Rating: 
Summary: Margaret's Melancoly Musings on Late Middle Age Angst
Review: Reading the opening sentence of THE SEVEN SISTERS "I have just got back from my Health Club", I was immediately drawn into this story. Having just joined a health club myself and being in the same age category as Drabble's protagonist I was intrigued and felt that I could certainly relate to her story and characters. Drabble is undoubtedly a well educated and intelligent author and her insights and observations are well stated. However, this is strictly a book for late middle aged women - and unhappy ones at that! So many of these book written by women about women of a certain age are filled with self absorption, loneliness and melancoly. Lest I sound too critical I did remain interested in this book and I think that I might like to read some of Drabble's earlier works - perhaps they might be a bit more uplifting.
Rating: 
Summary: Drabble Dribble
Review: Seven Sisters is pure drivel. Slow, dull, stereotypical, pseudo-intellectual whining. Ms. Drabble shows again that her writing is at best dribble. At least her recent sniveling liberal anti-war rants in the Telegraph had a little more spark. Though, I must remember that I am the one that procured this rot in the first place.
Rating: 
Summary: Trying to find fulfillment and happiness, late in life
Review: The first third of this book is so unassuming, even (shudder) "quaint" and "old-fashioned," that I was jarred both by the sudden change in fortune for the storyteller and by the three drastic changes in point of view that cause one to question the very truthfulness of the narrator. There is a reason for this ploy: while certainly a novel about growing old, "The Seven Sisters" is, above all, about a woman who is struggling, late in life, to find her voice.
Candida Wilton is that woman, cast aside by her husband, who remarries after an affair, and even by her three daughters, who seem to side with their father. She moves from the pastoral neighborhoods of Suffolk to Ladbroke Grove, a squalid area of London, where she tries to make new friends, first by taking a class on Virgil at a dilapidated adult education school and then by joining the yuppified health club erected on the site after the school is shut down. She even manages to make the acquaintance of a few human specimens from the seedy "street theater" that both frightens and bemuses her during her strolls. And she spends much of her time recording thoughts on her journey through life onto her new laptop computer; it is the entries of this diary that comprise the book.
The novel's first shift occurs when Candida reaps the benefits of an unexpected inheritance and decides to gather a group of "sisters," both from her past and from her Virgil class, to accompany her on a tour retracing Aeneas's journey from Carthage to Naples. This voyage allows her to deliberate on the meaning of friendship, on her passive acceptance of whatever has life has thrown her way, and on the "irony ... that as we near death, there are fewer people left to be sorry, fewer left to miss us."
For many readers, Drabble's introspective musings will surely be dull and ponderous; the startling postmodern shifts will seem incongruous; and the melodramatic use of the inheritance might seem whimsical (most lonely women won't find self-esteem with the arrival of a windfall). But Drabble's prose is so unassuming and her character's mindset is so immediately familiar that I was fascinated, and there's just enough of a "plot" to keep this novel from becoming little more than a character study of a woman with not much character. Through the diary of Candida Wilton, Drabble conveys, as few authors can, the sensation of suddenly feeling old and alone.
Rating:
Summary: Strong Return to Form
Review: The Seven Sisters marks a return to the deep characterizations that made Drabble's early to mid-period novels such good, deep reads. Candida Wilton strikes me as a woman who is ubiquitious in real life, but seldom taken as a novelistic subject: a woman in very late middle age, with no distinguished career, and a less than happy family life whose recent impolosion nonetheless came as a shattering blow. She shouldn't be a particularly likeable character, because she is rather cold -- bringing to mind Emma Evans in Drabble's sixties novel, The Garrick Year.But as with Emma, the deepness of the characterization brings us to empathize with this woman for whom simple gestures and human interactions take tremendous effort and courage. She cannot help being the way she is -- that is her character. Yet by the book's end, she seems to be entering the final leg of her life with renewed hope and connection. This is a grownup book, for intelligent people. I wish there were more being written like it.
Rating:
Summary: Makes the mundane interesting
Review: There is nothing special about Candida, but Drabble makes her struggle to create a new life after her divorce facinating. Drabble shows that people of any age are continously searching for connection to their environments and their loved ones. The narrative change in the second half of the book does break the spell a bit, but when Candida explains what she was doing it makes sense and the ending is in keeping with the rest of narrative.
Rating: 
Summary: stunning........
Review: This book is simply awesome. I savored every paragraph.
Rating:
Summary: Boring, boring and slow
Review: This book is slow, slow and then crawls. If you aren't a middle aged woman, it makes you pity them more than a post-Steinem member of society should ever have to. If you are a middle aged women, and Candida is the type of life you are supposed to enjoy identifying with - well, then, pass the knife now. I suugest that Ms. Drabble study her craft. This is not the work of an accomplished writer - this is the work of a pseudo-intellectual writing for other pseudo-intellectuals. Her use of language and plot - well, let's just say the only comparison she will ever get to Shakespeare is land of birth. She mistakenly believes that stilted, overstudied wordiness is a synonym for absorbing story, and the only emotion she engenders in her reader is ennui and stultified somnolence.
Rating:
Summary: Just when I finally started enjoying
Review: this book, out of nowhere comes the storyline change that ruined it for me. Had the story stayed on track I would have enjoyed it far more. 4 stars for the first half of the book, 2 stars for the last half. I have to wonder of Candida's friends thought the same of her as she did of Sally.
Rating:
Summary: Just when I finally started enjoying
Review: this book, out of nowhere comes the storyline change that ruined it for me. Had the story stayed on track I would have enjoyed it far more. 4 stars for the first half of the book, 2 stars for the last half. I have to wonder of Candida's friends thought the same of her as she did of Sally.
Rating:
Summary: Stunning
Review: This is Drabble at the top of her form. She has crafted this novel with care and cunning, it's form mirroring its themes. I loved this book, a delightfully satisfying read!
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