Personal tragedy informs a valuable and meticulous guide to dealing with childhood sexual trauma.
A childhood sexual assault survivor shares her recovery experiences and extensive personal research into the topic in this manual.
When Somes was about 4 years old, her lone confidant was her imaginary friend Carey Jones, a nonphysical presence that always offered her understanding rather than judgment. Many years later, while in therapy with Alpern, or Jerry as she calls him, she revealed a frightening truth—just before turning 5, she was pursued and violently sodomized by a neighborhood boy on numerous occasions. Somes confronted the way this impacted her life, delved into why she never told anyone about this abuse, and started to understand why she created Carey to help her. She also began extensive research into the subject of childhood sexual abuse. The result is this succinct yet thorough compendium—written with Alpern—that supports and informs not just sexual abuse survivors, but also their caregivers, parents, and educators, backed up with stigma-busting statistics. Concepts like triggers and self-care, oft ridiculed even as they become more broadly known, are explained along with their roles in developing effective coping techniques, avoiding harmful ones, and finding the resulting trauma behind anxiety and depression, sexual dysfunction, eating disorders, and addiction. Ways to spot abuse, handle revelations about it, and even discourage it by recognizing grooming behavior are also detailed, with an emphasis on frank communication between children and their parents or other sympathetic authority figures. The book approaches the topic of childhood sexual abuse in a straightforward, intellectual way, avoiding alarmist tropes or exploitative accounts. Much of the information here is presented as learned through Somes’ therapy, but facts and figures are still well cited. Her own experiences are intercut with other resources, from books like Marilyn Van Derbur’s Miss America by Day and Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score to guides from organizations such as Darkness to Light and the WINGS Foundation. The instruction presented here is practical, with the subjects including what a survivor should look for in a therapist and what questions to ask. The book also addresses the possible, often discouraging bumps in the road that may be encountered along the way. Somes’ personal experiences keep this advice from becoming too clinical. Numerous lists, with extensive appendices featuring further reading and useful outreach tools, make the manual easy to revisit.
Personal tragedy informs a valuable and meticulous guide to dealing with childhood sexual trauma.Pub Date: May 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4808-8752-7
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
