Having a Baby, by Diana Bert, Katherine Dusay, Averil Haydock, Susan Keel, Mary Oei, Danielle Steel Traina, and Jan Yanehiro (1984)
If you can get past the exceptional financial situations of these women (hiring live-in nurses, purchasing maternity wardrobes from Paris, having Lamaze instructors come over to give private lessons), the benefits of having seven points of view can be tremendous. These seven women got to know each other at a private exercise class for pregnant women that met at the home of Danielle Steel Traina (yes, the Danielle Steel), and when all the babies were born someone came up with the idea of writing it all down. The book is divided into sections such as Conception, Weight Gain, Sex, Seven Months, What You Feel Like Right Afterward, and Sex Again (Afterward), and each woman writes her 1/7th of the section. After awhile you may develop favorites. I personally preferred Averil, Mary, and Jan, and had real problems with a couple of the others. I don't mind telling you that a major difficulty for me was getting through the Danielle Steel sections. I'd say that the main thing this book needed was a heavy-handed editor: some of the women told the entire pregnancy and birth stories of all of their children in each section: the topic would be "Going Home," and the woman would be discussing the labor and delivery of her first child, not even the pregnancy the book was about and certainly not things relevant to the "Going Home" section---and furthermore, she'd already told us all about it in every previous section. After awhile I was skipping sections written by these particular women. The pity was that the women I liked kept it so short and sweet that I'd want to hear more, and then I'd be flipping past 2 dozen pages by someone who's probably a big hit at parties. I also could have heard less about the exhaustingly successful careers: "Of course, I was running my own business, serving on a board of directors, developing my own line of clothing, traveling around the world as my husband's secretary, serving as a Supreme Court justice, and building a house from the ground up---all while 7 months pregnant." A problem that is not the fault of the book or the authors is that it was published in 1984. This means we have "sonograms" and "spinals" and "choosing your birth philosophy" and "writing your own birthing script," and people are carrying newborns home in the car on their laps, and all the doctors are "he." This doesn't much hurt the purpose of the book aside from a few jarring moments. I'm also going to bring up this topic again: do we really have to obsess so much about "getting fat"?
Compatibility Test: A penchant for discussion groups.
After Having a Baby, by Diana Bert, Katherine Dusay, Susan Keel, Mary Oei, and Jan Yanehiro (1988)
When I worked in the infant room of a daycare, part of my job involved being interested in every little thing that every single baby in my room did when he or she was at home. Since I was paid for this I ended up enjoying it, and talking with the parents at the beginning and end of each day became one of the best parts of my job. I was not, however, paid to read this book, and I have no personal relationship with the women writing it, so listening to them defensively explain their philosophies of child-rearing was more like being caught on an airplane with someone who just can't say enough about her little darling's obvious intelligence.
Fortunately, we lose Danielle Steel in this follow-up to Having a Baby (see review, above); we can all thank our lucky stars for that since she has nine children and told me more than I ever wanted to know about them just in the introduction. Unfortunately, we also lose Averil Haydock (except for a brief section about twins), a favorite of mine from the first book.
The structure of this book is much like the last: topics like Sleep, Teething, and Toilet Training are followed by commentary from each of the five authors. I enjoyed skimming through the sections but didn't feel as inclined to read every word. Much of the advice was dithery anyway: "I do it this way, but then again sometimes I do it this way, and occasionally this way, and my husband feels we should handle it this way, and my friends prefer this way, but I really feel that with my exceptional child, justify-justify-justify, trust-honesty-empowerment-creativity." Good results are attributed to the mother's child-rearing decisions; bad results are attributed to what-can-you-do,-they-have-their-own-personalities-from-birth.
Something that struck me harder while reading this book than while reading the first one is that these women don't represent a cross-section of parents: they're friends (and so presumably share common views and feelings) in the same socioeconomic class. A more interesting book could have been written using just one of these women, plus one woman in her 50s who reared her own children and is now rearing her grandchildren, one woman who started having children in her late teens, one single mother, one at-home father, one mother of adopted children, etc.
Compatibility Test: An unquenchable and undiscriminating thirst for information. (Compatibility Test for the Compatibility Test: You're the sort of person who would ask a stranger in the baby food aisle which brand she fed her baby.)
