The Love Children

July 13, 2009
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.

September 15, 2009
It's the late Sixties, and Jess Leighton is caught up in the racial tensions, antiwar protests, gender issues, and sexual freedom of the times. She is also dealing with family issues. Her father is a moody painter who abandons the family and heads to Vermont when he hits the big time, leaving Jess's mother, a professor, to find her own way and support herself and her daughter. Eventually, she divorces himat a time when women were just discovering this new route to freedom from dead-end marriages. Jess grows up with many more options than her mother but has a hard time finding herself; she experiments with drugs and sex, joins a commune, and tries to operate a sustainable restaurant. VERDICT The recently deceased French, author of the classic feminist title "The Women's Room", covers familiar ground in her final novel, and her characters do little to inspire. Readers interested in feminist fiction might do better to go back and read her 1977 novel.Robin Nesbitt, Columbus Metropolitan Lib., OH

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2009
Frenchs novels read like memoirs, so methodical are her narrators in recounting their life stories, a mode that proves to be authentic and compelling. This posthumously published sagaFrench passed away in May 2009, after completing her magnum opus, From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World (19952008)begins where her groundbreaking novel of womens liberation, The Womens Room (1977), ends, in Cambridge circa 1968. As Jess Leighton enters the storm of adolescence, her father (a famous artist) and her mother (a part-time literature teacher at Harvard) launch the opening battles in the war that ends their marriage. Smart and sensitive, Jess copes with their rage and her surging sexuality, protests the Vietnam War, and tries to understand why her ardor for learning and passion for life are so harshly misconstrued. Its insidious sexism at work, a malevolent force Jess cant escape even when she leaves college for a commune. Frenchs meticulous and affecting tale of the forging of one womans conscience encompasses thoughtful portraits of love children, from peace activists to members of unconventional families, and a forthright critique of the counterculture that puts todays wars, struggles for equality, and environmental troubles into sharp perspective.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)