by Julia Glass
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Product Description
Julia Glass, author of the award-winning novel Three Junes, tells a vivid tale of longing and loss, revealing the subtle mechanisms behind our most important connections to others. In The Whole World Over, she pays tribute once again to the extraordinary complexities of love.
Greenie Duquette lavishes most of her passionate energy on her Greenwich Village bakery and her young son. Her husband, Alan, seems to have fallen into a midlife depression, while Walter, her closest professional ally, is nursing a broken heart. At Walter’s restaurant, the visiting governor of New Mexico tastes Greenie’s coconut cake and decides to woo her away to be his chef. For reasons both ambitious and desperate, she accepts–heading west without her husband. This impulsive decision, along with events beyond Greenie’s control, will change the course of several lives around her.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Manhattan woman finds herself by leaving NYC behind, 2008-09-27
I LOVED this book. I found the main character and all those who surrounded her compelling, and got engaged in the story easily. The plot is a familiar one of a woman who is not quite satisfied, making changes that uproot her from her comfort zone and lead to growth and awareness. Julia Glass is a super writer, very intelligent and amusing. I've read The Three Junes, and likely will read everything she writes, including the book that comes out this fall.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 No more Manhattanites please, 2008-07-07
This is the second novel of Julia Glass that I read, and I am disappointed reading about the lives of New Yorkers who have domestic problems. There are more concerns in the world that I would rather learn about other than what Julia Glass' concoctions of coconut cake and torte del cielo-like characters experience and portray. She has glossed over "wild blue" values like fidelity, filial love, and suffering for others that are directed to human beings and not mainly to dogs and animals. It seems like the only genuine affections that are unconditional and pathetically true in this novel are the love for The Bruce, Treehorn, Felicity the parrot, Stan's menagerie of cats, dogs and other animal foundlings. The love for wife, child or parent may just be passing thoughts to the characters that Glass blows. Has she ever heard of conditions of women in far flung places in the world where cooking is a matter of finding scraps of "isaw" (chicken intestines) to sell in the market for poor people? Personally, I would like to know more about chaat or Indian street food and how the poor people eat it without the expense of wining and dining in white table clothed brasseries. I would rather read about real food that is for survival and not for the pleasures of some "guvnoh" in Santa Fe New Mexico. East coast high society feather their artsy vacation nests in this ancient adobe domicile of the aztecs. I picked up only one indigenous food, "sopapillos", that I wanted to know more about.
I tolerated my being sort of a voyeur into the lives of the cosmopolitan New York West Villagers and their gentrified community of chefs, booklovers, gay and lesbian couples, psychiatrists, the uppity interstices of their Celtic origins. But enough is enough. I don't think I can read another novel about these characters whose lives are a blight to a sense of religion, family and meaning of purpose. I know about their lives and now I would shudder to think about what will happen to these folks when they get old and gray, and what kind of values they will pass on to George, Scott's children and Morticia's grandchildren. And did Glass mention that Scott, Walter's nephew was Stanford University bound? Forget about Greenies and Alans, these 21st century adults are just anchorless, without trajectory or purpose-flighty-flakes whose lives I really did not care about as I was reading. Glass is crafty with her words and command of lines in classic and children's literature, aptly quoting Emily Dickinson for the floridly sensual illusions of Saga, Dr. Seuss, Margaret Wise Brown, Joan Sweeney and Munro Leaf for the books Greenie read to George. Other than those ventures into her literary stash, I found this book lacking in how "flocks of birds binding the world like ribbon, fly the whole world over but always, no matter what find their way back home." And here, what I mean by home is not just your physical space but the restful joyfulness of belonging to a cause bigger than oneself, and one that will outlast all the terrors and separations we will experience.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
A beautiful, subtle story, 2008-07-05
I have to admit that I put off reading The Whole World Over because I loved Three Junes so much and didn't want to be disappointed. I certainly wasn't. Julia Glass weaves together the stories of her characters seamlessly and creates a beautiful tapestry of their lives. The story is told from several different perspectives but never gets disjointed and I couldn't wait to hear from each character again. A really lovely book.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Disappointed, 2008-07-03
I had high expectations for this book and was so disappointed. If I hadn't committed to read it for a book club, I never would have finished it. The characters weren't engaging enough to make one care about them,the story dragged, and what's worse,the discriptions of her 'fabulous' desserts kept me wearing a path to the fridge!
Based on this book, I won't bother with the next one.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
 Greenie and friends. , 2008-06-08
Julia Glass's second novel has a little bit of a lot of things. Gay people, straight people, politicians, cooks, children, adults, animals, city, desert. Any one of her characters could serve as the focus of a novel, but here, the central ones are Greenie and Alan, who are having serious marital problems and, against Alan's wishes, Greenie chooses to separate for a time, taking their obnoxiously precocious little boy with her. Shuttling between NYC and New Mexico, the action revolves around the decisions they make, but in my view, it's the ancillary characters who generate the most human interest, especially Saga, Walter, and Fenno. Luckily, Glass is a competent writer whose prose is a pleasure to read, whose understanding of human foibles is deep. Otherwise, such a talky story, low on action and high on thoughts and feelings, might degenerate into tedium. That's not the case, and I look forward to her next novel, in which I hope Saga and Walter play major roles.
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