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Marilyn French's 1977 novel The Women's Room epitomized the feminist movement and became one of the most influential books of our time. Now, in her last novel, she has captured the complexities of life for the daughters of the Women's Room generation in her highly anticipated new novel The Love Children.
It is the late 1960s in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Grateful Dead is playing on the radio and teenagers are wearing long hair and blue jeans. Jess Leighton, the daughter of a temperamental painter and a proto-feminist Harvard professor, is struggling to make sense of her world amid racial tensions, Vietnam War protests, and anti-government rage. With more options than her mother's generation, but no role model for creating the life she desires, Jess experiments with sex and psychedelic drugs as she searches for happiness on her own terms. In the midst of joining and fleeing a commune, growing organic vegetables, and operating a sustainable restaurant, Jess grapples with the legacy of her mother's generation.
"French's disciples will laud this as a life-affirming work; her critics will dismiss it; but it's too complex and nuanced a novel to be banished into either camp." - Publishers Weekly
"Had another author written The Love Children, I would have felt differently. I might have said, well, this is a pleasant if mildly flawed look backward. Coming from a woman who spent her life railing against injustice, it’s just plain bewildering. But I am loathe to close this review negatively. Marilyn French was a brilliant woman who left an impressive body of work, and her death diminishes us all." - January Magazine
This information about The Love Children was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Marilyn French is best known as the author of The Women's Room (1977). She is also the author of In the Name of Friendship, and From Eve to Dawn, a four-volume series of women's history throughout the world. She died in May 2009.
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