The Ten-Year Nap - Book reviews
From the bestselling author of The Wife and The Position, a feverishly smart novel about female ambition, money, class, motherhood, and marriage-and what happens in one community when a group of educated women chooses not to work.
For a group of four New York friends, the past decade has been largely defined by marriage and motherhood. Educated and reared to believe that they would conquer the world, they then left jobs as corporate lawyers, investment bankers, and film scouts to stay home with their babies. What was meant to be a temporary leave of absence has lasted a decade. Now, at age forty, with the halcyon days of young motherhood behind them and without professions to define them, Amy, Jill, Roberta, and Karen face a life that is not what they were brought up to expect but seems to be the one they have chosen.
But when Amy gets to know a charismatic and successful working mother of three who appears to have fulfilled the classic women’s dream of having it all-work, love, family-without having to give anything up, a lifetime’s worth of concerns, both practical and existential, opens up. As Amy’s obsession with this woman’s bustling life grows, it forces the four friends to confront the choices they’ve made in opting out of their careers-until a series of startling events shatters the peace and, for some of them, changes the landscape entirely.
Written in Meg Wolitzer’s inimitable, glittering style, The Ten-Year Nap is wickedly observant, knowing, provocative, surprising, and always entertaining, as it explores the lives of these women with candor, wit, and generosity.
Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews…
brilliant, timely, funny — she just nails it
I bought this book yesterday after hearing the author on NPR with Terry Gross and seeing the profile of her in the New York Times and was up most of the night (and half of the morning) finishing this unbelievably good novel up, though i was a little teed off my bookstore didn’t have the book until yesterday (publishers, what is the matter with you?). Wolitzer has everything you want in a writer — it’s like having a conversation with an unbelievably perceptive, wickedly amusing, but also on the inside serious person. And this novel takes a hard and entirely convincing look at the issues and the dilemmas facing women today. should they work or not work? is a woman’s role to take care of her kids and can you “have it all” and if you do, does that mean something has to be sacrificed (your marriage, your relationship with your kids, your work?). i have never seen a book tackle something like this before in such a believable way (and i’m a guy, so this isn’t really a topic that should interest me much, but I see it in my wife and in just about every woman i know and work with). so all in all she (wolitzer) has managed to carry off something pretty impossible in my opinion — a page turner that’s also a wonderful, beautifully written read. how often can you say that about a book? 5 stars all the way.
Read more and buy The Ten-Year Nap at cheapest price here!
Location: Home » Books » Contemporary
Tags: bestselling author, candor, classic women, corporate lawyers, film scouts, four friends, halcyon days, inimitable, investment bankers, leave of absence, meg wolitzer, money class, motherhood, new york times, npr, roberta, startling events, terry gross, working mother, york friends
