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.

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.

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.

UPDATE: This book is now the August AND September Online Book Club of the Month pick! Apparently, too many vacations, summer camps, etc. keeping mamas away from this heavier read during the last month of summer. Understood :). So the kidlets are back in school, and it’s time to get reading! Especially with the election coming up! Read this book, leave a comment, and enter to win our Aug/Sept Book Club GIVEAWAY: Custom monogram notecards and a custom frame by Munchkin Designs! (See photos at the bottom of the post)