Customer Reviews

Help Is On Its Way: A Memoir About Growing Up Sensitive

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I was a bright, sensitive and intense child, so I can relate to the story told by Jenna Forrest in this powerful memoir about a child struggling to understand and live with her sensitivity and intensity. I run a center for gifted education, and I was looking for a book that could explain to parents and teachers what it is like for a child to be bright, sensitive and intense. Her story is so important that I am making it the book club choice for my fall course on the social and psychological foundations of gifted students. I highly recommend this book for anyone who is sensitive and intense or loves someone who is a highly sensitive person.

I thought this was a great book. So many times, it's so easy to remember childhood as an easy time when all anyone had to do was play and had no responsibilities. Often we forget that childhood is actually a
very tough, confusing time for anyone, especially a deeply emotional and sensitive kid like Jenna. In the book, Jenna Forrest vividly explores the fears, love, anxiety, and wonder of childhood not through the filter of an adult looking back, but through the wide-open eyes of a child. And she nails it. The sights and smells of the world of a child are so real and tangible you feel like you're really living in Jenna's skin. I recommend this book for anyone who was ever a child (and to anyone who ever wants to be a parent.) There are an amazing number of life lessons here, but the tone is never pandering or didactic. She just let's the world unfold and allows us an intimate peek into a time of life that most of us have boxed up and long forgotten.

Jenna Forrest shares a profound gift with us by allowing readers of her memoirs to peer into her soul. Her poetic prose amplifies the experience to the degree that we can feel the vinyl on the chairs and hear the scratch in LPs she describes in her journey through childhood. Her words give voice to our child's mind with authentic eloquence, beauty, humor, sadness, fear, and hope.

If you are sensitive person, the parent of a child who is highly sensitive, or in relationship with a sensitive person, then you should read this book for its many, many insights and honest reflection. The reading is not always easy because a child's truth, so well expressed in this book, tells us all how much help the world and the people around us need.

In this book, Jenna Forrest has really captured a child's view of life in a way that brings us, as adults, back to our own childhood feelings and memories with a clarity most of us have likely lost.

As a parent, it is refreshing to realize how our own children may perceive things that to adults may seem ordinary or important. I hope to take this perspective into my daily interactions with understanding my own children.

A true story, Forrest bravely bares her soul in a memoir that is sure to touch every reader. There were many inspirational messages throughout the book, discovered by Forrest as she matured. My favorite being one that we all can and should bring to our own adult lives... "Being closer to people. I think that's what freedom really is... Realizing with relief that you are at last ready to show people your eyes instead of your back." I think it takes great courage to do this and I know I strive each day to live in just that way.

A fantastic read. Great front cover, but I don't think the description on the back cover does justice to the depth of the story.

Get it. Read it. It was great.

Excellent from the heart story of how different children respond to tough childhood situations. A great read for any parent as you can see the effects that every one of your actions has on your children.

The author is a great communicator! I find such child-like pleasure as I read this book. Perhaps Jenna's inner child wrote it?... as my inner child is reading it. I experience the anguish of that inner child (both the author's and mine), yet I also feel the joy of life from a child's perspective when everything was fun, exciting, fresh, important, and NOW; when exuberance was pulsating through my cells; when wishing, hoping, and dreaming were my method of operation. Even though that same exuberance -- when crushed -- was the source of pain, I am reminded how exciting life is through a child's eyes. I strive to live that way now -- full of enthusiasm and delight -- with my "adult" as my constant companion, always available to soothe my delicate "child within."

I highly recommend this book as a means of experiencing childhood through adult eyes.

This book was outstanding! Not only did I have trouble putting the book down, but I learned so much. Jenna's writing style is magnificent. Because of the level of detail that she included in her beautifully-crafted sentences, I was able to totally be in the moment with her and truly experience the myriad of feelings and sensations. So even though I do not think I meet the criteria for being highly sensitive, I thoroughly get it and could relate to it. I am grateful that she shared her journey with us because I know it will be so helpful and validating to many. I have already recommended the book to quite a few of my own patients. I only wish the book continued so I could witness how she evolved past her teenage years...I hope she is writing Volume 2!

In this book Jenna Forrest gives us insight about her life and how growing up sensitive was for her.
Through this book I re-lived my childhood years; years of living in homes that I never thought to be mine, growing up as a kid from a broken home and divorced parents, living like a ping-pong ball from one house to the other.
This book is powerful because it confronts us with our past and makes us talk about those things and feelings we never talked about because in those times, we simply accepted our lives as they were, thinking that life was supposed to be that way.
Jenna in this book makes us go back into our past and unwind all of those moments of conflict within ourselves and empowers us to face them, discuss them and even cry what we never did. The result is a sense of forgiveness of compassion for that child we were and a great sense of responsibility for our family and our children.
If you still have unresolved issues in your life, this is a book that will help you understand the path that many of us have walked so far, and will help you understand that help is no longer "on its way", but help is here now.

This book is a touching, emotional and honest memoir that brings back a flood of childhood memories. Jenna Forrest shares her powerful story of a what it was like growing up as a highly sensitive child. All parents and teachers should read this moving book.

Jenna Forrest takes the reader on her private journey into the life of a child lost in the mire of family dysfunction and the confusion that those of us who are sensitives can relate to and understand as we try to fit into the world around us; Jenna shares her innermost feelings from a child's perspective as she realizes even though living in a dysfunctional family, help and hope are delivered in the form of real human angels who do appear for support and empowerment! This book is a must for anyone who feels overwhelmed by visual, tactile, intuitive, and auditory stimuli that is unavoidable in our busy world.Jenna guides us through her reality into a world of awakening to the fact that sensitives and intuitive people are blessed with a gift which is understood by such a minority; Thank you Jenna for your inspirational memoir!