Customer Reviews

Mom the Wolf Man and Me

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This is one of my all-time favorite children's books. I own a hardcopy and a paperback, and have read it several times over the years.

It's the story of a mother and daughter living alone together. The mother finds a hairy boyfriend that the daughter nicknames "The Wolfman." The story progresses as The Wolfman becomes more and more a part of their lives, until he finally moves in. This book is one of the earliest children's books to deal with a single mother and a live-in boyfriend. But the story is handled gracefully, and the child is fully accepting of the situation. If anything, the awkwardness of the adults makes the child want to make them more comfortable with the situation.

I highly recommend for either children, or for adult light (very light) reading.

I just could not enjoy this book. The story is extremely dull, there is no depth to either the plot or characters, and nothing much happens. The text is so repetitive I found myself wanting to skip ahead in a book containing only 156 pages.

"Mom The Wolf Man and Me" is the story of 11 year old Brett Levin and her single mother. Brett's mom never married and never wanted to which suits Brett just fine. Suddenly, Theo (or Wolf Man as Brett calls him) comes into their lives and everything changes. The story unfolds in a very formulaic way and at the same time manages to go nowhere. You feel nothing for any of these two dimensional characters and there just isn't any conflict. The only parts of the book I enjoyed were Brett's interactions with her grandfather. While their relationship was sweet, it did not make up for the story overall.

Brett is probably the most apathetic, bland, and uninteresting character I have ever had the misfortune of reading about. Nothing seems to bother her much. Norma Klein takes the typical child-resents-new-man-in-mother's-life story makes the child as dull and agreeable as possible. After the entire book carefully builds up Brett's opposition to marriage and her aversion to change, she is upset about her mother's marriage and having to move for all of a page and a half, I kid you not (I counted). Of the marriage Brett says, "The day before the wedding Mom suddenly began acting funny. By now I'd gotten used to the idea of the whole thing. I mean, if you can't do anything about it, it's silly to make a big fuss." Gee whiz, I would have thought she'd be more upset, especially considering the chapters spent discussing how much she hated moving across the same town, much less out of state.

Decades ago makeup-less women in pants, intentional pill overdoses, women marching in Washington, men baking, and babies born out of wedlock MIGHT have made this an interesting read. It's just that once the "shock" of these things is gone, there isn't much left to the story.