my mom's been saying this for years.

I am twenty-seven-years-old, and excluding a year stint living in Myrtle Beach, I have been living at home my entire life. I only recently purchased a house which I move into next week, so When Will My Grown-Up Kid Grow Up? by Jeffrey Jensen, Ph.D. and Elizabeth Fishel speaks to me, and my poor mother.

This parenting guide focuses on loving and understanding your emerging adult (or man child, in other words). "Children" ages 18-29 fill their parents with a certain amount of worry. There comes a point when mom and dad start asking themselves: Will my twenty-something child ever leave home? Will they find love? Will they find the right job? Will they keep that job? Will they stop needing money from us and quit stealing our toliet paper? So many questions, folks, and if you start badgering your child with these questions, all you're going to do is stress them out, which will stress you out, and you'll potentially ruin your relationship. So Dr. Jensen and Fishel are here to guide parents through this process.

The DO's and DON'T's include:

• DO insist that your freeloading kid has a plan, a REAL LIFE plan.
• DON'T get involved in your kid's love life, say very little, when they are making an horrendous decision, simply encourage them to involve themselves with people who help them be the best person they can be.
• DO have the money talk with your kids after high school and college.
• DON'T contact potential employers for your kids, but be available to help them with resumes, cover letters, etc.
• DO take care of your own life
• DON'T worry about your kids' lives more than they do. You are only human.

double double boozey trouble.

Martha Grimes and her son Ken have combined their issues with cocktails (which tends to run in the family) in a double memoir titled Double Double: A Dual Memoir of Alcoholism. Very clever title, and extremely clever take on the disease that affects more people than you'd think.

The Grimes' have extremely different points of view on their personal addictions to alcohol as you can imagine seeing as they are different genders and different generations. The mother and son share their own personal stories of struggles with drinking, recovery and relapse. Including chapters (identified by their initials) on relationships with others, successes and multiple failures. What makes this memoir so real is the sharing of conversations with each other. It's in an interview kind of format, but it's just a conversation between the two authors. The unique way in which they let readers in is what sets them apart from others in this genre.

if you’d like one of those marriages that last, consider this…

In honor of my recent ENGAGEMENT, I thought this would be the perfect book to review today :)

We are all painfully aware of the divorce rate in this country. Half of us will mate for life, like penguins, and the other half will throw in the towel like praying mantises. No judgment here. It is said that the couples that pray together, stay together. This brings me to my next review…

Robert and Bobbie Wolgemuth have created a new couples devotional that features forty couples found in Scripture appropriately titled Couples of the Bible. These couples in history faced many trials and tribulations as husband and wife, and also as parents. While reading through these stories from the Bible together, the authors hope that modern day married couples find comfort in their own trials, and grow in their faith and love for each other.

In this devotional, each week highlights one couple in five different ways (for the five weekdays in the week). It pretty much goes down like this:

Monday: Meet the couple; learn about their relationship, the good and the bad.

Tuesday: Gain an understanding of the couple’s cultural surroundings and its influence on them.

Wednesday: Take some time to walk in the couple’s shoes, and discuss how you can act similar, displaying godly character.

Thursday: Questions are offered to help you apply Scripture to your own marriage.

Friday: A guided time for couples to reflect on what they’ve learned, listen to God and pray.

Manfriend and I are not super religious, but we do believe in God, and what the Bible says. I think this devotional will benefit the ‘honk if you love Jesus’ couples as well as the couples who only have a spiritual side. Let’s be honest, in this day and age, marriages need all the help they can get.

we've gotta fight for our right...

Former Senator, Olympia Snowe presents a strong case for the trouble with the current Congress in her political memoir titled Fighting for Common Ground: How We Can Fix the Stalemate in Congress. In a nutshell, Snowe is fed up with Congress. After 18 years in the U.S. Senate, the Maine Republican called it quits. When she announced she would not seek re-election in 2012, she cited increasingly partisan politics as a major factor. In Fighting for Common Ground, Snowe shares of how she went from being an orphan at the age of nine, to a GOP lawmaker known for reaching across the aisle. The main premise of the book is her take on what’s wrong with Congress today and how to fix it. She says she's "confident in the truism that there is nothing we can't accomplish together. Including making our government work again." Let's hope so.

spice up your next baby shower gift.

"If your mother tells you to do a thing, it is wrong to reply that you won't. It is better and more becoming to intimate that you will do as she bids you, and then afterward act quietly in the matter according to the dictates of your best judgement." -Mark Twain

There is more where that came from in Advice to Little Girls by Mark Twain (illustrated by Vladimir Radunsky). It is an adorable little picture book filled with the proper ways little girls should act according to Mark Twain. Very charming. I would have liked the book to be a bit longer, but that could be because I am an adult. Sort of.

the beloved sheriff longmire is back.

Walt Longmire and his cohorts are back for a ninth round in Craig Johnson's A Serpent's Tooth. It baffles me how authors like Johnson can write so many books in a series without it getting dull. Such imagination is just plain impressive. In this installment, Walt and Vic's relationship is progressing which I love because the interactions between these two characters is one of my favorite aspects of this series.

For those of you who don't know, Walt is an old school cowboy type Sheriff in the rural wilderness of Absaroka County, Wyoming who solves whatever underlying mystery each book revolves around. In A Serpent's Tooth, when a teenage runaway is found, Walt and his team begin searching for the boy’s mother. It appears he has been forced off a nearby polygamist compound for not complying to their crazy, and the deeper the crew investigates, the more complex and dangerous the case becomes.

making more of the everyday life.

I love when novelists come out with a collection of personal essays, they should do so more often. When I love the way an author writes, I want them to be my friend. Friends have to know things about each other, so a personal essay is a nice treat. Elinor Lipman's I Can't Complain is a collection of (all too) personal essays that her avid readers will eat right up. Some of these essays will look familiar to you as they have been published in newspapers and magazines over the years, but they were all brand new to me.

I Can't Complain was split into four sections, Meet the Family, On Writing, Coupling Columns, and Since Then. The sections are filled with stories from her childhood, anecdotes about her family members, her quirks as a writer, and her column originally written for the Boston Globe. It's not like Lipman's life has been terribly more extraordinary than the rest of ours, she simply finds more meaning in the little things, and that's what makes her a great writer.