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Description
Mother Is a Verb: An Unconventional HistoryWelcome to a work of history unlike any other. Mothering is as old as human existence. But how has this most essential experience changed over time and cultures? What is the history of maternity the history of pregnancy, birth, the encounter with an infant? Can one capture the historical trail of mothers? How? In Mother Is a Verb, the historian Sarah Knott creates a genre all her own in order to craft a new kind of historical interpretation. Blending
Welcome to a work of history unlike any other.
Mothering is as old as human existence. But how has this most essential experience changed over time and cultures? What is the history of maternity--the history of pregnancy, birth, the encounter with an infant? Can one capture the historical trail of mothers? How? In Mother Is a Verb, the historian Sarah Knott creates a genre all her own in order to craft a new kind of historical interpretation. Blending memoir and history and building from anecdote, her book brings the past and the present viscerally alive. It is at once intimate and expansive, lyrical and precise. As a history, Mother Is a Verb draws on the terrain of Britain and North America from the seventeenth century to the close of the twentieth. Knott searches among a range of past societies, from those of Cree and Ojibwe women to tenant farmers in Appalachia; from enslaved people on South Carolina rice plantations to tenement dwellers in New York City and London's East End. She pores over diaries, letters, court records, medical manuals, items of clothing. And she explores and documents her own experiences. As a memoir, Mother Is a Verb becomes a method of asking new questions and probing lost pasts in order to historicize the smallest, even the most mundane of human experiences. Is there a history to interruption, to the sound of an infant's cry, to sleeplessness? Knott finds answers not through the telling of grand narratives, but through the painstaking accumulation of a trellis of anecdotes. And all the while, we can feel the child on her hip.Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Picador USA
Published: 08/25/2020
ISBN: 9781250251299
Pages: 320
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.70h x 5.80w x 0.80d
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4.7 ★★★★★
Based on 21 reviews
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Product Reviews
★★★★★ 5
Great intro to (Monty) Python...
Format: Hardcover
Quick start books are really really good. Get right to the topic but in a way that does not leave your head swimming. Great intro text to the language that will prepare the reader for deeper tomes with the added bonus of a pretty well structured intro project. Recommend this publisher and will be looking for more of their titles.
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Reviewed in the United States on June 20, 2025
★★★★★ 5
Great for reluctant readers
Format: Paperback
This book is great for reluctant readers. I got this for my niece and her mother asked if I knew of any other graphic novels like this one because of how much my niece loved reading it. I ended up reading it and the story is very enjoyable and inspiring. The art is exceptional. I was very happy to find that there are more in the series. I bought both the first and second ones for my step daughter and other nieces this Christmas. Highly recommend!
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Reviewed in the United States on January 10, 2026
★★★★★ 5
Foster Care! Magic Paint! Superheroes! OH MY!
Format: Kindle
This was a great read. I loved everything about it. The artwork is vivid. The main character’s personality is spot-on. The humor was great.
Ashley is a girl in a world where she is herself and nobody else. At least, that’s what she thinks. Really, she’s a girl stuck in foster care because her dad’s in jail. She has a carefree attitude on the outside, but on the inside she’s really tender-hearted. Then one day a new family shows up, attempting foster care with Ashley. She’s living pretty nicely there and she’s made a friend named Luke. Then one day her foster mom comes home acting kind of strange. Later, Ashley decides to snoop into what’s in that mysterious suitcase her foster mom brought in and hid in a closet. She and Luke find paint. Lots of tubes of paint. Ashley puts them on her skin, because she “likes the texture.” This is where I think it’s waaaaay too obvious that what she’s doing has to be specifically made like that for the storyline. It’s okay though, they do an okay job of hiding it. Anyway. These paints are magic paints that give the person who wears them superpowers! So of course Ashley has to go and use them and be a superhero she calls ‘Primer’. But her foster mom’s job wants those paints she brought home back. So they send their roughest, toughest soldier to retrieve them. Ashley, of course, has a fight with her foster mom about it, and Ashley decides to run away, taking the paints with her.
Then obviously the soldier dude shows up, with a bunch of robots. There it just turns into your normal superhero fight scene, but then Ashley loses and the paints are taken except the teleportation one. The soldier, by the way, is named Strack. So then Ashley’s like, “Oh no, I’ll neeever be a hero” even though obviously she will, this is a superhero story. Suddenly her phone is ringing. It’s her foster dad and mom. She picks up their video call and it’s STRACK! He’s adult-napped her foster parents, of course. She debates going to fight Strack, or to just leave it. She goes with leave it until she looks up and sees a painting she made and this suddenly gives her confidence, for reasons unknown.
So then there’s another big fight scene with Strack, but Ashley is overconfident like she knows she can’t die, it’s a book and that would be devastating for little ones reading it. Anyway, she wins and frees her parents and they all live happily ever after.
So, this story ends in a cliffhanger that’s not a very good one. It’s just Ashley’s REAL dad seeing her on TV from when she went out and was a superhero the first time, and he’s like, “You’re not Primer, every father knows his daughter’s eyes, ASHLEY. See you soon.” So if I was hanging from a cliff here, I would be attached to it with a safety cable and I would be laying on the top of the cliff, with only my foot hanging off. It’s not much of a cliffhanger.
This was a great book about a female superhero. Oh, and another thing I forgot to mention, there is a page you should skip if you are reading to a child under seven. Page…. Let’s see here… oh yes. Page seventy-seven. It involves a gun and likely shooting afterwards, but it isn’t shown. I am a very sensitive person, and even I, an almost-teen was kind of rustled by it. Anyways, great story, lovely artwork, good book.
I’m rounding up from 4.5 stars.
-written by a tween
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Reviewed in the United States on February 26, 2022
★★★★★ 5
The best graphic novel!!
Format: Paperback
A great book... My daughter read this at the local library and had to have it ... She reads this constantly!!
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Reviewed in the United States on February 2, 2026
★★★★★ 5
Good read
Format: Paperback
My 8 year old son really enjoyed this graphic novel. Asked for the 2nd book but cant find it. Will keep looking.
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Reviewed in the United States on March 22, 2026