Linking up for Share Your Shelf today. I've been cruising through audiobooks lately.
Everyone says you have to do Listen for the Lie on audio. It's got all the bells and whistles of a true crime podcast, intertwined with the actual story. I can't lie: I didn't fall in love with it. It was good, though. It reminded me of Up and Vanished in more ways than one (I am NOT a Payne Lindsay fan, so take that for what it's worth). It also reminded me of Sadie, which was really good.
Anyway, do the audio but I think my expectations were set at 5 stars and this wasn't a 5 star book. There's definitely a lot of unnecessary graphic content as well.
I was shocked at how much I liked Hard is Not the Same Thing as Bad. Abbie is that person I've had to unfollow in IG and her podcast can make me roll my eyes (but I keep listening!). She's almost always right, though. This is uplifting and encouraging. It speaks of doing things that aren't supposed to be easy as being the work of parenting, basically.
It's worth your time but that main character is annoying and negotiating with the villain, turns out, would be like talking to a wall.
Free-Range Kids is SO GOOD. This isn't so much about letting your kids do whatever they want (which is what I think of when I hear "free range"). It's about teaching them to do an age-appropriate task and then letting them do it. Like, how I let Wells run off to the playground (where I can still see him) while I unload Sutton from the car. Or how he can go up to the cashier at Cracker Barrel to ask how much a toy costs. Or ordering for himself at a restaurant. Giving them independence is so much more important than I ever realized.
The Let Grow Play Club is something I'm interested in starting this fall here because our kids don't need more teacher-directed or parent-directed activities. They need to figure out how to play on their own. We should want them to come up with their own ideas, not listen to us tell them the rules of a game or have them stand in a line all the time. There is a place for school and a place for play and we've really confused the two, I think. We expect less from them in school and more from them in organized play. It's so backwards.
Free-Range Kids is also about letting go of our own constant anxieties.
I'm giving it 4 stars because you need to make sure you get the updated version of the book (on Audible). The 2009 version is a little outdated for current parents. That was intended for Gen Z's parents and, as we can see currently, no one took it seriously.
This book pairs beautifully with Bad Therapy by Abigail Shrier.
The Anxious Generation is what led me to Free-Range Kids. Highly recommend to parents and non-parents. It's especially important for teachers to understand that kids today are not the same as kids 15 years ago, or even 5 years ago. The Anxious Generation reads like a textbook and Haidt is very good at data and research. His other books are on my TBR. I did it on audio.
House of Glass was fine. I felt like the main character was kind of hard to like and I think her job is completely made-up; like such a position seems fake and unnecessary? I don't know. It was fine. I saw the end coming a mile away. Would probably make a good movie or show!
This is one author I will always read, so I feel like she was missing some magic with Greer Hendricks along.
And currently...I am one who starts a million books at once and will slowly finish some of them. Here's what my reading looks like this week:
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