A smart, vibrant, engaging story of a group of fortysomething women whose 1950s expectations have collided (sometimes disastrously) with real-life situations of today. Local author publicity (Chicago).
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Barrett (I Wish Someone Had Told Me) explores social changes of the last three decades through the lives of six girlfriends who originally met in the 1950s as students at a Roman Catholic elementary school in an unidentified locale. Their dreams of finding ideal happiness within marriage?hatched during a decade considered by many to have been repressive?were for some affected by career aspirations and, for others, by an awareness of their sexual needs. Although the author spent two years interviewing her subjects and differentiates them by describing, for example, Carole as "the nice one" or Maude as "the sophisticated one," their separate voices never become distinct from one another. Several individual experiences?Donna's decision to leave her husband, Maude's commitment to single motherhood?are of interest, but the text is marred by uneven writing and an overabundance of reconstructed quotations from long-ago episodes in the girls' lives. Barrett documents the emerging feminist movement by including excerpts from articles about Twiggy, Joan Kennedy and other high-profile women of the time.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
By unwinding the tale of six women (based on real people), Barrett (The Playgroup, LJ 2/15/94) intends to show us that women find their own identities in relation to each other, unlike men, who struggle with "Nature, or with the Devil, or with Civilizing Forces." The first chapters of this "biography" jump chaotically from character to character, producing too many to keep up with?a problem books of the "group" genre, like Mary McCarthy's The Group, often have. References to celebrities pepper the text, and an epilog tells what has happened to Joan Kennedy, Princess Diana, and Patty Hearst. Unfortunately, the import of all this is uncertain; does Barrett mean to compare her characters to the public figures listed? Such confusions weaken this book. Without a unifying voice to hold it together?and the narrator's voice isn't strong enough?this work falls apart. Not recommended.?Barbara O'Hara, Free Lib. of Philadelphia
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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