A beautifully illustrated guide to replacing negative thoughts with life-affirming messages.
In this picture book/memoir, a girl learns to replace thoughts that keep her unhappy with better ones.
From birth, a girl is “born with glue in her brain,” meaning that certain thoughts seem to get stuck in her head even when she’s trying to focus on activities like sports. Other children notice, too: “We’re in gym class, not daydreaming 101!” says an annoyed soccer player. The girl is too embarrassed to tell anyone about her problem, which becomes very tiring over the years. When she’s older, the girl tries solutions that don’t work, such as drinking, painting, yoga, and praying. But the repetitive thoughts remain stuck in her head. Hearing of a specialist who might help her, she goes to see him. The specialist explains that she has Glue Brain, in which some half-dozen thoughts are stuck, such as “I can’t do it,” “I’ll never get what I want,” and “No one wants to be near me.” He suggests a thought transplant, sticking new thoughts over the old. These new thoughts could be, for example, “I can do it” or “I love my ideas, and I’m excited to share them.” When the girl tries this method, she feels happier, finds that she can help others, and discovers that “New thoughts really do create new experiences!” In this book for ages 10+, Kane (Feed It to the Worms, 2019, etc.) takes techniques familiar from treatments like cognitive behavioral therapy and distills them to an elegant form that a broad range of readers can understand and use. The story is greatly aided by the author’s appealing, pared-down illustrations of a diverse cast in a palette mainly featuring ochre yellow, brown, and red shades. When the girl starts practicing her new thoughts, the palette enlivens the tale, as with a grocery store filled with multicolored bright fruit and a floor of deep, calming blue. While the clean line drawings are minimal, they express much. For example, to show how the girl’s thoughts persist over time, an image depicts younger to older versions of the character, each holding identical phones connected by a curly cord.
A beautifully illustrated guide to replacing negative thoughts with life-affirming messages.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73286-823-6
Page Count: 48
Publisher: YMMSBILYA PRESS
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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