cover image Stepmothering: Another Kind of Love: The Way to Happiness and Success as a Stepmother

Stepmothering: Another Kind of Love: The Way to Happiness and Success as a Stepmother

Pearl Ketover Prilik, Pearl Ketover Prilik. Forman Publishing, $17.95 (254pp) ISBN 978-0-936614-06-9

The author, a stepmother herself as well as a teacher and therapist, has a keen appreciation of the difficulties stepmothers have in coming to terms with children they did not bear and with their awkward parenting role. Building on her own experience, and that of stepmothers she interviewed for the book, Prilik has written a sensible guide to what such women can expect. She outlines the ways in which they can learn to relate better to their new charges and, perhaps most importantly, find comfort and a sense of solidarity by reading how others face the same problems. Prilik is sometimes over-sentimentalher saccharine opening, for example, hardly gives an idea of the no-nonsense briskness that is to followbut she knows her subject well, has thought about it carefully, and conveys sound advice and information. (Oct.)