Blog Archives
Journey of Self-Discovery
Adventure: Antarctica! follows a high school senior who sets out on an unforgettable trip to Antarctica that takes him far from the miserable events he has recently endured. What was the inspiration behind this story?
I wrote Adventure: Antarctica! to remind readers–especially young adults–that science is an adventure, not just a subject. Antarctica, Earth’s last true wilderness felt like the perfect setting to explore that truth. At its heart, this story is about finding purpose when life takes an unexpected turn. For Danny Gage, the Antarctic internship begins as a reluctant consolation prize, but becomes a journey of self-discovery, friendship, and awe. I wanted to capture how exploration–of the world and of ourselves–often begins where comfort ends.
What kind of research went into putting this book together?
Interviews, geographical map examinations, reading of science blogs, and watching many videos that scientists and support personnel have posted of their work and downtime over the years.
Your prose is clear and accessible, especially for younger readers. How do you approach writing for a teen audience?
I taught middle school for sixteen years, so my narrator’s voice is just kind of naturally tailored to that audience.
Can we look forward to seeing more work from you soon? What are you currently working on?
Yes. I’m currently working on a sci-fi/fantasy novel. I also have a time travel screenplay, a musical, and an unfinished comic book series that I’d like to revisit as I have time.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
When high school senior Danny Gage’s world unravels, his soccer dreams collapse, his girlfriend breaks his heart, and his family fractures, he never expects an impossible opportunity to change everything. Instead of a sun-soaked volcano internship in Hawaii, Danny is offered something far more daunting: a last-minute placement on a scientific expedition to Antarctica, the coldest, most unforgiving place on Earth.
Thrown into a world of crevasses, sub-zero survival, active volcanoes, meteorite hunts, and cutting-edge polar research, Danny must confront not only the frozen wilderness but his own doubts, fears, and sense of identity. As danger mounts and the stakes grow higher, one misstep could cost lives, and force Danny to discover what he’s truly capable of when everything is on the line.
Adventure: Antarctica! is a fast-paced coming-of-age adventure that blends real Antarctic science with gripping survival storytelling. Perfect for readers who love exploration, extreme environments, and stories of courage forged under pressure, this novel captures the awe, danger, and wonder of Earth’s last great frontier.
Sometimes, the coldest places reveal the strongest hearts.
On Emerald Wings
On Emerald Wings opens like a fireside tale and then keeps widening until it feels like a full sky. It begins with the Green Wizard Verridon carrying a hidden infant to the hermit Althea, who becomes Godmother to Andreana, or Andi, and raises her deep in the Emerald Forest with the horse Zalaryn as her other guardian. Years later, Andi is a practical, tree-climbing forest girl whose life is split between herbcraft, Green magic, and her wonderfully unruly friendship with Rowan, a pooka with mismatched eyes and a talent for turning any quiet moment into chaos. When Andi’s attempt to save the Emerald Stag leaves the forest wounded, the story shifts into a larger quest involving a fallen kingdom, the rise of the Raven Queen, and the mystery of Andi’s true identity, all building toward battles in Oakfield that are both personal and political.
The book has that rare middle-grade or young YA fantasy quality where the world is enchanted, but the feelings inside it are recognizably human and sometimes sharply painful. The scene with Andi and Rowan facing the hexenwolves is thrilling on its own, but what lingers is the cost of it, the terrible moment when Andi realizes that saving the stag has stripped the trees bare and placed her out of balance with the forest she loves. That choice gives the book moral weight. I also found the found-family thread genuinely affecting. Godmother and Zalaryn feel authentic, bruised by history, loving in slightly guarded ways, and the mystery around their past gives the early chapters a quiet ache. Rowan, meanwhile, is the spark in the tinder. The prankster energy, the blunt loyalty, the sheer comic force of that personality kept the book from ever becoming solemn for too long. I was especially taken with the Starlight Vow because it turns friendship into something ceremonial and binding without draining it of warmth.
