Come on-a my house. I'm going to give you plain-ass vanilla ice cream.

The Atlas of Love
Laurie Frankel

See that book? That's a BABY on the cover. That's why I bought this book, you know. I used to be impervious to babies, but now I am not. Their fat, fat cheeks and eensy-weensy little socks draw me in. I would buy a $300 toilet plunger if you emblazoned it with a picture of a baby face with a drooling, grinning mouth and one tiny tooth. Because that's the way my life is now. Thank you, hormones!

And while I can't say that I enjoyed The Atlas of Love, there were things I enjoyed ABOUT it.

• It was refreshing to read a book set in the Pacific Northwest. I liked that.
  
• I also liked that there was a baby named Atlas. Hubs and I have discussed kind of a weird name for our fetus, and we know that people won't like it, and we're going to take a lot of flak for it. So the fact that people took to a baby named Atlas was heartening to me.
  
• It's better than the other book featuring Atlas in the title (Damn you, Rand!)
  

Most of all, though, what I liked about The Atlas of Love was that it at first glance, it seemed like it would advance the cause of nontraditional families, an issue near and dear to my heart. It's a polarizing subject. It's going to piss some people off, or scare others. But Frankel manages to present things to a broad audience in a non-threatening way. When grad student Jill becomes pregnant, and decides to co-parent her baby with her roommates and best friends, Janey and Katie, then Frankel is free to tackle this controversial issue of what exactly makes a family without actually having to be controversial.

Meaning, of course, that she can explore the problems caused by the lack of recognition for gay marriages, or the intricate emotional balance of a polyamorous relationship, without having to mention sex, which can be so off-putting. Katie and Jill and Janey struggle with the same issues that these other families face: unexpected jealousies and rivalries, legal barriers to their parenting of their child. There's an especially compelling scene that highlights the girls' tenuous predicament, in which Janey rushes Atlas to the hospital, says she's his mother and is almost arrested for her claims. It's a scene that plays out in hospitals all over America, but here it's an educated, non-threatening straight white girl, we're sympathizing with, so you don't have to get all uncomfortably political about it.

So things started out promising, but then they...stalled around the middle somewhere. And the problem with this book is the same thing that makes this book so appealing to so many people. Frankel tries so hard to create an inoffensive nontraditional family that she ends up making one that's offensively bland. A vast portion of the word count is dedicated to B- and C-plot love stories, almost as though to reinforce that we don't have to worry about any squishy sexual issues. (There's even a Mormon thrown into the mix, for extra reassurance.) For all the sturm und drang, there's never any doubt whom Atlas's real mother is, even among the characters themselves. And with a wedding ending the book, it seems the traditional family unit wins out in the end.

So what has this book contributed? It's not the goal of every novel to push boundaries or advance some social agenda. But in this case, Frankel went to the effort of writing this, her first novel, seemingly to tell us how OK it is for a family that's not mom, dad, baby to exist. And then she disbands that family in favor of mom, dad, baby; everyone neatly paired up with opposite-sex romantic partners, animals going onto the ark in twosies, twosies. Ultimately, the act of reading this novel is something akin to trying to drive a car that's stuck in the mud. The wheels go round in a circle with a lot of noise and motion, only so you can end up in the same place you started out.

Rating: 2 of 5 stars