I'm not sure what to think about this book. I'm definitely disappointed as it didn't live up to some of the glowing reviews I read about it. It seemed as if certain things about the characters were forced in order to make them like the characters in Sense and Sensibility. I absolutely couldn't st...
I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. It's quite funny in parts and I loved that the three main characters ranged in age from almost 50 to 70 something. I thought the author captured the inner lives of the characters beautifully and wittily. I laughed in embarrassed sympathy rather often. I give i...
What if a female scholar, neurotic (but not so talkative) as a Woody Allen character, resented her husband for succumbing to a mid-life crisis (before he actually succumbed to one), and lapsed into her own? What if her reading of eighteenth-century philosophy and pornography penetrated her psych...
When Jane Barlow Schwartz and I were 25 years old, we finalized our Connecticut divorces. We had, each of us, married too soon. We never knew our boyfriends-fiancés-husbands-ex-husbands until it was far too late. We didn't know ourselves, either, and so the marriages ended. We needed to grow up.H...
I don't know why I continued to read this all the way to the finish. All I can say is that the premise that middle-aged children often find themselves becoming the parent to their parents. In this case, Elizabeth is trying to care for her grandmother Lotte who is suffering from skin cancer. Lo...
Molly saw a hermit thrush. Hummingbirds flitted in and out of white flowers shaped like bells. Pink buds of jasmine hung over the fence ready to burst into bloom. At the beach, surfers slid into the waves with the garish sunset behind them. Finches began to sing. She took one class to Catalina ea...
It had been one year since Fin’s mother died, one year since coming to New York City to live with Lady. He’d been an orphan for one year. It felt like ten. They went back home to Connecticut on the anniversary of Lydia Hadley’s death, a lovely, gentle Saturday in May. Fin sat in the same seat, in...