Rating: 
Summary: who wants to be depressed
Review: I don't know if this book is critically acclaimed or not. But I just wanted to add my thoughts. Fisrt, I don't like the way this book buries this Jesse character in Vancouver somewhere. What does it mean but a sloppy strategy for the streotype of the West Coast or Candian West Coast to take care of the end? Well, Vancouver is a place full of industrious people too. It is not a place for hippie Americans to smoke pot. Second, I know men of Jesse's type. You can spot them in health food stores picking up organic low fat, low carb thing and studying its nutritional label nervously. These people have some serious coming out to do. Aren't they anorexia nervosa? Therefore, no woman could have been attracted to this person. So one important storyline in this book is a total fallacy.
Rating:
Summary: King Lear today
Review: Jane Smiley just really can't write a bad book. The only reason I'm giving it 4 instead of 5 stars is because I think it could have been shorter and been improved by the editing.
Thousand Acres starts out as idyllic: a family farm in 1979 in Iowa where everything seems to be humming along lovingly and perfectly. Larry Cook, the father (Lear) of three daughters, abruptly decides to turn the farm over to two of them, cutting the third out of the deal. Dark secrets emerge, recovered memories, the girls divide and unite among themselves and with or against their father. It's a story of love, hate, greed, pathos, and what it means to be 'family.' Painful to read in parts, but ultimately revelatory. Just needed an editor with a sharper pair of scissors.
Rating: 
Summary: Amazingly Expressive Prose
Review: Jane Smiley truly has a gift for illuminating human nature, and familiar interactions; she brandishes both of these dualties in "A Thousand Acres". Set on an Iowa farm, a novel which revolves around country living was perhaps the least interesting thing in my mind to be writing about. Yet Smiley so skilfully illuminates the inner lives of this rural family, so expertly weaves the characters inner secrets and remonstrations, that I couldn't help but fall in love with the novel. Full of volitile emotion, expressive scenary, and jarring plot twists, this book will leave you breathless with anticipation and excitement till the very last sentence. An amazing literary work which is truly deserving of it's Pulitizer Prize.
Rating: 
Summary: HARVEST OF SHAME AND PASSION
Review: It is the 1970's and a successful farmer has suddenly announced that he will endow his thousand-acre holding, built up over several generations, to his three daughters. The rural Iowa community is stunned by the news; his irrascible neighbor is immediately suspicious and blantaly critical, while the amazed girls react to the unexpected windfall variously. Rose and her husband are delighted and grateful; Ginny is unsure what her father's decision portends for her and her husband, but is willing to go along. While Caroline--the only one who has managed to escape farm life, and Daddy, flatly refuses any share in this agrarian legacy. Speculation is rampant about what tyrrancial Larry Cook--never known for his generosity or paternal affection--is up to now. But local imagination pales beside the narrator's gradual revelation of the sisters' dark past. As the fertile acres change hands and then are disupted in court, two husbands watch helplessly as the Cook girls' painful, shameful secrets eke out into the light of family knowledge--released from long buried furor, disgust and outright denial. Could the gift represent hush land to assuage a guilty conscience? How to appear calm and normal despite the prying eyes and busy tongues of their neighbors? Add to this volatile mix the return of a native son, whose arrival sparks infidelity and jealousy, and readers have a tasty menu of seething passions on the prairie. Three women cope with qustionable success to survive their childhood and carve out their own future which their vicious father tried to manipulate for them. Is there no escape or refuge for sanity as sibling loyalty crumbles? Does insanity lurk beneath the surface, just like the poisoned well water which caused 5 miscarriages and possbily Cancer? Starkly brutal depiction of the disintegration of a family whose paternal core was rotten--particularly from the viewpoint of Ginny, who suffered the most in coming to terms with her grim heritage. No one could handle or resist Daddy, who left a legacy of controversy and abuse. This fast-moving, well-plotted novel will keep adults glued to the pages.
Rating: 
Summary: A Thousand Yawns
Review: I wanted to love this book. A woman taking on Shakespeare, in the same manner that Jean Rhys took on Charlotte Bronte by injecting a voice for the dispossessed women in Jane Eyre and King Lear respectively. A daunting task for which, Jean Rhys succeeds and Jane Smiley fails dismally. The problem I have with the novel is not with the premise, which is brilliantly conceived and researched, but with the style that Smiley employs. This story of women wounded by their father who now seek to claim what belongs to them rightfully had so much potential. However, the prose is so arid that it scorches. It is relentless in the way every detail of farm life is revealed and the riches as well as the poison the land holds. You don't come away from this novel feeling enriched, as though the women of King Lear have been redeemed, but polluted by the toxic wasteland that Smiley has created. You end with a sense of hopelessness. This is in contrast with something like Jean Rhys novel 'The Wide Sargasso Sea', which concludes tragically as well with Bertha dispossessed of her freedom as well as her origins. Yet you leave with a sense of redemption, that Bertha fought to maintain her identity despite the insolence and cruelty of her cowardly husband and by doing so, is given a raging passionate voice that resonates. Smiley does not provide Ginny and Rose with the same sort of moral centre, so that you end up despising the book because everything in it is despicable. It is a harsh review but reading it was like wading through swamp land. I won't deny that it raises profound issues but it did not succeed in enticing me to read more of Smiley's novels.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: An excellent book. One of the few Pulitzer winners I've read that I thought actually deserved a Pulitzer. Slow at first, with deliberate introductions and narrative, the book winds it way to exciting conclusions and character revelations that hold you until the end. You will particularly like this story if you grew up in the midwest and recognize all of these dysfunctional people striving to understand their lives and seeking to understand what "happiness" is.
