Description Where to Buy Reviews DESCRIPTION Set in Berkeley, California, in the 1970s, this novel "charts the breakup of an abusive, seventeen-year marriage. Their 'intellectual companionship' long over, Connie and her bullying husband Howard, a plant physiologist, fight so much their home 'reflects a Middle East battle zone,' with their two children the victims of their constant arguing. Complicating things further is Connie's relationship with her manipulative, belittling mother Elsie, an artistof some renown. . . . Connie's lack of self-confidence enables Howard to victimize her, and aids Marc, a psychiatry teacher she meets at a party, in his seduction and abandonment of her during the course of their short-lived affair.As the violence in her marriage escalates, Connie knows she must find the courage to leave Howard. . . . She must also learn to stand apart from her domineering mother." (Small Press) Hardcover, 364 pages. ISBN: 1880909057 (Baskerville Publishers, Inc., Sept. 1993) WHERE TO BUY --Amazon.com --Barnes and Noble REVIEWS From BookList Connie has lived with her curmudgeonly and verbally abusive husband, Howard, for years. Howard's absence while on sabbatical in Israel brings such relief to the family that Connie's consciousness is at last raised (the story is set in the 1970s). Webster's novel is a detailed account of Howard's haranguing, Connie's affair, and their daughter's adolescent rage and sexual relationship with a father-figure high school teacher. Punctuated by descriptions of newspaper and television accounts of Patty Hearst's kidnapping and Nixon's resignation, the novel has a sense of genuineness and real-life angst, but it has no sense of purpose. The book is successful as a portrait of a battleground of a 1970s marriage, complete with the damaging effects on two children, but it ends too abruptly and is perhaps too real for fiction's sake. (Denise Perry Donavin) From Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 1993 A first novel about the emancipation of a stifled housewife--a story rendered here with mind-numbing talk. It's Berkeley in the 70's, and Connie is following the Patty Hearst kidnapping and conversion to the Symbionese Liberation Army cause with fascination. In Patty's oppression she seems to seek some clue to her own. Unhappily married to Howard, a cold and often brutal man, daughter of Elsie, a celebrated painter and complete narcissist, mother of two children whose lives seem to be slipping from her control, Connie feels enraged, trapped, and directionless. Enter Marc, a leftist psychologist, with whom she begins an affair. The romance comes to little, but it galvanizes Connie to change her life. She gets a job teaching English part-time at a local Catholic college, her first employment since marrying Howard 17 years before. Then she tells Howard she wants a divorce, hires a lawyer, and begins to extricate herself from the marriage. But her ultimate liberation is from hatred of her mother: When Elsie, despairing over the encroachment of old age, takes an overdose of sleeping pills, Connie rushes to her bedside and there achieves an acceptance of her mother's limitations and forgives her. She resolves to help her mother publish her journals. Connie's endless, wearing verbal tussles--with Howard; with daughter Sarah, 16, who's sleeping with her Spanish teacher; with Marc, who won't commit; with her mother--make up perhaps 75 percent of the material here. The Patty Hearst references are welcome, opening up the claustrophobic universe of the book whenever they occur, but they are few. -- Copyright (c)1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Library Journal Watching Connie take control of her life is funny, painful, infuriating and rewarding. Belle Lettres Sins of the Mothers is fast-moving, witty, engaging and vividly drawn..from Watergate to Patty Hearst kidnapping. Complete with affairs, religious hypocrisy, mother-daughter trauma, and new job anxiety, SINS chronicles one woman's triumph over expectation and propriety. San Francisco Chronicle More than any novel of recent memory, Sins of the Mothers is reminiscent of Sue Kaufman's Diary of a Mad Housewife. Novels about women finding themselves often tend to extremes, but Webster finds a believable, satisfying middle ground."