Super You

 

Shirley J.                         Adult Non-Fiction                 Becoming the real superhero of your own life Super You: Release Your Inner Superhero by Emily V. Gordon   320 pages            

Emily Gordon talks about becoming your own superhero and what that looks like.   She offers lessons in every chapter helping you to see the real you, the inner thoughts, beliefs and dreams that make up who you are.   She helps the reader to explore how they got to be the you currently voguing for the world, wishing the world saw the cape around your shoulders.   A good book.   A little in-depth for the passive reader.   This book is going to take another read for me to really get into it as the exercises she gives you to complete go way down deep into the psyche and soul and I wanted to do a read-thru first before completing them.  Emily makes no claims to be perfect nor to have perfected her inner superhero, she reveals she is a work in progress dealing with her own inner super villains.   She talks honestly about her home life, her downs and outs and her accomplishments.   Her broken relationships (she is on her third marriage) and how and why they went south and what she has had to work on to get her life back where it needs to be.   In disclosing her own shortcomings, she talks about how most superheroes are born of tragedy and some traumatic event - Superman orphaned as a baby, sent from his exploding home plane by his parents in hope he would find a better life and who grew up to find his apex predator is Kryptonite, Batman who saw both his parents killed in front of him and grew up to fight bad guys to save as many people as he could from suffering as he did.   She cites examples of what adversity superheroes had to overcome then the good that came from it relating these experiences to what every day people go through.   Then she teaches how to apply those principles to our own lives.  She was a therapist at one time and adds her experience in that field to her sometimes clinical terminology which she warns you about in advance then proceeds to break it down simply for all of us non-therapists to understand.   Good book.   It is going to take me another read to really feel I have absorbed it all.   I recommend this book to middle schoolers on up.  Kids are savvy and they will get this from the git go.