Fly Away Home

The primary character, Daria, has been married for 20+ years and slowly comes to realize how unaware she has been of who she is and begins to question her view of her reality as that reality breaks apart. A great book for currently divorcing or recently divorced women. Hard to put down, and wonderful characters throughout. I especially enjoyed Piercy's characterization of Daria's new beau and the relationship and intimacy they develop together, consciously avoiding the mistakes they made in their first marriages.

I read this book as a selection for the book club I belong to. I found it to be a very accurate story about a divorce where deception is involved. It is also accurate about the wife's difficulty in seeing her husband as he is rather than as she believed him to be. As a divorced woman I could relate to many aspects of the story. So much so that the beginning was very hard to read. Even though the real estate story line seems far fetched, it is entirely believable to me. Truth is stranger than fiction. I liked many of the characters in the story. I have recently started reading another of Marge Piercy's books. Unfortunately, it is not as readable as this book was.

This is Ms. Piercy's best book--I've read it more than once, and wish she would write a sequel to it. Daria Walker is a character I relate to--a woman who learns to live on her own, and has a better life because of it.

As a man, my review of this book may be somewhat biased, but on the whole, I have to say that this is the best book I've read in a long time about any individual's personal quest to discover who he or she is. Daria Walker is a cookbook writer who enjoys some small fame in the Boston area, and (this is important to the story) who also comes from a working-class background. Her husband, Ross, can be best described as the scum of the earth - he married Daria simply because he saw her as an ornament to his life and career, but now he's met a plain-looking woman who happens to be incredibly rich, and he's also involved himself with several shady (to put it mildly) business deals, one of which involves burning out the tenants of buildings he owns in Daria's old neighborhood. But he doesn't actually own them; Daria does, and....well, this gets very complicated. The point here is that Daria gradually discovers all this, and it shatters her. She has to rebuild her life from the ground up, and finds unlikely allies in the tenants of these buildings. Ms. Piercy makes you believe that Daria is a real person, that this isn't just a piece of fiction. Daria, and all the characters in this book, come to incredibly vivid life. The greatest compliment I can pay to this novel is that I wish Ms. Piercy would write another one with these characters - which, considering that this book is over ten years old, she may well have done. I'd very much like to know what else happens to Daria, Tom, and all the other people in this world Marge Piercy has created. The rating of 9 is only because I detected a stiffness at times in the language of her characters - but that's a very minor detraction in an otherwise excellent book