Marguerite Kelly's Family Almanac: The Perfect Companion for Today's Family--a Helpful Guide to Navigating Through Book

For more than a dozen years, readers all over the country have checked in weekly with Marguerite Kelly's "The Family Almanac" syndicated column for help and advice in dealing with issues facing today's families. Now, fans of her column and her immensely popular book, The Mother's Almanac, will be thrilled with the arrival of this new title. Finally, families will have all the information they need in one volume: Sound ideas on everything from bringing home a new baby to choosing a preschool, coping with illness and divorce to nurturing self-confidence.

Kelly's warm, assuring voice and wit combine to speak to every mother and father who are facing the tough new concerns of parents of today -- self-esteem and values, divorce, AIDS, learning disabilities and single parenting -- as well as the age-old questions on sibling rivalry, raising an only child, discipline, and grandparents.

No one knows better than Marguerite Kelly how challenging parenting can be; nor can anyone be as encouraging, supportive, and enthusiastic about the joys and rewards it will bring.

Library Journal

If you can afford only one all-purpose parenting book, this is the one. Kelly's fame began with The Mother's Almanac (LJ 11/15/75) and its successor, The Mother's Almanac II (Doubleday, 1989), now classics in the field. Here she packs 600 two-column pages full of humorous, common-sense advice on parenting and family issues. Kelly writes in a fun and breezy style ("the eight...is a flibbertigibbet, who skims the surface of life") and offers wisdom to help parents deal with and transcend petty problems ("your worst day with children is still better than your best day without them"). She deals head-on with the changing families of the 1990s: overambitious parents, real-life fears, reluctant scholars, abuse of all kinds, and special-needs children. For its breadth of coverage, common sense, and comfortable style, Kelly's latest is sure to become a classic in its own right. Essential.-Linda Beck, Indian Valley P.L., Telford, Pa.