August 6-10

With her third novel, Gwendolen Gross brings the Mommy Wars into the fictional realm. In The Other Mother, Amanda is a successful book editor at a prominent publishing house in New York City. Thea is a stay-at-home mother of three who has never really left the community in which she grew up. Amanda, eight months’ pregnant with her first child, moves with her husband to suburban teaneck, New Jersey, next door to Thea and her family. Soon the two women find themselves both drawn to and repelled by each other and their opposing choices in the constant struggle to balance career and family life.

When a damaging storm forces Amanda and her family to take refuge in Thea’s home, the underlying tensions simmering between them are forced to the surface — and even more so when Thea fills in as Amanda’s temporary nanny. Gross paints the conflict between career woman Amanda and stay-at-home mom Thea in an even-handed manner, lending more nuance to the Mommy Wars than the issue often receives. In the end, the book not only chronicles the tensions between these two very different mothers, but reveals each woman’s own internal battle over her place in the home.

August 6: The Opinionated Parent kicks off our tour with applause. She writes “While I think the mommy wars are ridiculous and closed minded, they really do happen in some circles. I loved the way this book kept them as an undercurrent throughout the story without ever actually mentioning them.” And Anjali at Life in the Hundred-Acre Wood says “To peg this book as a fictionalized version of The Mommy Wars would be a great oversimplification – because The Other Mother is better characterized as a novel about two next-door neighbors, who need each other more than they let on, yet can’t or won’t take the time to try to understand the complexities of their relationship.”

August 7: This Mom liked the book but didn’t love it. “Maybe it was the similarity of the women’s voices but perhaps that was intentional? A way to reveal the holes in the notion of the ‘mommy wars,’ a way to underscore that we all struggled with conflicting desires, that we have more in common than the current hype would support.” And Three Kid Circus says “Gross illustrates her character’s world with poetic, descriptive passages that add richness and build tension masterfully. I couldn’t put The Other Mother down, and was left with a vague sense of disquiet upon closing the book.”

August 8: ReadingWritingLiving says “[The Other Mother] is compulsively readable (I think I snarfed it down in about two hours), and with enough twists and turns to keep it interesting … I think it would be fascinating book-club fodder in a mothers’ book group. I wonder if it would prove to be a bonding experience, or if people would start tossing wine at each other.” And A Vocational Duality says “The Other Mother works to make us think about ourselves, our relationships, and most of all, our assumptions — and what we can do to maintain more pragmatic expectations, instead of making a fantasy our goal.”

August 9: Bethany at Mommy Writer Blog resonated strongly with this book. She writes “The Other Mother dives into the heart of BOTH sides of the mommy consciousness. The conscience of working, or not. Of giving in to parenthood, and to struggling to resist it. And to just being happy with whomever we are as mothers.” And Jumping Monkeys says “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.”

August 10: Left-Handed Trees says: “The Other Mother is a highly engaging book–a perfect read for a late-summer evening, sitting by the pool, glass of iced-tea in hand.” And What Was I Reviewing? says “Intense would be the one word description for this book. I’m sure it’s going to be marketed as a book about the mommy wars between work outside the home and stay at home moms, but this is so much more than that. In fact, that’s almost a side feature of this book, which looks deeply inside the choices that women make once they become mothers.”

This entry was posted on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 10:34 am and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.