Powerful, brilliant and deeply healing

Genuinely practical and doable with memorable stories, heart-warming rituals and hard-hitting, life-affirming quotes. I wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone who wants to do the work.

Donna's words will peel back the emotional layers to reveal how you got to where you are, then help you build back up again, to the person you were born to be. The Bridge is a radical healing journey, truly transformational

One of my biggest regrets is that I didn't traverse The Bridge Retreat before the pandemic. At least God in her wisdom divined this book

My grief was blocking my joy. Donna's invite to go deeper into my pain meant I was able to access much more joy and it felt amazing. This work works! Give yourself the best gift ever, buy this book and go on the journey with Donna, you won't regret it

Beautiful... boundary-pushing … Jones is a pioneer ... she skilfully elucidates the monumental shifts motherhood brings ... I found myself inwardly cheering

It is difficult to put into words the importance of this book. I felt it in my heart. I carried it with me, I think I always will. Jones has written the book we desperately needed

Matrescence took me on a journey of reminescence through my own pregnancies and early years of motherhood, eliciting wry recognition, surprise at new evidence and insight, and gratitude for a work that really sees what it is to mother

A beautiful contemplation of the extraordinary yet ordinary metamorphosis that adult humans undergo as they become mothers ... I was entranced ... Matrescence is a passionate and powerful maternal roar for change

Hypnotic, fascinating and long overdue. I am so glad it exists. A gift of a book and told beautifully.

Matrescence is the book I've been waiting for. It feels like a gift. Radical, questioning and profound, it urges us to recognise and honour the many transformations of motherhood. With the deepest compassion for her fellow mothers, Lucy Jones shows us how contemporary society stacks the odds against them and calls us to imagine new ways of parenting which care for and support those at its heart

You'll marvel, wince and want to take to the streets after reading Lucy Jones' sweeping and courageous multidisciplinary survey of the motherlands. I wish we'd read it before we had our kid. (Mother) nature read in truth and awe

I was challenged, comforted, educated and nourished by this book ... It is the single most powerful, life-changing, heartachingly healing thing I have been given ... The kind of book we must ensure every one of us reads

A beautiful, intelligent book that is as tender and moving as it is demanding and urgent. There is something insightful and original in the way Lucy Jones seamlessly combines the analytical with the emotional, and it is an absolutely essential new addition to the literature of mothering and parenthood

This book should be a must-read for pretty much everyone. We don't talk about the hidden realities of the biological, social and psychological effects of matrescence nearly enough. Thank you, Lucy Jones, for changing that

Fascinating

Dazzling... Matrescence cements Jones' place as one of the most talented nonfiction writers we have. It really is *astonishingly* good

Matrescence is going to set mothers’ worlds alight. Finally, someone has properly expressed what the process of becoming a mother does to women: their sense of self and their brains. We all owe her a debt because it wasn’t just in our heads

Jones writes like a novelist, capturing wild swings of emotion, doubt, the adoration of a new baby, and (always) the tension between what she thinks is expected of her and the pressure of her own mixed-up feelings

Matrescence is a wild and beautiful book, a blend of memoir, science, psychoanalytical thinking and nature writing with a poetic sensibility and a strong sense of political purpose

Engaging and sensitive … Matrescence is an important work