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| Book Cover via Amazon.com |
Opinion
I am so delighted that Norma contacted me about reviewing her book. I picked this up on Kindle Unlimited and started to read. The reason I was excited to review this book is that Norma is a positive person, and I’m a positive person, so this is like book reviewing heaven for me. Anytime I can help spread positivity and joy; I like to do so. I enjoy a topic that I live and breathe every single day of my life.
Now I'd like to start the review with a bit of a change, and that is a disclaimer and an explanation as to why I am disclaiming anything. "Turn your Happiness On" is a non-fiction book, so this is a non-fiction review. I want to clarify first where this book lies compared to other non-fiction books I've reviewed in the past. Generally, when I review non-fiction, it’s a how-to book, or it’s a cookbook.
“Turn Your Happiness On” is an advice book, it is not a how-to book despite some of the stylistic choices that were made that I will cover later in the review. A How-to or Cookbook will show you a picture of a thing, instructions on how-to build or cook it, a list of materials or ingredients, and an explanation on how to assemble it. This is not that kind of book. There is no picture of happiness for you that will come with a materials list and poof, you're happy.
I reviewed a while ago a book about mother self-care after a baby is born. In that book, it was advice that if you have your baby and you are a new mother, and you try some of those things, it will help you recover or have a more comfortable time. Primarily, it was a book of advice. "Turn On Your Happiness" is similar to that kind of an advice book if you have some things you want to focus on to be happier, try the advice in those sections. There are however places in the book to write things in a journal format to help the reader with their checklists.
However, one thing I also want to get out of the way here, I cannot test this book’s theories or advice at all. The reason I cannot do that and be fair is I already am living a great many of them now. Ever go on a diet by watching the people in an Ad who were selling the diet who never say they were on a diet, but there is a heavy implication they were? The problem is, that person who is selling that diet thing probably is in the gym four to seven hours a day as their job.
If that person sells a diet and says “Oh it works! Look at me!” it’s not the diet that made them thin, it’s their job to be thin. Well, it’s my personal life job to be happy for me, I do that as a promise to myself, I don’t want to be unhappy.
I can’t with any glimmer of integrity state “Hey I tried this happiness book, and now I’m happy” because that’d be a lie. I am happy by nature, and I have been happy for some time. Many of the techniques which Norma talks about in this book are things I do already in some iteration that works for me.
Thus, I will be grading "Turn your Happiness On" on the structure of the book and how it reads.
What I would like to ask one of my wonderful readers who may pick up this book later, is if you were not a happy person but you tried the theories, please leave me a message in the comments below and let me know how this worked for you. I really want to know if others are getting good results from it.
First impressions of the book for me time. One thing that Norma points out immediately in the book is that by adopting a change from negative to positive, the stress is reduced. I don’t know if that works for everyone, but I do know that worked for me several years ago, and I am already giving Norma a plus on what her advice says as far as validity. I used to suffer from significant stress due to a very negative situation for over a year, and once I made a change and that negativity was gone, my life was instantly a lot less stressful.
I am very grateful that I was born in the family that I was born into, with the circumstances I have had, and the life I am living — the reason I say that most of this book was about things I do in my life. I don't know if you have noticed this or not, but I am in general a very positive person and try to be happy with everything I am doing. This is for my self-enrichment, but also because I find living this kind of a life is far less stressful than the previous iteration of my days when I was not doing what I do to be happy.
I can say that upon reading the first parts of this book, I was struck with a reminder of how much positivity plays in our daily lives, and I found it enjoyable.
Critiques time. This falls into the "Story Structure, Foundation and Presentation" part of my review scoring. I have three, and up first there are some issues with the justified text at times. When justified, the e-copy wasn't checked for the points where the text stretches out a bit when it shouldn't. It's bad enough that at times Kindle picked up on the stretched words and underlined under them to make it appear there was a misspelling when it's a spacing issue that happens with Kindle. This becomes more pronounced when there are lists involved such as page 11 of the "Action Step" and the first line, into page 12 where this continues and looks just as stretched. This is not the only example of this kind of justified text stretching.
As an example, page 39 on the Kindle, it has a list of common areas to focus on. The page is stretched, and there is word spacing that makes no sense, and it's a jumbled up mess.
Second, there are some line spacing inconsistencies. For most of the book after a paragraph is a double line, but every now and again there is not one. This makes the book look like someone edited it one way, and then someone else edited another way, and it is strange when reading it.
Lastly, the sectioning that is used to explain a point in a chapter is not comfortable. They look like mini-chapter markers, and they mush into the last point. Some of them are justified in the center, and there is a weird kind of a stretch to the words. Some of them are Left Aligned. Some of them are just centered. For example on page 37 on Kindle, the word "Self-Image" is left aligned. If you continue to flip pages you get to another highlighted word, this one is "Action Step," and that is centered. While most of the "Action Step" sections are centered through the book, the fact that this comes after another marker make the two appear inconsistent.
Now, let me be positive for a moment. Those critiques may seem very big, because of how frequent they happen. However, I think the reason for all of the spacing, alignment and wording issues has to do with the format of the book vs. the purpose of the book. This is a better workbook kind of advice book. This works better if you can write in it. This is not the ideal book for Kindle or mobi copies. I don't think that it is terrible to have an e-copy, but it does confuse the reader with so many writing in that space sections as to what they should do, or if they should just make a journal separately. Thus, please don’t let my structure comments scare you away from an opportunity to look at some advice that may be beneficial. These things I’m pointing outlook a lot better on a workbook, not a tiny Kindle screen, so if you can get that paperback to test it, I’d say do it.
For this part of the review where we go into things, I enjoyed about the book. There are a lot of helpful checklists that if someone wants to use them to make points toward happiness, I think they will enjoy it. This is where you get that "how to" feel to the book.
The next part I enjoyed was the aspects that were considered in giving tips on where to remove negative parts of persons daily routine. I found this a very logical conclusion based on a series of common issues that we all face, such as stress, money, and upbringing.
Overall, this is a well-worded book; it has much great advice on how to live a far more joyous and happy life when the intended audience is someone who is struggling with negativity.
I want to end this with my little bit of advice. I am a positive person, and a lot of what was talked about in this book are things I do personally. Thus, regarding my opinion on if the advice that is given in "Turn Your Happiness On" is sound or not, I think there are some high points to it. I would venture so far as to say; it's worth trying for your situation to see if that works for you. In my opinion, I'd say this is a good book to start with!
Score
Scoring time. After doing all of the math and adding up all of the points, "Turn Your Happiness On" is an 87/100 which is a 4 Star Review on Goodreads and Amazon.
If you want your blues to go away, and are looking toward a lifestyle change of more positivity, give "Turn Your Happiness On" a shot! Moreover, please, let me know how it went in the comments! I’d love to hear about it.
Until next time my friends, have a beautiful and happy day!
