Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Baby Proof is a fake childfree book written by a parent trying to impersonate the childfree voice, and she gets it all wrong. **SPOILERS AHEAD** Claudia, the main character, is like a background player in her own novel. I kept wondering why, in a book about a nominally childfree-by-choice woman, so much time was given to X, Y, or Z mommy or mommy-wannabe of the protagonist's acquaintance. She had no interests of her own besides her job; most of the time it felt like she was sitting around waiting for the phone to ring so she could listen to the mommies go on and on about themselves. All Claudia ever did was work and serve as a sounding board, babysitter, and supporter for the mommies she knew. When she finally hooks up with the hot childfree guy and goes on a fantastic vacation with him, she can't enjoy it because "something is missing." Gee, could the missing thing be...A BABY??!1?! Subtle, Giffin ain't. And Ben, Claudia's husband, comes off as so shallow, naive, and selfish that I couldn't stand him, and couldn't comprehend why Claudia wanted him back. When she left him, I thought GOOD RIDDANCE! He came off like a whiny, pouting, manipulative child himself. I couldn't imagine how any woman would want HIM around, let alone want to have his baby. Then towards the end, Claudia finally gets lonely and beaten-down enough to try to get back together with her husband by offering to have his baby, and at that point I wanted to throw the book across the room. It stopped being chick lit and became, for me, a very subtle horror story about how loneliness and relentless, soul-deadening social pressure force unmaternal women into having unwanted children just to get along in a world that treats non-mothers like second-class citizens. Yet Giffin depicts this slow erosion of her protagonist's true self as PROGRESS. Gee, glad to know that even women who are 100% sure they don't want children really-truly always want one deep down. Biology always IS destiny then, no matter what that woman's pesky CONSCIOUS MIND wants. Good to know. A very insidious book. Perhaps for an encore, Giffin can write a novel about a gay woman who gets pressured into a heterosexual marriage because everyone in her life wants to pretend she's straight. Or maybe she can give us the story of Ben and Claudia's 16-year-old daughter, who grows up knowing that her mother Claudia never really wanted her and only had her because her father Ben demanded it.