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3.64 AVERAGE
3.64 AVERAGE
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
There was just too much that happened in this book - so much that it was fantastical.
Book Review
Title: Lace
Author: Shirley Conran
Genre: Romance/Adventure/Erotica
Rating: **
Review: I first read Lace as a 16-year-old schoolgirl, I remember that chunky, glitzy novel being passed around during math, biology, religious education classes … under our desks, pages earmarked as it moved along …for your reading pleasure …
What giggles it provoked; how many hushed discussions it spawned, and how those we called the “forward” girls dissected and expounded on the text. And all of it done right under the noses of the austere nuns. There’s sexier stuff on the average literary forum. And this is hardly the first time a book has walked the line between novel and porn-light. What about the queen of the bonkbuster and her randy stable hands, Jilly Cooper? Lady Chatterley’s Lover? Valley of the Dolls? The terrifyingly bonkers, incest-stuffed Flowers In The Attic? And that’s just the very tip of the mainstream stuff – even more hardcore erotica doesn’t require you sneaking into a Soho bookshop and coming out with a brown paper bag these days. And very few of these erotic novels if any, concern a female virgin acquiescing to her partner’s every whim in and out of the bedroom.
One of the recently re-released “bonkbusters” (although I think author Shirley Conran would take umbrage at that description) is an eighties’ classic Lace, the Amanda Palmer to Fifty Shades‘ Girls Aloud. Conran, the ex-wife of Terence and mother of Jasper, was the original superwoman, the antithesis of the recent twee, cupcake vision of womanhood. She famously declared that “life’s too short to stuff a mushroom” and “I make no secret of the fact that I would rather lie on a sofa than sweep beneath it.” I would love to have her at my fantasy dinner party, although I would be careful not to serve stuffed mushrooms. Conran started writing Lace as a sex instruction manual for schoolgirls, but, bored of writing a dry textbook, she instead poured her indomitable spirit, vigor for life and thirst for equality into this book that went on to sell more than 3 million copies.
Lace, first released in 1982, is so much more than reworked fan-fic, it’s a sexy, glamorous book with feminist roots, where women rule in the boardroom as well as in the bedroom. Sure, there’s a lot of sex in it, but at the heart of Lace is the friendship of four incredibly successful self-made women. Their friendships and their careers are the most important things in their lives, even their children take a back seat – I can’t remember which characters have children or which don’t. These women aren’t defined as mothers or wives, they don’t need a man to complete them, although they do all love male company (especially ones that are good with their hands). They are their own women, their qualities sharpened by each other.
The four women first meet at a Swiss finishing school in the 1940s. There’s sweet, seemingly-naive Kate; chaotic, confident Pagan; poised, polished Maxine and bolshy, driven Judy. The novel spans four decades and follows the women as they marry, divorce, start families, lose parents and husbands, fail, succeed and fail again. Along the way these women do have sex, and, at times, it’s rather raunchy (although the novel’s famous goldfish scene doesn’t involve, unhappily for them, any of the big four). But crucially Conran doesn’t pull the satin sheets over our eyes. In Lace, the sex isn’t always good, in fact, at times, it’s horrific and violent. When these women have good sex it’s with men who are good to them, who they love and are loved by. The cruel, bullying chauvinists are all terrible in bed (with the exception of the creepy but dexterous of finger, Prince Abdallah) and their performance, or lack of, is never the fault of the woman’s. Sex, Conran is telling us, is about teamwork and not about women rolling onto their backs and putting up with bad men and bad sex.
The women of Lace — Judy, Pagan, Kate and Maxine — battle and strive from the 1940s right up to the late ’70s to fulfill their ambitions. They do it on their own terms, at times ruthless, at times fragile. There is Kate, the supremely talented war correspondent; Maxine, the uber-successful interior designer; Judy, the public relations dynamo; and Pagan, the business-oriented, charity fundraiser.
And, of course, Lili, single-minded actress, clawing her way up from B-movie hell to A-list star, uttering those unforgettable, pivotal words: “Which one of you b – – – – – – is my mother?” when she finally manages — through all kinds of scheming — to bring the four now-estranged women together and confront them in suite 1701 of a New York hotel.
To whom the book belonged remains a mystery, but in a sense it belonged to all of us convent girls in that sleepy town in southern Zimbabwe. We were having our eyes opened in more ways than one. We took turns taking it home, like a beloved class pet.