Wallis: The Novel, by Anne Edwards (1991)
I have enough trouble with the history of my own country to have retained any history of an entirely different country, but I certainly remember something about an American divorcee named Wallis Simpson and a king who abdicated the throne (or is it "abdicated the crown"?---anyway he stopped being king) for her. This feels more like storybook stuff, not history.
The unfortunate thing about an actual storybook format is that it's difficult to tell just how much is made up: we can't really know what Wallis or the king or any of the other participants were thinking, but the book misleads us into thinking we can. I'd prefer to draw my own conclusions about Wallis's motivations, yet the author has already concluded for me that she was ambitious, ruthless, cold-hearted, relentless, and a social climber to boot; and the author confirms her own theories by having Wallis think to herself things along the lines of, "I must be doing these things because I'm ambitious, ruthless, cold-hearted....." and so on. That's hardly fair.
I might still have been interested in the book as a sort of overview--to be followed later by a more fact-based biography--if the writing hadn't been so Historical Romance: "sloe eyes that mocked as they smiled" is a typical description of a romantic male figure. Eyes, in fact, are a big thing to the author, although generally only if they are blue. Everyone with blue eyes has the color mentioned several times with a creative use of adjectives ("glinting," "electric," "mystical," "china," etc.). Wallis's own "violet-blue" eyes are mentioned so many times that after awhile I was hoping she wouldn't make eye contact with anyone else so we wouldn't have to hear about it anymore.
Sex scenes are also in the historical romance mold: we have "arousing all her latent sexuality," we have "her boyish bosom" (Wallis's chest size is mentioned almost as often as her eye color), we have "skin the color of cream bisque." Add all these technical problems on top of the disillusionment of finding that neither Wallis nor the king is anyone so special you want to root for the romance between them, and you can see why I wish I'd left my limited historical knowledge as it was.
Compatibility Test: "What's wrong with 'sloe eyes that mocked as they smiled'?"
Personal Effects, by Francesca Duranti (1995)
I'm tired of authors putting a quote at the beginning of each chapter. At one point in my life I wouldn't have written a chapter without a quote in front of it, but that was the same time of life when I wouldn't have written a theme essay that didn't begin with "What is ____? Webster's dictionary defines it as...."
I'm also tired of satirical philosophical novels. Am I the only one who finds myself skimming through page after page of the college-students-smoking-on-the-lawn sort of dialogue?
I was destined to dislike this book, and this is interesting because one of the big deep discussions within the book is about whether "the favorable disposition of the reader" is the most important factor in whether a book hits the bestseller lists. To see if you might be favorably disposed, here's a summary of the plot. An Italian woman's husband leaves her after 10 years of marriage, and she feels the need of something to do to take her mind off things. She picks an author named Milos Jarco at random from the cover of a book she gave her mother for her birthday, and she travels to Eastern Europe to interview him. Once there, she encounters peculiar resistance to her suggestions that she meet people from his past, and she begins to think she's being watched and followed even though there's very little evidence to suggest this. She gets more and more obsessed with finding this author, and finally the secret of why she can't meet him is revealed to her. It's not a very interesting secret. Nor are the discussions she has with her new lover, a philosopher extraordinaire who comes up with profound remarks that until now have been the property of any reasonably intelligent high school student.
Compatibility Test: If you're not yet tired of all the things I'm tired of.
His Third, Her Second, by Paul Estaver
Henry and Margo get married and combine their children into one big family. There's no particular timeline: we jump from ten years ago to yesterday to five years ago to the day before yesterday to eight years ago. Usually I hate this because I keep getting lost: "Let's see, this says it was on his 14th birthday, but wasn't he 14 five chapters ago?" This book, however, had compensating qualities. My dad once told me that when you write something you should never seem as if you're writing everything you know on the topic---there should always be the impression that you could go on and on but you're limiting yourself for the sake of space. That's how this book was: there'd be page after page about a minor supporting character, chapter after chapter about a main character, but when the book was over I realized I'd barely said how-dee-do to these people considering how much there seemed to be left unwritten. The ending was blah, but for this style of book that's typical. There isn't a real out-with-a-bang or tying-up-the-loose-ends way to wrap up a slice-of-life book, even if the author wanted to.
Compatibility Test: If your tastes seem to be generally similar to mine, you will probably like it.
