The Household Guide To Dying

Call me perverse, or maybe masochistic, but back in mid-March I signed up for a Mother Talk book tour, for a book called The Household Guide to Dying. Given that my mother was in the process of dying, and did so before I finished the book, it was a ... (read more)

The School of Essential Ingredients

I like books.  I like food.  So when Mother Talk put out a call for reviewers for a book called The School of Essential Ingredients, and described it as being about a cooking class, I had to sign up, because, well, it's a fiction book about food...
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Nana Star

A package! Is it for me?

We open the big box that was left on the front porch and find Nana Star, her Moonman, and the first two Nana Star books. I extract the dolls from their packaging, and hand them over to my four year old.

I love her! I love her braided hair! I love the Moonman but he's sort of for Tiny. I want to give him to Tiny.

The doll, Nana Star, is sweet - a soft doll with hidden wires for structure. Her hair is braided, and tied with a bow, and she wears a blue dress and blue ballet slippers.

She has a heart on her hand and she has a tree sun - she's going to shoot something. She's shooting a poison flower! Look, I put the star in her hair.

Nana Star comes with a branch and baby star, both attached to her arms by elastic bands, so they're removable, and easily repurposed to hair ornaments. Or poison-flower-shooting weapons, as the case may be. [After a couple of weeks, the branch split open at the seam - I think it may have been chewed on by my co-reviewer.]

Her name is Nana Star? I want it to be Princess Lucy. Can we take her clothes off? Look, she doesn't have underwear!

Sure enough, her dress comes off, revealing a feature-less figure with no belly button. Her white gloves (white gloves!) also come off - they have long since disappeared. We read the first book, Nana Star. The book is about a girl who finds a lost baby star. She realizes that she needs to help him find his way back to the sky, and becomes his Nana Star. The branch turns out to be a plot device - an olive branch to help lift up the star.

I want to read the next one!

The second book is Nana Star and the Moonman. It continues the travels of Nana Star and the baby star, and introduces the Moonman, who watches over her even when she can't see him.

I like his pajamas. I turned him off!

When you push the right button on the Moonman doll, his head lights up and he plays a little music. It isn't like one of those baby sleep aids that plays lullabies or heart sounds for 20 or 30 minutes - it only plays a little folk rock fragment. [I did have a little trouble figuring out how to turn it on - it helped when I actually looked at the packaging which said "press center star for lights and music".]

The moon's watching over her by his singing. She has to fall asleep on him.

All in all, it's a pretty charming package. The doll is sweet and perfect for my four year old. An unexpected benefit is that she's the same size as the Groovy Girls - so their clothes fit Nana Star. Miss M. was pretty adamant that the Moonman was a "baby toy" which she wanted to give to her three year old cousin Tiny. But that didn't stop her from playing with it, and turning it on over and over and over, until its batteries ran down. The books are a little sappy, but gently impart reasonable lessons. The illustrations are lovely, and have a slightly vintage feel about them. Each book comes with a two-track CD: the story narrated, and a related song. While the CD is nice enough, it seems extraneous - if the child can't read the book, shouldn't an adult be reading it to the child?

I want to bring the Moonman and the girl to my school.

The kid liked it. What more could you want?

[I reviewed this for Mother Talk; the books and the dolls were provided by the publisher.]

More Than it Hurts You

Words, Darlene thought, are amazing little implements. Because of words something can be awful and untrue, while still being factual.

Darin Strauss's new book "More Than It Hurts You" is a fascinating construction - it pits family against bureaucracy, white against black, news media against ordinary people, rich against poor. Set in a semi-fictional Long Island, the novel centers around an "alleged" case of Munchausen by proxy. A black female doctor suspects a white stay-at-home mother of harming her child, though how and to what end is in question.

We, the omniscient reader, know the "cold, iron-gray secret" - but the doctor doesn't, the lawyers and child protective services people don't, the husband/father doesn't, the press doesn't.

The book moves inexorably from the ominous opening line "Fifteen minutes before happiness left him" which introduces Josh - the husband/father and a successful attractive frat boy salesman. Josh's wife Dori has rushed their 8 month old son to the emergency room, where he's admitted to the pediatric ICU by Dr. Darlene Stokes. In short order, we meet Dr. Stokes, and learn her complicated backstory (brought up by a single mother, now a single mother herself), meet the father she never knew (who's just been released from jail), and continue down the carefully plotted path of denouement.

