A chick book with attitude

"Hatched!"

Sloane Tanen

Bloomsbury, $14.95

Sometimes, the best gift for a mom is a laugh. Even the most sleep-deprived mother would be hard-pressed not to break a smile at Sloane Tanen's little toy chicken tableaus in "Hatched!: The Big Push from Pregnancy to Motherhood."

It takes other authors entire memoirs to skewer some of the same targets that Tanen does in one-page zingers. The New York mom sends up playground cliques, overprotective parents and competitive preschools in short, witty, in-the-know blurbs and amusingly detailed chicken vignettes.

"Nanette didn't believe in exclusivity," reads one note next to a picture of a posed chick. "She wasn't technically pregnant, for example, but prenatal yoga made her feel confident about her body for the first time. Was that so wrong?"

In others, it's the picture that holds the joke, as a mom chicken sleeps in a crib with her baby: "Patty took co-sleeping to the next level."

"Hatched" is destined to be a hip shower gift but it might take a little parenting experience to fully understand the jokes. Once you've read a bedtime book 500 times, the "Goodnight moon, hello martini" vignette isn't just funny — it sounds like a good idea.

Stephanie Dunnewind,

Seattle Times staff reporter