Another Review at MyShelf.Com

Publisher: Time Warner Books
Release Date: April 12, 2003
ISBN: 0-446-53074-3
Awards:
Format Reviewed: Paperback
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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.

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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