Raising a Reader : A Mother's Tale of Desperation and Delight

What were my kids born to do? That is the question I hope to help them answer. And because reading is the thing I love most, it's only natural for me to hope it will become something they love, too...The trouble is that reading is a particularly slippery passion to want to pass along because it's a skill most parents would agree their children have to master, to one degree or another.
--from Raising a Reader

Can passion be passed along from parent to child? Can you, in other words, make someone love baseball, ballet or books? Of course you can't - but that doesn't stop parents from trying. Jennie Nash was one of those parents - a parent so obsessed about getting her kids to read that her desire sometimes strayed into desperation; her hope often became an obsession; and instead of helping, her resolve got in the way. In the end, she found that, like so many of the things we do as parents, passing along a passion for reading happens in the push and pull of digging in and letting go, day in and day out, both because of and in spite of our efforts.

Nash shares stories and misadventures from the years when her young daughters were learning what it meant to have a relationship with words--and she was learning to let them. She reminds us how the magic moments happen in their own sweet time, by being together in the presence of good books and seeing each child as unique.

Each chapter of Raising a Reader ends with personal, practical tips and games that spring straight from the narrative. A comprehensive index discusses many of the books Nash has enjoyed with her children, providing a year's worth of titles for parents and their children to explore.

Jennie Nash is the author of The Victoria's Secret Catalog Never Stops Coming: And Other Lessons I Learned from Breast Cancer and Altared States. Her work has appeared in Child, Shape, HOME, Reader's Digest, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Working Mother, Glamour, GQ, Mademoiselle, US, and Cosmopolitan, among other publications. She lives in Torrance, California with her husband and her two daughters.