Catastrophic Happiness

April 11, 2016
Parents might be hoping for a guide to making childhood less messy, but Newman (Waiting for Birdy) will assuredly convince them that chaos is actually the funniest thing that could possibly happen. When the author's two-year-old throws a tantrum because she can't remove her own fingers, anticipate feeling a combination of horror and nostalgia. Newman comes across as a cool and smart momâmost of the timeâand her kids, Ben and Birdy, as adorable. Though the metaphor is both beautiful and cloying, she neatly captures the exact kind of anxiety that many parents possess: "First kids are so often sweltering inside a kind of worried parental greenhouse where they get clipped into odd, neurotic topiary children." The main criticism that can be lodged against this book falls into the same bag as a parental judgment: it's undoubtedly valid but not very useful. Readers almost certainly didn't need another parenting memoir, but this one is laugh-out-loud funny. Newman brings tears and laughter and truth to the inexplicableâlike the demanding aimlessness of her children's storiesâpairing some very effective anecdotes with the boredom, pride, disgust, and joy of child-rearing. Agent: Jennifer Gates, Zachary Schuster Harmsworth.

A mother's angst-filled yet romanticized experience of her children's growth. Near the beginning of her latest book, Real Simple "Modern Manners" columnist and parenting blogger Newman (Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family, 2005) notes how there are "things you thought would be fun with kids but secretly aren't"--e.g., "making biscuits, watching the Peter Sellers Pink Panther movies, ice-skating"--and "how they all end up in tears and pooping." Unfortunately, the author frequently overwhelms readers with cooing worship of her young children, and her focus on and adoration of them seem to exist in a bubble in which the nuclear family rarely comes into contact with outsiders. (She has no inclination for mentioning her husband, who barely registers in the narrative.) Newman is clearly besotted with her daughter, but readers may become frustrated with such observations as, "her dark-lashed peach of a face the dearest thing I've ever had the good sense to notice." The author's voice is deliberate and soft, and the very short chapters catalog her insecurities and show that she makes little time for herself. Most scenes are interior, centered on meals and the children's precocious conversations. Yet Newman is self-aware, and she admits she is filled with "dotty, nearly heartbroken devotion and, also, something like despair." But there is no relatable or humorous counterweight to her "apocalyptic, death-and-mayhem catalog of possibilities that arrive[s] daily in the in-box of [her] brain." Even as her children move into their preteen years, she continues to romantically pine for their early-childhood wonder. "I drive everybody crazy with my nostalgia and happiness," she writes. "I am bittersweet personified." An overly sentimental book. Child-free readers--and levelheaded parents in need of a break--should take a pass. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.