How to Party with an Infant
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4.0 • 21 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Descendants—a hilarious and charming story about a quirky single mom in San Francisco who tiptoes through the minefields of the “Mommy Wars” and manages to find friendship and love.
When Mele Bart told her boyfriend Bobby she was pregnant with his child, he stunned her with an announcement of his own: he was engaged to someone else.
Fast forward two years, Mele’s daughter is a toddler, and Bobby and his fiancée want Ellie to be the flower girl at their wedding. Mele, who also has agreed to attend the nuptials, knows she can’t continue obsessing about Bobby and his cheese making, Napa-residing, fiancée. She needs something to do. So she answers a questionnaire provided by the San Francisco Mommy Club in elaborate and shocking detail and decides to enter their cookbook writing contest. Even though she joined the group out of desperation, Mele has found her people: Annie, Barrett, Georgia, and Henry (a stay-at-home dad). As the wedding date approaches, Mele uses her friends’ stories to inspire recipes and find comfort, both.
How to Party with an Infant is a hilarious and poignant novel from Kaui Hart Hemmings, who has an uncanny ability to make disastrous romances and tragic circumstances not only relatable and funny, but unforgettable.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her funny and sensitive fourth novel, Hemmings (The Descendants) explores the intersection of personhood and parenthood. Mele Bart is a single mother in San Francisco navigating the world of potty-training specialists, elite preschools, playdate etiquette, and nanny envy. To top it all off, she is contemplating attending the wedding of the father of her child, the man who left her when she told him she was pregnant. After multiple failed attempts at seeming like another perfect privileged mother, Mele finds refuge among the other misfit parents in her daughter's playgroup Annie, Barrett, Georgia, and Henry. With their encouragement, she decides to revisit her dream of becoming an author and enters a cookbook-writing contest sponsored by the San Francisco Mother's Club. Interspersing recipes inspired by her own life with recipes inspired by the other parents in her group, all of whom are dealing with feelings of inadequacy, Mele devises a cookbook that is equal parts introspection and sharp observation. Mele's candor, her friends' stories, and some hilariously cringe-worthy interjections from the Mother's Club online message board come together in a layered narrative that is both ruthless and empathetic, satirical and sincere.
