Review: Bob Books

I am a reader. I have always been a reader. My mother took me to the library every week when I was a child. I wanted to live there. Marco is also a reader. He refuses to pay more than $12 to get his hair cut, but he won't blink an eye at buying a $30 hardcover novel every week. And, he actually reads them.

All three of our children ask to be read to several times a day, not just before bed. They see us reading our own books all the time. And for several hours each day Annabella will listen to audio books on her CD player. She recognizes letters and can write many of them. She sees her 7-year-old cousin read and when she recites books that she's memorized, she imitates the slow and steady tone he uses to sound out the words.

But if I ever try to encourage her to read on her own, she acts as if I've just tried to poke her with a corkscrew. 

I decided that maybe I was just doing it wrong. So, I was interested when MotherTalk offered to send me the Bob Books for beginning readers by Bobby Lynn Maslen & John R. Maslen. Annabella was very excited when the books arrived. The set came with over a dozen small, paper back books with brightly colored covers. And even though the books are a lot simpler than the books I normally read to her, she listened with the same quiet attention as she listens to the plot-heavy Henry Huggins.

The Bob Books start slowly, with only a few sounds at a time. The sounds that each book uses are listed at the beginning of the book. Annabella had about five minutes of patience with me asking her to sound out the letters and then she said plainly, "Mom, I want you to read it." When I tried to point to the words as I read them, she pushed my hand away. "I can't see the pictures!" I tried to encourage her a little more until she shouted with all the exasperation a four and half year old can muster, "I DON'T WANT YOU TO TEACH ME TO READ!"

I've consulted my expert sister and she assures me that her son (now an avid reader) had the same angst over reading, until one day when he didn't. Her friends report similar experiences. And yet, it's still hard to know where encouragement becomes pressure. If you take the training wheels off too early, your child can take some mean falls off their bike that they might just not recover from. Leave them on too long and they become a lot harder to take off at all.

So, I've put away the BOB Books for a while. If I'm going to do the reading, then it's going to be our steady rotation of Beverly Cleary and Dr. Seuss. I'll try the Bob Books again in a few months.

Here's a look inside Book 1 of Set 1 of the Bob Books.

Review: On Borrowed Wings

One of the things I like about being part of MotherTalk is that I'm asked to read books that I might never have discovered otherwise. On Borrowed Wings, by Chandra Prasad, is one of these books.

On Borrowed Wings is the fictional story of Adele Pietra, a girl from the granite quarries of Stony Creek, "a granite town at a time when granite was going out of fashion." Adele attends Yale University in the 1930's, before the school admitted women. She goes disguised as her brother with her hair cut short and her breasts bound.

This book is far more than a Just One of the Guys period piece. Prasad tackles issues of family loyalty, race, and class, as well as gender. The fact that Adele is passing as a boy is hardly the point. If you left home for college and went to a school where you don't know anyone, you probably had similar experiences. We try on a lot of disguises in those years in an attempt to figure out who we really are.

The book made me think about how I took my own college education for granted. I wasn't surprised when I learned that the college I went to didn't admit women until 1969. When I was there in the early nineties, there were still more men than women by a large margin, even when the opposite was true at most American universities. Because it was a school that specialized in math and science, the culture was not particularly friendly to women undergraduates. I didn't mind this and I think it went a long way in preparing me to work in the field of technology, which is also still dominated by men.

Still, a male-dominated culture is far different than a male-only culture. I have always appreciated that my parents were able to pay for me to go to college and I try never to miss an opportunity to thank them for it (Thanks, Mom & Dad!). But I haven't spent much time thanking the people who made it possible for me, as a woman, to attend the university at all.

I'm really glad that I had a chance to read this book. Not least of all because it's refreshing to read something that has nothing to do with parenting young children or technology. It's a simple story, but very well-researched and literary. There are a few moments in the book that require a suspension of disbelief. For example, why would a racist eugenics professor trust a student with an Italian last name?  But mostly I was along for the ride and enjoyed most every page.  

Review: Flirting in Cars

I know, I know, don't judge a book by it's cover, right? But when you see a headless women wearing pedal pushers and high-heeled shoes on the cover of a novel, you can pretty much guess what it's going to be like inside. This was the case with the latest MotherTalk book tour selection, Flirting in Cars, by Alisa Kwitney.

First, I must come clean and admit that I don't read chick lit or mommy lit. I totally understand escapism, but mine usually takes the form of Gilmore Girls re-runs or mommy blogs. But, when the latest list of MotherTalk books came up for review, I decided to expand my horizons. Most of the books I've read lately have been chosen by my book club. We have a strange way of voting on books and for some reason our selections have been pretty depressing. We've read novels about prisoners of war, leprosy, down syndrome, the apocalypse, and female circumcision. Sometimes it's not so much that we're a book club, but a self-flagellation circle, with wine.

