While taking the reader on a traipse through various laboratories, Tucker tosses off quips like a class clown on a science field trip. She’s cutesy about her subject ... This kind of voice has its place in a mom blog or standup show. But a topic inherently prone to gender stereotypes deserves the intellectually engaging reportage of which Tucker is quite capable. One has to ask: What is Tucker doing? ... Tucker is at her finest in retelling this dark struggle...From this humbled perspective she summons a deep compassion for mothers who have to go without this social support ... Tucker climbed that mountain of inconclusive science about how humans succeed at the terrifying and ancient task of mothering only to find the answers closer to home. And that’s what makes her tale ultimately redeemable and encouraging. If you can set down your expectations of reading about scientific breakthroughs and allow yourself to willingly cross the border from exposition into memoir, you might just see that an intriguing subject — the author herself — awaits you.

... an impressive synthesis of the current state of 'mom science,' a fairly new and fecund field that mostly considers how mothers are different from other people and similar to each other ... Ms. Tucker is clear on both the context and limits of these sex-based changes ... This is a fascinating book. Although Ms. Tucker’s writing occasionally adopts the chirpiness of a mommy blog, her research is deft, comprehensive, engaging and heavily footnoted. Her stories about her own parenting misadventures, including her emergency C-section and a bout with postpartum depression, helpfully illustrate the role context plays in our experience of parenthood.

Meticulously researched and well-documented, Mom Genes is one part memoir (Tucker intersperses her own experiences as a white mother of four children), and one part incredibly readable popular science ... Richly entertaining, filled with humor, and deeply informative, this engaging book is recommended for mothers, potential mothers, and anyone who has ever known a mother.

... humorous ... moving and amusing ... [Tucker's] conclusion—that maternal instinct indeed exists—comes with a warning: it is neither joyfully innate nor a magical enlightenment, but rather a volatile transmogrification, a sort of birth a woman herself undergoes ... Using clever, colorful, figurative language and a warm, conversational tone, Tucker documents the complex challenges women who become mothers face. Readers might come in to learn what baby cuddles do to the brain, be tempted to leave over the poop talk and placenta eating, but ultimately stay for the acknowledgment Tucker gives to the unique experience of motherhood.

My main complaint here is that brain scans and laboratory tests don't map well onto real-world maternal behavior ... A view of new mothers as brain-compromised and incompetent isn't a cute meme, it's damaging to women who may have to fight a tide of suspicion about their competence ... Tucker is wedded to the word 'instinct' but she does qualify it quite a bit ... For readers sensitive to animal cruelty, this book is tough going in places ... Occasionally Tucker breaks out of the heteronormative man-woman-baby structure of the book, as when she reports research on gay dads ... But by the time the stronger chapters occur, the damage has been done by the earlier wild claims of new moms falling apart. It doesn't help that Tucker refers to 'differences between mothers and regular women' and uses 'mom genes' language despite reporting scientists' cautions that genetic contributions to maternal variation are subtle, affecting the quality of maternal behavior in nuanced ways ... Tucker's deep dive into the scientific literature on new motherhood and her visits to labs unlocking mysteries of motherhood enliven her writing. Unfortunately, she renders the experience of new motherhood as such a draconian, impairing biological transformation that these positive aspects can't offer balance.

Despite some opacity based on learned guesswork, Tucker is a consistently energetic guide, and she doesn’t shy away from discussing 'the dangerous and opaque mental problems that hound moms.' In a particularly vibrant chapter, the author explores the countless deleterious effects of poverty and how American society continually fails to provide the support that mothers deserve. Filling in the gaps and moving the story forward are Tucker’s personal observations—she is the mother of four—and the ups and downs of her experiences, many of which will be familiar to mothers of all backgrounds ... Stimulating preliminary notes toward a deeper understanding of an area of science that shows promise.

Tucker has a knack for making complex science accessible, and she encouragingly touts the importance of mothers having a support system ... Moms-to-be in search of a straightforward look at the changes ahead will find this a good place to start.