Imagine Gossip Girl grew up, Miranda Hobbes became a stay-at-home mom, and Juno kept her baby. Mix these characters’ worlds together and you’re hanging out with Hannah Allen, the sympathetic heroine of Momzillas.

Add the slick, stylized tone of chick-lit classics like Shopaholic Ties the Knot and Baby Proof, and the resulting literary concoction is Jill Kargman’s Momzillas: It’s a Jungle out there on Park Avenue, Baby.

At-home mother Hannah, her investment-banker husband Josh, and their 2-year-old daughter Violet have relocated from San Francisco to New York City’s Upper East Side. After some prodding from her materialistic mother-in-law, Hannah loads Violet into the stroller and runs smack into the most vicious strain of mothers in America: the Momzillas of Manhattan.

Chronicling this stay-at-home mom’s move to moneyed Manhattan and her struggles to fit in with a gossipy clique of over-achieving mothers, Momzillas is an easy-to-read paperback pleasure that feels guilty but never actually induces the mommy guilt. As a less-than-perfect, all-too-human mother, Hannah is definitely no one’s martyr even though she feels an outsider’s pain.

Although the heroines and villains of Momzillas are stay-at-home moms, Kargman writes sensitively about the choices all new moms must make. She diplomatically covers the maternal controversies of breastfeeding, childcare, returning to work, and how much to spend on a little one’s toys, clothes and entertainment.

Many of Hannah’s days and nights in New York are lonely and depressing as she rides the rollercoaster of emotions that goes along with trying to find your place after uprooting your family and moving across the country. But Kargman offers a light, entertaining touch, with as much pop-culture lingo as a movie like Juno, and even includes a glossary to explain the native tongue.

New mothers across a range of geographical and socioeconomic levels will appreciate Momzillas, for the same reasons that a diverse horde of millions relate to Sex and the City’s aspirational characters.

Of course, the Momzillas bubble that Kargman has re-created does seem a bit too carefully constructed at times. Conveniently, all of the main characters are only children, and more than once I asked myself why Hannah doesn’t just pick up the phone and call her own mom in Seattle for sympathy when the going gets tough.

But overall, this glossy glimpse into malicious mommyhood is a light-hearted summer read, a pure pop confection of playground frenemies, preschool anxieties, and perfectly pressed professional nannies.

The Mommy Wars are well documented. In countless articles, news broadcasts, talk shows, and books, the choices we make to become SAHM, WOHM, WAHM, or DAWHM (I just made that one up) have been analyzed, over-analyzed, and painfully, damagingly re-run. In her latest novel, The Other Mother, author Gwendolen Gross attempts to tackle the heated issue of SAHM vs. WOHM by allowing us to see the world through the eyes of Amanda, a new working mom, and Thea, a stay-at-home mom.

Set in the ‘burbs, we meet Thea, a slim, attractive, Perfect Mother of three. She lives in the house in which she grew up, and new neighbors are moving into what was her best friend’s house next door. Amanda, a busy publishing exec pregnant with her first child, and her husband Aaron are moving to the burbs next door to Thea, fleeing the city they so love in order to build what they hope will be a more stable life for their growing family. In other words, we begin with a formulaic scenario, but by taking the reader into the minds and hearts of the two women - vessels for each side of the debate - Gross attempts to help shed new light on each type of life choice, and to bring us together as one in the same in the end.

I admire Gross for trying to take us there. Having personally been a full-time work-out-of-the-home mother, as well as a work-at-home mother, as well as a stay-at-home mother, I know that there is no way to understand the full challenges, responsibilities and triumphs that come with each if one has never been in those positions first-hand. And yet, I found myself not being able to relate to either of the main characters. In fact, I found myself not being able to find any resemblance of any real mothers I know or have known — and due to my line of work, I have known hundreds of moms in all types of life situations, so not being able to relate in any way to either of these characters kept me quite disturbed as I read this novel.

Thea, for example, was not like any stay-at-home mom (or any working mom for that matter) I know. She was always put together, she was always calm (no yelling, always disciplining in a kind, patient tone to her kids), and she was always on time, baked for her new neighbors, and calmly handled all three of her children (huh? who can do that all the time?). Amanda was written almost over-the-top, as the most manic working mom you can imagine. She bore excruciating amounts of stereotypical stress and guilt (oh the constant guilt!), whereas Thea’s only “issue” was not carving time out for herself, but the tone in the book was that Thea’s supposed martyrdom was something that mothers are supposed to strive for. I was given the impression that Thea was put on the “good mom” pedestal, whereas Amanda was the “bad mom” for having to leave her child with a nanny; the writing seemed very uneven in this respect. Being a stay-at-home mom is hard, hard work, one that makes you batty at times, impatient at times, and sometimes as manic as the fictional Amanda in this book; Thea was made into a Stepford with the undertone that being one is as easy as pie. I would have liked to have seen more balance in these two characters, because it is their unbelievable profiles that makes this a hard book to love (another is that I didn’t feel their love for their children either…that was disturbing).

The story is full in the beginning, with lots of inner dialogue and detail. Then like a movie production that realized suddenly it was millions of dollars over budget and three months behind schedule, we are given a quick descent into a thud of an ending. It’s wrapped up almost too easily, too quickly, and much too haphazardly. There is no closure, and I sense that there was an editorial indecision about where and how we should take leave of these characters. It is written in a way that makes me want to see the unedited version of the last two chapters.

There are moments of glory in The Other Mother: descriptions of childhood friendships missed (we all have those), odd neighbors, the mundane-turned-outrageous situations of life in the ‘burbs. The main characters do have their shining moments as well, but sadly not enough to keep the thread of this hem from falling apart. This is a book that, when allowed to sit in my mind longer, slowly unravels as a means of starting a conversation. In this respect, I value The Other Mother: it makes us think about the choices we make, how we treat and judge others who have made different choices, and how our own secret guilt can wreak unnecessary havoc on our lives and the lives of those around us. It’s not a great read, but it’s a good stone’s throw in the water of this societal debate. It is a quick read, and when you are done, allow yourself to let Gross’ words sit in your head for a while. Like a fine red wine, it gets better the longer it sits out there.