The Art of Good Enough: The Working Mom’s Guilt-Free Guide to Thriving While Being Perfectly Imperfect

This results-oriented, disappointing debut from Ge, a doctor of pharmacy, pushes women to put daily effort toward a “worthy goal” beyond creating income, parenting, and maintaining a marriage. Ge opens with a strength assessment questionnaire and advice for readers to be nicer to themselves, and then moves on to present her methods for dealing with anxiety, guilt, and shame, which ask women to supersede their emotions with logic. To help understand and overcome negative emotions, she suggests tips for combating the fear of failure, such as to “put things in perspective” and to “think like a man” by putting failure behind oneself in order to “jump back into action.” She also instructs readers in ways to age gracefully—by maintaining good posture, a regular sleep schedule, and a healthy skin-care routine—and makes suggestions for keeping up with cultural beauty standards, working out, and meeting gendered expectations like smiling or being sufficiently exciting in bed. She also provides a model of parenting that focuses on teaching children to be the “3 R’s—resilient, responsible, and resourceful.” Ge’s focus on persistence and methodology, combined with her reminder that childhood dreams don’t go away when one has a family, are inspiring. But those wrangling with the emotional ramifications of balancing career, family, and cultural expectations of women’s behavior are likely to find her approach unforgiving and facile. While Ge provides a straightforward framework, her narrow advice will only appeal to women already secure in their gender role. (Self-published)