Rating: 
Summary: A subtle interesting book unlike anything else I've read
Review: I loved this book. It's one of those where you could say that nothing much happens: the development is in understanding not in terms of action. It's modern in every way, but it also has a quality that seems somehow more attuned to 19th or 18th century fiction - perhaps because of the pace, which is relaxed and dreamy and takes its time. So it is a subtle novel; Schine creates a wonderful mysterious atmosphere that carried me through from the first page to the last. The relationships between the characters are very convincing and help the reader to associate with them. As a male, I was suspicious at first of what looked like - and indeed is - a romance. But it's also much more than that: a deep examination of the way the heroine's mind works. In this way we learn about ourselves and others and what makes us all tick. I think that's what good fiction is for. If you like subtlety, I recommend it highly.
Rating: 
Summary: beautifully written--but the ending left a bit to be desired
Review: I couldn't help but fall in love with the plot of this descriptive, beautifully written love story. -Intriguing older woman, young but not-so-naive man, a store full of literature and bubbling over with sexual tension. When young Johnny agrees to stay at his parents' home in the small, elite New England town of Pequot (no mention of the state) for the summer to earn some money working at a book store owned by a friend of his father's, he has no idea what he's gotten himself into. Helen MacFaquhar is beautiful. She's not pretty in the conventional supermodel-type of way. Her beauty is more like an air about her- an intriguing, disturbing, wrenching beauty. After a failed marriage, Helen was enjoying her single life, seducing the men of Pequot in droves. In fact, it wasn't always a sexual lure-it was in the way she spoke, in the way she looked every individual in the eye and touched them, gently, as she spoke, as she listened. Even women loved her. She owned Horatio Street Books, and this is where her affair with young Johnny began. One morning as Helen looked through her massive pile of mail, she noticed a love letter so full of passion she could not stop herself from reading it once, twice, three hundred times over. It was addressed to "Ram," written by "goat." For weeks this letter plagued her, drove her crazy to think someone could be in love with her so deeply. As the novel progresses, which by the way, is a tad slowly at first, you can sense the sexual tension between Johnny and Helen. When finally they do "get together," their love affair is so gripping and passionate it will make you long for the same. I found myself just wanting to reach over and hold the man laying next to me. It really inspires love. The ending, which I will not give away, leaves much to be desired. For a novel of this substance you want an ending that'll make you smile, you want a fabulous change to occur, you want to know where the affair ends up! But it's left quite open-endeed, which for me was awfully discouraging.
Rating: 
Summary: Coy and claustrophoba-inducing
Review: Based on the jacket blurb, I was hoping this would be a fun, literate romantic comedy. After the first two chapters, however, I found myself wishing Helen had a richer inner life, since Schine spends almost all her time detailing Helen's thoughts and feelings. Helen is too complacent and sold on her own charm and flirtatiousness to be interesting as a character we're supposed to identify with wholeheartedly. Jane Austen or Barbara Pym would know how to use irony to give us a larger perspective on Helen, but Schine really seems to expect us to fall in love with Helen. The references to books and reading (Helen owns a bookshop) end up feeling dropped in, since Helen never seems convincing as a reader and lover of books. The cutesy quality of the plot and some of the language, along with Helen's self-obsession, end up giving the novel a claustrophobic feeling.
Rating:
Summary: A smart, literate, elegant reading experience
Review: Schine's writing in 'The Love Letter' is deceptively simple but filled with subtle understanding of human nature and the sensual pleasures of the natural world. Consider the book's opening paragraph: "The honeysuckle was everywhere the day the letter arrived, like heat. Wild roses bloomed in hedges of tendrils and perfume. There were fat bees, dirigible bees, plump and miniature. It was a sweet, tangled morning..." Such passages recur through the book, and remind one of the small epiphanies of life that occur when we momentarily lose ourselves to joy.
