Interesting Women by Andrea Lee

Interesting Women Reviews

• 
  Tereneh

  Please read this book.
  
  I feel as if Ms Lee has been reading my travel journals. Her insight into the experience of Brown and Black women traveling the world is a reflection of her experience I am sure but also her writer's ability to extend to universal themes and ideas. I love this book. I finished it on the plane and immediately gave it to the 'interesting woman' I met sitting next to me. She was in her 70-80s so stylish I actually complimented her as we were boarding the plane. The fact that she ended up sitting next to me cracked us up, I think we could have been a chapter in this book. Love it.
• 
  Rose

  This book should be called "Interesting [Sex Lives of] Women," or, better, "Interesting [One-Time Sexual Choices Made By Rather Unrelatable] Women." I read the first story and, I admit, just skimmed the rest. In the first story, a woman hires two call girls for her husband, and.... nothing. This book really doesn't explore much of what happened after that, although it does try to explain why she might have made the decision. Then, while she's arranged to have the house to herself--kids gone, husband sleeping with beautiful strangers-- she... does nothing. She goes to bed early, and lies there. And that, my friends, is about as much insight into this choice as we get from the narrator or the author. Maybe this would be more satisfying to someone with a voyageur-type mindset, but for those wanting either plot or character development, I didn't find either. (Maybe if I'd paid more attention to the rest of the stories, I wouldn't have been so disappointed.)
• 
  Dolly

  This is a book that is full of engaging stories, all in a similar vein with common themes, but quite different from one another in the scope and emotions of the story.
  
  I liked it overall, but I was frustrated at the sheer number of "50 cent" words that I had to look up. There were at least 20 words that I'd never even heard of before and I consider myself well read. I hate to use the word pretentious, but there are many times that a more familiar word would have worked just fine. No need to show off. Quondam, matutinal, seigneurial and callipygian are just a few...
  
  
• 
  Nick

  Until I read a review online somewhere that referred to this book as Sex in the City set in Italy, I quite liked it. The author brings us to some truly exotic situations. The lead-off story is about a woman who buys two Brazilian prostitutes for her husband on his birthday. There's another about an American in a showdown of social mores with poor Africans. However, as you churn through all ten or so stories, you'll be wearied by the sameness: Every protagonist is black, Harvard-educated, proud and dismissive of men. The women start out interesting, but end up quite dull.
• 
  Martinxo

  Race, sex, class, Lee is a fine writer and this is a very enjoyable collection of short stories, almost all of them great!
  
  Looking forward to reading more of her work.
• 
  Brie Alsip

  perhaps the most telling detail about how well I enjoyed this book is how long it took me to read its 238 pages. for a group of short stories, I couldn’t tell you any differences amongst the characters in each of them — not even a vaguely euro-coded name!
  
  these women are simply…not interesting. they are all cut from similar cloths and their journeys, while all kinda sorta different, don’t have any substance to them aside from trying to paint a lavish life that’s hollow inside while sprinkling in some good GRE words in the mix.
  
  one good thing this book has is one line — two if you’re lucky and not terribly picky! — in each chapter that is beautifully written without sounding overly pretentious. there’s definitely still some “I’m 14 and this is deep” vibes to some of these lines, but we won’t let that take away the only silver lining I can find to this book.
  
  each story in this collection felt like it was trying to make some grand point that it never guided the reader to. the setup was there for a great revelation to be made, but the payoff never came. a real mirror to how I was set up to think I’d like this book and that turnaround never happened!
  
  overall, if it takes over half a year to finish a book and you have to google more than 3 words in it, it’s probably not going to become a good book after the 4th vocab word googled.
• 
  Niamh

  Dnf - every story is the same (an American woman living in Italy) and felt autofictiony
• 
  Casira

  I was disappointed. I read the first short story, The Birthday Present, and found myself immediately thrown into a cliche. An impossibly rich woman who has perfected the art of being an efficient trophy wife and contented herself with having a domineering husband with occasional infidelities...is a trope I have seen a thousand times over and am endlessly tired of.
  
  It seems like every writer has the same idea about rich women. They try to be perfect, are condescended to, thought little of, but bear it all with what (I suppose) we as readers are to think of as supreme elegance. Like there is something endlessly glamorous about a woman ordering a pair of call girls for her husband to sleep with because she knows that without an adventurous sex life their marriage means very little. (That's not a spoiler - it's in the dust jacket.)
  
