Playground Mafia by Clare Christian
The authors have spent 13 years in primary school playgrounds and have consistently been amazed and appalled by the characters they have witnessed. From the far north of the UK to the deep south, the playground mums fall into the same categories. From Competitive Mum ('Don't touch that Darling, Mummy has paid an engineer a lot of money to create that Easter bonnet') to Flaky Mum ('have you seen little Izzy? I'm sure I left her around here somewhere...on Tuesday I think...') to Tittle-Tattle Mum ('Ooh, yes, I saw her car outside his house last week...What? That's your house? Oh, er, oops...') the playground stereotypes are hilarious and horrifying in turn. In this book, Clare Christian and Elizabeth Kent (obviously both 'normal' mums) join forces to identify and categorise all the key players in the playground and provide a handy guide to how to manage them. Packed with hilarious case studies and handy check boxes to tick once you spot a type (I-Spy-style), this book will strike a chord with any mum who has cowered behind the wooden train for half an hour to avoid being cornered by OFSTED mum. And they throw in a few dads for good measure - there's a mid-life-crisis dad in surf shorts and FatFace flip-flops in every playground in the country, if not the entire world.