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Back When We Were Grownups
- Narrated by: Blair Brown
- Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins
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Publisher's summary
The woman is Rebecca Davitch, a 53-year-old grandmother. Is she an imposter in her own life? she asks herself. Is it indeed her own life? Or is it someone else's?
On the surface, Beck, as she is known, is outgoing, joyous, a natural celebrator. Giving parties is her vocation - something she slipped into even before finishing college, when Joe Davitch spotted her at an engagement party in his family's crumbling 19th-century Baltimore row house, where giving parties was the family business. What caught his fancy was that she seemed to be having such a wonderful time. Soon this large-spirited older man, a divorcé with three little girls, swept her into his orbit, and before she knew it she was embracing his extended family plus a child of their own.
Now, some 30 years later Rebecca is caught unaware by the question of who she really is. How she answers it - how she tries to recover her girlhood self, that dignified grownup she had once been - is the story told in this beguiling, searching, and deeply moving novel. As always with Anne Tyler's novels, once we enter her world it is hard to leave. But in Back When We Were Grownups she so sharpens our perceptions and awakens so many untapped feelings that we come away not only refreshed, but also infinitely wiser.
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How to Be an American Housewife is a novel about mothers and daughters and the pull of tradition. It tells the story of Shoko, a Japanese woman who married an American GI, and her grown daughter, Sue, a divorced mother whose life as an American housewife hasn't been what she'd expected. When illness prevents Shoko from traveling to Japan, she asks Sue to go in her place. The trip reveals family secrets that change their lives in dramatic and unforeseen ways.
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big disappointment
- By Kirsten on 04-12-12
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Sanctuary Cove
- A Cavanaugh Island Novel, Book 1
- By: Rochelle Alers
- Narrated by: Nicole Small
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Still reeling from her husband’s untimely death, Deborah Robinson needs a fresh start. So she decides to pack up her family and return to her grandmother’s ancestral home on Cavanaugh Island. The charming town of Sanctuary Cove holds happy memories for Deborah, and, after she spies a gorgeous stranger in the local bakery, it promises the possibility for a bright future. Dr. Asa Monroe is at a crossroads. Ever since the loss of his family, he has been traveling from one town to another. When he meets Deborah, the beautiful bookstore owner with the sunny smile, Asa believes he has finally found a reason to stay in one place.
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Not Good, Clean Fun
- By Cheryl on 12-20-12
By: Rochelle Alers
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The Untelling
- By: Tayari Jones
- Narrated by: Michele Blackmon
- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Aria is no stranger to tragedy. Fifteen years ago, a family outing took the lives of her father and baby sister, leaving remaining members of this fractured family struggling with their own guilt - real and imagined. At 25, Aria believes she can reinvent herself through her planned marriage with all its promise of a family of her own. Her infertility changes her life as swiftly and irrevocably as the urban landscape around her.
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Don’t waste your time!
- By shasha on 09-18-20
By: Tayari Jones
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Boy, Snow, Bird
- By: Helen Oyeyemi
- Narrated by: Susan Bennett, Carra Patterson
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking, she believes, for beauty - the opposite of the life she' s left behind in New York. She marries a local widower and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow Whitman. A wicked stepmother is a creature Boy never imagined she' d become, but elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out when the birth of Boy' s daughter, Bird, who is dark-skinned, exposes the Whitmans as light-skinned African Americans passing for white.
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For Literary Lovers
- By M. Shipe on 04-25-14
By: Helen Oyeyemi
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Custody
- A Novel
- By: Nancy Thayer
- Narrated by: Angela Dawe
- Length: 11 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Ambitious, brilliant, and engaged to a wonderful guy, Kelly MacLeod feels like her dreams are coming true when she lands a prestigious appointment as a judge in the Massachusetts Family Court. A passionate advocate on behalf of children of divorce, she can at long last put her fierce intellect to good use in the courtroom. But a chance meeting with a charismatic man forever changes Kelly’s life.
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Tempered and Forged by the Kiln of Experience
- By Empress Karen on 10-04-18
By: Nancy Thayer
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Summer House
- A Novel
- By: Nancy Thayer
- Narrated by: Emily Durante
- Length: 11 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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After years of wandering from whim to whim, 30-year-old Charlotte Wheelwright seems to have at last found her niche. The free spirit enjoys running an organic gardening business on the island of Nantucket, thanks in large part to her spry grandmother Nona, who donated a portion of her land on the family's seaside compound to get Charlotte started.
