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Product Description
Product Description
J. Courtney Sullivan’s celebrated debut novel is a sparkling tale of friendship and a fascinating portrait of the first generation of women who have all the opportunities in the world, but no clear idea about what to choose.
Assigned to the same dorm their first year at Smith College, Celia, Bree, Sally, and April couldn’t have less in common. Celia, a lapsed Catholic, arrives with a bottle of vodka in her suitcase; beautiful Bree pines for the fiancé she left behind in Savannah; Sally, preppy and obsessively neat, is reeling from the loss of her mother; and April, a radical, redheaded feminist wearing a “Riot: Don’t Diet” T-shirt, wants a room transfer immediately. Written with radiant style and a wicked sense of humor, Commencement follows these unlikely friends through college and the years beyond, brilliantly capturing the complicated landscape facing young women today.
Assigned to the same dorm their first year at Smith College, Celia, Bree, Sally, and April couldn’t have less in common. Celia, a lapsed Catholic, arrives with a bottle of vodka in her suitcase; beautiful Bree pines for the fiancé she left behind in Savannah; Sally, preppy and obsessively neat, is reeling from the loss of her mother; and April, a radical, redheaded feminist wearing a “Riot: Don’t Diet” T-shirt, wants a room transfer immediately. Written with radiant style and a wicked sense of humor, Commencement follows these unlikely friends through college and the years beyond, brilliantly capturing the complicated landscape facing young women today.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
What a ghastly bore of a story! "Commencement" doesn't even qualify for the genre of a good beach read. The four major characters are cartoonish, the style and plot twists weak, the resolution laughable. I don't relish condemning an author's first novel, but the book's glowing reviews have criminally overrated it.
Compared with authors whose stories about college life and its aftermath that have stood the test of time -- Margaret Drabble, Mary McCarthy, Dorothy L Sayers, etc. -- Sullivan's efforts are infantile and insulting to the intelligence of the university-educated women she attempts to portray.
Life's too short to read crap writing.
Compared with authors whose stories about college life and its aftermath that have stood the test of time -- Margaret Drabble, Mary McCarthy, Dorothy L Sayers, etc. -- Sullivan's efforts are infantile and insulting to the intelligence of the university-educated women she attempts to portray.
Life's too short to read crap writing.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
An awesome read that probably best falls into the "intelligent chick lit" genre.
Sullivan creates four lively and thoroughly believable profiles of twenty-something ex-Smithies.
A great beach read.
Sullivan creates four lively and thoroughly believable profiles of twenty-something ex-Smithies.
A great beach read.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
136 reviews
82 of 92 people found the following review helpful
About choices and love
3 Jun 2009
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review
(What's this?)
I am just about 20 years older than the women in this book, and I went to Mount Holyoke, not Smith, but I recognized the women in this book.
The book is imperfect. It seems to make the case that the life-changing aspects of an education at a place like Smith are all in the personal relationships and extra-curricular activities, and that's just not true. Academics are mentioned only in connection with a plot point that has nothing to do with education. It's not my experience (nor my observation, of my Mount Holyoke and Smith alum friends) that you can isolate any part of the experience like that. It's an education as well as a community.
Once the women graduate, again, the focus is solely on their emotional lives, except for April, and again, this is solely because it's needed for a plot point to work. On the whole, the separation of emotional life from the any grounding context weakens the book. (Example: At one point, Bree takes a long leave of absence from her job -- that she supposedly loves -- as an associate at a West Coast law firm, a job that was hard to come by, even after graduating magna from Smith and at the top of her Stanford Law class. Her response? "Oh well, I'll probably be fired.")
Now for what works about the book. The descriptions of the early days settling into Smith rang very true. The women seem realistic to me, even with their weaknesses. The friendships are complex and complicated, and even difficult, but believable.
Finally, and most important, the book is about choices. Good choices, bad choices, brave choices, careless choices, scared choices, and even the choices we make when we pretend not to choose. It's about accepting the consequences of those choices. It's about revising our understanding of the past in light of what we learn as we live our lives. And it's about the power of friendship and love in the face of the chaos we create with all our choices.
The writing is fluent, the main characters are likable and seem realistic, given what we know of where each came from. The book took me viscerally back to my undergraduate experience and to those years just after graduation. There's enough to like here that on the whole, I'd call this is very good book.
The book is imperfect. It seems to make the case that the life-changing aspects of an education at a place like Smith are all in the personal relationships and extra-curricular activities, and that's just not true. Academics are mentioned only in connection with a plot point that has nothing to do with education. It's not my experience (nor my observation, of my Mount Holyoke and Smith alum friends) that you can isolate any part of the experience like that. It's an education as well as a community.
