The Girl Pretending To Read Rilke

by Barbara Riddle

Overview

The Girl Pretending to Read Rilke is a coming-of-age novel set in a biology lab in the summer of 1963 in Boston. Both the heroine, 19-year-old Bronwen, and America are suffering growing pains and soon all the standards of the past will be shattered as the Pill and the war in Vietnam change people's expectations forever. A shocking telegram forces Bronwen to choose between family and the temptations of a dazzling future in science. "Barbara Riddle has given us a sharp, funny glimpse into a little-explored moment in women's recent history. The year is 1963, the same year Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. Brave young women were heading out from college and looking for lives very different from those their mothers had lived. My excitement about The Girl Pretending to Read Rilke stems in part from the fact that I was there- heading for graduate school in science in 1963. I recognize Riddle's heroine Bronwen for her spirit of adventure as well as her sometimes crippling self-doubts (carefully nourished by the all-too-realistic boyfriend-from-hell). Today's 20-somethings will recognize her as a woman struggling, like themselves, for personal coherence in a world that still has difficulty seeing us as complete and entire human beings." -Barbara Ehrenreich (author, Nickel and Dimed)

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780615904320
Publisher:	Pilgrim's Lane Press
Publication date:	10/13/2013
Pages:	212
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.48(d)

About the Author

Barbara Riddle received her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Brandeis, but in the process of writing her coming-of-age novel "The Girl Pretending to Read Rilke," she became committed to writing as her true vocation.
Her passion is helping young women to develop self-confidence and meet all challenges with humor and resilience. A native of New York City, she is currently at work on a memoir of growing up as the child of free-spirited bohemian parents in 1950's Greenwich Village, as well as being involved in the development of "Girl Pretending to Read Rilke" into an independent feature film in the style of "An Education." She divides her time between New York City, St. Petersburg, Florida and her extended family in Sweden. Her daughter Laramie is a filmmaker in Los Angeles and her stepdaughter Simona is a writer in Stockholm.
Among her favorite auhtors she lists Jean Rhys, Katherine Mansfield, Nadine Gordiimer, Amy Hempel, Carson McCullers, Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Truman Capote and Ivan Klima. She blogs at www.poodlesontheroof.com and her website is www.girlpretending.com. You can write to her at [e-mail] with your comments or questions. She loves to hear from her readers.

Editorial Reviews

2019-05-28
Riddle debuts with a pleasantly offbeat coming-of-age novel that looks back at the changing roles of women in the 1960s.

In 1963, 19-year-old Bronwen Olwen has just completed her junior year in a prestigious Portland, Oregon, college and is heading to Boston for a prime summer internship in a biochemistry lab—and, not incidentally, a couple of months of living with her boyfriend, Eric Breuner. He's four years older, ensconced in Harvard, and working toward a junior fellowship in the biology department, where he's a superstar. Indeed, Bronwen is daunted by what she accepts as his intellectual superiority. But this summer, she's decided to become an expert in the literary works of early 20th-century Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke as her nonscientific area of proficiency, because "All the scientists in Eric's crowd had a little niche, a subarea of nontechnical knowledge on which they could hold forth." Her boss, Felix, is a strange whirlwind of frenetic energy, always "rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet." Bronwen helps him with some problem experiments, enabling him to complete his long-overdue doctoral thesis. Her grueling hours at the lab prove more gratifying than her time spent with the obnoxiously arrogant Eric and his cohort of pseudo-intellectual male scientists. However, it takes a series of crises to force her to reexamine her life. Although Riddle's narrative is often humorous and frequently quirky, it also offers a stark reminder of the scientific community's treatment of women joining its ranks in the '60s. For example, Felix can't fathom why Bronwen would choose to study science given her other options: "Girls don't just whimsically decide to give up a social life and nice clothes to hang around in smelly hellholes with slavedrivers like me ordering them around." Throughout, Riddle mixes solid, straightforward storytelling with long, stream-of-consciousness sections in which the omniscient narrator jumps into Bronwen's chaotic mental meanderings. The run-on sentences in the latter can be confusing at times, but they effectively reflect the protagonist's inner struggle as familiar young adult angst meets bubbling social change.

A whimsical, funny, and poignant historical novel.

Kirkus Reviews