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Library Journal Review

For women of a certain age, Cantwell's book is a trip down memory lane. Cantwell, now a member of the editorial board of the New York Times , recounts her days in the small town of Bristol, Rhode Island, a place where she knew everyone and everyone knew her. Cantwell sees her subjects clearsightedly, but with affection. She remembers teachers, storekeepers, the rich summer people, and the Portuguese kids from Back Road. Her chapters are filled with detail: the smell of the sea, the feel of her grandmothers' stiff corset, the glimpse of her father's watch chain across his stout stomach. Like Susan Allen Toth in her memoir of small-town life in the 1950s ( Blooming , LJ 4/1/81), Cantwell evokes a time when life was simpler and slower and some things about growing up were easier. It is a time that has gone forever, but one that many people remember with nostalgia. Recommended.-- Rebecca Wondriska, Trinity Coll. Lib., Hartford, Ct. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

For Cantwell, a New York Times editorial board member, 1930s Bristol, R.I., was such a charmed setting to grow up inplease, don't take such liberties in rewriting, when you haven't read the book.gs that her chronic case of ``Bristol Complaint''--inability to leave the coastal town behind--is contagious. A serene, evocative writer, she makes readers tenants of 232 Hope St., which houses three generations of her family: father Leo, production manager at the rubber plant; mother Mary, onetime third-grade teacher; younger sister Diana; good pal seems awk to describe woman as `buddy'?/i've changed it to pal, but confidante is totally out of keeping with tone of book. gs Aunt Esther; Ganny, a model of rectitude even if she lays an occasional bet with her bookie; and Gampa, who is unfailingly content ``because he wants no more at this moment.'' Rarely do the rich summer folk or the Italian and Portuguese immigrants intrude on this snug world as family members make their way among the Friday-night after-movie crowd at the soda fountain of Buffington's Drugstore or spend an afternoon at the Bluebird Shoppe for Ganny's corset fitting. Cantwell's account of such a childhood is a bit Booth Tarkingtonish, but readers weary of anguished coming-of-age memoirs will feel refreshed. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

School Library Journal Review

YA-- Cantwell's deep affection for the coastal Rhode Island town of her girlhood in the '40s and '50s does not hinder her from recording with detailed detachment every nuance of societal strata as well as homey tradition. The surprise is that readers, too, will be become enchanted with the minutia of memory in this lively chronicle of local parades, school dances, picnics, and first love. The author wryly describes the snobbery of the WASP upper class, the clannishness of the immigrant workers, and the self-righteousness of middle-class Catholics. The current nostalgic notion regarding family values permeates the entire memoir, for Cantwell grew up in a three-generational home in which she received unconditional love and the assurance that there was nothing she could not accomplish if she so desired. Students of social history will find much to mine here.-- Jackie Gropman, Richard Byrd Library, Springfield, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

Two chronicles of women coming of age in two very different eras. Mary Cantwell, a New York Times columnist, has written a gentle memoir of her Bristol, Rhode Island, childhood that radiates with the love of her extended Irish-Catholic family. Her handsome father was her favorite, but she adored her indulgent grandparents and her independent aunt and treasured bright moments of closeness with her beautiful mother. Cantwell limns the Bristol of her youth with prose as quick, translucent, and deft as watercolors, capturing the spangled sea and the salty harbor breeze, the orderly streets and aromatic shops, the happy bustle of parades and carnivals. At one point, she even grouses that "every image that surfaces seems straight out of Life and the Saturday Evening Post," but her life wasn't really that simple. The old, blue-eyed, Protestant guard shuddered at the influx of dark-eyed Italians and Portuguese, while Cantwell aroused the sometimes violent envy and contempt of her public school classmates with her good clothes and fine manners. As she grew up musing on the mysteries of sex and sophistication, Cantwell stayed true to herself and her dreams, knowing that while she had to leave her beloved Bristol to really live and grow, she would always cherish it and define the world in its terms. A tender and captivating narrative that easily seduces us into slipping out of our present into her lyrical past. Where Cantwell is poetic and personal, sociologist Breines is brisk and evaluative. She calls her strikingly titled overview of the lives of young white women during the 1950s a "sociological memoir," since she mines social scientific data, cultural histories, fiction, letters, and interviews for keys to understanding the decade's rigid attitudes toward gender roles, sex, expectations, and values. The fifties propagated a "culture of containment" for women and blacks as the postwar boom spawned suburbanization, consumerism, conformity, and the cult of domesticity to bury the fears and doubts aroused by the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and the early stirrings of the civil rights movement, but it succeeded only in creating a hygienic facade. Breines peels back this thin veneer to reveal a squirm of conflict, paradox, and ambiguity. She analyzes the establishment of the teen market and the overwhelming message to girls to dream small and spend big. Prudery at home and the commercialization of sex, along with the worship of matrimony and the nuclear family, led to hypocrisy, polarization, and rebellion. An invigorating dissection of a curiously twisted era, which launched the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s. ~--Donna Seaman