Customer Reviews

Host Family

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

In the early part of the 20th Century, Virginia Wolfe wrote in "A Room of One's Own" that women needed to kill the Angel in the house. She was referring to a woman's propensity to care for family members at the expense of herself--and in Wolfe's case--sacrifice her writing.

Although middle class women don't have a lock on being the "Angel" in the house, they are the audience Wolfe was speaking to -- educated women who might want to do something with their lives other than be the chief cook and bottle washer in charge of maintenance and repair.

Daisy Lewis eventually learns how to take care of herself, but she certainly takes her time getting there. When Daisy isn't handling complaints at the supermarket where she works as ombudsman ("Why not ombudswoman?" asks her friend), she's organizing food banks, washing her college son's dirty laundry, cleaning up her husband's vomit and other excrescences, or hosting foreign students for Harvard.

On one level, the book title refers the family that hosts foreign students, but on another level, it refers to the "hosts" that attract parasites and viruses--organic and manmade. Daisy's ex-husband Henri (nee Henry) is a computer virus expert and a bit of a parasite himself. Daisy's new beau is a parasitologist who isn't a parasite but he brings them home.

I found the book entertaining, and read it in two sittings. I laughed out loud once, but the text is amusing and others may laugh more. I love wordsmithing, and was most entertained by Medwed's command of English (English majors should love this book). Her wordplay is as graceful as a trapeze act. A familiarity with literature, world affairs, and internatinal cuisine will probably make many of the book's wry comments and asides more understandable.

This book is so funny, so poignant, so intelligent. I wanted it to go on for ever, and even though I finished it weeks ago, I'm still thinking about the characters, wondering how Daisy Lewis and her extended family are doing. Absolutely a must read.

Mameve Medwed is a witty and wonderful writer. HOST FAMILY, like Medwed's first novel, MAIL,is filled with humor and heart from the first through the final page. If you haven't read it yet,and if you like funny, intelligent novels, don't wait another minute to read it.

Mameve Medwed proved she could write with her first delightful novel, Mail. In Host Family she proves that she is brilliantly sophisticated and captures puns, twists, Cambridge, relationships- all flawlessly. I LOVED Host Family...and eagerly await Medwed's third novel...although she would have to write long and hard to top Host Family!

Initially, I thought the story was going to be depressing. However, I was wrong and the novel is a wonderful tale of educated people living in a great city. The novel was not as "laugh out loud" funny" as MAIL, but I liked it a lot and thought it was overall very charming. I didn't want the story to end.

It's hard to believe that Mameve Medwed could top her first novel, Mail, but I think she's done it. Host Family is great - warm, witty, charming, and so hysterically funny. I love the way everyone splits apart and comes together in ever-changing symbiotic relationships. So true of our lives.A great insider's peek at Cambridge, too.

"Host Family" has a good plot line about the intersecting relationships of a Harvard family, its various members and the international students to which they have played "host family" for 20 years. But by the time I was halfway through the book, I was feeling too bombarded by both the very obvious analogies and symbiotic references to parasites and the somewhat ridiculous generalization of the French people as a whole. But the time I was three-quarters of the way through I was literally scratching from reading about head lice (our heroine has by now left her husband and is living with a parasitologist who, along with many other characters, is totally one-dimensional and has no conversational skills outside the realm of bugs) and by the final chapters I found myself speed-reading in order to get it over and done with.

This could have been a good book but for me the author's style was somewhat stiff and uncomfortable.

This novel is absolutely irrestible. I loved it, couldn't put it down. Stayed up most of the night reading it, went to work the next day with circles under my eyes. There was so much to relate to...decades long marriages, hippie do-gooders that never get over it, hysterically obnoxious male midlife behavior, the many varieties of symbiotic relationships.

Ms. Medwed, first in Mail and now Host Family, is the sort of high risk author who will take on unfamiar themes--the subleties of social class, the hilarious but quite convincing linkage between relationships and parasitology--with a voice as sly and funny as Melissa Roth or Elinor Lipman, but a quite disarming dig under the surface of things that is quite thrilling to discover and very much her own.She succeeded in charming this male reader fond of high-tech thrillers, and I believe theat anyone who believes that the two surviving virtues of our time are truth and humor will be swept up the same way.

I was a great fan of Mail, but Host Family won me over even more. Its Barbara Pym-like attention to domestic detail, its beautifully alive characters, its humor that never compromises the depth of the writing -- Host Family is a real treat. Five huge stars.