Take a photo of a barcode or cover
dontjudgeabrooke 's review for:
The Push
by Ashley Audrain
When I was a toddler, I thought that women automatically became pregnant by some divine intervention when they got married (I was therefore baffled by the existence of single mothers). I was also terrified of dying in childbirth, so by the transitive property, I didn't want to get married. My three-year-old self went around telling people this.
Then I started to act as a mother to my dolls (including a Baby Born; anyone else remember those?) and eventually learned more about the reproductive system. As a teenager, I nonchalantly recited what I heard other girls around me saying: "I want to have kids someday. I want to be a mom." But I never felt the passion that I could see in those other girls when they said it.
Like any other preteen, I did my fair share of babysitting, and I worked as a nanny after college. I loved it. I loved getting to know and cuddle and read to and play and laugh with those kids. I still wonder about the kinds of people they'll turn out to be. But at the end of the day, I also loved getting to return to my childfree home.
Now I've reached the part of my life where I'm trying my best to make a fully-informed, well-researched decision whether or not to have children. I come from a small, rural, overwhelmingly Catholic hometown where motherhood is treated as an inevitability rather than a choice and the size of your family is indicative of the size of your faith. Most of the girls from my high school class have at least one child already; some have three or four. My family views me as less valuable and less interesting because, unlike my cousins, I don't have children and I'm clearly in no rush to get there. I have friends who've miscarried who desperately want children, friends who've fostered and adopted children, friends who've had pregnancy scares.
Basically, like most women, I have a lengthly and complicated relationship with the idea of pregnancy and mothering, and I love reading complex, nuanced takes on these topics. That's why I appreciate books like this one.
I haven't yet made my decision, and I can't say this book really helped sway me in one direction or another, but I can say it made for an interesting read at this stage of my life. Blythe's two children seem to respectively embody my pros and cons for/against having kids of my own.
Beyond that, this is a well-written, engaging story and an impressive debut. I didn't find it to be the suspenseful novel it purports to be, because I personally found no reason not to trust Blythe. To me there was no evidence of her being an unreliable narrator, so I'm a little confused about why other reviewers have labeled her that way. It's not particularly original (I've seen lots of comparisons to We Need to Talk About Kevin) and it seemed to lose the plot a bit toward the end, but I'll definitely look out for Audrain's next work.
Then I started to act as a mother to my dolls (including a Baby Born; anyone else remember those?) and eventually learned more about the reproductive system. As a teenager, I nonchalantly recited what I heard other girls around me saying: "I want to have kids someday. I want to be a mom." But I never felt the passion that I could see in those other girls when they said it.
Like any other preteen, I did my fair share of babysitting, and I worked as a nanny after college. I loved it. I loved getting to know and cuddle and read to and play and laugh with those kids. I still wonder about the kinds of people they'll turn out to be. But at the end of the day, I also loved getting to return to my childfree home.
Now I've reached the part of my life where I'm trying my best to make a fully-informed, well-researched decision whether or not to have children. I come from a small, rural, overwhelmingly Catholic hometown where motherhood is treated as an inevitability rather than a choice and the size of your family is indicative of the size of your faith. Most of the girls from my high school class have at least one child already; some have three or four. My family views me as less valuable and less interesting because, unlike my cousins, I don't have children and I'm clearly in no rush to get there. I have friends who've miscarried who desperately want children, friends who've fostered and adopted children, friends who've had pregnancy scares.
Basically, like most women, I have a lengthly and complicated relationship with the idea of pregnancy and mothering, and I love reading complex, nuanced takes on these topics. That's why I appreciate books like this one.
I haven't yet made my decision, and I can't say this book really helped sway me in one direction or another, but I can say it made for an interesting read at this stage of my life. Blythe's two children seem to respectively embody my pros and cons for/against having kids of my own.
Beyond that, this is a well-written, engaging story and an impressive debut. I didn't find it to be the suspenseful novel it purports to be, because I personally found no reason not to trust Blythe. To me there was no evidence of her being an unreliable narrator, so I'm a little confused about why other reviewers have labeled her that way. It's not particularly original (I've seen lots of comparisons to We Need to Talk About Kevin) and it seemed to lose the plot a bit toward the end, but I'll definitely look out for Audrain's next work.