Audibook hell

No Biking In the House Without a Helmet
by Melissa Fay Greene

Fascinating story of a family adopting five orphans from overseas...buried inside a dull-to-the-point-of-nausea story of an author's self doubts, family tales, and pets.  I think it was the pets that finally did me in.  Her self doubts prior to the first adoption and her depression that followed it seemed to be an important part of the story.  She was trying to be honest with us, the readers, so it was interesting in spite of her bludgeonish writing style.  Someone must have told her, why tell something once when you can say it over and over again, hardly varying the words, ad nauseum?

The family tales--mostly about her biological children--were kind of interesting, but not what we were there for.  At times she was trying so hard to be funny that it grated.  What kind of mother honestly doesn't recognize that there was a reason why a music store wouldn't sell her pre-teen daughter a CD unless the parent came in the store and paid for it?  How out of touch could she be?

And--oh my god--the pets.  I really, really NOT wanted to hear about her dogs.  Not to mention squirrels, hamsters, guinea pigs, ducks...none of which seemed to be told in any relation to the adoptees and their reactions to the menagerie.

i I finished it.  I'd highly recommend reading the book instead of listening to the audiobook, especially if you're the kind of person who can skim over her endless listings of items.  At one point she goes to an Ethiopian market and proceeds to list every single item sold there.  Honest to god.  I must have taken up half of a page.   It's never good enough to give three examples--she always gives thirty or fifty or who knows?  I lost count after ten.

So...I take back my initial comment:  "Fascinating story...."   This could have been a fascinating story--with editing.

On a deeper note: is it right for a person, however deeply religious they may be, to adopt children from another religion and forcibly convert them?  Maybe with a baby or maybe even a five-year-old, but a nine-year-old?  Isn't that like saying, I applaud your heritage, but it's wrong?

Another deeper note: I have no right to criticize her family--only her book.  But I had some real issues with her family, especially her hands-off husband, her own inability to learn from mistake, and their "rules" that never were enforced.  I can only hope that some of the really bad parenting she describes is simple over-dramatization, put in to try and make the book funny.  It wasn't.