Rating: 
Summary: Please!
Review: I have been a Marge Piercy fan for years. Even if she can get a little maudlin and melodramatic at times, her heroines like VIDA and Shira in HE, SHE and IT are among the bravest and most original in contemporary literature. I took THE THIRD CHILD on a trip, eagerly looking forward to a good read from my favorite Jewish woman author. Was I disappointed. More angry than disappointed, really. A soap opera of cliches .I am used to the fact that the men in her books are users of women, conniving and untrustworthy. Sex with women is always better than sex with men. Piercy is married, but is also a lesbian, bisexual? But here the sex is great, the man is... a murderer. This struck me as racist to the extreme. Why would Blake, the son of a convicted murderer (we never know whether he was really guilty) a good-looking and talented college student, be cast as a murderer himself? What is Ms. Piercy saying? That you can't escape your race, your heritage, your genes?And the "political" family (the father a senator who supported the execution of Blake's father) please! Maybe if it were a comedy or satire, but she's playing it straight. I don't much like Republicans either, but I know Piercy is capable of deeper, richer characters whose words and actions ring true.
Rating:
Summary: Didn't like the dialogue
Review: I used to enjoy the occassional Marge Piercy book I picked up but I was disappointed in this one for many of the same reasons others have already mentioned. The characters drove me nuts.....couldn't feel empathy towards ANY of them.I wasn't sure if I was supposed to like Blake or not but I did not. Melissa was pathetic. I almost thought Alison might turn out to be a double-agent which could have been interesting..... I was especially annoyed at the dialogue as it struck me as stereotyped.....I guess I'm not with it but I thought Melissa and Emily and other friends were pretty crude when it came to discussing their sex lives. I'm Caucasian with many African-American friends who don't speak like they did in the book. I agree with the reader who complained about Blake's OVERuse of "Babes".....I would have dumped him just for calling me that. I was also annoyed by Nadine's comment about "hope you don't raise your children Christian" when she admitted to not even being a religious Jew. It seemed like an unnecessary dig at Christians without a point.Why in the world should she care? Obviously, for growing up with such progressive adoptive parents, their son missed out on some ethical training if he felt justified to go out and hack into others' computers,USE people for his advantage, lie and MURDER for revenge. About the only part I liked was reading about their house in Georgetown since I lived there for many years. I read about a third and then did something I never do...skipped to the last 75 pgs or so...who knows what I missed....who cares!(not me). I'm glad this wasn't her 1st book b/c I never would have read another.
Rating: 
Summary: Really 3.75
Review: I've been reading Marge Piercy's novels off and on for twenty-some years. "Vida" and "He, She, and It" are among my all-tme favorites reads. "The Third Child" doesn't quite live up to these predecessors, but it has its own virtues."The Third Child" is a combination romance, coming-of-age-story, political thriller, social commentary, and psychological portrait. That's a lot of baggage for one novel to carry, which may be why it's only partially successful. Melissa, the heroine, is the neglected third child of a politically prominent family. She is more of a prop than child to her ambitious conservative parents, and, compared to her brothers and sister, a less than satisfactory prop at that. As a college freshman, she feels free of their domination for the first time and tries to create a life for herself without them. Just how successful she is at doing this is debatable, since she quickly meets and falls in love with Blake, a fellow freshman. Melissa finds herself besotted with Blake, who is the mixed-race adopted son of her parents' long-time nemesis and a man with an agenda of his own. Using her own anger at her family, he manipulates her into helping him hack into her family's computer files to find dirt that will bring her father down. The whole thing ends badly, of course, leaving poor Melissa far worse of than she was at the beginning. Piercy tell the story from Melissa's point of view, so it is her feelings we see. This can make for some frustrating moments for the reader, especially towards the beginning of the book, where Melissa comes across as whiny, albeit whiny for a reason. There are other parts where you just want to yell at her for her naivete--any intelligent reader can tell that Blake is bad news--he's that glittering dangerous object that attracts but destroys. His manipulations are obvious, even though Melissa finds ways of excusing them. One of the great ironies of the book is that poor Melissa, having escaped her controlling parents, has landed in the arms of an equally controlling lover. She may perceive their situation as that of Romeo and Juliet, but is it really? Virtually all parties in the book tell her at some point to beware, to take things slowly. She ignores them all. There aren't a lot of plot surprises in "The Third Child," although there is a certain amount of suspense in seeing how things unravel. But the pleasure of the novel lies in following Melissa's responses. It's also part of the sadness.
