The Best Books to Gift Mothers

Updated: May 12, 2023

Author

Carrie Thornbrugh

“Life doesn't come with a manual; it comes with a mother.”

Mother's Day is a special occasion celebrated around the world to honor and appreciate the significant role that mothers play in our lives. It can be a joyful day spent with family and friends, but it can also be a painful day for those who have lost their moms or mother figures in their lives. While gifts and gestures are lovely ways to show our appreciation, sometimes the best way to honor mothers is by taking a step back and reflecting on their immense contributions. And what better way to do that than by reading books about motherhood? Read on for some recommended books and public book clubs that delve into the complexities, challenges, and joys of motherhood.

Our picks for must-read books for Mother's Day 2023:

Look How Happy I'm Making You book cover

Look How Happy I'm Making You by Polly Rosenwaike

The women in Polly Rosenwaike's Look How Happy I'm Making You want to be mothers, or aren't sure they want to be mothers, or--having recently given birth--are overwhelmed by what they've wrought. One woman struggling with infertility deals with the news that her sister is pregnant. Another, nervous about her biological clock, "forgets" to take her birth control while dating a younger man and must confront the possibility of becoming a single parent. Four motherless women who meet in a bar every Mother's Day contend with their losses and what it would mean for one of them to have a child. Clever, empathetic, and precisely observed, these stories offer rare, honest portrayals of pregnancy and new motherhood in a culture obsessed with women's most intimate choices.

Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth

When Ralph and Abby Lamb move in with Ralph's mother, Laura, Abby hopes it's just what she and her mother-in-law need to finally connect. After a traumatic childhood, Abby is desperate for a mother figure, especially now that she and Ralph are trying to become parents themselves. Abby just has so much love to give--to Ralph, to Laura, and to Mrs. Bondy, her favorite resident at the long-term care home where she works. But Laura isn't interested in bonding with her daughter-in-law. She's venomous and cruel, especially to Abby, and life with her is hellish.

Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder

One day, the mother was a mother, but then one night, she was quite suddenly something else...

An ambitious mother puts her art career on hold to stay at home with her newborn son, but the experience does not match her imagination. Two years later, she steps into the bathroom for a break from her toddler's demands, only to discover a dense patch of hair on the back of her neck. In the mirror, her canines suddenly look sharper than she remembers. As the mother's symptoms intensify, and her temptation to give in to her new dog impulses peak, she struggles to keep her alter-canine-identity secret.

An outrageously original novel of ideas about art, power, and womanhood wrapped in a satirical fairy tale, Nightbitch will make you want to howl in laughter and recognition. And you should. You should howl as much as you want.

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan

Frida Liu is struggling. She doesn't have a career worthy of her Chinese immigrant parents' sacrifices. She can't persuade her husband, Gust, to give up his wellness-obsessed younger mistress. Only with Harriet, their cherubic daughter, does Frida finally attain the perfection expected of her. Harriet may be all she has, but she is just enough. Until Frida has a very bad day.

Because of one moment of poor judgment, a host of government officials will now determine if Frida is a candidate for a Big Brother-like institution that measures the success or failure of a mother's devotion. Faced with the possibility of losing Harriet, Frida must prove that a bad mother can be redeemed. That she can learn to be good.

This is a captivating and transgressive novel of ideas about the perils of "perfect" upper-middle class parenting; the violence enacted upon women by both the state and, at times, one another; the systems that separate families; and the boundlessness of love, The School for Good Mothers introduces, in Frida, an everywoman for the ages.

Breasts and Eggs: A Novel by Mieko Kawakami

On a sweltering summer day, Makiko travels from Osaka to Tokyo, where her sister Natsu lives. She is in the company of her daughter, Midoriko, who has lately grown silent, finding herself unable to voice the vague yet overwhelming pressures associated with adolescence. The story of these three women reunited in a working-class neighborhood of Tokyo is told through the gaze of Natsu--thirty years old, an aspiring writer, haunted by hardships endured in her youth. Over the course of their few days together in the capital, Midoriko's silence will prove a catalyst for each woman to confront her fears and family secrets.

One of Japan's most important and best-selling writers, Mieko Kawakami mixes stylistic inventiveness, wry humor, and riveting emotional depth to tell a story of contemporary womanhood in Japan. Breasts and Eggs recounts the intimate journeys of three women on the path to finding peace and futures they can call their own.

Grocery Shopping With My Mother by Kevin Powell

When Kevin Powell's elderly mother became ill, he returned home every week to take her grocery shopping in Jersey City. Walking behind her during those trips, Powell began to hear her voice, stories, and language in a new way--examining his own healing while praying for hers

Grocery Shopping with My Mother dives into the complexities of relationships and contemporary themes with honesty and vulnerability. Creatively and spiritually inspired by Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life, Powell's poems shift in form and style, from praise chants to reverential meditations to, most importantly, innovative hope.

Women Talking by Miriam Toews + Discussion Guide

One evening, eight Mennonite women climb into a hay loft to conduct a secret meeting. For the past two years, each of these women, and more than a hundred other girls in their colony, has been repeatedly violated in the night by demons coming to punish them for their sins. Now that the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community, they are determined to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm.

Based on real events and told through the "minutes" of the women's all-female symposium, Toews's masterful novel uses wry, politically engaged humor to relate this tale of women claiming their own power to decide.

