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JacqueF

Very good book

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 23, 2023

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I feel in love with this book in my late teens/early 20's. I enjoyed reading it again, now in my early 70's, but I'm not as enamored as I was when I was younger. I found myself unable to read the very long monologues given by Noel and Mike.

Kay Ebeling

What a surprise this was SUCH a good book

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 7, 2023

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I get up in the middle of the night because I can't stop thinking about this story and wanting to read more. I'm surprised at this, because it's about a woman from a very different era from today, so different I thought I'd never relate to her. But I did! You expect her life to go one way but instead it goes off a different way. I just read the last few chapters, my eyes watering, my mouth open going, wow. Wow. Wow. What a story, what wonderful writing. Every character is fully developed and fascinating. Events are drawn out so well you live inside them as you read. I am now going to look for more books by Herman Wouk. PS a 1954 movie was made based on this book and There Needs To Be Another one, a series, that takes you through the entire story leaving nothing out. Wow what a good story.

Greg Williams

Wouk the woman

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 20, 2022

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I wasn’t particularly interested in reading this specific story but after having read Caine Mutiny, Winds of War and War and Remembrance, found myself wanting to read anything by this talented author, who died in 2019 at the age of 103.

This was an interesting read, particularly being that it’s the story of a young woman written by a man. Its further interest is influenced by being a “modern” story published in 1955 about a woman of Jewish heritage. Wouk does a respectable telling of a young Jewish woman’s perspective of life during the pre-WW2 world that reflects that period in an authentic manner.

I’ll have to reflect on this story before I can fully appreciate it but suffice to say, Wouk is a master storyteller.

Sharon D.

Well Written

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 18, 2023

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Not a page turner but it makes you think.

MarlowesMom

A Long, Quaint Story of a Nice Jewish girl

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 2, 2017

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SPOILER ALERT:

What's amazing about 1955's "Marjorie Morningstar" is that author Herman Wouk manages to hold the reader's interest at all--but somehow he does. I can't quite explain it. His artless, cliche-filled prose never says anything in five words when he can take ten. In a single paragraph describing a sunset viewed from the deck of the Queen Mary, the color purple is mentioned three times by various names. Male characters make pages-long philosophizing speeches that repeat themselves so often and reach such trivial conclusions they seem like jokes. Like an impatient child on an overlong car trip, you keep looking to see how many pages remain in this bildungsroman. The attitudes about women and female sexuality are, depending on your point of view, either virtuously old-fashioned or somewhere on a spectrum from laughably quaint to astonishingly sexist.

Marjorie Morgenstern, Wouk's protagonist--I don't think he would want you to call her a heroine--is an indulged young New Yorker from a traditional, ambitious Jewish immigrant family.. She is quite pretty and displays some talent in college and amateur theatricals. Although she has many suitors her parents would gladly see her accept, over her family's objections, she attempts to build a career as an actress on the Broadway stage under the slightly Anglicized name "Marjorie Morningstar" and, in a five-year chase, nail down the devilishly attractive dilettante judge's son Noel Airman (birth name Saul Ehrmann), who dabbles in songwriting, musical theater, the film industry, philosophy and advertising. Noel and Marjorie wrangle repeatedly over whether she will become, and whether she could possibly be happy becoming anything other than, a "Shirley," meaning a traditional Jewish housewife and mother. Noel wrangles with Marjorie and himself about whether he is able or willing to become a "Sidney," meaning a man with a stable career who can support a Shirley and her brood..After several years, with much shame and no ring on her finger, Marjorie gives up her virginity to Noel. She finally wrests a proposal from him, only to realize she doesn't want to marry him after all. Instead, after dreaming all her girlish dreams of stardom and her years of unquenchable passion for the erratic Noel, a good man, a lawyer, marries her even after she confesses she is "damaged goods," i.e., not a virgin, and she raises their four children in a kosher home in an affluent New York suburb. She has become precisely the Shirley she swore she would never be.

Throughout, Wouk makes no secret of his own attitudes: women who don't come virgins to their marriage beds will regret it for the rest of their lives, and women can only know happiness as wives and mothers. To that I can say only, "oy, vey."

David Valentino

For Everyone Who Has Dreamed a Dream

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 19, 2012

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We meet Marjorie Morgenstern as a teenage girl in 1933 with a dream, two dreams really, of stardom in the theater and of romance. We leave her as a woman of the mid 1950s, married, with children and a successful husband and, possibly, one of her dreams fulfilled.

