Friday Funnies: Please Keep Off the Grass



Only the Beatles ...

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Review: Binding 13 by Chloe Walsh

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I picked up a copy of the first novel in the Boys of Tommen series assuming that it was set in a university. Turns out that I was wrong. The characters are all in high school, though as per the note in the front, the novel is pitched at readers over the age of eighteen. The setting is quite dark and topics addressed include alcoholism, physical abuse and bullying. The romance, pairing a fifteen year old girl who is small for her age and described as having a childlike appearance with a boy who is physically mature, sexually active, who invades her privacy and is not far from his eighteenth birthday seems questionable.  After suffering through years of bullying at school, some of which put her in hospital, Shannon has transferred to a private school, one so expensive that her mother has to take out a loan to pay all the fees. Things are going well, she has friends at her new school, there are strong anti-bullying rules in place and everything at Tommen College seems well, nicer ... ...
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Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean...
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