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3.8 AVERAGE
3.8 AVERAGE
adventurous
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
fast-paced
Beautifully written, but not quite as good as what I remember of Cather's "My Antonia," which I read about 25 years ago. (Will be re-reading that soon enough to make a fairer comparison.) Her descriptions of the land and nature are rhapsodic, and Cather's treatment of her characters' thoughts and personalities is engaging and true for the most part. I might have given this book five stars except for the fact that it sometimes gets close to melodrama. Also, I was disappointed in the last two-and-a-half chapters. Perhaps part of that is that my modern sensibilities are different from those of 100 years ago when the book was written, but I was bothered by a character's thoughts and actions following a dramatic event. And there was a too-rapid tying up of things at the end.
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
A beautiful, melancholy book about the life of a family of settlers in Nebraska. The writing was succinct but rich, and I really grew to love the characters on the farms in this area, following their triumphs and tragedies.
Honestly I want to rate this less because that ending was so annoying. It felt very Shakespearean in its tragic-ness, but then the response from Alexandra about the tragedy... horrible. I loved My Ántonia so much more. Sigh.
Some of the bits early in the novel about how the U.S. was super empty until the settlers came to tame the land are really tough to read in 2024, but those references thankfully drop off after the first part. The rest is a mostly tragic love tale that’s a bit uneven but usually quite quaint and maybe even a little cute. I don’t know; I can’t verbalize it, but something about Cather’s writing is like a warm blanket for my brain.
reflective
relaxing
A fierce and elegiac tale of early female empowerment, first published in the decade before (white) American women won the right to vote. The heroine, introduced shutting down a catcaller with an "Amazonian" glance, is the eldest sibling in her family and the one tasked with running the frontier farm after their father's death. Over the years that follow, she proves more capable than her shortsighted brothers or their male neighbors at the business of managing a successful homestead, even at the potential cost of her personal hopes and dreams. Author Willa Cather -- who never married but lived with a close female friend for many years, leading to later speculation about her romantic orientation -- writes with real poignancy of both the unforgiving Nebraska landscape and the struggle for women to prove themselves apart from men.
I loved this so. much. Honestly can't remember the last time a book captivated me from start to finish the way this one did.
I loved it. And I still don't know if what elevated it to 5 stars (like 5 stars actually means anything, it means nothing, but whatever) is my own take on this book, but I'll keep thinking for a while that it's not.
It's that kind of evenness of the plot that comes to a sudden crescendo, that when combined with a simplicity and frankness, affects me deeply. I don't want to give anything away - it's a tiny book but somehow it has a lot, a lot more at least that many of the books I have read. It also speaks - at least, as I mentioned, for me - of things I keep thinking about more and more: how the communication with others and understanding of other people is limited, and how we must keep accepting this everyday.
It's through the ancillary characters that we understand Alexandra Bergson more, of her moral frankness and simplicity, and through the environment that created her - the harsh but steadfast frontier. And it's also through the sparseness of the prose, that still manages to convey such richness of people's interior lives, that I have come to appreciate this book so much.
It's that kind of evenness of the plot that comes to a sudden crescendo, that when combined with a simplicity and frankness, affects me deeply. I don't want to give anything away - it's a tiny book but somehow it has a lot, a lot more at least that many of the books I have read. It also speaks - at least, as I mentioned, for me - of things I keep thinking about more and more: how the communication with others and understanding of other people is limited, and how we must keep accepting this everyday.
It's through the ancillary characters that we understand Alexandra Bergson more, of her moral frankness and simplicity, and through the environment that created her - the harsh but steadfast frontier. And it's also through the sparseness of the prose, that still manages to convey such richness of people's interior lives, that I have come to appreciate this book so much.