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Summary: The right buttons.....
Review: Elizabeth Berg has pushed all the right buttons. Intricate descriptions of mother and childen relationships. Beautifully written.
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Summary: Open House
Review: Elizabeth Berg's novel Open House explores the life of a divorced woman and her journey to become independent, separate from her husband David, who has divorced her, and to the life that she had been living as a housewife, content in serving her husband and son. In order to afford her home after the divorce, Samantha, the protagonist, then decides to "open" her residence to boarders in order to pay the mortgage on the house. Sam tries desperately to win back her husband David, who moves on with his life, while her son Travis thinks that she is crazy. However, had it not been for her mother, a vibrant woman who enjoys dating, her best friend Rita, loud and honest and has no problem expressing her feelings, Sam would not have been able to keep going. Yet, the new personalities she meets are the real forces that allow her continue, such as Lydia, a nice elderly woman who teaches her that true love cans exist, and most importantly the new friend she finds in King, an overweight, yet handsome, MIT graduate who finds joy in doing odd jobs given through an employment agency. King becomes Samantha's backbone, lending an ear to listen and a shoulder to cry on. Sam also joins the employment placement agency and to make extra money, working at a Laundromat and as a telephone solicitor. After a few dates, which are arranged by her mother, Sam attempts to get back into the dating world; but she has a difficult time. By the end of the novel, Samantha has refused her husband's apology and desire to come home and discovers her love for King is more than friendship. She has found herself.
Berg captures the voyage most divorced women make and describes the aftermath of a divorce very well. Her remarkably vivid characters and realistic plot paint a masterpiece of mixed emotions. The implied theme, a search for identity and comfort in being oneself, can be applied to individuals' lives, not just divorced women. This is a wonderful story that makes you examine your own life, while learning of another's passage to self-discovery.
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Summary: A funny, often silly read about a silly woman
Review: I did enjoy parts of this book. Some of Sam's observations about her husband/men are right on. I also found some of this book as really silly and improbable. The main character, Sam, is very frustrating. Why didn't she try to go to school and become more independent? Why did she spend a lot of money on really silly things when she was concerned about the mortgage? I wasn't too thrilled with her new choice in a romantic interest, either. And you know, she would have jumped at the chance to reconcile! I was a little disappointed in this book.
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Summary: Weak, insipid main character
Review: What is to like about Sam, the main character? She is unaccomplished, weak and long-suffering. What kind of mother brings in random boarders after a divorce, forcing her son to deal with even more domestic upheaval? If she can get her ex to cough up 12K for china/jewelry, certainly she could get him to keep up the mortgage. I saw nothing in this character to inspire me to believe her husband WOULD want to be with her, ever, although he is a weak, mean man himself. (Just once, however, I wanted her to shut up after asking him why he left so we could get an answer from him.) In the end, Sam is still unaccomplished and finds purpose in herself in the only way weak women so often do: with a man who will love her. Oh, and how "romantic" it is that she falls for a nice man who philosophically wanders from job to job. In real life, a single woman with a son to care for, who herself has no steady income, would not be interested in attaching to a man like this. This begs the question: hasn't she learned anything here in order to prevent this from happening again? Two stars only because the author has a dry, witty sense of humor at times. Other than that, drivel.
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Summary: OPEN'S YOUR HEART
Review: I am a voracious reader of a myriad of authors on a bevy of topics, but when I want to reward myself I read Elizabeth Berg. She NEVER fails to deliver for me. "Open House" is a lovely, insightful, romantic, liberating read that left me flying high. Wanting more. The story of Sam's struggle to live through a divorce, is deftly handled in this story.. The deep well of emotions are explored with a careful scalpel of Berg's insightful precision, opening all wounds to the healing process. Perhaps some will say it was too predictable, but I think not. People do survive divorce after mourning the death of marriage....they struggle forward, take a step back, and two more forward. Berg's characters follow suit. I LOVED this book and I am not easily pleased anymore. Treat yourself to this open-hearted look at life in turmoil and solutions in progression.
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Summary: Not The Usual Oprah Book Club Fare
Review: This book was a light, easy, and enjoyable read. Although it deals with a topic that is unhappy - divorce, the author doesn't make the reader wallow in the character's grief. Instead she has created a character who is witty even when she is down on herself and the world. Unlike so many of Oprah's books, this one is easy - almost too easy. The book is a fast and not very challenging read. One of the things that I like about most of Oprah's other choices is that you can't read them quickly because you have to think about and/or feel much of what you read, as you read it. That's not the case here. So, if you're looking for an earth-shattering, life-altering book, this isn't it. If you just want something to laugh (and maybe cry a little) with on a sunday afternoon - this is your book.
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Summary: Great Book!
Review: This book was so well written I couldn't believe it when I turned to the last page. I didn't want the story to end. Can't wait to read more from this author.
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Summary: Is There Someone Here With Me?
Review: This book made me feel that quite possibly Elizabeth Berg had slipped into my back door and was taking notes of my own life! This brought back so many memories- and offered an excellent opportunity to see how much better life is now! I loved the characters and sometimes hated them at the same time. I wanted to punch David for his narcisstic attitude many times. This book was an easy and quick read and I enjoyed the memories.
