A useful, relatable introduction to mindfulness for kids.
In this illustrated children’s book, an anxious boy gets help from a friend who teaches him mindfulness practice.
Fourth-graders Mikey, a white boy, and Nia, a black girl, are neighbors and best friends, but they have different approaches to life’s problems. Mikey is a worrier, always afraid something bad will happen, and this keeps him indoors and lonely. He distracts himself by playing on his electronic tablet, but he often gets so absorbed that he doesn’t hear his mother call him for dinner, which annoys her. Nia, on the other hand, loves to live in the moment: “She calls this ‘being mindful,’ and it is her superpower!” notes the third-person narrator. After noticing that Mikey is unhappy, she resolves to help him by teaching him about mindfulness and how to practice it himself. He agrees to give it a try, and Nia takes him through the process, step by step. He learns that he can handle his feelings, make better choices, and focus, and he’s more attentive to his mother, pleasing them both. Mikey resolves to practice his new “superpower” regularly, which makes him happier and keeps him out of trouble. A note to parents and teachers explains how to use the book with kids, offering more background, questions to consider, and examples of mindfulness practice. In her debut, Dolinar, a psychotherapist, explains in clear, simple language how readers can slow down and pay attention to the present. (The book doesn’t address the issue of kids with more serious attention-related issues, such as ADHD, but clinical studies have shown mindfulness training can be effective in such cases.) The author shows what to do when intrusive thoughts arise, as they will: “Always look and take notice of them, but don’t hang on to them for long.” Introducing the subject through a friend rather than a parent, teacher, or therapist is a nice touch that may help readers feel more comfortable with a new technique. Barinova’s (The Story of Emi, 2018, etc.) images are cartoonlike—simple lines, oversized heads—and include appealing details and a calming, peach-and-light-blue color palette.
A useful, relatable introduction to mindfulness for kids.Pub Date: May 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5255-3611-3
Page Count: 44
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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