Official Review: Find Your Happy by Patricia May

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MarisaRose
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Official Review: Find Your Happy by Patricia May

Post by MarisaRose »

[Following is an official OnlineBookClub.org review of "Find Your Happy" by Patricia May.]
Book Cover
3 out of 4 stars
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Find Your Happy: A Kid’s Self Love Book, written by Patricia May and illustrated by Snezana Grncaroska, is a picture book full of exercises and tips to help a young audience find happiness. This book uses inward exercises to help children bring out their creativity, learn relaxation methods, and focus on self-love, all with an overarching theme of finding peace and happiness within. Find Your Happy is approximately thirty-two pages; each page includes a full-page illustration and, in most cases, a full page of overlapping text.

This book is essentially a self-help book for children. There is no story, rather this book includes fill-in the blank tasks and descriptions of activities children can perform on their own. With a focus on meditation, stress relief, self-love and exploring creativity, I was a bit confused about the target audience for this book. On the one hand, the bright, colorful pictures seem appropriate for young children, but the large number of words on each page and the topics discussed in the book seem far more appropriate for a pre-teen audience. Further, the children in the illustrations appear to be of adolescent age. After consulting the Amazon blurb, the author intended this book for children of all ages, but I would be hesitant to recommend this book for younger children because the majority of the ideas in the book, like stress, meditation, chakras, and yoga, are likely not yet relevant to their lives.

The full-page illustrations in this book are absolutely beautiful. The medium of the illustrations appears to be watercolor, which added to the earthy, calming tone of the book. Further, the colors are vivid and bright, adding a sense of joy to each page. Quite a few of the illustrations include depictions of children, and I was happy to see that the children portrayed in the illustrations are of all different nationalities. Overall, the illustrations help promote the themes of happiness, peace, tranquility and love that this book attempts to portray.

Unfortunately, this book contained a lot of basic grammatical errors. Improperly placed commas and apostrophes were found on multiple occasions. Moreover, the version I downloaded did not include a book cover. Although the content of this book is helpful, and the author does a great job of including many varied methods and techniques to promote happiness and appeal to all different types of children, the book could use some polishing.

Find Your Happy would be most beneficial to pre-teen children. Many of the exercises in the book will be fun and engaging for children of that age. Further, the concepts at the heart of the book are within their basic comprehension. Pre-teens facing stressful situations in life, whether they be related to school or friends or family, will gain a lot of insightful information about inspiring activities that will help them attain a better mind set. Additionally, the beautiful and inclusive illustrations alone will pique curiosity. If not for the grammatical errors and somewhat confusing message about the intended audience, I could have given this book a perfect rating. However, in its current state, I rate Find Your Happy 3 out of 4 stars.

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Sahani Nimandra
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Post by Sahani Nimandra »

The cover illustration is beautiful, and I'm sure that kids would love this read. I'm sure parents will be willing to get this book to their kids, and this book has a lot positive ways to impact on kids lives. Thank you for your review!
The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid! - Jane Austen :techie-studyingbrown:
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Post by HollandBlue »

Your review is very insightful. I love the title of this book. It seems like it's very inspiring for kids. I'm wondering if the younger readers could just follow along with the pictures. When my daughter was smaller she used to try to copy my yoga poses. I agree that having the different nationalities represented is a good idea.
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Post by Cecilia_L »

Based on the cover, the art does look beautiful. I agree with your thoughts about the recommended age groups. Thanks for your candid review.
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Corhan2
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Post by Corhan2 »

The cover of this book is absolutely beautiful. I agree with you regarding the targeted audience and also think pre-teens will benefit from this book. Thanks for your review.
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Post by Rafaella Michailidou »

Thank you for your detailed review. It's really amazing that children's books nowadays are becoming more and more deep and hard but nevertheless meaningful to read. Children these days build up empathy faster than we used, thus it is expected for literature to support this situation. I think is necessary today to learn to control your feeling because they tend to be overwhelming especially if you are a teenager or at a pre-teen age.
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Post by AmySmiles »

Grammatical issues should never exist in a children's book. That saddens me. It's quite an interesting topic for a children's book though, I would venture to say that there are not too many self-help books out there for children. Great review.
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Post by kfwilson6 »

It's great to get some clarification on the appropriate audience when a book gives conflicting impressions about the author's intended audience. I really like the use of the words "self love" in the title. Pre-teens are definitely getting to the stage in life where self-doubt and self-esteem issues start to creep up.
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Post by booklysis »

The errors are very annoying. The name too should contain the word 'happiness' instead of happy. But the concept is great.
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Post by KarinaBordas »

Find Your Happy seems to take a different approach towards stereotypical self help books. Hopefully this will be a useful tool for pre-teens who are not as willing to delve into traditional style self-help books. It’s unfortunate that a book that was intended for all children misses the mark and is only geared towards the preteen crowd. I agree, however, with your review that chakras, meditation, yoga and other concepts such as these are too advanced for gradeschool children. Hopefully Patricia May will consider creating something with the same concept of self love for children, but geared towards younger crowd.
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