Help Me I’m Stuck is a short self help book designed to help the reader do things such as silence their inner critic, and learn how to be kinder to themselves.  This is something I am 100% interested in, (as who isn’t unnecessarily cruel to themselves sometimes) and something I know that I need to learn as a person.

Let us start with the positives of this book.  For starters, I do like the overall message of this book.  Be kinder to yourself, work on your own self-image, and try to be positive.  The book itself does end up reading more like a blog than a book, which could be good or bad, but it is easy to read.  As the book itself is only 132 pages, it’s one of those books you could read in a day, or take some time and reflect after each chapter.

I will be honest, that is kind of where the positives end. 

The absolute WORST thing about this book, is it a self-help book, directed at helping women, written by a man.  The author did use a female ghost writer, I think to try and correct how condescending some of the advice sounds, but it did NOT work.  The focus of chapter one of this book, is to focus on the positive in your life, and not the negative.  Then the author goes on to include examples of how you can spin things in a positive light.  The first example given is how your husband makes you late for a girls night, and you are mad at him for it.  Then you bitch about him at girls night, but when you go home you feel terrible about saying mean things about your husband.  The “positive” light of this is your husband makes you late and you have a chance to read more of the rom-com book you were in the middle of, and its so witty it somehow makes you wittier and more fun to be around.

The second example the author gives, is you just gave birth to twins and went from a size 8 to a size 14.  You look in the mirror and feel fat and ugly and don’t want to have sex with your husband because you are afraid, he will be repulsed.  The spinning it in the positive light, is to look in the mirror and say kind things to yourself, and when you got to bed at night and snuggle up next to your husband, all you can think about is how excited you are to go to the gym.

I will be honest with you, number one, whenever I complain about my husband to a friend, I never regret it.  Mainly because he is not perfect and getting the opportunity to talk about him to friends, helps me get a better perspective.  Number two, the second example is so sexist and honestly disgusting.  Why is somehow the mother’s entire job to not only look perfect, but also manage to find time to take care of kids, satisfy the husband, volunteer at the kids school, and somehow find time to go the gym.  If I had to spin it in a positive light, it would be talking to my husband to figure out how to get the help I need.

In addition, this book spends quite a few pages where the author is essentially saying how much they helped all of the female friends in their lives with the advice from this book.  Then on page fifteen of the book (yes, I did say fifteen) the exact quite is “Unlike my friends though, Corcoran did make the world her oyster.”  You literally spent quite a few pages telling me how much your helping people and then you directly disregard that by saying, yeah not only did I not help my friends, they also didn’t do anything successful.

On top of the fun examples above, this novel is filled with cliches, and then describing how they are somehow important in your life.  For instance, “make the world your oyster”, and “don’t build a mountain out of a molehill”.  And if the cliches are not bad enough, it is also filled with lots of “proven” facts that are honestly mostly matters of opinions. If it is not a matte of opinion, it is a quote from someone else’s book, or blog.  If I am reading a self-help book, to try and get help, I don’t want to read about three hundred other books that might help me.  I want to read about the author, and their life experiences, and how they learned and overcame.  This book does not do that. 

Overall – realistically this book does cover good topics.  Training to your mind to focus more on the positive than the negative, the power that food has and why eating right is a good choice, and how you should have empathy for yourself and others.  But the author (who is male to remind you) is so focused on proving why he knows how to makes women’s lives better, he completely misses the point of the topics he is trying to present.  I think this book could potentially be good, IF the author were to rewrite it and not focus so much on how he knows how to improves women’s life, but instead focused on how he improved his own life with his advice.  In addition, I would love to see many of the cliches taken out of the book, and have them turned into real life examples,

Plot – 2/10

Characters – 0/10

Originality –  2/10

General Joy of Reading – 1/10

Overall Score – 5/40

Help Me, I’m Stuck: Six Proven Methods to Shift Your Mindset From Self-Sabotage to Self-Improvement– Vaughn Carter

Cost* –  Kindle is $8.99 Paperback is $16.99 Book is included with Kindle Unlimited

*Cost is based upon what the book cost when book review is published