Pride

By Lorene Cary

Book Overview

Four women, lifelong friends, are turning 40--and what a year it is.

Roz, the perfectly controlled (and controlling) politician's wife, is trying to keep her family together as she recovers from breast cancer and her husband runs for the biggest election of his career. Though he has strayed from her in the past, she has always been there for him--but all that is in jeopardy now that she has learned he has been sleeping with one of her three best friends.

Tam has been avoiding commitment all her life, both in an academic career that shows no sign of becoming permanent, and in her sexually combustive affairs with men. But she's ready to make some radical departures--including trying to return the interest of a sexy hunk who has more than just looks.

Ever since her husband's early death, Arneatha has immersed herself in her work as an Episcopal priest who runs a school and several community programs. But something is turning cold and brittle inside her, and for the first time in her life she questions her faith. Her last shreds of certainty are stripped from her when she is unexpectedly thrust into the role of mother--and finds herself falling in passionate, school-girlish love with a handsome African man.

Finally there is Audrey, whose climb back from the depths of alcoholism nearly costs her her life, but brings renewal to the friends' commitment to each other.

Vibrant, funny, heartwrenching, and real, Pride is an unforgettable novel.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385481837
• ISBN13: 9780385481830
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Anchor Books
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Solid entertaining literature

Cary is a gifted writer with an ear for dialogue. She makes the plot move quickly without sacrificing characterization. The four women came alive on the page for me. Arneatha's response to the baby, Tamara's bitter ironies and witticisms, Roz's razor-sharp determination, Audrey's compounding losses (music, sight, father, self), all came through in Cary's careful attention to individual detail. If you want a good entertaining read that opens you up to think about the ways in which women try to keep it together while things around us change and collapse and reformulate in ways that seem too fast and too much for us to absorb, read Pride.

Integrity and joy

I very much enjoyed PRIDE for what it had to say about friendship, and for how Lorene Cary interwove four women's lives -- four different women -- while maintaining the integrity of their voices. I felt PRIDE was reality-based, as opposed to playing into commercial ideas of friendship. It is, in a sense, anti-sit-com. I love Cary's resilence to the obvious, and to this degree she furthered herself immeasurably as a writer of the Afircan-American experience. She will never play to the easy assumptions. Read PRIDE playing close attention to the decriptions of events -- the bazaar, the airplane ride, the street scenes. Cary is masterful at capturing the ebb and flow of people, and how daily life influences the patterns of our thought and the nature of our relationships. In this book, she turns her eye to friendship and reveals just how stubbornly different they are from family. In PRICE OF A CHILD (her first novel) she looked at family. Both are great books, and in both she gets inside your head.

Four Friends Made Pride

I have read a few books in the same genre and feel it can hold its own against the others. While reading I couldn't shake comparisons to "Could This Marriage Be Saved" a Ladies Home Journal feature. At every turn I thought that all of these situations were going to be tied up. But this happens also in life too, no neat solutions for every problem, just more of the same in different intensities. I had been on a (novel) reading hiatus and it was good to begin again with Pride. The moment I finished reading this book I looked up to see the movie version of Waiting To Exhale coming on the tv. I felt elated.My only difficulty was with the editing. At times I couldn't identify which character was speaking and had to go back 2 or 3 sentences for clues.[Review dedicated to my late friend, a great fan of Lorene Cary]

Flawed but absorbing and worthwhile reading

Different from her first book, BLack Ice, but worthwhile in its own right. Cary deftly portrays the lives of four friends. The plot is a bit muddled but stick it through. A good second effort from a writer with much promise.

GREAT

I can relate to all of the characters in the book Pride. I am sure that everyone knows at least one person who fits the profile of Roz, Arneatha, Tamara and Audrey. It is a great book and I finished it in one day. Keep up the good work!!!