Rating: 
Summary: A Thousand Acres
Review: In a nutshell I describe this read as "a long road to a small house". Altough Smiley writes well the slow pace to a smarmy and unresolved plotline made me hurry and want to get the book over with not savor it.
Rating:
Summary: Just Kill Me Now
Review: Some four years ago when I began reading A THOUSAND ACRES, Jane Smiley's modern-day take on Shakespeare's KING LEAR, I was all but overflowing with the greatest anticipation. There was promise of a tale epic in Shakespearean scale, a winner of more than one prominent literary award, an Oprah Book Club pick, an intriguingly picturesque cover, and - most delicious of all, a subtle poetry in Smiley's lovely prose. Now, after all these years I still grimace to think that I actually read all the way through to the end of this book, even now unable to shake the feeling that each of those gentle allurements was a deliberate feint concealing the true state of things: The book is a fiendishly depraved work of literature bent on sucking the soul dry. Indeed it's a sinister novel, cunningly using to the limit each sundry enticement at hand in order to slowly draw the reader into Hell. The story's premise is harmless enough: the saga of an Iowa farm family, Larry Cook and his three daughters - Ginny, Rose, and Caroline. Ginny, from whose point of view this tale is told, is the dutiful farm wife. She makes meals not only for her husband, Tyler, but also for her father who lives down the lane in the family's original farmstead, and for Rose, who's recently undergone chemotherapy for breast cancer, and Rose's family: husband Pete and two daughters Pammy and Linda. "My morning at the stove started before five and didn't end until eight-thirty," states Ginny, so affirming that all is steady, tranquil and wholesome in the wide-open Heartland. It is only in Chapter 4, when the rapidly aging Mr. Cook decides to give his thousand acres of land to his daughters then disinherits Caroline because she is initially hesitant and skeptical to the scheme, that this deceptively quaint story begins to unravel its shroud. Mistake me not: Smiley's opening chapters are ingenious. Within them are exquisite descriptions of life on a farm: insightful detail as to the science and economics of farming, as well as vivid delineation of the vast, flat, open, yet somehow limited view of the world farm dwellers hold. Take, for example, Ginny's childhood memory of riding in the backseat of her family's Buick:
"For me, it was a pleasure like a secret hoard of coins - Rose, whom I adored, sitting against me in the hot musty velvet luxury of the car's interior, the click of the gravel on its undercarriage, the sensation of the car swimming in the rutted road, the farms passing every minute, reduced from vastness to insignificance by our speed;" After reading the first couple chapters, I even felt so good about this book as to muse that my own father, a midwestern farmer, might himself enjoy reading it. Oh my! How mistaken I was, and how extremely relieved I am that further reading prevented me from even contemplating such a consideration! Longtime neighbors to the Cooks are Harold Clark and his sons, Loren and Jess. Loren is a gentle and kind man who with his father farms their land. Jess, the prodigal son, has just returned home after 13 years of no contact with his family. Both Ginny and Rose succumb to his charms, and each begins an adulterous affair with him within weeks of his homecoming. This, along with the events coinciding Larry Cook's retirement, drudges up dark passions and dirty secrets, like so much sludge after a bad storm. Admittedly, there is never anything wrong with having dark dirty elements to a story; but in this one they keep funneling deeper and more intensely out of control - evolving the thing into a veritable black hole. Just when you think it couldn't get any more consumed in tragedy, it does. You're left finally with not even a wisp's chance of hope or redemption. Notwithstanding all the pretty writing, I suppose I should have noted early on the clues to this story's rotten underside, the toxins hidden deep within the landscape becoming slowly absorbed by all those who dwell therein: the sickness, lust, perversion, adultery, incest, barrenness, loneliness, despair, hatred, madness, and death. But I didn't. As I read fiction in order to escape many of the evils and the burdens of this world, I still feel angry that I should have wasted my time reading something that only serves to intensify my negative feelings.
I am therefore left to conclude that this book is the Devil: an ugly, mean-spirited, pockmarked beast craftily enshrouded under a thin veiled layer of beguiling beauty...
Rating:
Summary: A Daring Interpretation?
Review: A feel a bit negligent for writing a review without having neither read nor watched King Lear- but, nonetheless, here I go- I admit that the beginning of the book begins in a slow manner that did not much excite me. Not one of the characters was particularly likeable. And even when the characters were despicable they were not even clever enough to appreciate. But as the story become unmistakably more Shakespearean, I quickly became more interested. The characters quickly took on a new complexity that made me want to continue reading. Because am not familiar with the play, it is difficult for me to discern which character developments were purposefully patterned after those in King Lear and those that might just have been lacking. For instance, everything is there for the daughter living in Des Moines (Caroline) to be more layered, but there is little development there. Perhaps it is also a function of who Smiley chose as the narrator. Regardless, it was a fine read that is more complex than I can speak to. And while it starts out slow, it is something to stick with.
Rating:
Summary: Slow start...but spectacular finish
Review: I saw this movie several years ago- and I loved it. I finally got around to reading the book, and I admit it had a slow start, but when it started to pick up the pace, it really started!!
I have to say the movie also did a wonderful job of staying true to the book. This book is written very uniquely, and you feel as if you are on a journey of discovery, as the characters are. It feels like life itself is happening and you are watching, it unfolds true to form. The characters are a bit of a mystery.
Ginny is the only one we really get to have a close look at, and the others we get a good idea, but some things are left to our imaginations, but it this case, I think it helps propell the book along, and create excitement & interest.
I do recommend this book, but warn to stay on track & not let the first 100 or so pages discourage you.
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