The Bridge Ladies audiobook

Library overdrive...audiobook...read by Orlaugh CassidyWanting a lightweight ... but engaging walking-audio-companion while in the ‘thrones-of-thought’ about our current election....and having just read a deeper historical gut wrenching & mentally compelling autography ....”The World of Yesterday”, by Stefan Zweig....I picked “The Bridge Ladies”, by Betsy Lerner.I enjoyed it tremendously. This memoir not only has great humor, wonderful nostalgic descriptions, ( if you’re my age), a little education about Bridge, ( and why people play), but it’s a tribute to women’s friendships, and manages to be substantially compelling at the same time.At the heart of “The Bridge Ladies”, is the authors quest to restore-even revolutionize (as preposterous as that sounds), her relationship with her mother. ...and ‘ta-da’: success! I WAS INSPIRED....( ha, wanting a little more health and restoration with my first born daughter).But even if you have the best relationship with your mother in the world, have or have not played Bridge....are not Jewish, ( I forgot to mention everyone is Jewish in this book)....This book was VERY WELL WRITTEN.....with TONS of HEART.I am Jewish.....and no buffs-about it.....this is a very Jewish tale.I enjoyed the kibitzing, the stories learned from each of these 80+ year old ladies ( friends for 50 years that were always bed and roses), and the deeper personal issues between Betsy and her mother.We get a clear look at a generation/ and culture ( very familiar to many of us at a certain age), .....and it’s simply enjoyable! My heart has especially grew for the author: *Betsy Lerner*. Some of us ....( I’m sure I’m not the only one).... would love to hug her and thank her. There was a time in life when life looked very much like Betsy described.Of course I thought of my own mother. I remember the night before my father died, like yesterday.Mom was playing cards..( it wasn’t Bridge when I was four....but she did play Bridge later in my life).Candy bowls were always at these card-gatherings. ( ha...my sneaking the candies at such a young age is where my sweet tooth started).I had happy memories watching my mother with her friends...In our case....my dad was playing too. They were playing with my aunts and uncles. ( dad’s brother).The extended family poker gathering took place at our house once a week. Coffee and coffee cake served too.I kissed everyone goodnight - that last night. The relatives all said how cute I was in my feet pajamas. Off to bed I went feeling loved. The next morning when I woke up, early morning, our house was filled with people everywhere.For weeks people kept bringing food, dolls for me and my sister.....but those games ended. Years later ....my mom and her sister had ‘all night’ ( no sleep at all) marathon card games of Spite & Malice. They smoked like chimneys...sometimes yelled at each other....but it was also nice to wake in the morning and see them at it.Later...my mother became a serious Bridge player....but I was older and busy with my own life not paying much attention at the time. I asked Paul if would like to learn play Bridge together? He could be my partner.We used to play hearts with another couple for years.Paul said....”sure”. Will we really do it? Not sure...we’d need some lessons ...♣️♥️♠️♦️But I like this type of ‘friendship gathering’ ....playing cards and eating candies sounds heaven to me about now.If you like stories like “Steel Magnolias”.... then there is a great chance you might enjoy “Bridge Ladies”.I did a little reading about Betsy Lerner. Besides enjoying drinking diet orange crush 😊.... she is a recipient of the Thomas Wolfe Poetry Prize, a Tony Godwin Prize for editors, and was selected as one of PEN’s emerging writers. I LIKE THIS WOMAN. I’d love to read something else she writes. Last words from me:( chatty here the day after Election Day).... isn’t it a treat to simply enjoy a book - for whatever reason? Off for a walk now....love, peace, happiness, and good health to the community on Goodreads!!!!

4.5 starsBetsy Lerner started out writing a tale about the five Jewish women who made up her mother’s decades-long bridge club group. For three years, she observed their bridge club, interviewed each woman and her children, and set about learning to play bridge to further understand these women. When she began her project, Betsy and her mother had a troubled relationship that had carried over from when she was a teen. As she got to know all of the women better, she also began to view her mother in an altogether new light and set about healing their relationship. She came to understand that while they grew up in a very different time period and seemed a bit old fashioned to her that these women were actually tough, accomplished women who had lived and were continuing to live wonderful lives.The aspects of the group that fascinated Betsy also intrigued me. While the group meet every Monday for over fifty years, there was so much they chose not to share with each other instead just enjoying the company of each other. I loved getting to know each woman’s story and realizing how different it was to come of age in the 1950’s when getting married and having children was the goal for many women. The world has changed so much since they were young and sometimes it is hard to remember that.Parts of the book were very sad as Betsy Lerner addressed the issue of aging and how unpleasant it really is. As I deal with similar issues with my parents, those sections really hit home for me.My favorite part of the book was all of the historical and contemporary references sprinkled throughout from Edith Wharton to The Shining to Fiddler on the Roof to coffee commercials – a few I even had to look up. I also liked that each section of a chapter was separated by spades – a very clever touch for a book about bridge. Since I do not play bridge, I will say that at times the details regarding bridge made those sections drag a bit for me.I highly recommend this book. Thanks to Shelf Awareness and HarperCollins for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

