Books - Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--And the Journey of a Generation

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Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--And the Journey of a Generation

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Customer Reviews
Rating:

- Where was the Editor?
I was so excited to hear about this book, however, after slogging through 91 pages, I am giving up. I am sure there are gems of information somewhere in here but I am unwilling to look any further. It's as if someone published the first draft with no editing . . . ever. I find myself laughing outloud at the sentence structure and the length of those sentences; having to backtrack and re-read a passage to get the meaning. It is hard to know sometimes when Ms. Weller is talking about which singer, although having a different typeset for each individual is helpful, if a bit of an affectation. Save your money and wait until it comes out in video form; at least then there will be lots of pictures and music to go with the information.

Rating:

- "It's (Not) Too Late, Baby..."
A marvelous blending of the life stories of three women who came of age at the beginning of the feminist movement, but who came from very different places. Carole, a young bride and mother from Brooklyn, Joni from distant Canada, and Carly from upper-middle class New York.

They each have a major issue to come to terms with: for Carole, it was life after the smashing success of Tapestry; for Joni, it was the struggle to stay true to her art while remaining relevant in the record universe (as well as coping with putting her baby up for adoption); and for Carly, it was being taken seriously given her privileged upbringing and living with James Taylor's addiction. The resolution of these issues, and their quest to find a comfortable place for their work in the middle-aged world, make for an excellent read.

The paths they took and the times they lived through are fascinating for those of us who came after and should be read by young women today who really don't have a sense of how far women have come since the 1960s.

Packed with detail, the book is at times awkward to read (too many dashes, parentheses and footnotes!), but when you overlook the poor editing, it is hard to put down.

Rating:

- Filled with love, couldn't put down
This book is intelligent, cogent, and suffused with affection and empathy for these remarkable women and the era they lived through. Every page brought a new revelation. Sometimes you laughed, sometimes you wanted to cry. They lived grand lives to match their music, and the author got it, year by year by year. By the time it ended, I felt I'd re-lived those years and understood what hardy, hearty souls these talented women were and are. Bravo.

Rating:

- Painful
Let me begin by giving credit where credit is due: this is a great idea for a book, and if you were going to write a book like this, I can't imagine assigning a researcher with any more zeal than Sheila Weller.
Unfortunately, the poor woman simply can not write.
Having grown up in the era described, the forced veneer of social commentary contained nothing new to me, but could be instructive for those of a more tender age. But having grown up in the era described, I can tell you that the three subjects of this book had little if any commonality in terms of either their music, or their relation to the youth/feminist cultural awakening.
I don't want to belabor the point, but Ms. Weller must understand that there is no extra credit awarded for the greatest number of parenthetical statements, unsubstantiated conclusions, or incredibly bloated sentences.
As has been stated in another review, the ultimate crime here is the absence of an editor--at least one familiar with the English language. The underlying structure of the book is all wrong; contined forced lurches between the three subjects is literary whiplash. The reader is much better off streaming together every third chapter to link the story of one of the individual singers. It is honestly difficult to believe that anyone associated with a sub-brand of Simon and Shuster really read this.
Which leads to my personal conspiracy theory. Given that Carly Simon's father was one half of that publishing house, I can imagine a conversation in which the author pitched her idea for a book on Mitchell and King to an editor who answered, "not unless you also include Richard's kid--and if you do, we'll agree to print every last thing you put in your rough draft."
And they did.

Rating:

- Needs a good edit!
If ever a book needed a good edit; this is it. The book reads like a history of the music business as well as a history of the times, but the way the author structures it, she makes it extremely difficult to keep track of all the players in the lives of the three main protagonists.

Honestly, I wanted to enjoy this book and I did find many of the anecdotes interesting, but I couldn't possibly recommend this to anyone because I know it ends up reading more like an assignment. What a disappointment!

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