The Cider House Rules

The Cider House Rules

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4.03 of 5 stars 4.03  ·  rating details  ·  69,447 ratings  ·  1,981 reviews
Raised from birth in the orphanage at St. Cloud's, Maine, Homer Wells has become the protege of Dr. Wilbur Larch, its physician and director. There Dr. Larch cares for the troubled mothers who seek his help, either by delivering and taking in their unwanted babies or by performing illegal abortions. Meticulously trained by Dr. Larch, Homer assists in the former, but draws...more
Hardcover, Large Print, 973 pages
Published July 1st 2000 by Thorndike Press (first published 1985)
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Community Reviews

(showing 1-30 of 3,000)
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Ben
I shouldn't be throwing semicolons around too often; and yet, after reading Irving, what do I find myself doing? semicolon, semicolon, SEMICOLON ; ; ; ; I'm not winking at you; those are semicolons.. now you know what I mean. Irving affects me in many ways -- the semicolons are just one example. (And yes, I know I'm probably not using them correctly -- you don't have to point that out. You really don't.)

More than a week after finishing, The Cider House Rules, it's still on my mind, still sneakin...more
Dianne
this may be my favourite john irving book. i like his deceivingly lighthearted style, and the deadpan humour he gives his characters. the cider house rules in particular seems more real than the others, the orphanage and apple orchards seem more tangible, the emotions less idiosyncratic and the characters more human.

the direct issue here is abortion. the medical procedures to, the right to, the choice to...it's enough to make me want to cross my legs to prevent any traffic in or out.

the less dir...more
Katie Abbott Harris
I just finished reading this novel, and it is so phenominal that I'm almost speechless, and I'm sad that it is over. The story is engrossing, rich, moving, tragic, and satisfying, and the imagery is extraordinarily powerful. The plot takes place during the first half of the 1900's in rural Maine, and tells of Dr. Larch, an obstetrician, founder of an orphanage, abortionist, and ether addict, and his favorite orphan, and heroic figure, Homer Wells. Irving develops the characters superbly, such th...more
Pamela
Jan 23, 2008 Pamela rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: everyone...
Recommended to Pamela by: Tanja
I was actually really surprised at how much I enjoyed this book. I am VERY Pro-Life and was very skeptical before about picking it up...although I love John Irving as an author. He is excellent at character development and his stories are so multifaceted that you are never disappointed. This is certainly true here in this novel. My surprisingly favorite character was Melony. She was hauntingly creepy, pathetically adorable and demanding of your attention although not a primary character. I loved...more
Jacob
November 2009
What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us are wrapped up in parentheses.
(The Cider House Rules, p. 429)


In 19__, when abortion was still illegal (when women who did not want their babies were criminals; when pregnancy was a sentence and a fine), there were still ways to avoid the accident of birth: there were medicines and various chemicals to gamble with, or else there were grim back-room doctors, butchers, and other shad...more
Logan
Aug 31, 2008 Logan rated it 4 of 5 stars
Recommended to Logan by: Jeremy
I've always struggled with Irving and Cider House Rules is no exception. It's not that Irving is a poor writer, no one can argue that. His characters are always fully-fleshed and alive on the page and each sentence drips with so much detail that you think you're going to get splinters when Homer and Melony are messing around in the abandoned millworker's dorm. I just think that most of the time when I put the book down I feel like I've read the equivalent of cotton candy: really pretty but not m...more
Steven
John Irving might just be my favorite contemporary author. No current author can move me with their storytelling quite as capably as he.

I picked up this book to read on a recent trip to New England, specifically Maine and New Hampshire. I had previously seen the movie and I knew that the story was set in the land of lobsters and blueberries. Although I had enjoyed the movie version quite a bit, I enjoyed the book infinitely more. Indeed, the character of Melony, who is absent from the movie, may...more
Suzanne
I love John Irving but stayed away from this work for years because of the "abortion" issue. I didn't want to be preached to, (in principle I am against abortion) and I foolishly underestimated Irving's ability to create a complete work, one in which "abortion" was a small part. This is one of his finest works and I recommend it without reservation. Irving forces the reader to view the world from many angles and does it with his usual excellence in creating characters with depth and a plot that...more
Leah
Oct 25, 2009 Leah rated it 5 of 5 stars
Recommended to Leah by: Viluna Jennings
Shelves: favorites
I finally finished The Cider House Rules this morning; I've been working on it since mid-August. Usually if I take that long to read a book it's because the book isn't very good, I've gotten bored with it, or the writing is hard to comprehend. None of those things are true of The Cider House Rules. Instead I found the book to be wonderfully written with rich and complex characters (not to mention a moving and controversial storyline). I think the main reason I took so long to finish it (aside fr...more
Belinda
Jul 25, 2007 Belinda rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: anyone who is speculative about others
Like "A Prayer For Owen Meany," one to make you reflect on yourself and the world around you, while you laugh, cry and everything in between. Irving's skill with manipulating the English language for effect has never been more in evidence.
Bill
I started the Cider House Rules after giving up on 3 novels that just couldn't hold my attention.
John Irving will certainly make you love reading again. The Cider House Rules is once again a novel rich with characters so real you forget this is fiction and you care about what happens to them.
Why can I only say that about a mere handful of writers?

