Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Okay. I'll be straight with you. I'm a guy. But I'm a feminist father of a lesbian activist daughter, my personal motto was written by Virginia Woolf, and I'm an ardent believer that the sooner women achieve full equality in this world, the better off we'll all be. But this book was truly a struggle to get through. I'm perfectly capable of working through, and thoroughly enjoying, a complex book that details the experience of women in the world. Be it The Hours (Michael Cunningham) or Virginia Woolf's own works, I love the challenge, and I love the reward. This book failed on two major counts, and annoyed me on a third. First failure: the novel that spans generations has been done a hundred times, and done well. It is not a new plot device, and if it is to be done yet again, I'd like to see a hint of originality in the approach. Instead, I found wearying murkiness to the forward and backward literary catapulting, having to make frequent references to the chart in front of the book to relocate the plot line. Tiresome. Second failure: The book starts off with the death by hunger strike of a woman who explains "There was nothing else I could do". Truly? Nothing else one could do, when so many amazing women of that era DID find something else they could do, and did win incremental battles in a war that is not yet over. I read Gloria Steinem, and I think "Damn! What a mind! What a human!" I attend The Vagina Monologues, and I'm thrilled by the gutsiness and brilliance of the characters. I read about the five woman in this book and I'm left with a sense of "Oh, give it a rest". Somehow women shrink in this book, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. The tragedy of misogyny and gender prejudice is at its starkest when external limits shackle women of strength and ability. In this book, the women seemed uncomfortably close to shackling themselves. My third point of contention is that the book reflects a frequently noted phenomenon that has blossomed with text messaging, Facebook, Twitter: a type of narcissism that assumes that we really want to know about it when someone does a load of laundry, has a pimple, or had a bad day with the kids/spouse/car/hair. Though Walbert throws us an occasional tasty nugget (e.g. a supposed women's advocate giving a lecture about how women evolved to make men more comfortable), way too often it's kibble. Women seem trivialized and powerless in this novel, more by their own personalities than by the world of men that they live in. Choose this one for your book club or your personal pleasure at your own risk: this chunk of carbon is no diamond in the rough, it's a lump of coal that fails to ignite.