The Love Children

By Marilyn French

"The Love Children is valuable in its exploration and depiction of the many ways in which gender can still be a limitation, even within a supposedly more enlightened society."Bust Magazine

It is the late 1960s in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Grateful Dead is playing on the radio and teenagers are wearing long hair and blue jeans. Jess Leighton, the daughter of a temperamental painter and a proto-feminist Harvard professor, is struggling to make sense of her world amid racial tensions, Vietnam War protests, and anti-government rage.

With more options than her mother's generation, but no role model for creating the life she desires, Jess experiments with sex and psychedelic drugs as she searches for happiness on her own terms. In the midst of joining and fleeing a commune, growing organic vegetables, and operating a sustainable restaurant, Jess grapples with the legacy of her mother's generation

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781558616509

Marilyn French

Marilyn French was a novelist and feminist. Her books include The Women’s Room, which has been translated into twenty languages; From Eve to Dawn, a History of Women in the World; A Season in Hell; Her Mother’s Daughter; Our Father; My Summer with George; and The Bleeding Heart. She died in 2009.

Reviews for The Love Children

[ironicqueery · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Marilyn French is so wonderful in constructing her characters, that for many chapters in The Love Children, I thought she was writing a memoir. The greatest strength of this book is the deep inner examination of her main character's personality. That drives the book more than any turmoil outside the character. The main action of the story involves the inner development and discoveries made by Jess Leighton as she graduates from high school, finds herself during her college years, and completes the examination and determination of who she is and what her life will consist of. This never feels like a young adult novel; despite the young age of Jess when introduced to her, the deep introspection can be understood across ages. Along with the Jess's introspection comes wonderful observations about her family life, with a feminist mother and a sexist, depressed, artistic father. Her friends come from a variety of economic and social backgrounds, so the variety of observations and the interplay between all these groups result in another layer of introspection. The Love Children is a wonderful book that offers a refreshing change of focus. Instead of the typical action-driven novel, this book offers a deep examination of a person's personality and all the questions one asks oneself when uncovering who you want to be.

[bogopea · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Life for daughters of "The Women's Room Generation". Books protagonist, Jess, was born in 1953 and book continues til sometime after 9/11. Written in first-person without too much dialog between subjects. Good read but not my style of writing. If you are a woman of that generation, it's a walk down memory lane.