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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 818.5409
EAN num: 9780140267679
ISBN number: 0140267670
Label: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 256
Printing Date: October 01, 1997
Publishing house: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Sale Popularity Level: 101411
Studio: Penguin (Non-Classics)
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Amazon.com:
Can this be the author of such chilling tales as The Lottery and The Haunting of Hill House? An ordinary housewife stuck in a big, shabby house with three marvelous, demanding children and a charming husband who takes detached interest in the chaos they generate? Yes, it's Shirley Jackson all right: the precision of her observations and prose is familiar, even if her humour is something of a surprise. Not until Anne Lamott's Operating Instructions in 1993 would another woman write with such honesty about the maddening multitude of trivial, essential chores that constitute a mother's life. But Jackson nailed it first, 40 years earlier, in her hilarious chronicle of life in a small Vermont town, where getting the kids to school on time requires the combined gifts of a drill sergeant and a lady's maid. The saga of her son's bumpy adjustment to kindergarten, frequently anthologized as Charles, is justly famous, but Jackson's account of the Department Store Trip from Hell (two kids, two toy guns, one doll carriage and doll, mayhem in revolving doors and escalators) is even funnier. Although her memoirs are as merciless as her ghost stories, you may not notice because you're laughing so hard. --Wendy Smith
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Rated by buyers 
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I got my mother this book for her birthday, but she was still lost in the story of a certain boy wizard long after I finished with him so I read this very first instead. This book may have been written in the 1950's but the sentiments and trials of motherhood are timeless.
The only thing that really brought home to me that this book was written in a different era were the amounts of money. But even that only serves to reinforce for me just how pertinent this book is today, yesterday and for many tomorrows.
There is a scene where she ends up raiding her children's piggy bank that keeps me in stitches while reading it and makes me smile whenever I think about it. Whether it's 5 cents or $5, it doesn't matter why you raided your children's piggy bank , it only matters that bread and milk were on the table, the kids got to school (eventually) and that no matter what it takes, you got the job of mothering done.
Highly recommended.
Rated by buyers 
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As a stay at home, I enjoyed reading this book. It is very funny. It is also interesting to see the change in times. This book was written in the 1940s. Especially of interest is the author's description of her two week hospital stay for child birth. These days it is pracically a drive by procedure :) I felt the book dragged at times, but all in all this is an enjoyable read and certainly one I would recommend to other moms.
Rated by buyers -
Yes! This book was so funny, I actually laughed out loud at times! Her descriptions of family life really hit home with me, and I wish she had written more...
Rated by buyers -
I grew up reading and rereading this book, as did all the five children in my family. It's one of the very funniest books I know on the subject of families and their foibles. Shirley Jackson is so well known for her more macabre and adult writing that people are usually skeptical when I recommend this for its outstandingly intelligent humor. Once you read this you must also read Raising Demons, which is the sequel, and every bit as good, although much harder to find.
Rated by buyers -
This is Shirley Jackson's hilarious account of her struggles raising an expanding family of children. She is delightfully unsentimental in her account of family life, and any harassed parent will recognise the situations she finds herself in. For instance, what parent hasn't suffered the anguish of trying to eat in a restaurant with young children, how well Shirely Jackson sums of the sheer horror of that situation, among many others. I didn't think there could ever be a book about child-raising as funny as Jean Kerr's 'Please Don't Eat the Daisies' but this one runs it a very close second.
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