Braided Lives - Softcover

"This book demonstrates the maturation of Piercy's native talent for story-telling . . . we would have to look to a French writer like Colette or to American writers of another generation, like May Sarton, to find anyone who writes as tenderly as Piercy about life's redeeming pleasures – sex, of course, but also the joys of good food, good conversation, and the reassuring little rituals like feeding the cats, watering the plant, weeding the garden."  —Judith Paterson, Washington Post Book World

"A delicious binge of a book. I had a wonderful time reading Braided Lives, crying real tears at the sad parts and feeling real elation at the happy ones."  —San Francisco Chronicle

"Braided Lives is a big, rich book. This writer just gets better and better. She is allowing more flashes of humor and more generosity . . . her sure novelist's hold on making a good story, her poet's eye for careful detail . . . Braided Lives is a novel that tries not to simplify but to clarify . . . and by so doing, it adds a great deal to our understanding of how things came to be as they are, and what some of yesterday might have meant."  —Marcie Hershman, Boston Globe

"Honest and impressive power. No writer I know of has so thoroughly explored the changing, despairing, frightening, and complicated world of a young college girl becoming a woman."  —Washington Post Book World

"A magnificent achievement. With beauty and mastery, [Piercy] palpably creates, recreates a decade. Braided Lives is one of those rare, rich, valuable books that reveal how realities, class, sex, one's times—shape generations."  —Tillie Olsen

"Marge Piercy is the political novelist of our time. More: she is the conscience."  —Marilyn French

"Absorbing. Marge Piercy recreates the college campus of the fifties with all the desire, confusion, hypocrisy, and pain of young women's emerging sexuality."  —Alix Kates