An insightful and well-intentioned, if occasionally lackluster, book on raising happy teenagers.
A creative approach to handling the teenage years.
This parenting manual uses both fiction and nonfiction to help parents navigate the trickier bits of raising teenagers. Chetty (Where Am I?, 2013), a medical practitioner in Australia, opens the book with a story about a conference of the Gods created to help these troubled children. On the first day of the convention, letters from anxious parents are read by the Gods. This fairly effective bit—the letters are relatable and written realistically—conveys stories about the traps in which adolescents can get caught: drugs, cutting, bullying, etc. The authors of these letters, mostly average parents, are clearly distraught and unsure of what to do. In turn, the Gods spend the next two days of the convention assessing the situations and offering suggestions. They essentially conclude that a lack of awareness and good communication often contribute to the breakdown between parents and children, although much of it is biological as well. That’s where readers get a taste of Chetty’s medical background and learn that adolescent brains do not fully mature until they are 25 or so, though there are certain tools that can be used to work around this. While the tools themselves are not especially new—clearing clutter from our lives, appreciating those around us, meditating, being creative and learning self-defense techniques—Chetty does take a very practical approach, which is helpful. “Look around your room,” she advises, “focus upon an item, and ask yourself, ‘Is this item important to my immediate experience?’ ” Though her language is clear and accessible, the story drags a bit, and the book in general suffers in part because its audience is not especially clear. It comes across as rather juvenile for either adults or disaffected teens. Those readers are unlikely to pick this book up and feel connected to it as a whole, although some individual chapters may be useful. In many ways, the better approach would have been to write a more straightforward parenting manual, one that doesn’t attempt to lure in older children with a fairy tale.
An insightful and well-intentioned, if occasionally lackluster, book on raising happy teenagers.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1482897555
Page Count: 62
Publisher: PartridgeIndia
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An odd, humorous tale with an inclusive message that sets out to prove everything has value, no matter how strange it seems...
A boy befriends a lonely palm tree then searches for a way to integrate it into island life in the authors’ idiosyncratic picture-book debut.
Frederick lives on a tropical island and regularly walks the Nettleberry Trail to a pink sandy beach where a fantastic palm tree—with bulging, spicy pepperoni sausages hanging from its branches—grows on the shoreline. Ridiculed and mocked by the “normal trees” with their respectable coconuts and mangoes, the poor pepperoni palm confides in the boy, who promises to find evidence of other trees like it in the universe and put an end to all the derision. Frederick consults his books and turns up nothing, so he sets off around the world looking for evidence of similar species to end his friend’s loneliness. Many years later, he returns older and wiser with news that the palm tree is unique and he has big ideas for their future, including plans to build a pizza parlor on the beach. Parrish’s vivid illustrations, bursting with color and life, compliment the zany text and bring out the strangeness of the jungle, with its screeching monkeys, sneering papaya plants and gloating banana bunches. The whole thing has a touch of Seuss about it. But you can’t help wondering what will happen to this idyllic paradise once the Pizza Place is up and running and crowds of tourists are flocking to visit the world-famous tree and restaurant.
An odd, humorous tale with an inclusive message that sets out to prove everything has value, no matter how strange it seems at first.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-9849908-8-7
Page Count: 34
Publisher: Fuze Publishing, LLC
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Unique children’s lit that cleverly tackles interest rates, endowments, fluctuating commodities, bullying and identity.
A smart kid with a head for numbers takes on a corrupt Wall Street banker, in Everett’s debut middle-grade reader.
Toby Gold, orphaned at birth, is found in a green leather handbag. He takes his name from the word “Tobias,” written on a slip of paper lying at the bottom of the bag and the unusual gold marking on the iris of his left eye. Passed from one foster family to another, young Toby longs for a stable home but finds himself going from bad to worse when he moves into his 10th house, where foster brother Eddie makes his life a misery and steals his weekly allowance. Resourceful Toby gets a job walking the dogs of a local banker and, after exacting his revenge on Eddie with the help of his friends and some chocolate pudding (so effectively in fact that the young bully hardly utters another word for the entire book), he starts to watch the stock market reports on television. With his mathematical mind, Toby deciphers secret codes in the rising and falling commodities market and soon finds himself drawn into a web of financial intrigue. He is granted a place at the local high school for rich kids, where he unearths a scandal that threatens to bring down the name of the well-renowned school. The chocolate pudding escapades and Toby’s system for nicknaming his foster parents add some light relief along the way, and although the plot is a bit far-fetched, the story engages enough. The author makes a bold attempt at integrating some complex financial issues into the story, sometimes at the expense of his characters.
Unique children’s lit that cleverly tackles interest rates, endowments, fluctuating commodities, bullying and identity.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-1936214952
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Fiscal Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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