I loved reading this novel. While I initially disliked the character of Helen, as I continued reading I began to identify with her. She emerges from being a somewhat irritating flirt and controlling personality into a woman surprised and chagrined at finding happiness and emotional freedom with the love of a young man half her age. The reader comes away with a feeling that she has met a real, imperfect, vulnerable human being in Helen. The character of Johnny is humorously endearing and believable. Ultimately, this unconventional love story itself becomes an epiphany, one which reminds us of the joy awaiting when we embrace the gifts life brings so unexpectedly. A smart, literate, elegant reading experience, 'The Love Letter' makes us reflect-- on the essence of writing our emotions, the nature of love, the simplest pleasures of life, and our own fears, foibles and capacity for growth at any age.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent read, vaguely disappointing ending.
Review: Well, that about sums it up. However, the book is really worth the read. It's sweet, witty, and sharp. This book demonstrates perfectly what I like about the way Cathleen Schine writes. She loves words, and so, since I perfectly concurr on that point, I do enjoy her books, few of them that there are. (Two? Maybe three, but I've only seen, uh, read two.)For example: I never used to use the word banal, or how about insouciant, but the way she sort of twists the words makes them catch. Anyway, I can't remember the last love story that I enjoyed as much. Please don't write it off as that "crappy women's writing", as many are wont to do. Cathleen Schine is a smart writer, and one who obvioulsy reads literature; I caught a lot of the references, but some of them were like whoosh, right over my head. A fun read, fast despite its being a people driven book as opposed to an action driven one. Not too hard, but feels challenging nontheless. Read the book. It's good.
Rating:
Summary: An erotic comedy
Review: Cathleen Schine's beguiling voice makes a delightful comedy of manners out of a middle-aged woman's seduction of a college boy. The story opens on a radiant morning in June, the day the letter arrives. Helen MacFarquhar, owner of a small bookstore in seaside Pequot, is pleased with her life, "even with her daughter away at camp and her ex-husband making so much money." Conscious of her contentment, she regards her pile of mail as "a group of strangers with only one thing in common, and that one thing was Helen MacFarquhar." Among the letters, bills and solicitations is a note from her daughter, Emily, sent before her departure, beginning, "I bet I miss you already! Smiling, Helen disposes of her mail piece by piece and only then notices an oddly folded sheet. Beginning "Dear Goat," and signed "Ram," it's a love letter, typed, undated, anonymous. "A sudden warmth pressed upon her, unfamiliar, a tenderness, someone else's tenderness." Initially certain the letter was sent to another, she is as quickly uncertain. Helen, a flirt, has many admirers. "They were a kind of hobby, better even than gardening, which she also enjoyed." She locks the letter in a drawer, takes it out, rereads it, takes it home with her. Soon she has it memorized. Johnny, 20, three weeks into his summer job at Helen's store, watches her when he can get away with it. He's watching as she locks the letter away. "He was not surprised when she caught his eye, and said 'Yes?' in a poisonous voice." He finds Helen mercurial, dictatorial and fascinating. She often speaks to embarrass him, "to keep him in his place, which seemed to be the same as everyone's place - at her feet." On a whim - Johnny's parents are away - Helen makes a project of him, invites him to dinner, attempts to set him up with one of her other student employees. Johnny, who has watched her turn on the high wattage charm for her customers and just as quickly switch it off, is flattered, then infuriated when she does it to him. He comes across the letter (accidentally?) and he too is infected by it. Then one day, in her helpful mode, Helen comes upon him in his backyard, wakes him, and in a vulnerable moment he grabs her. Startled, Helen responds. She initiates their love affair which soon consumes them both. Meanwhile, Helen's mother, Lilian, and grandmother, arrive. Lilian, a cosmopolitan charmer who hates small-town Pequot, has come for an extended visit, perhaps to live. Harried and baffled, Helen scarcely notices her mother's odd comings and goings, too absorbed in snatching moments with Johnny. But it's not merely self-absorption which blinds Helen - her mother's secret is not one easily penetrated by a daughter. Helen agonizes over Johnny. It will end when Emily comes home from camp. It will end when Johnny goes back to school. But "when they were together reason seemed petty, anachronistic, like removing your hat when entering a house." Schine takes a chance, mixing comedy with passion, mingling light, deft touches of wit with erotic heat. What could be a tawdry affair is a moving, doomed romance. And her secondary characters - the librarian Miss Skattergoods, with her eccentric habits and her underlying melancholy, Helen's friend Lucy with her distant manner and her incisive tongue, Helen's grandmother who won't part with her unreliable Jaguar and won't drive it either - each of them is lovingly defined. "The Love Letter" is even finer than "Rameau's Niece". Dealing with some of the same themes, specifically imagination's role in erotocism, it is more of a whole and has none of the previous novel's occasional heavy-handedness.
