Reviewed by Heather Laird

Ok ladies. I’ll admit it. I am a huge fan of TLC’s John and Kate Plus 8. The idea of navigating a word with twins, let alone sextuplets, hold great mystery and intrigue for me. Diapers. Feedings. Cleaning the toilet. Laundry. I am barely able to manage my tiny brood of two girls who are four years apart in age. How do these courageous families adapt? Do they sleep? Do they shower? Do they ever have a moment to grab a latte and read a book? Ugh. And so, with great anticipation I read Cheryl Lage’s new book, Twinspiration.

Cheryl draws on her own experience with her set of twins to provide a very real worldview of raising twins. Bonus, she also gives great advice on everything from breastfeeding to involving Daddy in the routine. Cheryl found that when she looked to the Barnes and Noble family/children rack that there were virtually no books on twins that really gave the nitty-gritty.

This book is concise and well written. The chapters are setup in the same way that your college textbook outlined the complete history of Europe. Information is easy to find. It is like have the super encyclopedia of twins at your fingertips but with more humor and pizazz. Finances. Swing sets. Pediatricians. Air travel. Persona Hygiene (yours, not the babies). All covered. And what a relief, you will find that Cheryl is abhorrent to the “mommy police”. All the information is present with compassion and understand. She’s been there, done that, and has made the same mistakes that all leave us wondering, “What was I thinking?”.

This is a must have gift for a parents who have just found out that they are having multiples. And really, don’t you thing that the ultrasound technician should give this book to families who have just “seen” their twins for the first time? Sounds like a good idea to me.

Grace. Often used, rarely understood, ‘grace’ is the intimate stepping stone in Donna VanLiere’s new book about journeying through sadness and joy to a place of peace. “Finding Grace, a Memoir” is indeed a message of losing in order to find; a prodigal daughter story with modern characters.

VanLiere, who penned the famous Christmas Hope series of books that began with a slightly cheesy but heartening song about Christmas Shoes, is a beautifully descriptive writer. Her opening paragraphs provide vivid images of her childhood home and its supporting cast of characters, who, we discover, lead her to the place of lost childhood innocence and eventual grace.

God factors highly in VanLiere’s memoir; the Big Guy is, after all, the supreme giver of grace and offers it to us whether we deserve it or not. As with most people who struggle with the concept of something for nothing, this is unsettling for VanLiere. We feel her struggle to confront guilt in the backlash of sexual abuse by a neighbor boy when she was five and watch as forgiveness and grace torment her (though she knows not why) well into adulthood, and openly mock her desire to become a wife and mother.

A witty and gifted writer, VanLiere matures into a young adult with sharpness, zeroing in on other people’s un-grace. Finding it easier to point out where other people’s shortcomings in the grace department lie rather recognizing her own, VanLiere quickly discovers that grace and Christianity are not necessarily a package deal. In an astounding observation of a boyfriend’s parents, uber-conservative Christians, she states they were “so supersized in their spirituality they had no need for grace. They had forgotten that it was the lop-sided souls….who followed Christ while he was on earth.” Ouch.

Central to “Finding Grace” is VanLiere’s struggle to have children. Through honest storytelling and vivid descriptions of fertility treatments, we are witness to her walk down the ambiguous road of injections, sickness, and ultimate disappointment as she and her husband fail to conceive. Initially rejecting adoption, our author refuses to give in to the quiet, grace-filled whispers floating through her head, choosing instead to kick and scream her way through a daily regime of hormones. But, as grace often does when infiltrating our souls, VanLiere allows the whisper to become a voice, and the voice leads her to peace about her body, her emotions, and her spirituality as she begins to complete adoption forms.

Grace the child (and subsequent sister and brother) joins their family in a beautiful progression of chapters in which I became enamored with VanLiere and her lifelong quest to be herself, not just somebody she thought she should be. It’s about time, I thought, too late realizing that I, like VanLiere, might just be searching for my own level of understanding of grace.

The best part of “Finding Grace” is not what VanLiere actually says. While a distinctly Christian-based book offering the Almighty as grace-giver, the point is that grace is not something we should be fighting to seek as if on a quest. It is simple, quiet, and always there. We just have to wade through the crap to see it.

