Archive for the ‘sexism’ Tag
Set in 1960s in a northern Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C., Marie Bostwick’s novel, The Book Club for Troublesome Women is a misnomer– at least by today’s standards.
The housing development where the women live is new, so none of the neighbors know one another well. After visiting the local bookstore, Margaret Ryan decides to form a book club. She invites three other women to discuss Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which has just hit the shelves. The group calls itself The Bettys.
Bostwick ascribes interesting attributes to each woman. Marilyn, Viv and Charlotte are all married with children. Charlotte is brash and creative unlike anyone Marilyn has ever met. Bitsy, the youngest and married to a much older man, is desperate to get pregnant.
The novel focuses on the personalities and friendships, which are initially in line with the times in which they live. This is primarily focused on the sexism they face in their marriages and outside their homes. Slowly, and predictably, as the women grow closer they begin to change by challenging the norms of the day.
There’s plenty of humor and nostalgia, even for those who weren’t part of that era. The women’s frustrations at not being taken seriously are palpable, but so is their joy when they are.
The final chapter takes readers to the early 2000s. As for the title, these women aren’t troublesome; rather they’re brave, progressive and evolve to become defiant. There’s little that’s unexpected, but it’s a fun read nonetheless.
The Book Club for Troublesome Women
Almost four bookmarks
2025, Harper Muse
371 pages, including acknowledgements and Discussion Questions
Heartwood by Amity Gaige was just the kind of book I’d been looking for: one I couldn’t put down. Gaige’s writing hooked me from the very first paragraph. Consider: “You could read the weather like a poem.” This is written by Valerie Gillis, also known by her Appalachian Trail name “Sparrow,” in a letter to her mother.
Valerie has been hiking the AT for the past three months and is now lost in Maine’s North Woods. Rather than simply chronicling what’s happening in a journal, Valerie addresses her entries as letters to her mom. This helps sustain her; it’s evident through her writing, that Valerie has deeper bond with her mother than with anyone else.
Lt. Bev Miller is the Game Warden who oversees the search, formally known as the Incident Management Team, for Valerie that spans a 12-day period. Throughout a stellar career, Bev has worked her way up the ladder to her current position, something fraught with sexism.
The letters/Valerie and Bev’s perspectives are told through first person voices. A third, critical character is Lena, a resident in a senior care facility in Connecticut. The story alternates among these three. What they initially have in common is determination in their quest for Valerie’s survival. Through their backstories, mother/daughter relationships are revealed as another similarity, which vary among them.
The three women are distinct, representing different phases of life and experiences. A handful of other interesting characters populate the novel. Gaige imbues the story with humor, tension and intrigue.
Heartwood
Four-and-a-half Bookmarks
Simon & Schuster, 2025
309 pages
The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon is part mystery and historical fiction inspired by the experiences and diary of Martha Ballard, the novel’s narrator, who relates her story as the town midwife and life in rural late-1700s Maine.
When a body is found and recovered from the frozen Kennebec River, Martha is immediately suspicious of the cause of death. The victim is one of two men accused of committing rape; the other is a judge and respected citizen.
Despite numerous obstacles, including being a woman whose opinions are quickly dismissed by the men who oversee the social norms of the day, Martha is determined to fight for the preacher’s wife who was raped.
Martha is happily married and a mother, most of her children are in their teens and early 20s. She takes her role, as not just a midwife but medical care provider for the town and surrounding area, seriously and professionally – even after a Harvard-educated physician arrives and questions her knowledge and abilities.
The harsh elements of the wintry landscape and the hardscrabble life the townspeople endure are vividly described. Martha’s efforts to prove the rape victim told the truth while also trying to determine how one of the accused died results in an engaging work.
This is a portrayal of a strong, intelligent woman ahead of her time in her recognition of the sexism women faced. Martha’s story is one of life in a rural community impacted by the season, gossip and mores of the times.
The Frozen River
Four Bookmarks
Doubleday 2023
432 pages, includes author’s notes and acknowledgements
The Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel could easily be titled The Last Family because it’s about a mother and her teenage daughters trying to keep it together.
