My Ántonia by Willa Cather
Boston : Houghton Mifflin, c1988.
238 p. ; 21 cm.
I've been meaning to read Willa Cather for a long time and this summer I chose her first novel My Ántonia. It's really a beautiful novel, capturing a lost period of US/European settlement of the prairie frontier in Nebraska. The novel is told from the perspective of a young man, who is sent to Nebraska from West Virginia at the end of the 19th century when his parents die. He lives with his well established and kindly grandparents and becomes friends with a girl his age, Antonia - newly arrived with her family from Bohemia (modern day Czech Republic).
The novel is an unabashed fond look back at childhood on the plains of Nebraska. The novel doesn't shy away from the hard life of early settlers and farmers, but brings out the magic of the geography as seen through the eyes of a child and growing young man.
The writing is vivid and Cather's gifts for setting and characterization are in full force in this novel. She is able to convey the stark and sometimes harsh beauty of the Nebraska frontier and conveys the various interesting characters of the prairie farms and towns.
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