That Kind of Mother
"That Kind of Mother dives deep into big questions about parenthood, adoption, and race: Is mothering something learned, or that you're born to? How far can good intentions stretch? And most of all, can love can really overcome the boundaries of race and class? With his unerring eye for nuance and unsparing sense of irony, Rumaan Alam's second novel is both heartfelt and thought-provoking."--Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere ... From the celebrated author of Rich and Pretty, a novel about the families we fight to build and those we fight to keep ... Like many first-time mothers, Rebecca Stone finds herself both deeply in love with her newborn son and deeply overwhelmed. Struggling to juggle the demands of motherhood with her own aspirations and feeling utterly alone in the process, she reaches out to the only person at the hospital who offers her any real help--Priscilla Johnson--and begs her to come home with them as her son's nanny. Priscilla's presence quickly does as much to shake up Rebecca's perception of the world as it does to stabilize her life. Rebecca is white, and Priscilla is black, and through their relationship, Rebecca finds herself confronting, for the
Where That Kind of Mother keeps showing up
One of our editors' lists features this novel.
What you might want to know about That Kind of Mother
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Poet Rebecca Stone gives birth to a son and is overwhelmed. She hires the lactation consultant Priscilla Johnson as a nanny, and when Priscilla dies in childbirth a few years later, Rebecca adopts her Black baby boy.
That Kind of Mother was written by Rumaan Alam and published in 2018. Alam is also the author of Leave the World Behind. That Kind of Mother was an early novel that helped establish his literary reputation.
Both novels share Rumaan Alam's interest in race and class in upper-middle-class American life. That Kind of Mother is more domestic and quieter; Leave the World Behind is genre-leaning and apocalyptic.
That Kind of Mother is 291 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, That Kind of Mother takes most readers 4 to 6 hours to finish.
That Kind of Mother is a standalone novel by Rumaan Alam, not part of a series.
That Kind of Mother is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
