Synopses & Reviews
In The Easter Parade, first published in 1976, we meet sisters Sarah and Emily Grimes when they are still the children of divorced parents. We observe the sisters over four decades, watching them grow into two very different women. Sarah is stable and stalwart, settling into an unhappy marriage. Emily is precocious and independent, struggling with one unsatisfactory love affair after another. Richard Yates's classic novel is about how both women struggle to overcome their tarnished family's past, and how both finally reach for some semblance of renewal.
Review
"When it first appeared in 1976, Kirkus noted that 'nobody sings sadder songs of the way things were' than Yates....Kirkus celebrated Yates's strong suit, 'the thing he knows best failure.' Its gravity 'gives all his books their vulnerability and makes them imperative then and now reading for many people.' And now again." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"An eloquent, moving novel, quietly poignant." Larry McMurtry, The Washington Post
Review
"The effect is at once cruel and sweet, heartbreaking and brutal....The Easter Parade has an astonishing sweep and weight." Stewart O'Nan, The Boston Review
Review
"Extraordinarily good...written with the force and simplicity of absolute truth." The San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle
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"[A] sad tale of marriage and divorce, and a still sadder one of sexual liberation." Charles McGrath, The New York Times Books of the Century
Review
"Invigorating and gripping....Every word works quietly to establish the illusion that things are happening by themselves....A literary achievement." Time
Synopsis
In "The Easter Parade, first published in 1976, we meet sisters Sarah and Emily Grimes when they are still the children of divorced parents. We observe the sisters over four decades, watching them grow into two very different women. Sarah is stable and stalwart, settling into an unhappy marriage. Emily is precocious and independent, struggling with one unsatisfactory love affair after another. Richard Yates's classic novel is about how both women struggle to overcome their tarnished family's past, and how both finally reach for some semblance of renewal.
About the Author
Richard Yates was the author of the novels Revolutionary Road, A Special Providence, Disturbing the Peace, A Good School, Young Hearts Crying, and Cold Spring Harbor, as well as the story collections Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, Liars in Love, and The Collected Stories of Richard Yates. He died in 1992.