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Adelaide Einstein: A Novel By April L. Hamilton
 
 
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Adelaide Einstein: A Novel By April L. Hamilton (Paperback)

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Key Phrases: embroidery circle, yellow gunk, Adelaide Einstein, Sherry Bloom, Camp Pinole (more...)
4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (46 customer reviews)
Price: $14.00 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

NPR’s Science Fridays. On the surface, Adelaide, 46, has the life she envisioned when she dropped out of college and got married—a family, a volunteer position, and a great husband. The husband, however, is cheating with her best friend Gwynnie. When Adelaide meets terminally ill physics professor Jakob Pankowicz in a hospice center, new worlds literally begin unfolding as she takes classes and he takes her under his wing and (a little more) in the laboratory. As if these plots twists weren’t clichéd enough, both of her children, Patty and Eric have also started to stray from the straight and narrow. Patty is having sex (gasp!) and Eric is getting kicked out of camp among other places. And, of course, Addie who has always deferred to her husband, must take matters into her own hands and discover what it’s like to carve out her own life. It is not necessarily the story here that makes Adelaide’s worries so utterly unconvincing, it’s that she seems like a a blank canvas that the artist cannot decide how to fill. Overall, the writing is clean and consistent, but the story itself has very little soul. -- manuscript review by Publishers Weekly, an independent organization

What really works for me with this excerpt is the way Adelaide herself is crafted-- we learn a great deal about her with a very few actions, rather than endless description. Unfortunately, that isn't always the case with the plot, but that's nothing a quick revision wouldn't take care of. It's quite obvious that the author really feels for Adelaide (and as all those writing books tell you, if you don't cry when a character's dog dies, you're not doing it right), and has the skills to make the reader do so as well. I like this one a lot. -- Amazon Top Reviewer


Product Description

Adelaide Binchley is probably the only fortysomething housewife and junior college dropout ever to be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics, and she's certainly the only one whose career was launched by a bedpan. When Addie meets Physics professor Jakob Pankowicz, she discovers that having just one person see a greater potential in her, and believe in her even when she doesn't believe in herself, is all she needs to escape her self-imposed limits. In this hilarious and touching novel, as she navigates the rough territory created by her teenage-feminist daughter, borderline delinquent son, philandering husband, and the friends in her embroidery circle, Addie finds when one person selflessly reaches out to another, that gesture has the power to change the world.
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Product Details

  • Paperback: 310 pages
  • Publisher: CreateSpace (February 22, 2008)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1434890414
  • ISBN-13: 978-1434890412
  • Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 15 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (46 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,585,408 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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More About the Author

April L. Hamilton
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

› Visit Amazon's April L. Hamilton Page
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Search Inside This Book:
Inside This Book (learn more)
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
embroidery circle, yellow gunk
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Adelaide Einstein, Sherry Bloom, Camp Pinole, Jakob Pankowicz, Adelaide Binchley, San Francisco, Gwynnie Cox, God Adelaide, Concepts of Physics, Chief of Staff
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Customer Reviews

46 Reviews
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 (31)
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 (12)
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Average Customer Review
4.6 out of 5 stars (46 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
87 of 91 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars 'Adelaide, Adelaide, ever lovin' Adelaide...', January 31, 2008
By Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)      
April Hamilton bursts onto the scene with a sparkling little excerpt for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest with Chapter One of ADELAIDE EPSTEIN, and if character development has as much to do with the judging as it should, this entry should be a winner. Hamilton has apparently written a 'comic fiction' and in the best sense of that term this opener tests the reader's ability to judge between what is comedy and what is daily dull routine in the life of a housewife. When the author can induce laughs from introspective observations rather that pratfalls, then the reader can be assured that the story will develop well.

Adelaide is a housewife who gave up finishing college to get married and raise two children and who now faces the void of 'family out of the house' syndrome and tries to fill that sense of lack of purpose and importance by volunteering at the local hospital: she is assigned the 'bedpan brigade' type chores that are below the nurses and is repeatedly making judgment errors as well as committing faux pas situations that lead to her being fired - try being fired from a volunteer job! Depressed with her life and her station she leaves her volunteer blunder job and returns home to soak in a tub, trying to forget that she is a forty-six year old woman with excessive body tissue. While relaxing in her perfumed yet depressing tub, in pops her daughter unexpectedly, accompanied with her boyfriend - the two obviously planning an afternoon's 'diversion' in the empty house. How Adelaide is confronted by the nude couple in the bathroom and what transpires among the three is hilarious (and touching), and when she tries to share her life problems with her best friend Gywnnie (gorgeous, free spirited etc), she discovers that her husband is in flagrante in Gywnnie's bed. And the wheels start to spin on in this page-turner novel.

No doubt there are more beautifully drawn characters that will populate the following pages. Hamilton has a real gift for drawing credible people who have equal potential for being hilarious and tragic. She makes what some would find as an ordinary day into something that leaps into the extraordinary. Can't wait to see how Adelaide et al are worked out here! Grady Harp, January 08
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Stand up and cheer for Adelaide Einstein, May 11, 2008
At 46, hard working but physically inept Adelaide Binchley is married to a loyal man and the stay-at-home mother of two teenagers. After sacrificing her own education to marry, the high point of her existence seems destined to be the menial volunteer work she performs - she's a nurse's aide. But when she inadvertently runs a cart filled with soiled bedpans into the chief of surgery, knocking him down and breaking his tailbone - the fifth reportable incident she's caused in the last two months - she suffers the ultimate indignity: she's fired from her volunteer job.

