Help and hope for parents who struggle with their teens’ risky behaviors.
Empathetic and practical advice for parenting teens with emotional challenges.
May is a licensed professional adolescent mental health counselor whose practice focuses on high-risk teens, a calling rooted in her own recovery from family dysfunction and self-destructive behavior as a teen and young adult. She combines her professional and personal perspectives (her own child struggled with depression) to provide parents who feel “overwhelmed and unsure of how to move forward” with an “instruction manual for raising kids like me.” The author explains how dangerous and impulsive behaviors can be coping mechanisms for emotionally sensitive teens (dubbed “Fire Feelers”) and asserts that understanding children’s underlying pain is the first step toward helping them manage overwhelming feelings. She advises parents to let go of judgment—including self-judgment—and model healthy behavior and self-care, and provides practical techniques for handling difficult interactions and managing stress. Throughout the text, stories from May’s own life and counseling practice provide relatable examples of important concepts. Sidebars titled “Parent Like a Therapist” and “Top Takeaways” highlight and summarize key points. The author lays out psychological concepts and coping strategies simply and clearly, making them easy to understand and apply for even the most stressed-out parent. She is frank and matter-of-fact, making blunt statements like, “Listen up, buttercup... yelling doesn’t work” and “Looking for a quick fix? You won’t find it here.” She is also candid about failures, challenges, and potential setbacks, advising parents that it’s essential to be prepared for “your teen’s behavior to trigger and test you” and warning that the process of stopping a behavior may cause it to escalate temporarily. While acknowledging it isn’t easy, May shows parents how to go beyond “doing damage control” and become proactive. Parents will find a lifeline in May’s conviction that “You can repair your relationship with your teen, no matter what you’ve been through.”
Help and hope for parents who struggle with their teens’ risky behaviors.Pub Date: May 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781544545585
Page Count: 166
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: yesterday
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 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.
