Jane Smiley has a good story here--I like the setting and the characters--but she doesn't "take me away" any more with her work. I would like this to be less detached. Very hard to get emotional about this story an the characters. Plus she opens with a frame--showing us the present world of th...
This book is intriguing less for what it is than what it is not. Smiley tells us, year by year since the early part of the 20th century, about the major and minor events in the lives of an Iowa family. She shows how these people are affected by historical events, sometimes profoundly and sometime...
I received this free audio book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.This is a sweet story of a seventh grade girl named Abby. Abby is very lonely both at school (remember what 7th grade was like!?) and at home (her older brother Danny was thrown out of her home). She lives on th...
A Good Horse, by Jane Smiley, is a fictional book about two horses and a girl. This book is a sequel to the book The George's and the Jewels. The book takes place in in the 1960's of California. Abby Lovitt is in grade eight and lives on a farm with her parents. The girl has many chores but groom...
A Good Horse by Jane Smiley is about Abby Lovitt and her life on the family ranch. In the story, Abby and her father come across an extra special horse they name Black George. Black George has a gift. That gift is jumping. He goes over jumps with ease, and he loves to do it. Abby and Black George...
There is an early renaissance work called The Decameron, by one Italian bloke named Boccaccio. The book is a thinly veiled excuse to collect a bunch of smutty stories under a thinly veiled excuse for a framing plot (ten young men and women escape to the hills outside plague-ridden Florence, and b...
IAn idealistic Icelandic farmer journeys to Mormon Utah and back in search of paradise in this captivating novel by Nobel Prize—winner Halldor Laxness.The quixotic hero of this long-lost classic is Steinar of Hlidar, a generous but very poor man who lives peacefully on a tiny farm in nineteenth-c...
After reading Jane Smiley's abysmally bad "Ten Days in the Hills", I vowed never to waste any more time on Ms. Smiley's fiction. In a fit of masochism, I broke that vow to read "Good Faith", her 2003 novel centered on the real estate world, circa 1983 in the vicinity of Portsmouth (NH? The book ...
The Greenlanders is an exceptionally well-written bit of historical fiction, detailing the little-known history of the Norse settlement in Greenland from the mid-14th to early-15th century. While the story focuses primarily on one family, there is no real protagonist, and the narrative slips in a...
I’ve been debating whether to dive into Jane Smiley’s Last Hundred Years trilogy. It’s such a big commitment, following a multigenerational family from 1920 to 2019 through three long novels. And I really didn’t love A Thousand Acres, the novel that won her a Pulitzer. (Not because it was poorly ...
“…Daddy thinks history starts fresh every day, every minute, that time itself begins with the feelings he’s having right now. That’s how he keeps betraying us, why he roars at us with such conviction. We have to stand up to that, and say, at least to ourselves, that what he’s done before is still...
Ernest Hemingway once said, "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called 'Huckleberry Finn,' " and since then a river of ink has flowed to justify that monumental claim.Two years ago, Jane Smiley went against this current of praise and took the nation's school teachers...
This book consists of five short stories and a novella. First, let me state the obvious: that Jane Smiley, who won a Pulitzer for "A Thousand Acres" can really write. Her grasp of what really goes on at the heart of relationships, and within people in the course of their daily lives, is remarkabl...
Jane Smiley, you are my new favorite author.I picked this up on a whim at the library (slim paperback, easy to read while nursing), and ended up loving it. One, I love good dialogue, but I also love when an author can pick up on the subtleties (how a character is eating while they talk, or are th...
I went back and forth with this book. There is a wealth of inside information regarding the care of, abuse of, superstitions about, and shady dealings that surround professional horse racing—Smiley obviously did her research. I liked the numerous anecdotes about horses and race tracks and enjoyed...
Continuum Contemporaries will be a wonderful source of ideas and inspiration for members of book clubs and readings groups, as well as for literature students.The aim of the series is to give readers accessible and informative introductions to 30 of the most popular, most acclaimed, and most infl...
Another in my series of neglected classics, this tells the story of a boy's rude coming of age at the end of World War II in Jerusalem. Felix has been orphaned by the death of his British mother of typhoid in Baghdad, and after neighbors care for him a while, he is shipped off to live with his fa...
We dressed in our nicest casual clothes, baked our noodle-hamburger casserole and our brownies, and went together, the two families. Rose made us stand up straight so she could survey us before we got in the car. “Respectable to the core,” she declared. I have to admit that the sight of Daddy sta...
He honked, and since I was on the front porch, not having yet taken off my boots, I ran out and opened the gate. It was nearly dark. He pulled through, then I closed the gate, latched it, and ran after the truck and trailer to the barn. Dad was out haying the horses. Dad never stopped what he was...
A week after his sixty-third birthday last October—perfectly aware that Frank had been struck by lightning, had been seventy-four, had been unique in many ways—Henry had gone to his doctor and asked for a full workup. He was not one of those old men who dressed carefully in the morning in classic...
At the end of 1849 he began to develop a new weekly periodical that came to be known as Household Words, “conducted by Charles Dickens.” The first issue appeared on March 30, 1850. From this time forward, for some twenty years, he edited, wrote for, and profited from either this weekly magazine o...
And Mom answered the phone, because I was upstairs doing homework and listening to music. I didn’t even hear it ring. Since I hadn’t said a word to Mom about Pie in the Sky except ‘fine’, when she came upstairs and told me about it, she was all happy and excited. She sort of bounced into my room,...
October I admit I like to be prepared for things. A life without money is predicated on anticipation (although, maybe, it is shaped by the unexpected). More that is unexpected happens when you are married, more still when you have a child. Mostly these unexpected things leave me confused and slow...
Aren’t you lucky! I had to come from Buffalo Center,” and without even pausing to think, Claire exclaimed, “Oh, you poor thing!” Ruth had a plan for every hour of every day. She was twenty now. She would dress perfectly, cultivating verve and style, until she was well out of the secretarial pool,...
Tacker, the old man who had Jewel, decided he needed two more ranch horses, so he came by to look at what we had. Of course we had Black George and Ornery George. The other George was a chestnut with two white socks in front, so we called him Socks George. We also had the mares. The old man bough...