Down but Not Out Parenting 50 Way to Win With Your Teen Book

As others have said, this book is a collection of anecdotes from dozens of parents of various backgrounds. I enjoyed the diversity and variety of the perspectives offered. It's a sweet book in terms of helping me feel like I'm in the company of other new parents: alternately exhausted and exhilarated by the privilege of caring for a little one. You're almost sure to find an anecdote that hits home for you in this collection, since just about every viewpoint and experience related to new parenting is included. A couple have stayed with me and I'm grateful to have read them, as they give me a little more peace about my own parenting journey / have helped me frame things in a more thoughtful manner so I can be a better parent.

However, the lack of a single thread or story arc ultimately means this book is a couple of hundred pages of paragraph-length anecdotes organized loosely by theme. That is great when one is sleep deprived and only able to tune in for a couple of pages, but made it difficult for me to sit down and read this for any length of time in one sitting or feel like the book was "building" up to something meaningful. I found the brevity of the various anecdotes and the organization of the book tiresome in the end: I'd rather read a collection of short stories that each span a dozen pages and encompass a few themes, rather than a collection of several hundred paragraph-length anecdotes that don't build on each other apart from offering various perspectives on a single theme.