While taking the reader on a traipse through various laboratories, Tucker tosses off quips like a class clown on a science field trip. She’s cutesy about her subject.

... an impressive synthesis of the current state of 'mom science,' a fairly new and fecund field that mostly considers how mothers are different from other people and similar to each other.

Meticulously researched and well-documented, Mom Genes is one part memoir (Tucker intersperses her own experiences as a white mother of four children), and one part incredibly readable popular science.

... humorous.

My main complaint here is that brain scans and laboratory tests don't map well onto real-world maternal behavior.

Despite some opacity based on learned guesswork, Tucker is a consistently energetic guide, and she doesn’t shy away from discussing 'the dangerous and opaque mental problems that hound moms.' In a particularly vibrant chapter, the author explores the countless deleterious effects of poverty and how American society continually fails to provide the support that mothers deserve. Filling in the gaps and moving the story forward are Tucker’s personal observations—she is the mother of four—and the ups and downs of her experiences, many of which will be familiar to mothers of all backgrounds.

Tucker has a knack for making complex science accessible, and she encouragingly touts the importance of mothers having a support system.