A practical, encouraging workbook for finding and maintaining serenity.
A guided workbook about noticing and adjusting nervous-system patterns.
Stephenson-Laws’ compassionate workbook based on her self-help tome From Chains to Wings (2025) outlines nonjudgmental self-awareness and strategies for maintaining mind-body balance. The approach consists of three steps: Notice, validate, adjust. Stephenson-Laws recommends observing one’s behavior patterns nonjudgmentally and shifting from “I am anxious” to “I notice anxiety.” She provides tools to track how stress shows up in the body—headaches, clenched jaw, stomach upset—and invites readers to become their own “Body-Stress Detective” and document their somatic experiences. When panic hits, Stephenson-Laws recommends finding parts of the body that are not in crisis, like the earlobes, and focusing on them as a reminder that “there’s at least one safe place in your skin.” The book’s second part covers cultivating new responses. The author distinguishes between “window days,” when you have the capacity to handle various challenges, and “keyhole days,” when you don’t; she suggests adjusting your expectations accordingly. A checklist outlines factors that affect capacity—poor sleep, weather, and even anniversaries. Window days are best for complex projects, challenging conversations, and difficult tasks, while keyhole days involve canceling or postponing nonessential commitments, practicing self-care, and resting. The “Both/And Practice” acknowledges that self-worth isn’t tied to amassing achievements and includes ideas like “I want to help AND I need to protect my energy.” The book’s third part, which advises readers on how to stay regulated in relationships by protecting boundaries, covers topics like “emotional contagion” and consciously connecting with others. The book concludes with the reminder that “the real practice begins now—living with just enough consciousness to have choice when it matters.”
One of the workbook’s greatest strengths is that it doesn’t overpromise outcomes. At the outset, Stephenson-Laws reassures readers, “You cannot fail these exercises.” She doesn’t sugarcoat the process of healing. Instead, she gently nudges readers toward new perspectives with self-talk (“Some good things might actually be safe now”) and reconsiderations of prior beliefs (“Your body is trying to protect you, not punish you”). The book’s measures of success are actionable: “Not from tense to relaxed, but tense to slightly less tense.” The streamlined structure follows a predictable pattern, including reflection, recognition, and mental and behavioral experiments. The book offers a variety of creative exercises and tools, like a permission slip to “not be ‘over it’ yet” and to “take as long as I need,” and a script for talking to the inner protector (“What are you worried will happen?”). Stephenson-Laws offers sample responses to buy time in boundary-pushing situations, such as, “Can I let you know tomorrow?” She also validates readers with statements like “You’re not broken. Your patterns make sense.” The guide proactively prepares readers for hard times with an “Emergency Keyhole Day Plan,” which includes space for names and numbers of supportive people to text, things that can be canceled, and self-care strategies. Concepts like the “10/90 Rule” (a framework for identifying triggers) explain how little things can cause outsize reactions. Readers unfamiliar with the author’s accompanying self-help book may occasionally feel that context is lacking.
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9798298590181
Page Count: 317
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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