Love and Fury: A Novel of Mary Wollstonecraft by Samantha Silva

August,1797: Midwife Parthenia Blenkinsop has delivered countless babies, but nothing prepares her for the experience that unfolds when she arrives at Mary Wollstonecraft's door. Over the eleven harrowing days that follow, as Mrs. Blenkinsop fights for the survival of both mother and newborn, Wollstonecraft recounts the life she dared to live amidst the impossible constraints and prejudices of the late 18th century, rejecting the tyranny of men and marriage, risking everything to demand equality for herself and all women. She weaves her riveting tale to give her fragile daughter a reason to live, even as her own strength wanes. Wollstonecraft's urgent story of loss and triumph forms the heartbreakingly brief intersection between the lives of a mother and daughter who will change the arc of history and thought. In radiant prose, Samantha Silva delivers an ode to the dazzling life of Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the world's most influential thinkers and mother of the famous novelist Mary Shelley. But at its heart, Love and Fury is a story about the power of a woman reclaiming her own narrative to pass on to her daughter, and all daughters, for generations to come.

Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro

The only novel from Alice Munro-award-winning author of The Love of a Good Woman--is an insightful, honest book, "autobiographical in form but not in fact," that chronicles a young girl's growing up in rural Ontario in the 1940s. Del Jordan lives out at the end of the Flats Road on her father's fox farm, where her most frequent companions are an eccentric bachelor family friend and her rough younger brother. When she begins spending more time in town, she is surrounded by women-her mother, an agnostic, opinionated woman who sells encyclopedias to local farmers; her mother's boarder, the lusty Fern Dogherty; and her best friend, Naomi, with whom she shares the frustrations and unbridled glee of adolescence.

Through these unwitting mentors and in her own encounters with sex, birth, and death, Del explores the dark and bright sides of womanhood. All along she remains a wise, witty observer and recorder of truths in small-town life. The result is a powerful, moving, and humorous demonstration of Alice Munro's unparalleled awareness of the lives of girls and women.

A Woman's Story by Annie Ernaux

Upon her mother's death from Alzheimer's, Ernaux embarks on a daunting journey back through time, as she seeks to capture the real woman, the one who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris.

She explores the bond between mother and daughter, tenuous and unshakable at once, the alienating worlds that separate them, and the inescapable truth that we must lose the ones we love. In this quietly powerful tribute, Ernaux attempts to do her mother the greatest justice she can: to portray her as the individual she was. She writes, "I believe I am writing about my mother because it is my turn to bring her into the world." It's a deeply affecting account of mothers and daughters, youth and age, and dreams and reality (Kirkus Reviews).

You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith

In her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself in lyrical vignettes that shine, hard and clear as jewels. The book begins with one woman's personal, particular heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist even in many progressive homes. With the spirit of self-inquiry and empathy she's known for, Smith interweaves snapshots of a life with meditations on secrets, anger, forgiveness, and narrative itself. The power of these pieces is cumulative: page after page, they build into a larger interrogation of family, work, and patriarchy.

You Could Make This Place Beautiful is a story about a mother's fierce and constant love for her children and a woman's love and regard for herself. With a poet's attention to language and an innovative approach to the genre, Smith reveals how, in the aftermath of loss, we can discover our power and make something new. Something beautiful.

Mother Is A Verb: An Unconventional History by Sarah Knott

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? 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.

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.

Women We Buried, Women We Burned by Rachel Louise Snyder

With the “propulsive force of a novel,” according to Nomandland author Jessica Bruder, Women We Buried, Women We Burned details Snyder's journey from teenage runaway to award-winning reporter on the global epidemic of violence against women, offering a piercing account of family struggle, female survival, and the passionate drive to bear witness. Perfect for fans of Educated and The Glass Castle.

Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood by Jessica Grose

After she failed to meet every one of her own expectations for her first pregnancy, author Jessica Grose devoted her career to revealing how morally bankrupt so many of these ideas and pressures are. Now, in Screaming on the Inside, Grose weaves together her personal journey with scientific, historical, and contemporary reporting to be the voice for American parents she wishes she'd had a decade ago. The truth is that parenting cannot follow a recipe; there's no foolproof set of rules that will result in a perfectly adjusted child. Every parent has different values, and we will have different ideas about how to pass those values along to our children. What successful parenting has in common, regardless of culture or community, is close observation of the kind of unique humans our children are. In thoughtful and revelatory chapters about pregnancy, identity, work, social media, and the crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic, Grose explains how we got to this moment, why the current state of expectations on mothers is wholly unsustainable, and how we can move towards something better.

Horizontal Parenting by Michelle Woo

Children are exhausting! In the marathon of modern parenting, everyone needs a break--just 10 precious minutes to rest your body and tune out the chaos. Enter horizontal parenting, the super-simple parenting hack for everyone, everywhere. With creative and practical advice for overworked parents and caretakers who "just need a minute," this book includes 50 fun, effective, and hilarious games to play with toddlers and children while lying down.

mom reading with child

These books offer a glimpse into the many facets of motherhood, from the challenges and struggles to the joys and rewards. They remind us of the importance of honoring and appreciating the mothers in our lives not just on Mother's Day, but every day. Consider selecting one of the books above for your May book club meeting or for bookish moms out there looking for a book club to join, check out the following public clubs to join!

Book Clubs for Moms by Moms:

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