counseling

Book Review: I Can See You Now by Michael Shraga and Ayelet Shraga

Title: I Can See You Now
Author: Michal Shraga & Ayelet Shraga
Genre: Non-Fiction, Parenting
Rating: 4 stars
Purchase: Amazon
Review copy provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

What dark secrets are your children hiding from you?

This book takes you on a courageous journey into the souls of a mother and a daughter. A unique text, written by them in tandem, exposes what all of us are afraid to discover. Do we really know what is happening with our children? Are we perhaps at times asleep in our relationships? Has our child given up, and what can we do about it? What began as a normal communication breakdown between a rebellious teenager and her Mom—who is juggling studies, a career, raising her children, and preserving a marriage—turns into a nightmare, and secrets that had been hidden for years are revealed.

Encounter a mother and daughter’s true journey of healing, faith, and hope

Slowly, with great patience and caring, the mother succeeds in unraveling the entanglement in their lives, eventually bringing them to the peaceful shores of healing and love. This courageous, gripping book will not leave you unmoved. It provides a mirror through which one can learn to perceive the other without laying blame, to see the other without being judgmental. To give love in the hardest moments is the biggest cure you can hand to your loved ones.

In I Can See You Now, the focus is on the mother-daughter relationship, and the secrets children can keep from their parents – and how, if such a secret is revealed, parents can deal with this shocking rveelation.

I see a lot of myself, back when I was a teenager, reflected in this book. I can imagine my mother being equally as frustrated with me as the mother is here, and I can see my own frustrations reflected in the daughter’s tantrums.

The author duo does a great job portraying honest, raw emotions in this book, which I’m sure will connect with all mothers and daughters out there who once struggled with their relationship and the turmoil that comes with growing up, and with some of the struggles life throws at us. An inspiring read.

Book Review: Conversations About Evaluation by Miri Levin-Rozalis

Title: Conversations About Evaluation

Author: Miri Levin-Rozalis
Genre: Non-Fiction, Counseling & Psychology
Rating: 3 stars
Purchase: Amazon
Review copy provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Hey Mom, what’s this evaluation that you are busy with all the time?

Through the ingenious use of dialogue, this book discusses key issues of evaluation, such as: the origins of evaluation knowledge, the historical and social role of evaluation, concerns about ethics and social justice; dealing with the complexity of the real world; the challenge of giving voice to a broad spectrum of cultures and narratives; and the duties, rights, and responsibilities of an evaluator.

You mean to tell me it’s a real profession!?!

The book analyzes important considerations for conceptualizing and carrying out evaluation in varied programs and projects, providing thought-provoking answers regardless of one’s own approach to evaluation. Providing a coherent professional worldview, it gives the reader an in-depth understanding of program evaluation as a vital, research-based, independent profession.

Both theoretical and practical, this text is an important resource for practitioners, students enrolled in program evaluation courses, and their teachers.

“Evaluation” is just about the most dreaded word in my vocabulary. Even just hearing it, gives me the shivers. Yet, in Conversations About Evaluation, the author managed to make me hate the word a little less…a little.

Evaluation does serve a purpose, and it’s not just to taunt or bully people – its purpose is to gain insight into existing practices, reflect upon them, and help shape a better future. If something worked in the past but it did not always work as was intended, then evaluation can help uncover what went wrong and how this can be improved.

The book focuses on mother-daughter dialogues for evaluation, and makes the subject more interesting, even understandable – and lo and behold, by the end of the book, I didn’t cringe when I heard the word ‘evaluation’ anymore (okay, so I admit, I still cringed a little, but not that much).