The Girl Pretending To Read Rilke

Rating:
Summary: Oregon student's yearnings sizzle in summer
Review: "The Girl Pretending to Read Rilke" tells the adventures of an undergraduate chemistry major when she takes a summer job at a Harvard biochem lab. Her studies at a tough West Coast college did not prepare the middle-class Bronwen politically for the reactions she gets when she stumbles into some serious science. Add in a domineering boyfriend and a few assorted whackos, and the result is a fast paced page-turner that cost me a night's sleep. I loved it.

Rating:
Summary: The politics of science and sex
Review: A witty tale from a time just gone. Funny and sad, but not sentimental, it gives you a flash of another era, recent but somehow already history. I liked it a lot for its intelligent description of an important summer in a young womans life. Brave, bright Bronwen fights her battle with men, education and family in a way it's easy to identify with. Read it!

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Summary: Harvard co-ed's feminist yearnings fizzle in simplistic tale
Review: Barbara Riddle's debut novel, "The Girl Pretending to Read Rilke," has all the ingredients for success. The briskly-told narrative features a genuinely bright and attractive Harvard undergraduate co-ed whose summer experiences as a research assistant reveal to her both the unbelievably callow nature of her idealized boyfriend and her own sense of potential as a human being. The feminist themes of searching for authentic identity, rejecting of restrictive stereopyical roles, learning to rejoice in one's chosen sexuality, battling to create genuine relationships based on equality receive due treatment. One cannot help for have a sense of hope for the novel's protagonist, Bronwen. Despite all these attributes, "The Girl..." is an unaffecting and boring read.

Make no mistake about it: this is a thoroughly flawed novel. The writing, put simply, is terrible. Riddle's style is unbelievably simplistic and unimaginative; it even lacks the energy of a page-turning potboiler. Her characters have no dimension, and, sadly, devolve into stereotypes; characters becomes caricatures, and when her principal actors lose their credibility, the novel loses its ability to persuade and move the reader. For example, Bronwen's mentor, Felix, despite his respect for her abilities, invariably wears the food he always seems to be literally stuffing into his mouth. Her lover, Eric, is so outrageously sexist and domineering that one would wonder what possible reasons Bronwen would have offered to explain her three-year relationship with him.

It is ironically unfortunate that Ms. Riddle selected Harvard as the setting for her novel. Although her admirable intent was to universalize the discontent felt by the privileged Bronwen, the novel truly lacks the ability to translate the anguish of the "best and brightest" to those who could not imagine the Harvard experience. When it could have elevated itself to a genuinely significant exploration of feminist consciousness, "The Girl..." borders on the irrelevant.

Rating:
Summary: A must read for women...
Review: From the moment I settled into the book, I was hooked. Great characters - some you want to shake, some you want to hug and buy new shoes! Loved it.

Rating:
Summary: Success, Failure, Loneliness
Review: I enjoyed this poignant novel immensely,
but I must confess an interest,
I was in the area at the time.
It touches lightly on three themes,
success, failure and loneliness,
and I wish Barbara Riddle
had delved more deeply into them.
I should have liked to learn less
about those tedious graduate students,
and more about the parents, who,
along with Bronwen,
are the only people in the book
who have an inner life.

Rating:
Summary: Yes!
Review: I loved this book. I picked it up and was unable to put it down. The writing is straightforward, funny, and meaningful to any woman who grew up in the 50's or 60's. Sometimes the hardest thing to write seems to rest easy on the page. That's the mark of good writing, and this book has it.

Rating:
Summary: That girl reading Rilke is important
Review: Not only did I enjoy the main narrator and characters and their deeply felt emotions and intellect, but the prose is beautiful and reads like a poem. It is important to read about 'the girl pretending to read Rilke,' for women who dare to embark into science, love, and self examination. This is a wrenching and honest and wonderful novel for all women and men who dare to explore the universe and their evolution of self.

Rating:
Summary: The Girl Pretending to Read Rilke
Review: This beautiful Roman a Clef is must reading for all my female students who are entering science or academic medicine. It gives a wonderful and true flavor of the time and situation of a young woman who wants to become a scientist in the early 1960's [before Betty Friedan's book and the women's movement]. The book is almost painful in its honesty. The author describes an exciting summer of research after her junior year in college, in which she has the thrill of making a novel and important discovery ... all the while juggling a very unsupportive (even crushingly competitive) graduate school boyfriend/wunderkind, and trying to be respected as a developing researcher in a very male elite and sexist (Harvard/Boston) environment. On top of that, the problems of dealing with an unwanted pregnancy make an interesting epiphany to the book ... giving a flavor of the 1960's before abortion was legal. The book is great history, but with lots of lessons for both men and women in science or thinking of going into science (especially biomedical research) today. It probably would also have strong resonance with women seeking to break the glass ceilings in science and medicine today.