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nursenell's review against another edition
3.0
I read this in 1978, don't remember it but only found it a 3 star book.
yourfriendtorie's review against another edition
1.0
This book is awful. If the main characters, three friends who meet at Berkeley in the sixties and follow divergent paths through that era, are actually interesting people, this book makes them seem like total idiots. It reads like a trashy romance novel, so that eventually every time a male character enters the story, I could be assured that the event would be followed with "we made love.." Not that there's anything wrong with plentiful sex, but the womens' lives are ultimately supremely directed by the men they supposedly fall "in love" with. I approached the book as a documentation of womens' intimate lives within the counterculture, and so kept telling myself that this was the generation who learned to break with all the bullshit of the traditional gender roles so that my generation would know better. Whenever I got to feeling too disgusted and superior, I would remind myself, a sort of "There but for the grace of whoever.." But the book really just seemed to be about tiresome, bourgeois, privileged white women who don't seem to have anything very meaningful to say.
rhodered's review
5.0
Read it repeatedly as a young woman, although it was about the generation just ahead of mine. It was one of the few places I could see women, who were not in the entertainment industry, making their way through life without immediately coupling up.
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