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A review by novelvisits
Woman Last Seen in Her Thirties by Camille Pagán
4.0
My Thoughts: Woman Last Seen in Her Thirties is the story of a 50-something woman trying to rebuild her life after her husband suddenly tells her there’s someone else. While that in itself is awful, scary, devastating, it’s sadly not unusual. Many of us, including myself, have been through similar experiences and I suspect readers’ reactions to Woman Last Seen in her Thirties will vary widely based on their own experiences.
I found myself both sympathetic to Maggie and incredibly frustrated by her. Pagán captured the trauma of a long marriage ending suddenly in a very real way. Maggie was stunned, numbed. She walked around in a fog having no idea where her life would go. That felt real. Even her obsessive desire to figure out what went wrong and who the “other woman” was seemed real, but her longing to get her husband back under any circumstances initially turned my sympathies away from Maggie. It was hard for me not to watch Maggie through the lens of my own experiences. We had so much in common. Like her I took a solo trip to Italy shortly after my divorce and had great adventures there on my own. When Maggie acted differently then I would have, it was easy for me to grow frustrated with her, until finally I stopped judging her and recognized that everyone’s experiences are their own.
In the end, I liked Woman Last Seen in Her Thirties quite a lot. I do think that Pagán overplayed a few of her story’s elements and gave Maggie a fairly lucky (i.e. unlikely) set of breaks, but overall this was a sweet story of a woman learning to take back her own power and isn’t that what we want for all women?
Narration: I thought the audiobook edition of Woman Last Seen in Her Thirties was fine. I wouldn’t rave about Amy McFadden’s narration, but there was nothing awful about it either. Some of the dialogue felt a little off, especially when voicing the male characters. Maggie’s adult son always sounded like a stoned surfer dude to me!
Originally at: https://novelvisits.com/mini-reviews-clearing-the-shelves-volume-2/
I found myself both sympathetic to Maggie and incredibly frustrated by her. Pagán captured the trauma of a long marriage ending suddenly in a very real way. Maggie was stunned, numbed. She walked around in a fog having no idea where her life would go. That felt real. Even her obsessive desire to figure out what went wrong and who the “other woman” was seemed real, but her longing to get her husband back under any circumstances initially turned my sympathies away from Maggie. It was hard for me not to watch Maggie through the lens of my own experiences. We had so much in common. Like her I took a solo trip to Italy shortly after my divorce and had great adventures there on my own. When Maggie acted differently then I would have, it was easy for me to grow frustrated with her, until finally I stopped judging her and recognized that everyone’s experiences are their own.
In the end, I liked Woman Last Seen in Her Thirties quite a lot. I do think that Pagán overplayed a few of her story’s elements and gave Maggie a fairly lucky (i.e. unlikely) set of breaks, but overall this was a sweet story of a woman learning to take back her own power and isn’t that what we want for all women?
Narration: I thought the audiobook edition of Woman Last Seen in Her Thirties was fine. I wouldn’t rave about Amy McFadden’s narration, but there was nothing awful about it either. Some of the dialogue felt a little off, especially when voicing the male characters. Maggie’s adult son always sounded like a stoned surfer dude to me!
Originally at: https://novelvisits.com/mini-reviews-clearing-the-shelves-volume-2/