Rating:
Summary: Really 3.75
Review: I've been reading Marge Piercy's novels off and on for twenty-some years. "Vida" and "He, She, and It" are among my all-tme favorites reads. "The Third Child" doesn't quite live up to these predecessors, but it has its own virtues. "The Third Child" is a combination romance, coming-of-age-story, political thriller, social commentary, and psychological portrait. That's a lot of baggage for one novel to carry, which may be why it's only partially successful. Melissa, the heroine, is the neglected third child of a politically prominent family. She is more of a prop than child to her ambitious conservative parents, and, compared to her brothers and sister, a less than satisfactory prop at that. As a college freshman, she feels free of their domination for the first time and tries to create a life for herself without them. Just how successful she is at doing this is debatable, since she quickly meets and falls in love with Blake, a fellow freshman. Melissa finds herself besotted with Blake, who is the mixed-race adopted son of her parents' long-time nemesis and a man with an agenda of his own. Using her own anger at her family, he manipulates her into helping him hack into her family's computer files to find dirt that will bring her father down. The whole thing ends badly, of course, leaving poor Melissa far worse of than she was at the beginning. Piercy tell the story from Melissa's point of view, so it is her feelings we see. This can make for some frustrating moments for the reader, especially towards the beginning of the book, where Melissa comes across as whiny, albeit whiny for a reason. There are other parts where you just want to yell at her for her naivete--any intelligent reader can tell that Blake is bad news--he's that glittering dangerous object that attracts but destroys. His manipulations are obvious, even though Melissa finds ways of excusing them. One of the great ironies of the book is that poor Melissa, having escaped her controlling parents, has landed in the arms of an equally controlling lover. She may perceive their situation as that of Romeo and Juliet, but is it really? Virtually all parties in the book tell her at some point to beware, to take things slowly. She ignores them all. There aren't a lot of plot surprises in "The Third Child," although there is a certain amount of suspense in seeing how things unravel. But the pleasure of the novel lies in following Melissa's responses. It's also part of the sadness.
Rating:
Summary: A waste of my time
Review: It's rare for me not to finish a book, but I only got to about page 140 of this one. My one requirement for novels is that I must be able to care about the characters. They must get inside my head and linger there long after I've closed the book--they don't have to be likable, just well drawn and multi-layered. After 140 pages of The Third Child, I did not care one whit about these characters and in fact found them grating on my nerves. Melissa comes off as extremely whiny, needy, and unappreciative of what she's been given. Granted, her parents (stereotypical treatments themselves of a politician and his dominant wife) have not made her the center of their universe, but she didn't exactly make me want to root for her with her constant griping about how horrible her life is. The whole Dickinson sibling set is also stereotypical: the good son, the obedient daughter, the neglected daughter, the rebellious boy. And don't even get me started on Blake. This is supposed to be an 18-year-old college freshman? Please. He's a condescending jerk who treats Melissa like his property. Also, when was this story set? I assumed modern day, but one of Melissa's classmates actually says, "She wouldn't be down with it." I haven't heard that phrase since the 1970s. This was just one of several inconsistencies that irritated me. And if Blake called Melissa "babes" one more time, I think I might have lost my lunch. Instead, I just regretted the time I spent reading this drivel and started in on "The Namesake" by Jhumpa Lahiri. Now there's a novel with complex characters.
