If home advice is as ubiquitous as cheap throw pillows, why aren’t our houses less cluttered and more reflective of our best selves? Television host and interior decorator Moll Anderson has some theories, presented as a fascinating dŽcor throw down in Change Your Home, Change Your Life. Anderson, guest designer on Southern Home by Design, Look for Less: Home and Two Minutes of Style, presents the usual ideas about color and accessories and room arrangement, but asks the stuck amateur decorator to explore the emotional excuses for not picking up the paintbrush, from waiting for the kids to grow up or the raise to come through, to waiting for the ideal house to drop in your lap. Peppered among her fairly pedestrian decorating advice and projects for rental apartments, starter homes and bachelor pads using inexpensive must haves paint, light, fabric, music and flowers are insightful short questionnaires that reveal deepest desires for home. If you could pull any item from your closet and cover your couch in it, Anderson asks, what would it be? She acts as a room-by-room psychologist, encouraging readers to assign a song to each to capture its mood, to name three places you’d like to live other than your present abode, and to identify a space that’s your own scary movie, among many other seeking questions that refine and define dŽcor in a new way.
Valiant Women is a vital and engrossing attempt to correct the record and rightfully celebrate the achievements of female veterans of World War II.
