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: 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 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: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Entertaining but self-absorbed
Review: Jane Juska's 'A Round Heeled Woman' is an enjoyable read. I finished it in two sittings, and in the months since I read it I have found myself thinking about it still. It has the same kiss-and-tell appeal of shows like 'Sex and the City'. There are individual chapters, such as one where Juska tells about her experiences teaching writing at San Quentin, that show that Juska is a gifted writer. I admire her ability to reinvent her life and make no apologies for it.
That said, at times I found myself getting annoyed with the author. There is unquestionably something narcissistic about her personality, and I would agree with those that found some of her behavior questionable. Her need to sexualize every relationship she has seems consistent with someone who has been abused, but she never touches on this, except for a brief mention that she was in fact abused as a girl. What is the adult Juska's perspective on this? Does she think all expressions of eroticism are appropriate, or that some of her behavior is off-kilter?
By the end of the book, Juska reminded me of a certain type of self-absorbed person you encounter in life. People like this are highly entertaining to live vicariously through, but after a while you begin to feel like a prop in their life, an anonymous audience for their egotism.
Rating:
Summary: An ultimately lonely tale
Review: Jane Juska's search for late-life sex is not, as one might be led to believe by the title, a titillating steamfest. It is, instead, the ultimately lonely tale of a woman demanding the same attention and right to pleasures of all kinds that she enjoyed in her youth. It is a fascinating story, not least because Juska bares herself emotionally--so willingly does she do so, in fact, that the reader is sometimes compelled to look away. It is an astonishingly honest, forthright account of one woman's campaign to keep a sex life. Juska starts with a "New York Times Review of Books" personal ad, counting her dollars and trying to make every word count. She examines with fascination the differences between ads placed by men and those placed by women: "Somewhere I read that personal ads projected what the writers of them would like to be, not what they were: men's ads included the out-of-doors; women's, fireside coziness. It seemed to me that men wanted a way out, women a way in." The ad having been placed, Juska takes us on a whirlwind ride of dividing the ad's answers into yes, no and maybe piles; meeting different men; having dinner, conversation and yes, sex with some of the men. Beyond this, she makes the book an autobiography, talking a great deal about her growing-up years in Archbold, Ohio, about being (briefly) a wife and (forever) a mother, about teaching in high school, in college and in prison. We sense the loneliness our older years can bring, while seeing in her (mostly) bright attitude and her willingness to put herself on the line that anyone--anyone!--can go after something they want. We see that age does not protect us from yearning, from occasional foolishness, from selfishness and from making the same mistake more than once. It's a freeing and wonderful story, wonderfully told.
Rating:
Summary: Who would have thought?
Review: The idea that men and women can fall madly in love at the later stages of their lives sounds ridiculous to young people who feel it their personal domain. But, in fact, where people reach the stage where survival is not as challenging, children are grown, and they have good health, it's very possible, even probable that they have as much capacity to love and greater confidence to express that joy than they would at an earlier age. The affection that people sometimes feel for each other has a resiliency and a buoyancy not possible at other times of life, and possibly more pure than when they are younger. Unable to ignore the obvious aging that a lifetime brings or the flaws that come with it, the acceptance of oldsters or the elderly is a particularly gratifying spectacle since without pretense, they are free to love each other dutifully, and intensely with the same chemistry that had always been a part of their nature. Many men feel somewhat foolish but unnecessarily since love at any age is exciting and spectacular, evidence of its importance to us as humans where the ability to show affection is charactertistic of our human qualities, and shows the breadth and depth of our loving capacity with each other.
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