About this title: Consuelo Camacho Ramos, hospitalized after killing her lover, has been released, but her prospects look bleak. She receives telepathic visits from a genderless individual from the year 2137, who introduces her to a utopian world. Considered mad, she is returned to Bellevue, where she finds the strength to fight her captors and win.
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Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Fawcett
Date Published: 1985
ISBN-13:9780449210826ISBN:0449210820
Description: Acceptable. MAY HAVE COVER WEAR, SPINE CREASES, HIGHLIGHTING, UNDERLINING & PAGES YELLOWED FROM AGE. FASTER SERVICE FROM US! ! ! read more
Description: Acceptable. Former Library book. Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. 044900094X Earlier smaller paperback same content exactly-Aside from newer introduction/Afterward, original text has never changed, Standard Used Condition, some cover wear, different cover, No writing or Highlighting, some minor spine creases, minor age tan-well bound and solid, sold for content. read more
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Fawcett Books
Date Published: 1985
ISBN-13:9780449210826ISBN:0449210820
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Short pen mark on bottom. Name inside. Very light edge and corner wear. Tight, square book. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. 384 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Date Published: 1997
ISBN-13:9780449000946ISBN:044900094X
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Very light edge and corner wear. Notation inside front cover. Tight, square book. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 384 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Like New. Fawcett, PB, 1976, 22nd printing (1991). Appears never read, clean, tight binding, no markings or highlighting, minimal shelf wear. read more
Description: Acceptable. Former Library book. Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
"We are continually making our possible futures... and in this book Marge Piercy explores two conflicting futures. One is a village where manual labor has either been relegated to robots or is cheerfully undertaken by humans who relish being close to the Earth, where people live in small huts but study physics, chemistry, astronomy... their minds and their breadth of knowledge more important than any status symbols or material comforts... where children have three parents, and win their adulthood through a vision quest. This world is visited by a woman who is confined in a state institution for the insane. Eventually she learns that this future world is threatened by a parallel future world... where mind-control has shaped the classes into static, plastic, memories of human beings. And she has the ability to change the outcome..."
"This book took up my every waking hour while I was reading it, and indeed by the end I was having dreams about it too! Unfortunately my unconscious brain is not a good author, and the bits of plot I dreamed were rubbish!
I loved reading about the utopian society, but I didn't read it entirely without misgivings. It was fun to wonder would things be better this or that way, but also I found myself wondering what exactly the author intended at some points. I mean, I know that Connie's observation that the future men were emasculated was not to be trusted when you considered the horrors that she went through in her own time, but I wondered what Piercy intended in showing us Luciente/Diana as a destructive relationship, and also Bolivar/Jackrabbit as one which while not destructive, certainly caused pain for other characters. I know she points out the evil of homophobia elsewhere in the story (poor Skip) but am I really to believe it was a coincidence that two of the main characters had somewhat destructive gay relationships? Anyway, I worried a little about that, but overall the message was clear and Luciente's future was presented in a positive light. One thing I was delighted to see included was initiation rights for teenagers. I have thought for many years that those might sort out a lot of the problems caused by restless and irresponsible teens (and also eliminate the mental anguish a lot of people go through at that age).
Towards the end it built up into a quite a suspenseful action story and I flew towards the end. There was little resolution there, but that certainly made it more open-ended and keeps you thinking about what future we are headed to.
A lot of people are saying in their reviews that this is a book about the nature of sanity and insanity and no doubt it is, but funnily enough it didn't cross my mind that Connie might actually be insane until the last few pages. (Not that it would really matter if she was or not; the bits in the mental hospitals had me practically screaming in rage/fear at the injustice of Connie's plight and the smug, all-knowing air of the various people put in charge of her). Powerful stuff."
"I have gained a lot from utopian novels, and this book is partly that. It is also an intense "showing" of what it's like to be in a mental hospital, the horrific details of which we probably assume, but it's always good to be reminded. When you finish this book, you realize that it's like one of those pictures where looking from one set of eyes, it's a lampshade, but another set of eyes, it's two people. This book is like that. Either the heroine is a violent mental case who should be locked up for the betterment of society, or she is someone who has had a lot of hard luck in her life, ends up in a mental institution against her will, and then she has this whole series of visions of another whole life, in the future. Are those visions real, does she really travel into the future? Or is it all just in her mind? Piercy does a great job with this aspect, as well as outlining a society where people are more equitable, where there is less power-over, where people are empowered and for the most part having a meaningful, creative, rich life, with enough food and love for all. That's why I like utopian novels, they remind us that this all could be different...."
"This book could be good. Could. I have to admit, I read it to page 150 and stopped. The main character is a beat-up and bruised 40 year old Chicana living in New York. She is dead broke poor, has been beaten on and mistreated by men numerous times, and disliked herself so much at one point that she beat her 4 year old daughter (whom she saw as part of herself). She was put in a mental institution numerous times; the second time for smashing in the nose of her niece's pimp after he had beat up her niece. In the mental institution, she dreams that she can access a utopian society in the year 2174(?) via a "sender" living in that time, Luciente. There, she sees what a society that has moved beyond hegemonic gender roles, colonialism, and capitalist competition could be like. The book could be good, if the storyline wasn't so long-winded and unbelievable. Plus, the only really positive male character in the novel is one of Consuelo's dead lovers, who was a blind black blues musician. But he got killed in jail while participating in a Hep-C experiment that could have got him released if it didn't kill him. Unbelievable. Is there anything NICE about 1974, when the book was written? Not according to the author."
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