The title made me want to like it.
02 April 2015
With a title like People I Want to Punch In the Throat: Competitive Crafters, Drop-Off Despots, and Other Suburban Scourges, I really wanted to love Jen Mann's book.
It's a short book of humorous essays on parenting, of the sort I've been consuming like bon-bons ever since I had the CRjrs. There's a lot of this sort of thing:
"I love my cleaning lady just a little bit more than I love the Hubs. No, that's not true. I love her a lot more than I love the Hubs, and I'm not afraid to tell her, or him." (p. 32.)
And this:
"I have a confession to make. No, this isn't the part where I reveal that I'm a closet crafter who has a craft room in my basement where I hoard countless dollars' worth of rubber stamps, paint, tulle, ribbon, and glue guns (yes, glue guns, plural, because every good crafter worth her glitter knows you need more than one size). Even though that's all true, I'd rather talk about my even more embarrassing confession: I want a minivan. Baaad." (p. 103.)
Yeah, it's okay. I read the whole thing (it's only about 200 pages long). And it had a few moments. But overall? It just wasn't all that funny. As types in the genre, I'd much more heartily recommend Karen Alpert's I Heart My Little A-Holes, Drew Magary's Someone Could Get Hurt, or even Amber Dusick's Parenting: Illustrated with Crappy Pictures.