BOOK REVIEW: BRITNEY'S MOM DOESN'T TELL ALL
"Through the Storm"
Author: Lynne Spears with Lorilee Craker
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: Sept. 2008
Pages: 210
List Price: $24.99
If you are seeking the truth about Britney Spears' deep, dark secrets, or the juicy details of her recent mental collapse and her sister's teenage pregnancy, then this is the book to avoid. If, on the other hand, you are looking for a book that blames all of the tabloid family's problems on the man of the household, then you should rush right out and waste $25 of your hard-earned money.
Lynne Spears, mother of Britney, Jamie Lynn, and Bryan Spears, opens her memoir with an introduction that claims that this book is who she is, "warts and all, with some true confessions." While the book reveals details about Britney's rise to fame, there are no "confessions" about the dysfunctional Spears family that the media has not already brought to light; the book does not expose Lynne's "warts," but portrays her in an almost holy fashion. Her attempt to give her reader an inside glimpse into the Spears family and provide a few personal confessions fails miserably. In actuality, during Britney's public breakdown (including losing custody of her children and several psychiatric stays), Britney and her mother were estranged, and the book simply recites the events as Lynne saw them unfold on the T.V.
In addition to lacking substance, the book is riddled with errors that make it difficult to stomach. There are sentences throughout the book that don't make sense because of repeated words and missing ones. If you're like me, and the first thing you flip to in a celebrity's so-called "tell-all" are the pictures, you will be seriously disappointed there, too. Not only are the pictures unedited with wrinkles, tears, and red-eyes, they are boring photographs that hypocritically show Lynne as the ever-doting mother to her children.
According to her regrets section, two of the very few mistakes she made raising her children were that she did not do a better job of "sheltering them from the storm" of having an alcoholic father, and that she did not make more time for herself throughout their childhood. Not only does she use the personal regrets section to blame everything on the children's father, this supposed "real story" is filled with one-lined zingers that blame Britney's father for all the troubles of her life. She even goes so far as to claim that the family's minister privately said that all of Britney's relationship problems were her father's fault.
If you find yourself browsing the aisles at the local bookstore looking for a great celebrity tell-all, do not be deceived by the book jacket of this one. While Lynne tries to convince readers that this book is "a real story of fame and family in a tabloid world," it is nothing if not a 210 page defense of herself as a mother and a Christian. If you want facts about Britney and Jamie Lynne's lives, you would be much better served picking up a copy of People or In Touch magazine for a fifth of the price.
-Stephanie Necessary, for Weekly Surge