From Publishers Weekly
Can true love be found at the age of 83? It comes to pass in Weldon's latest offering (Big Girls Don't Cry, etc.), a jaunty but somewhat jaded romantic caper set in a Rhode Island retirement home and in London's Soho district. Felicity Moore is an attractive, sexually active octogenarian grandmother who has decided to move into the Golden Bowl Complex for Creative Retirement, an ominous institution where the staff is motivated to keep the occupants alive via financial inducements. Felicity's granddaughter, Sophia King, is a 34-year-old British film editor who'd rather live in the imaginary world of film (where she can discard unpleasantness on the cutting-room floor) than face the reality of her mother's suicide, her own simultaneous loathing of and longing for progeny, and her apparent lack of family relations aside from Felicity. When Sophia comes to New England to help Felicity settle into the Golden Bowl, she learns that her grandmother had another daughter whom she gave up for adoption more than a half century earlier. While Sophia returns to London in search of her long-lost aunt, Felicity falls in love with a compulsive gambler and together they outsmart the evil and sadistic Nurse Dawn. Between live half-sisters, dead stepchildren and cousins lengthily removed, the reader feels in need of a diagrammed family tree. Weldon's signature caustic humor enlivens this somewhat overwritten story, which succeeds in establishing that the search for ancestry is fairly complicated and usually disappointing. Since this is Weldon's first novel set in America, canny marketing might add more stateside readers to her devoted fans (who won't miss Weldon's name emblazoned across the cover). Agent, Russell Galen, Scovil Chichak Galen Literary Agency. (Nov.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Across an ocean and the passage of time the lives of two relatives become intertwined in the past. Sophia, a 34-year-old film editor who tends to see life in relation to film plots, and Felicity, her eightysomething grandmother, have more in common than they realize, more than the suicidal Angel, a bohemian madwoman who seemed to be their only other relative. The two women provide an engaging counterplay as they enter two very different phases in their lives, seeking happiness and fulfillment. The discovery of Felicity's secret past and additional cousins with their own desires reveals more than either of them bargained for. Entertaining and well read by Jan Francis. Joyce Kessel, Villa Maria Coll., Buffalo, NYCopyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
Weldon's novel moves seamlessly from irony to poignancy and back without ever slipping into sentimentality. What keeps it afloat is the specificity and acuity of her perceptions. Sophia, a successful English film editor, yearns for the family connections denied her by the insanity and suicide of her mother. What she has is her grandmother, Felicity, a willful octogenarian with much tragedy in her past who is still intent on squeezing all the enjoyment she can out of life. Jan Francis captures the keen intelligence and humor of both women and perfectly handles the accents on both sides of the Atlantic. It's a smart, witty performance throughout. M.O. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
Weldon's gift for spiking her witty and rompingly entertaining fiction with incisive social critiques flows unabated in her newest novel, a whirlwind drama of sexual politics and family secrets. Felicity is an expatriate Englishwoman with a painful past involving an evil stepmother, rape by her step-uncle (which resulted in a teenage pregnancy), mercenary marriages, and her daughter Angel's suicide. At least Angel produced Sophia, Felicity's only acknowledged progeny. Still elegant and impulsive in her eighties, Felicity decides to move into what seems like a paradisical Rhode Island retirement home but what turns out to be a virtual prison under the malevolent control of a hypo-wielding dominatrix. Londoner Sophia, stunning with her pearly skin and Botticelli hair, is a successful film editor who has long preferred movies to real life. She tries to be there for her flamboyant, I Chingconsulting grandmother, however, and flies over to help out, reluctantly leaving behind her film director lover. She also searches for Felicity's missing daughter, acquiring along the way two seemingly bland but actually uproariously troublesome second cousins once removed. As Sophia and Felicity, who outrages her keepers by launching a scandalous affair with a gambler, attempt to make peace with the past and open themselves to love, Weldon muses on how things change and yet remain the same. While Sophia and her peers have many more options than women of Felicity's age, they must still contend with society's stubborn chauvinism. Smart and funny, Weldon's boldly plotted and finely crafted tale deftly satirizes our infinite capacity for self-delusion. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


