I will be introducing Beth Harpaz at her reading on Feb 5 at 7:30 at Barnes and Noble on Seventh Avenue and 6th Street in Park Slope (down in the basement). It should be a fun reading for her new book, 13 is the New 18, which is essential reading for the parents of teens.
This event is a fund raiser for Beacon High School. That's the it-school of the moment for loads of kids in Park Slope. Participating in this event will not help your kid's chances of getting in there so don't even try (that's an attempt at high school admissions humor).
But come anyway. Please mention “Book
Fair” at the cash register and the school will get a percentage of the
yield on any book you buy ANY TIME that day or night, not just “13 Is
the New 18.”
Beth Harpaz figures there’ll be no Generation Gap when her kids become
teenagers. After all, she grew up in the ’60s and ’70s. She’s seen
everything!
But when her son has a bar mitzvah and turns 13, suddenly
her life goes from hosting pizza parties for 12-year-olds to monitoring
the MySpace page where he claims he’s 22 (even though his photo shows
him standing next to Bugs Bunny at Six Flags).
She joins Facebook to
spy on him, but he refuses to friend her. (No matter, she finds
hundreds of friends of her own and ends up addicted to it.) She
remembers being teased about her “highwater” pants as a kid, but she
just can’t accept her son’s argument that without $100 sneakers, he
might be bullied for having uncool shoes.
As she tries to decipher
lyrics to rap songs and text messages with mysterious codes like NM JC,
she starts wondering if she’s failed as a mother, or if all of this is
just a normal part of growing up in the 21st century.
When she finds
some scary secrets in her son’s room and starts getting calls from
school about his behavior, she’s afraid to ask the Perfect Mommies she
knows for advice, so she turns to a variety of unconventional sources:
the Sopranos, Erma Bombeck, and most of all, Google, her guru and
oracle. By the time her son turns 14, he’s grown out of a lot of the
things that worried her – and she’s learned a lot about raising
teenagers.