Reading this quite slowly, clearly a very good book, not one that should be raced through ;-)

yeah its pretty good this book.

Great as a jumping off point. TBH if you are striving for simplicity, you're not going to learn a whole lot from this book. TBH, if you are aiming for simplicity you will not be spending $1000 on Christmas, or you will at least have worked out that this isn't on. What its great for is affirming simplicity as a choice that has already been made. It also recognises that those of us with young kids have to make choices that other simplifiers possibly don't, or at least not to such an acute degree, eg the choice to reduce working hours vs the choice to save and downshift.

Doesn't really generate any new ideas, and some of the kids/families quoted in the book really could send you running for the hills ("mommy, why is that man eating poisoned (trans: non-organic) food?". Well, dear, maybe because he prioritises local food over organic food airfreighted from god knows where. Or maybe he's a dad who'd rather spend a few extra hours with his kids than work. Maybe he can't afford organic food owing to the sterling US welfare system. Or maybe he's just trying to wind moms like yours up )

Truly, a book in dire need of an editor. Doesn't exactly put us HSers in a great light. This is a woman who, when her daughter was inevitably old enough for college, moved and enrolled WITH her. Her comments on families with more than one kid would be offensive if they weren't so clueless. I gave my copy away pretty quickly.

yes its good, read it.

Not great, to be honest. The book this is most like is Knit Two, or whatever its called, a book that i suspect was read only by knitters. Yet another book about London in the Swinging Sixties, written by someone who may or may not have been to Britain, but is absolutely clearly not a Londoner. As a book about London it obviously has to include the following: quaint cottage, Edinburgh, tall Englishman, telephone boxes, ghosts, incredibly implausible co-incidences (there are so few of us on this island that we do pretty much know each other..). This book was one big jump of the shark, but the point of no return was the cameo by a young John Lennon (Britain is very small you know, we bump into the Beatles all the time on our arcane public transport system).

Really a let down after so many other good books. No one does paranoid suburban magical realism like Alice Hoffmann.