Rating: 
Summary: Just Plain Boring
Review: What was that? The lack of quotation marks alone are enough to get on anyone's last nerve. I thought everyone learned how to use quotation marks back in the fourth grade, but Mr. Haruf obviously did not. The countless number of run-on sentences didn't help much either. I don't understand how it got the excellent reviews that it did. The plot was dull and it left me feeling as though it didn't end. Why did Guthrie's wife act the way she did and leave her little boys? Victoria's mother is introduced only to kick her daughter out of the house. I wanted to like Victoria's character, but she too proved to be just as boring as the rest. This book proved to me that just about anyone can get a book deal these days.
Rating: 
Summary: welcome to the world outside of a big city
Review: the word plainsong is said to mean a hymn or prayer. the citizens of holt may need this, as every person does. i would like you to meet Victoria Roubideux, Bobby and Ike Guthrie, Tom Guthrie and the McPheron brothers. all of these are key players in this intricate story of life in a small town. this story is so life like that you will wonder if you are reading a piece of fiction or a biography. i give this book 4 3/4 stars, and strongly recomend it.
Rating: 
Summary: A delicate, hopeful book
Review: What I loved about this book was also what I found least believable. The characters are all, in their own ways, so graceful, so earnest. There is one exception to this rule, but even then, the feud that results is not really enough to cause the type of tension one might expect in a literary work. For this reason, the characters are somewhat unbelievable. The real mastery of Plainsong is that Haruf makes them believable. Though readers may see Haruf's emotional landscape as a nostalgia, I don't think any society has ever lived in this type of bliss. In this book, poverty is not crippling. Teachers fail undeserving students--and they don't have to teach to standardized tests. Believable? Well, in Haruf's hands, it is, which is what makes him such a fine writer. I would like to see Haruf extend his talents to more challenging terrain. What if the book's pages were inhabited by a more culturally and ideologically diverse group? But that would be another book altogether. This book is excellent as it is.
Rating:
Summary: You Can Go Home Again
Review: I just finished this book, I wish I had just started. Most people don't think of Washington, D.C. as having small town neighborhoods, but we did when I was growing up. Of course, there's very little resemblance between then and now, but Plainsong reminded me of those times. They weren't all good, financially or emotionally, but they were real. There was time to consider, to think, and we lived lives with real people, Plainsong reminds of those real neighbors who had each other's measure. The busybodies, the old ladies who cornered you and knew you would be respectful because they knew you had manners, the bullies -- young and old that everybody knew about, the women who were independent and helpful in their own woman-like way, and the people who you could count on because they meant what they said. Read Plainsong, you can go home again.
Rating:
Summary: A great book
Review: Plainsong describes the lives of some of the residents of Holt, Colorado; each of the different plots deals with issues of life, death, and the bonds that link a community together. Because of this simple style and interaction between characters, an extremely great story unfolds. Haruf makes this novel an interesting read, both comical and emotional, and I recommend it to everyone.
Rating: 
Summary: Up and Down
Review: Plainsong was a enjoyable read, but if I didn't have to read it for a class I probably wouldn't have. The book lacked depth into the characters feelings'. When I read a book I don't like having to decide what the character is feeling, I'd rather the book spell it out too me. Haruf does a good job at describing situations and conveying his thoughts in the book, but he lacked the depth required of a great book.
Rating:
Summary: A Simple Setting......A Sweet Novel
Review: I was given this book and I didnt really sit down to read it until I was faced with absolute boredom. Since I am an avid reader, I finished the book in a few days. I liked the fact that the setting was in a small town where everyone knows everyone because that is a setting I am familiar with. The charectars were true to life. Maggie was the compassionate school teacher. Tom Guthrie is the loving father who suffers through his wife's "illness" and then through her leaving him. Ike and Bobby are good kids who have nothing better to do than roam around the neighborhood. Victoria is a pregnant high schooler who has nowhere to go. The McPheron brothers are two old men who know almost nothing about life beyond cattle. These are the kind of people we relate to, and the kind of people we love. I liked the novel for the people, and for the unusual dialogue. The stories intrigued. I wanted to see what would happen to Victoria. I wanted to find out why Mrs. Guthrie wouldn't get out of bed. I have to give Kent Haruf my credits for creating charectars that you can love, and giving them the hardships of ordinary people.
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Summary: The Cycle of Reason
Review: Plainsong was a beautifully written book, and I could never put it down. Kent Haruf took into consideration the different aspects of what is means to be an American, even when the times got rough a friend was nearby to give them a helping hand. This book was a cycle of charcaters all relating to one another somehow throughout the story. The book takes place in a small town named Holt, and the characters range in age, from elementry school, to high school to adults. This is a book for eveyone, and I suggest for parents to read this book with young adults. This book will change your views on some of the issues there are today, and it will also let you see the problems in society from a different perspective.
Rating:
Summary: A brilliant book
Review: This is certainly the best contemporary book of fiction I've read in a long time. The spare writing is incredibly effective -- and almost cinematic in its absence of internal reflection. Somehow, by the end of the novel, you are absolutely engaged with the characters, crying at their pain and smiling at their simple joys. A wonderful example of contemporary fiction.
Rating:
Summary: extraordinary evocation of essence of American character
Review: Every now and then, there comes an author keenly attuned to the rhythms of our speech, the conflicts of our hearts and the values which motivate our actions. Kent Haruf's spellbinding "Plainsong" so deftly recreates the atmosphere of a small, isolated, rural American town and populates that community with such compelling, conflicted and endearing characters that the reader simply cannot put his novel down. As did Steinbeck before him (and as do such gifted contemporaries as Kaye Gibbons and Ivan Doig), Mr. Haruf truly believes common, everyday Americans have much to say about what defines the national character. There is such dignity and decency in this book, shown against backdrops of cruelty, isolation and loneliness. Perhaps that is one reason I found myself humbled, by book's end, in reading it. This is a book to cherish and to share and will become one of the most memorable reading experiences in your life.This profoundly important work will remind readers what the purpose of literature is: to inform us, through the action of an absorbing narrative, that humans serve a distinctive purpose, and that purpose, though obscured by personal anguish, desperate lonelines and unfair circumstances, is to understand, assist and grow to love each other. Each of the seven central characters, who evolve into their own community, seems driven to comprehend and act on the central premise of human frailty and interdependence. Thus, whether it be a father coping with the fragility of his sons' emotional health in light of their mother's evolving emotional and physical removal from life or a quietly resolute teacher searching for solutions to a teen's unexpected pregnancy or two old bachelor brothers awakening to the confusing, liberating possibilities of life, Mr. Haruf invests them with uncommon purpose and promise. Thomas Jefferson once said that our nation possesses "hope enough and to spare." Reading this triumphant novel, a reader will find renewal in the belief that our national purpose -- built on a sense of optimism and hope -- continues to live and to thrive in the hearts and minds of our most uncommom common people.
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