Room to Grow [Paperback]

Christina Baker Kline (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 5, 2000

Candid, reflective, and intimate essays that capture the essence of parenting. Harnessing the writing skill of a score of top contemporary writers, Christina Baker Kline has crafted an outstanding collection that touches the core of modern parenthood. The writers share their experiences as parents of children between the ages of two and ten-the period when our children are young and wholly dependent, before they have established separate identities. Each of these entertaining and evocative essays focuses on one central issue about raising young children:
the complexities of being a stay-at-home dad
the urge to avoid making the same mistakes our parents did
birth order and sibling rivalry
giving our children a sense of racial identity.

Room to Grow is a kaleidoscope of the early years of childhood, revealing new patterns and yielding insights at each turn. A remarkable exploration of the parenting experience, Room to Grow eloquently discloses those priceless moments of joy and heartache, closeness and separation, wonder and exasperation, amazement and exhaustion that parents encounter every day with their young children.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In Room to Grow, editor Christina Baker Kline has collected the essays of 22 writers reflecting on life as parents and exploring the "whys" rather than the "how-tos" of parenting. As in her acclaimed first collection, Child of Mine, Baker Kline demonstrates her ability to draw from each of her contributors the deep essence and meaning of their experience. As a result, this book, while more diverse and less focused than Child of Mine (which concentrated on the first year of parenthood), still resounds with insight, humor, and thought-provoking excellence. The diversity of these personal essays--the trouble and trauma of naming a child, the nightly reading ritual, the experience of adoption, the decision to have only one child--is highly appropriate for the subject matter, which includes the experience of parenting children as a whole, from toddlerhood to pre-adolescence, and the voices of both fathers and mothers.

From Lindsay Fleming's heartbreak at a daughter's public soiling of herself, to Hillary Seldan Illick's hysterical essay about her difficult preschool daughter ("I thought about printing up a bumper sticker: WHAT YOU CANNOT STAND ABOUT YOUR CHILD, YOU REALLY CANNOT STAND ABOUT YOURSELF"), to Rob Spillman's learning nursery rhymes for the first time, this collection has both breadth and breath, and resounds with both love and meaning. --Ericka Lutz --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Novelist Kline, coauthor of a book on mothers and daughters and editor of a collection of essays on becoming a mother, asked writersAmale and female, black and white, famous and less soAto write about their experiences as parents. The result is a strong collection of heartfelt essays dealing with the joys, frustrations, insecurities, and discoveries of parenthood. We hear from a stay-at-home father, an adoptive mother, a father who wonders what to do with a daughter, and a mother who wonders the same things about sons. We watch a little boy throw his arms around his mother and a teenager reject affection or communication. Tony Eprile writes lyrically about reading to his son, and Kevin Canty finds a new way to spend quality time with childrenAthe carpool. Noelle Oxenhandler discovers that "although in their immense need of attention they devour our time, they also lavish on us...the infinity of the unhurried present moment." Brief biographies of the writers are included. Recommended for public and academic libraries.ANancy Patterson Shires, East Carolina Univ., Greenville, NC
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Golden Guides from St. Martin's Press (May 5, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312263848
• ISBN-13: 978-0312263843
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,896,433 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Christina Baker Kline is a novelist, nonfiction writer and editor. In addition to Bird in Hand, her novels include The Way Life Should Be, Desire Lines and Sweet Water. She is Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University.

Kline was born in Cambridge, England, and raised there as well as in the American South and Maine. She is a graduate of Yale, Cambridge, and the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow in Fiction Writing. In addition to Fordham, she has taught fiction and nonfiction writing, poetry, English literature, literary theory, and women's studies at Yale, New York University,and Drew University. She is a recent recipient of a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Fellowship, a Writer-in-Residence Fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and a Fordham Research Grant. She donates her time and editing skills to a number of arts organizations in New Jersey and Maine.

Kline is coeditor, with Anne Burt, of a collection of personal essays called About Face: Women Write About What They See When They Look in the Mirror. She also commissioned and edited two widely praised collections of original essays on the first year of parenthood and raising young children, Child of Mine and Room to Grow. She is co-author, with her mother, Christina Looper Baker, of a book on feminist mothers and daughters, The Conversation Begins. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Yale Review, Southern Living, Ms., Parents, and Family Life, among other places.

Kline has worked as a caterer, cook, and personal chef on the Maine coast, Martha's Vineyard, and in Charlottesville, Virginia. She lives in an old house in Montclair, New Jersey, with her husband, David Kline; three boys, Hayden, Will, and Eli; and Lucy, an English springer spaniel. She spends summers with extended family in an even older house on Mount Desert Island in Maine.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars insightful collection of essays on parenting young children, October 31, 2001

By 

audrey (white mtns) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Room to Grow (Paperback)

I had really enjoyed the same editor's volume of essays on parenting in the first year, called 'Child of Mine', and so I was anxious to read this book, which contains essays by various authors on their experiences in raising children a little older (generally between two and ten years of age).

At first I was slightly disappointed because a number of the essays didn't seem to be of immediate interest to me personally, and because this collection did not seem to have the same coherence as the first. But after I began to read, I found myself making little notes of agreement in the margins, underlining sympathetic or insightful passages, and smiling at the experiences similar to my own. Even when an essay was not immediately relevant to me (such as the selections on adoption and raising twins), I found instances of shared experience with the writers, who seemed to be as awestruck and profoundly affected as me by their adventures in parenting.

Oddly enough, in reviewing the book, I found I most enjoyed the selections by the male contributors -- delighted at similarities of common experience and enlightened by the differences -- often told with great humor. So this book also helped me to appreciate the unique experience of fatherhood.

Very enjoyable.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Necessary Collection, November 22, 2001

By 

Anne Burt (New Jersey USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Room to Grow: Parents Disclose the Awe, Unanticipated Joys, and Paradoxes of Raising Young Children (Hardcover)

As my daughter grew from a baby to a toddler, I found myself as confused about parenting books as I was about her clothing size. No books seemed to fit my needs: I no longer wanted the "new parent hand holding" books, but I didn't feel ready to approach this new stage without the comfort I've always derived from reading thoughtful -- and thought-provoking -- essays about personal experiences similar to my own. When a friend told me about "Room To Grow" I was relieved; when I started to read the essays, I was ecstatic. This book was exactly what I was looking for: smart, moving pieces about the kind of parenting issues the parenting books ignore. I am certain I'll come back to this book again and again as my daughter grows older. Every parent should know about this collection.

3.0 out of 5 stars excellent stories - but not as good as 'Child of Mine', August 22, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Room to Grow (Paperback)

I read 'Child of Mine' during my pregnancy many times and since then many many times over. I expected to find the same joy in reading this new collection of parenting stories, but although most are well written, sometimes poignant, definitely moving - I did not find that as a whole the book worked well. I think the editor was perhaps a liitle confused as to the true focus of the book, and as a result the stories veer off to strange directions, not really connected and not giving a satisfying feeling at the end of the reading. Still I have to say that I am glad I read it as each tale gives a new perspective omn the daunting joy that is parenthhood, and I do recommend it as an addition to Child of Mine.