This review is part of a MotherTalk blog tour, and I received this book from the publisher to review.
When you are a new mother, you tend to believe you have found the One True Way of parenting. If you have an easy baby, you say that it is because of your parenting. If you have a difficult baby, you either look for other parenting styles or decide “(s)he would be even more difficult if we didn’t do it this way”. In an ideal universe, your next child is the complete opposite of your first, and you learn about hubris first hand. And not for the last time, either! In time, through friendships with other mothers and with children that follow your first baby, you learn about different baby types, how they respond to different parenting styles; children who are outliers on every curve; the exceptions to every rule; and that what you do as parents of babies is rarely important when they are 8.

What Mothers Do: Especially When it Looks Like Nothing, by Naomi Stadlen can be the stand-in for those years of experiences. This is a mothering book that turns mothering books on their heads - this is a chorus of women telling you about mothering.
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This review is part of a MotherTalk blog tour, and I received this book from the publisher to review.

The Dark Dreamweaver (The Remin Chronicles) is a tween/teen fantasy novel by Nick Ruth,with illustrations by Sue Concannon. The book blends imagination, magic, dreams, and monarch butterflies - some of our favorite things!

The beginning of The Dark Dreamweaver is dense, with a lot of information and small print. Our listeners liked the story, but found that the chapters were too long to read all at once (they, um, fell asleep). However, they loved the story itself. The beginning is slow, too - there’s a lot of set-up information that the reader needs, before the “good part” can begin. This can be hard for younger readers/listeners, as many might put down the book, not knowing how good it can get from the beginning!
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This review is part of a MotherTalk blog tour, and I received this book from the publisher to review.

February Flowers, by Fan Wu is a beautiful novel of women, China, and has a new twist on the classic coming of age novel. Most coming of age novels I read are set in the US, Great Britain, or Australia. The book gives you a peek into the cultural differences between the US and China, and it’s fascinating.

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