Surrender Dorothy

Rating:
Summary: Great summer read
Review: This is the first book I've read by Meg Wolitzer, and overall, I enjoyed it. The plot brings three just-turned-thirty friends into close and prolonged contact with the 50-something mother of their recently deceased friend. Wolitzer is able to pull this off because she obviously likes all of her characters, their various flaws notwithstanding. She also has the type of sense of humor that allows her to ligthen things up when emotions and events threaten to drag things down too much. The strongest character is the Mother, Natalie, who is one of the more appealing baby boomers in recent fiction, and by no means a mere caricature. My only objection is that several secondary characters are not as clearly drawn as the main ones. But in fairness to Wolitzer, in most novels the reader would not even care about knowing more about such relatively minor characters, and it's only her gift for making you care that makes this an issue at all.

Rating:
Summary: Great summer read
Review: This is the first book I've read by Meg Wolitzer, and overall, I enjoyed it. The plot brings three just-turned-thirty friends into close and prolonged contact with the 50-something mother of their recently deceased friend. Wolitzer is able to pull this off because she obviously likes all of her characters, their various flaws notwithstanding. She also has the type of sense of humor that allows her to ligthen things up when emotions and events threaten to drag things down too much. The strongest character is the Mother, Natalie, who is one of the more appealing baby boomers in recent fiction, and by no means a mere caricature. My only objection is that several secondary characters are not as clearly drawn as the main ones. But in fairness to Wolitzer, in most novels the reader would not even care about knowing more about such relatively minor characters, and it's only her gift for making you care that makes this an issue at all.

Rating:
Summary: A bittersweat read to usher in the fall.
Review: This is the first title I've read by this author and was enthralled by the tender passages. Having been a long time fan of Alice Adams, I surely thought that feeling of gentle familiarity with characters, beautiful on the outside and shattered and fragile inside, was a pleasure now gone. I'm pleased to say this book evoked the same feeling of honest haunting. Thank you, Meg Wolitzer for this gem of a read.

Rating:
Summary: Blah......
Review: What a bunch of adolescents. All pretty self-serving. And dissappointing. I don't think friendship is too awfully deep when you screw around with your best friend's husband. Kind of a book about 30 year olds not wanting to grow up - forget the fact that their dear friend has died. And talk about a suffocating mother....YIKES! This book is mediocre at best.

Rating:
Summary: Unsatisfying drama
Review: Wolitzer's book describes the changes in relationships caused by the death of a group of friends' close friend, Sara. The book follows the lives of four thirty-somethings and Sara's mother through a period of a month immediately following the death. In these trying times, there is a mass of sexual tension, sexual frustration, professional jealousy and general apathy to the world outside their own summer house. In relaying this interplay, however, Wolitzer fails to fully develop her characters. Everyone exists solely in relationship to someone else and does not have the presence to exist singly. While this does underscore their closeness to Sara and her former position as the nexus of their relationships, it leaves the characters flat and unfulfilling. Even the tensions within the group exist more academically than actually; Wolitzer fails to convey the deep emotions caused by Sara's death or the explosive emotions that (should have) followed. She also clutters the book by throwing in numerous other issues wholly unrelated to the central theme. Shawn's fear of AIDS, Nathalie's reunion with an old high school friend and Peter's guilt concerning his infidelity do more to add to the comic nature of the story and improve its likelihood of becoming a series of scenes for a soap opera than further along the central theme: coping with the loss of a loved one.

Rating:
Summary: Unsatisfying drama
Review: Wolitzer's book describes the changes in relationships caused by the death of a group of friends' close friend, Sara. The book follows the lives of four thirty-somethings and Sara's mother through a period of a month immediately following the death. In these trying times, there is a mass of sexual tension, sexual frustration, professional jealousy and general apathy to the world outside their own summer house. In relaying this interplay, however, Wolitzer fails to fully develop her characters. Everyone exists solely in relationship to someone else and does not have the presence to exist singly. While this does underscore their closeness to Sara and her former position as the nexus of their relationships, it leaves the characters flat and unfulfilling. Even the tensions within the group exist more academically than actually; Wolitzer fails to convey the deep emotions caused by Sara's death or the explosive emotions that (should have) followed. She also clutters the book by throwing in numerous other issues wholly unrelated to the central theme. Shawn's fear of AIDS, Nathalie's reunion with an old high school friend and Peter's guilt concerning his infidelity do more to add to the comic nature of the story and improve its likelihood of becoming a series of scenes for a soap opera than further along the central theme: coping with the loss of a loved one.