This is quite simply the best book about motherhood I have ever read: touching, tender, honest and true. Clover Stroud’s account of her experiences in bringing up five children captures both how overwhelmed with love you can feel as a mother and also how wrung out and distanced from your previous self. It made me teary with nostalgia for those days when your newborn feels like a newly baked loaf, but it also brilliantly evokes the pain mothers feel when teenagers begin pulling away, and your sense of powerlessness about protecting or guiding them.
Stroud’s children range in age from one to 17, so she is a veteran of the maternal trenches (she had her first two as a single mother in her twenties, then
