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kkilburn 's review for:
O Pioneers!
by Willa Cather
I read My Antonia at some point - high school maybe? - and enjoyed it, but I've rediscovered Willa Cather as an adult and love her. She somehow manages to write about people living and working on the real frontier without feeding the romance of man-against-nature or manifest destiny or any of the other simple, self-serving narratives that we are fed in our elementary school history lessons. She writes of real people, with real strengths and real limitations, with real dreams and aspirations who sometimes win and sometimes lose. And she writes of the land in a way that leaves me simply breathless.
I don't love her work because it makes me sentimental for an idealized past. She doesn't make me wish I lived in that time or place. She does transport me, and that's, for me, the mark of great fiction.
I don't love her work because it makes me sentimental for an idealized past. She doesn't make me wish I lived in that time or place. She does transport me, and that's, for me, the mark of great fiction.