Lace traveled from my own modest home in a newly integrated, formerly whites-only suburb, which lay on the fringes of the blacks-only township, to the lavish hillside mansions of my white schoolmates. It drew us all together like only a juicy novel, set in exotic lands could.
Many years later (married and a mother of two, living in Switzerland) I revisited Lace. I was writing what would become my debut novel, The Boy Next Door, which draws, in part, on my teenage years in Bulawayo. I was now in the very country where some of the glamorous action takes place. The Switzerland of private boarding schools, chateaus, chalets and the jet-set, worlds away from my own hometown, and yet the book still held its exotic appeal.
Shirley Conran really knows her characters and, boy, does she have the vocabulary and artistic flair to realize them. They are alive, bristling with desire and energy as they make their way in the world.
There is glamour, intrigue, scandal, and such wonderfully realized, provocative, unapologetic female characters that, surely, they can be considered feminist icons in their own way. They are go-getting, take-charge, make-things-happen women. They want and demand fulfilling careers that soar to stratospheric heights, and great sex to boot. The story may cross forty years, but the book is unmistakably ’80s, even in the tone of the austere post-war years. It’s big, brash, loud, and status obsessed. All the women are loaded (they work hard for it) and live in flash apartments or chateaux with wardrobes stuffed with elegant designer gear. They drink champagne like tea and hop on transatlantic flights like I take the bus. There’s not a lot of time for subtlety or poetry, Conran’s writing is concise and filmic and dialogue-led. The story fizzes along like a glass of Maxine’s chateau champagne, but although the plot is slight, driven on by the beautiful, mother-less Lili’s search for her mother, (“which one of you bitches is my mother?”), it’s a terrifically fun and feisty read.
feminist question was being asked: Can women really have it all, or does something have to be sacrificed along the way?
In light of all this, perhaps it’s time to take Lace out from that second inner row on my bookshelf and proudly slot it, right next to Simone de Beauvoir.
Title: Lace
Author: Shirley Conran
Genre: Romance/Adventure/Erotica
Rating: **
Review: I first read Lace as a 16-year-old schoolgirl, I remember that chunky, glitzy novel being passed around during math, biology, religious education classes … under our desks, pages earmarked as it moved along …for your reading pleasure …
What giggles it provoked; how many hushed discussions it spawned, and how those we called the “forward” girls dissected and expounded on the text. And all of it done right under the noses of the austere nuns. There’s sexier stuff on the average literary forum. And this is hardly the first time a book has walked the line between novel and porn-light. What about the queen of the bonkbuster and her randy stable hands, Jilly Cooper? Lady Chatterley’s Lover? Valley of the Dolls? The terrifyingly bonkers, incest-stuffed Flowers In The Attic? And that’s just the very tip of the mainstream stuff – even more hardcore erotica doesn’t require you sneaking into a Soho bookshop and coming out with a brown paper bag these days. And very few of these erotic novels if any, concern a female virgin acquiescing to her partner’s every whim in and out of the bedroom.
One of the recently re-released “bonkbusters” (although I think author Shirley Conran would take umbrage at that description) is an eighties’ classic Lace, the Amanda Palmer to Fifty Shades‘ Girls Aloud. Conran, the ex-wife of Terence and mother of Jasper, was the original superwoman, the antithesis of the recent twee, cupcake vision of womanhood. She famously declared that “life’s too short to stuff a mushroom” and “I make no secret of the fact that I would rather lie on a sofa than sweep beneath it.” I would love to have her at my fantasy dinner party, although I would be careful not to serve stuffed mushrooms. Conran started writing Lace as a sex instruction manual for schoolgirls, but, bored of writing a dry textbook, she instead poured her indomitable spirit, vigor for life and thirst for equality into this book that went on to sell more than 3 million copies.
Lace, first released in 1982, is so much more than reworked fan-fic, it’s a sexy, glamorous book with feminist roots, where women rule in the boardroom as well as in the bedroom. Sure, there’s a lot of sex in it, but at the heart of Lace is the friendship of four incredibly successful self-made women. Their friendships and their careers are the most important things in their lives, even their children take a back seat – I can’t remember which characters have children or which don’t. These women aren’t defined as mothers or wives, they don’t need a man to complete them, although they do all love male company (especially ones that are good with their hands). They are their own women, their qualities sharpened by each other.