Leo...would commute...until the morning he died.
This changed Dr. Stokes's life forever.
Josh considered May 27th the most truly horrific day he'd known.

CPS takes the child, the press gets involved, accusations of reverse racism are leveled at the black doctor trying to break up a white family. And finally, you're left to ponder what's going to happen next? Not left hanging, ready for a sequel, but wondering what will happen to Josh, to Dori, to baby Zach? What will happen to Darlene? Will any of them find peace within? It's a compelling and provocative read.

I did find some sloppy edits (something happened on the 3rd visit, the 4th visit, the 3rd visit; and Darlene's mother had sex once in 1966 but Darlene was born in 1968) and I found the Long Island setting disconcerting. Not because it didn't seem like Long Island, but because there was a curious mix of real places (Glenwood Landing, Searingtown Road, Roslyn, Old Country Road) and fictitious ones ("Washington Harbor" for Port Washington?, "Sand's End" for Sands Point?). And, at one point, Darlene takes the train to go on a date in another Long Island town. That would simply never happen - the LIRR doesn't work that way, and anyone with a car would drive. But those quibbles about LI are idiosyncratic - I grew up there. Most readers wouldn't notice the little discrepancies.

Five stars. Well-written, irresistible and so stimulating that I'm going to keep the review copy that I got from Mother Talk because I think it might be a good book club read.

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Strauss is about to kick off a book tour, and will be blogging about it for Newsweek.

Stay At Home Survival Guide

When Mother Talk offered up an opportunity to review Melissa Stanton's Stay-at-Home Survival Guide (Field-Tested Strategies for Staying Smart, Sane, and Connected When You're Raising Kids at Home), I jumped because secretly? I kind of want to be a stay-at-home mother. Next fall, my daughter will be heading off to kindergarten, and even though it's "full-day" kindergarten, there aren't enough hours for me to be able to get into the city and back to continue working as I do. So, either I need to take that sabbatical I've been dreaming of, find a part time job near home, or sign up her for the school-based childcare at the beginning and end of the day.

Stanton was, once upon a time, a magazine editor in NYC and is now a stay-at-home mother. The persona that comes through in the book is a defensive one - it feels as though she's writing the book to validate something, to prove that she's still got those Type A chops, even though she's no longer a high powered magazine executive.

Interestingly, the book doesn't really seem like a guide to staying home with kids, but a general guide to raising kids. More often than not, all you have to do is take "stay-at-home" out of one of Stanton's sentences and the sentence rings true for all parents. Like here: "By the time a stay-at-home mom, like me or you, has spent the day caring for kids and keeping a house together gets into bed, she's pooped." Take "stay-at-home" out of that sentence, and add in "earning a living" and you've described me to a T, along with every mother I know.

Woven throughout the book are anecdotes Stanton garnered from a survey of about 60 mothers. It's a very warm touch, and the book ends with three pages of "Final Words of Wisdom from the Experts". But again, most of those words of wisdom are equally applicable to stay-at-home parents and all other parents.

There's plenty of material that I found just plain irritating, starting with her frequent use of the word "gal". At one point, she sticks in a side bar of "great (little) escapes" that is so unimaginative as to be comically depressing: "watch Oprah", "email friends or family", "shop for yourself, by yourself". Really - do you need someone to write out a list like that and put it in a book? I don't think so.

Stanton does have some useful information, especially regarding issues about money (like what happens to your future Social Security earnings if you stop paying into the system for a while). My overall takeaway about her parenting style and parenting advice is that she's saying take pride in what you do and it's okay to not always love being a mom. That's good advice - but not advice that's uniquely needed by stay-at-home parents, it applies to all of us.

In short, if I do take some time off from working full-time, I don't think I'll need this book. It just doesn't have enough to offer beyond common-sense tips that seem self-evident. Then again, I'm not much for self-help books, so maybe I'm simply not the right demographic for the book regardless of my employment status.

