Live, Laugh, Love Like a Teenager

by Karina Williams

Overview

The teenage years hold more beauty, adventure, heartbreak, and love than any other time in a person's life. Teenagers live the way young people should-carelessly and perhaps even foolishly. Walking us through an amalgam of emotion and experiences is young poet Karina Williams, open to sharing her truth.

Live, Laugh, Love Like a Teenager gives readers a look into what it means and how it feels to be young. Take a journey through the inner workings of teenagers' minds. Sometimes, they break and burn everything in their path; other times, they embrace the gift of life. Every experience, good or bad, leads to the eventual discovery of who they are.

Here, there is depression, heartbreak, and wanderlust--yet, there is also first love and exciting exploits. Smiles hide deep pain, but strong friendships sustain through even the most testing times. Growing from naïve innocence to skepticism, teens become adults, but first, they discover what it really is to live young, laugh often, and love recklessly.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781480832244
Publisher:	Archway Publishing
Publication date:	06/30/2016
Pages:	84
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.17(d)
Age Range:	14 - 17 Years

Editorial Reviews

2016-08-22
A debut collection of 73 short pieces of poetry and prose traces the gamut of adolescent emotions, from hopeful ebullience to disappointment and despair. The poems and prose sketches in Williams volume capture the immediacy and intensity of passions during the teen years, a pivotal period of life when each experience seems to reveal a basic truth, and every passing sensation feels as if it will last forever. The poems read like a journal written in verse, as they express the ups and downs of youthful experience. Written from both male and female points of view, in a variety of verse structures and meters, some of the poems capture the tight rhymes and quick rhythms of rap music, others are lyrical, and one, A Broken Heart, dramatizes its subject by being written in the shape of a heart. Some pieces, such as Tragedies and Stuck, are prose paragraphs that convey pithy observations (Try as we might, looking forward now, we will never reach the futureafter all, we will always be stuck in the present). Some of Williams revelations seem a bit simplistic for todays world-wise teens, like People Matter, which begins: Theres only one person anyone can be. / Only you can be you, and I can be me. But many of the poems display a sharp and subtle perception, such as A Child, which captures the onrush of passing time in the line Preteen eyes saying, Catch me if you can, and the evocative Our Generation, in which even the young look back to simpler times: We long for the days we cant remember. Williams is at her strongest when she describes the power of deep emotion, as in Trust in Love, which closes: And there is nothing stopping you from hurting them, no walls to break through, / while they are simply trusting you not to break their heart. A moving and readable volume of verse that confronts universal themes of love, trust, and heartbreak in a modern vernacular.

Kirkus Reviews