A review by mwelting
After Birth, by Elisa Albert

3.0

Very mixed feelings. I found the main character profoundly unlikeable (which is not necessarily a bad thing for a book), but in ways that I also found not very interesting. So that made it hard for me to engage. I almost stopped reading after the first section, but in the end I'm glad I stuck with it. While there was much to dislike about the main character, there were moments where her articulation of early motherhood profoundly mirrored my own experience, and I greatly appreciated the camaraderie and empathy. On the other hand, there were also places where she spat out the all-too-common "mommy wars" rhetoric as noxiously as I've read, too. Rhetorical device or not, I've read that enough places and didn't feel the need to see it rehashed here.

Overall, I'm glad I read it (but glad my daughter was already more than a year old when I did, giving me a bit of distance to take what I wanted from it and leave the rest).