In a lightweight offering, McDonnell, a 1990s music critic and a former editor at the Village Voice
, explores the harmonious convergence of art and motherhood at age 40. Born to suburban bohemians in Milwaukee the year the Beatles played Ed Sullivan's show, McDonnell was weaned on the Jackson 5 and the women's movement, blow-dried hair and cowl necks, Patti Smith and Iggy Pop. She attended Brown at the height of its coolness, and found "refuge in noise." Moving to Manhattan's East Village in 1989, she got a job as a copy editor at the Voice
, a pacesetter in rock criticism, which segued into writing for other magazines. Her "tomboy soul" was undercut by a short-lived marriage to a man named Tad, but rebounded with a secure job as a senior editor at the Voice. Her romance with a Michigan carpenter with two young daughters, Bud, led to moving them all out to New York, then on to booming, multicultural Miami, where the author got a job as pop music critic at the Miami Herald
. Motherhood soon followed in the form of son Cole, and the author has to wing it mostly as a parent and stepparent. Her rather tedious, unenlightening memoir closes as she bemoans the loss of feminist progress in the behavior of Britneys and Jessicas. (Feb
.)
