Object Lessons

Quindlen, Anna

ISBN 10: 0394569652 / ISBN 13: 9780394569659

Published by Random House, New York, 1991

About this Item

A highly collectible first edition, tight clean copy protected in a new bro dart wrapper, no inscriptions, unclipped dustjacket, this is not an Ex-Lib or a BCE/BOMC edition. YA-- This first novel is an insightful family chronicle, an informed commentary on the '60s, and the coming-of-age depiction of a mother and daughter. As 13-year-old Maggie struggles with her identity within the boisterous Scanlan clan, her mother also finds her own place within the patriarchal family that has never accepted her. Both women experience rites of passage during the fateful summer that a housing development is being built behind their home, infringing on their emotional and physical spaces. A fast-paced plot involves small fires set in the development by Maggie's friends and romantic tension between her mother and a man from her past. Readers will appreciate Maggie's dilemmas as she grapples with peer pressure and sexual bewilderment, and as she begins to understand her mother, whose discontent oddly parallels her own.

Seller Inventory # RWARE0000007756

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Object Lessons
• Publisher: Random House, New York
• Publication Date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0394569652
• ISBN 13: 9780394569659
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Very Good/Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • General Fiction

About this title

Synopsis

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
"Elaborate and playful...Honest and deeply felt....Here is the Quindlen wit, the sharp eye for the details of class and manners, [and] the ardent reading of domestic lives."
THE NEW YORK TIMES
It is the 1960s, in suburban New York City. Maggie and her family, are in the thrall of her powerful grandfather Jack Scanlan. In the summer of her twelfth year, Maggie is despertately trying to master the object lessons her grandfather fills her head with. But there is too much going on to concentrate. Everything at home is in upheaval, her grandfather is changing, and Maggie is unsure if what she wants is worth having....


From the Paperback edition.

About the Author

ANNA QUINDLEN is the author of three bestselling novels, Object Lessons, One True Thing, and Black and Blue. Her New York Times column “Public & Private” won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, and a selection of those columns was published as Thinking Out Loud. She is also the author of a collection of her “Life in the 30’s”columns, Living Out Loud; a book for the Library of Contemporary Thought, How Reading Changed My Life; the bestselling A Short Guide to a Happy Life; and two children’s books, The Tree That Came to Stay and Happily Ever After. She is currently a columnist for Newsweek and lives with her husband and children in New York City.


From the Trade Paperback edition.