These Are the Gifts Tween Girls Will Be Happy to Receive
3 min
Tween girls are fun to shop for because they appreciate a wide range of gifts. Clothes and jewelry? Creativity kits? Room decor? Check, check, check. But the trick with this age group (generally considered from 8 to 12) is finding presents that match their maturity and don’t read as too babyish, says Jackie Schiavone, a Westport, Conn.-based fashion stylist and mum of a tween and teen girl. We asked Schiavone and other style pros to share their gift recommendations, so you can confidently shop for the tween girl on your list.
For making a personal style statement
Schiavone says that girls this age are often obsessed with initial jewelry, and Anthropologie’s 14-karat gold-plated Bubble Letter Necklace is a lovely take on the trend. The adjustable length (15 to 17 inches) on the snake-style chain means it works with different necklines and necklaces. “Tweens can stack it with other thin necklaces — think small beads and gold chains — or wear it solo as a statement piece,” Schiavone says.
For 3D design projects
“My daughter is 12 and really wants this 3D printer ,” says Brooklyn, N.Y.-based interior designer Jennifer Morris of JMorris Design . It comes with everything a tween needs to make their own toys and objects from non-toxic, biodegradable plastic. They can choose from the set’s 7,000 patterns (from toys to ornaments to planters) or create their own designs — a feature Morris appreciates. “I love giving an art gift that has creative freedom and doesn’t have a prescribed outcome,” she says.
For old-school selfies
Instant cameras, including the Instax Mini , are “the must-have tween gadget at the moment,” says Kimberly McLeod , the Toronto-based author of ” The Ultimate Book of Would You Rather Questions .” Digital natives get a kick out of seeing photos develop before their eyes, and they love the bubbly retro design and cute credit card-sized photos, she adds. This bundle supplies everything they need to capture memories: the camera (in blush pink, ice white, lilac purple, mint green or sky blue), a four-pack of Fuji film, a carrying case and a photo album.
For keeping cozy in style
Starting in the tween years, it’s “welcome to black clothing,” says Schiavone. This Sam. black and faux shearling jacket is a great gift (in fact, Schiavone has one that her daughter keeps stealing). She likes that the white faux shearling softens the black, while still feeling grown-up. Most importantly, it’s warm and cozy, with a faux sherpa lining, a sherpa-lined hood and impressive 90%-down, 10%-feather fill.
For staying inspired
A customizable letter board makes a fun gift for tweens because it lets them express themselves, says Athens, Greece-based Anna Tatsioni, lead interior designer at Decorilla , an online interior design service. This framed aqua felt board can be wall mounted or propped up on a surface and comes with 725 white and gold letters in different fonts to design with. Tweens like that they can keep changing up the message, whether it’s an inspiring quote, a personal mantra or a Taylor Swift lyric. “It also doubles as a great conversation starter when they have friends over,” Tatsioni says.
For a wardrobe staple
You can’t miss with black Lululemon Align leggings , says Schiavone. Tweens especially like the Mini Flare style because it doesn’t look like mom’s Lulus. The leggings are made from the brand’s signature super-soft and durable Nulu fabric, which means they feel wonderful and hold up well.
For screen-free fun
Morris loves this LED dart board for the fun factor. “Anything that encourages play and looks cute is a win,” she says. The acrylic target comes with a plug-in board and six darts for tweens to practice their aim — when they aren’t basking in its rainbow glow. “I love the light for an accent in a room,” Morris says.
For staying toasty — and connected
“A Bluetooth beanie hat is the gift of the season,” says Schiavone. Any tween with a smartphone, Apple Watch or iPad will love this cute pom-pom beanie with a smart upgrade: an embedded Bluetooth headset. Just pop the hat on and listen to a favorite song or podcast, or take mom’s call on the go. The knitted acrylic hat also comes in black, but Sciavone says “winter white is the way to go.”
For happy feet
Vans are back in style, and tweens are loving that they’re a bit bold and a breeze to kick on and off. In a fun color like olive green or not-so-basic black and off-white, “they’re just a classic,” says Morris.
For beauty lovers/For a beauty spree
“In the tween and teen years, half their wish list is for beauty products from Sephora, so I like to throw a gift card inside a fun cosmetic bag,” says interior designer Suzanne Flohr of Lennon and Flohr Interior Design in Charlottesville, S.C. You can personalize this Mark and Graham train case , which is made of printed canvas coated with plastic for easy cleaning. If you want to stock it with something besides a gift card, toss in Summer Fridays Holiday Lip Butter Set , a favorite of the middle-school set.
For blemish busting
“These Hero Cosmetics pimple patches may be the ultimate stocking stuffer,” says Schiavone. They’re invisible patches made with medical-grade hydrocolloid, a gel used to heal wounds and acne. When you peel the patch off, it removes gunk from the pimple, helping it to heal. “Everyone in my house uses these patches, including my son,” she says.
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Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
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