That Kind of Mother

Author: Rumaan Alam

One-sentence summary: A white mother adops the baby of her black nanny that dies during childbirth and grapples with adoption, race, and marriage while raising her children.

B.A.D. Girls Book Rating: 7

Our favorite thing about it: We enjoyed the story.

Our least favorite thing about it: We felt it might have skimmed some huge issues instead of going deeper.

Main Topics of Discussion: Motherhood, Babies, Power-dynamics, Race, Adoption, Marriage

Our favorite quote: “Rebecca didn’t know what was the better luck: to have a bad parent you’re ever trying to outperform or a good one to whom you can never hope to catch up.”

Notes: We mostly liked this book, but it didn’t measure up in some areas. The overall story was engaging and raised several questions about certain plot points. It was interesting to think about, but we thought that there were some really BIG questions raised that were kind of skimmed over. Other thoughts:

1. We thought it was interesting how Rebecca felt her life paralleled Diana’s

2. We identified with the author’s portrayal of early motherhood. It was written in great (almost too much) detail and was fairly accurate. However, as mothers, we already knew all of that – it seemed to be too much detail and superfluous because we have lived it! We felt those parts could have been scaled back and the same idea could have been gotten across.

3. We found it interesting that a male author would take on writing a female character – and a mother. He did a fairly good job, however, there were spots where we noticed he was a male writing a woman’s perspective.

4. We didn’t love Rebecca. It’s not that we didn’t like her at all, she just didn’t engage us as we would hope from a main character.

5. Again, it seemed like some big events – death and divorce – were clumsy in their presentation as plot points. Obviously, things have to actually happen in a plot, and sometimes they will be big things. But they seemed out of nowhere sometimes.

Memorable Meeting Moments: We had our meeting outside by Christina’s pool and swam together there for the first time. Lindsay fell asleep in her lounger, the Mama Mango bottle cork popped all on its own randomly and scared us all to death. We also got to smell the after-effects of a skunk spray somewhere in the vicinity.

What We Ate: