I just finished reading The Mother-Daughter Book Club, the first in a middle-grade series by the same name.  I’ve been meaning to read this series for awhile and I’m finally getting around to it.  The premise is so sweet: a group of moms organize a book club for themselves and their sixth-grade daughters.  The moms and daughters read Little Women together while the girls navigate the drama of sixth grade, asking all the while, “What would Jo March do?”

For the most part, I really liked The Mother-Daughter Book Club.  It was cute and the characters were engaging, and I enjoyed seeing Little Women through a different lens.  But there was one thing that really bothered me, and days later, it’s still nagging at me:

I didn’t like the way the moms made fun of another mom in front of their daughters.

Mrs. Chadwick is not a pleasant character.  She’s the town shrew, she’s mean, she expels the book club from the library, and she’s the epitome of helicopter parent.  She actually chastises a mom because her kid, in Mrs. Chadwick’s opinion, took her son’s place on the youth hockey team (even though her son can barely stand up on skates).  She also turns a blind eye to the bullying done by her daughter, Becca, the school snob.  When Becca steals another girl’s diary and reads it aloud to the victim’s crush, Mrs. Chadwick refuses to chastise her.  She also yells at one of the book club girls after Becca violently shakes the girl’s five-year-old brother by the arm.  Much of what Mrs. Chadwick does throughout the book is very much not okay.

However.  Mrs. Chadwick’s distinguishing physical feature is a large posterior, and the other moms vent their frustration about her high-handed tactics toward their book club by commenting upon it, incessantly, in the presence of their daughters.  They teach the girls to play a “synonym game” where they use synonyms for “big” in front of Mrs. Chadwick (who, true to form, doesn’t realize she’s being mocked).  Toward the end of the book Mrs. Hawthorne, the town librarian and organizer of the book club, comments, “Now that’s what I’d call a caboose.”  When the other moms gasp “Phoebe!” Mrs. Hawthorne turns red (even though she’s made the occasional nasty comment about Mrs. Chadwick before – she’s not the worst offender, but she’s hardly innocent) and begs them not to tell her husband what she said.

Your husband? I thought.  Who cares what he thinks?  Worry about them not telling your daughter – or actually, don’t, because she’s sitting right there and heard it for herself.  And if she isn’t already wondering, Emma Hawthorne will be soon beginning to question whether it’s okay for the other girls to comment upon her weight – which they do, even her friends – given that her own mother fat-talks another mom.

The book club moms have quite the double standard for what’s okay.  On the one hand, they heavily chastise and nearly expel one girl from the club because she turns a blind eye and participates in bullying.  But then they gang up on another mom.  They exclude Mrs. Chadwick from the club because she’s not in their yoga class (although, as Mrs. Hawthorne acidly remarks, yoga would do her some good).  They purport to instruct the girls on how to treat one another even when they’re bullying another mother.  Practice what you preach, ladies.  Forget Jo March.  What would Marmee do?  I can tell you one thing: she wouldn’t fat-talk another mom in front of her little women, no matter how irritating that other mom was.  I kept hoping for one of the moms to realize this and put a stop to the behavior, but none of them did.

Girls absorb a lot of information through their moms – not only from being spoken to directly, but from watching them too.  As Mrs. Hawthorne says, little pitchers have big ears.  The moms of the Mother-Daughter Book Club clearly know better, but what they’re teaching their daughters – even while giving lip service to kindness – is that bullying is okay if it’s someone outside your social circle.  That consideration and gentle treatment is reserved for your friends and when it comes to your enemies, all bets are off.  The girls spent the book listening to their moms tell them to treat one another nicely, but then watching them tear another mom down.  That’s a lesson that will stick with those girls, and not in a good way.  I don’t know if it’s something I would have picked up on before having Peanut, but now that I have a daughter I try to think about the example I set for her.  I want her to grow up treating herself and others with kindness.  I’m certainly not planning to preach one behavior and model the opposite – because girls are always watching, and they notice everything.  Peanut’s young yet, but ten years from now she’ll be embarking on her own middle school journey and when she does, she’ll have a mom that sets an example for her, and she’ll certainly never hear me fat-talking another woman.  I’m not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but I am going to try as hard as I can to never tear down another woman in front of Peanut.  I hope that in the second book, Much Ado About Anne, the book club moms will set a better example too.

According to the publisher’s description Much Ado About Anne, the moms invite Mrs. Chadwick and “snooty” Becca to join the book club in the next book.  So I’m hoping that one or all of them had an attitude adjustment and realized that they were behaving in exactly the unkind way they were warning their daughters against.  I’m not going to stop reading the series, because I really did enjoy the first book.  The premise is a lot of fun, and I did love the characters.  But if Peanut ever picks up this series, she and I will definitely talk after the first book about the moms’ behavior and how it relates to what she may experience with girls in middle school.  I’ll explain to her that sometimes moms make mistakes, and that it’s wrong to make nasty comments about a person’s appearance no matter how old you are.  And I’ll try my best to practice what I preach, because that’s what both Marmee and Jo would do.