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gaucheri's review against another edition
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
stenaros's review against another edition
It's the 1950s and Marge Piercy's main character doesn't want a man to posses her. Hmmm. Good luck with that. Having just read her memoir, I can tell that large portions of this novel are inspired by her own life. It seemed like things were going to be grim, and so my attention waned. Also? Horrible 80's-esque cover. So bad it is almost good.
ladygetslit's review against another edition
4.0
Actual Rating: 3.5 rounded to 4 stars
Marge Piercy is one of those authors best encountered at exactly the right time of life and in the right frame of mind. I’ve read three of her other novels ([book:Small Changes|169673], [book:Sex Wars: A Novel of Gilded Age New York|129635], and [book:Three Women|129644]) and found them to be, for the most part, what I expected: novels written by a politically active Second Wave feminist poet. For some reason, I really connected with Braided Lives, I think because the characters are close to my age range. This book is an obviously left-leaning political novel, but it’s also a lovingly crafted coming-of-age story with autobiographical elements, and that’s why I connected with it.
Jill Stuart, a non-religious Jewish girl raised in a working-class neighborhood in Detroit, narrates Braided Lives. The story follows her journey to college alongside her cousin Donna, through college courses, dormitory shenanigans, and relationships with men (and boys). Although it’s set in the 1950s, much of what Jill and Donna experience isn’t that far off from the modern day college experience. The situations each character encounters molds them into the women they become by the end of the story, and I think that’s a really accurate trajectory for most young women in college.
I really enjoyed Piercy’s poetic writing style in this. It’s a 500-page book, but it doesn’t seem like it; each bit of dialogue, each description, and each of Jill’s inner monologues are well-placed and poignant. There were several one-liners and longer passages that I want to cut out and hang on my wall as a reminder that I’m not the only one who’s felt this way or thought this certain thing about the world. What’s amazing to me is just how little has changed between the 50s and now. The women’s experiences with men remind me so much of my early relationships, particularly in college and directly after, in which I didn’t quite know how to articulate what I wanted and was easily swayed by overly confident men who were used to getting what they wanted.
With that being said, Braided Lives is a highly political novel, and its plot is shaped in certain ways by Piercy’s politics. Ultimately, this is a book about abortion pre-Roe v. Wade, about the dangers that having sex entailed for women and the lack of access to good birth control. Jill and Donna are both sexually active at a time when unmarried women were supposed to be virgins—despite the fact that unmarried men were presumed to be having sex. At one point, the girls buy themselves cheap wedding rings and fabricate husbands just to get fitted for a diaphragm. Keep in mind, this was before the pill was even invented, but that, too, was subject to a doctor’s discretion and it wasn’t easy to get a prescription if you were unmarried.
There’s a lot of discussion of mediocre sex, and a lot of Freudian opinions on how sex was supposed to be for women. Jill even admits to having same-sex attraction, but she hasn’t acted on it since she was a child; having lesbian tendencies would literally get you locked up in an insane asylum. Obviously Piercy (and Jill) disagree with these (now outdated) ideas about female sexuality, but Jill and Donna are still affected by these ideologies.
There’s even a self-induced abortion; I’m including this without a spoiler alert because it was an incredibly emotional reading experience and I wouldn’t have wanted to go into that blindly. Jill is involved in left-leaning politics on campus, and she later becomes involved in a sort of secret society that helped women access illegal abortions and aftercare. Piercy does not disguise her politics, but shows how for the characters the personal becomes political before that phrase was even coined.
I read another Goodreads review that said Braided Lives would’ve been way better if you stopped before reading the last 50 pages, and I have to agree with that. The first 500 pages of this book would’ve been 5-stars for me, to be quite honest, but the last 50 pages were more political than they were good storytelling. While I was somewhat disappointed that, for all her politics, Jill spends the entire book in and out of relationships with men, I completely related to that and found it realistic. What I couldn’t accept: Essentially, while I had hearts as well as tears in my eyes for the majority of this reading, the politically charged and unfulfilling ending left me with a 3.5-star rating, rather than a 5.
Marge Piercy is one of those authors best encountered at exactly the right time of life and in the right frame of mind. I’ve read three of her other novels ([book:Small Changes|169673], [book:Sex Wars: A Novel of Gilded Age New York|129635], and [book:Three Women|129644]) and found them to be, for the most part, what I expected: novels written by a politically active Second Wave feminist poet. For some reason, I really connected with Braided Lives, I think because the characters are close to my age range. This book is an obviously left-leaning political novel, but it’s also a lovingly crafted coming-of-age story with autobiographical elements, and that’s why I connected with it.