As for the writing itself, I found it earnest, vivid, and often charming. Author Jesse Whipple has a strong instinct for comic voice. The owl in the prologue, Rowan’s dead-serious nonsense, and even Andi’s dry reactions to pompous figures like the absurdly titled Corvinous give the book a buoyant rhythm that kept me smiling. I also think the author is at their best when writing movement and transformation. Andi crashing through branches, discovering the physical fact of her dragonwing body, or hurling herself into danger on the steps of the library all have an immediacy that makes the action easy to picture. This is not fantasy trying to reinvent the genre from the ground up. I felt it was more interested in restoring old pleasures with sincerity: balance versus corruption, magic as stewardship rather than domination, courage as something tied to loyalty and grief rather than swagger. That old-fashionedness mostly worked on me.
I admired the way the book lets wonder coexist with responsibility, and the way Andi’s growth never feels abstract but bodily, costly, and intimate. The final stretch, with its exhaustion, aftermath, and hard-won survival, left me satisfied while still making room for more story. My overall feeling is that this is a deeply likable fantasy, generous in spirit and grounded in affection for its characters. I’d recommend it especially to readers who want classic quest fantasy with warmth, younger heroes who feel emotionally real, animal and forest magic, and a strong found-family core.
Pages: 243 | ASIN : B0CW1J2QQH
The Metamorphosis of Marna Love
Tom McEachin’s The Metamorphosis of Marna Love follows a sixteen-year-old Iowa girl whose strange dreams, appetite for existential literature, and growing suspicion that her mother has hidden something immense from her begin to braid together into a deeper reckoning. What starts as a sharp, observant coming-of-age story about jobs, boys, school, friendship, a bowling alley that feels like sensory warfare, gradually opens into a mystery about memory, violence, and the buried aftermath of a supermarket shooting from Marna’s childhood. The novel’s real engine is not plot alone but Marna’s inward change: she moves from skittish curiosity to moral urgency, and then toward a harder, more adult kind of self-knowledge.
I liked how intimately the book inhabits adolescent consciousness without making Marna flimsy or precious. She’s funny, exasperating, bright, vain in small human ways, and often startlingly earnest. Her running arguments with Kafka and her teacher, her awkward experiments with dating, her loyalty to Kate, and her instinctive but imperfect love for her mother all make her feel lived-in rather than designed. I especially liked the way McEachin lets her mind dart: one moment literary, the next petty, the next wounded, the next brave. That movement gives the novel a supple realism. I also found the mother-daughter relationship unusually affecting. Barbara is not merely withholding information for plot purposes; she is a woman who has survived something and then tried, perhaps clumsily but lovingly, to make a habitable life after it. Their conversations have a bruised tenderness that resonated with me.
What surprised me was the book’s moral texture. A lesser novel might have turned the mystery at its center into a clean revelation, but this one keeps asking messier questions: what memory owes truth, what gratitude owes reality, whether one act of courage can coexist with a damaged life, and how a young person learns to judge others without becoming glib. I liked that the novel grows more serious without becoming pompous. I do feel that some passages could have been trimmed, and now and then the dialogue explains a touch too much, but the book’s emotional candor more than compensates. By the final pages, I felt the story had earned its tenderness. It doesn’t confuse transformation with polish; Marna’s metamorphosis is awkward, costly, and incomplete, which is exactly why it feels true.
I would recommend this novel to readers of young adult literary fiction, coming-of-age fiction, psychological fiction, family drama, and mystery-inflected contemporary novels, especially anyone who likes books where interior life matters as much as events. It should resonate with readers who enjoy the introspective intelligence of John Green, though this novel is earthier and more quietly feral in its emotional weather. I read The Metamorphosis of Marna Love as a novel about how identity is not discovered in one flash but assembled, painfully and beautifully, from memory, language, and the courage to look straight at what hurt you. This is a coming-of-age novel that understands growing up is less a bloom than a reckoning.
Pages: 252 | ASIN : B0GKCJDYGD
Adventure: Antarctica!
Jeff Hendricks’s Adventure: Antarctica! follows Danny Gage, a bright but emotionally rattled high school senior whose life seems to come apart in a single miserable stretch: he blows a crucial soccer moment, loses his girlfriend in the middle of an ill-fated promposal, and watches his parents’ marriage crack just as he misses out on a dream Hawaii internship. What begins as a consolation trip to Antarctica turns into something much larger, as Danny is swept through McMurdo, Wright Valley, penguin rookeries, ice dives, Erebus, meteorite hunts, and finally a genuinely gripping scientific discovery involving strange life in Lake Vanda. The novel is both a coming-of-age story and a science adventure, and it keeps braiding those threads together until Danny’s outward journey and inward one feel inseparable.
