Helpful Score: 3
Great book! Quick read, I really enjoyed it. JoAnn Beard is very funny.
Helpful Score: 2
This book was a sloppy, choppy, confusing, all over the place MESS. And boring to boot.
YUCK. I forced myself to read 60 pages then decided to move onto something MUCH more enjoyable and worth my time.
YUCK. I forced myself to read 60 pages then decided to move onto something MUCH more enjoyable and worth my time.
Helpful Score: 1
Rambling episodic memoir, well-written but drooping at the end. Despite the title and the cover image (a rumpled bed), it doesn't focus on sexual escapades, but rather on relationships between women -- mother/daughter, sister, cousin, lifelong friend, with men moving in and out the periphery.
Helpful Score: 1
I loved this book. It was written well and I could relate to most of it from first hand experience. It realy drew me in from the start. I hated it to be over.
Jo Ann Beard grew up amid a tightly knit clan of mothers, aunts, sisters, and girlfriends. Her steadfast family and its culture of women somehow made the prospect of dangerous neighborhood boys, friendly barflies, and potential romance all the more irresistible. But in these wonderfully engaging memory pieces, the boys of Beard's youth - and the men who eventually replace them - are elusive characters. Beloved boy dolls disintegrate, grade school crushes dissipate, and husbands disappear. The relationships that endure are the ones between women. Childhood dramas are balanced by actual tragedies and adult betrayals, and Beard captures the collision of youthful longing and the hard intransigences of time and fate like no other writer. In the title story, two old friends, stumbling away from ruined marriages, remember the darkest moments of abandonment, but also the thrilling momentum of a car doing ninety and the strange allure of teenage basketball players. In the end, they realize that in matters of the heart, nothing much, yet somehow everything, has changed.
The story isn't told chronologically, which gives you an interesting view of her life as a whole instead of as a collection of stories. I kind of like the impressionistic feel.
