Parachutes & Kisses (Paperback)

by Erica Jong (Author)
Key Phrases: new nanny, New York, Mel Botkin, Nurse Librium (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Married (again) and divorced (again), Isadora Wing is a single parent with an adorable daughter, an irritating ex-husband, and a startling assortment of suitors: an unorthodox rabbi, a poetic disc jockey, the son of a famous sex therapist, and WASPily handsomest of all: Berkeley Sproul III. Isadora and Berkeley meet at a health club, and he's fourteen years her junior. Of course their affair is tortuous and sexy, but is it love? Or does the stud just want a free trip to Venice, compliments of a famous author? Either way, Erica Jong wrote this romance with "a mixture of eloquence and savage wit as good as anything she has ever written," said The Wall Street Journal.

About the Author
Erica Jong is the author of twenty books of poetry, fiction, and memoir. Her most recent essays have appeared in The New York Times Book Review.

Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Tarcher (August 3, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1585425001
• ISBN-13: 978-1585425006
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #614,982 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars getting better with age, October 17, 2001

By	Robert J. Crawford (Balmette Talloires, France) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Parachutes and Kisses (Hardcover)

It is so rare to read follow-on novels that are in fact better than the original bestseller and continuing to improve. This one is perhaps even better - certainly more mature - than How to Save Your Life. I still think that for a hilarious and yet sad reflection of the pre-Aids 1970s and early 1980s, Jong is simply our best novelist. The psychology, the needs, the pain, and the ironies are so realistically and touchingly rendered that I found myself completely believing in the character. It is a first-rate effort and a pity that it is out of print.

While this is yet another novel about divorce and the search for both perfect love and always-spectacular sex, the protagonist has grown into a kind of world weariness along with her concerns on how to bring up her daughter. While she is still willing to experiment with guacomole in the nether regions, it is about entering middle age, with the baggage that so many of us carry, and yet keeping one's idealism and hope alive. The passages on her ex-husband are divinely insightful and comic, from his inability to become independent of powerful parents (and how that hinders his own creative development); I still chuckle about her exmother-in-law - in her quip "at least she's s nice girl" - "demolishing" both her son's new girlfriend and his ex-wife in one sentence. (Isadora "marvelled" at her effiecincy.)

Highest recommendation.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More adventures of Isadora Wing!, August 6, 2006

By	girldiver "Enjoy!" (tangled up in blue.) - See all my reviews

"How to Save Your Own Life" closed with Isadora basking in the sunset of Malibu with her young prince happily ever after and on that note we open to the first sentence of Parachutes and Kisses only to discover paradise in Malibu has eluded our heroin. Isadora Wing has been through analysis, found writing success, a third marriage, and a child only to discover she married a child and then had one with him.

Distraught and lost, Isadora journeys through another divorce, tax problems, single motherhood, and endless nannies looking for her demon lover. Parachutes and Kisses chronicles more exploration of self with regard to the love she feels for her third husband and the obvious pain of divorce, especially when there is a child involved.

This is another great book from Erica Jong about finder yourself and the inner strength that knowing who you are and what you're capable of brings. If you read Erica Jongs' book: Seducing the Demon Writing for My Life, which is somewhat of a short memoir, you might recognize some of the characters in Parachutes and Kisses.

A wonderful book!

girldiver:)

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Isadora Wing hasn't grown up yet?, February 23, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Parachutes & Kisses (Paperback)

I loved Erica Jong and FOF, but was really disappointed with this book.

She is still wondering why she hasn't found her "one true love." Isadora has become sort of pathetic, really. She mistakes hedonism with happiness, like a 400-pound binge eater with heartburn hoping another bag of cookies will make them feel light and energetic again.

But in this case she sleeps with anything in pants, drinks and uses drugs and wonders why her so-called "relationships" don't last. If she didn't seem to take herself so seriously I would think that was the lesson in the book.