I found a lot to admire here. What stayed with me most was the book’s earnestness. Danny’s voice has an open, slightly wounded sincerity that gives the early domestic material real weight. The sticky-note promposal going sideways could have played as mere teen melodrama, yet it lands with a real sting, and the family scenes around the separation have an authentic awkwardness I recognized immediately. Later, when the novel shifts into Antarctic mode, it doesn’t abandon that emotional texture. Instead, the frozen setting seems to sharpen it. The homesickness, the odd intimacy of fieldwork, the way Danny’s perspective slowly widens as he learns to stop centering his own disappointment, all of that feels honest. I was especially taken by how naturally the book moves from adolescent embarrassment to wonder, then from wonder to actual peril. A scene with a meteorite turning up in Danny’s pack and the later crevasse and ice-cave survival sequence gave the book a real pulse.
Hendricks clearly loves Antarctic science, and that enthusiasm is contagious. The explanations about Lake Vanda’s stratified waters, cyanobacteria, meteorites on blue ice, and the practical rituals of surviving cold are folded in with enough narrative energy that they rarely feel like homework. The book is strongest when it lets curiosity itself become dramatic. Danny isn’t just learning facts. He’s learning how scientific attention works, how to notice, how to persist, how to be useful to other people. I appreciated that. The prose is more sturdy than dazzling, but it has moments of vividness, especially in descriptions of cold, wind, brightness, and physical exhaustion. The novel sometimes spells out an emotional beat just after it lands. But its warmth is part of its identity, and by the time Danny is moving among Yura, Tatyana, and Ms. Nichols with something like earned confidence, the book has built a persuasive case for science not as abstraction but as a human vocation.
I came away feeling genuinely fond of Adventure: Antarctica!. It’s a generous, heartfelt novel with real narrative momentum, and its belief in growth, curiosity, and second chances feels lived rather than manufactured. It tells a good story and honors science. I’d recommend it most readily to teen readers, STEM-inclined readers, and adults who enjoy adventure fiction with a strong emotional center and a clean sense of wonder. It’s the kind of book that remembers discovery is thrilling not only because of what we find, but because of who we become while finding it.
Pages: 459 | ASIN : B0GBQ4KWNC
The Jingu Magical Garden
In The Jingu Magical Garden, Lillian Jingu, the youngest daughter in a big Japanese American family living inside the Japanese Tea Garden in San Antonio in the late 1930s discovers a strange egg by the koi pond, hatches a tiny blue dragon she names Kokoro, and hides him with the help of her brother Kimi, a very dignified turtle, and a tough gray cat. At first, it feels like pure magic and mischief in a hidden garden. Then a crack in time opens, and Lillian and Kokoro are pulled into moments that show how war, rumor, and racism creep into their world and shake the life they love in the tea garden. The story braids fantasy with the real history of the Jingu family and the garden, all the way through World War II and beyond.
I had a soft spot for Lillian right away. She just wants to grow her hair long, wear a white Stetson, blend in at school, and also secretly raise a baby dragon who drinks Coca-Cola and eats sardines out of a tin. That mix of ordinary kid worries and wild magical stuff really worked for me. The family scenes in the Bamboo Room kitchen made me feel like I was sitting at the table, listening to sisters tease each other while their parents try to keep everyone fed and in line. Kokoro is goofy and sweet and a bit chaotic, so every time he bursts out of hiding I could feel my shoulders tense and my brain go “oh no, not now,” in the best way. Some chapters feel cozy and funny, and then the tone shifts, and I felt my stomach drop when hints of war and suspicion started creeping into their everyday life.
The book talks about anti Asian prejudice without turning into a lecture, and that made it more powerful to me. You see how quickly neighbors and officials can turn on a family that has done nothing wrong, and it hurt to watch, because we know this stuff did happen in real life and still echoes today. At the same time, the dragon and the time travel bits keep the story from feeling hopeless, almost like the past itself is reaching out to protect this family and their garden. I liked that the author doesn’t pretend everything gets neatly fixed, but she still gives the Jingus courage, humor, and dignity, and that mix left me sad and hopeful at the same time.