“Didn’t you get the memo, God? The one I sent when I was five? Yeah, I got that memo, but I thought I’d give you something better than you think you deserve.”

That, Van Liere says, is the language of grace.

Read the book, mamas. You might know more about grace than you think.

Erin Kirkland is a freelance writer and blogger from Anchorage, Alaska.

The Ten Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer is imperative reading for any woman who has ever, with a heart so full it hurts, gazed lovingly at her sleeping child only to then glance at herself in the mirror and see a woman she no longer recognizes. It’s a story of four women. Four mothers. They are intelligent and educated and all held powerful positions before leaving the workforce to have children. Yet, even despite the comfortable privilege of their middle/high income New Yorker lives, each in her own way is suspended between who she is and who she always thought she would be.

For those wanting a light-hearted read, this is not it. Wolitzer is a brilliant - and complex - writer. The stories of these women and those with whom they live are not simple snapshots. They are portraits with the deep angles and dark shading of reality and the consequences of choices we all make as mothers, daughters, and wives. The consequences: they brim with both gratitude and regret.

There are several themes that run throughout the novel, but perhaps the most encompassing is feminism. The women – one a daughter of a prominent feminist, one a bohemian artist, one a statistician, and another who was voted the most promising in her college graduating class – have lived their lives expecting great things of themselves. Wolitzer flashes back throughout the book to stories of the girls’ mothers. Although I felt these flashbacks interrupted the flow of the contemporary issues, they did provide a historical context and framework for the ways the girls were shaped, purposely and unwittingly, by their mothers’ struggle for equality.

Perhaps most refreshing about this novel is the complete absence of judgment in the stay-at-home v. working mom debate. Instead, Wolitzer seamlessly addresses a larger dilemma: even in this day and age, women (particularly mothers) are not in fact provided equal opportunities or equal expectations. Society’s mindset may have changed, but the system in which it operates has not. That neither the author, nor the characters, has a simplistic answer authenticates the story, because as we know, there just isn’t one.

This book is exceptionally good. As I was reading, I felt a keen sense of recognition. It is one of those reads that encourages the use of post-it notes and highlighters. It is rich with short passages that illuminate the heart’s struggle to live up to our own expectations, to balance the fullness of being as we are with the hope of being more, and to maintain that hope especially in the times of flux and transition that besiege us when we least expect it. No, it isn’t a light novel, but it is lush and savory, and upon finishing it, you will feel as if you have found a friend in Meg Wolitzer.

Review by Mary Bordner Tanck

Soft Landing is a really great read! Hermanson takes a serious subject manner and shows an unusual knack for wit while still being sensitive to the subject matter.

After Maxine rescues a child she believes is being molested, she faces fears that she may have made a mistake. The next few days take her on a journey where she must examine the mistakes of her past and the future she is uncertain about. A trip to her old hometown opens Maxine’s eyes to what she must do.

While Soft Landing is mostly Maxine’s story, Hermanson gives us an intimate look into the other people who are in Maxine’s life - her fiance’, the little girl she saved, the parents of the child she saved, and her own sister.

Even though she faces charges of felony assault and kidnapping, the incident gives Maxine the chance to examine her life and right her wrongs - both past and future.

Hermanson’s characters are very human and very believable. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a nice down-home story.

Review by Melanie Cox McCluskey

With the tagline “The No-Nonsense Guide to a Smaller You and a Healthier Planet,” author Kami Gray’s self-help spin combines nutritional guidance with an eco-friendly push. I’ve never read a diet book before, but Gray’s approach intrigued me. A TV costume and set designer from Portland, Ore., Gray motivates readers to stick to “The List:” her 16 eating and drinking habits that everyone should incorporate into their lifestyle to make staying lean and healthy a no-brainer. Because much of The Denim Diet is about eliminating many no-no foods from your life, Gray tries to make the restrictions more fun with her witty asides and hilarious anecdotes.

