A creative depiction of dealing with trauma that may be too abstract for some readers.
A clinical psychologist explores trauma through an illustrated allegory in this book from Lim.
“For some, home is a refuge. For others, it’s a maze of locked doors and broken windows. A place where we spend a lifetime trying to leave,” Lim’s prologue states. With these words in mind, readers soon meet Isabel, a young woman who returns to an ominous, symbolic house haunted by a critical mother, a distant father, and oppressive cultural influences. Inside the home, Isabel encounters Crane, who helps her unpack what’s behind her perfectionism. Isabel then converses with an ox carrying heavy chains and stones inscribed with words like “duty,” “humility,” and “legacy,” representing the expectations passed down through her family. Isabel then descends into the basement, where she confronts Wolf—the embodiment of her anger—and learns that it has been trying to protect her from pain all along. Eventually Isabel gets to Rabbit, who represents her fear, and they discuss how to embrace her vulnerability. Isabel and all the creatures ascend to the rooftop garden, where they encounter the Celestial Whale, who reminds Isabel that “your healing reaches farther than you see.” Ultimately, Isabel successfully integrates the many facets of her identity, emotions, and history, recognizing that “everything held its place. Everything belonged.” Lim concludes the book with brief reflections on the existential weight we carry, the inheritance of pain, and becoming whole. The author elegantly combines allegory, therapeutic insight, and cultural reflection, while Joel Timpson’s atmospheric illustrations mirror the book’s emotional landscapes and complement the story’s symbolism. Lim makes understanding trauma accessible, and her narrative also authentically conveys the weight of cultural expectations, like how Isabel’s name, Meilin, was akin to “a family heirloom passed down like an old jade pendant: precious, but heavier than it looked.” However, readers seeking a practical guide to trauma recovery may find the book’s symbolism challenging to interpret and apply to their own lives.
A creative depiction of dealing with trauma that may be too abstract for some readers.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781761452871
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Hardie Grant Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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