  I digress. It wasn't terrible. It was written in that flowery way that all things about rich people are written; with lots of ultimately meaningless detail about architecture and expensive furnishings. I just found myself, within the first few pages, flipping ahead to see how long the story was because I was so immediately bored with it.
  
  In short, it wasn't very interesting.
• 
  Liz

  The stories in this book all fall in the same general category: interesting (duh) upper-middle-class women, usually African-American, living abroad, often in Italy. It's a category I like, but since they're all so topically similar, a few of the stories (that would probably be good on their own) sink a little lower when you read them all at once. But this is always the problem with short story collections, and when I sat down to look at the story list I picked about half as my favorites. To wit:
  "Brothers and Sisters Around the World" (from the New Yorker podcast that turned me on to Andrea Lee), "Interesting Women", "The Birthday Present", "The Prior's Room", "Un Petit d'un Petit", "The Pulpit", "Sicily"
• 
  Arthur Rosenfeld

  I love Lee's work. I only wish there were more of it. I first heard the eponymous story on the New Yorker fiction podcast, and was drawn in. I don't believe the rest of the stories in the book are quite as strong, but it doesn't matter as the that one carries the day.
• 
  umang

  Re-read 7/2009
  Re-read 7/2011. Enjoyed it a bit less this time, but it was very topical.
  
• 
  Karyn

  I heard Ms. Lee read a story from this book on Valentine's Day, 2002. I love the whole collection.
• 
  Keith Miller

  Interesting Women: Stories by Andrea Lee (2003)
• 
  lixy

  Great writer I'd never heard of. Really compelling short stories (which I don't normally go for!)
• 
  Bill

  just completed "brothers & sisters around the world"...exceptional short story!
• 
  EG

  A few of the stories were a little dull or repetitive, but most were engaging and insightful. Andrea Lee is extremely erudite, and has a great writing style.
• 
  Raquel

  I loved this book because of its beautiful, crystal clear descriptive nature.
• 
  Carrie Best

  Found this one on a list of authors that have been largely forgotten. Wish she'd write more books. Refreshing new perspectives on a being a European woman and relaionships
• 
  Amanda Cargill

  Worthwhile read. Delicious little short stories that smartly capture female experience of life abroad.
• 
  Ryo

  I received a copy of this book for free in a Goodreads giveaway.
  
  Despite the title of this short story collection, I didn't really find the women who were the protagonists of these stories to be very interesting. They were largely the same; the majority of the stories feature a Black American woman who's well-educated and lives in Italy (much like the author, I suppose). Most of them seem to have to deal with rich men they find uninteresting, and they find themselves bored of the men and other people. I found myself getting kind of bored, honestly, despite the fact that these are supposed to be separate short stories with separate plots and characters, because they felt kind of the same thing after a while, and there's not really many likable characters. Not much happens plot-wise in these, there's not really a big reveal, just a lot of introspection, which didn't really hold my interest. On the plus side, these are well-written, the prose flowery and sometimes showy with big words, and lots of descriptive text about the various locales, mostly in Italy.
• 
  Katherine

  A mosaic of short stories with a colorful set of characters each as vibrant as the next. Travel round the world in these 14 shorts stories (one set up as a mini-play). Would make a good, light read for vacation travel as the stories are set all over the place and there is a smattering of various European languages sprinkled here and there to help set the tone of the stories. Not my usual style of book, but won it in a giveaway. An entertaining enough, light read.
• 
  Nicolette

  Not gonna lie, I’m still not sure what to rate this book. The only reason I even continued reading was because I realized the author is Black. It’s a series of short stories that don’t really seem to have a point other than highlighting themes of American women moving to Europe and “finding themselves” in some way, shape or form but the stories are surprisingly weak or maybe I just didn’t get them or maybe I just expected more given the title.
  
  It’s an easy beach/vacation read I suppose.
• 
  Allison Sayre

  This book is essentially multiple stories about how men are the epicenter of women’s lives. I would have thought it was a male author trying to write relatable stories about women. There was not one story about just women, every story was about the way in which women perceive men and how men perceive women.
• 
  Olga Rudenko

  Pretty interesting account of free spirited cosmopolitan or often just different women. Weighted towards American wifes in Europe. Nice style that differs in narration depending on the character enough to make the stories speak their heroines voice. Entertaining