After consuming some vodka-infused sangria at the neighborhood picnic, stay-at-home mom Celeste and working mom Wendy wake up to find themselves living in the body and home of the other. When they realize they will be stuck in each other’s bodies for at least a week, Celeste and Wendy decide it might be fun to walk in the other’s shoes for a while.
This is a cute, Freaky Friday/body swap plot book. I actually thought it was going to be funnier and that there would be more hijinks as Wendy and Celeste try to live and act like each other. The book surprisingly ended up containing a lot of commentary about stay-at-home moms vs. working moms and if one was better than the other. I am not a mom so I don’t know if I am the right audience for this book as I don’t necessarily have an opinion on the “mommy wars”.
I did find it a bit difficult to keep all the characters straight and I kept having to flip back and forth to remind myself whose kids belonged to which mom. The book is told from alternating points of view from Celeste and Wendy and while I think it was a good literary device to read both POVs, sometimes it was confusing.
I was not a huge fan of the Wendy character which made it hard to sympathize with her. I thought she was extremely critical of Celeste’s parenting and instead of trying to keep Celeste’s routine while she was in Celeste’s body, she just did whatever she wanted and railroaded over all of Celeste’s parenting decisions. She kept talking about how easy it is to be a stay-at-home mom and that it would be a vacation for her to be in Celeste’s body for a week, and then she didn’t do anything that Celeste did during the day. Of course it’s going to be easy when you don’t follow the plan! At least Celeste in Wendy’s body tried to go to some work meetings and tried to help out her family.
It’s obvious that the moral of this book is that there is no one way to parent and that women can choose if they want to work or stay at home. I’m just not sure that either character got the lesson through.
I feel like I’m really putting this book down, but it wasn’t bad! I just didn’t love all of the mom-shaming. Plus, I was hoping for something really funny and this wasn’t really it.
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