© 2018 Book Chatter | Book Chatter

Sunday Matters

I love holiday weekends even when I don’t have anything special planned. Just the idea of having an extra day to do ANYTHING appeals to me.

Right Now:

We went to church on Thursday so we could sleep in today. Yesterday we were at a volleyball tournament and had to leave pretty early in the morning so my plan at the moment is to be a total slug.

This Week:

Tuesday, my life group is going out to dinner to celebrate a graduation. Japanese food, here we come!

In other news, school ends on Thursday for us. Unbelievable, really. There was a theatre showcase to attend but it’s been rescheduled so many times and now I think it’s been cancelled for good.

Volleyball camp starts on June 4 so there won’t be any downtime to speak of. I gotta figure out the online summer school program too. Still waiting for info from the school counselor about that. With all the electives and sports, history will be taken over the summer.

Reading:

I finished and reviewed The Female Persuasion and liked it very much. Right after finishing it, I started The Other Mother and let me tell you, it is impossible to put down. I started it and before I knew it I was 150 pages in. Now, I am done with it! The review will post this week.

On a very sad note, my pre-order for King’s new book, The Outsider never came and it’s a holiday weekend, the perfect time to read it so I may have to walk into a store to buy it and then deal with the return/refund of the other copy later.

Watching:

Not really anything new. But I feel like watching some old movies this weekend or a really good action movie. I still haven’t seen Black Panther.

Making:

Memorial Day begs for something to be grilled but what? With me being gluten-free and The Girl being a vegetarian, meals are somewhat complicated. The other day I used a veggie crumble as a meat substitute in a casserole and after eating it had a terrible reaction to it. It was ALL gluten! I had no idea.

What are you making? Kabobs sound pretty good.

Grateful for:

The extra day off, of course!

The Female Persuasion
By Meg Wolitzer
Riverhead Books, 9781594488405, April 3, 2018, 464pp.

The Short of It:

I love it when a book makes you feel things.

The Rest of It:

Greer Kadetsky is young and smart and vibrant but she’s resentful because of a mistake her parents made with her financial aid forms. Instead of Yale, she ends up at another university where her boyfriend is not. This separation isolates her and makes it difficult to fit in. One night, she meets a guy who takes advantage of her, and it occurs to her that men like him exist for the sole purpose of treating women like objects, taking what they believe to be rightfully theirs.

In protest, she attends a feminist rally while wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with this loser’s face. Faith Frank is in attendance and Greer is in awe. Faith is older, more refined and brilliant. Her passion while speaking stretches to the back of the room and Greer is changed forever. Completely smitten by Faith, Greer is ecstatic when she is offered an entry-level position with Faith’s magazine.

The Female Persuasion is mostly about Greer and her evolution as a woman fighting for women’s rights but there are some other characters who occupy space in this novel. For one, Greer’s boyfriend, who suffers a devastating loss that changes him in ways that Greer never imagined. Faith’s fight for funding and her endless pursuit of elevating women’s rights is tarnished by one, not-so-slight oversight. Greer’s closest friend Zee, is betrayed by Greer which is so ironic given the circumstances and what Greer does for a living.

This is a large, impressive read. I found myself re-reading passages because some of them beg to be re-read, digested and pondered. When I turned to that last page, I felt deeply satisfied with the story’s ending but also somewhat uneasy about the state of the world we live in. A little sick, really.

I think men will shy away from a book like this but there’s something in it for them too if they give it a chance.

Get a copy and read it.

Source: Review copy provided by the publisher.
Disclosure: This post contains Indiebound affiliate links.

Chatting with friends about books and life…