'The Sunshine When She's Gone' by Thea Goodman

The Sunshine When She’s Gone, Thea Goodman (2.5)

For such a bright and cheery book cover, I found this to be a depressing book. The married main characters narrate a weekend in alternate chapters. I don’t mind giving away the main plot point – as it happens quickly in the book and hopefully none of you will read it anyway. They have a baby and are dealing with new parenthood. The book begins with the father deciding to take the baby for an early morning trip to a diner (they live in NYC) on the corner to let the mother sleep in. He grabs their mail to read over breakfast. Once he finds the diner closed, and finds their passports in the pile of mail, he decides to take the baby on an adventure – and jumps on a plane for Barbados- without telling the mother! That the mother wakes up sees the note that they’ve gone to breakfast, gets a voicemail later in the day that they are visiting grandma and doesn’t actually talk with the father the ENTIRE WEEKEND is really unimaginable to me. As the weekend unfurls the mother parties it up and the father realizes taking care of a baby is not really as easy as he thought – they both do unforgivable things and eventually reconnect, but by that time you despise them both and frankly don’t care what happens. The ending is more of an aside than anything else. A comment on the back of the book indicated that the book was funny and had a lot of truths about parenting. I hope that is not true – and I can’t imagine who would find this book at all funny.