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Summary: A beautiful Story
Review: My Antonia weaves the tale of a young girl from Bohemia who comes to live on a Nebraskan farm where "there was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. " In this new world, Antonia learns to survive and thrive even though she was not always socially accepted. Many people can relate to this feeling of being alone in new experiences and places. Antonia was strong and refused to conform to social pressures, some of the same pressures that people face today. Willa Cather describes the setting and characters so beautifully that it feels as though the reader is really there, learning along with Antonia and Jim. Her style of writing is smooth and easygoing, making this book a leisurely read. We found this book very delightful and would recommend it to all readers.
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Summary: My Antonia
Review: I enjoyed this book, and I recommend others to read this book. As it was a very enjoyable book. It was about immagrants, and how they survived coming to a new country.
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Summary: A little slow
Review: This book started out great. I thought the story about the wedding and the wolves was very interesting. After they moved out to the city, the story kinda slowed down...way down. It didnt get good again untill Jim went to college. I really don't think this book is all that worth reading unless you have to.
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Summary: A magical book
Review: Having grown up in the city of Omaha, and having travelled across the state of Nebraska countless times, this great novel (if the plot is too "slow-moving" for you, you need to boost the old attention span) amazes me in how it captures the magical quality of the land itself in spite of its ostensible drabness, particularly in Jim Burden's wagon ride to his new Nebraska home in the early pages. The sense of time and place - including, as several other reviewers have mentioned, the symphonic portrayal of the immigrant experience - in this book is also inspired and inspring. However, it is the depiction of a Truly Significant Soul in Antonia's character, and what it means to be a close confidant in youth to such a person, that makes this one of my ten or so favorite books. Antonia is a compelling, inspiring character, the type of person the reader would love to have known. Relating in friendship and intimacy to such people is nourishment to the souls of the rest of us, and often defines in some sense whom we ourselves are. More than anything else, this novel is at once a character sketch and a portrait of a friendship - the ways that two people can be so different as Jim and Antonia are from each other, but have so much experience, care, and goodwill in common. Cather conveys more than her plotlines, more than her (poetic as it is) prose - this great novel resonates with the truth and beauty of life. Skip the horrific movie with Jason Robards - it completely misses the point of the book, turning it into something as twee as the Little House on the Prairie TV show, when the novel itself actually has more in common with contemporaneous modernist works by Virginia Wolfe, E.M. Forster, et al., or those of a contemporary writer like Barbara Kingsolver. Such books serve to reveal those underlying connections between all spirits of goodwill.
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Summary: This is a great book about the immigrant experience, I know!
Review: I really enjoyed this book. Since I came to America this year from Panama, this is one of the first books I have read in English. Willa Cather tells the story of Antonia, a young Bohemian girl who came with her family to the United States and settled in the plains of Nebraska, where I live. She and her family encountered many problems coming to live here, including the language, because they didn't know how to speak English.This story reflects much of actual life today in this country, because so many immigrants from Mexico, Central America, South America and other countries come here in search of a better future for them and their children. It is a very difficult situation for the immigrant families to abandon their countries, their customs and specially having to learn a new language. Many times these new immigrants are not welcomed here and suffer discrimination. They have to try extremely hard to get a better education and improve their lives, but all this effort and hard work is worth it if at the end we can succeed and achieve our goals. I also really enjoyed the author's description of the environment where the story takes place here in Nebraska. The way she describes the fields, the plains, the animals as they used to be, make the story more real and vivid. The characters in My Antonia came alive and were very interesting. After all the struggles the immigrant families suffered, many of them succeeded and had a good life in this country. This was very encouraging for me to learn. My family and I came to this country with the objective of improving our family situation economically and professionally. It has not been very easy for us. We have gone through some difficult situations, but we have faith and hope that we too will reach our goals, especially after learning our new language, English. By Margee Santos, submitted by my teacher Mrs. Masters
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Summary: Give me a Woman to match my Prairie Sunsets
Review: Ten-year-old Jim Burden arrives in the dark Nebraska vastness, on the same train as a hopeful but impoverished Bohemian family. The newly orphaned boy is welcomed by loving grandparents and kind farm hands, who gently teach him prairie survival skills. Alas, there is no one but a sly cousin from the old country to greet/dupe the hardworking folk who sacrificed their homeland to make a better life in the New World for their children. Still, hroughout the entire book it is Nature--particularly in the form of the undulating, ever metamorphosing prairie--which dispenses both cruelty and blessing on Americans and immigrants alike. How each group copes reveals their moral fibre and hints at future success. Young Jim is most enchanted by his 14-year-old neighbor, a bronzed, hardworking daughter of the soil, who toils selflessly for her family--Antonia Shimerda. Their strange customs and diverse personalities awe and confuse Jimmy, who immediately feels appreciation and affection for this brave girl from a flawed family. The novel recounts their lives from childhood until young adulthood; how they took divergent paths in their quests for true happiness and contentment in life. Cather's style is lyric: music is found in both Papa's violin and the waving of golden grain. She vividly portrays the chiaroscuro of shimmering sunsets and dappled leaves by the creek; gracefulness in the lilt of a barefoot walk and the natural aspiration of the heart toward peace and beauty. Does Jim regret the lost days of his boyhood, when life's pleasures were innocent, when hope was young and shy, when dreams were easily shared with a trusting companion and sincere smile? Was it worth all his serious studies and prestigious N.Y. job, when he recalls the tremulous private confessions of their youth? Can a prairie lad completely divest himself of his nurturing environment, or do the dancing grasses still hold secret sway in his adult heart? An American classic of the midwest, MY ANTONIA is meant for readers all over the world because of the unashamed truths it reveals about the heart of man.
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Summary: A wonderful story
Review: Willa Cather in this novel paints a vivid portrait of late nineteenth century rural bourgeois Nebraska where she grew up. The society is puritanical and prissy with clearly drawn class distinctions but people, particularly the children had a great deal more enjoyment out of life, a sense of its infinite mysteries and possibilities than they do today. Being poor did not necessarily mean one could not have hope. Cather traces the life of Antonia, the charming and pretty daughter of an impoverished and troubled Czech immigrant family, as she struggles through endless hardship from the suicide of her father to endless hours in the fields doing man's work to being abandoned by the father of her first child to finding hapiness, through the eyes of Jim Burden, her close friend from the moment she arrived in America.
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Summary: Inspiration to women
Review: Willa Cather's "My Antonia" is a book of strife and hardship. The strong willed main character is Antonia Shimerda who despite her numerous opsticles always manages to land on her feet. Her life is hard from the beginning, when she lives in the pathetic excuse of a house and deals with working as a man in the fields. She gives an inspiration to women because of how strong she stays throughout the book. However, the book does drag and soem of the parts are a little dull. Overall, not a bad book and I would recommend it to anyone who likes books with a slow developed plot.
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Summary: Great Book
Review: I think this book is excellent. I would recommend it to anyone who likes Historical Fiction. Bye
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Summary: a truly American work...
Review: Quietly moving, beautifully written, and meaningful in its implications, it is rare to find a novel that can be read by almost anyone; unlike much of Cather's work, My Antonia becomes whatever it is you see in it, whatever it is you want it to become. Part love story, part epic novel, part assessment of cultural values, at its root what Cather gives us is a truly American work with an unforgetably poignant ending. Read this book; it is important to do so.
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