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Summary
Summary
For every woman trying to strike that impossible balance between work and home-and pretending that she has-and for every woman who has wanted to hurl the acquaintance who coos admiringly, "Honestly, I just don't know how you do it," out a window, here's a novel to make you cringe with recognition and laugh out loud. With fierce, unsentimental irony, Allison Pearson's novel brilliantly dramatizes the dilemma of working motherhood at the start of the twenty-first century. Meet Kate Reddy, hedge-fund manager and mother of two. She can juggle nine different currencies in five different time zones and get herself and two children washed and dressed and out of the house in half an hour. In Kate's life, Everything Goes Perfectly as long as Everything Goes Perfectly. She lies to her own mother about how much time she spends with her kids; practices pelvic floor squeezes in the boardroom; applies tips from Toddler Taming to soothe her irascible boss; uses her cell phone in the office bathroom to procure a hamster for her daughter's birthday ("Any working mother who says she doesn't bribe her kids can add Liar to her résumé"); and cries into the laundry hamper when she misses her children's bedtime. In a novel that is at once uproariously funny and achingly sad, Allison Pearson captures the guilty secret lives of working women-the self-recrimination, the comic deceptions, the giddy exhaustion, the despair-as no other writer has. Kate Reddy's conflict --How are we meant to pass our days? How are we to reconcile the two passions, work and motherhood, that divide our lives? --gets at the private absurdities of working motherhood as only a novel could: with humor, drama, and bracing wisdom.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This scintillating first novel has already taken its author's native England by storm, and in the tradition of Bridget Jones, to which it is likely to be compared, will almost certainly do the same here. The Bridget comparison has only limited validity, however: both books have a winning female protagonist speaking in a diary-like first person, and both have quirkily formulaic chapter endings. But Kate is notably brighter, wittier and capable of infinitely deeper shadings of feeling than the flighty Bridget, and her book cuts deeper. She is the mother of a five-year-old girl and a year-old boy, living in a trendy North London house with her lower-earning architect husband, and is a star at her work in an aggressive City of London brokerage firm. She is intoxicated by her jet-setting, high-profile job, but also is desperately aware of what it takes out of her life as a mother and wife, and scrutinizes, with high intelligence and humor, just how far women have really come in the work world. If that makes the book sound polemical, it is anything but. It is delightfully fast moving and breathlessly readable, with dozens of laugh-aloud moments and many tenderly touching ones-and, for once in a book of this kind, there are some admirable men as well as plenty of bounders. Toward the end-to which a reader is reluctant to come-it becomes a little plot-bound, and everything is rounded off a shade too neatly. But as a hilarious and sometimes poignant update on contemporary women in the workplace, it's the book to beat. Agent, Pat Kavanaugh. (Oct.) Forecast: Knopf is pulling out the stops for this, with a 100,000 first printing and a seven-city author tour; movie rights have already been sold, and word of mouth from early readers-plus ecstatic London reviews-will help stoke interest here in buyers of both sexes; it's a likely bestseller. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
An above-average addition to the crowded genre of working-mother-angst novels, a first from British journalist Pearson, the mate of New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane. Written largely as diary entries by London career woman and mother Kate Reddy, the tale begins at 1:37 one morning as Kate, disdainful of stay-at-home moms but intimidated by their homemaking skills, alters store-bought pies to pass off as homemade at her daughter's school the next day. Kate, whose high-powered job as a funds manager requires long hours and lots of travel abroad, rarely sleeps, but for all her manic activity she spends little time with the children she claims to adore. Readers may feel less than sympathetic with her complaints about husband Richard, a mild-mannered architect actively involved with the children, or about her nanny who doesn't always follow Kate's strict rules, mostly set in absentia, concerning the kids' nutrition. Kate's major crises are about finding cabs to the airport and keeping up with the men in her firm. Though she's filled with guilt and self-pity about lack of involvement with her children, she seems to spend most of her free time writing cutesy e-mails to her friends, who are also career women, and splurging on shoes. Then her life begins to spin out of control. She almost has an affair with a client; her boss's wife, a truly good woman, dies of cancer; Richard gets fed up and moves out; she smokes dope with her cab driver, who turns out to be a philosophy student. She finds her priorities shifting. The clever cattiness of the early chapters gives way to an earnest, endearing introspection that makes it possible for Kate to strike a more satisfying, if almost too-perfect-to-believe, balance between family and work. From the upper echelons of working mothers, a fictional answer to The Nanny Diaries-and likely to be as popular. First printing of 100,000; author tour
Booklist Review
This terrific novel is alternately hilarious and sad, and the driven, irreverent Kate Reddy is the perfect companion for this headlong voyage into the world of a high-powered hedge fund manager and mother of two. When we first meet Kate, jet-lagged from trips to three cities in four days, she is "distressing" mince pies for her daughter's school concert so they can pass as homemade under the scrutiny of the cadre of judgmental stay-at-home mothers she dubs "The Muffia." Pearson, an award-winning journalist, columnist for The Evening Standard, and mother, knows whereof she writes. Kate's voice rings with authenticity and dark humor, whether she is providing ironic commentary on the e-mails in her overflowing inbox or performing her daily "kit inspection" at the door of her office ("Shoes, matching, two of? Check. No breakfast cereal on jacket? Check"). Comparisons with other entries in the burgeoning "inside the mind of a thirtysomething woman" genre are inevitable, but this is no Kate Reddy's Diary. Pearson has crafted a compelling manifesto on the plight of working mothers that manages to be both angry and funny. Success in Britain, Miramax film rights, and wide publicity will spark demand for this wonderful novel. --Meredith Parets
Library Journal Review
Named both Critic of the Year and Interviewer of the Year at the British Press Awards, Pearson is also the mother of two. So she should know how protagonist Kate Reddy balances her job as hedge fund manager with being a mom. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.