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An Intimate Journey through the First Year of Parenthood in Four Countries
by Abigail Leonard
In the tradition of Lisa Taddeo's Three Women and Robert Kolker's Hidden Valley Road, Abigail Leonard's immersive, page-turning reporting follows four women from around the world as they embark on the first year of motherhood.
Utterly moving and addictively readable from page one, the book begins with the pregnancies and labor experiences of Anna in Finland, Tsukasa in Japan, Sarah in the U.S., and Chelsea in Kenya. The year that followed was an experience both remarkably unique for each woman, and remarkably universal. Leonard takes readers inside their relationships, families, and interactions with employers, the healthcare system, and the social safety net, weaving in deeply researched background on each country's history, political priorities, and cultural norms that influence the women's lives.
As debates surrounding paid leave, universal daycare, and national healthcare rage in the US and around the world, Four Mothers offers a uniquely intimate, moving portrait of what those policies mean in the everyday lives of parents. By turns enraging and full of hope, this on-the-ground yet global look at new motherhood today offers readers – especially new or future parents – unprecedented context for the innumerable different ways we could create our family lives, to help us more expansively imagine the possibilities for the future.
"[B]y turns piercing and poignant...This is an enthralling and kaleidoscopic view of modern motherhood." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"With all the gifts of a novelist, reporter Abigail Leonard chronicles the lives of women around the world during their first year of motherhood, to make you feel their joy, their fear, their exhaustion, and their fierce love for their children. This is real motherhood on the page, bolstered by rigorous research to explain why our current systems have failed families and offer insights for a brighter future." ―Jo Piazza, bestselling author of How to Be Married
"Abigail Leonard's Four Mothers is the exquisitely reported and intensely readable story of how women from four corners of the world navigate early parenthood. Despite vastly different social systems and relationships, the strains and joys of motherhood are similar across cultures and familiar to anyone who is a parent. Leonard paints compelling portraits of each woman, her partner and her world, and I needed to know how everything would turn out. Once I started Four Mothers I could not put it down." ―Darcy Lockman, author of All the Rage
This information about Four Mothers was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Abigail Leonard is an award-winning international reporter and news producer, currently based in Washington D.C. and before that in Tokyo, where she was a frequent contributor to NPR, Time Magazine, and New York Times video. Her stories have also appeared in the Washington Post, Newsweek, and Vox. Before she moved to Japan, she wrote and produced long-form news documentaries as a staff producer for PBS, ABC and Al Jazeera America, and was a lead writer for "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" and "The War Room with Jennifer Granholm." Stories she reported have earned a national Emmy Award, an Overseas Press Club Award, an Association of Health Care Journalists Award, a National Headliner Award, and a James Beard Foundation Media Award Nomination.
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