Raissa Falgui's Blog
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Jul.27.2012
My daughter made a fuss earlier while eating her snacks. She said she was thirsty. I offered her water, but she insisted on juice. Juice and nothing but juice, which we didn't have right then. She was on the verge of a tantrum as we told her either to drink water or wait patiently until we could go...
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Jul.26.2012
My favorite authors tend to produce widely varied works. Ray Bradbury, God rest his soul, Margaret Atwood, Madeleine L'Engle, Lois Lowry, and Nick Joaquin to name a few. Bradbury and Atwood's stories touch upon a wide variety of subjects, told from various points of view, are in various genres....
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Dec.15.2011
Children!
When my borhters and I grew into our teens, Christmas and New Year celebrations began to pall. There was no longer a thrill in opening presents on Christmas morning or lighting fireworks to welcome the New Year. Fortunately, my cousin had a son and daughter and holiday celebrations soon...
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Sep.20.2011
My three-year-old has been going through a phase of refusing to go to nursery school, after being thrilled with it for a month. She cried in school for a week, so her teacher invited me to visit for a day. After observing her in her classroom, I have worked out that her issues probably have to do...
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Sep.09.2011
I spent two weeks in Italy once, in 2004. I went with my mother and we were supposed to join a tour, but as we couldn’t make the date for the tour group, we hacked it out on our own instead. Drifting in places where English was not the most facile medium of communication without even a map of the...
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Apr.22.2011
Bunnies abound in children's literature. Children's books seem to favor them, along with bears and pigs, though not as much as mice, as characters especially in anthropomorphizations. Why the popularity? Sure, they're cute, but so are puppies and ducklings and they aren't used in such stories with...
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Feb.26.2011
I just watched Letters to Juliet after my mom gushed over it. While it is a sweet movie, with lovely scenery, I kind of predicted most of what would happen after the first twenty minutes.
If I'd written the script to that movie, I would have tightened the Romeo and Juliet allusion by making...
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Jan.21.2011
How does one determine whether a film adaptation of a book is a good one? In the first place, for a well-written book that is brought to life by the writer’s words with just a little help from the reader’s imagination, why should a film adaptation be necessary at all? I haven't watche The Boy in...
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Nov.18.2010
Her name doesn't even appear on the cover, only a lime green girl in the style of a child's stick drawing, beneath a hastily scrawled yellow star against a brilliant blue background. This simple enigmatic cover drew me to the book, even before I knew the author and the title, named on the spine...
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Jul.06.2010
With the storm season approaching, I’ve prepared myself by reading two books that deal with real-life disasters. The first is a piece of nonfiction, Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun which tells about a family that survived Hurricane Katrina. The second is Richard Lewis’s The Killing Sea, a young...
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Jul.06.2010
I’ve just finished Saving Fish from Drowning by Amy Tan, a book which I wasn't certain I should read because the reviews I’d read were always at either of two extremes. Then again, reviewers must have a tendency to veer towards the extremes, because you rarely read reviews that say, “It...
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Apr.16.2010
My favorite anecdote from Beverly Cleary's autobiography A Girl from Yamhill is about the time a teacher asked her grade school class to write about a favorite book character. She had so many beloved characters that she couldn't choose just one and ended up writing a story where all her favorite...
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Feb.17.2010
Every now and then, in our idle moments, my husband and I come up with brilliant plot or concept ideas. At least they seem so to us. Okay, they're usually silly. But sometimes silly is good. Like when we wrote a pair of hundred-word Christmas stories about how Rudolph's career developed after that...
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Oct.23.2009
We are still washing off mud from the things we have saved from the flood that inundated our house. We have dried out some books. Some just need to have mud wiped from their covers. Usually those that have plastic covers fared better than those without, justifying my mom’s fanaticism about covering...
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Oct.15.2009
It's funny but I never read the The Wizard of Oz as a child. At least not the original book. I had a highly abridged pop-up book version and later a movie-script based one, with pictures from the film. I always liked the movie and later I read some of the later installments of the series, The...
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This book contributes to the literature that gives voice to women by weaving together the stories of two female painters from different eras....
[S]ilent space in history is vividly recreated in the novel. ”
—Review: Woman in a Frame, Xi Zuq's Nook
About Raissa
As a child I loved to read fairy tales and myths and pore over art books. My writing now, mainly fiction, reflects these interests. My YA novel Woman in a Frame is an art novel, which may be downloaded from Amazon, Kobo, or Flipreads. I have also written a...
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