Million Tiny Things

Discovering herself pregnant with a third child she'd sworn not to have, Kenna Lee wanted more than ever to follow the advice in the never-ending stream of "e;go green"e; books and magazine articles. Fortunately for her readers, Kenna's two toddlers and a bad case of morning sickness turned her oft-foiled attempts at Doing the Right Thing into a darker, but funnier, shade of green. "e;Kenna Lee says all the things out loud that the rest of us keep to ourselves, and in doing that she gives us the best gift we can hope to receive from a book: the realization we're not all alone with these dark thoughts of ours."e; - Susan Choi, author of A Person of Interest and American Woman, Pulitzer Prize FinalistWhat those "e;go green"e; books and articles almost never address is the real-life gap between our beliefs, our desires to change, and our day-to-day actions, down in the trenches of parenthood. A Million Tiny Things is an on-the-ground chronicle about the process of figuring it all out: mothering and life, from diapers to bio-diesel, carpool politics to climate change. It's a book for the rest of us, articulating our common anxieties and the discomforts of the "e;solutions"e; we are being offered, while still clinging desperately to humor and hope. Through a continuum of personal stories about having more kids than she planned, driving a bigger car than she wanted, eating more junk than she should, and buying a seemingly incessant flow of not-entirely necessary products, A Million Tiny Things describes Kenna's journey toward righteous green living, replete with both high ideals and low impulses. The book's three-year narrative span traces Kenna's oxymoronic minivan-driven campaign to save the planet, ranging from reproduction-induced guilt, through moments of plastic-laden frustration, toward a fragile hopefulness maintained by small eco-righteous actions and constant cracks at self-forgiveness. In the words of her editor, C.A. Carlson: In the end, it's a book not just about saving the world, but about why the world is worth saving.