I had heard good things about Meg Wolitzer, so when I stumbled on her book The Position as a good deal on Amazon (and let's be honest here, most of my ebooks are based on being on sale on Amazon for $2-4 apiece), I grabbed it. It's the story of a family, told through the eyes of the husband/father, the 4 kids, and the wife/mother. The premise is that the husband and wife made wrote a sex book that was a huge bestseller, and the kids stumble upon it in their bookshelf on one slow suburban weekend that changes them all.
Now, this sex book is not just any sex book. It's called Pleasuring, and it contains not only descriptions of almost any heterosexual position or kink they could think of (and they did a lot of research, a LOT), but it also features illustrations of the couple themselves in the positions they are writing about. So the kids stumble not just on a book their parents wrote about sex, but on actual drawings of the sex, complete with the occasional bondage implement or white go-go boot (it was the 1970s).
Now the kids are grown and trying to make their own ways in the world, and the parents have divorced. As they each struggle to come to terms with their own failings and struggles, they realize that the family has to come back together to survive.
I'd heard great things about Wolitzer's style of writing, and while I found it enjoyable, it didn't sing to me in a way that some authors' works do. But maybe it was because I found the premise distracting. I grew up in that sort of lazy suburb, albeit in the Midwest, and I could sympathize with that idea that some days just change your life in ways you can't completely recover from. I couldn't help but wonder what I would have been thinking had that been my parent's office, my parent's bookshelf, my parent's sex. Or maybe it's just that I really didn't like the wife/mother character and struggled to understand why men became so enthralled by her. So I'm hoping that this is not her best work. From what I've heard, I'm right about that.
Would I recommend Meg Wolitzer to a friend? Yes. Would I recommend this one? Probably not, unless they need something a little dark and twisty. Just a little. So I will feel a little uneasy about her until another of her books hits the Amazon sales pages and I get another taste.