“I hate homework. I hate it more now than I did when I was the one lugging textbooks and binders back and forth from school. The hour my children are seated at the kitchen table, their books spread out before them, the crumbs of their after-school snack littering the table, is without a doubt the worst hour of my day.”

Israeli-American novelist and essayist

Ayelet Waldman is an Israeli-American novelist and essayist known for her mystery fiction and personal writing. She wrote The Mommy-Track Mysteries, a seven-book mystery series, along with four other novels. Waldman also wrote autobiographical essays about motherhood. She spent three years as a federal public defender, and that experience often informs her fiction, especially the legal and everyday pressures that shape her characters.