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Best Nancy Thayer book I've read
- By MW on 05-07-15
By: Nancy Thayer
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It Happens Every Spring
- By: Catherine Palmer, Gary Chapman
- Narrated by: Jill Mueller
- Length: 8 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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The first in a new series, Four Seasons, takes us to Deepwater Cove, a small community on the shore of the Lake of the Ozarks, where we're introduced to four couples in different stages of life. It Happens Every Spring centers on Brenda, a lonely wife, and Steve, a go-getter real estate agent, in the mid-winter of their relationship. When a stranger appears at their door one night, change blows through their house and their marriage.
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Amazing book!
- By Rad on 10-07-22
By: Catherine Palmer, and others
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Stars over Sunset Boulevard
- By: Susan Meissner
- Narrated by: Ann Marie Lee
- Length: 10 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Los Angeles, present day. When an iconic hat worn by Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind ends up in Christine McAllister's vintage clothing boutique by mistake, her efforts to return it to its owner take her on a journey more enchanting than any classic movie.... Los Angeles, 1938. Violet Mayfield sets out to reinvent herself in Hollywood after her dream of becoming a wife and mother falls apart, and she lands a job on the film set of Gone with the Wind.
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Pass on this
- By Lulew on 03-24-17
By: Susan Meissner
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The Wednesday Sisters
- By: Meg Waite Clayton
- Narrated by: Julie Dretzin
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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For 35 years, Frankie, Linda, Kath, Brett, and Ally have met every Wednesday at the park near their homes in Palo Alto, California. Defined when they first meet by what their husbands do, the young homemakers and mothers are far removed from the Summer of Love that has enveloped most of the Bay Area in 1967.
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Loved it!
- By Denise Wallace on 06-26-09
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Magnolia Wednesdays
- By: Wendy Wax
- Narrated by: Käthe Mazur
- Length: 13 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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At 41, Vivian Armstrong Gray's life as an investigative journalist is crumbling. Humiliated after taking a bullet in her backside during an exposé, Vivi learns that she's pregnant, jobless, and very hormonal. This explains why she says "yes" to a dreadful job covering suburban living back home in Georgia, a column she must write incognito. Down South, it's her sister's ballroom dance studio that becomes her undercover spot where she learns about the local life - and where unexpected friendships develop.
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Painful. And not in a good way.
- By Kate on 01-24-13
By: Wendy Wax
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Plantation
- A Lowcountry Tale
- By: Dorothea Benton Frank
- Narrated by: Susie Breck
- Length: 6 hrs and 2 mins
- Abridged
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Overall
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When Caroline Wimbley Levine learns that her mother, Miss Lavinia, has supposedly gone mad, she leaves the big city bustle of Manhattan and returns to Tall Pines Plantation. Caroline originally left Tall Pines to escape her feisty, eccentric mother and her drunken brother, Trip. When Miss Lavinia dies, Caroline is forced to come to terms with her family's troubled history as well as her failing relationship with her husband.
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Abridged!!
- By Teresa on 04-18-16
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Excellent
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This novel has earned all the recognition ---
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amazing
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Excellent
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Maggie and Ira Moran are on a road trip from Baltimore, Maryland, to Deer Lick, Pennsylvania, to attend the funeral of a friend. Along the way, they reflect on the state of their marriage, its trials, and its triumphs - through their quarrels, their routines, and their ability to tolerate each other's faults with patience and affection.
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This novel has earned all the recognition ---
- By DLTBGYD on 11-20-22
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amazing
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Liam Pennywell, who set out to be a philosopher and ended up teaching fifth grade, never much liked the job at that run-down private school, so early retirement doesnt bother him. But he is troubled by his inability to remember anything about the first night that he moved into his new, spare, and efficient condominium on the outskirts of Baltimore. All he knows when he wakes up the next day in the hospital is that his head is sore and bandaged.
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Doesn't measure up
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Willa Drake can count on one hand the defining moments of her life. In 1967, she is a schoolgirl coping with her mother's sudden disappearance. In 1977, she is a college coed considering a marriage proposal. In 1997, she is a young widow trying to piece her life back together. And in 2017, she yearns to be a grandmother but isn't sure she ever will be. Then, one day, Willa receives a startling phone call from a stranger. Without fully understanding why, she flies across the country to Baltimore....
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disappointed
- By Amazon Customer on 07-13-18
By: Anne Tyler
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Charlotte Emory has always lived a quiet, conventional life in Clarion, Maryland. She lives as simply as possible and one day decides to simplify everything and leave her husband. Her last trip to the bank throws Charlotte's life into an entirely different direction when a restless young man in a nylon jacket takes her hostage during the robbery - and soon the two are heading south into an unknown future and a most unexpected fate.
