Usually when I can't finish a book because it really irritates me I don't review it, but this book irritated me so I want to be sure I don't recommend it to anyone. It was to literature like paint-by-numbers is to art. I never got into the characters, and the so-called Rose variations are just her various affairs, with people I could never understand why she bothered. ( )

An impressive first novel that captures the zeitgeist of the mid-70s very well. Rose MacGregor is a composer and new college professor. The novel tells of her efforts to succeed as a composer, to experiment in love and sex, to gain tenure as a music professor and to process her complicated familial relationships. Rose is a well-developed, multi-dimensional character and at least for me, as someone who lived through this time in my early twenties, she comes across as very real. The situations she faces, and how she deals with them, should prove easily recognizable to those of us who were there. In general, the female characters are better articulated than the male characters who are somewhat two-dimensional, but that honestly did not detract from the pleasure the novel offers. ( )