The Not So Perfect Mum

Kerry Fisher

Jul 2014 · HarperCollins UK

About this ebook

A hilarious, straight-talking read for fans of Fiona Gibson’s The Mum Who Got Her Life Back and Sarah Morgan’s Family for Beginners.

Previously published as ‘The School Gate Survival Guide’.

Maia is a cleaner for ladies who lunch. With mops and buckets in tow, she spends her days dashing from house to house cleaning up after them, as they rush from one exhausting Pilates class to the next.

But an unusual inheritance catapults her and her children into the very exclusive world of Stirling Hall School – a place where no child can survive without organic apricots and no woman goes a week without a manicure.

As Maia and her children, Bronte and Harley, try to settle into their new life, Maia is inadvertently drawn to the one man who can help her family fit in. But is his interest in her purely professional? And will it win her any favours at the school gate?

A hilarious, straight-talking read for anyone who's ever despaired at the politics of the school run.

Ratings and reviews

Maia is mum to two primary school aged children, living with her partner(and father to her children) Colin and trying to hold the family together from her income as a Cleaner. Her favourite, and most lucrative client, passes away and Maia is genuinely upset - not only about the loss of income but also the loss of a friend and mentor. Couple with this her worries over bringing the children up on the Walldon Estate and Colin's lack of interest in finding work and life is just one long worry. Summoned to the solicitor's office she finds that the dear departed Prof. has left her £24K a year - so long as it is used to pay for the children to go to private school. Over-riding Colin's resistance to the idea of sending Harley and Bronte somehow Maia scrimps and saves to afford school uniform and school supplies all in the name of giving her children the best possible start in their life. So starts the rollercoaster of Maia's life. Engagingly told with a good few dollops of pathos as well as humour; this is a great read for a wet weekend curled up in front of a warm fire. Nothing ground breaking or illuminating about the tale, or the way it is told but enjoyable enough. The characters are more or less walking stereotypes: Colin - Feckless, lazy, council estate male who spends all his money down the pub and the bookies. Lost his physique and now sprawls on the couch in his vest when not out spending his benefits. Maia - Put upon modern women who is trying to do everything for everyone but failing. Jennifer - Very middle-class and despises the peons from the estate and is not afraid of showing it. Clover - Seriously rich, clearly from old money but seriously scatty and foul mouthed. I think you get the point. It doesn't help that you more or less know exactly how things will turn out from the first 50 or so pages. If you are a fan of chic-lit then this is a worthwhile purchase, if you are on the fence about the genre then this may not be for you as the story is pretty much a genre staple. The writing is adequate with sparks of genuinely good passages of dialogue that do drive the tale forward. Personally, although this is not literature in any shape or form it is an enjoyable story that is told acceptably well and it entertained me. So, despite all my criticisms above I still gave it a middling 3 stars because it did what all books should do - entertained with a tale.

omg! I have never EVER cried reading a book in my 42 years of life and I did with this! I have over four thousand books in my playbooks library and this has been the best by far. Kerry F. you are amazing. Thank you Hammy Grey.

A great story told with the usual humour I now expect from a 'Kerry Fisher' book!

About the author

Kerry was brought up in Peterborough. She now lives in Surrey with a very tolerant husband and two children. She studied at Bath University and speaks fluent Italian, Spanish and French. She also trained as a journalist at City University, then went on to write travel guidebooks for Thomas Cook.

After landing her dream job working on women’s magazines, she discovered that she hated writing about real people in case their families got upset.

The Writers’ Program at the University of California helped her move from fact into fiction – the perfect forum for exploring human emotions without worrying about some poor mother weeping over her son’s account of his childhood.