Magdalena Stanhoff | Updates

The Voice in the Well

Magdalena Stanhoff — Sun, 1 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The third book in the Migrant Birds series is now available on Amazon! Have you checked it out yet?

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Children and reading

Magdalena Stanhoff — Mon, 21 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Reading books is not only fun, it's also one of the best ways to develop one's language skills. I tend to drone on about it to anybody willing to listen, especially to the parents of my students, and then, inevitably, I get asked this eternal question. How to persuade children to read books?

The answer is painful. Not because it is so difficult, no. But there are two conditions, and in most cases, when parents hear them, I can see the answer on their faces right away: "Not going to happen."

Condition one: they need to read books themselves, regularly.

"But we don't have time for reading. We are so busy."

Well, children are busy, too. There are so many things, school, friends, TikTok, sports practice, homework, computer games, after-school classes, Netflix. If the adults demonstrate every day that reading isn't important enough to find time for it, children won't bother either. Because why would they?

Condition two: all those wonderful electronic distractions (I'm not being sarcastic here - they are wonderful, and I'm quite fond of them) need to get switched off for some time. Books are low profile entertainment, and they seem unattractive at first in comparison with the flashier options. It takes some time for children to start appreciating written stories, but once they do, you can usually switch all electronics back on. Because once the kids have been hooked...

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Gender revolution tiptoes in, disguised as a book

Magdalena Stanhoff — Fri, 29 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

When I was very young, I wanted to be a boy. In all the books I read and all the films I watched, boys had such interesting lives, much better than girls. They had adventures, they fought, they changed the world, they protected their beloved. And the girls? Well. They mostly stayed loved and protected, while watching the boys do all those fantastic things.

Now don't get me wrong. I adore a male hero loving and protecting his girl; anybody who's read any of my books will have no doubts about it. But why couldn't those girls from my childhood literature have some adventures, too? It was so unfair. (Here I have to pay homage to great Astrid Lindgren and her unforgettable Pippi, who saved my self-esteem and helped me make peace with my gender.)

When my oldest daughter was little, something started to change. We both watched Mulan a hundred times, and stories with enterprising, spiny, smart heroines popped up on bookstore shelves and on the cinema and TV screens one after another. But they all still carried this note of amazement: look, a girl, and she did THAT! Which basically meant it wasn't normal, nor really recommended for ordinary girls to be so... unfeminine?

But in the following years, girls and young women grabbed at pens and keyboards themselves, en masse, and started creating their own stories with kick-ass heroines, rebel heroines, genius-girl heroines etc. And now the youngest generation reads these books and treats them already as the classic canon. Isn't it marvelous?

I have no illusions. There are still enormous areas of our globe where girls are discouraged or even forbidden from having their own life and their own opinions. Gender discrimination happens on everyday basis even in the developed, allegedly modern societies. But.

All these young girls of today who read their favorite books, and OF COURSE a girl is the protagonist. OF COURSE she has adventures and saves the world, and protects the weak. She decides her own fate, OF COURSE, and becomes the spaceship captain, or the school math champion, or the top sword master, whatever the genre dictates.

Oh, how I love this OF COURSE.

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