Why Have Kids? A New Mom Explores the Truth About Parenting and Happiness by Jessica Valenti

(New Harvest, $23)

Becoming a mother isn’t supposed to make a woman feel ambivalent, said Jenna Goudreau in Forbes.com. Yet that’s what happened to Jessica Valenti. After becoming pregnant, the founder of the feminist blog Feministing.com eagerly awaited the moment when motherhood would “complete” her. Instead, complications during delivery endangered her health, and postpartum blues blurred into a persistentfeeling that she was failing to be the mother she was supposed to be. In Why Have Kids? Valenti “exposes a growing disconnect between the fantasy and reality of modern motherhood.” We’re told that parenting is life’s most important role, yet many parents encounter more criticism than meaningful social support. For mothers, joy too often turns to guilt.

“When it comes to unpacking what it means to be a female in America right now,” Valenti is “one of the smartest minds out there,” said Jesse Ellison in TheDailyBeast.com. But the author of The Purity Myth and He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut doesn’t deliver here on the promise of her title. In the book’s first half, she provides the argument against having children—including the survey evidence indicating that parenthood makes people less happy, not more. But “she never convincingly argues the opposite point,” except to offer this baffling conclusion: “The truth about parenting is that the reality of our lives needs to be enough.”

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“Occasionally, Valenti offers a glimpse of what the book could have been,” said Lauren Sandler in The Boston Globe.Scattered throughout are “spot-on proclamations about motherphilia and its discontents.” And yet the author consistently fails to develop them. Early on, she claims that her book will make readers angry. But if she really cared about reforming maternity leave or child-care benefits, she would have recognized that the only way to move social policy is with “a drumbeat of carefully constructed arguments.” This book will make readers angry, “not because of what it says, but because of what it doesn’t.”