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The Ten-Year Nap | 
 enlarge | Author: Meg Wolitzer
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $13.45
You Save: $11.50 (46%)
New (33) from $13.45
Avg. Customer Rating:  17 reviews
Sales Rank: 224
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.5
ISBN: 1594489785
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781594489785
ASIN: 1594489785
Publication Date: March 27, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: BRAND NEW!! - SHIPS IN BOOK BOX SAME OR NEXT BUSINESS DAY WITH CONFIRMATION EMAIL!!
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Product Description
From the bestselling author of The Wife and The Position, a feverishly smart novel about female ambition, money, class, motherhood, and marriage-and what happens in one community when a group of educated women chooses not to work.
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 jobs as corporate lawyers, investment bankers, and film scouts 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 gets to know a charismatic and successful working mother of three who appears 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 Amy's obsession with this woman's bustling life grows, it forces the four friends to confront the choices they've made in opting out of their careers-until a series of startling events shatters the peace and, for some of them, changes the landscape entirely.
Written in Meg Wolitzer's inimitable, glittering style, The Ten-Year Nap is wickedly observant, knowing, provocative, surprising, and always entertaining, as it explores the lives of these women with candor, wit, and generosity.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 12 more reviews...
 Liberal view of stay-at-home moms May 5, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I did not enjoy the book. The book should have a warning label..."Conservatives beware!" As a stay-at-home mom in my mommy years and the mother of a stay-at-home mom, I was uncomfortable (and at times angry) reading this book. I don't think it paints a true picture. It does, however, paint the picture liberals want the world to see. There were times in the book that left-wing politics weren't as obvious, and I enjoyed those parts of the book. The author is obviously very intelligent and talented...too bad her anti-war, anti-Bush, extreme feminist views were so overbearing.
Reads like an extended magazine article. May 4, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Wolitzer is a good writer and some of the images really hit the mark (I should know - I've been home with my kids since 1999). But ultimately it felt like she was just skimming the surface of what is possible. It was a quick read, but I'm not recommending it to my friends.
 For my daughter April 28, 2008
I purchased this book for my daughter based on an NPR interview with the author. It is a good read--especially for women who are stay-at-home-moms.
 Good premise, but nothing ever happens April 28, 2008
Basically, the book relates the mental life of a medley of women with kids as they go about their business, struggling with the fact that they don't work, they're kids are growing up, and various and sundry other issues. It starts well and there are many places where Wolitzer shows she "gets" the inner life of mothers. Sadly, though, the book comes to not much, as the only major plot line comes to a bit of a minor "pop" and then fizzles. All quite pleasant but very light.
Subtle and insightful New York story April 26, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book contains beautiful observations on the experience of motherhood, marriage, and friendship between women. Many passages resonated with me in profound ways. I would not read it as some have--as a text on the contemporary dilemmas facing women. This is very much an upper class New York story and the basic work/life choices that these women take themselves to be confronted with bear very little resemblance to the choices and dilemmas faced by myself and my circle of female friends. The main characters, interestingly, are more confined by their passive, yet persistent desire for the status and money than they are by any kind of tug of war between mothering and a genuine longing to work. The book aimed to capture four distinctive characters along with several others that kind of blip through, but to me, it nevertheless seemed speak with only a single melancholy, yet original and compelling voice. I found it somewhat distracting to see the effort to delineate the characters rely so heavily on stereotype--we are reminded several times that the Jewish woman has a big nose and the Asian woman lacks imagination and a capacity to understand emotional nuance. This book does capture something, though, about a particular dimension of our generation that I have not seen captured so well anwhere else and I enjoyed reading it.
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