rite-of-passage

Too many adults wish to 'protect' teenagers when they should be stimulating them to read of life as it is lived.

When they reached their ship, Ed gazed out at the bay. It was black. The sky was black, but the bay was even blacker. It was a slick, oily blackness that glowed and reflected the moonlight like a black jewel. Ed saw the tiny specks of light around the edges of the bay where he knew ships must be docked, and at different points within the bay where vessels would be anchored. The lights were pale and sickly yellow when compared with the bright blue-white sparkle of the stars overhead, but the stars glinted hard as diamonds, cold as ice. Pg. 26.

Fiction has been maligned for centuries as being "false," "untrue," yet good fiction provides more truth about the world, about life, and even about the reader, than can be found in non-fiction.

Healing, it turns out, is a journey. It doesn__ happen all at once.

It__ time to stop dreaming about who you want your son to be and help him become the healthy, happy, and successful man he__ supposed to be.

There__ a wound most troubled boys share, which, at its core, comes from the feeling that they don__ have their father__ unconditional love.

Healthy boys grow into healthy men.

Despite what you might believe right now, your son__ future is bright. You only need the right tools to help him get there.

According to most studies on the subject, boys who grow up without fathers grow up at a disadvantage.

When a boy feels as if no one cares about him, or as if he will never amount to anything, he truly believes it doesn__ matter what he does.

Teaching a boy to be a man is the primary job of a father.

So it was a crossroads summer, when the universe seemed to stand perilously still like an egg wobbling on a precipice, a regular rite of passage summer that saw us traverse the hazardous divide between the illusions of boyhood and the far more pernicious deceptions of maturity, et cetera.