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BUT YOU'RE STILL SO YOUNG

Name: BUT YOU'RE STILL SO YOUNG
Author: Kayleen Schaefer
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4483-0

HOW THIRTYSOMETHINGS ARE REDEFINING ADULTHOOD

by Kayleen Schaefer ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 2, 2021

A disappointingly superficial approach to a potentially rewarding topic.

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Schaefer’s breezy survey examines the dilemmas facing Americans in their 30s.

The author of Text Me When You Get Home, now in her 40s, discusses her own experiences and those of seven other men and women, "all part of today's sprawling middle class,” as they face five life transitions that in earlier times often occurred significantly earlier in one’s life span. These include completing school, leaving home, marrying, becoming financially independent, and having a child. Schaefer, who began this book before the pandemic, touches briefly on its role in slowing these achievements down, but she focuses primarily on pre-pandemic life. The author occasionally refers to other books, generally pop sociology like Gaily Sheehy’s Passages or Jill Filipovic’s The H Spot, and quotes celebrities like Jennifer Aniston, but she pays most attention to documenting the lives of herself and her subjects. While these anecdotes are entertaining, in occasionally uncomfortable ways, the individuals that Schaefer profiles are hardly representative of the range of 30-something experience. Two are stand-up comedians attempting to find success in Los Angeles, sometimes relying on money from their parents; another quit a stable job to pursue entrepreneurship; one is a stay-at-home father writing a novel. Alongside their stories, Schaefer chronicles her own familiar struggles within the 21st-century journalism landscape. Most of her subjects are impetuous—e.g., using a $10,000 loan to go on a spending spree or saying things like, "Let's be irresponsible with it. Let's go to Italy”—which means little reader sympathy for their plights even as they attempt to take risks and follow their dreams. While a book about delayed adulthood in the U.S. could be useful, this one covers such a narrow spectrum of individuals that it's difficult to extrapolate any meaningful conclusions from their experiences. By contrast, Sheehy’s book included interviews with 115 people.

A disappointingly superficial approach to a potentially rewarding topic.

Pub Date: March 2, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-5247-4483-0

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Dutton

Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS | SELF-HELP | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES

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THINK YOU'LL BE HAPPY

MOVING THROUGH GRIEF WITH GRIT, GRACE, AND GRATITUDE

by Nicole Avant ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 17, 2023

Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.

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Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.

“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”

Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.

Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023

ISBN: 9780063304413

Page Count: 288

Publisher: HarperOne

Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023

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THE MESSAGE

by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2024

A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.

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Bearing witness to oppression.

Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”

A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.