Word: freeman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Time for Tears, Freeman...
...reader concerned only with plot, the yield is relatively low. The pastoral is an ancient tradition. Small schools for the young daughters of the leisure classes have had more literary attention, certainly, than their numbers have called for. Freeman has missed no gothic twists here--ghost sightings, illicit trysts, sensual foreigners, even secret abortions...
...like the Easter eggs she writes about, Freeman's tale is delicately and colorfully sketched. From afar, it is a bright and cheerful scene. Poor closely, however, and you begin to see the delicate flaws of the picture. Only then can you see the missed brush strokes and splotches splenty hidden in this pastoral scene...
...written today, and its sensibilities are as wise as our own. A scene in which a cadet shows off his skill with an airplane for his sweetheart from the girls' school begins with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of the era, but just a few words later and Freeman is describing the nosedive with modern phallic abandon. Later on, a troubled character exclaims that not even "Professor Freud" could explain his malady. Freeman seems to suggest ironically that perhaps he could...
...story is nostalgia updated. The reader is given a tale of a time long ago, but gently prodded to make sense of it in a modern context. Yet despite the fact that Freeman has our values and knows the same literary buzz words we do, she succeeds in re-creating an era on its own terms--an era for which Freud had no answers, when a young lady's unchaperoned absence raised eyebrows, and when Easter egg hunts were actually...