The women are friends, all single and childless (though not by choice), and each is a little quirky. By the time Essie\u2019s 11, she\u2019s read a great deal about the world but experienced little. Meeting G.E., a boy who looks just like her, makes her dream of being part of a large family. The two plot: Essie\u2019s four mothers could marry the four male department store employees who are G.E.\u2019s dads. The real outcome turns out to be slightly more complicated. The adult characters are drawn with broad, slightly stereotypical strokes: fat, white Midwesterner Doris is a terrible cook, French Jeanne-Marie is \u201cthin and spiky\u201d but a romantic at heart, Black Taisha has incredible skin and \u201ca lovely froth of black hair around her head like moss,\u201d and black-haired Lucinda has \u201cthat kind of look\u201d that makes people think of fortunetellers (likewise, Hernandez, one of G.E.\u2019s dads, \u201cmakes great Mexican food,\u201d in contrast to the \u201cregular stuff\u201d prepared by one of his white dads). Horvath doesn\u2019t simplify her vocabulary or philosophical musings for her audience, tossing in, without translation, French phrases and a little Yiddish. The low-tech, late-20th-century, small-town setting offers a safe, well-staffed library: It\u2019s a lovely daydream for readers who think that E.L. Konigsburg\u2019s Claudia Kincaid had the right idea (but should have run away to a library instead of the Met). <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The women are friends, all single and childless (though not by choice), and each is a little quirky. By the time Essie\u2019s 11, she\u2019s read a great deal about the world but experienced little. Meeting G.E., a boy who looks just like her, makes her dream of being part of a large family. The two […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":321,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}