I don’t really like Austin Clarke’s writing. I liked this more than most of the other books by him that I’ve read, but it still began to pall about halfway through.

I’ve sort of gone off most self-help books (I know, I know, Rick Warren says that this isn’t a self help book, but that’s what I’m going to call it), but this one wasn’t bad. I find that a lot of self-help books tend to be sort of glib, as if it’s as easy as pie to change your life just by changing your mind. This one acknowledged that yes, it’s difficult to change, but it may also be worth it. That being said, it’s probably not going to be of much interest to people who aren’t at least nominally Christian. And, to be honest, I’m not any clearer about my specific purpose in life than I was when before I read it.

Maybe it’s because I read Susan Faludi’s excellent “Backlash”, which has a similar theme, only a few weeks before I read this book, but I found “The War Against Women” disappointing. It jumped all over the place, it suffered from a lack of focus, it skimmed over a lot of topics, but dealt comprehensively with very few, and in some places research seemed scanty. Not a satisfying read at all.

Ah, this was okay. I think the book excerpts could have, in some cases, been better selected, but it was still a worthwhile read.

This book was much much better than I’d expected. There are some books where you I just fall in love with the way the author uses words—this is one of them. And she captures the voices of her three main characters really well. Highly recommended.

A disappointing end. It felt like Shields would have gone on and on writing (and her writing is quite evocative) if she could have, but she had to bring the novel to an end somehow. For a mystery, there were all sort of (seeming) clues that amounted to nothing in the end.

A really charming book. Highly recommended for any fan of young adult literature.

A good read. Makes me wish that I’d been around to read it when it first came out and was truly revolutionary.

I heard a lot about this book before I read it, and it lived up to the hype. A fun and informative book.

Interesting reading.