Rating: 
Summary: Juska gets Five Chocolate Dipped Strawberries!
Review: "A Round Heeled Woman" grabbed me. I am a Romance Coach and read plenty of books about relationships, sex, and the finding of all, so I am not an easy "grab."
Juska's writing is wonderful. Her teaching background and love of books and learning shows. The subject has just the right combination sexy heat, seat-grabbing terror at the author's daring, and writhing embarrassment at the caddish behavior of these lusty older guys. It's impossible not to empathize and squirm with Juska's worries about her age and looks and her large breasts, her hunger to be touched and to feel.
If you can tolerate the risks that Juska takes and the pain and sadness she goes through when she gets bumped around by a man's ego, defenses, or inabilities, then by all means, read this book, all the way through. Then her courage and triumph and daring to live both pay off and come through brilliantly. Her perseverance makes all she goes through worth it, and she is a smashing role model for older women.
However, if you are a single woman and thinking about dating, but prone to paralyzing fears of the unknown or the dating horror stories of others, you probably ought to give this book a pass. I loved Juska's courage, but it would be all too easy to be distracted by her brutal honesty. Her experiment could easily have flattened others far earlier in the process. If you are "faint of heart," take care of yourself and put off this delightful read until you are solidly in a happy relationship. Then, you'll be glad you did both.
From Kathryn Lord, Your Romance Coach
(...)
Rating: 
Summary: Don't Wait Too Late
Review: "My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance" is what the cover says but not too much of this book is devoted to adventures, this is really the author's life biography with long stretches dealing with her repressed upbringing, unhappy marriage, teaching career, relationship with son, and her volunteer activities at a prison. Except for the parts about the search for romantic liaisons, I found the book dull and sad, what a lonely life, it seems she only awakened in her sixties to all she'd missed out on.As to her search for a man with an ad placed in the New York Times Review of Books, I found her experiences fascinating and admire her initiative. Probably not so encouraging for seniors seeking partners since she goes from disaster to disaster with men her own age and older and does not achieve real satisfaction until she meets a lover half her age. Could be an inspiration for the middle aged with the realization that passion and lust still burn in an old body, so don't wait till 67 like this woman did to start exploring that side of life. Bet if it had been a 67 year old man with a 33 year old woman, there wouldn't have been half as much hesitation and self doubt.
Rating:
Summary: I'm going to be that old someday and ...
Review: ... I hope I'm better than the men this author met.
Jane Juska's book about a woman suddenly deciding at 67 that "she's just gotta have it" is a hoot. Unfortunately, all the men she meets that are any where near her age let her down - one way or another. I would think that a woman with so much bravado would fare better. But then she hits the jackpot with a younger lover. So simultaneously you think, hurray for her but what's his problem.
Rating:
Summary: Better than you think it will be
Review: A friend of mine at work absolutely demanded that I read this book. And I'm still not done thanking her. In spite of its "Airplane Reading" cover design it's an amazingly good book. If you've ever been worried about growing old then curl up with Juska's novel. You'll find yourself reassured that growing old does not automatically mean you'll be tuning into Matlock and wondering whether or not you've taken your tablets. Erma Bombeck meets Dr. Ruth.
Rating:
Summary: A Timeless Quest
Review: For decades, the personals section of _The New York Review of Books_ has been a cheerful island of sexuality within an august intellectual setting. Those of us who browse it out of curiosity rather than sincere shopping can't help but wonder how these attempts at finding love turn out. Will the beautiful, brainy SJF, earthmother, find her sweet, brilliant, companionable sexy beast? Will the adventurous, intellectual, DWM, 47, periodontist, photographer, musician, cat-lover find his full-figured woman for passionate sex and scintillating discussions? (I am citing real ads from a recent issue.) Thanks to Jane Juska, we know, quite thoroughly, how one of those ads played out. Juska was watching an Eric Roehmer film in Berkeley, carefully munching her malted milk balls, when she started writing her ad. Carefully budgeting the $4.55-per-word prose, she eventually submitted, "Before I turn 67 - next March - I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me." Her funny, revealing, and smart book, _A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance_ (Villard), shows that the old slogan is quite true: it pays to advertise. If you are not "of a certain age", Juska's title might elude you. It is an old phrase that indicates a woman who is easy to get to go from vertical to horizontal. "My heels are very round," she writes, "I'm an easy lay. An easy sixty-seven year old lay. 'Twas not always so." She had gone through decades of not having a man in her life. This is not just a story of what happened once she placed her ad, but also a memoir of her life so far that led to its placement. She recounts a Midwest upbringing, sad marriage, divorce, single motherhood, teaching high school (and prison) English, her love for the novels of Anthony Trollope, and much more. Of course the main fare is how Juska managed her respondents. She triaged the letters into Yes, No, and Maybe, stacks that proved not to be rigid. Her first encounter, filled with all the worry that would do justice to any virginal adolescent, could not have been worse; the cad had sent an outdated photograph and steals her champagne flutes and her pajama bottoms. Good writing paid off for another: "... a varied syntax sends shivers up and down my spine." She fell in love with a man who only wanted a friend. She had completely successful encounters with a man who was thirty-five. He wrote her that he realized "that there is a somewhat substantial age gap between us (not quite Harold and Maude, but in the neighborhood)" but that age didn't matter for people that mattered to him. He sounds too good to be true, but there isn't any disillusionment at the book's end. There has already been backlash about the book; many would have been better pleased if she had followed the path old ladies are supposed to take and did not admit to any lingering libido. Of course, then there would not have been any book, and then there would not have been as happy and as fulfilled an author. Most readers will be rooting for her, as she grins against the disappointments life and men inevitably hand her. She cannot help loving them, and enjoying in particular their legs, buttocks, and penises, about which she writes with gusto. She may be needy, but she is also frisky and honest. She is neither noble nor pitiable, but simply reluctant to let physical thrills be a part of the past, something that only young people savor. She is brightly appreciative of the intellectual thrills of meeting interesting men, too. This is a unique memoir by a funny and irrepressible lady, and a sexy one as well.