From Kirkus Reviews
Our preeminent fictional chronicler of the war between men and women takes a break to report on the state of battles between continents, generations, past and present.Or so at first it seems when Sophia King, whose knowledge of life is based on the films she's edited, gets an imperious phone call from her grandmother, Felicity Bax, demanding that Sophia help Felicity sell her house in Connecticut and find a living situation more suitable for a person of her advancing years. For Sophia, orphaned, unmarried, and unloved but for the intermittent embraces of preoccupied director Harry Krassner, the summons is a call to arms-an invitation to confront her dead, insane mother Angel, her own dereliction in failing to rush to Felicity's bedside during an earlier medical emergency, and the brave new world of America, which Weldon is visiting for the first time. As unquenchable Felicity, aided by Sophia, the I Ching, and her fractious New England neighbor Joy, plows ahead on the new adventure of locating new digs, settling into the plush, sinister Golden Bowl Complex ("a CIA training ground for surveillance techniques and psychological warfare"), and embarking on a December-November love affair with an alarmingly incorrigible gambler, Sophia burrows more deeply into her family history, and soon shakes loose relatives she had never known about. But Felicity's escapades and Sophia's investigations alike reveal a familiar cast of villains-uncaring patriarchs, conniving mistresses, self-justifying parasites of both sexes-whose selfishness, greed, and cruelty Weldon's joyously caustic cadences hammer as they frolic and tickle the humorously humane readers she invites us to be.Despite its apparent departures from her mold, this ends up as one of Weldon's most characteristic fairy tales, with the novelist (Big Girls Don't Cry, 1998, etc.) pressed once more into the role of the fairy godmother who'll rescue her heroines from the plots swirling perhaps a little too generously about them. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Smart, sexy, and infinitely charming, Rhode Island Blues tells the story of Sophia Moore, a loveless and guarded thirty-four-year-old film editor in London who believes that her only living relative is her stormy and wild grandmother Felicity. Troubled by her mother's long-ago suicide and her father's abandonment, Sophia overworks, incessantly contemplates her past, and continues a flat sexual affair with the famous director of her latest film. But when she travels to Rhode Island to help Felicity settle into a retirement center, she begins to unravel mysteries about her family history while Felicity learns to gamble, falls in love, and uncovers the truth about the center's evil nurse Dawn. A hilarious tale of family secrets, nursing-home high jinks, and late-life love, Rhode Island Blues is Fay Weldon at her witty best. "...Fay Weldon transports her wry wit, trenchant observational powers, and sublimely snappy prose to this side of the Atlantic...." — Elle "Wry and witty, Weldon smartly skewers retirement homes, the film industry, and the deceptive elasticity of family ties." — Entertainment Weekly "Energetic.... [Weldon] possesses a wry wisdom about mating behavior." — The New York Times Book Review "Smart and funny, Weldon's boldly plotted and finely crafted tale deftly satirizes our infinite capacity for self-delusion." — Booklist

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Can true love be found at the age of 83? It comes to pass in Weldon's latest offering (Big Girls Don't Cry, etc.), a jaunty but somewhat jaded romantic caper set in a Rhode Island retirement home and in London's Soho district. Felicity Moore is an attractive, sexually active octogenarian grandmother who has decided to move into the Golden Bowl Complex for Creative Retirement, an ominous institution where the staff is motivated to keep the occupants alive via financial inducements. Felicity's granddaughter, Sophia King, is a 34-year-old British film editor who'd rather live in the imaginary world of film (where she can discard unpleasantness on the cutting-room floor) than face the reality of her mother's suicide, her own simultaneous loathing of and longing for progeny, and her apparent lack of family relations aside from Felicity. When Sophia comes to New England to help Felicity settle into the Golden Bowl, she learns that her grandmother had another daughter whom she gave up for adoption more than a half century earlier. While Sophia returns to London in search of her long-lost aunt, Felicity falls in love with a compulsive gambler and together they outsmart the evil and sadistic Nurse Dawn. Between live half-sisters, dead stepchildren and cousins lengthily removed, the reader feels in need of a diagrammed family tree. Weldon's signature caustic humor enlivens this somewhat overwritten story, which succeeds in establishing that the search for ancestry is fairly complicated and usually disappointing. Since this is Weldon's first novel set in America, canny marketing might add more stateside readers to her devoted fans (who won't miss Weldon's name emblazoned across the cover). Agent, Russell Galen, Scovil Chichak Galen Literary Agency. (Nov.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Across an ocean and the passage of time the lives of two relatives become intertwined in the past. Sophia, a 34-year-old film editor who tends to see life in relation to film plots, and Felicity, her eightysomething grandmother, have more in common than they realize, more than the suicidal Angel, a bohemian madwoman who seemed to be their only other relative. The two women provide an engaging counterplay as they enter two very different phases in their lives, seeking happiness and fulfillment. The discovery of Felicity's secret past and additional cousins with their own desires reveals more than either of them bargained for. Entertaining and well read by Jan Francis. Joyce Kessel, Villa Maria Coll., Buffalo, NY Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

AudioFile

Weldon's novel moves seamlessly from irony to poignancy and back without ever slipping into sentimentality. What keeps it afloat is the specificity and acuity of her perceptions. Sophia, a successful English film editor, yearns for the family connections denied her by the insanity and suicide of her mother. What she has is her grandmother, Felicity, a willful octogenarian with much tragedy in her past who is still intent on squeezing all the enjoyment she can out of life. Jan Francis captures the keen intelligence and humor of both women and perfectly handles the accents on both sides of the Atlantic. It's a smart, witty performance throughout. M.O. (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine

Ron Charles - Christian Science Monitor

Right on the mark...When Weldon refers to " the continuation of mirth, that most precious of nature's crations," she might as well be talking about what's best in her own novels.

Kirkus Reviews

Our preeminent fictional chronicler of the war between men and women takes a break to report on the state of battles between continents, generations, past and present.