Reviews provided by Syndetics
Library Journal Review
Two friends fall in love with each other's teenaged sons-and other startling tales from the masterly Lessing. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publishers Weekly Review
The latest by the prolific Lessing is a collection of four novellas that vary considerably in quality, with the best of them, "Victoria and the Staveneys" and "A Love Child," showing her at the top of her very impressive form. They are both at once intimately detailed yet infinitely expansive in their suggestions of a lost world only recoverable by a profoundly observant writer. In "Victoria" a young London black woman of charm and great fortitude survives and transcends the hardest of all assimilations: acceptance by a free-thinking, liberal white family. The shades of racial and social subtext here are evoked with a sure hand that even a Zadie Smith could envy. "A Love Child" powerfully evokes a strange aspect of a familiar time: a terrible ocean voyage, during WWII, by a hapless British regiment sent to the Far East to help protect India against Japanese invasion. James Reid, a young conscript, puts ashore in South Africa in the course of this nightmare voyage and embarks on a liaison that transforms the rest of his life. The detail and almost hallucinatory power with which an era and an ethos are recaptured are Lessing at her best, comparable to Ian McEwan's amazing war scenes in Atonement. The other stories are on a much lower level. The title story is about an odd relationship between two older women and each other's young sons; it is an original idea, but curiously lame in the telling. And "The Reason for It" is one of those peculiar tales in the SF/fantasy genre that Lessing does well enough, but that never seem to be quite her m?tier. Still, the two prize pieces here are well worth the price. (Jan. 9) Forecast: Fans of the writer will be amply rewarded by the better half of the book, her best work in some years. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
After more than 50 years as a great writer, Lessing continues to break new ground with this exciting collection of four short novels about intimacy among family, friends, and lovers. In the daring title story, two close girlfriends marry good men and raise their children together; then each woman has a passionate affair with the other's son. The sons eventually get married, but what chance do their wives have? In Victoria and the Staveneys, a poor black child longs for a room of her own, and a liberal, rich white family does help her; but it's her child, Mary, who will find space in the middle class--if her mom can let her go. A Love Child tells a rare World War II story of bored troops stuck in India (they joined up to fight Hitler, why are they defending the British Empire?) and about one soldier haunted forever by his brief, secret, passionate affair. Except for The Grandmothers, the stories go on too long. You can't wait to find out what happens, and you wish Lessing would get on with it. But then beautiful individual sentences stop you with their startling insight about experience usually hidden in silence. Yes, Lessing needs editing, but that was even true of her unforgettable classic The Golden Notebook (1962). --Hazel Rochman Copyright 2003 Booklist
Kirkus Book Review
Four novellas demonstrating that 84-year-old author (The Sweetest Dream, 2002, etc.) still boasts a range and power few writers half her age can muster. Lessing opens with "The Grandmothers," a portrait of taboo-defying sex and a friendship beyond ordinary bounds. Roz and Lil form in girlhood a bond so close that it eventually drives away Roz's husband. The women's two young boys are best friends too, but after Lil's spouse dies in a car crash, her sensitive, "nervy" son Ian seems to pine--until, at age 17, he climbs into Roz's bed. Her son Tom spends the very next night with Lil, and for more than a decade the foursome maintain a secret idyll, its meaning and consequences addressed with penetrating psychological complexity. In "Victoria and the Staveneys," a short masterpiece of sharp social realism, a young black girl's chance connection in London with a family of wealthy white liberals changes her life. Victoria's personal struggles (poignant, but never sentimentalized) stingingly contrast with the Staveneys' comfortable journey through two decades in late-20th-century Britain. "The Reason for It," an allegory of civilization's decline in the mode of Lessing's Canopus in Argos series, will not appeal to everyone, but it's meticulously crafted with her customary serious intelligence. "A Love Child" practically flaunts the author's ability to vividly enter into and convey almost any experience: an English soldier's nightmarish ocean journey on a WWII troop ship, a Cape Town wife's vague feelings of privileged discontent, their almost hallucinatory four-day romance, and the soldier's subsequent, desperately dull administrative service in India, which leaves plenty of time for his obsessive memories of the affair that will shape his postwar life as well. Class distinctions, political unrest, emotional torment: Lessing nails them all in blunt prose that disdains elegance for the sterner pleasures of truthful observation. When you're dealing with an author whose track record spans a half-century and paradigm-altering works like The Golden Notebook, it's too easy to simply praise another excellent effort. Where is this woman's Nobel Prize? Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.