katherineflitsch_'s review
adventurous
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
5.0
I don’t even know what to say about this book, because its own words say it all. Gracefully and assuredly, with poise and composition. I don’t know what to say, except to say that I hope to develop to write like this.
grooovyzeee's review
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
bethanyjnz's review
emotional
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
sarah_suts's review
emotional
hopeful
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
alisonburnis's review
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
I love a good plotless navel-gazing novel, but this was not it. It was trying way too hard to be intellectual all the time that it was exhausting. There were some sharp lines, but the pacing was weird, and the characters were too flat to be the subject of a plotless book. Rose and Charlotte are writers trying to make it in New York in the early 2000s, and this is the story of their intense friendship over decades, which ultimately fades. They see themselves as two sides of the same coin, before diverging in their thirties.
Worse that all of its other crimes, it was boring. Charlotte stopped being interesting a few chapters in, and it continued to go downhill. They’re unlikeable in a very real way, but this is a hollow, dull novel.
Worse that all of its other crimes, it was boring. Charlotte stopped being interesting a few chapters in, and it continued to go downhill. They’re unlikeable in a very real way, but this is a hollow, dull novel.
jmatkinson1's review
3.0
Rose and Charlotte meet in New York, fresh from University and keen to explore all the city can offer. They form a strong friendship, linked through life, love and loss, until suddenly their lives start to diverge.
This book is touted as a great feminist novel of our times and that, in my opinion, is total hype. It's a solid enough novel of female relationships but it's nothing that's not be written before! To me, the characters are not inspiring, they are rather unlikable with a selfish hedonistic approach to life. The writing does depict this lifestyle in a tawdry way which fits. Luckily it didn't take a lot of reading but I was somewhat disappointed
This book is touted as a great feminist novel of our times and that, in my opinion, is total hype. It's a solid enough novel of female relationships but it's nothing that's not be written before! To me, the characters are not inspiring, they are rather unlikable with a selfish hedonistic approach to life. The writing does depict this lifestyle in a tawdry way which fits. Luckily it didn't take a lot of reading but I was somewhat disappointed
jmooremyers's review
3.0
3.5 ⭐
Chapter 2:
Everyone has their own New York, and this was ours.
When I wasn't rewriting pieces, I pushed punctuation around, uprooting colons and semicolons and planting them where they needed to be. I was weeding a garden, and I found it soothing.
Chapter 3:
I told her [Rose] that I knew I could die also when I written myself out of the fear that Joan Didion would laugh if she were ever introduced to any of my sentences.
Rose and I loved each other because we were relieved to finally find a friend who understood what it was like to want so much for yourself it hurts - and who understood that real heroines don't let on that it hurts, they shut up and do the work. A friend who knew what it was like to love your family but to want another family created out of the authors you have decided are your truest relations, and to try to live up to what the famous dead, unrelated by blood, had asked of you. What it was like to have known even before you learned the word existed that you were a feminist, but to be raised by women who were never impelled to take up the label and in fact sometimes disparaged it.
Rose and I would never have said that we had unhappy childhoods, but they were shadowed childhoods, because we knew, or thought we knew, that our mothers were unhappy, even though Rose's mother and grandmother and aunts worked it out so that she would never have to see the worst of her mother's grief if they could help it, and my mother and grandmother and aunts hid all their true feelings behind jokes and food and alcohol and housekeeping. Still we sensed that there were clouds hanging over the women who raised us, and it made me quieter than I should have been, made Rose louder than she should have been, and left us both determined never to be mothers. To be a mother meant to die inside, constantly, so that everyone else could live. No thanks.
Chapter 9:
She cried harder. I sat there with my hand on her back, looking away from her and out at the strip malls so she could have a little bit of privacy as she cried, filling with rage at all the women who knew their own mind and had no pity for those who had mistaken the insistent voice of desire for a needle on a compass.
Chapter 10:
It [Rose marrying Peter] sounded supremely logical, and I could not decide whether that meant it was a terrible idea or a very good one.
