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The Ten-Year Nap

Audiobook
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks

For a group of four New York friends, the past decade has been largely defined by marriage and motherhood. Educated and reared to believe that they would conquer the world, they then left prestigious jobs to stay home with their babies. What was meant to be a temporary leave of absence has lasted a decade. Now, at age forty, with the halcyon days of young motherhood behind them and without professions to define them, Amy, Jill, Roberta, and Karen face a life that is not what they were brought up to expect but seems to be the one they have chosen. But when Amy meets someone who seems to have fulfilled the classic women's dream of having it all--work, love, family--without having to give anything up, a lifetime's worth of concerns, both practical and existential, opens up. As her obsession with this woman's bustling life grows, it forces the four friends to confront the choices they've made--until a series of startling events shatters the peace and, for some of them, changes the landscape entirely.

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    • AudioFile Magazine
      Meg Wolitzer's very entertaining new novel explores the linked lives of four New York women friends who find themselves more or less stranded in a version of their lives they don't recognize--a doldrum when the intensity of raising infants is over. But they've been out of the workforce so long they don't know who they are except wives and mothers. Wolitzer knows the territory cold, her ear for dialogue is impeccable, and she's created a marvelous kaleidoscope of personalities linked in a pattern that changes as we watch. Alyssa Bresnahan's performance is nuanced, well paced, and sympathetic, and her voice is lovely. But doesn't anyone in the studio have a biographical dictionary? If Freud is pronounced "froid," is Freund rendered as "froond" even a good guess? B.G. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      December 24, 2007
      In her latest novel, Wolitzer (The Wife
      ; etc.) takes a close look at the “opt out” generation: her cast of primary characters have all abandoned promising careers (in art, law and academia) in favor of full-time motherhood. When their children were babies, that decision was defensible to themselves and others; 10 years on, all of these women, whose interconnected stories merge during their regular breakfasts at a Manhattan restaurant, harbor hidden doubts. Do their mundane daily routines and ever-more tenuous connections to increasingly independent children compensate for all that lost promise? Wolitzer centers her narrative on comparisons between her smart but bored modern-day New York and suburban mommies and the women of the generation preceding them, who fought for women’s liberation and equality. Contemporary chapters, most of which focus on a single character in this small circle of friends, alternate with vignettes from earlier eras, placing her characters’ crises in the context of the women, famous and anonymous, who came before. Wolitzer’s novel offers a hopeful, if not exactly optimistic, vision of women’s (and men’s) capacity for reinvention and the discovery of new purpose.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 26, 2008
      This self-conscious, idea-driven novel is read well by Alyssa Bresnahan, but she doesn't clearly distinguish each mother struggling for identity and purpose in today's confusing “post-feminist” middle class. Speaker identity comes not from the reader but from “Amy said” or “Jill said.” There is plenty of irony—note the title—but Bresnahan's ironic tone sometimes leads us to dismiss characters' experiences and feelings. This is not entirely her fault as the main players are somewhat stereotyped: lawyer quits work to care for baby (now aged 10); husband struggles to keep family afloat; grandmother remains feminist warrior; Chinese mother wastes her mathematical genius. But Bresnahan does enliven Wolitzer's recap of modern women's conundrums, so despite limitations, this audio will surely kindle controversy on blogs and at book clubs, kitchen, school and office confabs. Simultaneous release with the Riverhead hardcover (Reviews, Dec. 24).

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