This is a novel about abortion in the 1940s. The dilemmas of abortion are obvious, and this novel does lean towards pro-choice. I think pro-lifers woul...more
Jennifer
Oct 08, 2007 Jennifer rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Most bookworms
Cider House Rules started fairly slow, but I found myself engrossed in it more and more as I waded through. The novel focuses largely on the issue of abortion and often confronts the main points with such bald truth that it can feel a little harsh. The story itself isn't as predictable as many novels in this sort of genre, and I found myself really wondering how everything would turn out in the end. I found the moral dilemmas very intriguing and it actually made me evaluate my own beliefs in the...more
Rachel
Loved it like I loved The World According to Garp. Anybody else ever confuse John Updike with John Irving from time to time? Whoops.

Homer Wells is an orphan at St. Clouds, where Wilbur Larch is giving safe, illegal abortions to women and delivering unwanted babies. I still cannot say exactly where I stand on abortion - I waver back and forth. Of course, CHR makes a case for abortion rights based on incest, and an alternative of chemicals and coat hangers. Which is really the only case for it. B...more
kristin
A Prayer for Owen Meany made me want to read more from John Irving. While I know I have seen pieces of the movie, it was barely enough to be worth mentioning. This book was a little slow at first, but I've discovered this is because he takes extra steps in developing his characters and setting the stage for their intertwined lives (a theme in the other Irving books I've since read). Ultimately I want to see the movie now for comparison because the book was just so damn good. Very raw and dark at...more
Mark
Aug 10, 2007 Mark rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: fans of strangeness
After seeing the movie (which I loved), I knew I wanted to read the book. It's still the only Irving book I've read, but it made me want to read all of them. Homer Wells is a character that I could identify with in a strange, but very specific way. (No, I'm not an orphan. But I have felt so many of the same feelings that he did. Haven't we all?)
The book is, first and foremost, about abortion. It's very pro-choice. So, if that bothers you...well, read it anyway. Maybe it will change your mind.
It'...more
Ashley
my first irving novel----how late i came to irving! this novel is full of secrets that you only start to see in hindsight as you reflect on what you've read. irving's depictions of relationships are uniquely complex and full of mysteries that draw me in as a reader and force me to take a very close look. irving is a master of gestures and nuances in novels that can feel, if you aren't reading carefully, like simply a series of short, small actions.

what is extraordinary to me in irving is how mu...more
Steve
Dec 03, 2007 Steve rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Any Adult Serious Reader
OK - this is the second book. Can you tell I like John Irving? Many people have seen the movie based - pretty faithfully thanks to the author's involvement - on the book. I must say I prefer to remember Toby Maguire from this role, however much fun I found Spiderman.

Like most John Irving books, this one is inhabited by real people with flaws and amazing humanity. What did I learn? I am reminded with each read that absolutism in any form can only bloom where the existence of real people and lives...more
Christopher Green
I really can't stand John Irving's style of writing. This was a six hundred page novel that should have been three hundred. Also, I found it to be a little heavy-handed. He admits that it is deliberately didactic, but I think he pushes it the the point that it starts working against him. Any character opposing his ideals is put up as a two-dimensional straw man that he villainizes and knocks down, which doesn't help convince anyone of his views. I was surprised to learn that he wrote the screenp...more
Inge
really liked this book, the film hasn't a tenth of the story, depth, character et all that is in the book. i highly recommend it and not just to you princes of Maine.
Pam
This is a good book with a good story. However, it is not one of my favorite of John Irving's novels. There is a sexual scene with a woman and a horse that set me off guard somewhere near the beginning of the novel. I also had a difficult time with Doctor Larch's ether addiction as well as his unreasonable and almost psycho obsession with Homer Wells. The graphic abortion scenes were also not very pleasant for me. I think that the writing of John Irving is still commendable however the tone of t...more
Walter
Dec 03, 2007 Walter rated it 3 of 5 stars  ·  review of another edition Recommends it for: fans of clever writing and tolerance for horror
The author has a great talent for writing. I was impressed at the vividness of the writing and the ability he had of adding humor to the horrible. That being said, there was much too much of the horrible for my liking. Death, betrayal, incest, addiction, self annihilation, and no hope for progress...argh! There is quite enough of this in real life (just read the news). I'd rather avoid dealing with these grim topics in a work of art, unless there is some transcendence of the horror. One could ar...more
Alyssa
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
John
Excellent and at times very funny
Ron
There's no doubt about it: John Irving is a genius. I don't know of any other author to whom I've given three of his books five stars, but this is another, and I've yet to read several of his others.