Much of Gray’s manifesto comes from personal experience. She gains the reader’s empathy and trust by describing her embarrassing overweight years in college, then goes on to explain her eating epiphanies. Observing her skinnier friends’ health habits combined with a life-changing drive across fast food-littered Texas inspired Gray to write The Denim Diet. But she backs up her unscientific observations with medical research, recent studies, and health and nutrition news. She doesn’t pretend to be a dietician, and offers both sides of controversial health topics, such as the pros and cons of dairy. As someone who loves to cook for my family, I appreciated Gray’s common-sense information but found some of her tips very restrictive, like the ban on white flour. I adore the selection of recipes in the back. And the bullet points at the end of each chapter worked like a charm for motivation. They are as helpful a takeaway as any magazine tear-out card.

Gray also makes a strong argument for improving eating habits as a way to save the planet. Consuming more fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds and whole grains forces our bodies to burn more calories while reducing the impact of wasteful packaging and processing on the environment. Her perspective on creating a lifestyle that nurtures the human body and the planet makes perfect sense.

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Reviewed by Kristin Benson

China Ghosts, a memoir written by journalist and father, Jeff Gammage, is about … well, China. (It is also about ghosts, primarily the kind that haunt one’s psyche.) In reading China Ghosts, we learn a little about Chinese history, culture and politics, and lot about his daughters, Jin Yu and Zhao Gu. While Gammage’s narrative takes us to China and back – twice — his story is really about the process of adopting girls from China. Except that it is not.

Thinking that I would be reading about another parent’s journey into parenthood – what I’d expected to be a much different journey from my own – I instead found a touching account of something so few parents are able to articulate: how we fall in love with our children. In surprising bursts of intimate and heartfelt language, Gammage is able to communicate both his love for his daughters and the deep and engulfing sense of responsibility that he has to them. He writes that many parents reduce their experiences to clichés (but that clichés are clichés because they are true). Fortunately, he is able to avoid this fate by artfully articulating both the gravity and levity of parenthood. While there is much about the relationship between Gammage and his daughters that is unique – for example, my father did not spend enormous amounts of time, energy, and resources in an attempt to track down the smallest clue about my first days of life – the strength of the book comes from how he translates these specifics into commonalities. Its strength lies in its resonance.

There is a scene toward the end of the film Children of Men in which the faint cries of a newborn are able to arrest the movement and hearts of a swarm of armed soldiers. While contextually and artistically worlds apart, this scene communicates a sentiment echoed in China Ghosts: our children hold the power to transform us, to make us better people, and, for this, we owe them the world.

ENTER TO WIN! Leave a comment to this post (and be sure to include a valid e-mail address!) and you’ll automatically be entered to win this month’s giveaway including two fabulous Mama Lit books! Congrats to Barbara G. of Damascus, OR for winning the February Book Giveaway!

As soon as your children are able to crawl, you child-proof your home. You child-proof your car. You child-proof your yard. But child-proofing a marriage?

Like the latches, gates and locks designed to keep tots out of harm’s way, every marriage needs its own rituals and techniques to keep offspring from sabotaging intimacy and romance.

What Happy Parents Do: The Loving Little Rituals of a Child-Proof Marriage offers bite-sized anecdotes from married couples who’ve preserved the passion and intimacy of marriage despite the strains of raising children.

Authors Carol J. Bruess, Ph.D. & Anna D.H. Kudak, M.A., have obviously done their homework. Happily married themselves, the college professors drew on interviews with hundreds of parents and more than 15 years of research.

Everyone knows that the demands of parenting are enough to dampen marital bliss in the child-centric family culture of 21st-century America. What not enough couples know is how to keep the original “two-pack” intact.

But rather than coming off as a laundry list of chores to add to an already booked life, Bruess and Hudak take 50 real-life examples and then explain why they work.

Nothing in the book offers a last-ditch solution to save a dying marriage. Instead, readers may notice rituals throughout the book similar to special things they do in their everyday lives. “What Happy Parents Do” keeps married couples from taking those special routines for granted and encourages husband and wife to nurture what led them to fall in love in the first place.

For me, this quick, bedside-table book made me take a closer look at the rituals my husband and I had established in our still somewhat-new marriage. Some of the book’s examples seemed goofy at first read. Then I realized that the corny, private stuff sometimes too embarrassing to share is what keeps couples connected – and children out – through the course of a healthy, happy marriage.

