This is one of those "I'll read it someday" books. When a copy happened to land in the children's department, I decided that this was as good a time as any. Lindbergh, wife of the famous aviator, uses different types of seashells as metaphors for aspects of the lives of women and occasionally men. While there is much here to appreciate in this slight volume, there was much that annoyed me. Of course, it is easy to recommend that women take vacations away from their obligations of home and family to recharge when you are wealthy and have your own beach house in Hawaii to escape to. Lindbergh's ideas that children are the ultimate purpose of woman is also irksome. That being said, this gentle book has much to make it worth recommending. She stresses the importance of creativity and taking time for creative pursuits (once again, much easier when you have great amounts of leisure time). I found her comparison of stages of marriage to the knobby calcifications on an oyster shell to be interesting. The addition of a ninth chapter, added twenty years after the initial publication, addresses the changes in society in that twenty years. All in all, it's a nice book, not terrific, not awful...just nice.
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