As for the writing, it has a very old radio show vibe in spots, with Buck Rogers and songs on the wireless and little period details tucked everywhere, and I thought that was charming. The garden descriptions are lush and detailed, so I could picture the waterfall, the stone paths, and the hidden corners where a dragon might hide, and those scenes slowed my breathing in a good way. The dialogue can be a bit old-fashioned in places, which fits the time period. Still, the emotional beats land. When the family faces public shaming, name changes, and the loss of their place, the simple language hits like a punch because you already care about these people and this garden so much.
I really enjoyed this children’s book. I would hand it to middle-grade readers who like dragons but can handle some heavier real-world stuff, kids around nine to thirteen who are curious about World War II on the home front, and any young reader who has ever felt caught between cultures or out of place. It would also be great for teachers or parents who want to talk about racism, resilience, and community in a way that feels authentic. If you want a story with cozy family meals, secret magical pets, and real history woven together, this one is a good pick.
Pages: 282 | ASIN : B0GCQV9TB9
The Thirteenth Cagebreaker: A Cantara Academy Novel
The Thirteenth Cagebreaker is a young adult fantasy set in a glittering, ruthless magic school where talent is currency and control is everything. We follow Sparrow “Roe” Kettler, a dockside voice mage whose mother vanished years earlier after attending Cantara Academy on the same kind of scholarship. When Roe arrives, the academy’s Designating Stone brands her as the thirteenth amethyst, the first student it has ever physically marked, tying her to a secret history of “Cagebreakers” and to a containment machine under the school that feeds on students deemed too dangerous. The book follows her first term as she scrambles to catch up academically, builds a fierce little found family, falls into a complicated maybe-more-than-mentorship with Blaise Arcement, and slowly uncovers a system that cages magic and calls it safety, all building toward a public confrontation that forces the powerful to answer for what they have built.
Roe’s voice is sharp and funny and aching all at once, full of dock slang and small sensory details, like the way her secondhand robes never quite sit right or how academy marble smells different from salt-wet wood. The writing balances that chatty tone with these sudden punches of poetry, especially when it talks about cages, about learning to make yourself small so people feel safe around you. The magic school setting is lush and cinematic, but what stuck with me more than the floating bridges and singing gates was the constant hum of class difference and scrutiny. Scholarship kids sit under the banners near the kitchens, sponsor families glide through the memorial halls, and every hallway conversation is edged with who has power and who is expected to be grateful.
What surprised me most was how much this fantasy plot about a containment Vault and a secret Cagebreaker Protocol ends up feeling like a story about being told your feelings are too loud. The author keeps coming back to this idea that systems call it “control” or “stability” when what they really want is compliance. Roe’s training scenes hurt, especially when teachers tell her to forget the work songs that kept her community alive or label her survival magic as “crude” and unprofessional. At the same time, there is a very tender through-line: Minna and the other scholarship kids who adopt Roe almost on sight, the quiet solidarity in the library stacks, and Blaise choosing truth over the legacy he was born to protect. The slow-burn romantic fantasy element feels earned because it is built out of hard choices and shared risk, not just witty banter. I did feel the book’s “Book One” status in the last stretch; the big machinery of the world is still turning when you hit the final page, but Roe’s emotional arc from scared scholarship girl to someone willing to testify in front of the Board feels complete enough that the ending lands.
The author is not shy about institutional abuse, parental abandonment, or the way grief sits in the body, and she flags that clearly right up front, which I really appreciated. The story keeps a thread of stubborn hope running through all of that, though. Roe does not magically fix the system with one song, and she does not become perfectly controlled or endlessly forgiving. She keeps choosing, again and again, to tell the truth, to ask better questions, to trust the people who have actually earned it. That repeated choice gives the book this grounded, almost defiant optimism. It feels less like a fantasy about a chosen one and more like a fantasy about a girl who refuses to let the people in charge decide what her magic is for.
If you like young adult fantasy that mixes a moody magic school, found family, and a slow-burn romance with sharp conversations about power and control, I think you will really click with this. It is especially for readers who have ever been told they are “too much” or who grew up squeezing themselves smaller to fit someone else’s comfort. If you are up for a character-driven, emotionally intense ride that feels like a friend taking your hand and saying, “You were never meant to live in that cage,” then this book is absolutely worth your time.