My Rating:4.5Favorite Quotes:“Yes, my mother has told me about Eugene Genovese a hundred times, the Italian boy she had a huge crush on. It's her West Side Story without the snapping.”“The recipe looks like a panel from the Dead Sea Scrolls: stained many times over with fish grease, darkened with age spots like the back of an older person's hand, annotated with figures for doubling the recipe, and unidentified schmutz... 'Now we take out the eyes,' my mother says with too much gusto. And then without warning she raises a knife, Norman Bates style, and plunges it into the eye of the fish. A wave of nausea moves through me, and I feel like I might faint.”“When it's Travis's turn to discard, he tilts his seat back, legs spread wide, and flicks a card into the center of the table as if he were an outlaw, gun cocked, ready for a shoot-out on a dusty main street. In other words, the guy's a douche, but I find him fascinating.”“The house grew quiet when they played a hand, interrupted by chatter when they'd shuffle the cards and deal a new hand. Sometimes they called it 'washing the cards,' and I couldn't help but think of a soapy sink where the cards were submerged, my mother's hands in pink latex gloves washing each one and affixing it to a clothesline with a pin.”My Review:Being a memoir, The Bridge Ladies is brimming with insightful self-revelations and memories, some of which squeezed my heart while many provoked smirking and barking aloud from the humorous use of metaphor and juxtapositions. The writing was entertaining and plump with lush descriptions that I could almost taste, see, and feel. Each scene was fully set from the floor to the ceiling with rich and juicy word choices. Being the exact same age as the author, I greatly enjoyed her thoughts, observations, and feelings spanning the different stages and periods of her life, and recalled having identical ideas and chaffing at the same constraints and having similar thoughts and reactions to my own parents at the time; which is rather remarkable given the vast disparity in our geographic locals, religious teachings, and social experiences. It was an eye opener and a wonderful read for a rainy spring day.

This is a charming sociological commentary on the women’s move me as well as relationships between mothers and daughters. Lerner chronicles the hopes and dreams of the bridge participants as well as their habits, including dress and drink. This really is heartfelt at times and humorous. Immensely relatable and enjoyable. Copy provided by TLC Book Tours and Publisher

I love books about mother/daughter relationships and this book is a winner. The author tells it like it was, the good and the bad.Her relationship with her mother was strained at times, but when she moves back to be near her mother who needed surgery, she gets to see her as she is with her friends and how they see her when she starts sitting in with her mother’s bridge club ladies.The book takes you on a journey that many of us would love to go on with our mothers. I know I was close to my mom, but rarely got to spend time with her and her friends. Now I wish I had done it more often.This book is perfect for all women I think. It’s a quick read and I know I’ll want to pick it up again.

Our Story Circle book group read and enjoyed this--even the non-bridge-players (like me) have high praise for the book. Betsy Lerner manages to sympathetically but honestly depict a generation of ladies who are often criticized for their shallowness and focus on appearance. These are strong women, each in her own way, and Lerner allows us to see both their strengths and their frailties. An excellent mother-daughter memoir, and more.

This is so much more than a book about the bridge ladies. It is about mother daughter relationships, it is about being in the sandwich generation, it is about love and loss. I loved each and everyone of the bridge ladies and I sympathized with the author's relationship with her mother. These ladies were from a different generation and it was a fascinating look at the changes that happened in their lifetime. It also sparked an interest in bridge that I have never had before.

The book wasn't what I expected, but I found it very enjoyable. I bought it because I'm a serious bridge lover, and I did get a kick out of watching the author learn to appreciate the game. But more than that, I enjoyed seeing her build a relationship with her mother and learn to appreciate the women of her mother's generation. While their story was quite different from mine, my mother and I had also had issues and I could relate to a lot of what they went through.

The Bridge Ladies is a memoir about a group of ladies who got together every Monday afternoon for 50 years to play bridge. On the surface, it's a book about the game of bridge but in reality it's so much more.'I disrespected her for only caring about how things looked. I never understood how much there was to hide.' This is one of Betsy's comments about her mom very early in the book. They had a complicated mother daughter relationship. Betsy grew up in the age of women's liberation wanting to pursue a career before marriage. Her mom grew up in the age when getting married and staying married was the goal of every woman. Betsy spent a lot of money in therapy to better understand her mother but it was only by joining her mom's bridge group and learning more about her mom as a person and not as her mother, that she was able to understand how much of her mother's life she knew so little about and that it was these hidden parts that defined the person her mother was.Even though the central part of this story is about Betsy and her mother, there are also the other four women in the bridge group that Betsy interviews and that we get to know. Through her understanding of the women as individuals and as a group, we get a glimpse into a generation where secrets aren't shared with the world and opinions are kept quiet. It's a wonderful look at the generation that my Mom is part of and reading it gave me some insight into her life.Thanks Betsy for sharing this book with your readers. I think it will be a great book for mothers and daughters to read together and discuss.

This book is about so much more than bridge. It's about the expectations of and for women who were of marrying age in the 1950s. And it's about their children and especially their daughters -- what the '70s were like for them ... and what it was like to be a mother of a child growing up in the 70s when values were so very different. It's also about being part of the Jewish subculture in a gentile world. And yes, it's about bridge, which is really a device for discussing the varying parts of what makes up this memoir. Overall, this is well worth reading. Two quibbles: the first is that it's actually a bit hard to remember which of the bridge ladies is which and what distinguishes them from each other. Their individual stories are interesting, but I'd be hard pressed to tell you what happened to Bea vs. Rhoda vs. Jackie vs. Bette vs. Ros (on the other hand, I do remember their names). The second is (and you'll see this mentioned in a number of reviews) is that we learn quite a bit (too much?) about the author's psychological issues. Yes, this is a memoir, but it's called The Bridge Ladies for a reason. Isn't it her memoir of them? Well, maybe not.In any case, an enjoyable book, for sure.

So much more than bridge! Betsy Lerner captured mother daughter relationships, friendships, depression, and the choices we make. I have to admit that I loved the bridge lessons as well, since I have a passion for the game.