Braided Lives - Tapa blanda

"This book demonstrates the maturation of Piercy's native talent for story-telling . . . we would have to look to a French writer like Colette or to American writers of another generation, like May Sarton, to find anyone who writes as tenderly as Piercy about life's redeeming pleasures - sex, of course, but also the joys of good food, good conversation, and the reassuring little rituals like feeding the cats, watering the plant, weeding the garden." --Judith Paterson, "Washington Post Book World"

""Braided Lives" is a big, rich book. This writer just gets better and better. She is allowing more flashes of humor and more generosity . . . her sure novelist's hold on making a good story, her poet's eye for careful detail . . . "Braided Lives" is a novel that tries not to simplify but to clarify . . . and by so doing, it adds a great deal to our understanding of how things came to be as they are, and what some of yesterday might have meant." --Marcie Hershman, "Boston Globe"

"Honest and impressive power. No writer I know of has so thoroughly explored the changing, despairing, frightening, and complicated world of a young college girl becoming a woman." --"Washington Post Book World"

"Marge Piercy is the political novelist of our time. More: she is the conscience." --Marilyn French

"A magnificent achievement. With beauty and mastery, [Piercy] palpably creates, recreates a decade. "Braided Lives" is one of those rare, rich, valuable books that reveal how realities, class, sex, one's times--shape generations." --Tillie Olsen

"Absorbing. Marge Piercy recreates the college campus of the fifties with all the desire, confusion, hypocrisy, and pain of young women's emerging sexuality." --Alix Kates

"A delicious binge of a book. I had a wonderful time reading "Braided Lives," crying real tears at the sad parts and feeling real elation at the happy ones." --"San Francisco Chronicle"

Jill and Donna are cousins and lifelong best friends but could not be more different. Despite their contrasting characters, fiercely independent, dark, street-smart Jill and pretty, blond, alluring Donna are very close, attending college together in Ann Arbor and then moving to New York City after graduation. Ultimately veering onto different life paths, they both experience love, betrayal, friendship, pain, independence, and fear. Though their fates differ as widely as their personalities, both reflect the danger that sex poses for women during a time in which abortions are illegal: an affair could destroy a woman’s life, and a chance encounter or a night of love could be a matter of life and death. Spanning 20 years and teeming with vivid characters, this poignant novel tells the powerful, unsentimental story of two young women coming of age in a time of enormous social upheaval.