A Short History of Women: A Novel [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

There are some books that I like because they are satisfying in all ways. They are neat, tidy, and don't miss a trick. There are other books that I love because they are unsatisfying, even unsettling. This is such a book. It has left me wanting more. More from the author (I will be looking into her other books for my summer reading), but also wishing the book went on longer, giving me more and more about these characters she has crafted. I want more not because they aren't fully developed (because they are), but because I want to follow these characters even longer.

I have to say that this is one of my favorite reads in a while. I loved the sliding around through history (from 1898 through 2007), living with different generations of the same family, sensing the way women's lives and issues have changed (and not changed). Because of the sliding and shifting that does occur, this is a book that demands your attention--full attention--and I loved this sense of the book making sure I was involved, that I was really listening to it and its characters.

I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for an intelligent, interesting read, especially if you are interested in women's lives through the twentieth century.

Okay. I'll be straight with you. I'm a guy. But I'm a feminist father of a lesbian activist daughter, my personal motto was written by Virginia Woolf, and I'm an ardent believer that the sooner women achieve full equality in this world, the better off we'll all be. But this book was truly a struggle to get through.

I'm perfectly capable of working through, and thoroughly enjoying, a complex book that details the experience of women in the world. Be it The Hours (Michael Cunningham) or Virginia Woolf's own works, I love the challenge, and I love the reward. This book failed on two major counts, and annoyed me on a third.

First failure: the novel that spans generations has been done a hundred times, and done well. It is not a new plot device, and if it is to be done yet again, I'd like to see a hint of originality in the approach. Instead, I found wearying murkiness to the forward and backward literary catapulting, having to make frequent references to the chart in front of the book to relocate the plot line. Tiresome.

Second failure: The book starts off with the death by hunger strike of a woman who explains "There was nothing else I could do". Truly? Nothing else one could do, when so many amazing women of that era DID find something else they could do, and did win incremental battles in a war that is not yet over. I read Gloria Steinem, and I think "Damn! What a mind! What a human!" I attend The Vagina Monologues, and I'm thrilled by the gutsiness and brilliance of the characters. I read about the five woman in this book and I'm left with a sense of "Oh, give it a rest". Somehow women shrink in this book, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. The tragedy of misogyny and gender prejudice is at its starkest when external limits shackle women of strength and ability. In this book, the women seemed uncomfortably close to shackling themselves.

My third point of contention is that the book reflects a frequently noted phenomenon that has blossomed with text messaging, Facebook, Twitter: a type of narcissism that assumes that we really want to know about it when someone does a load of laundry, has a pimple, or had a bad day with the kids/spouse/car/hair. Though Walbert throws us an occasional tasty nugget (e.g. a supposed women's advocate giving a lecture about how women evolved to make men more comfortable), way too often it's kibble. Women seem trivialized and powerless in this novel, more by their own personalities than by the world of men that they live in.

Choose this one for your book club or your personal pleasure at your own risk: this chunk of carbon is no diamond in the rough, it's a lump of coal that fails to ignite.

A Short History of Women is Kate Walbert's third novel. Her previous novel, Our Kind was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2004.

This outing opens with the death of dedicated suffragist Dorothy Townsend in 1914 from self-imposed starvation for the cause. The rest of the book deals with the consequences of her action on her progeny - from her daughter Evelyn to her great-granddaughter Liz.

I so much wanted to like this book because of Dorothy Townsend and her decisions, because of the historical eras in which the book is set, and because of the reviews being published. Unfortunately, I found this book hard to like. I was never drawn into the characters enough to actually like or dislike them. It's almost as if Walbert was more interested in, for instance, ensuring that Townsend's thoughts and speech patterns were authentic rather than creating characters her readers could relate to. Walbert's goal may have been to write a "literary" novel, but in doing so, she may have lost the main-stream reader. And more's the pity because many if most people are unaware of the sacrifices the early suffragettes made.

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