writing style — whimsical and poetic, but sometimes I do miss a bit more depth in the characters with dual POVs. Still, your review makes me curious enough to give this one a shot. It sounds like a solid setup for the rest of the series, even if not perfect. Thanks for sharing such a well-balanced review!

The big idea: should we give babies the right to vote?

Strange as it may seem, it’s hard to refute the arguments for truly universal suffrage

Two years ago, Alisa Perales sued California and the US government because they wouldn’t let her vote. The academically gifted Perales, who was eight years old at the time, argued that the rule excluding under-18s from democracy, which is enshrined in the US constitution, amounted to age discrimination.

Her case was thrown out, but it wasn’t the first time the voting age was challenged and it won’t be the last. The issue of whether the limit should be removed entirely has been raised periodically since at least the 19th century, and the ageless voting movement has been gaining momentum since political philosopher John Wall wrote a manifesto for it in 2021. More recently, children’s author and education researcher Clémentine Beauvais published a short tract in her native France making the case for it.

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‘When I read my sister’s stories I think, that’s not what it was like!’: Esther Freud on the perils of writing about family

The Hideous Kinky author has always drawn inspiration from her own experiences. Now her sister Bella is writing her own version of their childhood. Does fact or fiction come closer to the truth, she asks

I’m four and I’m pretending to be dead. I’ve been lying here behind the sofa, and I’m hoping I’ll be missed, but more than that I’m hoping it will make a story. The story of the games I like to play, and how I profess to remember my past lives. It is 1967, a few months before we set off for Morocco – my mother, my sister Bella and I – travelling overland by van, taking the ferry from Algeciras to Tangier, breaking down on the road to Marrakech. From then on everything becomes a story. The camel festival we visit, the path into the hills so steep that Bella and I are packed into saddlebags while the donkeys’ hooves skitter and slip. I can’t remember later whether it is a camel that is sacrificed when we reach the top, or a chicken. But either way I keep the description of the chicken to myself, running in circles, blood spouting from its headless neck.

For all the decades since, I’ve been the family chronicler, as much in my novels as in our lives. I’ve kept the few possessions from those years in Morocco. The kaftans we bought in the souk when we arrived, the corduroy patch that I unpicked from a pair of too small trousers, embroidered with a flower by a boyfriend of my mother. “Are you my Daddy?” I’d asked him, as I’d asked others, not because I thought he was, but because I’d read about another little girl asking the same question in a book. I can still see the look of consternation on the boyfriends’ faces, hear my mother’s embarrassed laugh.

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