Cheap Peyton Place (Book) (Grace Metalious) Price

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Customer Reviews of Peyton Place

Very Enjoyable Read
I don't want to judge whether Peyton Place and its sequel is a good or great novel or not, as it is rather pointless. People mostly use their own subjective standards for such judgment. However, I do enjoy reading this book thoroughly. As to the sexual explicitness, I can imagine that it would be "groundbreaking" in the fifties as far as it being on printed pages; they otherwise did not seem overly dramatized.

The book gives me a sense of what a New England small town life is like. Of course, I don't, for a minute, believe that the events are typical. I enjoyed all of the characters Grace Metalious sculpted, and I also liked the plot very much. Grace Metalious constructed a perfect web of links between the characters to tell her story. At the center was the evolving relationship between Constance, her husband Tom (Mike) and her daughter, Allison. The other characters, such as Selena Cross, and the Harringtons added important sidelights. The sequel was quite well done and provided a welcome sense of closure, although it is not as riveting as the original.

Yea. I think you will enjoy this book, too.

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A wonderful book deserving of the title "Classic".......
My mother, who was born and raised in New Hampshire, and I were having a conversation about books one afternoon. I told her that I had seen someone on the subway with a copy of Peyton Place, which inspired her to launch into some stories of the controversy that had surrounded the book upon it's publication, and the scandal that reverberated through small-town New England, with each town trying to figure out if they were the subject of Metalious's work.
I finally read Peyton Place several years ago, long after it wasn't 'hot stuff' or controversial. Certainly it isn't shocking by today's standards but the book presents an interesting view of 1950's America, far removed from the soda pop and sundae image that nostalgia has tried to recreate.
The story centers around Allison McKenzie, a girl coming of age and facing all of the challenges of growing up in a small town without a father. Her mother, Constance, is emotionally distance at the novel's beginning but warms steadily as she undertakes a romance of her own. Matt Swain is presented as the doctor with a conscience, and the impoverished Cross family provides an ample contrast to the genteel country setting. The book, in many ways, reminds me of Edith Wharton- characters whose lives are woven together in a tremendous fabric of narrative and insight. All characters seem to struggle with the perceived morality forced upon them by the social morays of life in a small town, and the manner in which the deal with problems provides much of the plot that propels this book. In short, this book is wonderful and probably on my top three or four lists of favorites. It's exciting without being tawdry, and something I wish I had read a long time ago.

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Only consider this book in the context of the times
People who trash this book as 'not a big deal' forget that society was eager to believe itself 'wholesome' in the 1950's. If they existed, the 'bad' people were supposedly easily cordoned off into separate areas of town--instead of being your friends, neighbors, or even yourself.

What is not very shocking today was the mid twentieth century eqivalent of having to slow down and gawk at a traffic accident.

In her short career, Grace Metalious held up the proverbial social mirror and forced people to confront two very critical truths about themselves. They LOVED material like this, and they also led very closely simmilar lives to the characters in this book. Whether it was intended or not, the book helped people in simmilar sittuations see they were not alone, and the fictionalized characters also went through their own trials.