Instant Mom

February 15, 2013
A humorous celebrity parenting story. Vardalos (My Big Fat Greek Wedding, etc.) had a successful career writing and acting in films, a loving husband, a close-knit family and good friends, but she was missing one thing many women find impossible to live without: a child. Years of fertility treatments left her exhausted and distressed--until she decided to investigate the "fost-adopt" system: the option to adopt a child in the U.S. foster-care program. Within hours of a match, the inexperienced author found herself the mother of a nontalking toddler. "Of course there isn't a baby shower," she writes. "It's not just that there isn't time for one, it's because I hate them. I have left one too many stuffy houses on a Sunday afternoon with a throatful of egg salad and an empty aching uterus to inflict this same abuse on others." Suddenly, Vardalos' life was turned upside down as she learned to navigate the laugh-out-loud and painful-in-the-shins moments of raising a scared 3-year-old child. The author holds nothing back as she chronicles the years leading up to the adoption, and she recounts the minute details of the first year of life as a mother, as her daughter began to learn how to love and trust her new surroundings. Vardalos provides solid information on the foster-care system and includes an appendix of questions and answers on all types of adoption. Parents will relate but may find the situation too similar to their own child-rearing adventures to consider the author's experiences unique. A heartwarming tale of adoption and unconditional love.

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March 1, 2013
With her love of family fully on display in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the movie she wrote and starred in, it's no surprise Vardalos had always wanted to be a mother. After 10 agonizing years undergoing fertility treatment, she and her husband looked into adoption, a process with its own ups and downs. Finally, with only 14 hours' notice, Vardalos was the mother of a three-year-old girl. The years enduring the well-meaning inquiries of friends, mean-spirited jibes of insensitive women, and probing of Hollywood reporters were over. Now all she had to figure out was how to mother a preschooler with a very well-developed personality and cope with her own early insecurities about the match. Vardalos offers candor, humor, and poignancy in her account of adoption and parenthood as she pokes fun at parenting memoirs but delivers on emotional impact. Readers can feel the tension between desire to share her joy and good fortune and wish to maintain her child's privacy. Vardalos, who has become a spokesperson for adoption, offers helpful information on the process as well as encouragement to prospective adoptive parents.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)