"The Love Children is valuable in its exploration and depiction of the many ways in which gender can still be a limitation, even within a supposedly more enlightened society."—Bust Magazine
Marilyn French's 1977 novel The Women's Room epitomized the feminist movement and became one of the most influential books of our time. Now, in her last novel, she has captured the complexities of life for the daughters of The Women's Room generation in her highly anticipated new novel The Love Children.
It is the late 1960s in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Grateful Dead is playing on the radio and teenagers are wearing long hair and blue jeans. Jess Leighton, the daughter of a temperamental painter and a proto-feminist Harvard professor, is struggling to make sense of her world amid racial tensions, Vietnam War protests, and anti-government rage. With more options than her mother's generation, but no role model for creating the life she desires, Jess experiments with sex and psychedelic drugs as she searches for happiness on her own terms. In the midst of joining and fleeing a commune, growing organic vegetables, and operating a sustainable restaurant, Jess grapples with the legacy of her mother's generation.
Marilyn French is the author of The Women's Room, In the Name of Friendship, and From Eve to Dawn, a four-volume series of women's history throughout the world.