Once the women graduate, again, the focus is solely on their emotional lives, except for April, and again, this is solely because it's needed for a plot point to work. On the whole, the separation of emotional life from the any grounding context weakens the book. (Example: At one point, Bree takes a long leave of absence from her job -- that she supposedly loves -- as an associate at a West Coast law firm, a job that was hard to come by, even after graduating magna from Smith and at the top of her Stanford Law class. Her response? "Oh well, I'll probably be fired.")
Now for what works about the book. The descriptions of the early days settling into Smith rang very true. The women seem realistic to me, even with their weaknesses. The friendships are complex and complicated, and even difficult, but believable.
Finally, and most important, the book is about choices. Good choices, bad choices, brave choices, careless choices, scared choices, and even the choices we make when we pretend not to choose. It's about accepting the consequences of those choices. It's about revising our understanding of the past in light of what we learn as we live our lives. And it's about the power of friendship and love in the face of the chaos we create with all our choices.
The writing is fluent, the main characters are likable and seem realistic, given what we know of where each came from. The book took me viscerally back to my undergraduate experience and to those years just after graduation. There's enough to like here that on the whole, I'd call this is very good book.
40 of 48 people found the following review helpful
Beachy-read and then some......
12 Jun 2009
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review
(What's this?)
"Commencement" is a beach book for 2009 for the post college crowd. I am probably not in the demographic that this book would appeal to but I applaud the author, J. Courtney Sullivan on her debut novel just the same.
The story seems benign at the onset as 4 women meet and become bonded in their first year at Smith College. But this tale takes serious twist and turns in the lives of it's 4 female characters weaving back and forth between their college years of discovering who they are and their post college years as the women they have become.
There are heavy topics used as platforms or springboards for this story and sometimes it does approach preachy. Prostitution, child abuse, lesbian relationships, date rape, just to name a few.
The author J. Courtney Sullivan, who is a graduate from Smith goes into detail about the unusual tendencies and rituals of attending an all women's college and I found this amusing and sometimes a little freaky not having attended an all female college myself. I have heard the rumors but this was way more than I needed to know--if it's really true!
Overall, it was an easy read with a small mystery towards the end. Was it a page turner? No. At the heart, it's a book about the bonds of female friendships in a fast paced world which barely leaves you time to take out the garbage, much less keep up with your most cherished relationships.
The story seems benign at the onset as 4 women meet and become bonded in their first year at Smith College. But this tale takes serious twist and turns in the lives of it's 4 female characters weaving back and forth between their college years of discovering who they are and their post college years as the women they have become.
There are heavy topics used as platforms or springboards for this story and sometimes it does approach preachy. Prostitution, child abuse, lesbian relationships, date rape, just to name a few.
The author J. Courtney Sullivan, who is a graduate from Smith goes into detail about the unusual tendencies and rituals of attending an all women's college and I found this amusing and sometimes a little freaky not having attended an all female college myself. I have heard the rumors but this was way more than I needed to know--if it's really true!
Overall, it was an easy read with a small mystery towards the end. Was it a page turner? No. At the heart, it's a book about the bonds of female friendships in a fast paced world which barely leaves you time to take out the garbage, much less keep up with your most cherished relationships.
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Enjoyable read
5 Jun 2009
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review
(What's this?)
Since I'm always a sucker for novels about academic life, I devoured Commencement as soon as it arrived in the mail. This novel chronicles the complex lives and relationships of four young women (the Southern Bree, the radical April, the complicated Sally, and the dynamic Celia) who meet as freshmen at Smith. The chapters move seamlessly, and each character is beautifully intertwined within each chapter. This novel is more complex than most novels about women's friendships, and this has more "bite" than a typical summer read. I agree with some of the other reviews in that the novel has somewhat of an "identity" crisis, but I don't think that this is necessarily a negative quality. I enjoyed the look into the emotional lives of the characters, the clever dialogue, and the very realistic feel of the plot devices. Refreshingly, these characters do more than shop for designer clothes and sip on cosmos. This is a thinking girl's summer read.
The characters' post-collegiate lives serve as relevant commentary on the many choices that today's young women have. The plot twists and turns, and most of these twists are resolved at the end of the novel, which is satisfying. Don't let the social commentary fool you, though- This is still an enjoyable book. I think that readers who enjoy Curtis Sittenfeld or Kate Christensen will enjoy this one, as well.
The characters' post-collegiate lives serve as relevant commentary on the many choices that today's young women have. The plot twists and turns, and most of these twists are resolved at the end of the novel, which is satisfying. Don't let the social commentary fool you, though- This is still an enjoyable book. I think that readers who enjoy Curtis Sittenfeld or Kate Christensen will enjoy this one, as well.
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