Redeeming Eve

By Nicole Bokat

Book Overview

Thirty-year-old Eve Sterling is a 90's woman with a hankering for the 18th century. A literature scholar writing her thesis on Jane Austen, Eve lives alone in Manhattan, is eclipsed by her domineering mother, Maxie, and doubts she'll ever find a man to rival her beloved fictional heroes. When a friend sets her up with Hart -- a funny, gentle photographer -- Eve simultaneously discovers true love and loses control over her own fate.Eve aims to achieve a choreographed, graceful existence, one modeled on the elegant world portrayed in Austen's novels. But, in a series of both comic and painful mishaps, she learns just how clumsy and chaotic real life can be. Irrevocably changed by marriage and motherhood, Eve struggles to reconcile contrasting allegiances: those to herself versus those to her family. And, if carving out a niche for herself while balancing the demands of a new baby weren't enough, Eve has the additional burden of living in the shadow of an imposing celebrity -- her mother Suddenly thrust into the limelight, Maxie has been transformed into a media darling just after her own daughter's career begins to falter. Embarking on a journey to reclaim her lost sense of purpose, Eve is forced to face the toughest question of all: can she fulfill herself without severing the bonds of those she loves most?By turns witty and poignant, Redeeming Eve is an accomplished, engaging first novel. Anyone who has ever risked old dreams for a richer, more complex life -- or ever longed to do so -- will identify with its very contemporary heroine.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1579620647
• ISBN13: 9781579620646
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: Permanent Pr Pub Co
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.8" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

A Pleasure to Read a Well-written Novel

What a pleasure it is to read a well-written novel about a modern woman. This is not a genre romance, though it deals with passion, betrothal and marriage but, rather, it is a story featuring a complicated woman with complicated issues. As such, REDEEMING EVE is a reassuring shift from classic woman's fiction, requiring some attention on the part of the reader. The devise that holds the story together is the background of the heroine's work on her doctoral thesis about Jane Austen. The details about the scholarly process should be interesting to anyone outside of academia. I found Bokat's novel absorbing and well-paced; I admired the fact that she didn't take the facile way and make her heroine easy to like. Bokat's writing style is embracing and her story is compelling. This is post-feminist fiction at its best.

intelligent humor

In her brilliantly funny, poignant novel, Nicole Bokat gives insight into the challenge Eve faces sandwiched between the constant demands of a newborn baby girl, a larger than life mother and an intense Ph.D program. The story is beautifully written and the characters are riotously human. Redeeming Eve respects the intelligence of readers and characters, and is a must read for the 21st century.