The Everyday Living of Children and Teens Monologues

The Everyday Living of Children and Teens Monologues
Adra Young
Trafford
ISBN: 141205949
Non-Fiction, Teen, YA
Reviewed by John Clark

The Everyday Living of Children and Teens Monologues addresses a unique area and need. Most modeling/role modeling young people get today comes from sources we would prefer were a distant second or third. Television paints a distorted picture of nearly every value-based facet of life, while peer role modeling can often be unhealthy, particularly for teens with self-confidence issues.
Adra Young has written a simple, easy to use guide to address these very dilemmas. She has created 51 different situations that young people regularly face. In each instance, she gives affected teens and children a brief monologue for a given real-life situation and includes hand/face/body gestures as well as emotional guides. The briefness allows readers to assimilate them quickly and then improvise. The variety is nice, too; covering situations ranging from theft of a long-awaited birthday bike (and its recovery) to learning that a beloved friend has died at a party you chose not to attend.
There are a few things I would like to see in a subsequent edition. First, as a writer myself, I am a stickler for proper spelling and word usage. There were isolated instances where words should have been different (like stop for stopped) and occasional misspellings. It would also be good to have some of the emotive cues (hand gestures, facial expressions) demonstrated in pictures as many of the children and young adults who will benefit from this book may need an idea what emotions look like in real life. I would also encourage the author to add a section inviting readers to submit their own monologues for subsequent versions.
Overall, this fills a definite need and took an insightful and creative person to recognize the possibility and make it a reality.