In a world before social networks made it a routine act performed with a click, "like" is a state of mystery and meaning among teenagers navigating the halls of Wadena Senior High School. Fifteen-year-old Monica is sure she would be happy if only she had a boyfriend, but first she endures a litany of boys who think flirting is accomplished with insults and other shenanigans. After her first kiss, performed on a dare and described in the pages of Dear Diary as "the pits! Gross! Dirty!" Monica learns the truth about French kissing from a charming outsider. Navigating relationships and learning the meaning of like-or love-is far trickier. Set in a "hick town" on the windswept plains of Minnesota where a teenager's social calendar is marked by basketball games, cafeteria dances and playing Pac-Man at the bowling alley arcade, Truth, Dare, Double Dare, Promise or Repeat examines the fateful year Monica devotes to reeling in a keeper of a boyfriend like so much walleye. With self-deprecating humor, authenticity and awkward details captured on the pages of the diaries Monica faithfully kept at the time, it's a story that reminds us what it feels like to be a teenager again, grappling with timeless questions of desire, loyalty and finding answers. This book is for every teenager trying to navigate the maze of finding true love, or at least true "like," and for every woman who grew up in the '80s who might have forgotten all she learned during those seemingly simpler times.

Victim to Victory is about a woman in her midthirties who tells her life story about how she was a victim of emotional, financial, mental, physical, and sexual abuse. It goes into details about how it has had a negative effect on her life. This story gets into the mind of an abuser and unveiled reasons why abusers abuse. This story helps to get a better understanding of why people don’t leave abusive relationships. I hope after reading this book, someone that has been in any of these situations will find comfort and relief through this reading and find it the way I did through God.

It’s no secret that Sylvia is a little crazy. People have thought so ever since she first came to town when she was a teenager. But outside her own family, no one knows the depth of her mental illness. For her daughter, Mercy, Sylvia’s illness is at once a source of agony and fascination. Mercy’s mother is absent from her life on several occasions. First, she is taken away to a mental hospital for treatment. Later, on a summer night in the early 1980s, Sylvia disappears entirely, never to be seen again. Her absence is pivotal in Mercy’s life. Populated by an array of compelling characters the mad mother, the lovelorn father, the crossdressing younger brother, the quirky grandmother Love Object is a gripping account of the coming-of-age of a teenage girl in rural Ontario in the 1980s.

In this volume of Critical Storytelling , female incarcerates and undergraduate writers share insights from their liminality of living with/from behind/within invisible bars, posing important questions about how to incite change for the future.

BOOK FIVE DOUBLE DARE Tess wants to be noticed. But making her mark has a high cost. Is it all worth it? Can super achievements change her into someone really special? This year’s birthday is the worst. First, Tess is cut from the school play. Then all her friends cancel on her birthday sleepover. Worst of all, everyone seems to be great at something–except her. Tess searches for a way she, too, can be unique and special, like her brother and her friends. Finally, she finds one. She decides to try out for the local gymnastics squad–and she’s good! But the demands of practice time force her to give up other things she cares about, like time with her Secret Sister, Erin. Making the team might be the answer to her dreams. Or is there something about who she is already that makes her a superstar?

This book presents a unique annotated collection of some 2000 playground games, rhymes, and wordplay of London children. It charts continuity and development in childlore at a time of major social and cultural change and offers a detailed snapshot of changes in the traditions and language of young people. Topics include: starting a game; counting-out rhymes; games (without songs); singing and chanting games; clapping, skipping, and ball bouncing games; school rhymes and parodies; teasing and taunting; traditional belief and practice; traditional wordplay; and a concluding miscellany. Recorded mainly in the 1980s by primary schoolteacher Nigel Kelsey, transcribed verbatim from the children’s own words, and accompanied by extensive commentaries and annotation, the book sets a wealth of new information in the wider historical and contemporary context of existing studies in Britain, Ireland, and other parts of the English-speaking world. This valuable new resource will open new avenues for research and be of particular interest to folklorists and linguists, as well as to those working across the full spectrum of social, cultural, and educational studies.