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: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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