Jill Stuart, a non-religious Jewish girl raised in a working-class neighborhood in Detroit, narrates Braided Lives. The story follows her journey to college alongside her cousin Donna, through college courses, dormitory shenanigans, and relationships with men (and boys). Although it’s set in the 1950s, much of what Jill and Donna experience isn’t that far off from the modern day college experience. The situations each character encounters molds them into the women they become by the end of the story, and I think that’s a really accurate trajectory for most young women in college.
I really enjoyed Piercy’s poetic writing style in this. It’s a 500-page book, but it doesn’t seem like it; each bit of dialogue, each description, and each of Jill’s inner monologues are well-placed and poignant. There were several one-liners and longer passages that I want to cut out and hang on my wall as a reminder that I’m not the only one who’s felt this way or thought this certain thing about the world. What’s amazing to me is just how little has changed between the 50s and now. The women’s experiences with men remind me so much of my early relationships, particularly in college and directly after, in which I didn’t quite know how to articulate what I wanted and was easily swayed by overly confident men who were used to getting what they wanted.
With that being said, Braided Lives is a highly political novel, and its plot is shaped in certain ways by Piercy’s politics. Ultimately, this is a book about abortion pre-Roe v. Wade, about the dangers that having sex entailed for women and the lack of access to good birth control. Jill and Donna are both sexually active at a time when unmarried women were supposed to be virgins—despite the fact that unmarried men were presumed to be having sex. At one point, the girls buy themselves cheap wedding rings and fabricate husbands just to get fitted for a diaphragm. Keep in mind, this was before the pill was even invented, but that, too, was subject to a doctor’s discretion and it wasn’t easy to get a prescription if you were unmarried.
There’s a lot of discussion of mediocre sex, and a lot of Freudian opinions on how sex was supposed to be for women. Jill even admits to having same-sex attraction, but she hasn’t acted on it since she was a child; having lesbian tendencies would literally get you locked up in an insane asylum. Obviously Piercy (and Jill) disagree with these (now outdated) ideas about female sexuality, but Jill and Donna are still affected by these ideologies.
There’s even a self-induced abortion; I’m including this without a spoiler alert because it was an incredibly emotional reading experience and I wouldn’t have wanted to go into that blindly. Jill is involved in left-leaning politics on campus, and she later becomes involved in a sort of secret society that helped women access illegal abortions and aftercare. Piercy does not disguise her politics, but shows how for the characters the personal becomes political before that phrase was even coined.
I read another Goodreads review that said Braided Lives would’ve been way better if you stopped before reading the last 50 pages, and I have to agree with that. The first 500 pages of this book would’ve been 5-stars for me, to be quite honest, but the last 50 pages were more political than they were good storytelling. While I was somewhat disappointed that, for all her politics, Jill spends the entire book in and out of relationships with men, I completely related to that and found it realistic. What I couldn’t accept:
Spoiler
Jill’s decision to marry Howie, despite being totally against marriage, and Donna’s death-by-botched-abortion. I felt that Jill’s decision to marry Howie was counter to all her previous character development and just a “neat” way of tying things up; and while I understand the realism of Donna’s death, it felt very heavy-handed coming so close to the end of the novel. Additionally, I was thrown off by the lack of actual denouement in the last 50 pages: it’s hinted that Jill ends up marrying and divorcing a guy who treats her like shit, but we don’t get the resolution of knowing who that guy is for sure, or seeing how their relationship unfolds; it’s hinted that Howie dies a hero and Stephanie’s teenage daughter comes looking for Jill later, but that’s not really fleshed out either. A bunch of hints are dropped about what happens after Donna’s death, but none of it really winds together in a way that makes sense.mkat303's review against another edition
3.0
I really liked this book when I read it back in 1991, but when I tried to re-read it recently, I wasn't that into it
tracey1981's review against another edition
4.0
There were parts of this book that I really loved but I did find that it dragged on quite a bit and I got tired of hearing about the protagonist's love affairs. She was such an ardent feminist and yet there was so much focus on the men in her life of whom I grew quite bored. I would have preferred to read more about the character's political work which was just mentioned here and there in passing. But, still, it was nice to read a feminist account of women's lives in the 1950s.
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