Rating:
Summary: A Round Heeled Woman
Review: I believe it was a necessary journey for Jane to go through. Although dangerous and sometimes very saddening and unsatisfying(My personal feeling for Jane) she learned quite a lot from her adventures. I found her writing compelling. Her words creative, detailed, elicit, profound at times. The openings to each chapter most appropriate. After reading this book, I felt as if I knew this author. All her stories stage you in her presence and experience. I could not put this book down. Maybe because it definitely had to do with the author's own sorrow's, which I believe anyone can definitely relate to. But more than that. Her search for romance. Not so much about sex, suprisingly. Sadly though, she's a hopeless romantic. I felt her pain along with her, of course re-living it through her book, but you feel- what she felt. She describes things in a sense where I believe anyone has encountered something of this sort. She is so real, -honest. I recommend this book to any true romantic at heart.
Rating: 
Summary: Emotionally dishonest
Review: I found this a very disturbing book, not for the issues that the author faced, but for the ones that she didn't, but that are very apparent in her life -- her alcoholism (which, when her son was young, seemed to border on child abuse), her later dysfunctional relationship with her son (come on, the kid ran away and became homeless at 17), her inability to come to terms with her relationship with her parents (by middle-age I would hope that we can all get over *some* things), her potential to be a sexual harraser (if you were a parent and your adolescent came home and told you that his English teacher kept mouthing "I love you," to students, what would you say?), and finally, her inability to be honest about what she really wants (an emotionally satisfying and longterm relationship with a compatible man). Her initial ad in the NYRB sounds gutsy and is clearly the premise that has sold this book, but she's not looking to become sexually satisfied; her neediness becomes very apparent to the reader, although she never delves those depths; clearly *this* is the topic, rather than sex, that is too intimate for her to write about.
Rating:
Summary: I couldn't put it down
Review: I thought the author wrote honestly, and showed the courage needed to keep intimacy alive. I really had other work to do, but I couldn't put it down until I had read the last page. I hope this author writes more!
Rating:
Summary: I would give it 10 stars if I could!
Review: Jane Juska deserves international recognition for writing so honestly and beautifully about the normally hushed up issues of single seniors' sexual desire -- with all its attendant anxieties about body image, performance, the how and where to connect with potential lovers, financial and emotional neediness, i.e., the business of all that 'baggage' accumulating over nearly 7 decades. Amidst today's rampant beautiful-body mania to 'fix' imperfections of dating hopefuls half her age and younger, this detailed account of an intelligent, cultured, late-60s not-so-trim woman's determined and successful campaign to get naked with the proper stranger was totally riveting. The backstory of her childhood repressions, long-ago unhappy marriage, turbulent relationship with her sole child, and reflections on the long asexual phase of her life are elegantly written, free of the bathos that frequently characterizes sensational tell-all memoirs. I thought frequently throughout this provocative book of the interesting gender issue it unwittingly raised: as a single guy about half a generation behind Jane, how much sympathy or empathy would I receive were I to publish my desire to have essentially zipless sex with women of all ages?
Rating:
Summary: A Most Engaging Memoir-- Read On...
Review: Jane Juska is a most engaging memoirist and human being. She is a retired high school English teacher from Berkeley, California who sings in a chorale, has successfully completed psychoanalysis, and who now teaches student teachers and, even more memorably, offers classes in writing to prisoners at San Quentin. At the age of 66, she decides that her life has been touched insufficiently by passion, and sets out to correct the situation with an ad in the New York Review of Books: "By the time I turn 67-- next March-- I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like..." This engaging book starts here, and details what happens next. Don't expect a sexcapade. This is a sensitive and funny memoir about a refined, intelligent and eclectic woman. Do expect to meet a literary best friend who muses exquisitely on longing, pleasure, relationships and coming into one's own. Would I like to be Juska's friend? Emphatically yes. So would you. Buy her book and find out.
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