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Lovely writing
- By J Matalon on 10-29-24
By: Anne Tyler
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Celestial Navigation
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Thirty-eight-year-old Jeremy Pauling has never left home. He lives on the top floor of a Baltimore row house where he creates collages of little people snipped from wrapping paper. His elderly mother putters in the rooms below, until her death. And it is then that Jeremy is forced to take in Mary Tell and her child as boarders. Mary is unaware of how much courage it takes Jeremy to look her in the eye. For Jeremy, like one of his paper creations, is fragile and easily torn - especially when he's falling in love.
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Marginalized characters
- By Linda on 05-05-24
By: Anne Tyler
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Redhead by the Side of the Road
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Micah Mortimer is a creature of habit. A self-employed tech expert, superintendent of his Baltimore apartment building, cautious to a fault behind the steering wheel, he seems content leading a steady, circumscribed life. But one day, his routines are blown apart when his woman friend (he refuses to call anyone in her late 30s a "girlfriend") tells him she's facing eviction, and a teenager shows up at Micah's door claiming to be his son. These surprises, and the ways they throw Micah's meticulously organized life off-kilter, risk changing him forever.
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Disappointed Diehard Tyler Fan
- By Suze on 04-13-20
By: Anne Tyler
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The Year of Pleasures
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- Unabridged
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Story
Betta Nolan moves to a small town after the death of her husband to try to begin life anew. Though still dealing with her sorrow, Betta nonetheless is determined to find pleasure in her simple daily routines. Among those who help her in both expected and unexpected ways are the ten-year-old boy next door, three wild women friends from her college days with whom she reconnects, a young man who is struggling to find his place in the world, and a handsome widower who is ready for love.
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The Year of Pleasures
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By: Elizabeth Berg
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Saint Maybe
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Ian Bedloe is the ideal teenage son, leading a cheery, apple-pie life with his family in Baltimore. That is, until a careless and vicious rumor leads to a devastating tragedy. Imploding from guilt, Ian believes he is the one responsible for the tragedy. No longer a star athlete with a bright future, and desperately searching for salvation, he stumbles across a storefront with a neon sign that simply reads: Church of the Second Chance. Ian has always viewed his penance as a burden. But through the power of faith and the love of family, he begins to view it as a gift.
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Brilliant
- By MNtea on 02-26-22
By: Anne Tyler
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French Braid
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The Garretts take their first and last family vacation in the summer of 1959. They hardly ever leave home, but in some ways they have never been farther apart. Mercy has trouble resisting the siren call of her aspirations to be a painter, which means less time keeping house for her husband, Robin. Their teenage daughters, steady Alice and boy-crazy Lily, could not have less in common.
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Definitely not my favorite
- By 80 Oaks on 03-31-22
By: Anne Tyler
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If Morning Ever Comes
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In the debut novel that set her on the path to becoming an American classic, Anne Tyler's If Morning Ever Comes presents a timeless portrait of a young man's homecoming and his ensuing journey through youth, identity, family, and love. Raised among a family of strong-minded women has left Ben Joe Hawkes as something of a worrier, who has always felt like an outsider in his own family.
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Her Worst on Audible
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By: Anne Tyler
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A Spool of Blue Thread
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"It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon..." This is how Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959. The Whitshanks are one of those families that radiate togetherness: an indefinable, enviable kind of specialness. But they are also like all families, in that the stories they tell themselves reveal only part of the picture.
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The Sharp Edge Of Family
- By Sara on 03-10-15
By: Anne Tyler
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Morgan's Passing
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Story
Morgan Gower is bored of the tedium of his ordinary life: of his job as manager of a run-down hardware store; of his wife; of his "industriously dull" daughters; of his mother; of his sister. But Morgan's secret escape lies in a box filled with costumes, filled with everything from a fake beard to Napoleon's tricorne to Daniel Boone, all of which provide an outlet away from his life and into the identity of someone who is assuredly not Morgan Gower.
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Nothing good to say
- By RH on 05-06-24
By: Anne Tyler
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Searching for Caleb
- By: Anne Tyler
- Narrated by: Amy Finegan
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- Unabridged
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Through the syncopated rhythms of the ragtime era to the thumping, rocking beats of the 1970s, generations of Pecks have maintained a determined steadiness. Adamantly middle-class - Peck-proud, as the family slogan goes - they are quick to sweep under the rug those members who do not live up to their standards. Maybe that's why Caleb Peck took off with his violincello as a boy? Sixty years later, his brother, Daniel, is still wondering.
