Babycakes

by Armistead Maupin

Paper Book, 1984

Status

Available

Call number

813/.54

Series

Tales of the City (4)

Genres

Publication

New York : Harper & Row, c1984.

Description

When an ordinary househusband and his ambitious wife decide to start a family, they discover there's more to making a baby then meets the eye. Help arrives in the form of a grieving gay neighbor, a visiting monarch, and the dashing young lieutenant who defects from her yacht. Bittersweet and profoundly affecting, Babycakes was the first work of fiction to acknowledge the arrival of AIDS.

User reviews

LibraryThing member AlexTheHunn

Maupin's delightful and fascinating characters find their way through San Francisco in the late 70s. AIDS and social awareness has crept into the lives of the inhabitants of Barbary Lane. The party is winding down. Michael and Mary Ann are no longer kids.

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LibraryThing member tls1215

I loved all of the Tales of the City books so much that I read one each day when I was on a week-long beach vacation. I don't normally pay full price for books, but I had only brought the first 3 with me, and ended up buying the last three at B&N.

LibraryThing member miketroll

Maupin’s Tales of the City series (this is No.4) set in San Francisco is easy to read, gently amusing, lightweight, often sentimental and saccharine. Probably a big influence on TV shows like Friends and Sex In The City. More recently, Alexander McCall Smith has successfully emulated Maupin's

achievement of writing his novels in the 44 Scotland Street series as daily newspaper instalments (in The Scotsman).

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LibraryThing member Othemts

This is the fourth book in The Tales of the City series and probably the best. The 2nd & 3rd books descended into near stupidity, but this book brings Maupin's characters back older, wiser, and more socially aware. This is one of the first works of fiction to deal with the scourge of AIDS. Still,

it remains very funny and heartwarming.

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LibraryThing member presto

I think this is the best yet of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City. In addition to favourite characters Michael alias Mouse, Mary-Ann and Brian, Mona and Mrs Madrigal, we have a handsome young English sailor who jumps ship (the Britannia no less), a gay English lord, and a delightful young

aborigine Londoner. If you haven’t guessed some of the action takes place in England.

I read this some time after reading the preceding Tales of the City books, but very quickly picked up with the familiar characters. Full of unlikely coincidences, Babycakes is not just as funny, possibly even the funniest so far, but is also especially heart-warming with so many endearing individuals, Michael really wins our hearts as does his mischievous young aborigine friend.

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LibraryThing member thorold

Things start getting a bit darker after the third book: AIDS has shifted Maupin's focus a bit, and he's beginning to get a bit tired of some of his characters. Mona and Mrs Madrigal are reduced to walk-on parts; Mary Ann still has plenty to do in this one, but she has become a far less sympathetic

character than she was in the earlier books. Maupin makes the most of the opportunities for comedy that arise out of Michael going to England, and he gives some more depth to the character of Brian, so there's still plenty to smile about, but it doesn't really feel as though there's much ground for optimism.

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LibraryThing member maggie1944

[Babycakes] by Armistead Maupin

Well, that was a fun romp. Maupin finds silly ways to put his characters into predicaments and then even sillier ways to extricate them. I read this book in one day, a few hours. I am not a fast reader any more. Used to be one. Not now. But his books are easy reading.

And fun. And make you laugh out loud.

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LibraryThing member jeffome

Very fun book!.. I very much enjoyed the first 3 of this series, and this followed suit perfectly. It is silly...sit-com silly......many of the characters are really caricatures - stereotypical....but Maupin makes you love them and root for them in spite of all their silly stereotypicalness (nice

word, huh?).....nice compact chapters that jump from scene to scene and you keep reading cuz you have to find out how they survive their ridiculous situations. I read the others quite a few years ago and the characters and their connections came a little slowly at first, but it eventually all clicked. A little too many drugs taken way too casually to suit me, but we are talking about San Francisco in the early 1980's. No Pulitzer here, but an awful lot of fun!

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LibraryThing member sunnydrk

Sigh, the first book in the series that I didn't like. There was just something about the story line and the characters that didn't seem as thorough or complete. Hopefully, the next one will be back tot he usual standards.

LibraryThing member richardderus

Never imagine for a moment that Author Maupin is lacking in spinal steel: He kills off a character, a lovely and belovèd character, with the sangfroid of a CIA-trained assassin. It was a painful loss, but it resonated with what was happening in our lives about that time (1984). And there's nothing

in any universe anywhere that makes losing someone you've loved easy.

Why I don't rate the read higher than three stars is simple: Author Maupin lost control of his cast. Scattered from pillar to post, incoherence of events plagues the story, and that severely limits my pleasure in the read. I won't re-read it, but the issue of its uncenteredness is only part of the reason.

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LibraryThing member raschneid

A fun and heartfelt read as always, with an enjoyable American-in-London setup that doesn't romanticize the UK.

My only caveat is that while I enjoyed the wacky baby-making plot arc, the resolution throws a minor character under the bus to further the arc of our main characters, in a manner that I

found distasteful.

Read this in print, but apparently Alan Cumming narrates the audiobook(!)

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