Love isn't enough? ... That's all there is, lady! ... You know what? You're so smart, you're stupid. [Jimmy]
Chapter 12:
He [Mark] hadn't wasted his twenties and thirties the way Rose and I had wasted them, the way all the people I knew and loved had wasted them: drinking and talking, seeing bands, seeing movies, seeing art, buying clothes, buying shoes, buying music, buying books, traveling, writing things whose importance evaporated within a week even though we were trying hard to engineer posterity.
Chapter 14:
What did we want? We no longer knew. None of our friends knew what they wanted either. If you had told us, all of us, when we were thirteen, sixteen, twenty-one, or twenty-five, that we would grow to be what the world called faithless, we would have protested loudly and said you had no idea what you were talking about. ... We thought because we were readers, scholars, students of history, we would be protected against a certain amount of stupidity and stasis. We felt we owed the books we'd read proof that we were as open and free as they had commanded us to be. We had been hoping to do something new, but found ourselves pulled toward the old. We were angry and didn't know it, or angry and didn't think we should be, despite having come of age on an unending stream of women who wielded guitars and rage like swords and shields. Why were we angry? Our hard work might come to nothing, and we had been told everything depended on our hard work. We were not as strong as we thought we were; not as smart as we thought we were. The men we loved were not as strong or passionate as we felt ourselves to be, but they were always less hobbled by doubt; they were always less bothered by how long it was taking to get everywhere, which meant we were going to have to keep dreaming alone.
Chapter 19:
And I would write, in fact wrote a lot, ... but the sentences were dead on the page. They were too elegant and said nothing. I kept at it, thinking something living would have to erupt, but I was too intent on making sure no one could tell the person writing them was angry or lonely. No one ever saw these pages, but they were a forest I like to go walking in. The paths were well-worn and kept me out of harm's way.
Chapter 25:
Inside the auditorium, hundreds of us stood beneath the chandeliers, colored light rushing over and around us, our faces, older than the hearts they shielded, raised toward the stage, where, for two short hours, the singer and his piano issued a thunder so total and radiant it made the world outside shrivel up and blow away.
... the realization that I no longer wanted to waste time intensely envying other women for having loved themselves enough to love their lives and everything in it, for loving their lives so much they'd helplessly lavish even the smallest of tasks with a care that turned anything they put their minds or hands to into works of art ...
Chapter 26:
I am homesick for you sorry not you just for the girls we were for how happy we were and it was the most fun I'll ever have just standing next to you on a street corner on the way into some show some reading some party and one day if I ever get over myself which is looking unlikely maybe I'll write this all out and send it to you as an application for forgiveness but I don't want to work that hard for anything anymore do you but I will if you do no I will if you do please I will if you do
Chapter 27:
She wasn't luck, but I was lucky, because she was the daughter or a man who liked to kiss the freckles on her mother's shoulders and quote that line from Hopkins: Glory be to God for dappled things. It might have been all she'd ever need to know about him: he was that tender, that imaginative, that whimsical, that earnest, that alive to the music of words.
[Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty, 1985]
When he [Karl] talked about his children it made it easier to hang on to the belief that the world contained just as much light as darkness.
Chapter 28:
But the point is that it takes real work for a woman to sustain the creation of something outside herself that is not a child. Real will, because we are always going to be tempted in a way men aren't to wander off the road and find some place to get knocked up so we can relieve ourselves of the burden of trying to figure out what everything in life is really worth, and then, as a reward for this abdication of responsibility, get ourselves worshipped as if we'd climbed Mount Everest when all we'd done was let nature take its course. Men don't walk around with a door inside them that they'll constantly have to worry about - should I open it, should I keep it shut, does it lock, well wait, if I lock it, can I call a locksmith to get it back open, how long does it stay open, what's the data on what happens if you've left it open for a really long time, can anything get through? ... They don't have this inherent, latent source of power serving as a standard against which they can measure every other way they can access power, or every other dream they might have, and then run the risk of finding those dreams or that power wanting in comparison to the thing their body could do.
"Heloise and Abelard," I said. "Avenge her for us, my dear," she [Dr L.] said, uncorking the wine, the red-black plenty splashing loudly into those plastic cups, the sound of that wine-dark sea turning us into sorceresses.
