No Biking in the House Without a Helmet Audiobook

Quotes

• An upbeat chronicle of a life that has been lived on the bright side of the road, its ruts beveled by naked love.

  — Kirkus

• “Love knows no bounds—and no borders—in journalist Greene’s ebullient valentine to her family of nine children.”

  — People (four stars)

• “Moving, enlightening, and surprisingly funny…No Biking in the House without a Helmet…folds an adoption primer into a meditation on family.”

  — O, The Oprah Magazine

• “Readers…will find plenty of hilarity in this romping account of [Greene’s] boisterous brood…[She] brings her well-honed research and reporting skills to this very personal story…This joy—experiencing it and conveying it to readers—is her greatest success.”

  — Washington Post

• “Joyful and big-hearted…This funny and frankly personal book is a departure for Greene, whose previous work has been sober and measured. The title sounds like a madcap domestic comedy in the tradition of Jean Kerr and Erma Bombeck, which it sometimes is. But Greene’s humor is less acerbic, her persona less addled…Greene is such an open and self-deprecating narrator she makes every addition to her family seem like the most natural and beautiful move in the world, ‘each child—whether homemade or foreign born—a revelation, a treasure.’ The ability to write brilliant books with a houseful of children is clearly the least of Greene’s gifts.”

  — NPR

• “There are funny parenting books and wise parenting books. Rarely a funny and wise parenting book. Melissa Fay Greene really does have nine children, five of whom were adopted from foreign orphanages—but this book isn’t a treacly, multicultural Brady Bunch. Neither moralistic nor preachy, this memoir is about what it’s like to have heart, and grow children with heart. In another writer’s less deft hands, children who herded goats in Ethiopia and then relocated to a big old house in Atlanta could have become a Southern Jewish version of Brad and Angelina. Greene captures the wild vicissitudes of her family’s life and how individual difference enriches them all.”

  — Chicago Tribune

• “No Biking in the House without a Helmet is [Melissa Fay Greene’s] sprawling, imperfect, courageous, and joyful account of the adoption process, warts and all…The moral of her story? Just the opposite of the title’s warning. Don’t be afraid to break the rules, to ‘steer by the light of what makes us laugh, what makes us feel good’—especially if it means biking in the house, with or without a helmet. With deep compassion, sparkling humor and an unshakable faith in the power of the whoopee cushion, she leads the way.”

  — Atlanta Journal-Constitution