by Willa Cather

I avoided Willa Cather for the better part of my first 54 years, although in hindsight, I’m not sure why. I assumed Cather belonged to the high-minded and academic world of literature. I spent of good chunk of college pursuing literature and found it wasn’t for me. I prefer a good story, straight forward and not buried in inaccessible language. Speak plain and entertain or educate or inform me. Those are my favorite books.
Color me surprised to find that Cather’s My Antonia is exactly that–a good story plainly written.
My Antonia tells of Jim Burden and Antonia Shimerda, two young children from vastly different worlds who meet in the middle of the night on a train station platform in rural 19th century Nebraska. The story consists of vignettes into their lives as they grow up on the virgin plains, their eventual move to town, and their turn to adulthood.
It’s a love story about family, heritage, and destiny, a destiny that took the two on different paths in life, both satisfying in their own right. Cather paints a vivid portrait of what life was like in the early settler days of rural Nebraska, and builds a portrait of a family and a way of life that is as satisfying today as it was when she wrote it in 1918. I enjoyed it tremendously, and will not wait long for my next Cather read.
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