Martha

Not so good for how to change your child's behavior, but excellent for how you can change your reaction.

Intriguing, but a bit tedious.

Not specific enough to be helpful.

Practical strategies to use with my passive-aggressive child!

Discussed Active Listening (a way to accurately decode communication, while letting children solve their own problems) and negotiating win-win compromises with children. Also discussed the difference between the child's problems (and how to be helpful but disengaged) and the parent's problems with the child, and the different approaches to take with each type.

I wasn't very impressed. Sure, it's a good idea to think what you might be doing to encourage your child's bad behavior, but it's not always 50% your fault (and the solutions she suggests put more than 50% of the changes on the shoulders of the parents). Some solutions sounded good, like ignoring tantrums so they don't get the attention they want, but others were very unrealistic. For instance, just ignoring backtalk is not going to make it go away, in my experience. And if I told my kids that they wouldn't get punished for doing something wrong as long as they told the truth about it, I'd probably have very honest trouble-makers.

I thought the techniques in this book would be good to try for a lot of things, not just backtalk. I also thought it was a better book for mild parental codependency than The Co-Dependent Parent.

4 1/2 stars.

It was perhaps surprisingly good. The characters were enthralling, the vocabulary plausible, the mystery a good hook (but not much more), and the religion vitally integrated. 3 1/2 stars.

Not everything that should have been explained was, and much of the rest was too predictable.

The ghost didn't work for me. There were other problems as well. It seemed a little too random, for instance.

Hogwash.

Not as much detail on what they actually did for school, but lots of discussion of why they did homeschool and the advantages they found in it. Did mention differences between various children & how they dealt with them.

The plot wasn't as good as the first book, but the wild sense of humor continued up until the “action-packed climax,” at which point it died away for a while.

Writing style was not well-suited to first-person narrative. Author did not think out certain aspects of background well enough. Despite flaws, I'll look for the sequel.

I laughed. I cried. I liked it.

Only made it through half of the book before I'd had enough.

I liked this book more than I thought I would (with the notable exception of one scene integral to the plot & mostly undetailed). I do, however, think it ranks as an adult book & not a juvenile/young adult one.

A nice synthesis of Blink and its opposite, Think. Rather just arguing about which type of thinking is better, it discusses under which circumstances one type of thinking is better than another, and why and how. And then it does it all over again for other types of thinking.

2 1/2 stars.

Clean but boring.

Very funny!

Rather strange, but I remember feeling strongly about things in my youth that ended up not being very important.

The Golden Sail–good point about forgiveness.
Biscuits of Glory–very lighthearted.
I, Earthling–my favorite in this book.
The Giant's Tooth–unexpected ending.
There's Nothing Under the Bed–this volume's story that I told my children not to read.
The Stinky Princess–fun, if a bit predictable.
The Japanese Mirror–shades of Dorian Gray.
Am I Blue?–strange, but interesting, in a way.
The Metamorphosis of Justin Jones–reminds me of learning about transitional characters.

2 1/2 stars. Some content may not be appropriate for all readers.