The four women first meet at a Swiss finishing school in the 1940s. There’s sweet, seemingly-naive Kate; chaotic, confident Pagan; poised, polished Maxine and bolshy, driven Judy. The novel spans four decades and follows the women as they marry, divorce, start families, lose parents and husbands, fail, succeed and fail again. Along the way these women do have sex, and, at times, it’s rather raunchy (although the novel’s famous goldfish scene doesn’t involve, unhappily for them, any of the big four). But crucially Conran doesn’t pull the satin sheets over our eyes. In Lace, the sex isn’t always good, in fact, at times, it’s horrific and violent. When these women have good sex it’s with men who are good to them, who they love and are loved by. The cruel, bullying chauvinists are all terrible in bed (with the exception of the creepy but dexterous of finger, Prince Abdallah) and their performance, or lack of, is never the fault of the woman’s. Sex, Conran is telling us, is about teamwork and not about women rolling onto their backs and putting up with bad men and bad sex.
The women of Lace — Judy, Pagan, Kate and Maxine — battle and strive from the 1940s right up to the late ’70s to fulfill their ambitions. They do it on their own terms, at times ruthless, at times fragile. There is Kate, the supremely talented war correspondent; Maxine, the uber-successful interior designer; Judy, the public relations dynamo; and Pagan, the business-oriented, charity fundraiser.
And, of course, Lili, single-minded actress, clawing her way up from B-movie hell to A-list star, uttering those unforgettable, pivotal words: “Which one of you b – – – – – – is my mother?” when she finally manages — through all kinds of scheming — to bring the four now-estranged women together and confront them in suite 1701 of a New York hotel.
To whom the book belonged remains a mystery, but in a sense it belonged to all of us convent girls in that sleepy town in southern Zimbabwe. We were having our eyes opened in more ways than one. We took turns taking it home, like a beloved class pet.
Lace traveled from my own modest home in a newly integrated, formerly whites-only suburb, which lay on the fringes of the blacks-only township, to the lavish hillside mansions of my white schoolmates. It drew us all together like only a juicy novel, set in exotic lands could.
Many years later (married and a mother of two, living in Switzerland) I revisited Lace. I was writing what would become my debut novel, The Boy Next Door, which draws, in part, on my teenage years in Bulawayo. I was now in the very country where some of the glamorous action takes place. The Switzerland of private boarding schools, chateaus, chalets and the jet-set, worlds away from my own hometown, and yet the book still held its exotic appeal.
Shirley Conran really knows her characters and, boy, does she have the vocabulary and artistic flair to realize them. They are alive, bristling with desire and energy as they make their way in the world.
There is glamour, intrigue, scandal, and such wonderfully realized, provocative, unapologetic female characters that, surely, they can be considered feminist icons in their own way. They are go-getting, take-charge, make-things-happen women. They want and demand fulfilling careers that soar to stratospheric heights, and great sex to boot. The story may cross forty years, but the book is unmistakably ’80s, even in the tone of the austere post-war years. It’s big, brash, loud, and status obsessed. All the women are loaded (they work hard for it) and live in flash apartments or chateaux with wardrobes stuffed with elegant designer gear. They drink champagne like tea and hop on transatlantic flights like I take the bus. There’s not a lot of time for subtlety or poetry, Conran’s writing is concise and filmic and dialogue-led. The story fizzes along like a glass of Maxine’s chateau champagne, but although the plot is slight, driven on by the beautiful, mother-less Lili’s search for her mother, (“which one of you bitches is my mother?”), it’s a terrifically fun and feisty read.
feminist question was being asked: Can women really have it all, or does something have to be sacrificed along the way?
In light of all this, perhaps it’s time to take Lace out from that second inner row on my bookshelf and proudly slot it, right next to Simone de Beauvoir.
Not sure what to say about this book.
It starts with a very graphic abortion scene and goes from there to the well known "Which of you bitches is my mother?".
A question which the author barely bothers with from there on for the next nigh to six hundred pages. But Conran is a good writer (everything else im about to say put aside) and so she manages to capture and hold reader interest.
However, "Lace" is a troublesome story. In my younger days I may have filed it under "guilty pleasure" but these days I find Conran's cynical view of (male) human sexuality rather disturbing. Sex in "Lace" is not an act of passion or love, and least of all involves respect, it's only a means to establish dominance over another.
Sex and violence go hand in hand in Conran's World, and so it surprises little that when time comes to wrap up the story one feels as if Conran realized on the last leg of her characters journey that one of the female friends is still left unmolested and went to rectify this error.
Rape and sexualized violence are such common occurences in the book that nobody, the author included, gives them much thought, they are treated as inevitable trivialities in the day to day exchange between the genders.
