I really wasn't terribly impressed by this book. It never hits a consistent tone, bouncing back and forth between an ambivalence about the choice not to have children and an almost anti-procreation attitude which I think, based on what she says about herself, reflects the author's own personality more than anything. There's also a huge focus on relationships, which as a single-not-looking person I frankly find boring. ( )

I was super disappointed in this book.

I picked it up on Amazon for free, and I was really excited, as a childfree person who doesn't see much "pro-childfree" literature anywwhere. I admit that I was curious what this "Insider's Guide" might be.

I cannot, for the life of me, decide who this book was aimed at. If you are childfree, then there's no new information here you wouldn't have figured out on your own (surprise! Childfree/less people are just like everyone else, only, don't have children!). Sure there's a stigma against us, but she barely touches on it. She shies away from any of the more controversial topics within the community (or at least those that childed tend to find inflammatory), or just barely touches on important issues while writing more about things that don't matter as much.

I guess this book could be recommended to fence-sitters - people who don't know if they want kids and they want a glimpse at what people without kids live like, but the author is very narrow on the people she studied and their motivations as well as attitudes towards certain social/economic issues.

She basically just took a bunch of "interviews" from childless/childfree (some by choice, "circumstance," or the inability to have children) and boiled it down to snippets that were boring, and seemingly self serving. Most of the time seemed more like she was trying to justify her childfree status.

You can learn more, and get a better breadth of people who are childfree by going to various childfree sites and just reading for a while.

On a technical note: this Kindle book was horribly formatted. A random quote from the chapter or entry would be inserted somewhere in the text (at times either before or after the actual quote) at odd intervals, in bold. Most irritatingly there were a lot of h-es missing ('tem' instead of "them", "te" instead of "the", etc) repeatedly through the book. ( )

I was super disappointed in this book.

I picked it up on Amazon for free, and I was really excited, as a childfree person who doesn't see much "pro-childfree" literature anywwhere. I admit that I was curious what this "Insider's Guide" might be.

I cannot, for the life of me, decide who this book was aimed at. If you are childfree, then there's no new information here you wouldn't have figured out on your own (surprise! Childfree/less people are just like everyone else, only, don't have children!). Sure there's a stigma against us, but she barely touches on it. She shies away from any of the more controversial topics within the community (or at least those that childed tend to find inflammatory), or just barely touches on important issues while writing more about things that don't matter as much.

I guess this book could be recommended to fence-sitters - people who don't know if they want kids and they want a glimpse at what people without kids live like, but the author is very narrow on the people she studied and their motivations as well as attitudes towards certain social/economic issues.

She basically just took a bunch of "interviews" from childless/childfree (some by choice, "circumstance," or the inability to have children) and boiled it down to snippets that were boring, and seemingly self serving. Most of the time seemed more like she was trying to justify her childfree status.

You can learn more, and get a better breadth of people who are childfree by going to various childfree sites and just reading for a while.

On a technical note: this Kindle book was horribly formatted. A random quote from the chapter or entry would be inserted somewhere in the text (at times either before or after the actual quote) at odd intervals, in bold. Most irritatingly there were a lot of h-es missing ('tem' instead of "them", "te" instead of "the", etc) repeatedly through the book. ( )