Charlotte SilverCritiques

Bennington girls may be easy, but making a life and a living in NYC after graduation is brutally hard. That's the picture author Charlotte Silver gives us of main characters Sylvie and Cassandra, two Cambridge, MA natives who attend liberal, artsy, free-spirited Bennington in VT and try to make a go of it in the big city. In addition to the main characters, we meet several other women and men who also went to Bennington. All of them faltering and failing in their jobs (I can't even use the word "career" and their love lives) as we follow them even 10 years after graduation.

Perhaps their failures are due to environment; "What a racket New York City was, when you really thought about it,"; perhaps their education and upbringing; "Bennington alumni were a remarkably nonresilient lot,"; or perhaps Silver is making some sort of wider commentary about how the current economy is affecting millenials with liberal arts (vs. technical or scientific) degrees.

The misfortunes of the characters don't garner much sympathy from the reader. The characters have few redeeming qualities. They're narcissitic, dishonest, conniving, lack a work ethic, and so on.

I kept going back and forth on whether or not I actually liked the book. Observations about Cambridge, NYC, Brooklyn, etc. were funny and spot-on. The characters themselves were so loathsome, it almost seemed like Silver was trying too hard to make them banal. 2.5 stars rounded up to 3.

Thank you to NetGalley and Doubleday for a galley of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Bennington Girls Are Easy is about two best friends, and their wider circle of college friends. Actually, it’s about living in the city right after college.

Would definitely recommend, but don’t expect a cheery adventure about college girlfriends making in the big city, though. That NetGalley blurb is a bit misleading. Instead, this novel is a blunt and somewhat dark look at sex, money, social class, and the evolution of college friendships in adulthood.

Reed my full review

She's Got Books on Her Mind

"I grew up rich. The setting—or stage set—of my childhood was the velvety pink-and-green dining room of my mother's restaurant, Upstairs at the Pudding, located above the Hasty Pudding Club in a red-brick Victorian building at 10 Holyoke Street in Harvard Square. My life was not a child's life of jungle gyms and Velcro sneakers, but of soft lighting, stiff petticoats, rolling pins smothered in flour, and candied violets in wax paper. It was a life of manners, of air kisses, of "How do you dos," and a life for which I needed six party dresses a year, three every spring and three every winter. We were rich. Everybody knew it.

Yet we were not; we were not rich at all. For as long as I could remember, the restaurant had tottered on the brink of collapse. I always knew we would lose it one day. And we did lose it; we did."

Charlotte grew up in a world filled with all manners of fancy things. In a little girl's eyes growing up in a restaurant like Upstairs at the Pudding was simply a wonderful dream that you didn't want to wake up from. Who wouldn't want to grow up at Upstairs at the Pudding when you are able to eat dessert whenever you want, stay up late with the grownups, be coddled by the staff, and best of all you get to wear the prettiest (preferably pink) dresses. But not everything's right in Charlotte's world. As she grows up things start to change. Her parents' divorce, the staff who were once her friends start to leave, and even her namesake, Charlotte au Chocolat, is disappearing from the menu. Everything is changing and only after the fact does she realize what the restaurant, her mother, and her childhood really meant to her life.

I really enjoyed reading about Charlotte's childhood. It wasn't just her childhood... but for the most of the book it was. At first it was all glitz and glam but like you know from the quote above on the very first page Charlotte told you how it was. I actually forgot about how the restaurant would inevitably close down because I had immersed myself so much in the here and now of the story. And what a story it was. Charlotte described her childhood in a way where it was like she was someone else. All wise but not out of touch with what was going on with her life. It's like she was reflecting on her life while she was telling her story. Her "voice" was one of the most recognizable things that I remember about this book.

In Charlotte's world people could be put into two groups. You are either a front room person which means you are like the glitz and the glamour of the restaurant or you are a kitchen person which means you are the backbone and rough, raw passion of the restaurant. We are all labeled as something or put into categories by someone else one way or another. I see people in different ways just like other people do and like Charlotte does which she got from her mother. It was interesting to read about her view on different people. I could never quite get who front people were. I understand kitchen people. They are easy to understand. They are the strugglers, the hard workers. I liked her description of her view on different types of people because well... I liked how she described everything! I love the way she wrote and this is a perfect example of how she writes. In that wise, and awareness type of tone. I feel like she's in her head a lot and is an observer of the world which I've always felt I am like.

"When I was a small child, I associated my parents with individual flavors. It was the same way you might filter someone through a filter of color - thinking of some people in blues, other people in reds - but instead of color, the sensation I latched on to was flavor. My mother's flavors were always those of the desserts she made - suave caramels and milk chocolates and the delicate, utterly feminine accents of crystallized violets or buttery almonds. But my father's flavors - my father's flavors were something else altogether. They were subtle and elusive and melted on the tongue only to vanish before you could place them. Dark, adult flavors, and slightly bitter: veal carpaccio, silvery artichokes. And, most of all, mushrooms: chanterelles, chicken of the woods, and - my father's favorite mushroom of all - trumpets of death."

Charlotte even categorized her parents which is funny because I think about my parents and who they are. I see obvious differences but I also see obvious similarities. It's like when you see a couple together for a long time. They just fit together. Charlotte's parents did not. Her mother was this very stylish woman who was very... strict in a way. She was just tough about emotions. She's the type of person who probably expresses her love not by words, hugs, or kisses, but by food and advice. I never really liked her but I couldn't say I full out hated her or anything like that. I think it was the resolution in the end. This scene she and Charlotte had together. Charlotte felt resolved after it but I really didn't like what her mother had to say. Her tough attitude wasn't needed then.

