Solid book full of honest and real ideas. This should be on most high school kids reading lists. It kept my interest and was easy to understand what the author was trying to convey.

Thank you to netgalley for providing an e-galley for review. Attention Hijacked deals with the ubiquitous nature of screens and technology in today's world. Marcus discusses both good and bad aspects of technology for the teen set, but adults can have a few take aways too. While this would not be a book to sit and read cover to cover, this is something to grab and discuss certain chapters with teens. Very accessible language and activities.

ATTENTION HIJACKED by Erica B. Marcus, a former English teacher and now full-time mindfulness instructor, is her attempt to "offer perspectives, awareness activities, and practices that can help you shift toward the relationship you want with technology." She is a strong advocate for "Using Mindfulness to Reclaim Your Brain from Tech" and begins by exploring both the pluses and minuses of technology use. From there, she moves on to describing mindfulness and how it can be applied, especially relative to technology use by teens. Booklist gave a starred review and recommended ATTENTION HIJACKED for high school students, but I am not sure that they are going to be willing to devote time to reading it. Instead, I think getting copies to Social Workers, Guidance Counselors, and Health teachers could be much more productive. That would allow these adults to sift through Marcus' many recommendations for journal prompts, visualization or audio exercises, and other resources and to then choose those which would work best for their specific teen audience. Repetition and practice is key with mindfulness, especially if tackling tech addiction in some form. Over the years, we have developed a large collection of books on mindfulness, and a personal favorite is Learning to Breathe which relies on research and develops a B-R-E-A-T-H-E strategy for participants. Prior to COVID, we spent a year working on this program with advisories (homerooms), but much more could – and should – be done.

This is a very in-depth book with lots of information. Unfortunately, it is a little too in depth for my teenagers to be interested in reading. I've found it is best to read with them in small pieces, or they tend to shut down. This is a good idea, but honestly maybe a bit too much info to keep teens attention (at least teens these days who are used to having their attention hijacked by technology ;) )

Attention Hijacked is great for children to be more mindful about their screen time. I wouldn't recommend for high schoolers, but middle schoolers and below would benefit from this book and its suggestions!

This book is definitely geared towards students, and that's not a bad thing! This book is still relevant for all ages however, not just for teens or parents concerned about their phone/social media usage.

I found this book to be perfectly readable. Not something that I would usually pick up but nonetheless still a worthwhile read. If you're looking for some science fiction to capture your attention, consider this novel.

This book fell flat for me. Yes, I 110% agree that technology is taking over our attention and that we need to reduce our screen time. Picking up this book, I expected some great things to help accomplish that. However, nothing in this book was new to me or a new inventive way to tackle the topic. Possibly others will get more use out of this book than I have as I agree, we should reduce our time on phones/tablets/computers. However, this just didn't give me any new technique or information about it that I didn't alrwady know.