"Florence Gordon has my vote for most deliciously enjoyable novel of the year (her associates might not use the word 'enjoyable' for Florence, but they’d all agree that her company is never boring.)
Florence is a septuagenarian feminist, activist, writer, and professor. When the novel opens, she’s trying to write her memoirs, but life’s messiness—family, acolytes, illness, a washed-up ex-husband, a Jezebel-esque blogger—keeps intruding.
Brian Morton lightly populates Florence’s universe with real-life academics and writers. It’s an ingenious touch that brings Florence’s milieu fully to life, but Florence herself is so fierce, funny, furious, and fantastic that she burns more brightly and seems more real than any of them."
Publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication Date 2014-09-23
Section New Hardcover - Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Liz S.
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9780544309869
A wise and entertaining novel about a woman who has lived life on her own terms for seventy-five defiant and determined years, only to find herself suddenly thrust to the center of her family’s various catastrophes
Meet Florence Gordon: blunt, brilliant, cantankerous and passionate, feminist icon to young women, invisible to almost everyone else. At seventy-five, Florence has earned her right to set down the burdens of family and work and shape her legacy at long last. But just as she is beginning to write her long-deferred memoir, her son Daniel returns to New York from Seattle with his wife and daughter, and they embroil Florence in their dramas, clouding the clarity of her days and threatening her well-defended solitude. And then there is her left foot, which is starting to drag….
With searing wit, sophisticated intelligence, and a tender respect for humanity in all its flaws, Brian Morton introduces a constellation of unforgettable characters. Chief among them, Florence, who can humble the fools surrounding her with one barbed line, but who eventually finds there are realities even she cannot outwit.
