Review by New York Times Review
NO country house murder or cockpit cliffhanger can get a cast of characters more efficiently assembled and down to business than a fictional book-discussion group. Karen Joy Fowler brought this device some sparkling exposure a few years ago with "The Jane Austen Book Club." In more pastelshaded mode, Hilma Wolitzer's latest novel uses it to frame a gentle summer triptych of interlinked lives, complete with three happy endings. Wolitzer's reading group is the Page Turners, a sorority of Hamptons trophy wives who have signed up for painless intellectual sun-lamp sessions by way of Trollope, García Márquez et al. It's no wonder Wolitzer's publisher is alertly pitching "Summer Reading" to summer readers. (The lawn chair on the dust jacket is really quite inviting.) The group's meetings bring together three women with barely the dimmest curiosity about one another's lives. Lissy, the club's hostess, is a borderline dyslexic inevitably put to sleep by the effort of reading. Michelle, her truculent housekeeper, hands round iced tea and more elaborate "themed" refreshments (like empanadas for the García Márquez session) before going home to domestic dissatisfactions more like her employer's than either of them realizes. Sixtyish Angela, retired from a dreary academic career to the marginally better occupation of leading book-discussion groups, keeps mentally revisiting an agonizing decades-old rupture with deeply treasured friends. These three women - the young society matron, the aging bisexual and the sullen representative of the Long Island labor force - have no idea that they share an intense emotional investment in some sort of past or present surrogate kin. The clank of narrative machinery being hauled into place is rather too audible at the outset, before the three dovetailing plots take on a graceful momentum of their own. As readers, the Page Turners don't rise to any sustained perceptions or transformative epiphanies, but unexpected nudges from books do help set each of the three heroines on inner-sleuthing missions reminiscent of the more somber one in Wolitzer's last novel, "The Doctor's Daughter." Everyone does some belated growing up. Painfully forced to stop telling herself wishful stories about the past, Angela finds lasting reward in the here and now. A club member's misplaced copy of "Mrs. Bridge" gives Michelle the courage to break with a seemingly dead-end relationship and get something more than moral vindication. Lissy, who never makes it through any of the assigned books, nonetheless wrestles with Angela's claims about art as life lesson and ends up with a stronger lease on marriage and stepmotherhood as well as miraculous recompense for a never-healed childhood loss. Maintaining three perspectives throughout a comparatively short book without labored or slick effect is no mean feat. But once she gets things up and running, Wolitzer accomplishes it with unforced smoothness. The breezy grace of the narrative is inches from mere coasting; the benign warmth with which she surveys assorted Suffolk County denizens is inches from sappiness. But what soundly judged inches! Anne Mendelson is a freelance writer and editor.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
In this intricate tale of love, loss, and redemption, Wolitzer, author most recently of The Doctor's Daughter (2006), tells the story of three women whose paths cross during a summer in the Hamptons. Lissy Snyder, an insecure second wife, is uncertain of her place in her husband's heart and feels intimidated by her stepchildren. To help cement her position in Hamptons society, Lissy decides to host a book club for other young socialites and hires an eccentric former English professor, Angela Graves, to lead the group. Angela guides her pupils through books such as Madame Bovary, inspiring both Lissy and her day girl, Michelle, to reexamine their relationships with the men in their lives. Meanwhile, Angela herself is haunted by a years-old love affair. Wolitzer's subtle analysis reveals the underlying hopes and tensions that guide each woman's daily life as she struggles to come to terms with her own choices and mistakes, led, in part, by the heroines of the books Angela has chosen. --Katherine Boyle Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The eighth novel from Wolitzer (The Doctor's Daughter) opens as Alyssa (Lissy) Snyder-trophy second wife, reluctant stepmom, and major dyslexic-hosts a summer book discussion group. She's hoping to catch the attention of Ardith Templeton, who initiated the group and who, with her husband Larry, commands center stage in the tony Hamptons social scene. Retired English professor Angela Graves conducts the group, assigns the readings and tries to inspire her charges to take life lessons from the likes of Jane Eyre and Madame Bovary. Lissy gamely tries to read enough pages (or search out enough online commentary) to appear prepared-but Ardith rarely shows up. Meanwhile, Lissy's husband dotes on his children and begins spending time with his first wife. First-person chapters alternate among Lissy, Angela (who picks over old regrets), and Michelle Cutty, a young local who works as Lissy's summer maid and who provides some class-based frisson. There are small pleasures, but the trio of pretty endings is too hurried (and in Lissy's case too unearned) to be satisfying. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
It's a lazy summer in the Hamptons, and earnest Angela hopes to convince her book group that reading Flaubert and Bront? really will make a difference. With a reading group guide, of course. nonfiction (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A summer of reading and contemplation among the privileged--and less than privileged--of the Hamptons. Angela is a retired literature professor who inhabits a small cottage and supplements her pension by leading book groups for the Hamptons' coddled trophy wives. Lissy, one of the wives, joined--and named--the Page Turners Club even though books make her tired. She wants to impress Ardith, Alpha-female of the Summer People, but Lissy also harbors an obscure yen to change her life--an idyllic one, except for hubby's hectoring ex, Danielle, and Lissy's two ultra-entitled stepkids, who are threatening to visit this very summer. Lissy's maid, Michelle, named after the Beatles song, frets over her boyfriend Hank's ambivalence and lingering affection for his ex-wife, April. She'd love to mother Hank's daughter, Kayla, if only the anorexic teen would let her. Angela's set for a life of fraught bi-sexuality. The love affair that defined her fate, estranged her from her best friends and ended as a result of the shocking malice of an ex-girlfriend, hardly ever intrudes on her thoughts now. That changes after a chance encounter with the former friends' daughter, Charlotte, in Manhattan. Angela learns that Charlotte's father, her long-ago painter lover, is dead. But Charlotte and her actor boyfriend are ripe for surrogate parenting. Lissy, meanwhile, is haunted by murky memories of her childhood nanny's sudden death, and flustered by her attraction to an inept magician who has stalked her ever since she hired him while performing her hobby job, party planner. Despite a fondness for overly pat resolutions, Wolitzer (The Doctor's Daughter, 2006, etc.) still manages to wrest originality from the jaws of clich with this sharply observed, multi-voiced novel. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
