A broad-minded and engaging activity book to help children work out their feelings.
An interactive workbook designed to help kids deal with separation and divorce.
This volume from Nightingale (Building Resiliency, 2018) draws on her experience as a psychologist and family therapist. She offers a series of illustrated exercises that aim to help children of separation and divorce work through various aspects of chaotic events in their lives. They’re peppered with affirmations, such as “It’s okay to keep on loving both your parents” and “Do you know that crying can sometimes make grownups feel better, too?” It presents a kid-friendly frame story in which a beautiful mermaid and a strong knight fall in love and have four children: Constance, Arletta, Newton, and Spartacus. After a while, tensions grow when the mermaid wants to return to the sea and the knight wants to stay on land: “everything seemed to upset both of them, and they complained about each other,” Nightingale writes. The book offers a series of scenarios involving each child as they experience their parents’ split, and this narrative device allows the author to effectively explore different reactions, including withdrawal, moodiness, anger, and resentment. Each section offers discussion questions (such as “Newton wondered WHY about many parts of his parents’ divorce….What things have you wondered WHY about?”) and pages of exercises (such as “Draw a picture of something special at your mom’s house”). Nightingale’s experience and empathy make the book invaluable for parents who may have read adult books about divorce—including, possibly, the author’s own—but want a similar resource for their kids. The author’s decision to create four fictional children, instead of one, is wise, as well, as it increases the likelihood that a child will find someone relatable in these pages.
A broad-minded and engaging activity book to help children work out their feelings.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-889755-01-4
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Nightingale Rose Publications
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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