Reviews for It's a Boy: Women Writers on Raising Sons

The average rating for It's a Boy: Women Writers on Raising Sons based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-10-02 00:00:00 Andre Munandar I bought this book days after the ultrasound. I have a near-two-year-old daughter; I was convinced this second would be a girl too. (And, in all fairness, I was convinced with Maya that she would be a boy, so much so that I balked at the announcement, asking the tech to check again, so it turns out my motherly intuition is completely out of whack, and I've had to make peace with that.) I was ready for a boy then, but somehow, after twenty-two months of re-analyzing my feminist attitudes, I'm going to have to re-learn where I stand all over again. I was prepared to share my American Girl Dolls and tell her about the sisterhood and give her a copy of Our Bodies, Our Selves. Now I have to figure out equivalents. This will probably be the first sequence of many narratives I use to bolster myself up, but I have confidence when I think of all the women I admire who have raised and are raising sons. Maybe I won't foul this up. I think I was a bit frustrated at the earlier pieces in the book--so many of them were the same reiteration: I thought I'd have a daughter, I was meant to have a daughter, I knew how to raise a daughter, but I got a son. And then the comparisons of boys and girls. One I had to read aloud to my husband: "Spinning around until he had to stagger around dizzily also figured prominently in his play, as did putting things like putting trash cans on his head and walking into walls. Several times he inexplicably got his head stuck in the banister. I've never known a girl to do that" (33). And as our daughter leapt from end table to his unsuspecting lap, my husband said what I was thinking, affectionately, "She should come to our house." As I write this, my daughter has thrust the emptied toy drum onto her head and she is guffawing at the macho black dog of ours as he skitters away, snuffling in fear. (And, in more fairness, he's a complete weenie--afraid of camping mattresses, laundry hampers, wine buckets. It's not hard to scare him, though Maya is sort of exceptional in this department, as she's a big aggressive in her love of all pets.) And here I'm already falling into the trap that annoyed me a bit in the book: touting examples of masculine versus feminine toddler behaviors as a way of appeasing that gender-ideal in our own heads. I want to say: she loves blocks and her choo-choos and her babies and is busier than any other toddler I've met, save her cousin when he was her age, perhaps. In the end, she is an individual, and those were the stories I loved the most, the ones that strove to send the message that parenting is about celebrating who that *person* is as opposed to that little girl or little boy. My favorite piece was "Pretty Baby," which took a look at one son whose favorite color was "darky pink" and oohed over the magic of The Nutcracker on Ice. The piece opened with the you-voice, bringing the reader in, letting that reader imagine he or she was sitting behind them, observing her son's fascination of glittering snow and pink costuming, then goes on to defend her son's passions, which aren't just about pink or boyishness or girlishness but being a child with a solid sense of wonder, and instead of landing in the predictable place where the you shames the author's allowances of her son, the you gets to say, "Your son is lovely," and I think that is exactly the perfect thing to say about a child whose heart is clearly big and ready to swallow up the world in all its beauty. See, it's not about equivalents. It's not about being thrilled that your son loves pink and nurturing his baby dolls and that your daughter knows more names for bugs and is willing to play in the dirt from dawn to dust. It's not about making peace with trucks and princesses. My daughter, too, is lovely. And I love that. I can't wait to meet my son, because I think he will be lovely too.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-11-28 00:00:00 Yubo Lu It's A Boy is a series of short essays by female authors (including Jodi Picoult and Jacquelyn Mitchard) on various aspects of being a woman and raising a boy. I found them, by and large, to be thoughtful, poignant and relatable. There were certain topics that didn't really pertain to me (having a boy after having a girl; dealing with a teenage boy) and others that really resonated with me (worrying about how to best raise a boy; watching your boy develop a definite preference for trucks and masculine items despite your desire to create a gender neutral atmosphere). I really enjoyed reading the collection and think it's one of those books that'd be a great gift for any mother of a son.