a recent read: divining women.

My view, reading on the fire escape outside our bedroom window on a nice day.

This week I started and finished Divining Women, written by Kaye Gibbons. It's essentially this incredibly crafted story of the female experience in 1918 America and, as one critic with words better than mine put it, "a harrowing and explicit declaration of the power of a woman wronged". I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and finished much quicker than I anticipated, chiefly due to Gibbons' brilliant writing that swept me up. I hope to check out more of her books from the library this weekend. I love what she writes about below: 

"She believed that a woman had to be bright enough to choose correctly and distinguish between abiding trust and transient infatuation. She believed...that a woman's intelligence, which she called "the ability and desire to spend as much time in the world of serious ideas as in the shoe shop," should be swirled in with her other attributes. She spoke of intelligence as heightening the impact a woman could make, the way a cook might scare vanilla batter with just enough nutmeg to make the cake memorable".

. . .