Listen to Me Good: The Life Story of an Alabama Midwife, by Margaret Charles Smith and Linda Janet Holmes (1996)
I don't care if it did win a prize in women's studies, I was disappointed. The back of the book says that M.C.S. "...has thousands of birthing stories to tell. Sifting through nearly five decades of providing care for women..., she relates the tales that capture the life-and-death struggle of the birthing experience...." Silly me, expecting to read about these in the book. Instead, half the book is written by L.J.H., whose dull and questionably relevant background information gave me a yeah-yeah-yeah-get-to-the-good-part feeling, and the other half is written by M.C.S. about hospital politics for black midwives and how easy kids have it nowadays. Oh, sure, there's a placenta here and a labor pain there, but it wasn't five decades and thousands of birthing stories and the life-and-death struggle. I wanted anecdote after anecdote about deliveries, and they gave me Jim Crow laws and how to grow cotton.
Then let's talk about the pictures: in a book that's supposed to be about midwifery we have pictures of an abandoned cabin, a civil rights activist, a KKK poster, and the two authors signing their book contract.
The end result is an amateurish, disappointing book that gives the reader a feeling of false advertising and dashed hopes. Assuming that reader is ME. A reader looking for a photo of a KKK poster would be genuinely pleased.
Compatibility Test: Researching Jim Crow laws and how to grow cotton.
Diary of an Emotional Idiot, by Maggie Estep (1997)
Some people think nothing makes for more fascinating conversation than stories of their own nasty habits, usually sex- or bathroom-related. Their voices get louder and more frenzied as they imagine they're whipping their audiences into impressed astonishment, when actually the audience is wondering how much longer they have to keep their eyebrows up as if they care. Diary of an Emotional Idiot is a long monologue of this sort.
The narrator considers herself special for belonging to a group of ";self-loathers," people who claim that they do stupid self-destructive things because they hate themselves, but actually do them because have to do big attention-getting things so everyone else will notice how special they are. The narrator thinks it's special to have promiscuous sex and then write about it, and to write all about her assorted bathroom habits. Well, I'm so impressed with how open she is about her life, how uninhibited and free. If only we could all be this disgusting with each other, I'm sure the world would be a better place.
Compatibility Test: Eyebrows raised with genuine impressed astonishment as a co-worker compares her bathroom habits with those of her child.
The Quilt, by T. Davis Bunn (1993)
Spiritual morality books with a main character too good for this world are not on my usual reading list. I chose this one anyway because of a quote on the front that sounded intriguing: "So many memories, so many stories to tell. . .and something left undone."
The "something left undone" is the making of a prayer quilt. An old lady who has never said an unpleasant word in all her life hears from the Lord that before she dies she needs to make a quilt of thanksgiving and gratitude. Before long, most of the women in the village are helping. The quilt is completed, and the little old lady dies on cue.
Let's put this story in the fairy-tale category so that I can deal with it without needing acid to scrape off the goo. People whose lives are beyond reproach don't exist, but if you can think of her as some sort of symbolic representative of the potential goodness within, rather than an actual human being, then this sweet little story is bound to have you weeping into a hanky and counting your blessings.
Compatibility Test: Fond of the kind of book where pure, large-eyed children drift into death in such a sweet, peaceful way that they teach their elders a lesson about life.
Lifelines, by Caroline Leavitt
I love mother-daughter-relationship books, and this isn't the yucky kind where all they do is yell at each other. Duse is the mama, a palm-reader and psychic who marries a dentist and gives birth to a baby all by herself on a piece of plastic she spreads over the bed. Isadora is the daughter, doomed as most daughters are to alternately cringe at and be charmed by her mother's eccentricities. When Isadora is little, Duse shows her a "star" made of the lines in Isadora's palm, and tells her that this means Isadora is special. Isadora believes it when she is little, but as she gets older feels her mother is pushing her to be more than she is. The relationship for the most part avoids the easy route of soap-opera dialogue, and the plot, while a little unusual and unlikely, seems to fit the unusual people that Duse and Isadora are. I wouldn't say the book is so slice-of-life that it'll be like looking in a mirror, but the way mothers and daughters sometimes feel about each other comes through. I also appreciated the way the book seemed to favor Duse---many books written about mother-daughter relationships seem to come down on the side of the daughter, perhaps because most of them are written by daughters who have some issues to resolve. Speaking of resolution, the ending isn't what I'd call ultimately satisfying: some plot lines dangle, and it's uncertain what's going to happen from here.
