- Hardcover: 336 pages
- Publisher: Quercus; First Edition edition (4 Sep 2008)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1847242049
- ISBN-13: 978-1847242044
- Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 15.8 x 3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 526,915 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Review
Weldon’s style, that virtuoso of intelligence and insinuating garrulousness, achieves a kind of ideal equilibrium between therapy and gossip - The Times
Her prose, never flabby, grows leaner with each book. It’s impressive what she achieves with so few words - The Independent
The novel spans the spectrum of family relationships; it is profound, alarming, funny and wise … Fay Weldon is writing at the top of her game: her novel is highly recommended - Daily Telegraph
… a blistering look at the battle between a woman and her stepdaughter… A fiendish modern morality tale - the old Cassandra is back in superb form - Kate Saunders in The Times.
...wry, witty take on a duplicitous world, in which unexpected quirks are adapted to the female experience - Saga Magazine.
A heartfelt story, full of ups and downs - Scottish Daily Record.
Her prose, never flabby, grows leaner with each book. It’s impressive what she achieves with so few words - The Independent
The novel spans the spectrum of family relationships; it is profound, alarming, funny and wise … Fay Weldon is writing at the top of her game: her novel is highly recommended - Daily Telegraph
… a blistering look at the battle between a woman and her stepdaughter… A fiendish modern morality tale - the old Cassandra is back in superb form - Kate Saunders in The Times.
...wry, witty take on a duplicitous world, in which unexpected quirks are adapted to the female experience - Saga Magazine.
A heartfelt story, full of ups and downs - Scottish Daily Record.
The Independent
Her prose, never flabby, grows leaner with each book. It's impressive what she achieves with so few words
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
How can that be?.....,
By V (UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Stepmother's Diary (Hardcover)
I was quite enjoying this book UNTIL the chapter where Sappho is taking the contraceptive pill daily for around a year believing it to be a multivitamin. I can suspend disbelief just enough to accept that she might, given all other pressures, not notice that it is rather small for a multivitamin (!), but she wouldn't actually be having periods! At this point she is actively trying to conceive, is seeing a specialist (whose first question would surely have been about her periods!), and her husband is being asked to take a sperm test. "At the end of a year she saw the doctor... He did blood tests and said there was rather a lot of oestrogen around, and he supposed she had stopped taking the contraceptive pills he had prescibed her some time back and she said yes, she was not an idiot." Well neither am I, and this part of the tale totally ruined the book for me.
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Weldon at her sharpest and most current,
By
This review is from: The Stepmother's Diary (Paperback)
'I read my daughter's diary the other day. Let me share with you. You may think you know pretty much what's going on in your own family. Believe me, you do not. You think truly awful things only happen in other countries, other cultures, far away: but they also happen in your own back yard, to the nicest people, and at the hands of others who believe that they too are perfectly sane and nice, the kind who sort the household waste and try to save Africa.'
Weldon has always been good at dysfunctional families, money and property and this is a return to form, giving us the point of view of Sappho, the stepmother but not the wicked stepmother familiar from fairy tales. Weldon uses the device of the story being reviewed and analysed by Emily, mother to Sappho as she reads her daughter's diary. Emily, a psychoanalyst had warned her daughter that the archetype had changed - that `wicked stepdaughters are more common now that wicked stepmothers ever were.' However, it is a function of a Weldon novel that warnings are never heeded and Emily marries Gavin, formerly husband to Isolde. There are the usual turnarounds you see in Weldon - the man who becomes a financial drain the moment the knot is tied, the theft of talent and the dissipation of money and success. Weldon builds suspense through the twists and turns of these situations and as they deteriorate the reader cringes. Somehow she does it all better here and with more wit and style than she has done for a while.
3.0 out of 5 stars
A diary of psycho-babble,
By
This review is from: The Stepmother's Diary (Hardcover)
For a moment I thought Fay Weldon was getting back to the good old days and I was in for a treat, but then it all fell apart. I got the impression she'd been taking a course on psychoanalysis and just wanted to show what she'd learned. And I agree with the previous reviewer - mistaking contraceptive pills for vitamins goes a bit beyond belief. A very disappointing read from a very clever writer who needs to get back to her old style of writing rather than churning out mass market productions.
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