Home :: Books :: Romance  

Arts & Photography
Audio CDs
Audiocassettes
Biographies & Memoirs
Business & Investing
Children's Books
Christianity
Comics & Graphic Novels
Computers & Internet
Cooking, Food & Wine
Entertainment
Gay & Lesbian
Health, Mind & Body
History
Home & Garden
Horror
Literature & Fiction
Mystery & Thrillers
Nonfiction
Outdoors & Nature
Parenting & Families
Professional & Technical
Reference
Religion & Spirituality
Romance

Science
Science Fiction & Fantasy
Sports
Teens
Travel
Women's Fiction
The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart

The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart

List Price: $14.00
Your Price: $10.50
Product Info Reviews

<< 1 2 3 >>

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Alice Walker never disappoints
Review: This is a beautiful book. It is a collection of related stories about love and heartbreak, but typical of Alice Walker, it is never bitter. When reading something that I know is autobiographical, the temptation is strong to wonder which parts "really happened" and which are made up or embellished. However, I found myself letting go of that urge once I sank into the book (which I read in one afternoon). Every word that Alice Walker writes is true - it doesn't matter which details were made up or changed, Alice Walker always writes of truth and beauty.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Lyrical, uplifting
Review: This is my first Alice Walker book -- I saw The Color Purple several times, but had not read any of her work. Two weeks ago, this book spoke to me from the shelves of a Seattle-area bookstore, and so I took it home. I read it this past weekend, in an introspective mood due to the death of a friend and my spouse's move back to PA later this month.

It was a beautiful book - lyrical and matter-of-fact at the same time (the casual mention of a gun in the bedroom in the 60s in Mississippi). As a southern woman (about a decade younger than Ms. Walker), I appreciated seeing my home from another perspective. I felt more kindly towards my own eccentric relatives and laughed at the thought of taking my own mother and her sisters to see "Deep Throat"! (no way am I that brave - or foolhardy!)

I laughed and I cried and felt reassured that wisdom is possible with perseverance. And I was inspired to read more Alice Walker - plus I'll share this copy with my friends. Highly recommended.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Not Ms. Walker's Best...
Review: Unarmed with the language and depth that is an earmark of Alice Walker's wonderful body of work, this novel was an unexpected disappointment.

The ambitious title left me anticipating a memoir with the strong character of You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, deftly weaving the fictional with nonfiction. Rather, I found the introduction staid and the remainder of the novel difficult, rambling, and not fulfilling, lacking the strength I admire from Walker's other works.

What is redeeming about this book is the tone--the very apparent importance to Walker herself in the telling of her story leaving the reader with an appreciation for the effort if not for the work itself.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Not Ms. Walker's Best...
Review: Unarmed with the language and depth that is an earmark of Alice Walker's wonderful body of work, this novel was an unexpected disappointment.

The ambitious title left me anticipating a memoir with the strong character of You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, deftly weaving the fictional with nonfiction. Rather, I found the introduction staid and the remainder of the novel difficult, rambling, and not fulfilling, lacking the strength I admire from Walker's other works.

What is redeeming about this book is the tone--the very apparent importance to Walker herself in the telling of her story leaving the reader with an appreciation for the effort if not for the work itself.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Beautifully Bittersweet and Binding....
Review: Walker is, in this book, as always, compelling and lyrical, binding the soul of the reader into the souls of her characters. I wept, actually, reading "To My Young Husband", a story that resonates so painfully right now in my life as my young husband divorces me for another woman.

But as I read, and read these stories of broken hearts, of broken dreams, I realized that this book lacked what I desperately desired: an easy answer, a simple way forward. How DO I survive this? It seems that Walker's characters simply limp on, terminally scarred, never recovering, just surviving. And maybe, just possibly, that will be the way for me; I will go on, but never recover. I lack any sisters to go on midnight swims with, I lack an Auntie Putt-Putt to tell me how much more terrible things could be. Perhaps this book holds too much of brutal reality, that innocence and joy, once lost, cannot be regained.

This is not a book of hope, or cheery good endings, of neatly tied strings. It is not "Echinacea And Tofu Soup For The Soul". But it is beautiful, and terrible, and true, and well worth reading many times.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Beautifully Bittersweet and Binding....
Review: Walker is, in this book, as always, compelling and lyrical, binding the soul of the reader into the souls of her characters. I wept, actually, reading "To My Young Husband", a story that resonates so painfully right now in my life as my young husband divorces me for another woman.

But as I read, and read these stories of broken hearts, of broken dreams, I realized that this book lacked what I desperately desired: an easy answer, a simple way forward. How DO I survive this? It seems that Walker's characters simply limp on, terminally scarred, never recovering, just surviving. And maybe, just possibly, that will be the way for me; I will go on, but never recover. I lack any sisters to go on midnight swims with, I lack an Auntie Putt-Putt to tell me how much more terrible things could be. Perhaps this book holds too much of brutal reality, that innocence and joy, once lost, cannot be regained.

This is not a book of hope, or cheery good endings, of neatly tied strings. It is not "Echinacea And Tofu Soup For The Soul". But it is beautiful, and terrible, and true, and well worth reading many times.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Raises Questions About Political Correctness
Review: When I first began wading through this book I kept asking myself why I was bothering. I pegged it as quintessential Oprah -- cosy homilies, platitudes -- the author's truth, I'm sure, but not a very profound one. Completing the book gave a more complex picture.

Some stories crossed the line between a form of literature which is, if not hate speech, then psychobabble therapy. Why was I so offended at one character's repeated use of "Irish" and "Scottish" when naming a rapist master, when I am not and have never been Irish or Scottish? I found it offensive in a way I wouldn't have if he were named as a generic white male. Maybe because it's too easy to transpose "Jew" or "black" as an adjective to the abuser, an action that would be labelled unfair, if not an outright lie by the Oprah set. It seems some people are allowed truths and not others. If a Celt, innocent of these crimes, is offended by this depiction, it's his tough luck, because as Walker could point out -- these stories are true. But suppose one's story about a black or Jewish offender is true? To speak out is considered "bad taste" if not evidence of racism. Walker's ingenuous racism has the perhaps unintended effect of making this reader understand how blacks must have felt -- so offended they couldn't even articulate a reply -- when wrongly typecast as she often typecasts whites here.

I was a bit amazed that the great feminist Alice Walker was a stay at home housewife, living off the sweat of a white male for so many years. Then she couldn't understand why he was so cold when she decided to dump him for no good reason. As this man was apparently a saint as a husband -- unfailingly supportive financially and artistically -- and she couldn't blame him, she decides to blame the old stand-by "white society."

A pompous assumption comes through many of these story/memoirs -- "I am right and have always been right because I'm a member of a victimized sex/race, and therefore hold no responsibility for my actions." I really felt for the daughter, who at 25, brought her parents together in the therapist's office, asking, Why couldn't you be there for me? Never does Walker take a gander into her own soul and ask if she herself could have done more. It's always someone else's fault.

The stories set in Civil Rights Mississippi are vividly detailed and full of emotion. It is interesting to see her take on the issue of "forced love" that some black domestic workers feel for the white families that employ them. The complex and often angry feelings this brings up in the author are completely understandable, because clearly delineated. Certainly this story will make many white limousine liberals who employ black women in their homes squirm.


<< 1 2 3 >>

© 2004, ReviewFocus or its affiliates