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From New York Times bestselling author Domenica Ruta comes a heartfelt, hilarious novel about a single mom reimagining what the perfect family can look like.
Sandy thought she was making her greatest mistake yet when she got unexpectedly pregnant in her mid-thirties by a dating-app flop. Now, her baby Rosie is the love of her life, but trying to co-parent with her daughter's dad, a wannabe rock star, is a challenge—and seems to be veering into catastrophe territory when Sandy finds out through social media that her daughter has a half-sibling Sandy doesn't know anything about.
Enter her ex's ex, Stephanie, the other mother. Sandy is prepared to hate her but when the two women meet, they are shocked to learn how much they have in common beyond the deadbeat father their children share. Now Sandy needs to figure out what her and Rosie's family looks like with all these new additions. Could life in a "mommune" be the answer to her prayers, or just a new brand of chaos?
In this winning story of family both born and chosen, Sandy is about to discover that when nothing goes as planned, the best things become possible.
"A perfectly charming and complex ode to mothers and found families...The real marvel is the beautifully drawn characters, who are realized with tremendous depth. Ruta skillfully sketches the complexities and struggles of single motherhood, especially as it relates to financial precarity and the importance of cultivating joy and community." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Have you ever gotten screwed over by a man you never cared all that much for to begin with? Join the club...This delightful and honest novel by Domenica Ruta...is a joyful journey about the trials of motherhood and found family." —Harper's Bazaar, "The 20 Best Beach Reads"
"No one writes about motherhood like Domenica Ruta. Seriously, no one. With tremendous humor, intelligence, wisdom, and, of course, heart, Ruta takes a hard, unflinching look at exactly what it takes to survive in America as a single mother. The result is a defining novel for these turbulent times. I loved it and can't stop thinking about it." —Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year
"Warm, funny, and absolutely right, All the Mothers is a novel about my favorite kind of family: complicated. Domenica Ruta's intimately-sketched characters are impressively messy, familiar, beguiling, formidable, maddening, heartbreaking, and life affirming ... sometimes all in the same morning." —Laurie Frankel, author of Family Family
"All the Mothers is a wickedly funny, wildly entertaining, and deeply felt novel about motherhood, money, and making a happy home beyond the borders of convention. You won't be able to put this one down." —Leigh Stein, author of Self Care
This information about All the 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.
Domenica Ruta is the New York Times bestselling author of the memoir With or Without You and the novel Last Day, lauded one of 100 Notable Books of the Year in 2019 by the New York Times Book Review. Born and raised in Danvers, Massachusetts, she is a graduate of Oberlin College and holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. She currently teaches in the creative writing program at Sarah Lawrence College, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Cut, The American Scholar, Oprah online, and many others. She currently lives in New York City with her family.
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