Addie's self esteem is at an all-time low and her self doubt at an all-time high. The choices she's given her best years to are about to come apart at the seams; Patricia, her 16 year-old, will secretly have her genitals pierced and the site will become infected. The director of her son's summer camp is about to call, threatening to sue for damages caused by the boy, who has a decidedly malicious streak, and the reader will soon learn (although she will not) that her husband is sleeping with her best friend.

Addie is so desperate to hang onto the only part of her existence that has any meaning that when she hears the hospice wing of the hospital desperately needs volunteers, she leaps at the chance. The next day she enters the wing, where she is almost immediately mistaken for someone else - Jakob's friend - and quickly delivered into the presence of a stranger. His first words, "Ah, my catch of the day," reveal that this is not the first time an innocent passerby has been waylaid to visit him.

The two at first appear to be polar opposites. Jakob is thirty-something and bookish, with brown curly hair and wire-rimmed spectacles. Clearly whatever form of disease he has has taken a toll on him, but Addie thinks that once he must have been very handsome.

A skilled conversationalist, Jakob seems to be measuring Addie and liking what he sees. Even though he's a physicist and college professor and she a lowly, uneducated housewife, they become fast friends, and when he proves to her that she is fully conversant with both the first and second laws of thermodynamics, then invites her to monitor his introductory physics class, Addie takes the first step in what will prove to be a beautiful and uplifting metamorphosis.

Adelaide Einstein is about opening your eyes to the world, seeing the place you can reach in it, and getting started on the path. Along the way, Addie has some truly exquisite moments. Moments that had me alternately holding my breath and clapping my hands and cheering. April L. Hamilton is a master of the craft. The evidence is in plain sight on every page of Adelaide Einstein. With the right push, this novel could become a bestseller. It's a rewarding and beautiful story. Relative to my other five star reviews, I'd give this one six if I could.

Art Tirrell is the author of The Secret Ever Keeps.


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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A delightful caterpillar to butterfly story., February 23, 2008
By Garry Buck (Tucson, AZ) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This is the story of Adelaide (Addie), a middle aged woman who is living her dream. Addie's a stay-at-home mom, 2 kids, successful husband, house in the 'burbs, who does charitable volunteer work and hosts a lady's sewing circle. What could be more wonderful? But if she's living her idyllic girlhood dream, why it it so unsatisfying? Perhaps the fact that her son is a delinquent, her daughter thinks she's a dinosaur, her husband is a patronizing jerk, and she just got fired from her volunteer work has something to do with it. And the lady's sewing circle friends, well they're a whole 'nother can of worms.

The story traces Addie's path to growth and redemption. I don't want to say more and give away the plot, but the story is smart, funny and poignant.

This is the second book I've read by April L. Hamilton. There's something about her writing style that I find deeply engaging. With other works of fiction I feel like a voyeur, like I'm peering through a window observing someone else's life at a distance. With Ms. Hamilton's first book Snowball, and again with Adelaide Einstein, it's as if I'm in the room, inside the character's skin, seeing her world through her eyes and actually living her experience.

This is the sort of book that I didn't want to put down because I wanted to know how it ended, and was sad when it ended because I wanted it to go on forever.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Adelaide Unlimited
Adelaide is a forty-something mother of two whose husband is secretly fooling around with her best friend and whose life revolves around her family, her embroidery circle, and a... Read more
Published 14 months ago by Susan Petrone

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Read!
This was the first book that I read on my Kindle. I LOVED it. Adelaide is someone I can identify with. Read more
Published 17 months ago by A. Hayden

5.0 out of 5 stars Just one person can change your life (4.5 stars)
Just how do you get fired from a hospital volunteer job? You'd think only "Scrubs" could write this one, but Adelaide catches your attention--and your sympathy--with this one and... Read more
Published 17 months ago by R. Kyle

3.0 out of 5 stars Adelaide Einstein
April L Hamilton is a talented writer. She creates a world of mostly believable characters with a light, animated style. Read more
Published 17 months ago by Amanda Hamm

3.0 out of 5 stars Not too bad, but could have been better
I have been following the author's blogs and occasional contributions to a few discussion threads, and I am impressed by her sense of humor and down-to-earth style; however,... Read more
Published 17 months ago by L. Langston

4.0 out of 5 stars Adelaide and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (Continued)
I read the first chapters of this book way back when it was an ABNA entry, and was quite impressed by the way the author was able to make her characters tragic yet funny and real,... Read more
Published 19 months ago by Amanda Richards

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful First Book to read....
This was the first book to read on my Kindle. It feels great to get back to reading and this book was very difficult to put down. Read more
Published 19 months ago by K Dygert

5.0 out of 5 stars A Work of Literary "Genius"!
Adelaide Binchley is a California housewife who has just been fired from her volunteer job. To top that off she's gradually lost the respect of her two children and her husband... Read more
Published 19 months ago by L. Guerrero

5.0 out of 5 stars I want more!
What I've read so far is delightful. When will the entire book go on sale? This is like waiting for my Kindle all over again!
Published 21 months ago by Garry Buck

4.0 out of 5 stars One of Life's Crash Courses
Middle-aged Adelaide seems to have led a fairly charmed life until the day she gets fired, surprises her teenage daughter about to engage in pleasurable activities with her... Read more
Published 21 months ago by Patricia Hester Wiggins

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