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Interesting Story!
- By GoodLife on 04-18-24
By: Anne Tyler
What listeners say about Back When We Were Grownups
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- mary j miller
- 09-17-07
Mid-life crisis
This is just a story about a woman having a mid-life crisis. Nothing dramatic ever happens as she works her way through it. Somehow it manages to be entertaining probably because of the colorful charaters.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Gary
- 06-30-16
Our true selves are never known
I very rarely ever re-listen to a fiction book. My only exception so far have been this book and another Anne Tyler book, "The Accidental Tourist".
Really good fiction makes one see beyond the plot and allows one to feel the meaning of a universal truth. Everyone needs to understand fiction for themselves, but I know why I like this book so much. The author understands how we get our purpose in life and that (at least for me) that the structure of the world is in place before we enter it and we have to accept that structure.
Our true selves are never known (that's a line form the book). We are thrown into the world and for us to make sense of our understanding about our own understanding we must accept our presence-at-hand and make sense of our worldliness (purpose) by realizing that our purpose comes about by understanding the whole by looking at the pieces we interact with.
Or perhaps I'm just reading something into the story the author never intended. Regardless, the book can be an entertaining listen.
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5 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Barbara
- 08-19-03
Wonderful characters
As always, Anne Tyler delivers an interesting story with wonderful, quirky characters. She shows life as it is lived--full of self-doubt, unintentional side-trips and lots of ups and downs. You leave an Anne Tyler book, though, realizing that ordinary lives can be extraordinary if people live consciously. Don't read it for the plot (though that is great, too)--read it for the characters.
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15 people found this helpful
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- Romney
- 03-12-12
Unusual story, great read
What did you love best about Back When We Were Grownups?
A non-traditional plot with a complicated family that Tyler somehow made interesting and diverse.
What about Blair Brown’s performance did you like?
Brown gets nuances in her acting and narration - she puts the irony where it belongs; stands back when she should.
If you could rename Back When We Were Grownups, what would you call it?
I don't know, but this wouldn't be the title.
Any additional comments?
Tyler is a master and this book so fresh and unusual - loved it.
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall
- swalk
- 08-20-04
Excellent, Interesting Context
This has been one of my most favorite Audible fictional titles. Who of us hasn't woken up sometime wondering--How did I get here? What am I doing? One decision 20-30-40 years ago from some dumb teenager who didn't have a clue---and here I am. I know some call it mid-life crisis.
This was interesting, thought-provoking, while remaining entertaining and a good read. Perhaps not quite as good as Saint Maybe but a close second.
For those who have started this book keep listening--the old man's comments near the end are worth the whole jouney in themselves!
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13 people found this helpful
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- Cindy Gehrt
- 07-18-16
Really Great 'Slice of Life' Story
Enjoyed the story and the narration. Definitely would recommend this. Ann Tyler at her best.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Lisa
- 03-05-15
I was disappointed
I was looking forward to some conclusion, some respect for the character of Rebecca. I never leave reviews but I'm just coming away from this sad.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Amie Wunderlich
- 05-13-23
a story about life
As a woman who is generally content but has spent plenty of time myself thinking about what has brought me to where and who I am, and considering all of the what ifs, I enjoyed the glimpse into the life and path that led the main character in this book to where we meet her. There's not a suspenseful or something exciting to watch unfold, but by the time I was finished I felt like I was dissaponted to say goodbye to a friend which in my mind, qualifies this as a great story.
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Overall
- Cathy S.
- 02-24-09
An unfortunate disappointment
I wanted badly to be drawn in, but it simply didn't happen. I kept an open mind, and listened even when I began to feel the story was interminable. So, yes, I saw it through to the end, but only because I was hoping for a big realization, or ...something. But despite a twinge of identification with the central character's declaration of having not lived the life she was intended to have lived, I was never engaged, and I could not very much identify with Rebecca . I did not expect an optomistic novel, but I did have expectations of something a bit more insightful, and much less hopeless. I was further put off by the drab characteriztion of all the children and granchildren. None were fully fleshed out, but only provided to the reader as partial justification for Rebecca's discontent.
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- Serena
- 06-16-20
Depressing
I had hoped this 50 something character would bring me hope. Hope that life over 50 is not all down hill but it did not. She was pathetic from Start to finish. She treated people badly and rarely ever spoke up for herself. Sorry I put the time and credit into it.
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