'Mature' 50's, 60,s+: Reads Featur Women
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'Mature' 50's, 60,s+: Reads Featur Women
| Sun, 05-29-2005 - 11:43am |
Let's see which titles out there in Fiction Land feature female (or male) lead characters in the 50's plus age group!~
Reading Jeanne Ray's "Julie & Romeo", I was surprised and delighted that "Julie" was a 60 something lead character, fully developed...the main character!

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The Miss Julia books feature Julia who is in her 60's. She is a wonderful, strong woman. I've only read the first one, Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind, and just loved it!
Scrappy
E.L. Swann's "Night Gardening" combines a love of gardening with 60 something love...a superb read (thanks to Plant Lady for this rec a few years ago).
One of my favorite books!
Remnant Population by Elizabeth Moon
"When her husband Humberto died, Ofelia became her son's dependent in the eyes of Sims Bancorp. Forty years after she helped to found Colony 3245.12, all of her children but Barto are dead along with their father; and Ofelia tolerates her domineering daughter-in-law Rosara as best she can. When Sims Bancorp sends a ship to withdraw the colonists, after deciding to abandon its unprofitable colony and cede its license to the world that Ofelia now considers her home, the company demands extra payment for relocating the useless old woman who will probably die in cryosleep, anyway. Luckily for Ofelia, though, she's scheduled for a later shuttle than Barto and Rosara. When she slips away from the village to hide in the nearby, still untouched alien forest, the only two people who would protest her absence are already in the cryotanks. Soon the ship is gone, leaving Ofelia alone. And that's just fine with her.
The old woman revels in her solitude, because this is the first time in her long life that she's been free from the demands and restrictions placed on her by others. She tends her garden, competently maintains the village's power plant, and laughs when she throws her last pair of detested shoes into the recycler. Then another company's ship enters orbit, and starts to insert a colony at a location thousands of miles from Ofelia's village. At which time she, and the newly arrived colonists, find out that this world has indigenous intelligent life after all.
Ofelia, a person who had little worth to start with in her society's eyes - a housewife and mother, educated no more than necessary to perform her expected tasks - has no value at all now, in age and physical infirmity. But what she does have, a naturally intelligent woman's decades of experience and wisdom and insight, turn out to be exactly what the unexpected and dangerous first contact situation on her adopted world requires. No longer willing to suffer fools gladly - still savoring life, but no longer reluctant to risk leaving it behind if that's the price of being free at last to make her own choices - Ofelia is at once a fully realized individual, and a worthy representative of all the other wise and salty old women whose value too few societies appreciate. Or even comprehend."
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/034546219X/qid=1117552981/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/102-6027934-6228135?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
"The Blackberry Tea Club: Women in Their Glory Years"
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1573249653/qid=1117726727/sr=1-5/ref=sr_1_5/002-7752256-2516051?v=glance&s=books
Oh Teri....How will I ever thank you! This is just the thing I have been looking for. Books for someone of my maturity (read age, LOL). I also have read one recently, but of course I can't remember the title....by Alice Adams. Will go from here, directly to Amazon.
I am having a dickens of a time finding some "lovely" books about people like me. I just tried to read "The Breakdown Lane," Jacquelyn Mitchard's latest book. I'm sure it is a good book, but I just couldn't get into it. I think Elizabeth Berg has come closest to getting me thru this period of time. I can't get into the psycho-thrillers, once my favorites & dysfunctional families have become a little much. I do also like Sue Monk...The Secret Life of Bees... a book to savor.
I've jotted down every suggestion & hope that later on there will be many more. I'll be back. dee
I just remembered a wonderful book by Alison Lurie....all her books are wonderful & usually about older women....& men. This one is called Foreign Affairs.
This is from an Amazon review (can I do this?)that I certainly agree with:
"In alternating chapters devoted to each character, six months in the life of Virginia ("Vinnie") Miner, an unmarried Ivy League college professor for whom the sweet bird of youth has long flown away, are contrasted with the same period in the life of Fred Turner - young and handsome, and a junior faculty member of the same Ivy League college. Although they barely know each other, they are both members of the English department and are both on sabbatical in London at the same time doing research.
Their stories are studies in contrast and in similarities. Fred is lonely, having recently become estranged from his wife; Fred loathes England (at least, at first). Vinnie is beyond lonely - at 54, she has settled into a life of comforting routine, even if the routine involves frequent trips to her beloved England. Fred turns heads; Vinnie is "the sort of person no one ever notices."
They each find romance in England. Fred is upwardly mobile - he falls in love with a beautiful and aristocratic actress of some fame. Vinnie is shocked to find herself having a romance with a sanitary engineer from Tulsa, a man who rarely reads books and with whom she would barely have deigned to have talked had they not been thrown together.
Which of these two relationships goes on to become a life-love, and which ends in humiliating farce? It is the genius of this book that the answer, like life itself, remains unpredictable throughout the novel, right up to its surprising end. This novel was highly deserving of the Pulitzer Prize."
This is an elegantly written book. Lurie is a "gold" standard author & I always learn new things from her books. I can't recommend others because, of course, I can remember the plots, but not the titles. So "half a loaf is better than none!" Enjoy. dee
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