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Aug 19, 2008

Glen rated it:

When this book was chosen by our book club for this month's theme of "tragedy," I approached reading it with some trepidation. There are a number of things that I don't care for in literature, and one of them is the family drama which centers on the drama as drama for its own sake, rather than to say something more about the world. Part of my bias against this kind of writing comes from having cut my eyeteeth on science fiction, the literature of ideas which, at its best, is about toda More...

2 comments like (16 people liked it)

Jun 27, 2008

Joe rated it:

This book won a Pulitzer back in that day, and that pisses me off. Although, really, I should know better by now. I'm always burned by the Pulitzers.

Based on the rough plot of King Lear, yes, which is objectively the worst of Shakespeare's plays and that should say something. This book is an excellent example of why everyone should leave psychological novels to the Russians and Henry James. Nothing strictly happens, of course, just like in Lear (except there, at least, everyone dies More...

3 comments like (6 people liked it)

Jan 17, 2012

Steve rated it:

A clunky retelling of Lear. Only at the very end do you get a touch of Lear's darkness, but it's not enough to save the novel. One of the most overrated novels I've ever read. I think this book won some awards, and might of been an Oprah Book before there were Oprah Books. A classic example of why some awards and book club favorites are not to be trusted. Come to think of it, I've only read one great novel by Smiley, The Greenlanders. And that book is unlike anything else she's done.

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Jan 05, 2008

Angela rated it:

A simple story-family lives on and works a 1,000 acre farm that has been in the family for four generations. Father, Larry, decides to retire and leave the farm to his three daughters. Dad acts funky, daughters become concerned, family unravels, peope die, people get angry, people leave, etc. Boring, right?

Wrong!! The beauty of this story IS its simplicity. However, the characters, like real people are quite complex. They move through life vastly unaware of their motivations. Throug More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Nov 18, 2007

Kate rated it:

Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres, (Harper Perennial, London, 2004)

This is an interesting novel, to say the least. I came to it with prejudice, I must admit, as it's a reworking of Shakespeare's King Lear, a play that I love and that I'm currently working on for my dissertation. So then, on reading the blurb, I immediately thought that Smiley's novel would involve her murdering the play. I was wrong.

What happens, in fact, is that Smiley puts her own spin on the More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

May 15, 2009

Saxon rated it:

This won a Pulitzer Prize and acts as yet another testament to why the Pulitzer Prize should largely be ignored. However, the fact that it did win a Pulitzer makes me feel less embarrassed about reading it...even if it was just for class.

A Thousand Acres, told from the middle of three daughters, is a story about a small farming community in rural Iowa during the mid-1970s and is loosely based on King Lear. A bunch of tragic shit happens that is mostly the fault of the men. This prove More...

2 comments like (3 people liked it)

Sep 26, 2008

Suzanne rated it:

This is a modern retelling of King Lear and is a tragedy. The location is the midwest and the father is planning on turning over his property (farm) to his 3 daughters. Everything has its price. And these daughters have paid it. This is a well-written novel which deserved to win the Pulitzer Prize. Nonetheless I found it depressing and haunting.

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jun 08, 2008

Becky rated it:

This story is much more profound that I originally expected it to be. Three daughters raised under similar circumstances,but each reacted very differently to their childhood. There is a lot of depth to the characters in this book, even some of the minor ones. Humans are so complex and so interesting.

Ginny (the oldest daughter) just adapted to whatever circumstances came her way. Most people would call this 'easy to get along with'. But it caused a lot of miscommunication and unhappin More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Apr 22, 2008

Cynthia rated it:

I just didn't get this book. I think this Pulitzer Prize winning book was just over my head.

This story involves a Iowa farm family (3 daughters with their husbands and their overbearing, stubborn, old school father). Their farm is their life (with the exception of one daughter, Caroline, who became a lawyer). The father decides to relinguish control over the family farm and sign it over to his two oldest daughters, Ginny and Rose, and their husbands (Ty and Frank?) . Well he imme More...

1 comment like (5 people liked it)

Nov 02, 2007

Lisa rated it:

I read A Thousand Acres as part of a senior seminar. We read King Lear first and then this modern take on it, and that was a great way to do it. You get the historical and literary context of the novel and also an almost brutal comparison of who's good, who's bad, who's complicated, and what does it mean for the themes of power, loss, and loyalty.

