The Baby Diaries by Sam Binnie

The Baby Diaries by Sam Binnie
Buy The Baby Diaries by Sam Binnie at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Women's Fiction
Reviewer: Zoe Page
Summary: The next installment in the popular and entertaining Diaries series, this is the one where baby makes 3. Funny and sweet, and very easy to read.
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 384	Date: February 2013
Publisher: Avon
ISBN: 978-0007477104
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Hot on the heels of the Wedding Diaries, Kiki and Thom are back with the next installment of their lives. It’s not giving too much away, given the title, to tell you that there’s a baby on the way. It was sorta, kinda not all that planned, but they’re happy if a little shocked. Luckily she’s got her sister to guide her through the process, numerous friends who are newly married, newly pregnant or newly parents themselves, and her own mother who seems to be almost nice for once.

This being Kiki’s life, though, things can never be that simple, and whether she’s burning down the house or not taking pregnancy yoga as seriously as she’s expected to, there’s always something to make you smile during the 9 months. Still trying to hold down her job in publishing, and juggling concerns about her family’s health, the months fly by in a story where there’s a lot going on, but everything now seems to have a baby theme to it.

I love the way she over-reacts to so many things, like planning a whole future friendship with her new GP based on the fact she seems nice and is also pregnant. What better basis do you need for a friendship, anyway? I also enjoyed her erm, what now? approach to pregnancy, where she very much seems to have been thrown in the deep end. Unlike the smug mothers she finds herself up against, she has no clue what is coming next, hasn’t spent years swotting up through baby books, and generally is bemused, and befuddled, but various aspects of pregnancy. She’s not too ridiculously thick or dozy, but she does come across as someone quite normal, someone who has been busy doing other things in life to date rather than practicing and preparing for being a mum.

This is the perfect follow up to the original book that started the series, and I actually think I liked this one a bit better, though I’d still recommend you start there for the full introduction to the characters. Like the first book, this is funny, and easy to read, taking a diary format with a mixture of short and long entries, script-style conversations and literary interludes each month. It’s better written than a lot of 'silly' chicklit, and seems well researched and up to date too – I liked the reference to Pertussis vaccination for pregnant mums, which is quite a new thing.

This is a predictable book – the clue is in the title – but that doesn’t mean it’s not a great read, whether you’re prenatal, antenatal, postnatal or as far from natal as can be. Recommended.

Thanks go to the publishers for supplying this book.

Shopaholic and Baby by Sophie Kinsella tells a similar story. I like to think Becky and Kiki would be friends, y'know? You never quite know how things will turn out, but I reckon if it's anything like The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy by Fiona Neill they'll have a blast.

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You can read more book reviews or buy The Baby Diaries by Sam Binnie at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
You can read more book reviews or buy The Baby Diaries by Sam Binnie at Amazon.com.

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