Like everyone in New York media, editor Liz Buckley runs on cupcakes, caffeine and cocktails. But at thirty-one, she's plateaued at glossy baby magazine Paddy Cakes.
Liz has spent years working a gazillion hours a week picking up the slack for colleagues with children, and she's tired of it. So one day when her stress-related nausea is mistaken for morning sickness by her bosses—boom! Liz is promoted to the mummy track. She decides to run with it and plans to use her paid time off to figure out her life: work, love and otherwise. It'll be her ‘meternity’ leave.
By day, Liz rocks a foam-rubber belly under fab maternity outfits. By night, she dumps the bump for karaoke and boozy dinners out. But how long can she keep up her charade…and hide it from the guy who might just be The One?
As her ‘due date’ approaches, Liz is exhausted—and exhilarated—by the ruse, the guilt and the feelings brought on by a totally fictional belly-tenant…about happiness, success, family and the nature of love.
Review: there as a whole lot of controversy surrounding this books but I knew even before people started shouting about it that I would want to read it. I love any book set in New York tend really enjoy reading about the publishing industry as well and so this book had it all for me, including a protagonist that was just like me and in a similar position to be, being one of the only women of her age in her workplace who doesn't have children. I'm in the lucky position of being able to take some time off just now and funnily enough it coincides with my best friend maternity leave so I'm saying it's like my own version of that, was this book actually written for me?
I really liked the idea behind the storyline and could totally see where it had come from. I really like the idea that this author challenged the I balance between people who have children and people who don't, in the work place and particularly the expectations we have of working mothers, whet here those expectations are too high or too low. I think this was an interesting way to explore the subject matter and at times, it felt as if it was handled in a little to much of a frivolous manner, but I think you do have to remember that this is a novel and not a journalistic piece of writing.
Now I know that the character of Liz has been criticised a lot, but I tried to go into this with a really open mind when it came to Liz, and if we take Way the fake-pregnancy aspect of her story, she's really just a single woman in New York trying to have it all and we get to read about her going out and dating and having a good time just like many other novels. I really did like her and really coul identify with her. At times I felt that she as a little narrow-minded and a little naive, she didn't think everything through fully but that's called living life and learning as you go along, we all make mistakes and it was great to see how she picked herself up from those mistakes.
Of course I loved that this book was set in New York, it is definitely one of my favourite settings for a novel and so I really liked reading about the workplace and the places she went for dates as well as Liz's apartment and what she did with her friends. It was really interesting reading about other people's perceptions of her and what we got to see about the others perceptions of working mothers and mothers in general. Liz's relationship with her own mother made me cringe a little but overall, I think that you can gather that i did enjoy reading this book. It felt like it could have been developed by about another 50 or so pages to avoid any massive time jumps but I would recommend it and I applaud this author for tackling a very contraversial subject matter in an entertaining way!
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