Jane is a paleo biologist, whose husband died in a car accident a year ago. Eve and Vera are 15 and 13, but wiser than most kids their age. This is, in part, due to their strong bond with each other and to tagging along with their parents on scientific expeditions around the world.
The novel is rich with humor and pathos as the trio treks to Siberia, Iceland and a private animal refuge in Northern Italy. As Jane becomes increasingly disappointed in her ability to be heard/seen as a legitimate scientist, the girls assume responsibility for her care. Grief fills all three as they move forward with their lives while making scientific and personal discoveries.
Part of which involves Jane’s theft of genetically-created embryos of a woolly mammoth, which are clandestinely inseminated into an elephant at the Italian refuge.
What ensue are questions of ethics, sexism and a family struggling for some semblance of normalcy. The latter is particularly difficult given the possibility of introducing an extinct prehistoric animal to the modern world.
Eve and Vera are remarkable characters even if, at times, difficult to consider realistic because they’re wise beyond their years, self-aware teens. They have enough sense to be skeptical of what the future holds, yet are naïve enough to hope for the best – attitudes worth emulating at any age.
The Last Animal
Four Bookmarks
Riverhead Books, 2023
278 pages
The best books are those you don’t want to pick up because once you do, you don’t want to put them down. It’s a conundrum. Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus is one such book. It’s a love story (on many levels) wrapped in science, specifically chemistry.
Elizabeth Zott is not a woman to be dismissed. Even after her post-graduate education is derailed due to sexual assault, she’s relentless in her pursuit of science.
Well ahead of her time in the late 1950s early ‘60s, she refuses to let her gender restrict her dreams, nor does she allow her good looks to dictate how’s she’s perceived. She’s exceptionally intelligent with a strong sense of self and a desire to be a chemist in the male-dominated scientific community.
She’s hired at a research lab where she meets Calvin Evans, a socially-awkward but distinguished scientist. A relationship based on mutual respect, desire and, ultimately, love flourishes despite the ill-will of their colleagues.
Garmus deftly illustrates the sexism and hypocrisy of the era. Yet, this is not a male-bashing narrative. When circumstances change, Elizabeth finds another way – round-about though it is – to pursue a career in chemistry: she hosts a television cooking show where she takes an unusual approach. Instead of identifying ingredients by their common names, she uses scientific terminology (ie., sodium chloride vs salt). Surprisingly, the program is a hit.
Humor and tragedy are incorporated in equal measures with several endearing characters the reader would love to spend more time with.
Lessons in Chemistry
Five Bookmarks
Doubleday, 2022
390 pages (includes acknowledgements)
The lies we tell ourselves, and others, to create new lives is the theme of The Vanishing Half. Brit Bennett’s novel addresses several timely issues including racism, sexism, privilege and gender identity. These are daunting points to undertake, but Bennett, without diminishing their importance, imbues the narrative with compassion and wonder.
At its heart, this is about twin sisters, Desiree and Stella, who, as teenagers, ran away from home: a small, rural community of fair-skinned Blacks. The story tracks their lives as they eventually take separate paths, both figuratively and literally. Desiree returns home with Jude, her young, very dark daughter in tow; Stella passes herself as white, marries, moves to an exclusive area in Los Angeles and constantly worries she’ll be exposed.
The emphasis on Jude’s blackness drives the uncommon, perhaps unpopular, notion racism is only something whites project to nonwhites. Within her own, albeit pale, Black town, Jude’s been shunned since the day she arrived. Despite this, she doesn’t see herself as a victim and hers is the most engaging subplot within the novel thanks to those she interacts with most.
Although some stereotypes exist, most of Bennett’s characters are well-defined. This goes beyond physical descriptions, but includes their joys, heartbreaks and deep emotions.
The settings change but the most important action occurs in the rural south and Los Angeles. Incorporating different locales makes it easy to see problems aren’t restricted to geographic regions. And, lies travel easily from one place to another.