Joyce [Dr. K's assistant] came to my graduation, and I attended her funeral. And when I said that out loud to Elinor it reminded me how lucky I had been to know and love all the women I had known and loved, and realized I no longer wanted what I didn't already have.
Chapter 29:
... but rage and despair tend not to give a shit about exactitude ...
Chapter 31:
Songs my mother and her sisters danced to in the kitchen when they were teenagers, songs my mother and sisters sang to me in that same kitchen when I was very small. Folk songs. Hymns. [One Fine Day, Please Mr. Postman, My Boyfriend's Back]
Standing there looking through that window I felt, for the very first time, the weight of the life inside me in a way that did not feel like grief. Innocence and joy were possible, therefore this child might be possible, and my sadness did not have to be the only thing I passed on to her. I could teach her these old songs that always sounded new, and I could tell her of the alchemy that happens when girls stand next to each other working hard, so hard, like these students, like Rose and I did, to stun and beguile and so become much more than girls and turn into gold. Go find those girls, I could say, and you will never get lost.
Chapter 2:
Everyone has their own New York, and this was ours.
When I wasn't rewriting pieces, I pushed punctuation around, uprooting colons and semicolons and planting them where they needed to be. I was weeding a garden, and I found it soothing.
Chapter 3:
I told her [Rose] that I knew I could die also when I written myself out of the fear that Joan Didion would laugh if she were ever introduced to any of my sentences.
Rose and I loved each other because we were relieved to finally find a friend who understood what it was like to want so much for yourself it hurts - and who understood that real heroines don't let on that it hurts, they shut up and do the work. A friend who knew what it was like to love your family but to want another family created out of the authors you have decided are your truest relations, and to try to live up to what the famous dead, unrelated by blood, had asked of you. What it was like to have known even before you learned the word existed that you were a feminist, but to be raised by women who were never impelled to take up the label and in fact sometimes disparaged it.
Rose and I would never have said that we had unhappy childhoods, but they were shadowed childhoods, because we knew, or thought we knew, that our mothers were unhappy, even though Rose's mother and grandmother and aunts worked it out so that she would never have to see the worst of her mother's grief if they could help it, and my mother and grandmother and aunts hid all their true feelings behind jokes and food and alcohol and housekeeping. Still we sensed that there were clouds hanging over the women who raised us, and it made me quieter than I should have been, made Rose louder than she should have been, and left us both determined never to be mothers. To be a mother meant to die inside, constantly, so that everyone else could live. No thanks.
Chapter 9:
She cried harder. I sat there with my hand on her back, looking away from her and out at the strip malls so she could have a little bit of privacy as she cried, filling with rage at all the women who knew their own mind and had no pity for those who had mistaken the insistent voice of desire for a needle on a compass.
Chapter 10:
It [Rose marrying Peter] sounded supremely logical, and I could not decide whether that meant it was a terrible idea or a very good one.
Love isn't enough? ... That's all there is, lady! ... You know what? You're so smart, you're stupid. [Jimmy]
Chapter 12:
He [Mark] hadn't wasted his twenties and thirties the way Rose and I had wasted them, the way all the people I knew and loved had wasted them: drinking and talking, seeing bands, seeing movies, seeing art, buying clothes, buying shoes, buying music, buying books, traveling, writing things whose importance evaporated within a week even though we were trying hard to engineer posterity.
Chapter 14:
What did we want? We no longer knew. None of our friends knew what they wanted either. If you had told us, all of us, when we were thirteen, sixteen, twenty-one, or twenty-five, that we would grow to be what the world called faithless, we would have protested loudly and said you had no idea what you were talking about. ... We thought because we were readers, scholars, students of history, we would be protected against a certain amount of stupidity and stasis. We felt we owed the books we'd read proof that we were as open and free as they had commanded us to be. We had been hoping to do something new, but found ourselves pulled toward the old. We were angry and didn't know it, or angry and didn't think we should be, despite having come of age on an unending stream of women who wielded guitars and rage like swords and shields. Why were we angry? Our hard work might come to nothing, and we had been told everything depended on our hard work. We were not as strong as we thought we were; not as smart as we thought we were. The men we loved were not as strong or passionate as we felt ourselves to be, but they were always less hobbled by doubt; they were always less bothered by how long it was taking to get everywhere, which meant we were going to have to keep dreaming alone.
