The Test

By Dorothy Bryant

Book Overview

From American Book Award-winner Dorothy Bryant, comes this timeless story about caring for an aging parent. With complexity, bravery, and dry humor, The Test details the frustrating push and pull between Pat and her eighty-year-old father, who is attempting--for the third and last time--to pass the test to renew his driver's license. Bryant's unflinching gaze sees deep into the hearts of both parent and child, revealing the dramatic, awkward, and universal struggle each faces with aging, memory, and love. Trying to reconstruct memories of her childhood and of who her parents once were, Pat puzzles out the confabulations of family memory: how stories become accepted fact, how facts get twisted in stories, and how some perspectives are lost completely. In a deeply sensitive examination of one woman's coping with the changes of aging, Bryant offers a rare and moving testimony.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1558612742
• ISBN13: 9781558612747
• Release Date: October 2001
• Publisher: Feminist Press
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

uniquely different

I enjoyed the book-the unique subject matter--aging ,senile father--distraught,overburdened daughter and their communication and unique intent toward one another. However, the author should have defined chapters. Every page was a continuation of the other. I found it very annoying. Perhaps because it all took place in one day--, pauses and time to reflect through chapters would have made it easier to read(I dept loosing my place-paragraph after paragraph. It was tedious. All in all, the book was well written andthe characters very real and well protrayed. Bravo

Wonderful Novel

The Test is a great novel, perhaps my favorite of Dorothy Bryant's, though it's hard to say because she has so many fine books. I only know that this book is so skillfully written that you believe every word. Superbly drawn characters. Nothing flashy or gratuitous. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in the the difficulties of life and how we survive them.