It's certainly no coincidence that the only decent male characters are either impotent, gay or too old to be still interested in sex. Despite the high rating, because it has times when it is truly entertaining, it's not a novel I could easily recommend.
It starts with a very graphic abortion scene and goes from there to the well known "Which of you bitches is my mother?".
A question which the author barely bothers with from there on for the next nigh to six hundred pages. But Conran is a good writer (everything else im about to say put aside) and so she manages to capture and hold reader interest.
However, "Lace" is a troublesome story. In my younger days I may have filed it under "guilty pleasure" but these days I find Conran's cynical view of (male) human sexuality rather disturbing. Sex in "Lace" is not an act of passion or love, and least of all involves respect, it's only a means to establish dominance over another.
Sex and violence go hand in hand in Conran's World, and so it surprises little that when time comes to wrap up the story one feels as if Conran realized on the last leg of her characters journey that one of the female friends is still left unmolested and went to rectify this error.
Rape and sexualized violence are such common occurences in the book that nobody, the author included, gives them much thought, they are treated as inevitable trivialities in the day to day exchange between the genders.
It's certainly no coincidence that the only decent male characters are either impotent, gay or too old to be still interested in sex. Despite the high rating, because it has times when it is truly entertaining, it's not a novel I could easily recommend.
Terrible, long-winded, and dull. I expected a lot better.
Four elegant, successful, sophisticated women in their forties have been called to New York to meet Lili, the world-famous movie actress.
Already a legend despite her youth, Lili is beautiful, passionate, notoriously temperamental... Each of the four has a reason to hate Lili. And each of them is astonished to see the others; for they are old friends who first met in school, old friends who share a guilty secret - old friends whose lives are changed when Lili suddenly confronts them and asks, "Which one of you bitches is my mother?"
The answer to this question - a question that has obsessed and almost destroyed Lili - is at the heart of Lace. As the reader travels from an elegant Swiss finishing school in Gstaad to the glittering places where the rich and successful congregate, the book traces not only the life of Lili herself - abandoned, seduced, exploited, but at last rising to triumph as a star - but the lives of the four women, one of whom is her mother.
The blurb actually goes on for several more paragraphs, and I was tempted to include them, because I wanted to point out a few things in there that make me wonder if whoever wrote the blurb actually read the book, but anyway.
I don't actually have all that much to say about the book, although I enjoyed it. It fits a formula, that of 3 or four women who meet in school and become close friends. They're all wealthy, except one, who either marries into wealth by the end or creates her own. One of the wealthy ones has been raised to feel perpetually inadequate. One of them's foreign. There's bound to be some exotic royalty (sometimes one of the women, sometimes someone else). And there's some sort of secret scandal, usually involving somebody's pregnancy. It's good light chick reading, although not as light as, say, the Shopaholic series.
This particular incarnation of that formula was actually quite good. Well-developed, believable characters, in well-written situations. I was starting to think Conran had issues with men, but all the girls eventually found love, and I guess we all go through a few Mr. Wrongs before we find Mr. Right.
One thing I did think was really kind of neat about this book was the way she depicted female friendship. In fiction, female friendships are almost always torn apart somehow when they feature so prominently in a story. The deeper the friendship is portrayed in the beginning, the more likely it is to fall apart by the end. This one didn't. The four women went their separate ways after school, but remained close friends who stayed in contact, visited often, and were always there for each other if one of them needed help. There was one blip between two of them, but as soon as they figured out that it was engineered by th guy involved, they immediately picked up where they left off, with no lingering feelings of resentment or suspicion. Right to the end, they protect each other. After Lili finds out which one is her mother, and wants to know who her father is, the mother hides the truth to avoid hurting both Lili and one of the other three (even though it was ancient history), and all three know she's lying, for various reasons, but instead of suspecting the worst, they believe that she has good reasons, and not one of them calls her on it. It's nice to see female friendship portrayed like that, because that really is how the really good ones are.
I've learned that there's a sequel, in which Lili goes looking for her father (the stated father is dead, so I guess she learns that that wasn't true after all?), and I think I'm going to read that, because there really were good reasons for her mother to keep that information to herself, so I'm actually quite curious how all that's going to go down.
Already a legend despite her youth, Lili is beautiful, passionate, notoriously temperamental... Each of the four has a reason to hate Lili. And each of them is astonished to see the others; for they are old friends who first met in school, old friends who share a guilty secret - old friends whose lives are changed when Lili suddenly confronts them and asks, "Which one of you bitches is my mother?"
