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The Ten-Year Nap | 
 enlarge | Author: Meg Wolitzer
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $6.10
You Save: $18.85 (76%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  57 reviews
Sales Rank: 3436
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 351
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
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: SATISFACTION GUARANTEED! NEW Book! May have remainder mark. Most orders ship within 1 BUSINESS DAY with ORDER CONFIRMATION.
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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 52 more reviews...
 A Slog of a Read October 12, 2008
I'm not a privileged, accomplished 40 something woman who gave up my career to be a full time mother, so I just didn't get it. I agree with other reviewers that there's a whole lot of whining, and not much happens save for an affair by a secondary character. Yes, you get the kids off to school, you go for coffee with friends and waste a morning. I'll bet a lot of women wouldn't mind spending their days like that. Life happens. Get over it. I wish I could say the writing was stellar, but it was just OK. I usually zip through books within days; this one truly felt like ten years. It wasn't worthy of its reviews and media coverage.
 Profound look at the state of affairs for women and men today September 30, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I'm sorry to see this gem of a book is not getting better reviews. As a women in her 50s, I was interested in it only because I heard that the protagonists' mothers, who were the original 2nd wave feminists of the 60s and 70s (my generation), would also be represented. However, in reading about the 30-somethings, I was instantly transported back to the days of raising my son and all the dilemmas facing women who were caught between wanting careers and wanting to be mothers at the same time. Wolitzer does a wonderful job of representing women with different hopes, dreams, and desires and how they each negotiate marriage, motherhood, and career. For each woman it is different and often not exactly what they expected when they graduated from college.
A difficult book to read... September 26, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I also heard about this book on NPR and picked it up the next day. Being a stay at home mom to four children who are all in school I was hoping to get inspiration on how to approach this next stage in my life. However, I must say it did not come from this book.
The book proved difficult to read due to many different character introductions and then flashbacks to that characters parents whose stories did not help me to understand the main characters more.
The middle of the book was the most exciting with Amy dealing with her obsession with her friends affair. Once the affair and the friendship were over it seemed that she just resigned herself to accepting that she would be happy with a mediocre life and unhappiness as did every one of the other characters.
The book left me feeling empty and wishing that the characters had wanted more out of life for themselves and their families.
Disappointing.
 Thank-you. September 20, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
After the seemingly endless train of poorly edited novels I've had to endure this year, *finally* one that admittedly, i can only guess has been diligently worked on post-author, to bring to market a book as cogent as should be expected by *any* published title. Kudos to Sarah McGrath.
'Ten Year Nap' is a well-crafted meditation on the question 'What happens when smart, educated women temporarily leave the work force for motherhood...and somehow don't find their way back?' Granted, there is a case to be made that it could have been an even better read if there had been less meditation and more storytelling. But she does such a good job at leavening her keen-eyed observational tracts with picante Life-slices that I'll place more weight on the overall power of the book than on its shortcomings. (But I have pondered what the result might have been had she been less discursive...and been more bold in telling such a timely tale in a more conventional manner.)
Here is a novel where the writer's capabilities are clearly in force, with hardly a misstep in the multitude of character threads. Though she is a lover of language and its effectiveness, she never indulges the word-lover in her; this only adds to the strength of 'Nap'.
She made me laugh, she made me cry...she made me think. Ms Wolitzer is a writer with something to say; I'll be delving into her back-catalogue as well as looking forward to what she publishes next.
Well intentioned but needs a plot September 13, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I've listened to 6 of the CDs in this audiobook version of The Ten-Year Nap, and I'm giving up. The writing is fine, and the question the author is asking--WTF are these educated, upper-middle class urbanites doing with their lives?--is pertinent. But the story has no forward motion because, well, there is no story. She goes from one less-than-interesting character to the next (one seems hardly different from the others, so I had trouble keeping them straight), spinning out lots of details about their kids, their kids school, their shelved ambitions.
It's like getting together with your friends and kvetching about dull things. If I wanted to hear that kind of talk, I'd just get together with my friends but I'd give them a good talking to about wasting their lives. I prefer a novel that has at least some semblance of a plot, and some conflict. What we are left with here is just a fairly dull read describing lots of dull people. Oh, and the reader of this audiobook doesn't help matters much with her dry, listless intonation.
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