Chapter 19:
And I would write, in fact wrote a lot, ... but the sentences were dead on the page. They were too elegant and said nothing. I kept at it, thinking something living would have to erupt, but I was too intent on making sure no one could tell the person writing them was angry or lonely. No one ever saw these pages, but they were a forest I like to go walking in. The paths were well-worn and kept me out of harm's way.
Chapter 25:
Inside the auditorium, hundreds of us stood beneath the chandeliers, colored light rushing over and around us, our faces, older than the hearts they shielded, raised toward the stage, where, for two short hours, the singer and his piano issued a thunder so total and radiant it made the world outside shrivel up and blow away.
... the realization that I no longer wanted to waste time intensely envying other women for having loved themselves enough to love their lives and everything in it, for loving their lives so much they'd helplessly lavish even the smallest of tasks with a care that turned anything they put their minds or hands to into works of art ...
Chapter 26:
I am homesick for you sorry not you just for the girls we were for how happy we were and it was the most fun I'll ever have just standing next to you on a street corner on the way into some show some reading some party and one day if I ever get over myself which is looking unlikely maybe I'll write this all out and send it to you as an application for forgiveness but I don't want to work that hard for anything anymore do you but I will if you do no I will if you do please I will if you do
Chapter 27:
She wasn't luck, but I was lucky, because she was the daughter or a man who liked to kiss the freckles on her mother's shoulders and quote that line from Hopkins: Glory be to God for dappled things. It might have been all she'd ever need to know about him: he was that tender, that imaginative, that whimsical, that earnest, that alive to the music of words.
[Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty, 1985]
When he [Karl] talked about his children it made it easier to hang on to the belief that the world contained just as much light as darkness.
Chapter 28:
But the point is that it takes real work for a woman to sustain the creation of something outside herself that is not a child. Real will, because we are always going to be tempted in a way men aren't to wander off the road and find some place to get knocked up so we can relieve ourselves of the burden of trying to figure out what everything in life is really worth, and then, as a reward for this abdication of responsibility, get ourselves worshipped as if we'd climbed Mount Everest when all we'd done was let nature take its course. Men don't walk around with a door inside them that they'll constantly have to worry about - should I open it, should I keep it shut, does it lock, well wait, if I lock it, can I call a locksmith to get it back open, how long does it stay open, what's the data on what happens if you've left it open for a really long time, can anything get through? ... They don't have this inherent, latent source of power serving as a standard against which they can measure every other way they can access power, or every other dream they might have, and then run the risk of finding those dreams or that power wanting in comparison to the thing their body could do.
"Heloise and Abelard," I said. "Avenge her for us, my dear," she [Dr L.] said, uncorking the wine, the red-black plenty splashing loudly into those plastic cups, the sound of that wine-dark sea turning us into sorceresses.
Joyce [Dr. K's assistant] came to my graduation, and I attended her funeral. And when I said that out loud to Elinor it reminded me how lucky I had been to know and love all the women I had known and loved, and realized I no longer wanted what I didn't already have.
Chapter 29:
... but rage and despair tend not to give a shit about exactitude ...
Chapter 31:
Songs my mother and her sisters danced to in the kitchen when they were teenagers, songs my mother and sisters sang to me in that same kitchen when I was very small. Folk songs. Hymns. [One Fine Day, Please Mr. Postman, My Boyfriend's Back]
Standing there looking through that window I felt, for the very first time, the weight of the life inside me in a way that did not feel like grief. Innocence and joy were possible, therefore this child might be possible, and my sadness did not have to be the only thing I passed on to her. I could teach her these old songs that always sounded new, and I could tell her of the alchemy that happens when girls stand next to each other working hard, so hard, like these students, like Rose and I did, to stun and beguile and so become much more than girls and turn into gold. Go find those girls, I could say, and you will never get lost.
pferdina's review
funny
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
A tale of a woman’s life, her love affairs with men, and her decades of friendship with another woman. It is not an easy life, it has success at times, and deep failures too.