Blog Book Tour: It's a Girl

Today I'm participating in the blog book tour for It's a Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters, edited by Andrea J. Buchanan. (See here and here for my participation in her past blog book tours.)

After editing two anthologies about parenting and gender, Buchanan writes,

My initial questions about boys and girls turned out not to have definitive answers—after reading hundreds of submissions on parenting sons and daughters I still can’t tell if girls are more "complicated" or boys more prone to violence. But I can tell you something about the difference between mothers of girls and mothers of boys. For both books, I received many essay submissions from writers who were conflicted about the sex of their baby. But the concerns of writers in It's a Boy were about the otherness of the male gender: What the heck do you do with a boy? It's a Girl writers ask the same question about their daughters, but what prompts it is not fear of the unknown, but fear of what they know all too well.

It feels odd to participate in this book tour because I have no idea what it's like to be the mother of a daughter. I do, however, know how it feels to be the daughter of a mother. For many of the writers included in this anthology, parenting a girl brings up unresolved issues with their own mothers.

Overall, the essays in this anthology offer a lively mix of perspectives and make this a worthwhile companion to It's a Boy. I know I'll return to this book if I ever hear the words "It's a girl...."