Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Having used many of Mrs. Meyer's cleaning products over the years and having found all of them both effective and pleasant to use, I looked forward to this book. In fact, I bought a copy for myself and one to give as a gift. And the online excerpts looked promising.
But, on receiving and reading the book itself --- what a keen disappointment! The book appears to have been self-published because the absence of professional editing is striking. The text is ponderously heavy on family lore and reminiscences, used in a way that frequently crowds out useful advice. The formatting uses sketches and enlarged graphics in place of substantive text. And the substance of the text itself is problematic.
There are some helpful lists given. But beyond those, there are concerns. Some of the advice is painfully obvious ("flush toilets after every use") and some just plain bad. We're told, for instance, to clean a refrigerator when it begins to smell (!) and then to "unplug it and take everything out." This is poor household management. A better, less time-consuming practice is to clean a shelf a week: move everything to one side and clean the empty side with a cloth wrung out of a solution of two tablespoons baking soda to one gallon of hot water. Dry the cleaned side, move things to the clean surface and clean the other side, sorting outdated items as you go. This piecemeal cleaning, done at least once a week, completely avoids the crisis mode of Mrs. Meyer's choice.
More troubling are the lapses in taste that even cross the boundary into vulgarity. Beyond the admonition about flushing every time there is, for one example, her four-year-old's graphic description of a stray cat giving birth (repeated twice in case you weren't sufficiently grossed out the first time). This kind of story does not improve anyone's housekeeping skills.
Women in the twenty-first century don't want to choose between having a home and pursuing a career. They want both. But there is a disconnect between this generation of new homemakers and their mothers and even their grandmothers, neither of whom may have been homemakers themselves. Therefore the popularity of the many books on home management now available. Martha Stewart's book Martha Stewart's Homekeeping Handbook: the Essential Guide to Caring for Everything in Your Home is wonderful, full of useful, detailed information, helpfully indexed. Cheryl Mendelsohn's Home Comforts is encyclopedic and good reading besides. And neither of these writers peppers her prose with "Geez," as Meyer frequently does.
A personal favorite of mine is Karen Logan's Clean House, Clean Planet, in which Logan includes many family stories and references without once lapsing into Meyer's poor taste. Logan's book also contains her personal recipes for safe, natural cleaning solutions, several of which I have used successfully for years.
In addition to these three, an interested reader can find literally dozens of other choices. I only wish Mrs. Meyer had created a truly valuable addition to the list!
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Mrs. Meyer's Clean Home: No-Nonsense Advice that Will Inspire You to CLEAN like the DICKENSWhen Thelma Meyer tells it to you, she tells it straight: Clean the kitchen daily! Don't waste anything (not even the water leftover from those potatoes you just boiled)! Always work hard! This philosophy meant that when Thelma's daughter Monica founded Mrs. Meyer's Clean Day products (named after her mom), the products were designed to work hard for you.
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