He produces storylines whose twists and turns are crafted carefully to be convincing yet never predictable; a range of characters that stay in the mind for a long time after putting down the book; research on a variety of topics that makes you believe he's an expert on them all, and also the little t...more
Kdubs
i am a wee bit grossed out by this book. i get the reason for the blatant abortion details, but i'm a little too much of a pussy to read about it. and the weird (but kinda sweet) interaction on wilber larch's part toward homer wells is disturbing. i get the feeling he's going to turn out to be a pedafile. but, at the same time, i can't put it down and will likely rate it 5 out of 5 stars.

ok, ok. i take back the part about dr. larch maybe being a baby molester. this book was awesome. i loved it.
Sarah Horn
Homer Wells grew up in an orphanage. Well...there's a unique story starter. But Wells' roots are about the only stereotypical story grabber in this entire novel. That and his not so subtle name.

The story is told in flashbacks, chronicling Homer's life. The trauma, the subsequent reaction, the ins and outs of falling in love (Charlize Theron in the movie...awesome). Oh and war, terrible injuries, affairs, lost connections, questionable relationships...basically your stereotypical Irving hodgepodg...more
Stacey
Recently I read The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall, which basically is about how susceptible we are, as humans, to stories. One point he makes in the book is how morality itself is codified in stories... religions are all based on stories, and sacred myths exist both in religious doctrines as well as nation-making myths (such as the story of Columbus, for example).

Anyway, the point is, he doesn't actually cite The Cider House Rules, but this book is all I could think about when the...more
Katie
OK, this is my least favorite Irving novel. I think I'll be stopping with this one... I found it long and tedious. And it has one of my pet peeves, which is bizarre and unexplained quirky character development; I just found that more often than not, the characters said or did things which I just did not understand. I didn't "get" them and I couldn't feel what they were feeling a lot of the time, and this limits my liking of a book.

The story: it's about an orphanage, and how the resident doctor d...more
Katia
Avec ce roman, John Irving nous plonge dans l'univers de St Cloud's, un orphelinat. Ce dernier se compose d'une partie médicalisée, où les femmes peuvent accoucher ou se faire avorter. C'est là que se trouve la part du Diable. Notre héros est Homer Wells, un orphelin qui ne trouve pas de famille d'accueil. Il va alors trouver un père de substitution en la personne de Wilbur Larch, le médecin. Je ne saurais dire pourquoi, mais j'ai eu du mal à lire ce roman. J'ai retrouvé un auteur que j'aime mai...more
Maduck831
“In other parts of the world,” Dr. Larch wrote, “delirious happiness is thought to be a state of mind. Here in St. Cloud’s we recognize that delirious happiness is possible only for the totally mindless. I would call it, therefore, that thing most rare: a state of the soul.” (28) “I have been given the choice of playing God or leaving practically everything up to chance. It is my experience that practically everything is left up to chance much of the time; men who believe in good and evil, and w...more
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The Cider House Rules = Kindle daily deal 2/21/13 4 39 Feb 21, 2013 04:40pm  
Who Thinks Tobey Maguire Was the Best Actor for this Character? 26 106 Jan 03, 2013 10:21pm  
did anyone else start to get angry at homer? 1 26 Dec 01, 2012 07:15pm  
The importance of the title 2 47 Feb 09, 2012 09:19pm  
Was Homer an allusion to the Odyssey? 3 22 Feb 09, 2012 04:36pm  
The Cider House Rules (Paperback)
The Cider House Rules (Paperback)
The Cider House Rules (Hardcover)
The Cider House Rules (Paperback)
The Cider House Rules (Hardcover)

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John Irving published his first novel, Setting Free the Bears, in 1968. The World According to Garp, which won the National Book Award in 1980, was John Irving’s fourth novel and his first international bestseller; it also became a George Roy Hill film. Tony Richardson wrote and directed the adaptation for the screen of The Hotel New Hampshire (1984). Irving’s novels are now translated into thirty...more
More about John Irving...
A Prayer for Owen Meany The World According to Garp A Widow for One Year The Hotel New Hampshire The Fourth Hand

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“What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.” 343 people liked it
“Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.” 120 people liked it
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