Amanda Bright @ Home
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
An important, shrewd, and laugh-out-loud funny debut novel that answers the question: What happens when Bridget Jones or the Sex and the City girls get married and have babies?
Maybe you know Amanda. Maybe you are Amanda. Whoever you are, you will love Amanda. Nothing ever prepared Amanda for this: not her elite college degree, not her brainy friends, not her mother the feminist heroine. At age 35, she finds herself at home with two children, mopping spills and singing The Itsy-Bitsy Spider. It doesn't help that her husband's face is all over national television or that her best friend is dating a billionaire or that every woman she knows seems to have a plastic surgeon and an interior decorator. While everyone else is racing up the fast track, it's getting hard for Amanda to remember why she left work in the first place. Set amidst the glamour and power of boom-time Washington, D.C., Amanda Bright is a novel about status and ambition marriage and jealousy and a woman's struggle to discover the things that matter most. Amanda Bright@Home will become an anthem for a generation of women that is learning that success is not always found at the office.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Working moms on two continents found a kindred spirit in Kate Reddy, frantic heroine of the megaselling I Don't Know How She Does It; stay-at-home moms may become similarly attached to Amanda Bright, the bedraggled, deeply ambivalent heroine of this witty debut by journalist and TV pundit Crittenden (What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us). As she slogs through her day with five-year-old Ben (dangerously on the verge of flunking preschool) and three-year-old Sophie, Amanda, a former NEA publicist, soon stops deluding herself that she is "not a homemaker," just temporarily at home to care for her children. As husband Bob petulantly points out, it's not much of a home cramped, chaotic, cluttered with doll body parts "as if it had been attacked by suicide bomber Ken." Play dates and cocktail parties at swank Beltway McMansions painfully remind Amanda of the folly of subsisting on Bob's government paycheck. Bob isn't even home much, thrilled to be leading the Justice Department's investigation of software giant Megabyte. Envious of Bob, alienated from her rich female friends, estranged from her disapproving feminist mother, Amanda turns to the one sympathetic soul in her life Alan, a stay-at-home dad. Originally published as weekly installments in the Wall Street Journal, this breezily polemical tale is lively and sometimes poignant. Crittenden writes knowingly about Washington politics, but is just as astute describing the politics of play dates and private schools. At times she overplays the satire, surrounding her likable "domestic curator" with a supporting cast of self-promoting narcissists and cutthroat workaholics, none of them worthy of the heroine's ambivalence or her precious free time. Still, this is a fun read, perfect for poolside.
