Our Kind [Paperback]

Kate Walbert (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Scribner (2005)
• ASIN: B001APBTW2
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,034,127 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Kate Walbert is the author of Where She Went, a New York Times Notable Book of 1998; The Gardens of Kyoto, winner of the Connecticut Book Award for fiction in 2002; and Our Kind, finalist for the National Book Award in 2004. Her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and numerous other publications. She lives in New York City and Connecticut with her family.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Forgotten Women, December 29, 2004

By 

Patricia H. Parker "Bookwoman" (Springfield, Massachusetts United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Our Kind: A Novel in Stories (Hardcover)

I'm not sure why this book didn't win the National Book Club Award. I have read three of the other finalists and this is, by far, the best of the bunch. It is a "must read" for women of all ages.

I am a bit younger than these women - our age group spanned the time before the Feminist Movement and after. We were on the cusp. Therefore, some of the things which affected these women where "preached" to my age group, but many of us were lucky and escaped. We went back to school and finished our educations, and, when our husbands left or died and our children grew up, we had other places and things to which to turn, and now we have new memories to replace the old ones. I am surprised that, none of the reviews I have read mention Viv. She, of all the characters, is the most poignant for me. Viv is the brilliant, but poor girl, who is awarded a full scholarship to Smith. However, it is the time when young women went to college to earn their MRS. degree, and, in spite of being championed by a pair of women professors and pushed toward graduate school, she hears the "siren call" and marries a month after receiving her undergraduate degree. He is a non-entity and soon becomes colorless in her eyes so that, after he is no longer a part of her life, she can't even remember what he looks like. However, she remembers vividly, half a century later, the professors - how they looked - how they spoke to her - how angry they were when she gave up her birthright to get married. Now she runs the "book club" for the ladies and watches the sessions dissolve into "niggling" and nonsense spoken by women who will never be as bright as she, and who just don't understand the inner meanings of the books they read.

This is a book which should be on the reading lists of every Women in Literature class in this country, and it teaches lessons which should never be forgotten by any woman of any age.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Succinct and Perceptive, August 31, 2004

By 

K. L. Cotugno (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Our Kind: A Novel in Stories (Hardcover)

Although Walbert does not pinpoint her location, various clues lead me to believe that this book is situated around Wilmington Delaware or Philadelphia, a milieu I am very familiar with. The portraits of these women are drawn with such accuracy I feel I could provide their true names, including my mother. Since she still lives there with her cronies from her youth, husbands and children either gone or scattered, through these stories I have a truer insight into her life than I have gotten from the weekly telephone conversations we share. I know this is a very subjective review, but it is rare that a book has hit me at such a personal level.

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Delightful Gem, September 7, 2004

By 

Elizabeth Hendry (New Jersey USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Our Kind: A Novel in Stories (Hardcover)

Kate Walbert's Our Kind is a delightful gem, a wonderful work reminiscent of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, a novel several of the characters in this novel discuss at a book club. Both novels focus on the circularity of time, but Walbert's novel also focuses on the ravages of time, particularly on this collection of women in the novel. These women were married in fifties and now are all alone, deserted by husband and children by death, by divorce, by choice. Time is running out for them, but not many of them acknowledge that. Time swirls by them, the past comes back, they relive it, it repeats itself. These are wealthy women, not usually pitied, yet their stories echo with horrible tragedy, much death, many sadnesses. The narrative in the novel is lyrical without being too much or two twee. Walbert has done an excellent job; Our Kind is an excellent, moving novel.