Super Mom Saves the World [Paperback]

Melanie Lynne Hauser (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 6, 2007

Confessions of Super Mom was the perfect remedy for overwhelmed mothers everywhere. Now, the super-powered suburban avenger who was turned into a superhero by a Horrible Swiffer Accident is busily fundraising for a brand-new stadium and planning a wedding to her very own Super Man. But she better watch out. Because someone wants to toss Super Mom out of the game for good.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Birdie Lee of Astro Park, Kansas, is like every divorced mom raising two teenagers, except for her secret life as Super Mom. After an accident involving household cleaners, she was transformed into a squirt-bottle-wielding superhero with the ability to sense when children are in danger. But the good she does isn't always appreciated since her last adventure cost many residents their jobs. So when Super Mom detects something wrong with the stadium the town is building for its Little League team, people want her to stay away. Super Mom's job is never easy, especially now as she gets engaged and her ex-husband decides they should get back together, and a bucket-clad villain appears. Hauser's sequel to Confessions of Super Mom (2005) is an amusing and sharp critique of the thankless job mothers perform as they juggle home and work. Every mom will want to be Super Mom. Patty Engelmann
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

Smart, zany, and touching... (Karen Quinn, author of The Ivy Chronicles)

Never has there been a more appealingly down-to-earth heroine or a superhero with more enviable powers. (Pamela Redmond Satran, author of Suburbanistas)

Hauser's quirky characters sparkle brightly as a newly Swiffered floor, and her writing shines like freshly polished glass. (Meg Cabot, author of The Princess Diaries and Queen of Babble)

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 300 pages
• Publisher: NAL Trade (March 6, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0451220366
• ISBN-13: 978-0451220363
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,254,855 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Hailing from the Hoosier state (where I grew up in the shadow of the Indianapolis 500 racetrack), I'm a late bloomer who is just now figuring out what I want to be when I grow up. Having tried my hand at telemarketing, candy striping for a nursing home and acting under my maiden name, Melanie Miller (Most Academy Award-Worthy Performance: The title role, complete with bear costume, in the gut-wrenching exploration of good touch/bad touch entitled "What's the Matter, Little Bear?"), I put everything on hold in order to marry, have two children, and spend my time making sure they didn't stick their fingers in electrical sockets. (Both the husband, and the children.) I put in a brave couple of years with the PTA, driving my sons to soccer practices, track meets and orthodontist appointments. In short, I was in training to become Super Mom.

At an age when many women throw themselves back into their careers after raising their children, I looked around and realized I never had one in the first place. So I turned to the one thing I did know: Books. So I wrote one. It stank. I buried it out in my backyard, next to the compost heap. I wrote another book. It didn't stink quite so much; still, nobody wanted to publish it. I wrote another book. It stank the least of all, and led to my current, wonderful literary agent, but still it went unpublished. Then I wrote CONFESSIONS OF SUPER MOM. So far, nobody has said that it stinks. In fact, so many people like it that I wrote the sequel, to be published in 2007. And finally, at long last, I have a career. (And old men in nursing homes everywhere breathe a huge sigh of relief.)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Thoroughly delightful, March 6, 2007

By 

Carrie Kitzmiller "voracious reader and homes... (Colville, WA, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Super Mom Saves the World (Paperback)

Take some high heels, an amazing apron, and the power to clean with 20,000 Swiffers. Add special appearances by Ryan Seacrest, Mr. Clean, the Scrubbing Bubbles, and a villain named The Phantom of the Bullpen. Throw in a lot of humor with a pinch of sarcasm, some romance, a lot of adventure, a handsome yet nerdy fiance, a suddenly-attentive ex-husband, and three surly teenagers.

That's right, Birdie Lee (aka Super Mom) is back. Fresh from saving Astro Park from the evil snack-producing corporation, she continues to work hard to keep teenagers safe from themselves and the streets free of litter. And she's grossly under-appreciated. Aren't most moms?

Birdie is facing a new challenge - a giant Sports Dome being built in Astro Park, and an over-zealous mayor whose greatest wish is a winning Little League team. Along the way, she's planning a wedding, fending off advances from her ex, Doctor Dan, and raising two teenagers. Who said this superhero stuff was easy?