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Summary: Nothing Novel About Open House
Review: "Open House," by Elizabeth Berg, is one of those novels that makes a travesty of that august and oft misapplied designation with such insouciant glibness that that feat itself easily eclipses the dubious literary merits of the work in question, to the extent that readers may almost be forgiven for accepting it as that which it pretends to be. Perhaps the most fundamental and commonly understood meaning of the word novel is "new," a descriptor that can hardly be applied to anything in or about "Open House." We have all, alas, visited this house before, and have known its inhabitants to a far greater degree than we are permitted to know Ms. Berg's characters, each of whom follows their narrowly scripted roles with such dogged assiduousness that, at times, one feels that they themselves are painfully aware of merely marking time until they, and the reader, can be put out of their misery. Indeed, the reader who perseveres through the final page with so little hope of compensation shares something of the hopelessness which Ms. Berg would have us recognize and sympathize with in her abandoned housewife protagonist. In this, at least, she may have to some extent succeeded. At the novel's center we have a kept wife who is left suddenly by her husband, who has evidently tired of her (and who can blame him?). Sam ("Samantha") proceeds to lick her wounds for the duration of the book, wallowing in her helplessness, indulging her love-hate conception of Martha Stewart, and generally boring herself (and the reader) with an all-consuming fear of life without hubby. The supporting players include her mother, a beauty salon habitue and live wire on the over-fifty dating circuit; her young son, a dull construct strikingly void of any depth of feeling, thought or activity and existing mainly as a foil for Sam's maternal angst, and a blasé commentator on the series of boarders Sam admits into the house; her old college chum Rita who serves as Sam's sounding board via phone calls, and who, conveniently enough, had never liked Sam's husband; and finally (bet you knew this was coming) the new love interest: a bulky and philosophical bachelor who has a PhD. in astrophysics and yet prefers to earn a living as a temp worker, walking dogs and performing other odd jobs (read "smelling the roses"). Additionally, there are three boarders Sam takes in to supplement her income, each representing a specific outlook on life, each of which, ostensibly, serves to help shape Sam's own evolving outlook in the new "single woman" landscape she now inhabits: Lydia, an elderly woman who is with Sam only briefly before remarrying and moving out ("optimism"); Lavender Blue, a morose female college student who believes life is a dungheap ("pessimism"); and Edward, a gay man with his own business (that's right, a hair salon) who seems content enough with his life at present (middle of the road, neither optimism nor pessimism), and we know he is gay because the narrator tells us so and describes those telltale physical mannerisms we all know so well. Transparent moralizing in a novel is rarely if ever a virtue, far less so in a book such as this which so heavily depends on cultural cliches, hackneyed character types, and a cookie cutter plot. For example, the protagonist is clearly made to reflect a happy reversal of the tendency to judge others by appearance, while at the same time Ms. Berg relies on such judgements to achieve what slender characterization she manages for characters existing solely to suit her program. The basement dwelling college student is, fairly explicitly, written off as a feckless doomsayer and, accordingly, evicted from the "open" house, where her negative worldview threatens to contaminate others. Were the reader as judgemental and narrow minded, the protagonist herself would have been evicted early on for shameless co-dependency, conspicious consumption, and a vacuous intellect. And while some may counter that the novel's aim is to chart her transcendence of this deplorable condition, one might reasonably ask why an astute reader should overlook her faults and assume latent strengths, hidden dimensions and the ability to evolve while remaining content with the limitations imposed on all the other characters? In short, why (and how) does a reader accept one character as multi-dimensional and capable of transformation and transcendance (as real) when all the others are damned cardboard characters? The protagonist's tedious journey to the arms, and the bed, of the gentle giant, "King," (and clearly, nothing less than full carnal knowledge will answer) is as inevitable as the passage of time squandered in the reading of it. King's conquest is money in the bank; he merely has to walk dogs and count the leaves on the trees while waiting for it to roll in. By attempting to impart a richer characterization to her protagonist at the expense of all other characters, Ms. Berg has only made it that much harder for the reader to accept Sam's ultimate rejection of her husband when, abandoned by his mistress, he attempts to come crawling back to her; for this reader, at least, the weight of Sam's characterization tips the scales toward her willingness to take hubby back (and her overwhelming relief in so doing). At the very least, the promptness of her rejection is unsettling, if her character really has evolved to the extent this novel would have us believe; after all, there is a child to be considered into the equation as well, and even in the bitterest of divorces, even the most self-absorbed parents give a thought to the child. Sam's knee-jerk decision seemed made with her and only her in mind . . . is she really so very different than she was at the beginning of the book?
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Summary: Elizabeth Berg's Open House is filled with self-realization
Review: Open House is a book that unexpectedly draws you into the character's emotions and has a way of making you feel the pain, love, sarcasm and everything else she experiences. From the moment I started the book, I couldn't bring myself to put it down. It is an inspiring story of a woman struggling to find herself and build herself a new life through a divorce. I am sure many women can relate to the loneliness, sadness and emptiness Sam went through after her divorce as well as the love and joy she felt afterwards. This book is for everyone, especially those who have struggled through tough relations and divorces....it makes you realize that there are others who go through the pain of loving someone.
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