Along the way, Herman Wouk introduces us to an extraordinary cast of characters that include Noel Airman, the elusive, rebellious (against common life and religious tradition) passion of Marjorie's heart; Wally Wronken, for whom Marjorie is a passion; Samson-Aaron, the embarrassing uncle consumed by a passion for life; Mrs. Morgenstern, the demonstrative mother and Mr. Morgenstern, her modestly successful importer father; Marsha Zelenko, her on and off again friend, who marries very well, and her crazy parents; the mysterious Mike Eden, who sells chemicals in Nazi Germany and rescues Jews clandestinely; and various others, among the most notable the sleazy Broadway producer Guy Flamm, who raises Marjorie's hope of becoming the star, Morningstar, only to dash her dreams with reality.

As always, Wouk excels at setting the many scenes in the book: the period and its upper middle class mores, the rituals of life, the proper behavior of young women and men, especially the social constraints on women, the summer camp, the Bar Mitzvah, the wedding, and the theatrical world. Some may find his pacing leisurely, though thoughtful readers will discern his purpose: painting a detailed portrait of the period between the onset of the Great Depression and the start of World War II. While all the characters are Jewish, the values of the Morgenstern, Ehrmann, and even Zelenko families reflect those of the times.

Readers will find several scenes particularly good, enlightening, and filled with humor, often riotous. Wouk writes comedy very well and you'll find yourself shaking with laughter reading about the Bar Mitzvah party, the most incredible Seder ever, disrupted by the antics of Neville the Devil, the summer camp South Winds, and the wedding.

In the end, as we all realize from the beginning, Marjorie marries and settles into a comfortable, expected and accepted upper middle class life as the wife of a successful man. Modern readers may wonder how such an intelligent and ambitious young woman could end up a 1950s stereotype. Yet, in this too, Wouk provides an accurate rendering of the period, for countless thousands of women with dreams followed in Marjorie's footsteps. Then came the 1960s and with it social revolution for American women.

Top reviews from other countries

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Egni

War ganz nett.

Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on August 1, 2013

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Das Buch liest sich ganz gut, obwohl es stellenweise doch sehr langatmig ist. Es vermittelt einen Eindruck vom Leben jüdischer Familien in Amerika zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts. Für meinen Geschmack hätte das Buch wesentlich kürzer sein dürfen.
Die junge Marjorie, die dem Traum nachjagt, Schauspielerin zu werden, verliebt sich in einen jungen Songwriter. Weder die Liebe noch der Traum werden Wirklichkeit.

Chrissy Frost

Actress in love

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 8, 2019

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Modern day feminists should read Marjorie Morningstar for a peek at how far the lives of women have evolved since the 1930s. The novel is a real time trip - written in the 50s and set in the 30s. The story follows Marjorie Morgenstern, a beautiful young Jewish woman from NYC who decides to buck the trend by pursuing an acting career instead of marrying an Ivy league boy, moving to New Rochelle and having lots of babies. Her parents are horrified and even more so when she falls for a rather feckless composer of popular music whom she meets whilst working at a summer camp. Most of the narrative follows the story of Marjorie's romantic ups and downs with the rakish and unreliable Noel Airman and her determination to become an actress in spite of many unsuccessful theatrical forays. Because this book was written just post-1930s (not written by a modern author trying to recapture the moment) it is a true glimpse into the social norms of that time. When you have finished this book you will have no choice but to think, "We've come a long way baby."

Susan Best

Marjorie Morningstar revisited

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 13, 2013

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I first read this book about 40 years ago - unbelievable! It was the first Herman Wouk novel I'd read. I've just finished re-reading it, as the book made a great impression on me as a young girl and I'd often thought about it. Re-reading it at a more mature age gave me a different perspective on the principal characters (in fact on all the characters), but I loved the book as much now as I did all those years ago. I think that although it is set (and was written) in different times, when morals/behaviour and expectations were very different to modern ways of thinking, nonetheless the motives, feelings, emotions, doubts, insecurities and actions are ones that people can relate to just as much today as in previous, more innocent times. The book has it all - a great story, many different themes to engage the reader and is simply unputdownable. I highly recommend it.

c m english

Marjory Morningstar

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 17, 2014

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I remember reading this book almost 40 years ago. I was so engrossed in the story that I read it in one sitting. So many years later the book did not disappoint, I was equally pulled into the life of Margery that it was difficult to come up for air. I love this book, it is easy to relate to the characters, the hopes and dreams of youth and how life has a funny way of dealing out destiny. Great book and a talented author. A true classic.

NICK

A FEMINIST'S NIGHTMARE!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 27, 2017

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The book feminists and freethinkers hate to love: Wouk's irresistible saga of how a lovely, not-quite-talented enough Jewish girl tries to make it as an actress before settling gratefully for marriage, children and love. Unfortunately, the conservative Mr Wouk is an engaging and convincing writer. Should probably be banned!

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