'Mommy Lit' Taps Motherlode of Frustration

Slate reviewer Katie Roiphe dresses down the entire emerging "Mommy Lit" genre in her caustic feminist review of the Brit bestseller "Slummy Mummy." Roiphe says she doesn't have a problem with light summer page-turners, but she takes issue with the novel's celebration of frumpy female mediocrity. 

Fiona Neill's novel, based on her columns for the London Times, is ho-hum women's middlebrow fiction at its worse, with none of Bridget's Jones' oomf, according to Roiphe. Yes, being a stay-at-home is a tough job, Rolphe admits, but asks "is it really that hard? Aren't there some things on earth that are harder?" (More literature stories.)