Yeah, I mean, the book does get props for having older characters who go after what they want, which as you note is really rare -- and I think that's great! I even don't mind it being relatively easy to get what they want (hey, it happens sometimes in real life) -- but the way in which it was easy seemed... just not very emotionally realistic to me. I mean, no one I know has found it really quite that easy to have kids and give up or change careers to do so, for example.
On the larger theme of projection -- I also can say that there are lots of bits to the book that I appreciated as a parent that I wouldn't have understood and/or appreciated before trying for/having kids -- there are a lot of (second-hand) observations and thoughts about parenting that I found interesting and telling but that my childless-not-interested-in-children-25-year-old-self wouldn't have. And yet... lack of character is still boring for all that.
I am certainly looking at it from a 55- point of view, but my observation has been that 55+ people of my acquaintance don't so much want a biological legacy as kids as they want to have grandkids which they don't have to full-time raise themselves :) I think that's one of the reasons why Cordelia's six-kid family didn't quite gel with me... I get that she feels cheated out of having the multiple-kids experience (I know our experiences here differ, but it was something that I really wanted to have and would have been really disappointed if I couldn't have), but six...
Anyway! I think that there definitely are a lot of interesting ideas in there that could have been explored much more thoroughly; it's the lack of thoroughness of the exploration that annoys me, not the ideas themselves.
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On the larger theme of projection -- I also can say that there are lots of bits to the book that I appreciated as a parent that I wouldn't have understood and/or appreciated before trying for/having kids -- there are a lot of (second-hand) observations and thoughts about parenting that I found interesting and telling but that my childless-not-interested-in-children-25-year-old-self wouldn't have. And yet... lack of character is still boring for all that.
I am certainly looking at it from a 55- point of view, but my observation has been that 55+ people of my acquaintance don't so much want a biological legacy as kids as they want to have grandkids which they don't have to full-time raise themselves :) I think that's one of the reasons why Cordelia's six-kid family didn't quite gel with me... I get that she feels cheated out of having the multiple-kids experience (I know our experiences here differ, but it was something that I really wanted to have and would have been really disappointed if I couldn't have), but six...
Anyway! I think that there definitely are a lot of interesting ideas in there that could have been explored much more thoroughly; it's the lack of thoroughness of the exploration that annoys me, not the ideas themselves.