RaveThe Washington PostDivided into sections about menstruation, lust, reproduction, nurturing, working and aging, Mother Tongue also explores words describing male violence and emerging feminist language ... With painstaking detail, Nuttall chronicles how language controlled by men...codified ideas about women’s behavior and lives ... Touches on the hilarious and the devastating, with ample dashes of an ingredient so painfully absent from most discussions of sex and gender: humor.
Christie Tate
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewI related to many of Tate’s flaws ... But I wasn’t sure how typical our experiences were ... Tate doesn’t tell us. I found myself hungering for more psychological, historical and sociological insight into the intricacies and pitfalls of female friendship, not just into her own psyche ... I also longed for a more novelistic touch, to experience vicariously and viscerally the aching awkwardness of the moment you realize you’ve forever altered the tenor of the friendship ... At times B.F.F. felt like too claustrophobic a look at a phenomenon that’s so much bigger than her fallen-apart friendships, though I applaud Tate’s willingness to expose her shortfalls... and offer readers a way forward.
