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A Dangerous Age: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Ellen Gilchrist
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Category: Book
List Price: $23.95
Buy Used: $1.95
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Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 318636
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 245
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.7 x 1.1
ISBN: 1565125428
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781565125421
ASIN: 1565125428
Publication Date: May 13, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Ellen Gilchrist is one of America's most celebrated and respected authors, a classic writer in the tradition of Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and Elizabeth Spencer. The author of more than twenty books, she was awarded the National Book Award for her short story collection Victory Over Japan. Now, with her first novel in more than a decade, she returns in top form.
A Dangerous Age tells the story of the women of the Hand family, three cousins in a Southern dynasty rich with history and tradition who are no strangers to either controversy or sadness. By turns humorous and heartbreaking, the novel is a celebration of the strength of these women, and of others like them. In her characteristically clear and direct prose, with its wry, no-nonsense approach to the world and the people who inhabit it, Gilchrist gives voice to women on a collision course with a distant war that, in truth, is never more than a breath away.
As the Washington Post has said, "To say that Ellen Gilchrist can write is to say that Placido Domingo can sing. All you need to do is listen."
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 a little heavy-handed May 9, 2008
Pricey (Maine)
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
I have been a big fan of Ellen Gilchrist for 25 years, I've read and enjoyed all her books but I found this one a big disappointment. To me, it seemed like a political polemic thinly disguised as a novel. We want to read about how the political climate affects the lives of the characters or how they feel about what's happening, not read page after page of their political views. Not much character development or plot, lots of proselytizing.
 Just not my cup of tea May 2, 2008
Terry Mathews (a small town in east Texas)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
"A Dangerous Age" was my first Ellen Gilchrist book.
While I'm all for realism and non-Hollywood endings, this story about how the Iraq war impacts the lives of three women left an unpleasant aftertaste. Maybe that's what the author wanted.
Living in the Washington, D.C. area, Winifred Hand has been adrift since her fiance was killed on 9/11. Her cousin Louise meets, beds and marries a young marine, himself a cousin of Winifred's dead fiance.
Just when you think this book is going to center around Winifred and Louise, Gilchrist takes her readers to Tulsa where she introduces us to their black sheep cousin, Olivia, a tough-as-nails newspaper editor who is forced to change her view of the war. She revisits a first love, only to find loss of another kind.
There was something just a bubble off plum about this book. While the writing style is solid, the plot feels incomplete.
 Great Dry Wit June 26, 2008
Mary Lins (Houston, TX USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Ellen Gilchrist's latest novel "A Dangerous Age" was made especially enjoyable to me because of her dry wit. I laughed out loud several times, and while there is certainly tragedy in this novel, it is by no means a "tragic novel".
In the character of Olivia (arguably the main character) we explore how opinions and convictions can change once you have some "skin in the game". I didn't feel that Olivia's questions about the war in Iraq were a political statement by Gilchrist, but rather a mirror of the uncertainty that many of us feel. What is right? Do I even know? CAN I even know? Those are legitimate, often unanswerable, questions.
"A Dangerous Age" was a quick, interesting and enjoyable read.
 Gilchrist proves again why she is one of today's premier storytellers! May 7, 2008
BookWoman/BookMan TV REVIEWS (Nashville, Tn United States)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"The long wait was absolutely worth it. Gilchrist proves again why she is one of today's premier storytellers. We could not put A Dangerous Age down, the story of the women of the Hand family - Olivia, Winifred and Louse - are sure to be the plot of a movie very soon."
Asymmetric July 12, 2008
Heather A. Conrad
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Not having read Ellen Gilchrist before, I was expecting something more literary from A Dangerous Age. The novel opens with Louise narrating life-changing incidents in casual, wry prose. Major events tumble out, one per paragraph, told in a cavalier, almost absurdist tone. Then suddenly Louise's cousin Olivia de Havilland Hand takes over the narrative and becomes the main voice and character for the rest of the novel. More thoughtful and sincere, Olivia is a newspaper editor and much of the story is a vehicle for her views on the Iraq war.
As it turns out, all the primary characters in the story are female cousins who marry men serving in Iraq. This coincidental situation has the effect of both 1) seeming artificial and propagandistic; 2) driving home the legitimate point that for military families the Iraq war is an all-consuming experience and totally different than for most of the people in the U.S.
Olivia is pro-Bush and for the war, yet critical of some of its aspects and may ultimately be against the war. One cousin questions the war, another signs a letter "your flag-waver cousin". Although full of politics, what point the author is making politically, other than relativism, is ambiguous.
A Dangerous Age is skillfully written and deceptively casual; describing many mundane details of life in moments of crisis or profound change add a surface realism, but also a lack of drama. I found the novel quite readable but not compelling.
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