I read a quote from Jane Smiley in which she said someone had come up to her and said that they loved this book. She said she appreciated t More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Sep 01, 2007

Johnsergeant rated it:

Narrated By: C. J. Critt

Awards -
Pulitzer Prize Winner

Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Jane Smiley’s spellbinding novel also headed best-seller lists for many months. A Thousand Acres is the powerful, mythic story of an American farm family and the land that nourishes and consumes its members. Three daughters and their husbands are pulled into a tangle of love, jealousy, and fear when their father, Larry Cook, grows too ol More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 15, 2007

Peter rated it:

Jane Smiley's take on William Shakespeare's King Lear is a powerful story of anger, redemption and guilt. Smiley's plot follows Shakespeare's closely: Larry Cook is an Iowa patriarch who decides to divide his farm among his three daughters: Ginny, Rose and Caroline. Problems arise immediately when Caroline, the youngest, voices doubt and is instantly cast out of the family. The remaining two daughters begin to gradually wrestle any control away from their father, who in turns responds to his eve More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Mar 12, 2008

Chu Yi rated it:

I did not enjoy reading this book, but I am glad I managed to get it done. I hate all the family issues and questions that were raised because it seem very unsympathetic and I could not understand why would family members do things like that to each other. Larry, the father of the family decided to pass his 1000 acres famr to his three daughters, but the youngest, Caroline turned him down. So the other two daughters, Ginny and Rose and their husbands took over the farm. What I couldn't understan More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 04, 2007

John rated it:

This is a hard book to read. It is Smiley's adaptation of King Lear, told from the point of view of one of his daughters. Most of the characters are good sorts of folks--or at least can be decent--except the father, who is a shallow and evil man.

What makes this book hard to read is that it is like watching a loved one with an addiction that goes untreated. The demise is horrible and inevitable, and the characters lack the insight to avoid it. One of the women in the book, the n More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Mar 25, 2008

Megan rated it:

This book kept me so interested all of the way through. It is one of those very well written books by a superb author. But unlike many such books, I felt no difficulty at any point. I was just so caught up in the story, despite the fact that I knew going in that it was a modern version of King Lear and therefore had a head's up on the story line. But Smiley incorporated the aspects of King Lear so smoothly into the plot that it was completely believable and, what's more, understandable. I l More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Mar 14, 2009

Visha rated it:

Picked this up because once again, a retelling of Lear has hit the shelves (Chris Moore's FOOL) and Entertainment Weekly did a write up about Lear re-tellings and this one was mentioned. Was impressed - highly readable, incorporates fascinating facts specific to a time and place (1979's Iowa farmland), OUTSTANDING characters (although you, like me, may want to beat the shit out of some of them, including Ginny, the narrator), compelling narrative drive - honestly, I took a morning off and just More...

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Feb 17, 2009

Heather rated it:

This book was truly mesmerizing to me. I can't distinctly put my finger on what make this book entirely un-put-down-able. This story is set on a family farm in Iowa from a period between (circa) 1977 to 1980, a time and place as anachronistic to me as Japan in the 1830's; however, through Smiley's writing style I was there, I could see the beauty of the farms, smell their smells, and feel what it was like to kick dried mud off a tractor tire. Smiley is likely very faithful to farming, she used a More...

0 comments like

Jan 11, 2009

Faith rated it:

I bought this book last August, and only now I got to read it. It was sertainly worth waiting for... Or, well, waht I mean is that it is totally great! "A great American tragedy about the failure of a family's land and the failure of its love", Independent says on the cover of my copy of the book. That's it in a nutshell. Larry Cook owns a farm of a thousand acres, and he desides to retire and hand the farm over to his three daughters and their husbands... And then everything starts go More...

0 comments like

Jan 04, 2009

Antof9 rated it:

Well, I've processed the book a bit, and I also watched the DVD. I'm still trying to decide if I'd say I "liked" it or not. I guess I did like it, but I didn't love it. It was interesting to me that while reading the book, I could kind of picture some of the beautiful cinematography that the movie captured. That doesn't usually happen for me :) I was also somewhat distracted by the fact that I knew the two women who were in the movie. So although I didn't know which was played by More...

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Nov 15, 2011

Diana rated it:

This is a story about a farming community in Iowa during the late 1970’s. Traditionally, the farms have been handed down from generation and generation. Jess Clark, returns after a thirteen years absence and his father, Harold, welcomes him back. His influence on the main characters is felt throughout the story. In the Cook family, the two older sisters, Ginny and Rose, married and stayed on the farm while their younger sister, Caroline, moved to the city. Their father, Larry Cook, is a goo More...

