A positive, reassuring guide to managing complex emotions and navigating healthy change in one’s life.
Mental health educator Sunderland offers this practical self-help guide for personal growth.
According to the author, this is a self-help “bathroom book”: She’s organized it into brief, reader-friendly sections—perfect for reading two or three pages at a time. Sunderland claims to speak to harried, anxious, and overwhelmed adults with this blend of personal anecdotes, mental health insights, and practical advice for managing difficult emotions and cultivating resilience in the face of adversity. The author explores a period of her life when she felt overwhelmed by anger, fear, guilt, and sadness, ultimately realizing that there are no good or bad emotions: All are part of being human. Acknowledging these feelings, says Sunderland, can help prevent angry outbursts or crippling anxiety. She encourages readers to lean on a supportive person during this process, and not only recommends books and audiobooks that support change, but also provides suggestions for one’s “‘feeling better’ toolbox”, including the practicing of mindfulness, meditation, therapy, and self-care. The book’s final section explores how to build confidence by allowing yourself to go through multiple transformations, how to respond when “yucky days still happen,” and recognizing when a “long-ago bruise” (or past hurt) gets “poked.” Sunderland’s approach equips readers with straightforward strategies to instigate change in their lives. She also offers helpful visual metaphors, like envisioning emotional turmoil as a toboggan hill, where some paths are so well traveled that “it is now so slippery and icy that there is no chance of stopping or even slowing down.” Although readers are given helpful mantras like “I can only be me,” the book’s tendency toward short chapters results in too many surface-level explanations of complex psychological concepts.
A positive, reassuring guide to managing complex emotions and navigating healthy change in one’s life.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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