A wide-ranging and winningly honest guide for young adults entering the wider world.
Shine presents a primer to help young adults build a wide variety of life skills.
In her nonfiction debut, the author draws on her two decades of experience as a consultant, team leader, and manager to provide her target audience of young adults with detailed and practical advice compiled to address concerns about adult life. Shine’s main areas of focus include self-knowledge, self-care, academic excellence, searching for a job, managing money, paying for college, transportation, getting an apartment, guarding against fraud, and dealing with issues of spirituality and morality. Under each of these headings, the author provides pragmatic counsel and anecdotal elaboration. About academic achievement, for instance, she writes bluntly, “The number one academic skill that can change your life is your ability and desire to read. It is fundamental.” About getting a job, she states simply, “There’s no feeling quite like earning a paycheck with your name on it.” Accompanying each of these chapters are “Take Action!” sections designed to help Shine’s readers apply her points in real life, asking questions such as “Looking back on your childhood, were there any traumatic incidents or episodes?” The guidebook’s plainspoken phrasing is its chief strength; at every step, the text feels like straight-shooting talk from an experienced, caring friend. When discussing how to behave at work, for example, the author warns against the cheap pleasure of gossip: “Never talk about anyone behind their back… Be the person who can always be trusted.” Tips on everything from rental hacks to GED details are balanced by deeper considerations of honesty and finding peace in a loud and distracting world. Young adults just entering that world will find much of this advice invaluable—and adult readers may get some very helpful reminders, too.
A wide-ranging and winningly honest guide for young adults entering the wider world.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781738203352
Page Count: 224
Publisher: FLONA Vision Inc.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2024
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
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
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