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The Love Children (2009)

by Marilyn French(Favorite Author)

3.44 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

1558616063 (ISBN13: 9781558616066)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

The Feminist Press at CUNY

review 1: Back to the 60s for this novel as Jessamine finishes high school among her friends, her difficult family and their drugs of choice. Her university career is short and she moves to a rural commune with her friend Sandy. Disillusionment ensues in due course and finally Jess makes a life for herself as a chef and raises her child, finding true love along the way. An easy read of no great depth, but enjoyable enough.
review 2: (This review was also printed in the summer issue '09 of Bust Magazine.)Marilyn French’s first novel, The Women’s Room, released during the women’s movement of the seventies, focused on a submissive housewife who divorces her husband to find her own life. The book quickly went on to become a feminist classic as it embodied many of th... moree issues at the heart of the movement.The Love Children picks up where The Women’s Room left off, exploring the lives of the daughters born to the women who achieved new liberation during the sixties and seventies, finding that limitations exist even with their generation’s new found freedoms. As French sadly passed away this May due to heart failure, she was unfortunately never able to see the novel in print. The book focuses on Jess, a girl trying to find herself in a world in which she still faces limitations due to her gender. When her feminist mother divorces her overbearing and self absorbed father, Jess’s life is thrown for a loop. She struggles to etch out her own sense of identity; experimenting with drugs, sexuality, and career paths all in a bid to find a fulfilling existence. After being mistreated in college due to her gender and sexuality, she abandons school trying to find a more suitable life in a commune, only to find that blatant sexism exists there as well. Eventually Jess is able to find fulfillment in organic cooking and a partner who will ultimately accept her as an equal. The Love Children is valuable in its exploration and depiction of the many ways in which gender can still be a limitation, even within a supposedly more enlightened society. (Adrienne Urbanski) less

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