Mele, single mother of Ellie, joined the San Francisco Mother's Club (SFMC) to be matched with the perfect playgroup, something that never happened. Two years later, she's part of a rogue, "laughing, shit-talking, texting, even talking on the phone" fivesome that came together organically at the playground they all frequent. They've recently decided to go "official" with SFMC for the benefits, one of which, for Mele, means entering the SFMC Cookbook Competition. Completing the intimately detailed questionnaire yields wild and zany answers that reveal how Mele improvises (including the truth), seeks (even steals), and obsesses (over Ellie's father's desertion and his impending wedding). Interspersed with Mele's self-examination are entertaining glimpses of her eclectic playgroup; between trying too hard to impress and managing fraying familial bonds, Mele's four BFFs provide just the right recipe for companionship, support, and raucous good times. Hemmings (The Descendants) mixes the best and worst moments of parenthood with plenty of snark and delight. With her buoyant, charming voice, Joy Osmanski proves ideal for eliciting eye-rolling sympathy and head-nodding empathy. VERDICT Audiences in search of a chuckle-inducing, bitingly smart read will surely enjoy listening in. ["Effectively captures the judgmental, overly prescribed nature of today's parenting assumptions": LJ 8/16 review of the S. & S. hc.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Using the San Francisco Mommy's Club as her clearinghouse, single parent Mele searches for a playgroup for her daughter, Elle. She wants to find other parents like herself: young, hip, edgy but grounded; not the label-lording, thigh-gap-obsessed, organic-vegan-non-GMO crowd she is matched with. And then, in one of the city's less desirable parks, she finds her tribe: Annie, Georgia, Bartlett, and Henry. They help Mele cope with the fact that her ex, Elle's father, is getting married, that he had, in fact, been engaged while dating Mele, and that he wants Elle to be the flower girl. So she spends her playdates obsessing about unfairness and completing the questionnaire to enter the SFMC's cookbook competition, profiling her pals and pairing recipes with their personal tales of woe. This is satire with soul. Hemmings (The Possibilities, 2014) skewers the cottage industries that helicopter motherhood has fostered, while plaintively celebrating the basic joys and frustrations all parents experience. Whip-smart, sharp-witted, and downright brave, Hemmings' novel of modern parenting is sleek, sly, and sublime.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2016 Booklist

In her funny and sensitive fourth novel, Hemmings (The Descendants) explores the intersection of personhood and parenthood. Mele Bart is a single mother in San Francisco navigating the world of potty-training specialists, elite preschools, playdate etiquette, and nanny envy. To top it all off, she is contemplating attending the wedding of the father of her child, the man who left her when she told him she was pregnant. After multiple failed attempts at seeming like another perfect privileged mother, Mele finds refuge among the other misfit parents in her daughter's playgroup-Annie, Barrett, Georgia, and Henry. With their encouragement, she decides to revisit her dream of becoming an author and enters a cookbook-writing contest sponsored by the San Francisco Mother's Club. Interspersing recipes inspired by her own life with recipes inspired by the other parents in her group, all of whom are dealing with feelings of inadequacy, Mele devises a cookbook that is equal parts introspection and sharp observation. Mele's candor, her friends' stories, and some hilariously cringe-worthy interjections from the Mother's Club online message board come together in a layered narrative that is both ruthless and empathetic, satirical and sincere. Agent: David Forrer, Inkwell Management. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

WHITE RAGE: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, by Carol Anderson. (Bloomsbury, $17.) In 2014, as protests erupted in Ferguson, Mo., after the killing of Michael Brown, Anderson wrote about the white backlash to black progress. She expands her argument to include tensions stretching back to the Civil War, times when white rage thwarted efforts toward democracy and a semblance of racial equality. SWING TIME, by Zadie Smith. (Penguin, $17.) Two girls in Northwest London forge a close, complicated friendship in their dance class, where they are the only "brown girls"; they rely on one another to navigate a swirl of issues surrounding class, race and politics. Years later, their relationship has ruptured but still forms the emotional core of the novel, which brims with "cadenced digressions and lyrical love letters" to dance and London itself, Holly Bass wrote here. BEING MORTAL: Medicine and What Matters in the End, by Atul Gawande. (Picador, $16.) Gawande, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a surgeon, examines various models of living for older people, from multigenerational homes to hospice care, and outlines a case for a paradigm shift among medical professionals: Doctors should expand their focus from treating and curing disease to improving well-being and end-of-life care. THE SENILITY OF VLADIMIR R, by Michael Honig. (Pegasus, $15.95.) A novel imagines President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in decline: retired, sidelined by dementia and tended to by a cast of aides. His nurse, Nikolai, an unfailingly scrupulous man, is naive about Russia's corruption, until his nephew becomes embroiled in a scandal - exacerbated by Nikolai's proximity to Vladimir. As our reviewer, Boris Fishman, wrote, "this is an author who understands the grotesque reality of a place where the honest man is the coward." LABOR OF LOVE: The Invention of Dating, by Moira Weigel. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $16.) After a heartbreak, Weigel set out to investigate the history of courtship in the United States and the romantic dissatisfaction and unbalanced gender roles it perpetuates. Weigel adroitly draws on pop culture and history - from reality TV to the self-help industry - as evidence, though her scope is largely limited to straight couples. HOW TO PARTY WITH AN INFANT, by Kaui Hart Hemmings. (Simon & Schuster, $16.) With her personal life in turmoil, Mele Bart, a single mother in San Francisco, looks to a local cookbook competition as a distraction. There, she finds solace and strength in a band of other hilarious and misfit parents, who help temper the absurdities of raising children in a hypercompetitive and status-obsessed community.