May Contain Nuts - John O'Farrell

Just to get the obvious out of the way, 'May Contain Nuts' is a very funny, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny book. It starts out very promisingly: as a farce, really, an almost (but not quite, as not to alienate the potential readership) vicious satire on ridiculously competitive urban upper middle class parents hot-housing their children into Prokofiev appreciation and contract bridge, children scheduled, tutored and stimulated; never left alone to do 'whatever', never let go. Satire on paranoid parenting with mothers checking every label of every foodstuff and not allowing an 11 year old to walk down the road to a newsagent, never mind travel on a bus to school. Satire ...

I must confess to you that I am not sure that I would like to be a parent. The responsibility of brining a new person into the world, looking after it and teaching it to be a good citizen is very frightening. You want your child to be protected from the big bad world. It is human nature but where is the line drawn and where do you neglect the interest of the child so it is some over protected pampered but unhappy child? Alice Chaplin the main character in John O'Farrell's "May Contain Nuts" certainly knows about this dilemma. Alice Chaplin is a neurotic middle class mother living in South London. She wants her children to have the best chances in ...

Having read and thoroughly enjoyed John O'Farrell's two previous novels - not to mention "Things Can Only Get Better", his hilarious memoir of life as a Labour supporter under 18 years of Tory (mis)rule - I was looking forward to reading his latest, a satire on modern middle-class parenting. Clapham definitely contains more than a handful of nuts, at least if the characters in this book are anything to go by! The novel is narrated by Alice Chaplin, mother of three - eleven-year-old Molly and her two younger brothers, Jamie and Alfie ("Nobody had told us that the '-ie/-y' suffix wasn't actually compulsory."). The children attend a private ...