Lovely Little Shelf

The Book: The Girlfriends’ Guide to Pregnancy: On Everything your Doctor Won’t Tell you; by Vicki Iovine

The Story: Kind of just another pregnancy “tell all.”  The idea behind this one is that it’s a lot of compiled information.  The author has talked to tons of her “girlfriends” and gotten the real lowdown on pregnancy, from the ever-growing boobs to sex during pregnancy to yadda yadda.

What I Thought: Meh. For some reason, this book is absurdly popular among soon-t0-be mamas.  When I was asking for advice on pregnancy reading, this one ALWAYS came up. So I bit.

I will say this right off the bat: I didn’t hate it like I hated a couple of the pregnancy books I read.  I thought that at times that the author was genuinely funny.  The stories from her friends had me cracking up a few times. So at least it had that going for it.

I guess what annoyed me about this book was that there was just so little actual information.  I knew going in that this book was supposed to be funny, but I assumed that there would be, I don’t know, something other than just filler.  The author just seemed to be kind of air headed and very self indulgent.  Maybe she’s not. I don’t know. One chapter was advice on how to get your husband to buy you a “push gift” and how to get that gift to be diamonds. Puh-lease.  Throughout the book she repeatedly belittled: men, people who were chunky, people who exercised, people who ate healthy during their pregnancy, people who went with natural labor, and any woman who is feeling positive about pregnancy.

My more negative opinion of the book, I think, largely came from the fact that I couldn’t relate to the author in any way.  I’ve found that the pregnancy books that I really like are the ones where I am like, “yes! That is exactly what I’m going through!” and make me feel normal.  This author is all about money and manicures and jewelry and being a size two and sitting around with her “girlfriends” and talking about what idiots their husbands are. That is just so completely far from my situation that I found myself rolling my eyes over and over and over.  Do people really live like this?

So that’s that.

Conclusion: If you have to read this “must read pregnancy book” I would just say to take her “advice” with a grain of salt.  Don’t buy it. Get it from the library.  You’ll be glad you did.