The Magic of Motherhood

By page two of the Introduction I already knew The Magic of Motherhood by Ashlee Gadd and writers from "Coffee + Crumbs" would be a good book. The sentence " Rather than offering advice, we're offering ourselves" drew me in. And offer of themselves, they did. Each essay was real, raw, and so heartfelt that you could imagine you were across the table with the authors, having a face to face discussion about motherhood.

   In the "picture perfect online life" it's easy to feel less than the perfect mothers with the magazine worthy home and the fairy tale children so it's a breath of fresh air to read a book of the true struggles, and real rewards, of motherhood. It's not a parenting advice book in the least but offers the best advice of all - we all just make this up as we go and pray that our best was good enough.

This book was given to me by BookLook Bloggers in exchange for my honest opinion. 
 

Woman No. 17

Woman No. 17 by Edan Lepucki is a book with two characters you love to hate. First up is Lady, who is described as a writer could barely eek out two pages worth of material, yet she hires a nanny to care for her young son while she does everything else possible to avoid working on said "book" (which never materializes). She hires S. to watch her three year old without so much as a background check or knowing anything about her, then spends the whole book seemingly uncomfortable with a young woman being around her older, mute son. The story lines didn't jive.

This book held my attention and was a quick summer read but left me wanting. Lady is a self-absorbed self-sabotaging woman who is not likeable in the least. S. is a young "artist" who seems to use people and has such a weird project going on that you never truly understand what her "art" is. The book went no where - a few month's in someone's life with no point whatsoever. It just ended. The dust jacket read "darkly comic, twisty and tense" and I can't figure out how someone read this book and came up with that. There was no humor, no suspense, no point.

This book was sent to me by Blogging for Books in exchange for my honest review.