Forbidden Notebook | 
pick4/5 🌟
This novel explores womanhood and motherhood through the eyes of a woman who secretly keeps a diary. Writing late at night, she's anxious that her family might find it, feeling ashamed of her private thoughts. As she journals, she begins to question her values, family dynamics, and sense of self.
A thought-provoking and engaging read.
I haven‘t posted a #BookOutlet haul in a while. 😠The top few are (mainly) for my 12 year-old, although I may read some of them before she gets around to it.
pickExcellent. I suspect I will be thinking about this one for a long time.
#Top23of23 Part 2
pickIt's been years since I've read Virginia Woolf but, within sentences, The Forbidden Notebook brought me back to Mrs. Dalloway, to A Room of One's Own, and that impression never left. The first two-thirds of this novel are compulsively readable. Changing the last third is unthinkable; it would be a far less powerful text if it read any differently. Still, the task became grueling. You always want the best for your protagonist. Alas...
pickThis was very engrossing. Such a great look into a middle aged European woman 70 years ago. She grabbles with her own rich emotions and opinions, while maintaining a strict societal code. She sees in her daughter a new freer generation - a freedom her son looks to thwart. She is relevant to all as a mother, wife, housekeeper, secretary, but seemingly not as an independent thinker. Recommend!
pickVery good. So glad this has been rediscovered and newly, brilliantly translated after being out of print for decades. Originally published as a serial in an Italian weekly magazine 1950-51, I kept thinking about how this must have spoke to the women reading it then. The diary format feels so intimate. Even today, it can be a radical act for a wife and mother to seek privacy, autonomy, time and space to write and reflect on life. Highly recommend!
My Mother‘s Day presents. Kids know me so well 💕 I am super excited about the tagged one, that @batsy and @merelybookish wrote such fabulous reviews about! And I loved another book by Ben Winters and am eager to discover a new one!
pickThis book is a gut punch. One Sunday, 43 year-old Valeria, wife, mother, office worker, buys a black notebook that she keeps hidden & writes in on the sly. Her clandestine entries make up the novel. They offer a story of self-discovery as well as the struggle of what to do with that knowledge. First published in Italy in 1952. A tale of the impossibility of women's lives & the danger of finding your writing voice. Sure to be a best of the year!
pickWhat happens when a working wife and mother finds a room of her own in the pages of a notebook and starts writing for the first time? This post-war Italian novel, translated by Ann Goldstein, is brilliant. The style is raw and intimate but expressed with such clarity of thought. The facts of a woman's life laid bare is one aspect, but the thing that disturbs and haunts me is what happens when someone starts writing and thinking about their life.