The answer to this question - a question that has obsessed and almost destroyed Lili - is at the heart of Lace. As the reader travels from an elegant Swiss finishing school in Gstaad to the glittering places where the rich and successful congregate, the book traces not only the life of Lili herself - abandoned, seduced, exploited, but at last rising to triumph as a star - but the lives of the four women, one of whom is her mother.
The blurb actually goes on for several more paragraphs, and I was tempted to include them, because I wanted to point out a few things in there that make me wonder if whoever wrote the blurb actually read the book, but anyway.
I don't actually have all that much to say about the book, although I enjoyed it. It fits a formula, that of 3 or four women who meet in school and become close friends. They're all wealthy, except one, who either marries into wealth by the end or creates her own. One of the wealthy ones has been raised to feel perpetually inadequate. One of them's foreign. There's bound to be some exotic royalty (sometimes one of the women, sometimes someone else). And there's some sort of secret scandal, usually involving somebody's pregnancy. It's good light chick reading, although not as light as, say, the Shopaholic series.
This particular incarnation of that formula was actually quite good. Well-developed, believable characters, in well-written situations. I was starting to think Conran had issues with men, but all the girls eventually found love, and I guess we all go through a few Mr. Wrongs before we find Mr. Right.
One thing I did think was really kind of neat about this book was the way she depicted female friendship. In fiction, female friendships are almost always torn apart somehow when they feature so prominently in a story. The deeper the friendship is portrayed in the beginning, the more likely it is to fall apart by the end. This one didn't. The four women went their separate ways after school, but remained close friends who stayed in contact, visited often, and were always there for each other if one of them needed help. There was one blip between two of them, but as soon as they figured out that it was engineered by th guy involved, they immediately picked up where they left off, with no lingering feelings of resentment or suspicion. Right to the end, they protect each other. After Lili finds out which one is her mother, and wants to know who her father is, the mother hides the truth to avoid hurting both Lili and one of the other three (even though it was ancient history), and all three know she's lying, for various reasons, but instead of suspecting the worst, they believe that she has good reasons, and not one of them calls her on it. It's nice to see female friendship portrayed like that, because that really is how the really good ones are.
I've learned that there's a sequel, in which Lili goes looking for her father (the stated father is dead, so I guess she learns that that wasn't true after all?), and I think I'm going to read that, because there really were good reasons for her mother to keep that information to herself, so I'm actually quite curious how all that's going to go down.
Dun feminismo moi dos 80, moi hetero, moi branco e brutalmente burgués (incluso nobiliario), pero narrativamente engancha mil. E é un clásico escrito e protagonizado por tías.
I read this in high school, every one was reading it. It was incredibly trashy. So of course we loved it.
A trashy but captivating novel full of sex and angst and relationships, and the ending is both heartbreaking and wonderful at once.
Better than I'd thought it would be when I read the back cover and realised it was compared to Jackie Collins, just bringing back bad memories of running out of books at the end of holidays (in the days before kindles) and being forced to read the bonkbusters deposited at the courier's tent. In spite of the fact that I seemed to spend a large part of the 700+ pages skipping past awkward sex scenes while trying not to miss essential plotpoints (and though I think Conran uses the word "breasts" roughly every other page, which grated after the first few times [as did her use of "avuncular" - fair enough once or twice, but at least 3 times? really?]), it was actually quite a good story in terms of plot and characters, and so not wholly without merit.
I remembered the mini-series from the early 80s, which was rather scandalous for its time. I'd figured to find more of the same in this book, and while there are moments of graphic (and sometimes icky) sex, you have to slog through a lot of tedium to get to it.
You may be familiar with the premise: four friends from a Swiss girl's school bond, and one becomes pregnant. The baby is given up for fosterhood, and the story jumps from each woman's life and that of the child left behind. Everybody suffers bad relationships pretty much, and baby Lili has it worst. The miniseries was updated to the present day at the time, but the book spans post-WWII Europe through the early 70s.
Compelling in parts, boring and squeamish in others. Think I'm going to skip Lace II.
You may be familiar with the premise: four friends from a Swiss girl's school bond, and one becomes pregnant. The baby is given up for fosterhood, and the story jumps from each woman's life and that of the child left behind. Everybody suffers bad relationships pretty much, and baby Lili has it worst. The miniseries was updated to the present day at the time, but the book spans post-WWII Europe through the early 70s.
Compelling in parts, boring and squeamish in others. Think I'm going to skip Lace II.