I received an Advance Reading Copy of this book thanks to the publisher. All opinions are my own. Available through Greenleaf Book Group Press 13 April 2026.
Elly Sparrow didn’t plan on having four children or that her life would be narrowed down to simply being their mother. But somewhere along the way, her life has become very small. On the surface, everything looks perfect. Her husband is a succesful lawyer, her children are healthy, her home is clean and tidy. But Elly is increasingly unhappy and her marriage is falling apart. Her husband, Dan, seems bored of her, uninterested in anything she has to say and she feels detached from the world around her. When Dan moves out, Elly must figure out what her life is actually about and who she is.
Rules for Mothers is set in Portland, Oregon in the 1980s, a setting that worked well for the kind of story that Swendsen Young was telling. Divorce is still uncommon but not unheard of. Likewise with women in the workforce. Elly hasn’t worked in years but did have a job before having children and is able to use some of those previous connections to navigate her previous life, though Dan remains the primary breadwinner. This negated any tension that might have come from Elly having to support herself as a single mother.
Dan isn’t necessarily a bad guy though he comes off as a disinterested husband and father. He speaks disparagingly to Elly when they are still together and he doesn’t seem particularly introspective, though we do learn more about his background as the story progresses. He works hard, aiming to be made partner of a law firm, and sees this as enough in his familial role. An attitude that was probably pretty prevalent in the 1980s.
Elly loves her children but is also overwhelmed and doesn’t know how to balance those two things. An attitude that was probably pretty prevalent in the 1980s and still is today. For all the progress we’ve made in the past 40+ years, I still don’t know a mother of young children who feels confident in that balance of self and motherhood.
I think there’s an interesting story being told here and it’s all the more interesting for how familiar it is. Where Rules for Mothers fell flat for me was that I wanted to feel more tension. I guess I wanted to worry about Elly and her children but things often seemed to work out more easily than I would have expected. She stays in their family home while Dan is the one to move out, she is able to find childcare and get a job. She and Dan argue about how to divide their parenting time but that seemed inevitable to me. I have to admit that I’m also listing to Nesting by Roisin O’Donnell, another story of a woman whose marriage is in the process of ending, and it was hard not to compare the two. Nesting has almost too much tension for me but every time I picked Rules for Mothers back up, Elly’s problems didn’t seem so bad.
The ultimate climax of the book does go in an unexpected direction and I appreciated that Swendsen Young took it there, but I would have liked to stay in that situation a little longer, learn more about what Elly was experiencing there. The jump to something bigger happening to her (I don’t want to give it away) felt like a big one and then the story wrapped up a little too quickly.
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