Author: Shelley Admont
Publisher: SA Children's Books
Rating: WARTY!
I typically review children's books positively because I apply somewhat different standards to them then I do to young-adult, or to mature books. Children's books are oriented rather differently and especially if I can find some educational value in them, I tend to look upon them favorably.
It pains me to have to review this one negatively, but what bothered me about it was that both children and adults alike were presented in what felt to me like a very 1950's retrospective, with the attendant and unappreciated stereotypical gender-roles. I tend to react negatively to that.
I can understand an author wanting to write a children's story praising the important role of parents and of their maintaining a really strong relationship with a child, and I was even willing to let this one get away with excluding pretty much all male content, but to do that, and then pigeon-hole both a female child and her mother in traditional roles isn't helping women in my opinion.
There's no problem with showing a woman performing traditional functions; to show them only performing those functions as though they have no other option is what's wrong. The one needs to be balanced with the non-traditional, otherwise what's a child to think but that this is the way things are and the way things ought to be? How are we ever going to remove glass ceilings if we're so focused on polishing them up to such a high sheen?
Another problem I had with this was with Liz's problems with math. It smelled far too strongly of Teen Talk Barbie which said, "Math class is tough!". Math can be hard, but not only is it important, girls are at least as good in math as boys and I thought it was wrong to present Liz as not only struggling with it, but as also being incapable of helping herself overcome her problems. I thought that this merited a far more positive spin than the one it got in this book, and prefacing the section with "Usually I love math, but today it's just terrible" didn't cut it for me.
It was good that the author put beauty last in Liz's list of her mom's qualities: "...smart and funny, nice and strong, kind and beautiful...' but why was it necessary to comment on her physical appearance at all? I know that children exaggerate and it's only natural to consider someone you love "beautiful" (in whatever way you conceive that), but this emphasis on beauty, no matter how far down the list it appeared, was still wrong for me.
A young child doesn't really possess a good concept of inner beauty, so trying to go that way would not work, and for me it's better not to even raise this. Unlike the other qualities listed, beauty isn't a requirement to be a good mom. The others all are important, or at least helpful, but beauty? No! It's better to leave it out, or at the very least, if you must include it, to ameliorate it by simply saying something like 'and beautiful to me'.
I know this was a mom and daughter book, but to leave dad out entirely (he gets one mention and made no appearance) felt like it was going a bit too far. It was almost possible to believe that this was a single-parent family - which would have been fine had it been one, but it wasn't. The presentation made it look like Liz's mom was a stay-at-home mom with nothing to do and no interests other than simply being a "housewife". I know there are people like that and that this may well be their choice, but most homes these days have both parents working (when they can find work). This story seemed like an outlier when it wasn't.
The norm is not to have the "man of the house" bringing home the bacon while his "little wife" exists like a fairy-tale maiden in captivity, with nothing on her mind but sewing, baking, and home-making, which is the impression given here. In that vein, the sewing o' the jeans, and the baking o' the cake were really the final straws for me! I have no objection to any of these activities being depicted as girl's activities - or as boy's activities - but to have all of these traditional chores represented without even a single non-traditional one in evidence was honestly too much to countenance!
It's for these reasons that I cannot recommend this book no matter how well-intentioned it may have been.