Her father is a rough type of person. I don't really think he's the loud type of person which I first envisioned in my head for him. He's more reserved and secretive which you and Charlotte come to know. After the divorce you figure out who he really is. He photographed brooms and other weird still life. I was as confused by him as Charlotte was. He's completely different than what you expect. Around the time you are discovering what he really is like you get to know the downsides of owning a restaurant. There's this sad undertone to the book but it's not like you feel overly sad or anything. It's just there. I'm guessing I didn't feel it as much because again how Charlotte wrote her story. It was a closed off view of her life which means you didn't feel overly emotional about those parts in her life. I did feel connected to the story though and couldn't help relaxing into and discovering what's going to happen next.

The whole story reminded me of the 1950's. You've got what seems like a great life that you wish you had because this book seriously makes you hungry whenever you just look at the cover and you want to stuff a whole cake into your mouth... Anyways there is this credit building up and you act like it's not there but for Charlotte she didn't even know. She didn't know there was a price to her life. It's not like her mother was intentionally wasting money she just wanted the best for her restaurant and life and just like any restaurant it can close down. It's like how when you realize the concept of money and then you fully realize what it takes to feed a family and live in a home. It's her growing up and realizing these things like we all do. It captured those moments in our life where we grow up and your view of everything is different from what you felt the world was like as a child. This book reminded me of all those things but mainly it reminded me of why I love memoirs. I want to read more memoirs again because of this book more importantly more food memoirs.

Overall:

Fantastic writing, great story and characters. Loved that I could get a sample of the restaurant world through this book especially when I think of all that food. The transition of childhood to adult and figuring out how the real world is was wonderful because we can all relate to those changes. Only thing is that scene with her mother in the end. I didn't feel like her story should have been resolved with that scene like I felt it was made out to be.

Grew up in her mother's restaurant "Upstairs at Pudding" in Cambridge
Rich/traded everything — glamorous dresses to wear there — interesting light read — other side of Kitchen Confidential

Charlotte Silver grew up in her mother's restaurant. Located in Harvard Square, Upstairs at the Pudding was a confection of pink linen tablecloths and twinkling chandeliers, a decadent backdrop to a childhood. Over dinners of foie gras and Dover sole, always served with a Shirley Temple and often candied violets for dessert, Charlotte kept company with a rotating cast of eccentric staff members. And after dinner, in her frilly party dress, she might catch a nap under the bar until closing. Her one constant was her glamorous, indomitable mother--nicknamed "Patton in Pumps" by one line cook--a wasp-waisted woman forever clad in stilettos and cocktail dresses who shouldered the burden of raising a family and running a kitchen after her husband left.

I know that this book is really a satire of rich private school girls after college. However, all the characters were so vapid I did not find any humor in the book. My thought throughout this book is that if these characters are based on real people the world is screwed! Then it seems to end in nothingness. Not sure why I stuck with this. I think I was waiting for it to get better.

More like a 3.5 but I did enjoy it and it was a quick read.

More like a 3.5 but I did enjoy it and it was a quick read.

More like a 3.5 but I did enjoy it and it was a quick read.

I did not like this book. I think Charlotte Silver intended to do for Bennington College what Mary McCarthy did for Vassar in The Group or Sigrid Nunez for Barnard College in The Last of Her Kind: to use an elite, private, originally women-only college as both the hothouse spawning intense female friendships and the launching pad to "real life" in the big city. She has failed. Instead, she has given us two pretentious caricatures who are neither witty nor amusing, but simply unlikeable, wrapping them in overblown, unintentionally parodic prose. In place of a "dark and stormy night," we have "the golden-green wilds of adolescence" and "sweet pangs of nostalgia."

Of her two main characters, Sylvie and Cassandra, we are clearly meant to prefer Cassandra, yet what reader could care about this woman:

"Today, Sylvie and Quinn were sitting together, doing pastel chalk drawings on the pavement. Cassandra, seeing them, thought: Oh God, am I going to have to sit on the ground? This babysitting business sometimes got a little too rugged for her, even as a spectator. She looked down at her shapely navy blue dress - much more chic than black on a spring afternoon - worn to show off her figure to Professor Sobel. It was going to be difficult to kneel in that dress without the fabric tugging."

In the right hands, self-centered characters can nevertheless be charming, but they need a more down-to-earth foil if they are to avoid becoming cartoonish (think Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited). Those hands are not Silver's; her Bennington girls may be easy, but they are not funny.

I received a free copy of Bennington Girls Are Easy through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

She tried to make her mother sound fascinating, but,sadly, the mother never did anything unusual at all. The unusual parent was the father who made few appearances after age 6.

I really wanted to like this more than I did. The writing is good, the story is interesting and yet I found it really easy to put down for several days at a time. And where are the recipes? The author talks about several interesting dishes - red pepper soup, Charlotte au Chocolate, Brioche doughnuts, etc. It would have been nice to have included those recipes.½

Absolutely charming.

This book had potential to be a great read, but it fell flat. I imagine that told from her mother's perspective it would be very compelling. As it were this book reads like an adult has edited a child's diary using better vocaulary. None of the characters were developed, which led to a parade of bland characters. The redundancy of naming favorite foods over and over made me wonder who edited this book, and mentioning that there was a brother in the family, yet ignoring him almost completely leaves the reader unsatisfied with the incomplete attention to the family dynamic.

A wistful visit to times gone by in Harvard Square tells the story of Charlotte Silver and the place where she felt most at home. In an interview with The Boston Globe, Ms. Silver said, "This is not a portrait of a woeful or dysfunctional childhood. …It's not a vengeful memoir or an angry memoir. It's really a portrait about the romanticism of childhood, about the very special and romantic state of being a child and the special things a child can observe." Yes, indeed.

I received this book for free as part of a first reads promotion