A review by howifeelaboutbooks
Fathermucker by Greg Olear
3.0
Sometimes you just have one of those days where nothing goes right, and you let yourself get beat down and take it. But sometimes, as in Josh Lansky's case, you know you're going to have a bad day - his horoscope predicts a mere two-stars - and you can brace yourself for it. So Josh does, to the extent one can be prepared for anything when your wife is out of town and you're in charge of two children under five. That's actually Josh's every day life - he's a stay-at-home-dad, a screenwriter suffering from writer's block. He's been with his wife, Stacy, for ten years. She was an actress when they met, but instead of making theirs a Hollywood marriage, she stops acting and gets a marketing job. They leave New York City to move upstate, and Josh falls in with a handful of stay-at-home-moms who arrange playdates. This is where he finds himself when a mom tells him that Stacy is having an affair. And thus we are introduced to Josh's two-star day, which is the entire span of the book.
Three hundred pages over the course of just one day actually works, since there is a bit of backstory, and Josh's imagination frequently runs wild. There were a lot of celebrity references that I could have done without, as well as the outspoken opinions. Josh is not necessarily an opinionated character, as I saw it, but every once in awhile some hatred for Republicans or tattoos would come out and ramble for several sentences, and it screamed "This is the author!" to me. There was also a weird thing where there would be italicized phrases in the middle of a sentence, which were occasionally song lyrics, or maybe catchphrases, or Josh's thoughts - I never quite got the point of them, and they interrupted the sentence, so I just started skipping over them. I don't think I missed anything.
Ex: "Chris teaches at the Culinary Institute in Hyde Park, but his wife does the cooking at home and I get fish right on my dish.
Overall, an entertaining book. I liked the conflicts that came up, and Josh handled them in a realistic way that I could identify with. I think stay-at-home-dads would especially like this book, because the focus seems to be on how they shouldn't be such a rarity. Also, the four-year-old son in the book has Asperger's, and there is a lot of nonfiction information about the condition, as well as autism, inserted nicely into the book.
Three hundred pages over the course of just one day actually works, since there is a bit of backstory, and Josh's imagination frequently runs wild. There were a lot of celebrity references that I could have done without, as well as the outspoken opinions. Josh is not necessarily an opinionated character, as I saw it, but every once in awhile some hatred for Republicans or tattoos would come out and ramble for several sentences, and it screamed "This is the author!" to me. There was also a weird thing where there would be italicized phrases in the middle of a sentence, which were occasionally song lyrics, or maybe catchphrases, or Josh's thoughts - I never quite got the point of them, and they interrupted the sentence, so I just started skipping over them. I don't think I missed anything.
Ex: "Chris teaches at the Culinary Institute in Hyde Park, but his wife does the cooking at home and I get fish right on my dish.
Overall, an entertaining book. I liked the conflicts that came up, and Josh handled them in a realistic way that I could identify with. I think stay-at-home-dads would especially like this book, because the focus seems to be on how they shouldn't be such a rarity. Also, the four-year-old son in the book has Asperger's, and there is a lot of nonfiction information about the condition, as well as autism, inserted nicely into the book.