To take a break from such dark and serious fare I chose to read Flirting in Cars. It's the story of a Zoe, a forty-one year old journalist and mother who moves from Manhattan to the country so her daughter can go to a school that will do a better job of catering to her learning disability. The book is told in the alternating points of view of Zoe and Mack, a thirty-something army vet who was born and raised in the small town where Zoe moves. Zoe can't drive. Mack is a driving instructor. You get the picture.

There are lots of obstacles in their relationship -- Zoe's love of organic goat cheese versus Mack's love of pepperoni pizza, the fact that Zoe's daughter Maya still sleeps in her bed, their different religions, and a ten year age difference. What makes this more than just a simple "opposites attract" story is the way Kwitney writes about the interesting conflict that comes from the fact that Mack works for Zoe and when they start a relationship he starts to feel like a kept man.

The characters and scenery of the town where Zoe moves are colorful and quirky and in their best moments they remind me of one of my favorite novels, Empire Falls by Richard Russo. Throughout the book, Kwitney also creates some really interesting scenes with funny dialog. The story gets going right away with a pretty hilarious interaction between Zoe and a pushy, young Manhattan mom who's interested in buying Zoe's apartment. However, despite the author's attempt at endearing Zoe to readers by comparing her to a far worse version of the self-absorbed metropolitan mommy, I still found Zoe sort of elitist and annoying. I appreciate that she's independent and that living in a small town makes her change, but I never connected to her in a way that I think I need to to enjoy the novel, escapist or not. I found Mack slightly more interesting, but I really never connected to him either and often wondered why he put up with Zoe.

I'd like to say that Flirting in Cars made me appreciate chick lit and want to read more, but it didn't. Right now my book club is reading Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami. And despite the fact that I've read and re-read the first three chapters and still have very little idea of what's going on, I feel like I'm getting something more out of it than I would from lighter lit.

Review: The Other Mother

I've been thinking about the so-called mommy wars (the rift between stay-at-home moms and working moms) since as far back as this post in 2004. The biggest change I've seen since then is how many other people are thinking about it.

There's no shortage of non-fiction books that feed the fires of the mommy wars, namely Caitlin Flanagan's To Hell With All That, Linda Hirschman's Get to Work, and Leslie Bennetts' The Feminine Mistake. And although I haven't read any of these books, I'm glad they exist, because I appreciate the dialogue that they've encouraged.

I also disagree with writers who argue that there are no mommy wars. As someone who works from home, I don't feel like I'm in a battle against mothers who take care of their children full time or mothers who work outside of the home full time. Instead, I experience a constant battle within myself about whether I've made the right choice. Ultimately, I feel like I've struck the best balance I can, but I imagine that I'm not the only person whose tumultuous feelings result in criticizing other people who've made other choices.

As I mentioned, I've read a lot about books about the mommy wars, but I've never actually read any of the books. The topic interests me, but I just don't read that much non-fiction. That's why I agreed to take part in MotherTalk's virtual book tour for Gwendolyn Gross', The Other Mother, a literary novel about the mommy wars.

The Other Mother is the fictionalized story of two neighbors: Thea, a stay-at-home mom, and Amanda, a full-time working mom. The narrative shifts back and forth between Thea and Amanda's points of view and Gross captures the emotions of these two women beautifully, especially the drastic differences in how they perceive the same encounters. Mothering exhausts Thea, but to Amanda she appears unflappable.

Thea and Amanda justify their own choices based on the choices that the other has made. "I never imagined working when they were so young," Thea says to Amanda. To which Amanda retorts,"I never imagined not working."

The characters in The Other Mother are much more developed and feel much more real to me than the working mother or stay-at-home mother stereotypes I often see in novels and films. I found it interesting that Gross chose to portray the the stay-at-home mom at her most vulnerable point (when all of her kids are almost in school) and the working mom at hers (when she has a newborn at home).

My only complaint about the book is that I wish the plot could have been a little more compelling, especially toward the end.

If you want to read more about the mommy wars, but you're not interested in spending your precious free time reading non-fiction, pick up a copy of The Other Mother, by Gwendolyn Gross.

The publisher of The Other Mother sent me two extra uncorrected proofs of the book to give away here. If you're interested in reading the book for yourself, post a comment below about your own experience with the mommy wars and I will choose two commenters at random tomorrow and contact you so I can send each of you a copy of the book.

UPDATE: I randomly picked Amy and ComputerGuyinGrandBlanc to receive the extra copies of the book. Thanks to everyone who left comments.