The Barnes & Noble Review You must breastfeed your infant for at least one year. Never, never sleep with your child. Go back to work as soon as possible. Don't work: Stay at home. If your bookshelves are already heavy with volumes spouting so much dogmatic and alienating advice that you cannot bear to read them, and you know that you already have a unique and perfectly decent parenting style, you will enjoy THE MOTHER TRIP. Ariel Gore's new book affirms, through the telling of her own journey into motherhood, that you can be quirky and original, follow your own wisdom, pursue your dreams, and mother well. In a series of vignettes of varying length — an ideal structure for tired and busy parents — she weaves together her life experiences with work from other writers and bits of historical and political analysis, eschewing society's recipes for the "best way" to raise children. "Take a moment to imagine the perfect mother," she instructs her readers in the book's early pages. Then she gently turns the notion on its head. "No, wait. Take a moment to look in the mirror. She is you." Gore's writing resonates with simplicity and truth. It is often very funny. And it can be hauntingly beautiful, as in this description of her first sleepless night with her newborn daughter. "By first glassy blue morning light, we had reached the shore of a strange island," she writes. "The dark ravens that had flown politely back and forth outside our window all through my labor were perched at the end of our lifeboat. And the church bells sounded once more, but this time endlessly, marking no time,justsounding and sounding and sounding, shaking the whole island with their vibrations and causing great waves to swell up in the sea." Gore became a mother at 19 while traveling in Europe with a boyfriend, and while she dealt with the financial, emotional, and even custodial repercussions