Rating: 
Summary: Another great read from Piercy
Review: Marge Piercy is a writer like Joyce Carol Oats - a very tight writer, not a word out of place or a dangling plot line or character. Just good writing. (Or good editing). But Piercy is not as prolific a writer as Oats; her novels are rarer finds than Oats'. Her latest, The Third Child, is up to her previous writings. The two main characters, Melissa and Blake, the doomed lovers, come together with such force that the reader knows early on that all cannot end happily. Melissa, daughter of the parents-from-hell, and Blake, whose parentage is easily surmised early on, carry on the sins of the parents. Piercy moves easily from family to family, throwing in a third family, Emily's, as sort of a "middle" for the other two extremes in political views. She catches the nuances of a conservative and liberal households well, and the effects that growing up in these households have on the children. Its a very good novel and character study.
Rating:
Summary: An intriguing story of ambition and love
Review: Marge Piercy's The Third Child is a coming-of-age story tells of a prominent family where ambition comes first and third child Melissa has always felt she comes last. Her freedom at college leads her to Blake, a man of mixed race and unknown parentage, and a fiery affair which hides a secret which could destroy both their families. The Third Child is an intriguing story of ambition and love.
Rating:
Summary: A Phenomenal, Provocative and Passionate Story
Review: Melissa Dickinson was in her senior year at Miss Porter's School in Connecticut. "In her father's family ... the women always attended Miss Porter's --- even her, no matter how far down the family hierarchy she was rated. Her father wanted to be President, and her mother was determined to get him there. Daddy's importance was like a family member, bigger and even more visible than her two older siblings, Richard IV" ... an ambitious younger version of his politician father ... and her sister, smart, beautiful, lawyer-to-be Merilee. Her younger sibling Billy was the rebel but he had an edge that made him "acceptable" because he was handsome and smart. As the third child among the four, Lissa felt like a misfit. She had failed before she started in this family. And as the "outsider" she had taken an objective view of her family and she didn't particularly like what she was saw. In her position "she was powerless, but she could try to place them in perspective, she could learn and criticize, silently, stealthily. With [her parents] all was stealth." Marge Piercy, who has written fifteen novels, sixteen books of poetry, a writing manual, a play, a memoir, a collection of essays and has edited an anthology of poetry written by American women opens her latest novel, THE THIRD CHILD, by introducing the reader to the Dickinson clan through the eyes of the story's mixed-up, unhappy, and very lonely heroine. Now that she was eighteen ... "she had gradually come to understand things that had been encoded and hidden when she had been young and naïve. Her past with her parents rewrote itself as she gathered knowledge, as the landscape of her childhood mutated out of ... blue skies to a landscape with shadows and dark pits and hidden fires burning," under the imperfect reality of her powerful parents. This form of narrative works perfectly; especially when she gives us hints of what we can expect to emerge as the novel unfolds. "The first big event Melissa remembered after her father had become governor (of Pennsylvania) was an execution. The prisoner's name was Toussaint Parker, and he had killed a policeman." On the night he was to be put to death, the governor's mansion was surrounded with protestors, "[m]ommy called the demonstrators softheads ... [she] said it was an excuse for the radicals and the commies and the softheads to make a fuss, but no judge was going to let off a Black troublemaker who killed a cop." Her father, the current senator, was the prosecutor at the time of the trial and it was he who got the conviction. Piercy is a rebel in ideology and action. She became politicized when she protested the war in Vietnam and much of her writing reflects her commitment to righting wrongs imposed on individuals. Usually, she writes about women who are struggling to escape whatever confines them. In THE THIRD CHILD, the protagonist is very much trying to stave off the knifelike criticisms heaped on her by her mother, while trying desperately to shed the role she was forced into as the family's scapegoat. Her world is often bewildering, and when she finally graduates from high school and gets to Wesleyan she begins to slowly pull herself away from their dark influence. "Melissa felt as if she abandoned past selves like snake skins of shame along her