Book Review: Tag You’re It!

Tag You’re It!: Empower Yourself, Establish Boundaries and Embrace Your Worth

Laprince Lagacy Press
Published, 2025. 147pp.
Reviewed by  Rabbi S.B. Levy
December, 19, 2025

In her new book, Tag You’re It, Dr. Shelly LaPrince goes far beyond offering advice; she provides real solutions to life’s most pressing problems.  You will appreciate this book because it was written by a courageous woman of faith who grew up in Congregation Temple Beth-El in Philadelphia. She went on to earn a Ph.D. and establish a very successful career as a financial analyst in the healthcare industry. Along the way, she married her husband of 28 years, Rabbi Elijah LaPrince. Together, they raise three wonderful children and are active in several civic and community organizations and charities. Most notably, Dr. LaPrince has been working with the Jewish Federation of Philadelphia to involve more Jewish women of color in their programs and outreach.

Despite her many accomplishments, this book is decidedly not a Horatio Alger tale about how to succeed through hard work and sacrifice. On the contrary, the book is dedicated to Dr. LaPrince’s mother, Clarissa, who died in September of pancreatic cancer.  Dr. LaPrince wrote this book primarily for women like her mother who worked too hard and sacrificed too much. Through this book and her personal example,  Doctor LaPrince teaches stressed people how to find the proper balance between caring for family, community, and career without neglecting themselves. The solution is contained in the subtitle of the book: empower yourself, establish boundaries, and embrace your worth. Each of the short chapters explains precisely how to turn these popular concepts into lived reality as she has done.

The title of the book, Tag You’re It, was inspired by the game children play in which being “tagged” temporarily shifts responsibility to another player. In keeping with this analogy, we have the power to tag ourselves in and out of certain situations. Most importantly, you do not have to wait passively for someone to tag you; when necessary, you can tag yourself. In this way, Tag You’re It  is far superior to the majority of books that fill the self-help section of most bookstores. Dr. LaPrince is not some guru selling simple platitudes about the power of prayer, patience, and positive thinking. She believes all of those things are necessary and have a proper place in your life. What distinguishes her book is the emphasis on personal agency; in other words, Dr. LaPrince focuses on what you can and must do for yourself in order to achieve true happiness.

Dr. LaPrince establishes credibility and intimacy with the reader by sharing her pain, challenges, and vulnerability.  Her first book, A Mother’s Desire, A Father’s Prayer, God’s Promise (2018), explored their twelve-year struggle with infertility. Yes, they prayed and they waited patiently, but they also enlisted the help of medical professionals. Likewise, in Tag You’re It, Dr. LaPrince speaks from experience. Instead of “keeping up appearances,” she keeps it real with her readers. For example, she reveals that at one point the stress in her life reached the level where she suffered temporary paralysis on one side of her face.  At another point in her life, she was diagnosed with Hyperthyroidism.  Had she not made changes at work and at home, these habits could have led to a stroke or heart attack. Salvation requires new ways of thinking and being. She wrote, “We’ve been told that rest is laziness, asking for help is weakness, and that self-sacrifice is the highest form of love.” This book provides the keys we need to escape those mental prisons that confine us.

Though written from a female perspective, men should not feel alienated from the wisdom contained in this volume. Indeed, Tag You’re It  will be beneficial reading to people of all backgrounds who confront the challenges of modern society. This book is  therapeutic and prescriptive. If you make it to the end, there are easy exercises that help you implement what you have learned. Fortunately, Dr. LaPrince is a talented writer who presents a wealth of information in a form that is easy to understand and yet enjoyable to read. You will love her wit and sense of humor contained in many of the stories she tells. She does not burden us with footnotes or an extensive bibliography, but the quotations that start each chapter are an indication of the depth of scholarly research that went into this book.

In our tradition, when we finish reading a book of the Torah we say, Chazak, chazak, v’nitchazeik, which means “Be strong, be strong, and we will strengthen one another.” When you finish reading Tag You’re It  you will become stronger. If you give this book to people you love, they will become stronger. Through reading and doing, we make each other stronger and thereby heal ourselves and the world. Amen.

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