I really *wanted* to like this book. Pregnant with my first and almost exactly the same age as the author when she was pregnant, I thought it would be an interesting and informative (and possibly even inspiring) story about becoming a first-time mom, and imagined that I'd be able to relate to the author's experience of pregnancy and motherhood.
Despite my desire to like this book, the author began to lose me as early as page 15. She writes for several pages about how hard it was to want to be pregnant and not achieve it, before eventually revealing that she "tried" for just three months. As someone who tried for much, much longer, I felt it was rather ridiculous and uninformed to expect to be instantly pregnant at age 35, if not insensitive to include in the book her overly dramatic three-month period of "anxious waiting." Still, I kept reading and hoped to reconnect to the author.
That hope was dashed when, starting on page 56, the author writes about planning a dinner party to tell their closest friends of her pregnancy. The menu, for at least 30 guests in her "small apartment" in San Francisco, included homemade tuna and salmon mousses, homemade fresh pate de campagne (which as the author writes is "at least a week-long process"), coq au vin, chocolate roulade with candied oranges, and champagne and bourbon milk punch (among other things). And this at the end of her first trimester, when many of us are so exhausted we struggle to keep up with normal household tasks. Suffice it to say that any possibility that I'd be able to relate in any way to the author vanished as quickly as, I'm sure, her coq au vin did that night.
Throughout the book I had to stop and pause several times at how completely unprepared for pregnancy and motherhood the author appeared to be, as if she'd never truly taken the time to consider the implications of having a baby and that, as Jean Kerr said, "The thing about having a baby is that thereafter you have it."
I did appreciate the final chapter, in which she writes about many of the physiological changes that happen to an infant in his or her first year. I was so emotionally disconnected from the author by this point that scientific facts and theories about development were a nice change and a small redemption for the book. In fact she does this throughout the book (the back of the book says she "marries scientific details with intimate insights"), but if you've read any other books on pregnancy (
What to Expect When You're Expecting: 4th Edition,
The Unofficial Guide to Having a Baby,
The Mother of All Pregnancy Books: The Ultimate Guide to Conception, Birth, and Everything In Between (U.S. Edition), etc), there won't be any new information for you here. As I've only recently begun to read books focusing on post-natal development and experience, that information was new to me and very interesting.
The author does write beautifully, although as another reviewer mentioned, she tends to use five-dollar words when a more pedestrian word would suit just as well. I'd consider reading a work of fiction should she ever publish one, simply because her writing is rather lyrical. However, her writing style was overshadowed in this book by the complete emotional disconnection between the author and, at the very least, this reader. I'm not a regular reviewer here, but I wish I'd seen a review like this when I first looked at the book--I would have skipped it.
