I connected with the main character, Jane Ward, so many times in this book. The author must have been a little older in life before she wrote this (I need to look into that) because she is able to write her story from the point of view of the main character, Jane, from age 14 to age 51 and in each stage in her life the writing makes sense. At one point when she was in her mid 30s, her kids come running in from the bus and one of them needs new shoes, another wants to take his rabbits to school and the other wants friends over and they are all asking her at once. The dialog at this point really rang true to me: "'Hush!' said Jane. 'Pick up your coat, Jenny, and hang it in the closet. Steve - your books don't belong on the floor. Yes Cicily, you can telephone Aunt Isabel tonight and ask them.'" Then she sends them upstairs and sighs and goes in the other room, sits down and thinks "they were terrible noisy. They never seemed to behave like other people's children." I think that anyone who has children has had this conversation on a daily basis when they come home from school. Reading her viewpoint of motherhood, I totally related to her.
This book is about a girl, Jane (as I mentioned before) and it starts out when she is 14 years old and has fallen in love with a young boy, Andre, who is sixteen. Before long, Andre is moving to Paris to study to become a sculptor and asks Jane to marry him (at this time she is seventeen and he is nineteen). She of course realizes that she is in love with him and wants to marry him, her mother freaks out, but her father (I think he is my favorite character in the entire book) handles it well. They decide that it wouldn't work out and that they shouldn't have any contact with each other until Jane is twenty one. This is in contrast when Jane's own daughter, Cicily, wants to marry at the age of seventeen and Jane and her husband are not able to stop it, a difference in parenting and loss of influence, I suppose.
Jane and Andre obey her parents wishes and in the mean time Jane meets another young man, Stephen, who falls in love with her and pursues her for a couple of years and asks her to marry him at least a dozen times. When Jane is actually twenty one she gets a letter from Andre and he tells her that he won't be able to come to Chicago because he has a once in a lifetime opportunity to go to Rome for two years to study with the best instructors. She apparently felt betrayed or offended; if it were me I think I would have understood. But she decided then and there that she would marry Stephen. If Andre couldn't make the effort to come to Chicago to see her then he must not care; I think it was a rash decision and not entirely a wise one, although I did like Stephen a lot.
This book is divided into three sections, the first is named Andre, second is Jimmy, and third is Cicily, Jenny and Steve. The second book is where it kind of started to disappoint me and the whole theme of the book comes out in one little sentence that her father says to her out of concern, "Avoid the appearance of evil". This is something that I think Jane doesn't understand. She agrees to help her old college roommate's husband to feel welcome in Chicago. As she does this she spends entirely way to much time alone with him and he is far too flirtatious with her. If she would have thought to heed her father's advice, she probably never would have fallen in love with Jimmy and avoided a difficult time in her life. She doesn't seem to mind Jimmy's attention though, she thinks it is all a bit of a game and before she knows it she has fallen in love with Jimmy and he asks her to run away with him, which she agrees to do. When she wakes up in the morning, however, she realizes that she can't do it and tells him so. He then runs off to travel the world, joins the army and dies in the war in France. She never tells her friend about her love affair with her husband, but instead lets her friend believe he died an honorable and faithful husband. I'm not sure if that was the right choice or not.
The last book is all about her children and who they become. Her daughter Cicily marries young, as mentioned before, and then she begins a love affair with her cousin's husband. She acts just as her mother acted, but I don't think that Jane is aware of it. She thinks Cicily is horrible for her actions. Her other daughter Jenny doesn't want to marry, she wants to run a dog kennel in New York with her college roommate. Her son moves to Boston (where her husband's family is living) and works at a bank. I don't want to give the whole book away for those of you who want to read it, but it does end up well. One warning: you have to understand French in order to understand the ending. She finally does meet up with Andre in the end and goes with him to his studio and he says something to her in French and it offends her and she cares no more for him. I don't speak French and so therefore I didn't get what was going on. I did look it up on Google translation and this is what he said, "Love makes time pass, time makes love pass". I guess she was offended because after all this time his love had passed or maybe he thought her love for him had passed. I don't know.
One other thing that bothered me about this is how nonchalant her husband was about everything. Once they got married Stephen's character took a back seat. The night Jimmy asked her to run away with him she tried to get Stephen to go walking with them (I do have to admit that she tried really hard not to be alone with Jimmy and she was very faithful until the night she said she would run away with Jimmy) but Stephen just told her to go with out him. He was a little unaware of what was going on. His wife was spending all this time with Jimmy, going to lunch with him, having him come out to their house for long periods of time, etc. Even the nurse and the maid had an idea of what was going on. Maybe he just had a lot of trust in his wife and was never concerned about it.
All in all this book was enjoyable to read and quite interesting. I enjoyed it for the most part. I do have to admit that it kind of dragged on in the end and a lot of the book was her thoughts instead of conversations, but it was still good.
