Little lives on the Prairie
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Orphan Jim Burden moves from Virginia to relatives living on the frontier farmlands of Nebraska where `native' American settlers and immigrants from Scandinavia and Eastern and Central Europe are involved in opening up the Prairies. The eponymous heroine Antonia is the spirited elder daughter of the Shimerda family, poor Bohemian neighbours of the Burden's, who is forced to become a servant after her father has committed suicide. Her difficult life and that of the narrator Jim Burden are the central focus of this elegiac but unsentimental novel from the beginning of the twentieth century. It is most notable for evocative descriptions of the Prairies and pioneer lives in tough circumstances but also says a lot about ordinary human motivations. Plainly and lovingly written but a little lacking in excitement for today's readers.
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Leaves You Wondering!
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I started "My Antonia" just to find out what this literary classic was about. I soon found myself captivated by a development of characters and their relationships.
The story is seen through the eyes of Jim Burton, who begins the story as a ten year old orphan traveling from his family home in Virginia to his grandparents' farm near Black Hawk, Nebraska. The other two primary characters in the book are Antonia Shimerda, a Bohemian immigrant four years older than Jim, and Lena Lingard, a similarly aged girl from the local Norwegian community. As the years and the book pass, we see the characters develop in different ways. During this their relationships change, but the reader's interest is held.
The ability of this book to captivate the reader in intriguing! It has no real crises, no particular tragedies, just developing personalities and relationships. Although the main characters change, they all seem to develop along self directed lines, with no winners or losers. At the end the reader rides off with Jim, possessing many of the same feelings as he expresses. One test I apply to a novel is whether it leaves me wondering. Wondering why the characters lives develop as they do, wondering if the characters are really satisfied with their lives, wondering whether they desire something that the others have, wondering what happens to them after the last page. I am still wondering about "My Antonia." Any book that can do that has earned its status as a classic.
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