Description:
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
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