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Cheap Cabernet: A Friendship (2010)

by Cathie Beck(Favorite Author)

2.98 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1401341543 (ISBN13: 9781401341541)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Hyperion

review 1: Cheap Cabernet by Cathie BeckThis was a nice idea for a story especially because I enjoy stories about female friendships. This story is told about two women one of whom is suffering from Multiple Sclerosis. The story is told looking back in time at the development of their friendship.I was a bit confused by the transitions in time. I was not always aware when there was a shift in time - Was it the present, past, or distant past. I couldn’t tell from what point of view Cathie Beck was writing the story. At first it seemed to me she was a woman in her early 40s but then it seemed as if she was writing from a viewpoint older that that perhaps her early 50s. I had just read “Girls in White Dresses” in this book women continue to act like young college st... moreudents well into their twenties and thirties. In “Cheap Cabernet” the main character is forced to grow up very quickly and becomes a wife and mom before she is in her twenties. Her husband leaves her when her children are very small. Despite their poverty and disadvantaged circumstances she makes a life for them but has little energy for herself. Cheap Cabernet is the story about after she has raised her children. Now she decides is the time to reclaim her lost youth and she begins acting like she is in her early twenties?! Do her grown children never visit? It seems like they rarely enter her consciousness. There is only one part of a chapter where she is sad that she was never able to give her two kids a traditional sense of a “home place” moving them from cheap rental to cheap rental over their growing up years. Other than that, no time is really spent on how she is now still a mother but to grown children who are in college. They seem magically to have no problems and no need of their mother.The story focuses on the female friend she makes after she realizes she has time for a friend. They have a lot of silly fun together but she also sees the slow, then rapid decline her friends is on as she suffers with MS. In the end her friend ends her own life prematurely as she feels her quality of life had declined more that she could endure. This story is told to honour their friendship.
review 2: This is the story of a friendship that at first reads like a fiction novel. The friends, two women right about my age, find each other around age 40 and this is the story of how they create meaning for one another in quirky, cavalier ways. This would generate a lot of discussion for a group read about the nature of friendship and the effects of dysfunctional families. I would have liked to have had stronger impressions about how Cathie's two kids responded to all this turmoil. Probably hard to incorporate too many points of view, but kids (more even than ex-husbands) are a huge part of any woman's life. This narrative reminded of people I've known along the way, so in many ways, it rings true and relevant. less

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