6/27/2023 0 Comments Some luck by jane smileyIt’s 1920, and Walter, recently home from World War I, contemplates his first-born son and his “perfectly graceful” young wife, Rosanna. The story opens with the patriarch, Walter Langdon, walking his Iowa farm. Smiley gives all the family members their own scenes. Her no-muss, no-fuss storytelling, if unsurprising, is also frequently subtle, wry and moving.Īmong her many novels, Smiley has written a powerful chronicle of Midwestern farm life in her Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Thousand Acres” and a clever satire of academic life at an agricultural studies university, “Moo.” “ Some Luck” explores many more characters and a far longer stretch of time - hence its structure, tidy as a well-planted cornfield, one chapter devoted to each year from 1920 to 1953. Smiley delivers a straightforward, old-fashioned tale of rural family life in changing times. Over the course of the novel - already longlisted for the National Book Award - most of the children will leave the farm just as surely as the rest of the white rural Midwest will pack its bags. “ Some Luck ,” the engaging first volume of Jane Smiley’s planned trilogy, is a sweeping story that spans 33 years, three continents and a generation of children on an Iowa farm.
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