A wise, mild and enviably lucid book about a chaotic scene.

The Raffi essays raise fascinating and thorny questions about children’s rights to digital privacy, and how the internet has influenced our willingness to accept levels of access into people’s lives we would have once found unthinkable and likely grotesque.

... his book proceeds as so many dad books don’t: with a father’s careful, piercing introspection, and a deep analysis of anger.

Simply by virtue of the fact that Gessen doesn’t treat the occupants of those prams as an obstacle to his writing career, he’s done something unique and valuable... I have to say: I feel seen.

It is a paean to New York City, and how that city changed for him when he became a dad. The book also surveys the child development literature to which so many parents turn—some of us with deeper desperation. Parents will empathize with the strategy to look to books when toddler parenting gets tough; parents with toddlers prone to Raffi’s (and my Theo’s) particular brand of 'uncivil disobedience' might, like me, find themselves scribbling I FEEL SEEN on every other page.

... a book by and for dads somewhere in the middle of that spectrum: well-meaning, serious, flawed parents who know well enough the stereotype of the bumbling, arrogant paterfamilias they’re trying to avoid but also resist the sanctimony and even Sisyphean impossibility of the kind of father they might aspire to be. All the Confused Middle-Aged Literary Dads.

... will res­onate with any­one who has raised a child, give pause to those who antic­i­pate doing so, and fas­ci­nate those who do not expect to have this par­tic­u­lar expe­ri­ence.

Gessen covers all the basics: from the intricacies of a home birth, through toddler temper tantrums, to the fraught process of choosing a school. And let me placate any sceptics who might be wary of the potential self-absorption involved when a middle-class Brooklynite waxes lyrical about their parental angst: Gessen is not above scrutinising his own myopia.

Gessen would be the first to admit he didn't set out to write a book of parenting advice, but young parents reading the nine frank but warmhearted essays that compose Raising Raffi: The First Five Years will be happy he did, not least for the collection's reassuring message: you are not alone.

Undertaking his project with curiosity and humor...Gessen writes about choosing a school amidst rampant gentrification in his Brooklyn neighborhood, attempting to raise toddler Raffi to be bilingual in English and Russian...and discovering the lives of the writers behind his favorite children’s books.

It’s fantastic when someone thoughtful manages to hit pause on the relentless motion and reflect on what it all means. In Raising Raffi: The First Five Years, Keith Gessen does just that.

Gessen doesn’t miss a chance to share interesting anecdotal information about the parenting of favorite children’s literature authors or parenting customs around the world. At times this feels a bit disjointed, but the book is engaging and better-written than many parenting books on the market. In addition, it is a fascinating look at the triumphs and struggles faced by a first-generation Russian immigrant.

... a tour of the anxieties of semi-gentrified Brooklyn in the 2020s...It is a faithful and perceptive depiction, though I’m not sure anybody will really like what they see.

Gessen renders the daunting frontier of new parenthood with tenderness and humility in these eloquent essays about rearing his first child.

Recounted with humility.