Pages: 457 | ASIN : B0G6LRSPM3
Curiosity Matters
A New Way to Know follows Francis Bacon from a questioning boy to a power-brokering statesman, only to learn how costly truth can be when evidence collides with loyalty and politics. What drew you to Francis Bacon as a middle-grade protagonist?
What drew me to Francis Bacon as a middle-grade protagonist is that, before he was famous, he was simply a curious kid. Long before he became a powerful statesman or philosopher, he was a boy who asked a lot of questions, sometimes too many for the adults around him.
Middle school students understand that feeling. They live in a world where adults often say, “Because that’s just how it is.” Bacon was the kind of kid who answered, “But why?” That curiosity made him stand out. It also sometimes got him into trouble. I think many young readers can relate to that.
I was also drawn to the tension in his life between truth and loyalty. Growing up around the court of Elizabeth I, he saw how politics and power often mattered more than facts. Later, his friendship with Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, forced him to face a very hard choice: What do you do when someone you care about is wrong? Do you protect your friend, or do you stand by the truth? That is a question young people understand, because friendships and loyalty are a big part of their lives.
Another reason I chose Bacon is that his greatest contribution wasn’t just one big discovery. It was a new way of thinking. He believed people should observe the world, test ideas, and look for evidence instead of just repeating what older books said. That message is powerful for young readers. It tells them that their curiosity matters. It tells them they don’t have to accept something just because it’s old or because someone important said it.
As a classroom teacher, I’ve seen how exciting it is when a student realizes, “I can think for myself.” Bacon’s story shows that even someone who helped shape modern science started out as a kid sitting in a classroom, feeling frustrated when his questions weren’t answered.
In the end, I was drawn to Francis Bacon because he wasn’t perfect. He was smart and ambitious, but he also made mistakes. He struggled with big choices. That makes him real. His story shows that searching for truth isn’t always easy, and doing the right thing can be painful. But it also shows that one curious kid with a notebook can change the way the world thinks.
What did you most want kids to feel about Francis Bacon beyond “famous thinker”?
More than anything, I wanted kids to see Francis Bacon as a person, not just a “famous thinker” whose name appears in a textbook.
Today, many of us benefit from ideas like the scientific method without ever thinking about the struggle it took to bring those ideas into the world. We enjoy the results. We quote the principles. But we don’t always see the cost. I wanted young readers to feel the weight of that cost.
Bacon didn’t just wake up one day and become important. He questioned teachers who didn’t like being questioned. He challenged traditions that had stood for centuries. He lived in a world where loyalty to powerful people, including figures like Elizabeth I, could matter more than evidence. He had to balance ambition, truth, friendship, and survival. Those pressures weren’t abstract; they were personal and painful.
So, beyond “famous thinker,” I wanted kids to feel his courage. Not loud, dramatic courage — but the quieter kind. The kind that keeps asking questions even when adults sigh. The kind that stands by truth even when it costs you friendships. The kind that keeps working on an idea when no one else fully understands it yet.
I also wanted them to feel empathy. Big ideas don’t float into the world on their own. They are carried by real people who doubt, struggle, fail, and try again. When kids understand that, they begin to see that greatness isn’t magic. It’s built — often slowly, often painfully.
If young readers finish the book thinking, “He was brave,” or “He paid a price,” or even, “That must have been hard,” then they’re seeing him clearly.
The modern classroom experiment frames Bacon’s legacy without hero-worship. What made you choose that structure, and what do you hope teachers or students do with it after finishing the book?
I chose the modern classroom experiment because I didn’t want Francis Bacon to feel distant or untouchable.
It’s easy to turn historical figures into marble statues that are impressive, but cold. I didn’t want hero-worship. I wanted my readers to have a connection. By framing his legacy through a modern classroom experiment, students can see that Bacon’s ideas aren’t trapped in the 1600s. They’re alive. They’re practical. They’re something a twelve-year-old can try tomorrow.
The classroom structure also does something important: it shifts the spotlight. Instead of saying, “Look how great Bacon was,” it quietly asks, “What happens when you try this way of thinking yourself?” The focus moves from admiration to participation.
