Friday, October 16, 2015

Never Judge a Book By Its Cover

So, I was in the library grabbing books to read, in a bit of a rush. Picked up the holds I had waiting, collected a few more of the Y: The Last Man series, and was looking for something to round out the stack of volumes I was about to borrow. I saw this book on display in the "New Books" section.


No time to read the back cover -- it looks like a food book. And addressing organic food --maybe ths is something like what Michael Pollan writes, I thought to myself. Or book in the same vein as "Can You Trust a Tomato in January," by Vince Staten.  Needless to say, I was expecting a bunch of foodie wisdom and rants.

What I got was the joys and travails in the life of a stay-at home mom. Quite the dramatic content shift!  Or to quote Obi-wan..


Although this wasn't what I would probably have picked up for myself, it actually turned out to be not that bad a book. It reminded me a lot of Jenny Lawson's Blogess series, but kid-focused. The author, Stefanie Wilder-Taylor, doesn't pull punches and she uses humour to take issue with the state of parenting today. In a world where the mere act of sending a lunch to school with a child is promoted by Martha Stewart and her ilk as an opportunity to get creative with ingredients and presentation, producing little bento boxes of cuteness, she doesn't hold back from telling the world:


She also takes the world of "everyone's child is a special snowflake and/or genius" to task, and gives parents of the world the sad fact that no, their child most likely isn't a genius/ the next Picasso/ insert superlative here. And really, how could they be? The whole idea of everyone being exceptional leads to no one being so. The book covers a wide variety of other topics as well, from finding a new BFF that can relate to your status as a new mom to how not to get sucked into the black hole of being an unappreciated volunteer at the local PTA (in other words, avoiding Mean Girls part II), to reviews of children's books that are a bit problematic when you think about what they are actually saying. (I liked that she agreed with me on The Giving Tree by Sheldon Silverstein being abused by the little boy.)

Overall, I gave this book a 3.5 out of 5. Some of the humour fell a little flat for me, and some of the content was stuff I had heard quite a bit before. But overall, it was good. I would probably recommend this book to my friends with little ones.

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