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Publisher:
Time Warner Books |
Release
Date: April 12, 2003 |
ISBN:
0-446-53074-3 |
Awards:
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Format
Reviewed: Paperback |
Buy
it at Amazon |
Read
an Excerpt |
Genre:
Fiction – General -- Contemporary |
Reviewed:
2003 |
Reviewer:
Kristin Johnson |
Reviewer
Notes: This is the only novel to be serialized in the
Wall Street Journal. The author has previously published
What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us.
Reviewer Kristin Johnson is the author of
Butterfly Wings: A Love Story, Christmas Cookies Are For
Giving. |
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Amanda
Bright@Home
By Danielle
Crittenden
What
do you do when you’ve traded a NEA job for choosing dinner
from the local organic food store---preferably something your husband
and two hyper-energetic kids haven’t eaten before? How do
you cope when the mothers in your children’s elite Washington
D.C. playgroup buy facelifts and renovations like you buy burgers
at Burger Chalet, or when your friend dates a billionaire who happens
to be a major part of your husband’s DOJ prosecution of the
rogue monopoly Megabyte, or when you’re more exhausted after
raising children than your radical feminist mother was during protest
marches? What do you do when the world screams for you to go back
to work…and you want to?
If you’re
Amanda Bright, you navigate your way through your friend’s
underhanded plots to get her married billionaire lover to leave
his wife, your attraction to stay-at-home dad Alan, your son’s
teacher’s attempts to sabotage his future because of “poor
scissoring skills” and waving forbidden peanut butter cookies
beneath other children’s noses (a hilarious send-up of how
overboard child safety has gone), your suspicions of your husband’s
affair…and when the big crises finally come, you meet them
with tenacity and resilience, discovering that, like Dorothy, you
need not look any further for happiness than your own back yard.
Anyone
who is a fan of Backlash by Susan Faludi will not welcome this fictional
foray into the post-women’s movement landscape, and will take
smug delight in the revelation that the billionaire dating Amanda’s
best friend, who has complimented Amanda on her choice to be a stay-at-home
mom, is a married man and therefore a hypocrite.
However, women who see nothing wrong
in allowing little girls to dream about princesses (except when
it interferes with putting the dishes away), who agonize over whether
their children are going to be lost in public school, and who confront
their mothers (as Amanda confronts domineering mother Ellie Bright
in a conflict that is less about feminism than it is about the dynamic
between mothers and daughters) of the right to live their own lives,
will see the book as their anthem.
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