Compatibility Test: A dreamy mood and a willingness to let the 5-year-olds in books be different from the 5-year-olds picking their noses and trashing your living room.
Mirror Dance, by Lois McMaster Bujold (1994)
I wanted so badly to enjoy this book, because the author was recommended to me by a woman whose opinion of Interview With the Vampire ("pointless whining, along with some gross bits") I deeply respect. Also, I understand from several sources that this author is considered a master in her field. Nevertheless, I thought the book sucked. You and I, we might have to agree to disagree.
I love the occasional book of science fiction short stories, especially the ones that are more O. Henry than spaceships-and-aliens, but in general, it's not my thing--and it's too much work to tweeze out the kind of science fiction I do like from all the kinds I don't. (Just for starters: busty, sweaty, flowing-haired woman in high boots and leather bikini, looking tough and wielding a weapon in addition to killer abs? Not my type of science fiction. And that's like half of it.)
This book reminded me of a spoof I once saw: the characters were on the moon eating dinner, and every word out of their mouths was moon-this and space-that: "Pass the space-butter, Dad," and "Could you clear away the moon-dishes, kids?" In addition, there were all the dumb made-up words: bahzul this and bopahn that. I'm sure that a thousand years from now our vocabulary will be significantly changed, but I don't see any reason to speculate on what the changes will be to the point that the text becomes unreadable to anyone from this section of the timeline.
Another thing I don't like is the insistence on having as many weird aliens as possible. Then we have the overabundance of gadgets: toys galore, for everything from war armor to household objects.
As if that weren't enough, this particular book is cursed with a sickness that can strike any genre: Exposition Disease. The author can't seem to pass along any information without having a character do a mental inventory, or think back over past events, or ask themselves questions about how they got to this place.
I think science fiction can be fun, since it has so much to work with: planets, characters, and props can all be anything the author can dream of---but I'm going to go out on a space-limb here and say I don't think it's really good unless it sticks to at least some of the rules of "regular" literature: personalities that make sense, plots that aren't run by the prop descriptions, and writing that can be understood without constantly checking the space-glossary.
Compatibility Test: The only thing I can say is that you should like science fiction. From there, you're on your own.
A Lasting Spring, by Jean Stubbs
This is what a romance novel should be. I'll have no more of those silly paperbacks starring a mocking-eyed hero and a flashing-eyed heroine united by their instant dislike of each other's infuriating ways, then later falling into bed helpless against the forces that make the world go 'round. That moronic dross has led many a woman down the path of discontent just because she and her husband don't regularly engage in pseudo-witty insulting repartee in which they address each other using full names ("I've put up with your infuriating ways long enough, Jack Stone!" she snapped, eyes flashing with inner fire. "You love it and you know it, Cassandra O'Shaunessy," he replied huskily, pulling her to him and mesmerizing her with the dark pools that were his eyes.) A Lasting Spring won't give you any of that nasty syrup, so don't go looking for it. However, if you're a sucker for the kind of happy ending called "bittersweet" and perhaps a good weep or two, you've found the next book for your library list. We get to hang around with Evelyn from the time she's 7 or 8, attending her father's wedding and meeting a new step-brother, until she's 24, meeting her husband after two years of wartime separation. In between we meet a huge cast of characters and start rooting for Evelyn to get beyond the romantic failings we see so clearly (the ones no doubt inspired by paperback romances) and find good solid love with a nice guy. I promise a happy ending, but I can't promise there won't be a lot of sad endings before you get there.
Compatibility Test: Box of chocolates, fresh cotton hankie, and not a mocking glance within miles.
Girlfriend in a Coma, by Douglas Coupland (1998)
Just try to tell me this plot doesn't interest you. A teenage couple has sex for the first time one wintery evening, and that night the girl goes into a totally unexplained coma. Seventeen years later she wakes up to meet a child she conceived on that night. If that isn't enough, when she wakes up she predicts that the end of the world will occur in 2 months, and danged if this doesn't happen, leaving alive only the woman and her small group of high school friends and her daughter who is now pregnant. A coma and the apocalypse! And the ghost of a high school buddy to help them through it! There's a nice heavy-handed moral to the story, but if you're like me you won't even care: you'll be too busy turning pages with wide eyes and cold hands.
Compatibility Test: I can't believe you don't want to read this book.