books 2016: Boundaries with Kids, by Henry Cloud and John Townsend

Full title: Boundaries with Kids: How Healthy Choices Grow Healthy Children
Finished on 3/14/16

This book includes great advice for setting limits for kids to help them grow into moral, responsible, thoughtful people. After I finished the book, I kept it around for a few weeks and flipped back to reread sections over again. I thought it was well organized, too, with suggestions around different types of troubling behavior grouped into chapters that escalate from basic limits to more complex concepts.

The one issue with this book that drops it from a five-star rating for me is all the unnecessary Jesus. The authors seem to be operating under the mistaken idea that only Christian parents want responsible children with strong morals, so they've geared the book specifically to people who need a Biblical citation in every paragraph and frequent mentions of what God wants for us. This was so unneeded for the content. The Biblical references were actually not difficult to skip past, since they're often just tacked on in parentheticals (so WHY IS IT THERE), but the God business can be a bit heavy-handed from time to time. Readers with a problematic religious background will be frustrated by this and may not be able to complete the book, which is a shame because the content really is useful.

books 2016: Red Rising (Red Rising #1), by Pierce Brown

Finished on 3/17/16
I actually really liked this! Once you get past the fact that the setting on Mars is completely tangential to the story (because Mars has been terraformed to the point that it could be any other planet, and all the author was really going for was a futuristic setting for a Hunger Games-like fantasy), then it was actually pretty fun. The key is to read it with the same expectations that you'd have for Hunger Games or a similar YA book (the same way that you'd watch a movie like Mission Impossible with entirely different expectations than you would an art house documentary and yet could thoroughly enjoy both for different reasons). Looking forward to arguing in favor of this book at my sci fi book club (since I know one of my friends already hated it). And I'll pick up the next one.

books 2016: The Magician's Lie, by Greer Macallister

Finished 3/23/16
The plot twist at the end was telegraphed quite early on, but that didn't diminish the fun of getting there. Nice historical fiction with a female stage magician - not exactly commonplace today, let alone in 1905. Recommended.

books 2016: The Opposite of Spoiled, by Ron Lieber

Full title: The Opposite of Spoiled: Raising Kids Who Are Grounded, Generous, and Smart About Money
Finished probably 3/25/16 or sometime around then
Have to say, I loved this. Lieber has a lot of down-to-earth suggestions for talking with kids about any topic related to money, dispelling the taboos around this subject. He also deals honestly with the fact that some families have more money than others, and gives good practical advice for talking about this fact with kids (because hey, they're going to notice). My child is still a little young for much of what he discusses, which will really apply to school-age children and teens, but I do plan to implement the Spend-Save-Give jars as soon as she starts seeing money as more than something to play with by pouring it from one jar into another and back again. And I plan on rereading this when she's a bit older, too. Highly recommended.

(And interestingly, the recommendations here dovetail nicely with those in Boundaries with Kids, a more general parenting book which I happened to be reading simultaneously.)