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Title: My Father's Geisha by James Gordon Bennett, Jane Rosenman ISBN: 0-671-74000-8 Publisher: Washington Square Press Pub. Date: December, 1991 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $8.00

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Average Customer Rating: 2 (5 reviews)

Rating: 1
Summary: What am I supposed to take away from this?
Comment: The literary world really doesn't need to be blessed with Mr. Bennett's set of aesthetics. In his debut novel (which I'm told is the "better"-received one of the two he's published, *shudder*) he captures a myriad of banal interactions between two completely ordinary siblings without ever taking the annoying trouble of integrating them in a deep, important plot or characterizing them as anything more than stuck-up brats. Ergo, nothing is novel or interesting about this book that entices you to keep reading it.

It took me only ten pages into it to get everything I needed to know: Teddy's dad is a career military man who will keep disappointing him and end up screwing over his whole family in the end; Cora is an incorrigible brat who is uncapable of emoting anything other than sarcasm; and Teddy is a sad, bitter young man who barely even steps out of his passive role as the observer who surveys the disintegration of his family. That's pretty much all there is to it, and I was none too impressed to find out the 140 other pages were mainly just needless explication, with the author scraping the the bottom of the barrel for lines he must consider "witty" between two essentially unlikeable, pompous main characters.

If you like authors who prefer to write about incidents of seminal interest with flat-as-a-board dialogue and a minimum of any real interplay between characters (as is the case with so many other greenhorns who are keen to write up a mostly unremarkable childhood as the "Great American Novel"), you might be amused by My Father's Geisha. But if you care for the presence of cohesion or suspense, or if you want to sympathize with a story's characters, pass this one up in favor of an experienced author who knows how to compose engaging fiction. Why write a story about a set of completely unremarkable lives if you can't find a way to make them special, or make your readers think about their own?

Rating: 1
Summary: No wonder this is out of print!
Comment: I came across this book quite by accident when someone suggested some "coming of age" books for my teen-aged children. Not only did they find it totally plotless, but pretty pointless as well. These kids are pretty much brats, and we already have too much of that around these days! What happened to novels that have plots? This is a character study at the very best, but the problem is that these characters are not very interesting at all! This author should not write about girls growing up if he does it this badly. Coming of age? I think not!

Rating: 5
Summary: A wonderful book!
Comment: I once used this book for a class on the contemporary novel and the students loved it. When it was released it received terrific reviews from the critics, and rightfully so. It's a terrific coming-of-age story, written lyrically and with unforgettable characters. Cora will go down as one of the most delightful and sympathetic portraits written in contemporary fiction. An absolutely wonderful read! This novel deserves to be back in print.