PaperbackSuch an interesting idea for an experiment: make the house a screen-free zone for 6 months. No computers, TVs, smart phones, or iPods -- if you want to talk to someone, you call them on a land line. If you want to poke someone, you have to get near enough to push your finger into their actual flesh. If you've simply got to do something on a computer, it's going to have to be at the library or a friend's house. And it gets even more interesting when three teens are (not altogether willing) participants in the experiment.
I love the idea here and would have truly enjoyed the book to be entirely in diary form -- we get 50 days or so worth of stingy entries sprinkled throughout the text. I wanted to know when and how stuff happened...not just be told that it did. And I was not interested in Mom's philosophizing (nor her incessant use of "LOL" -- even if it was meant ironically). The result of the experiment was, it seems, entirely positive. Grades went up across the board, sleep patterns were restored, family cohesiveness was rediscovered, meals became an event -- planned and enjoyed rather than grabbed and inhaled, and a musician was born. Quite a lot in such a short span of time.
For such an interesting premise, though, the book was really felt like a slog at times. The portions that breezed along were the diary bits. When the author rambled, however, I was usually just annoyed. She's a blogger, I believe, and her style of writing is much more suited to that. She seems to think it's her job to stretch a small thought into an entire page of text, usually by employing similes. Not everything has to be colorful -- sometimes a TV is simply heavy, it doesn't have to be as impossible to budge as somebody's husband during the football match.
Still, amazing story. Maybe I'll try it sometime and write an incredibly interesting diary about it.
B
