Belles on Their Toes by Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey

This review was originally written in 2007.  It was moved from my general blog to my book review blog. 

This is the sequel to Cheaper by the Dozen and is in much the same vein. In this story, the father has just recently died and Mother has to take over for him in more ways than one. Determined to keep the family together, she takes over his work obligations and gradually overcomes prejudice against women in the field by proving that she can, in fact, do the work.

The story, although it supposedly about Mother, actually centers more around how the kids pitch in to run the family on a limited budget. In a family this large, it is inevitable that some of the children will be more memorable than others. The boys, after a while seem rather indistiguishable. It is the girls, though, who seem to have their own characters more clearly delineated. Anne, the oldest, takes charge at the vacation house, while their mother is off earning money in Europe. Martha runs the budget.

All in all, it is a good family story. It is rather outdated, but that, in itself, is interesting. It points up things that have and haven't changed. Fashions come and go; loyalty to family remains important, but certainly takes a different form nowadays.