Rating:
Summary: Loved it!
Review: Starting the book, I didn't care much for Helen, but she grew on me. I realized how much our personalities were alike. She goes around being extremely charming and flirting with everyone while she is quite the opposite in truth. Only a select few people see her other side that is quite scalding at times, but comes and goes very quickly. My favorite things about this book were the thoughts. The thoughts of Johnny and Helen were so wonderfully written that I often felt them becoming my own. I was in this story, not just reading it. And it read so easily! I love that very little scenery description was used. I didn't want to put this book down. The torture that was Johnny and Helen thinking about each other was fantastic. The ending was a little lacking for me, however. It left me dangling there wishing there was yet another page because things didn't seem to come to a close. All in all, it's a wonderful read. Interesting and sexy without the boredom of the run of the mill romance. I saw the movie based on the book before reading this, and I have to say that the book was a thousand times better.
Rating:
Summary: Boring, poorly written, unbelievable
Review: The biggest problem with this book is the unbelievable main character, Helen. She's forever pleased with herself and obsessed with her own charm. Consequently, she's totally unlikable. Schine's writing is unimaginative and she fails to make me care about the story.
Rating:
Summary: A Sophisticated, Witty And Tender Novel - Worth Your Time!
Review: Divorced, intelligent, and lovely, Helen MacFarquhar moves back to her childhood home, Pequot, with her 11 year old daughter Emily. Here in this small Connecticut town by the sea, populated primarily by middle-class intellectuals working at a nearby university, Helen opens a bookstore, Horatio Street Books. She is adept at seducing customers into buying "just the right volume," knowing they will enjoy the book, as well as her attention, and return for more of both. One glorious morning in early summer, Helen discovers a cryptic love letter mixed in with her regular mail. The intensely personal missive is addressed to "Goat" from "Ram." Initially Helen is fascinated. She searches for the envelope, and potential clues to the author's identity amidst the trash, but cannot find anything. She eventually becomes obsessed with the letter's lines and sentiment, as she reads and rereads it. Who are Goat and Ram? Is the mysterious letter meant for her, or was it dropped in her store by mistake? Who wrote it? Who is the intended recipient? All who enter the bookstore, and some who don't, are suspect. The mystery remains unsolved throughout the summer, but never far from Helen's thoughts. It is a summer of change. Emily is away at camp for the first time. Helen is alone also, for the first time since Emily's birth. Although she misses her daughter, she is happy in her solitude. Then her mother and grandmother come for an extended visit. And Helen begins a love affair with 20 year old Johnny, a college student working at the bookshop for the summer. Their relationship captures the passion of their bodies, and the intimate connection between their minds and emotions. Readers will find themselves seduced into believing in this unlikely duo. Cathleen Schine's writing is sharp and witty as she follows the rapid workings of Helen's mind. The dialogue is believable, and frequently original, as are the characters. The novel is a delight, and the descriptions of books and details of running a bookstore are a plus - as is the surprise ending.
Rating:
Summary: Dear Goat....
Review: What a fabulous love story, this is one of my favorite books. The story centers on a letter to Goat from Ram - the letter, of course, is received by the wrong person. The story takes off from there and there is love everywhere for everyone. It is a delightful and quick and easy read.
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