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If you think it might be a useful book for you, I'm giving away my copy. Leave a comment with your email address, by the end of the day on Monday 6/16, and I'll make a random pick on Tuesday.

Naptime Is The New Happy Hour

There are umpteen parenting books out there. Lots of them are general, trying to cover all the bases. Some of them are specific, focusing on breastfeeding or sleeping. Most of them are earnest and serious.

But there are a handful of parenting books that offer advice couched in humor. A couple of years ago, Stefanie Wilder-Taylor took on infancy with Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay. I never read it (and actually, I'd rather have a nice muscadet than a chardonnay, but I digress) so when Mother Talk offered up a chance to read her toddler years sequel, Naptime Is the New Happy Hour, I raised my hand.

I found it both entertaining and infuriating. Wilder-Taylor makes one too many cracks about her avoidance of the kitchen, and her hope that her child doesn't come to expect a home-cooked meal. Her list of warning signs that your kid is watching too much TV includes "she watches more TV than you do" - which bugged me because honestly, my kid does watch more TV than me, but that's only because I watch none. On the other hand, she nails toddler bathtime ("they act like having their hair washed is against the Geneva Convention"), toddler energy ("the attention span of a house fly, and they're much more destructive") and toddler eating habits ("it's normal for them to go an entire day eating nothing but a peanut M&M they found on the floor of the car"). And she has a wonderful quiz to use to vet potential play-date moms, which start with:

I show up at your door with a bottle of Pinot Grigio. Your response:
a) What kind of a mother are you?
b) Oh, I would never drink this early, but I'll store it for you in my Sub-Zero fridge.
c) Pop that sucker open, bitch.

Naptime Is The New Happy Hour is not the book to turn to for practical advice when the kid is screaming in the middle of the night. Rather, it's imbued with a laissez-faire slacker mom mentality. The message is basically loosen up, have a drink, your kid will be fine. And frankly, that's pretty good advice.

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Edited: The random number generator chose FreshHell!

The Liar's Diary

I feel a little like I'm in sixth grade, with a book report due. In some fit of madness, I signed up to do a book review for Mother Talk. What do I do? It seemed so easy when I was raising my hand – I read books, I write about stuff, hey, write about a book! Yeah, right.

To start with, the book is a murder mystery, so writing about it is tricky; I don't want to give away the plot. And, I find that I read viscerally rather than critically. Is it any good? I don’t really know. Did I like it? Yes and no.

The assignment was The Liar’s Diary by Patry Francis. Francis writes a blog called Simply Wait, and this is her first novel.

In short, it’s a thriller of suburban sturm und drang – families and individuals appear perfect but are hiding substantial secrets, all against a background of school hallways, pretty houses and trips to the grocery store. Nothing is as it seems.

The book is written in the first person, a necessary device but one that often feels stilted. Too many sentences begin with “I”, “Since I”, “Realizing I”, “I don’t know”. The narrator is Jeanne, a suburban doctor's wife and mother, with a job as the school secretary in the local high school, where her son goes to school. A new music teacher arrives at the school, and turns everyone’s life topsy-turvy. Ali, the music teacher, keeps a diary that eventually goes missing. Is Ali a liar? Is she prevaricating in her diary? Or is the “liar’s diary” of the title a reference to the book itself? After all, a diary is a first person narrative, and Jeanne may not be the most reliable storyteller - she's psychologically stilted and unable to recognize the darkness in her marriage.

The book is absolutely a page turner; I read about 2/3 one night and finished it the next. And it’s cunning – the plot twists and turns, with little foreshadowing of the next revelation. The denouement was a surprise. In retrospect, maybe it shouldn’t have been, but I let myself be carried along in a stage of suspended disbelief, because sometimes escapist fiction is just the ticket. At the same time, though, that final revelation is completely preposterous and quite implausible. Does that matter? It depends on what’s important to you in reading fiction. Harry Potter is completely preposterous too.

Am I happy to have read it? Yes.

Is it going on the list of favorite books of all time? No.

Are you intrigued a little bit? In need of some diversion for a trip to the beach? If you are, leave a comment and I’ll do a random drawing on March 1st – the winner gets my copy of The Liar’s Diary.

Edited to add: Susie J won the book!