A collection of short stories about women existing, flourishing, and barely making it through their lives while managing children, jobs, husbands, lovers, parents, etc.

I enjoyed reading this short story collection! In every story the main character was a mother, or expecting, and they talked about the struggles of parenthood or work/life balance. Some of the stories had some unsettling undertones to them, some talked about COVID, and a lot of them had absent/missing father figures.

My favorite story was the last one, Dino Moms, which takes a Jurassic-esque park where moms and daughters are "doctors" to these dinos, and live in the park as well. There is only one story I kind of glazed over (it was getting way technical), otherwise I was able to read this collection in one sitting.

This book has me thinking, and I like that in books. There are so many struggles with motherhood, the book doesn't really glaze over them. The stories can all be set in the same universe, and some of them ran together, but they all had different messages and a different issue at hand.

Overall, I enjoyed a few of the short stories, but this has also got me thinking about motherhood. It was my first book by this author, and I would be interested in reading more in the future.
Content warnings: sexual content, toxic relationships, loss of a loved one

This was 3 stars for me!

The short stories were well written but I just couldn't connect with them personally. I enjoyed the journey of each character but there was something within the stories and characters that didn't click with me. This made my overall experience with my first Naomi Wood novel a blah moment.

It was still enjoyable in regard to the writing style and the overall flow of each story.