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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Listen on CD!,
By Andrea Elise (Santa Monica, CA United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: She May Not Leave (Paperback)
If you listen on CD, the narrator is amazing! She was also the narrator of the "spa" book. VERY talented! I think Fay Weldon is a tremendously talented writer, and having someone narrate her writing who has such a perfect delivery is pure pleasure. I almost cried when it ended.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
much better than expected,
By
This review is from: She May Not Leave (Paperback)
I got this book by accident--I was on vacation in England and grabbed some British women's magazine off the rack in the gas station, thinking I would have a little mindless reading for the train ride. Well, in England a lot of magazines include free gifts, and this book was shrink-wrapped to it.
I expected this to be a silly romance novel, on the level of the ones Cosmopolitan prints excerpts from. I had never heard of Fay Weldon. So I was quite surprised to find a very, very darkly humorous and well-written novel. The key is that NONE of the characters in this are sentimentalized at all. While Martyn and Hattie and Frances et. al. really do love each other, they are predominantly self-interested. Martyn is more concerned with the future of his political journalism career than with his partner's slow breakdown, Hattie is more concerned about being able to go back to work than with the obvious play Agnieszka is making for her common-law husband and child, Agnieszka is more concerned about getting to stay in England than by the damage this could cause Kitty in the long run, and even Baby Kitty, Weldon points out, loves best the person who attends to her needs the most. That said, because the characters are so unlikeable (or very uncomfortably likeable), it's a hard novel to get into. Many people will be put off by the rather cavalier way mothers in three generations of this family leave their young children in the primary care of others. The mothers, simply put, aren't "motherly." As to the people who claimed that the ending was a cop-out...uh, didn't you read the very beginning of the book? It was building all along...
5.0 out of 5 stars
Romantic/domestic "comedy" that weaves another tale altogether,
By Coffeechick (Chapel Hill, NC USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: She May Not Leave (Paperback)
Fay Weldon is something of an aquired taste. Words like "ascerbic" and "brisk" have been used about her, and those are accurate. I think Weldon annoys quite a few who read her. She annoyed me considerably when I first read her years ago. Then I realized that Weldon aggravates by not writing what we expect--she doesn't write to make us happy, but to tell the truth. Weldon's choice of subject matter is the eternal love/war between the genders, and, just as importantly, how families create the main characters whose lives we follow. In Weldon's world, men and women put up with a great deal from each other, until the day a crack in the relationship becomes a fissure, and life goes on, but in a far more confusing and unanchored fashion.
"She May Not Leave" is about a young professional couple who hire a nanny/housekeeper, and realize how dependent on her they become. They go to ludicrous lengths to keep the talented Agniewska, telling themselves they'll never find another like her. But woven into Hattie and Martyn's story is a meta-story, a story of a family of women going back generations who just can't mother very well or very long. The relationships between mothers and daughters are distant, or outright dysfunctional, but grandmothers and granddaughters get along and support and love each other. The story of this unusual matriarchy is as interesting as the surface "main story." The denouement comes as a surprise to the reader, even though the reader realizes, later, that there was a family history hinting at what might come... As well as delineating male/female relationships and familial relationships, Weldon has many telling observations about current English/Western culture and mores. Yes, she's "ascerbic," but it's gratifying to read truly adult fiction--a bit wounding, a bit harsh, but overall truthful, and with gleams of humor along the way.
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