MixedThe Irish Times (IRE)This book contains a lot of complex research findings, and in general, Conboy does a good job of presenting it. So, will women find it interesting and helpful in understanding their experience of becoming a mother? Some will. But this 261-page book, with a further 71 pages of references, is not for the faint-hearted. The biggest problem is that the book is needlessly long. She devotes an entire chapter to debunking the myth of the maternal instinct, something that could have been done in a few pages — and then for good measure revisits it again in another chapter. The last four chapters of the book are meandering and sometimes repetitive, and whatever new information or insights they contain could have been easily integrated into earlier chapters. Conversely, there is quite a lot of information about fathers scattered across the book that merited a separate chapter ... In the preface, Conaboy discloses that her original intention was to write an essay about her own realisation of motherhood as a developmental stage. But then, as she delved into the research on the parental brain, to use her own word, she was \'hooked\' and unfortunately it shows. A little bit of distancing from the research and a lot of editing would have made this a better, more readable, and useful book.