I thoroughly enjoyed Super Mom Saves the World. Melanie Hauser has a witty way with words (evidenced by her blog) and can tug at the heart-strings at the same time. Super Mom deals with the same issues all moms do: letting our children go a little more each day, carving out time for ourselves, cooking and cleaning and carpooling and... And she does it with grace and humor. I can't wait to find out what Super Mom is up to next.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Our SHE-ro has returned, March 7, 2007

By 

Rayna Gorowitz "Sparkina" (Pembroke Pines, Florida USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Super Mom Saves the World (Paperback)

Melanie Lynne has done it again, with her mix of realism, romance, adventure, comedy, and fantasy. Loved the steroids bit and the Phantom of the Bullpen and Our She-ro's engagement to the Clark-Kentesque Carl, as well as daugyhter Kelly's teenage ups and downs and her also Clark-Kentesque teen son's Martin's case of the sparks for a teenage news reporter. Bravo! Hoping for a third installment. And I had no issues with the whole Mr. Clean-Scrubbing Bubbles thing

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Crime fighting and motherhood, March 7, 2007

By 

Debra Hamel (North Haven, CT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Super Mom Saves the World (Paperback)

Super Mom, the newest member of the Justice League of America, has a lot on her plate in this second installment in Melanie Lynne Hauser's series featuring Birdie Lee, mild-mannered grocery clerk turned über-Frau. Having gained her extraordinary powers in book one after a Horrible Swiffer Accident--Birdie can clean with the power of ten thousand Swiffers--she finds her powers suddenly upgraded this time around, a mixed blessing, it turns out, as Super Smell can have its drawbacks. With great power comes great responsibility, of course, and Birdie finds a new nemesis or two stirring up trouble in Astro Park, the evil plot of the moment connected with the construction of an over-sized, domed stadium for the town's Little Leaguers. More interesting than Birdie's super-difficulties, however, are the more mundane issues she faces as an ex-wife and mother: her children are growing up--and dating and driving and shutting her out and fraternizing with undesirables--and her ex-husband Dan seems to be on the rebound after a second failed marriage. Meanwhile, Birdie's relationship with nerdy scientist Carl brings its own complications into her life.

The Super Mom books are an interesting mix. In part Hauser offers comic book fantasy, with over-the-top bad guys, in jokes for the superheroically literate (e.g., journalists Jimmy Nelson and Lois Blane), and action scenes in which Super Mom uses her cleaning powers to thwart evildoers. But on top of this cartoony infrastructure Hauser builds a more serious, quite realistic story. And this is where her writing shines, where it is downright poignant at times, when she explores the complicated relationships within families, and in particular the changing dynamics between mothers and their growing children. Humor mixed with heartache. In this outing Hauser does an excellent job, too, of exploring Birdie and her son's developing relationships with Carl's son Greg.

I do have two complaints about the book, one substantial and one...born of disgust. Taking the latter first: there are two occasions in the story in which Birdie--a sworn enemy, remember, of sticky spills and dust and germs, a woman who passes out Wet Naps while crime fighting--in which she...well, I'll let the passages speak for themselves:

"'Birdie.' His arms tightened around me. 'Do you have any idea how much I love you?' I nodded. Then blew my nose on the sleeve of his shirt" (p. 24).

"I blew my nose on the sleeve of his shirt, because I knew he wouldn't mind. And he didn't. He just laughed and wiped it off on the sleeve of my shirt" (p. 63).

He didn't mind?! In what alternate universe is blowing one's nose on the habiliments of one's paramour appropriate behavior? I'm still shuddering over this.

Secondly, I worry that Hauser has jumped the shark in introducing advertising icons such as Mr. Clean into her story as real-life entities. To me part of the strength of the Super Mom story lay in introducing a little bit of fantasy into the otherwise banal world of a more-or-less average house(ex)wife. I am able to accept (a little unwillingly, actually) the existence of the Justice League of America in Super Mom's universe, but for me, at least, positing the real-life existence of the Scrubbing Bubbles and the magical cleaning world they inhabit goes too far. I would implore Hauser to rein in this particular fantasy in her next installment.

And I would advise readers to seek out the author's blog Refrigerator Door, where she writes regularly and with great humor about her own family life and her experiences as a writer.

[Disclaimer: Since reading Melanie Lynne Hauser's first book I have come to know the author a bit, virtually, through our respective blogs, and I in fact have her to thank for my copy of this book. I hope that our acquaintance has not influenced my review.]

Debra Hamel -- author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece (Yale University Press, 2003)