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A review by sweetsequels
Children by Edith Wharton
5.0
I sort of meandered through this book, which was suitable. It's a book to savor; reading it was like immersing myself a dreamland of sorts, but of course - in typical Wharton fashion - the ending was heartbreaking.
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SYNOPSIS:
Old bachelor Martin Boyne meets the Wheaters, a band of parentless children, on an Atlantic cruise and befriends the , eventually sort of taking them in. Their parents, old acquaintances of Boyne's, have been bouncing them back and forth between homes during their numerous breakups and reconciliations - and all the children want is to simply be together. Poor Boyne. He becomes a father figure to them, something he obviously (subconsciously) yearns for in his lonely middle age. Of course, things don't go well for him.
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This book was beautifully written and bittersweet. Children rarely play a key role in Wharton's fiction, so this book had a really different feel than her most - dreamlike, nostalgic, comic, youthful. Wharton wrote it in 1928, after winning the Pulitzer Prize for Age of Innocence and after her divorce from husband Edward Wharton (she had no children of her own). She was living in France at the time, which shows itself in the foreign setting of this novel. As ever, this novel is biting in it's critique of society and is shockingly modern, considering it was published over 90 years ago. The effects of divorce on children remains sadly the same, and is artfully exhibited here.
.
.
SYNOPSIS:
Old bachelor Martin Boyne meets the Wheaters, a band of parentless children, on an Atlantic cruise and befriends the , eventually sort of taking them in. Their parents, old acquaintances of Boyne's, have been bouncing them back and forth between homes during their numerous breakups and reconciliations - and all the children want is to simply be together. Poor Boyne. He becomes a father figure to them, something he obviously (subconsciously) yearns for in his lonely middle age. Of course, things don't go well for him.
.
.
This book was beautifully written and bittersweet. Children rarely play a key role in Wharton's fiction, so this book had a really different feel than her most - dreamlike, nostalgic, comic, youthful. Wharton wrote it in 1928, after winning the Pulitzer Prize for Age of Innocence and after her divorce from husband Edward Wharton (she had no children of her own). She was living in France at the time, which shows itself in the foreign setting of this novel. As ever, this novel is biting in it's critique of society and is shockingly modern, considering it was published over 90 years ago. The effects of divorce on children remains sadly the same, and is artfully exhibited here.