The Love Children

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 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. |||This book is sold in the US by Sony Electronics Inc. |||This book is sold in Canada by Sony Electronics Inc.

Marilyn French's The Women's Room, published in 1977, spoke to a generation. In this final novel, published posthumously, French uses the social unrest of the late 1960s as the seedbed for modern dissatisfaction. Jess Leighton navigates her parents' divorce, the Vietnam War, racism and her burgeoning sexuality with difficulty. She plunges into sex, drugs, bad relationships and life on a commune growing organic vegetables, something she had never imagined back in high school in Cambridge, Mass. A novel that feels like a memoir, there are many beautiful passages and poignant moments, but French tries to cover too much and tells more than she shows. When she pulls back the curtain on specific, life-changing moments in Jess's life, the writing is strong and the investment in the characters deep, which makes the weaker sections all the more frustrating. 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. (Sept.)
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• Published by

  The Feminist Press

• Publish Date

  August 31, 2009 

• Print ISBN

  1558616063

• eBook ISBN

  9781558616509

• Imprint

  The Feminist Press

• Filesize

  334.54 KB

• Number of Print Pages*

  352

* Number of eBook pages may differ. Click here for more information.