One Word Summary: I want to be an astronaut
More Words: I like what I learned about the female experience as a wife and mother in the '60s and'70s. The book is set in a fascinating era, and I feel like I appreciate the social culture of that time better, now that I've read this story. Unfortunately, I didn't really like the book. The story is about very four very different women who start their own writing circle, all told from the perspective of one lady. Every few chapters the perspective would change and the reader would get a paragraphs worth of insight into a different lady. It was informative, confusing, and a little boring. I wished there could have been more everyday details. For example, Kath becomes a single parent. I wanted to read more about her struggle to feed and bathe and care for children and find time/energy to realize her own dreams. I wanted to read a passage where she cries, fuly clothed in an empty bathtub. Although I can understand why the author didn't delve into the everyday heartaches of motherhood; she's in the business of writing books people will read not preaching to the choir. Besides a story like that would have to be on the scale of Middlemarch. As it is the book had a sort of Forrest Gump feel- the women just sort of show up where history is happening and say stuff like: and this is how it was for us. I guess that'll just have to be good enough.
Quote:
More Words: I like what I learned about the female experience as a wife and mother in the '60s and'70s. The book is set in a fascinating era, and I feel like I appreciate the social culture of that time better, now that I've read this story. Unfortunately, I didn't really like the book. The story is about very four very different women who start their own writing circle, all told from the perspective of one lady. Every few chapters the perspective would change and the reader would get a paragraphs worth of insight into a different lady. It was informative, confusing, and a little boring. I wished there could have been more everyday details. For example, Kath becomes a single parent. I wanted to read more about her struggle to feed and bathe and care for children and find time/energy to realize her own dreams. I wanted to read a passage where she cries, fuly clothed in an empty bathtub. Although I can understand why the author didn't delve into the everyday heartaches of motherhood; she's in the business of writing books people will read not preaching to the choir. Besides a story like that would have to be on the scale of Middlemarch. As it is the book had a sort of Forrest Gump feel- the women just sort of show up where history is happening and say stuff like: and this is how it was for us. I guess that'll just have to be good enough.
Quote:
I know writers who have a talisman or a ritual to make writing easier:Rate: 2 sidecars
bunny slippers they wear or a certain candle they always burn when they're
writing; putting pen to paper at sunrise, or noon, or 11:00 p.m.; sitting in a
certain chair in a favorite cafe or walking their dog on the beach first;
playing one song on their iPod on infinite repeat for one novel, then choosing
another song for the next. But that always strikes me as dicey. What if the cafe
table s taken? What if the dog you walk on the beach eats your bunny slippers?
What if your iPod dies? And the fact is, we were mothers and wives; if we waited
for the stars to align just so, we'd still be waiting.
Other Books:
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya sisterhood by Rebecca Wells
Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares
Books To Read
The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald
Love Story by Erich Segal
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