NONFICTION : The Girls Next Door: A 12th-Century Mystic, a Spy, an Aviatrix, a Persian Princess, a Mother and a Journalist

GOOD ENOUGH MOTHERS: Changing Expectations for Ourselves by Melinda M. Marshall. (Peterson’s: $18.95; 321 pp.) The bottom line of this book, with its kind of sort of comforting title, is that the choice between home and office, no matter how level the playing field, how bad the backlash or how good the child care, is always unpleasant. The balance struck is always jury-rigged, sometimes more clear-mindedly and creatively than others. “Any suggestion that we chose our imperfect predicament,” writes mother and journalist Marshall, using Susan Faludi, author of “Backlash,” as a baseboard, “is heresy.” Faludi incurs Marshall’s scorn because she forces recognition of what Marshall believes is an over-exaggerated victim status. “Tomorrow may well dawn a better day,” she writes, complaining over Faludi’s plethora of shoulds, “but it’s today we’ve got to get through.” The first step in doing this is being proud of how far we’ve come, to stop having to prove ourselves and be “good enough just the way we are.” I don’t know about you, but just the way I am includes that internal metronome that regulates the balance by saying, “That’s not good enough.” Putting that out of commission would be very expensive and time consuming, so if, for $18.95 these stories about how different women have found and accepted their own solutions is helpful in slowing the incessant clanging of the metronome.