Rating: 
Summary: Alternately engaging and annoying
Review: A certain smugness pervades the pages of "Morningside Heights," Cheryl Mendelson's paean to life on the Upper West Side. I picked up the book in the hopes that it would evoke the late Laurie Colwin, but I was disappointed. In the end, I felt that the self-absorption and entitlement of the ostensible protagonist, the stock supporting characters, and the utter predictability of the storyline made the second half of the novel drag and chafe. It's too bad, because there's a lot of intelligence here and I enjoyed the first chapter, which focuses more on the neighborhood than on any of the characters. But overall the book's tone of entitlement and pretension and its psychoanalytic fervor grated on me while the characters failed to sufficiently engage.
Rating: 
Summary: a great read for a Fall day
Review: a wonderful work of fiction of life on the Upper West Side.
Rating: 
Summary: Bright little parable of how life ought to be
Review: Although lapses in research usually bother me a lot, in this case I was entirely drawn in by the parabolic nature of this novel. Succinctly, this is a story of how circumstances sometimes intervene to save us from bad choices. It helps, the author heavily implies, if we have been living true to the North Star of our own hearts. The outcome is uncommonly optimistic, even rather far-fetched. If I am prepared to suspend disbelief for the sake of a too-happy ending, then I suppose I can do so as well for an imaginary performance of Don Giovanni. The characters are interesting, their predicaments far from banal, and the author puts in a nice plug for the subversive idea that homemaking (or its absence) forms adults in ways we seldom admit.
Rating:
Summary: The lives and loves of New York sophisticates.
Review: Cheryl Mendelson, in her first novel, "Morningside Heights," focuses on the various crises that befall a group of friends and neighbors living on the West Side of Manhattan. Charles and Anne Braithwaite's problems are mostly financial. They spend more money than they take in on their three children's music lessons and tuition, gourmet foods, and maintenance charges on their cooperative apartment. Charles is an opera singer who has never achieved stardom, and Anne has given up her career as a pianist to be a stay-at-home mom.Charles and Anne have a motley crew of friends, such as the neurotic Merrit, a beautiful and scholarly woman who undermines her chances at happiness by always falling for the wrong men. She has always had a special enmity for a scientist friend of the Braithwaites named Morris, and Morris unexpectedly becomes a part of her life when he moves into the Braithwaite's building. "Morningside Heights" is a psychological and sociological look at a group of quirky, self-absorbed, well-educated, and sophisticated urbanites who have a tendency to overdramatize the events in their lives. Although the characters are lively enough, Mendelson's writing style is stilted and her dialogue does not ring true. Mendelson also goes into each character's rambling inner thoughts in detail, and these passages are often more tedious than enlightening. There are some plot twists involving the estate of an elderly neighbor and Merrit's tortuous love life, but these surprises are not enough to save the book from its own pretentiousness.
Rating:
Summary: The lives and loves of New York sophisticates.
Review: Cheryl Mendelson, in her first novel, "Morningside Heights," focuses on the various crises that befall a group of friends and neighbors living on the West Side of Manhattan. Charles and Anne Braithwaite's problems are mostly financial. They spend more money than they take in on their three children's music lessons and tuition, gourmet foods, and maintenance charges on their cooperative apartment. Charles is an opera singer who has never achieved stardom, and Anne has given up her career as a pianist to be a stay-at-home mom. Charles and Anne have a motley crew of friends, such as the neurotic Merrit, a beautiful and scholarly woman who undermines her chances at happiness by always falling for the wrong men. She has always had a special enmity for a scientist friend of the Braithwaites named Morris, and Morris unexpectedly becomes a part of her life when he moves into the Braithwaite's building. "Morningside Heights" is a psychological and sociological look at a group of quirky, self-absorbed, well-educated, and sophisticated urbanites who have a tendency to overdramatize the events in their lives. Although the characters are lively enough, Mendelson's writing style is stilted and her dialogue does not ring true. Mendelson also goes into each character's rambling inner thoughts in detail, and these passages are often more tedious than enlightening. There are some plot twists involving the estate of an elderly neighbor and Merrit's tortuous love life, but these surprises are not enough to save the book from its own pretentiousness.
Rating:
Summary: Really love the first half- can't make myself read past it!
Review: I've tried to read this book FIVE times, now, and am seriously frustrated that I can't seem to get past the first half of it. The first chapter is so beautifully written and so promising, but as the story develops, Mendelson tries to do more with her characters than her matter-of-fact, removed tone allows. I would like it better if the story stayed focused on the Braithwaite family instead of getting into their friends, who make a weak side-plot. Her writing is definitely more exact and convincing than many contemporary works, and up till the second half the book really flows well. After that, though, the story just becomes tedious. I don't think I'll try it a sixth time, but I do plan to try to second book in this trilogy.
Rating:
Summary: More, please!
Review: Thank goodness this is just the first book of a planned trilogy. Once you meet the Braithwaites in this, Mendelson's first detour into fiction, you will want more and more of them, their family, and their extended circle of friends. Delightful Manhattan neighborhood ambiance, urban optimism, marital stress...what's not to love?
Less than great literature, but way more than a good beach read.
Rating:
Summary: A trilogy? Puhleeze!!
Review: The people who populate Morningside Heights do not seem very real. They have absolutely no financial sense; they live in New York in fabulous rent controlled apartments; they shop at stores from movies (but wear hand me down coats); they have jobs that I didn't really think existed (opera singers?); they discourse on topics that I never thought people really talked about. Nevertheless, whether this is true fantasy, or there are real people like this out there somewhere, this is an interesting if slow moving book because of the setting and true fantasy of people living in New York in an apartment. I hope that her style changes in the next two books. It is very stilted and slow moving. I get the sense that she is writing down to her readers. She seems to envision her readers as yokels reading the book while smoking corncob pipes in the outhouse and certainly not sophisticated enough to mix with her characters.
Rating:
Summary: Really love the first half- can't make myself read past it!
Review: The reviewer who noted that Cheryl Mendelson entered the rarified world of Laurie Colwin with this novel hit the nail squarely on the head. Mendelson goes Colwin one better though by adding a mystery to this study of a circle of Manhattan friends and acquaintances. Anne and Charles Braithwaite are living a life under pressure of the forces of capitalism. Their apartment and belongings take on the air of genteel decay while they stuggle ever more to meet tuition payments for tony private schools and music education for their three children. An unexpected (or was it?) fourth pregnancy threatens to cut the very fragile thread keeping their household together. Finding both strength and exasperation in their friends, families and belief systems, Anne and Charles confront the unspoken contract of their marriage while trying to maintain their intellectual and, to their view, moral superiority of their way of life.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful Story to Draw You In
Review: The reviewer who noted that Cheryl Mendelson entered the rarified world of Laurie Colwin with this novel hit the nail squarely on the head. Mendelson goes Colwin one better though by adding a mystery to this study of a circle of Manhattan friends and acquaintances. Anne and Charles Braithwaite are living a life under pressure of the forces of capitalism. Their apartment and belongings take on the air of genteel decay while they stuggle ever more to meet tuition payments for tony private schools and music education for their three children. An unexpected (or was it?) fourth pregnancy threatens to cut the very fragile thread keeping their household together. Finding both strength and exasperation in their friends, families and belief systems, Anne and Charles confront the unspoken contract of their marriage while trying to maintain their intellectual and, to their view, moral superiority of their way of life.
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