Margaret Pearce

What protection do females have from the social culture moulding the humans they develop into? The fourteen sharply perceptive tales in A Feminine Perspective celebrate the quiet courage within each woman's heart.

It's not all beer, skittles and Dr Spock, this motherhood caper. Somewhere between the experts who theorise and the amateurs who practise is a wide deep gap. Experts have written a lot on how to raise children. In a free society, you pay your money and take your pick. Starting from the Good Book (the original spare-the-rod-and-spoil-the-child advocate) to the very latest volumes out on toddler taming, child psychology and emotional problems (the child's, not yours). One of the interesting side effects completely ignored by experts is how raising children lowers mothers - right down. They are reduced to tears, tea and aspirin, hysterics, sherry, cigarettes, blunt instruments, bullying and blackmail. Some of the more fortunate are driven to sympathetic psychiatrists and rest homes. All this keeps the rest home industry healthy, ups the sales of something to fortify and simultaneously drown your problems in at supermarkets and liquor stores, and gives the experts on outer suburban neuroses plenty of material. Life with children is composed of confrontations, truces, compromises and intermittent battles. Suitable textbooks on survival of child raising might well include guerrilla warfare, unarmed combat and, of course, communications - handy for negotiating terms for truces, compromises, moratoriums, rescues of badly wounded psyches, egos and compensation payments when in the wrong (which is always). In the no-man's-land of the outer suburban battlefields, this motherhood caper keeps going on (when will they ever learn?) and so do the battles. And unfortunately we don't win 'em all.

Augustus Brown is a fun, rhythmically-rhyming picture-book, with a sweet story, imaginative illustrations and a highly unusual pet. This book is not recommended for parents with arachnophobia, however, brave young kids will be captivated.