MAG-MARJORIE and WON OVER

Name: MAG-MARJORIE and WON OVER
Author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
ISBN: 0-9655309-4-9

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1999

Though the tales are dated and at a glance have little import for the modern reader, Gilman’s sharp characters and her...

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Two didactic, at times sentimental novels (first serialized in Gilman’s magazine, The Forerunner) still prove fascinating in their explications of gender in turn-of-the-century New England.

A preeminent pioneer of contemporary feminism, tackling in her nonfiction the repressive economic and domestic life of women, Gilman (1860-1935) didn’t stray far at all in her fiction. Written only a few years before the publication of her significant Herland, both Mag-Marjorie and Won Over (1912 and 1913) present women confronted with the challenge of independence in a world of petticoats and social calls. Though the plot of the first is conventionally melodramatic, the solution to its “problem” is pure Gilman. Mag, a 16-year-old maid at her aunt’s inn, falls for Dr. Armstrong, becomes pregnant, and is tossed aside by the misogynistic Lothario. Luckily for Mag, the exceptional Mary Yale is visiting the inn and saves the girl: “He’s not going to be ruined by this summer’s sins – why should you?” The wealthy, unmarried older woman makes plans for Mag’s next ten years – a Henrietta Higgins transforming the country girl into an educated European surgeon. Won Over is more contemporary in its relevance and far more compelling. Stella Widfield, a happily married mother, discovers the emptiness of her life when her sons go off to boarding school. In a nice turn of paranoia à la “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” Stella becomes obsessed with her husband’s safety until she discovers a world outside the stifling environs of her Manhattan apartment. Rediscovering her love of writing (thanks to another well-to-do lady and her broader circle of Socialist bohemians), Stella also discovers herself and in turn reignites her faltering marriage by changing from a frothing handmaid into an individual whom her husband can respect.

Though the tales are dated and at a glance have little import for the modern reader, Gilman’s sharp characters and her insights into gender traps provide enough appeal to interest those outside academic circles.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-9655309-4-9

Page Count: 272

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.