bumpy route to adulthood ... she viewed herself as a project under construction, the road all torn up ... [s]he would remake herself ... into somebody strong and important." Unfortunately, Blake, the man she meets and falls in love with, has a hidden agenda that will lead her down a path littered with landmines, searing explosions and irreversible decisions. With his encouragement she begins to slowly investigate her father and his political history. Blake introduces her to a fellow classmate, Phil, the son of the investigative reporter who ... "had tried for years to smear her father and never succeeded. Phil was engaged in amassing long lists of contributors to [her father's] campaigns and to organizations supporting him. They were looking for interlocking directorates of corporations and institutions to identify the men --- and it was eighty percent men --- who had given and given again, whose pockets were deep for Dick." Slowly, Melissa begins to uncover secrets her parents have worked diligently to keep buried. Her politicization helps foster the tension between protagonist and antagonists. Piercy does more than create suspense; she has molded her characters in perfect relief to each other. Their actions result in repercussions beyond anything each of them could have predicted, thus pummeling them as every event unfolds. THE THIRD CHILD is a phenomenal story comprised of a carefully thought out thematic structure that is very complex. The issues addressed are many and range from a coming-of-age story, to an intense love story; from a political treatise, to a fully realized novel; from its chilling undertones it often reads like a mystery; and as we move along with Lissa, we see, too, that it has all of the elements of a true bildungsroman. Marge Piercy gives readers a valiant heroine, a young woman who painfully comes to know herself and her family. This novel is very provocative and resonates with passions that are both restrained and at the same time allowed to run wild. Many of Piercy's novels often end sadly, but that is no reason not to read them and learn from them, to think about them and grow with them. Enjoy! --- Reviewed by Barbara Lipkien Gershenbaum
Rating:
Summary: Come on, Marge!
Review: My 7-day check-out of Marge Piercy's new book, The Third Child, expired today. Although I was only 1/3 through the book, I took the unusual (for me) step of returning it, unfinished, rather than pay the fine, because there were some things about the story that I just couldn't get past. The heroine of the story is Melissa. Melissa is the daughter of a Republican senator; she attends Wellesley. She meets an adopted boy of unknown racial descent and begins a love affair with him. Melissa hates her parents who are cold and bad, presumably because they are Republican. On the other hand, she is obsessed with "Blake", who is distant, secretive, at times surly, and who nearly forces her to have sex with him the first time they are alone together, saying "I'm only taking what's mine." Hmmmmmmmm. Wow. But perhaps the hardest thing for me to get past were Blake's comments about his parents. Or rather, lack of them. Although he was adopted by his parents at birth, when asked about his parents for the first time, Blake says that he doesn't have any, because he was adopted. His adoptive parents raised him and are sending him to an expensive college; but he *doesn't have any parents because he was adopted*. Then who are the people who raised him? I have said elsewhere that I would read Marge Piercy's grocery list. I have to amend that statement. I could not bring myself to finish this book. I found the heroine ditzy; the "hero" was a *complete* jerk; and the "villains" (Melissa's Republican parents) painted with broad, stereotypical strokes (cold-hearted, racist, want-to-kill-your-grandma kind of people). Marge, I hope you were going somewhere with all of this; but I won't be finishing the book to find out.
Rating:
Summary: A very enjoyable page turner
Review: Okay, so maybe there are a lot of cliches in this book, but the writing is good and there's a real plot! Omigod! After about 200 pages, the end was predictable, but so what? I actually lay on the couch for 90 minutes reading because I really wanted to know how it would end anyhow. I think Piercy did admirably well for an older adult writing from the point of view of an 18-year old in 2000. Sometimes I cringed at the conversations, but not too much, as I am also an older adult. Piercy is true to her "lefty" beliefs, applying them even now long after the sixties have ended. I admire that. And some of her metaphors and analogies are excellent. She has the right balance of description and conversation. Blake was believable and not predictable. I liked his parents and his story. All in all, a satisfying read.
|