The Vanishing Half
Four-and-a-half Bookmarks
Riverhead Books, 2020
343 pages
American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson addresses a shopping list of timely topics: sexism, racism, politics and the meaning of family.
The story begins with a bang: the attempted murder of Marie Mitchell, an intelligence officer with the FBI. Marie’s story is told via a journal she writes to her young twin sons. She addresses them frequently, which reminds readers they’re privy to what a mother wants her children to know. As the novel progresses, the phrase in case anything happens could be added to most sentences.
Marie kills the would-be assassin who invades her Connecticut home, takes her kids and family dog to Martinique to hide in her estranged mother’s home. Marie’s narrative recounts her youth, including that she, her older sister and their father were left in New York City by their mother who returned to her island country.
Marie is intelligent and likeable, but her sister, Helene, has more personality as portrayed through Marie’s memories. The sisters are close. Helene decides she wants to be an FBI agent when she grows up; Marie follows suit after Helene mysteriously dies. However, because of gender and race, Marie’s given little opportunity for advancement.
Then, she’s approached to help undermine the revolutionary president of Burkina Faso Thomas Sankara.
Wilkinson takes the reader back to the 1960s, mid-1980s and early 1992 when the novel begins. At times fast-paced, at others more deliberate, Marie wonders about the role she’s assigned as she gets to know Sankara. Why she’s a target is the over-riding question.
American Spy
Four Bookmarks
Random House, 2018
292 pages
The Atomic Weight of Love begs the question: how heavy is love? Elizabeth J.Church’s novel has war as its bookends: World War II and Vietnam. The passage of time reflects changes in attitudes toward conflict and women.
Meridian Wallace is a brilliant, young student interested in pursuing not only a college education, but an advanced degree in ornithology. This is unusual in 1940s Chicago. While at university she meets and falls in love with professor Alden Whetstone, who is secretly involved with the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, N.M. Although he can’t reveal his research, he convinces Meridian to postpone her studies, move across the country and marry him. There will be plenty of time later to pick up where she left off academically. Ha!
Alden’s commitment to his work and the slow disintegration of a loving relationship could seem a cliché. Yet, Meridian manages to flourish even when the attitudes of the day bear down on her. On her own, she continues to study birds without the benefit of academic resources, she makes a few friends despite being ostracized for not having a doctoral degree like most of the wives in her community. Although they are well-educated they do nothing with their education.
Meridian falls in love with a much younger man but maintains the façade of her marriage with Alden, who becomes increasingly narrow-minded and unlikable as the novel progresses.
The author is masterful in the transformation she ascribes to Meridian and the world around her.
The Atomic Weight of Love
Five Bookmarks
Algonquin Books, 2016
352 pages
The Dime by Kathleen Kent combines two elements atypical to most mysteries: a lesbian protagonist in a contemporary Dallas, Texas, setting. Betty Rhyzk is a transplant from Brooklyn who moves to the Lone Star State with her partner, Jackie who wants to be nearer her supposedly-ailing mother.
Betty is a no-nonsense detective whose often-sarcastic attitude, above average height and flaming-red hair keep her on everyone’s radar. When a drug bust goes awry, Betty unwittingly becomes a target from an unlikely group for an even more improbable reason.
Betty’s an interesting, smart character. Her sexuality is a minor part of her personality. This adds another dimension of dealing with bias in a nearly all-male police department as well as some instances of close-minded Dallas residents, including most of Jackie’s relatives.
In addition to Betty and her police colleagues, is the ghost of Betty’s Uncle Benny. He’s not so much a specter as a presence in her life. His influence and wisdom is a large part of who she is. She thinks of Benny often and the voice she hears in the back of her mind is attributed to him. She isn’t crazy, she just misses him and the guidance he provided.
Severed body parts, sexism and wayward evangelism converge to threaten Betty and those in her life. An abundance of suspension of disbelief is required as Betty encounters the novel’s real villains. Kent has created a strong, female central character, but at times Betty’s portrayed as much more than a superhero.
The Dime
Three bookmarks
Mulholland Books, 2017
343 pages
The Blue Page Special 