I must confess to having read this novel shortly after Youngblood Hawke. As a result, roughly 1,000 pages of 1930-40s New York City dialect and social mores tends to grate after awhile. The result was, that about halfway through the book, I found myself not only failing to care about the "heroine", but actually beginning to dislike her quite a bit. Once that point was reached, I simply began to look forward to the end of the book.

Perhaps if I'd read it first, it would have created a more favorable impression. As it was, I thought if I read the expletive "Gad" one more time, I'd vomit.

In a nutshell, the novel follows the adolecent and early adult years of a Jewish American princess in 1930s New York City. Mildly entertaining at first, for me the book dragged and fell into a vicious cycle of relationship and career events that became repetitive at best. I've read most of Wouk's work and for me, this was the weakest. ( )

I read this book in 1957 when I was 17 and impressionable. How things have
changed, but the feelings I felt at 17 were pretty much the same as Marjorie's.