A helpful adjunct to diagnosis, therapy, and meds for youngsters with ADHD and their families.
A boy with attention deficit disorder learns coping methods and appreciates his own strengths in this illustrated children’s book.
Despite the title, this work’s unnamed, dark-skinned protagonist doesn’t exactly lose his attention. More often, his attention distracts him, especially in school, “by showing him all the other things that were happening inside and outside.” As the boy gets older and meets higher expectations for self-control, his distractibility, curiosity, and high energy cause problems at home and at school. Teachers devise various strategies to help him pay attention, such as rewards for completing work; at home, the boy’s mother also tries to keep him organized with lists and schedules and signs him up for energetic activities. A special doctor performs tests and diagnoses “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD, for short,” and also discovers the boy is gifted in reading and math. With medication, the boy’s school performance improves, although he dislikes the pills’ side effects and sometimes doesn’t take them. Eventually, he realizes his “superpowers”—talents other kids don’t have—such as noticing patterns, grasping new ideas quickly, and problem-solving. (In fact, kids without ADHD can also have these qualities.) As an adult, now with “Adult Attention Deficit Disorder, or AADD,” he has a good job and uses his superpowers while still taking meds and managing his organizational challenges. Several pages of information and resources on ADHD are included. Weston (The Girl Who Couldn’t Read, 2018), an elementary school teacher with special needs students, skillfully describes the various manifestations of ADHD in simple language that youngsters with the condition can easily understand and relate to. The book covers the sometimes-puzzling aspects of ADHD, like the ability to superfocus on interesting things like video games. The author usefully acknowledges that not every solution works and that medication has drawbacks, helping to manage readers’ expectations while still providing hope and optimism. The colored-pencil or crayon images by debut illustrator AK (The Girl Who Couldn’t Read, 2018), a sixth-grade student, are well-done in a naïve manner, showing various expressions and diverse characters.
A helpful adjunct to diagnosis, therapy, and meds for youngsters with ADHD and their families.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5255-3788-2
Page Count: 48
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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