Reviewed by Erin Kirkland

I’m ready to stop reading the newspaper altogether. Headlines scream fearful preludes to violence, treachery, and dishonesty that make it difficult to believe sensible people inhabit this big blue marble. Global events have terrified and disgusted us, and shaped how we perceive the leadership of our local, state, and national governments. Enter author Gina Bennett and “National Security Mom“.

Bennett, a 20-year veteran of the U.S. Intelligence community with special emphasis on counterterrorism, describes for us in a nutshell our greatest threat to national security policies; us.  Fear, suspicion, and the rapid unraveling of “security”, both as policy and concept, spurred Bennett to look closer at mothering and governing.  “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”, “Life is not a fairy tale”, “Choose your friends wisely”. Ponder to the mantras that we as mothers have repeated to our children over and over, apply it to America‘s current governing bodies, and you might see things a bit differently.

Since the U.S. is still floating in the wake of events surrounding September 11th, 2001, Gina Bennett’s candor and blunt realism for what she sees as absolutes for our nation’s success seems too simple at first. But as the book unfolds, page after page of real-life-parenting and real-world intelligence assignments gently lead us towards Bennnett’s theory that “going soft” will make American strong.

Most striking is Bennett’s comparison of national security and the family unit. Indeed, a family’s security “flows from the ability to retain the love and respect family members show each other…” Is this not the basis for the golden rule that children the world over are taught even before their ABC’s? Should not U.S. leaders, as global citizens and parents, be practicing what they have preached as they navigate policy in a world that now appears ready to seize our very souls?

Bennett also addresses the very real sense of fear prevalent since 9-11. Fear is, as anyone who has traveled by air since that day knows, everywhere. It is in our laptops, our shoes, and our cell phones. It resonates through children struggling to understand the departure of a parent to a far off desert. It consumes if we allow it.

The distance between fear and freedom is short. Bennett states, and quite correctly, that terrorists like Osama bin Laden cannot win unless we hand over our freedom; and to do that, we would have to give in to fear. But we are human, too, and Bennett, like all of us, is “tired of being afraid.”

America has the chance to be the ultimate in example-setting by showing respect for its citizens without compromising democratic ideals.  Knowing better than any of us that terrorism must not lead us down the rutted path of security obsession out of fear, Bennett concludes that our influence, if respectful, thoughtful, and candid, can extend to Asia, Africa, South America, and beyond. We are what we are exhibiting to the world. And this, she warns, must be clarified before we can go one step further in raising the bar as parents part of the collective, greater good.

Hey, mamas! I recently had a conversation with an old friend who lamented that her friends never really really really told her how difficult the transition from one child to two would be for her family. So often in life, we search and yearn for the a little extra guidance to help us deal with the challenges that face us. None of those challenges are unique, so why aren’t more people sharing ways to conquer them?

Well, stay-at-home mommas now have an excellent new book to help guide and educate them on their path. “The Stay-At-Home Survival Guide” by Melissa Stanton is here to help. No surprises here. The day of stay-at-home mom is not glamorized (thank god), politicized, or judged. I’d recommend this book to Moms new to the stay-at-home routine, as well as to those mommies who have been at it for years. There’s something in here for everyone.

Stanton is a former magazine editor and it shows in her book. This book reads like the best of a woman’s magazine article. The information is dense and well written. There is expert advice and a few self scoring tests. And best for busy mommies; it is a quick and enjoyable read.

Stanton covers all the basics; the inability to actually do housework with small children underfoot, a change in self-image when transitioning out of the work force and how to renew the zing (aka sex) in your marriage. Plus, she has some really heavy hitters. She spends a good amount of time reviewing finances and getting down to the nitty gritty with Social Security. (Ladies, there are some very important Suzy Orman moments in this book.) Depression and coping techniques are also covered.

So, here’s the only caveat about this book. This book mostly discusses almost entirely only the experiences of college educated career women who become stay-at-home moms in their 30’s and 40’s. That’s me, so I felt INCREDIBLE validation and connectedness to this book. If this describes you, then this book is a more than perfect fit!

Loved it. Loved it. Loved it.

ENTER TO WIN! Leave a comment to this post (and be sure to include a valid e-mail address!) and you’ll automatically be entered to win this month’s Book-of-the-Month giveaway including two fabulous Mama Lit books!