Reviews for Empress of Weehawken: A Novel

The average rating for Empress of Weehawken: A Novel based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-01-31 00:00:00 Erica Futral I spend a deal of time driving at the moment, especially at the weekends when my go-to radio station tends to get taken over by commentary and analysis of soccer games and anyway te tum te tum dee doodle dee is fine for quick ten minute trips but an hour each way, well, it begins to grate. So I decided to at last try to finish this audiobook which was one of our choices for a previous long car journey. We tend to suffer from a strange kind of lethargy when it comes to exchanging CDs: our device holds five, this version consists of eight. Somehow the last three stayed in the box. Unfortunate when you don't remember about swapping the CDs until the car has already been strategically loaded for the return journey so that the boxes of wine are safe. What, you want me to take all that out again? No, don't bother. I must say that Hannelore Hoger is brilliant as the narrator, if we lost interest it was not because of her. The story of three generations of a mixed Jewish-Catholic immigrant family was absorbing, shot through with humour, revealing of the dichotomy between the values of that old way of life and the brashness and glamour of the new. Irene Dische tells the story of her own family through the voice of the grandmother: this gets a little hokey when granny has to describe her own death, and once she's dead and speaking from inside the grave, she eventually loses interest in the further career of her granddaughter (who really did work with Louis Leakey) so that the last couple of CDs turn into a catalogue of characters dying off. A six CD changer would have been ideal.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-03-22 00:00:00 Kevin Frederick This was a horrible story based on the life of the author's grandmother. What I thought would be a delightful fish out of water tale ended up being a truly disturbing story full of bigotry. No one in this story comes off as sympathic, best to not even bother with it.