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Oct 29, 2011

Rachel rated it:

This is an interesting retelling of King Lear. It doesn't leave me feeling excited to promote it, though. It shows the tragedy of living for appearances, whether it is American society striving to maintain that white picket fence exterior view, or our own natures trying to appear fresh and camera ready at all times. Maybe we try to keep up appearances because of the long list of "shoulds" in our heads, the "shoulds" that we ought to be, given to us stamped and ready-made More...

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Oct 17, 2011

Michelle rated it:

Guys, A Thousand Acres is totally a gothic novel set on a farm! And I love gothic novels. This one had it all--affairs, incest (I know, it's in every book I read lately), some sort of craziness or depression?, backstabbing, family drama AND courtroom drama, attempted murder, suicide(?), grave illnesses....

Probably my favorite part of the book were the unexpected turns all of the characters took, but each showed a very true and human thing--when people are only out for themselves, they More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Jun 13, 2011

Tifnie rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

0 comments like

Jan 12, 2011

Osvaldo rated it:

I'll just repost the first paragraph of a scholarly article I am writing on this novel:

Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres presents the American family farm as the unstable element upon which the American nation is built. The metaphor of the nation as family has a long tradition in the narratives of national unity and resulting identity, and the mythic role of the agrarian family life as the virtuous bedrock of labor and subsistence at the heart of the nation girds this concept by ennoblin More...

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Jun 17, 2010

Tim rated it:

Although the prose itself isn't especially accomplished, Smiley does a good job of drawing the reader into the small world of an insulated farm family. Things get increasingly bleak as the King Lear inspired plot kicks in. Now, I haven't read Shakespeare's play but all summaries indicate that Smiley is depressingly faithful to this source and it shackles A Thousand Acres to a tragic plot that doesn't really work very well in a different setting. The result is sometimes inexplicable but almost al More...

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Mar 24, 2010

Maxililyn rated it:

The novel “A Thousand Acres” retells a well known story “King Lear” in a more creative and impressive way. The characters the author created are closely linked to every character existed in the famous Shakespeare’s play, where the dad is corresponded to King Lear, and the three daughters are corresponded to the descendents of the king. Similar to the King Lear, the “A Thousand Acres” implicitly followed the format of family dramas, leads the story to a tragedy. By reading through the novel, the More...

0 comments like

Sep 24, 2009

Mehrsa rated it:

The book is a modern and American re-telling of King Lear and it is a delight to read--that is, for a story about a family that completely falls apart. What's so great about the book and the re-telling of Shakespeare is that it's such a fresh perspective: It's female, American, and modern. For one, it's not easy to lay fault on any one person for the tragedy that unravels (Shakespeare easily blames the two eldest daughters in KL). If anyone is to blame, it's the abusive father. (And it's a moder More...

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Aug 16, 2009

Barbara rated it:

I really enjoyed this book. The writing style is very natural, clear, and quick moving. It reminds me a little bit of Thomas Hardy's novels in that the landscape is integral to the story, to the point of almost becoming a character. In this case, the landscape is a farm in rural Iowa. The land and the practice of farming have formed the characters, their personalities and views. The farm is both sustenance to its inhabitants and the cause of a great deal of anguish.

THe narrator of th More...

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Apr 06, 2009

Lizzy rated it:

The other day a woman at the store asked me what I read for "trash," as in beach books and stuff. Truthfully, I don't really have any guilty pleasures when it comes to books (the internet is where I get my trash on). Finally I decided that Jane Smiley is my beach read! I concluded this because 1. she writes about horses, 2. I borrowed this copy from my friend's mom, and 3. Andi saw it on the coffee table and said "Isn't she one of those authors they have on the shelf at the superm More...

0 comments like

Apr 09, 2011

Whitaker rated it:

I know a guy who grew up in a small rural village in Sweden. It was a small, tight-knit community. Everybody knew everybody. And nobody was different. If someone took up a hobby, say, macramé pretty soon all the women would be doing it. It was all very Stepford; difference was not something to be encouraged. He got out of there as soon as he could.

Imagine, though, how it would be to live like that: under the constant eyes of your community, gossip buzzing around about you, judging y More...

2 comments like (9 people liked it)

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