The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer
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Book Reviews of The Ten-Year Nap
Book Review: Pretty good, not particularly substantial
Summary: 3 Stars
This book was a good read for a summer weekend or vacation. Lots of characters, some funny and some poignant situations. The second half was better and more entertaining than the first.Book Review: easy read
Summary: 3 Stars
easy to pick up and read quickly, can relate easily to theme of motherhood, friendship and balancing the act of home and work.Book Review: Misses the mark, there's nothing here
Summary: 2 Stars
I bought this book from a bookstore's sale bin, I'm glad I didn't pay full price. I did love most of the writing. The book is full of wonderful phrases, clever analogies, and some on-target observations. I found myself rereading some paragraphs just because of how beautifully/clever they were written. Why the character Amy's decision to leave her job and stay home with her baby son was complete and articulated how a lot of women feel.
That said, the book did little else. I found myself bored by the characters and disinterested in their lives. While the book does an amazing job describing scenes and characters, it does little to make the reader care about them on an emotional level. Because of that, despite the writing, I slogged through the book and found myself flipping forward to read snippets of later chapters, hoping to see an indication of the story going somewhere. Amy, the central character, seems to operate in dream mode. Stereotypical, she left The Law Firm to become a Stay At Home Mom. Her Hard Working Husband is still at the same law firm where they had met and fallen in love. Therefore, while she can picture what his days are like he unfortunately has no clue and very little interest in what she does all day long. What Amy and her friends do all day long seems to be the obsession of the book. Not just what they do, but how the characters (particularly Amy) feel they are perceived by others. A chapter on this might be good, and enlightening for both sides of the situation. But an entire book? With an endless dose of whining thrown in? Nope.
Too many other stereotypical moms as well. The Perfect Mom will of course turn out be flawed, and her reasons for being flawed are stereotypical as well. Obviously there's nothing wrong with having stereotypical characters, but only if the reader is led to care about them does their story become interesting.
I puzzled by the fact that despite the focus on what the women "do all day long", there was actually very little in the book about what they DO do all day long. There's no mention of the routines of laundry, meals, cleaning up, etc. My guess - and it's just a guess - is that these things were left out of the book because maybe the author felt they would be boring to the reader. But - that's the stuff life is made of, and one way readers might have connected better with Amy is if there were references to her sorting socks or fixing a salad while dinner bubbles on the stove. I might have cared more about Jill's relationship with her adopted daughter if there were actually elements of their daily routine woven throughout the story. [One thing that made books by authors such as Rosamunde Pilcher so popular is that mixed in with the good stories are all the mundane, predictable daily routines of day to day life. The readers CARE about those characters; you feel for all the world as if you know them].
The children in the book, the very reason the women were at home, are back ground props. Yes, it's a book about the women. But to understand the women there needed to be something more about the kids as well.
Book Review: Uninteresting Characters
Summary: 2 Stars
I thought the premise of this story was a great one--a few women living in New York city, privileged enough to be able to quit their careers and stay at home with their kids are now questioning their lives as their children get older. Some feel content to stay at home, despite pressure to go back to work. Others are eager to do something else with their lives. As educated women, they are all to some degree insecure about being out of the working world. All stand in awe of the one mom at their sons' private school who has been working in a prestigious career all along.
I just didn't feel like the characters in this story had any depth. They floated along, occasionally whining about their position, but didn't really do anything about it. I found Amy and Jill particularly annoying. Amy knew her husband was worried about money, yet she dawdled on the idea of going back to work herself, and she put pressure on her husband to go on expensive vacations and to send their son to an expensive school. Why was she so senseless?
Jill never bonded with her daughter and thought there might be something wrong with her, but she never sought help in the form of therapy or diagnosis. Instead, she just vaguely disliked her child and ignored the hint of problems.
At the end of the book, I was left feeling unsatisfied; I didn't feel like anything of consequence had happened to these women. They just sort of drifted on with their lives, without seeming to really try to make changes. Things happened TO them, instead of them going out and doing things purposefully.
I just couldn't connect to any of these characters at all, which was unfortunate. It had the potential to be a really interesting story about the different choices moms make about work and kids.
Book Review: Is it over yet?
Summary: 2 Stars
I listened to this last week while commuting to work. Not what I'd hoped. While I got some laughs--especially about the lawyers--most of it was like the parents talking in a Charlie Brown special "wahwahwah..." The odd inclusion of glimpses into lives of "great" women such as Margaret Thatcher just made the book longer--they didn't really add anything in spite of their minor connections to minor characters or minor incidents in the lives of characters. I was unable to believe that the suburban Mom who adopted from Russia hadn't bothered to get any therapy for her daughter or herself. Finally--near the end the poor child is offered some help. I did laugh at the Mom's thinking this child was profound when she was, all along, merely signing a tv commercial jingle! Basically this book was smug. I was left happy that I didn't know any of these women!