Love in Full Bloom - Softcover

Fowler, Margaret

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345382218 ISBN 13: 9780345382214

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1994

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

A collection of stories dealing with love, fantasy, romance, heartache, passion, and renewal

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly:

This collection of short stories represents a well-meaning attempt to demonstrate the complexity of romantic experience among the elderly. Unfortunately, due to undeveloped characters and weak plots, many of the tales unwittingly propagate the stereotypes of old people as sexless and inflexible. Edna O'Brien's protagonist is a retired cabaret dancer who develops a dreamy passion for an angelic young actor she finds sleeping in the municipal garden she tends; but she backs off for fear he might someday abandon her. In William Humphrey's tale, a 76-year-old woman in a stale marriage receives a surprise call from an old lover and decides to make a break until guilt shackles her to her past. Luckily, the collection is peppered with more compelling stories and more daring characters. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Indian widow has a love-hate affair with a racist Dutchman that offends her children, but she ultimately chooses passion over family. In Alice Adams's story, an art historian remembers a near-affair between her musicologist husband and a young researcher decades earlier and wonders for a moment what would have happened to them both if he had left her then. Fowler and McCutcheon co-edited Songs of Experience .
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

All kinds of folks English uppercrust, Southern black, Slavic, the quiet and the verbose, the social and the reclusive, rich and poor, successful and failed, have one thing in common--advanced age--in this anthology. Fourteen prominent 20th-century writers convince us that love and romance are not the sole province of the young, though the quality of mature love may differ. Here, time becomes more precious and is not to be wasted on inconsequential matters. Note the old Chinese widower and the Jewish widow who do not allow their differing backgrounds or the objections of their children to deter them from the pleasure they share in Irvin Faust's "Bar Bar Bar." Often funny, always poignant, these tales bring warmth and remembrance to older readers and perhaps understanding to their offspring. Recommended for public libraries.
- Marion Hanscom, SUNY at Binghamton Lib.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.