As a longtime teacher, I’ve seen that students understand concepts best when they experience them. Reading about observation and evidence is one thing. Testing a question, collecting data, and discovering that your prediction was wrong, or right, that’s powerful. It creates ownership. And ownership matters more than memorization.
I also hope teachers use that structure as permission. Permission to slow down. Permission to let students ask messy questions. Permission to let them be wrong and then figure out why. Bacon’s method wasn’t about having the right answer immediately. It was about building a careful path toward truth.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?
My next historical fiction project brings René Descartes to life for young readers.
If A New Way to Know explores how Francis Bacon helped shape a new method for discovering truth through observation and evidence, this next book shifts the focus to a different but equally powerful question: What can we know for certain? Descartes wrestled with doubt, reason, and the foundations of knowledge in a way that still influences how we think today.
As with Bacon, I’m not interested in presenting Descartes as a statue in a textbook. I want readers to see the human being — the young man who questioned everything, who struggled with uncertainty, and who tried to build a framework for truth from the ground up.
The book will be available this fall. I’m excited to continue the journey of introducing students to the thinkers behind the ideas they often take for granted — showing not just what they concluded, but what it cost them to get there.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
From the bustling halls of Queen Elizabeth’s court to the risky friendships with ambitious nobles, Francis must navigate loss, loyalty, and the temptations of power. Along the way, he discovers that curiosity can be both dangerous and brilliant—and that true understanding comes from observing, experimenting, and thinking for yourself.
Part historical adventure, part scientific discovery, part coming-of-age story, A New Way to Know is the story of a boy who would grow up to change how the world learns forever.
Forge New Paths
Goldie Bird follows an 11-year-old girl who copes with her sister leaving for college and her great aunt’s death on the same day, and navigates grief and loneliness, while searching for belonging. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
When a longtime friend read through my first draft of the book, she asked me what percent of Goldie was ME. I hadn’t thought that I was writing bits of who I was into my main character, but in looking back, how could I not? We write what we know, and fiction gives us the power to embellish our own experiences and forge new paths and outcomes. I have memories of traveling with my mother and siblings to lay my great-grandmother to rest. The backdrop to my story, the small town of Charlotte, Illinois, is a fictional place that takes much inspiration from bits of things and places that have meant something to me. My characters, too, have qualities that remind me of pieces of personalities and mannerisms of people I have known.
Goldie experiences multiple losses at once. Why was it important to layer those changes together?
Goldie must certainly have anticipated spending time differently with her mother once Elise would be at college. She never got to find out what that would be like, though, as the timing of her great aunt’s death and the events that followed changed the course of what Goldie had expected. I believe the compounded losses have a strong impact on Goldie as well as readers of the book—Goldie has much to overcome and figure out, and the pain is magnified by her own grief and her mother’s unavailability. Goldie must figure out how to navigate her days as she settles into her new place in her family.
Why weave in references to The Little Prince, and what does that story mean to Goldie?
Goldie’s first and subsequent encounters with Kip revolved around The Little Prince, a book assigned to Kip as a class project. Goldie had also read the book with her beloved sister before she left for college. The book serves as a connection to Kip and to Elise, but also, as the story progresses, to Goldie’s father, who highlighted part of the text before sending his copy of The Little Prince to Goldie. Goldie finds parallels with characters in the book as she explores her new relationships.
The “small world” realization near the end is powerful. Why was that moment important?
I believe Goldie’s discovery of who her father is showed her that we are always growing and changing, and when we are going through losses and challenges, there is also hope—and there are new, joyful discoveries waiting for us.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
But when she joins her mother for a trip to Heritage where her late aunt lived, Goldie forms an unlikely friendship with Kip, a sweet boy with an infectious sense of adventure. Kip shows Goldie the carefree thrills of birch bending and secret caves where the two bond over common experiences and escape the complexities of the adults around them.
As she reluctantly returns to her life, Goldie must adjust to being a middle schooler as things at home become more challenging. Despite her deep love for her sister and mother, Goldie feels unsure of where she fits in their lives, forcing her to grapple with the bittersweet aspects of growing up and letting go of the way things used to be.
With her frequent letters from Kip and her new friend, Kate, by her side, Goldie tries to navigate all that comes her way on the quest for acceptance and belonging. In this timeless, coming-of-age novel, Goldie symbolizes the universal experience of deep familial connections, friendship, and self-identity.
