Rating: 
Summary: Grand Scale
Review: An exhasutive piece of brilliance set in the Pacific Northwest circa 1850-90s. Dillard paints word pictures of the magnificent scenary as well as of the characters down to the minutest detail. A must read for those who want a realistic portrait of the difficult yet full lives the men and women led in settling and growing this land. She has cleverly written into her characters many underlying and intertwining themes that are evidence of her great talent. Only that she would write another novel.
Rating:
Summary: Depressing, but vivid
Review: Annie Dillard has one of the clearest, most attractive writing voices I have ever read. It's almost always an eye-opening joy to read her, just for the way she puts words and sentences together. This novel is no exception, although it's not her best work.The plot here - about the settlement of the Pacific Northwest, and some characters in and around Bellingham, Washington - is fairly interesting, although not compelling. After about 100 pages, I started to find the title ironic: I felt it should be called "The Dead and Dying." One gets a real taste of how difficult life was in the 19th century, when the frontier was still being opened. But Dillard's style does not mesh well with the demands of a novel. She is far better at conveying her innermost thoughts; her memoirs and essays are what make her so good. If you have the choice, read those rather than this.
Rating:
Summary: Depressing, but vivid
Review: Annie Dillard has one of the clearest, most attractive writing voices I have ever read. It's almost always an eye-opening joy to read her, just for the way she puts words and sentences together. This novel is no exception, although it's not her best work. The plot here - about the settlement of the Pacific Northwest, and some characters in and around Bellingham, Washington - is fairly interesting, although not compelling. After about 100 pages, I started to find the title ironic: I felt it should be called "The Dead and Dying." One gets a real taste of how difficult life was in the 19th century, when the frontier was still being opened. But Dillard's style does not mesh well with the demands of a novel. She is far better at conveying her innermost thoughts; her memoirs and essays are what make her so good. If you have the choice, read those rather than this.
Rating: 
Summary: The Living End
Review: Far and away the finest novel of the decade. Dillard transports the reader to a time when just "living" during that raw period and landscape of our so distant past was a precarious notion.
Rating:
Summary: Grand Scale
Review: Grand in scope and finely detailed...this is just the kind of journey-driven writing that I like. Quirky but real, like the conditions of our lives. I missed the lack of dialogue, though, and feel like she walks a thin line between showing and telling. A bit too much telling for my taste, because I was a little distracted worn & out by the end of this journey.
Rating:
Summary: Should Have Been Called "The Dying"!
Review: I have found this book to be incredibly insightful to the early Northwest. Although the characters are many, and we don't get an indepth study of them, I find that they are there to lend to the overall "feel" of the book. Life was bleak at best, and so are the characters. Life was a struggle, and so are the lives of the characters. My youngest sister and her husband live on Lopez Island and I am sending this book to them because I know they will be able to identify with the weather, the surrounding areas, the people, and the history. Hurrah for Annie Dillard!
Rating:
Summary: The Living
Review: I read Annie Dillard's The Living through the library and am now buying a copy to send to my sister in Vancouver, B.C. When visiting there, we traveled the area discussed in the book, which has come alive for me now. The protaganist IS the Great Northwest, and as such, the trials, triumphs and tribulations of Ms. Dillard's 'main character' enthrall, delight and dismay - but never disappoint. Much as I have enjoyed her non-fiction, I look forward to more fiction from her pen.
Rating: 
Summary: All the Pretty Children Die
Review: My book club also read this one. While one cannot dispute that Annie Dillard is a wonderful craftsman of words and prose, I didn't feel that she exacted the necessary character attachments and drama for this to be a successful novel. Perhaps we would have been better served had she stayed with her forte: non-fiction. On the plus side, I have not read a more beautiful or perfectly written final paragraph in recent memory, which endeared the book to me more so than it would have otherwise.
Rating:
Summary: Start "living." Read Dillard.
Review: Reading a book rarely gets better than reading Annie Dillard. I often reread her nonfiction books. Her writing is insightful, poetic, and moves from page to page with a sustaining ring of truth. Midway through "The Living," Dillard's main character, Clare, thinks to himself, "set thine house in order; for thou shalt die, and not live." "The Living" is Dillard's only novel. It is set in the last fifty years of the 19th century, on the Washington coast, roughly twenty miles south of Canada. As Dillard's novel gradually unfolds, we witness her characters enduring the hardships of living and dying as they struggle out their interrelated lives deep in the unsettled Pacific Northwest. "Accidents happened," Dillard observes, "and human bodies were thin-skinned parcels out of which the force of life leaked at a prick . . .all deaths were accidental, or none was, for disease was just as random an accident as injury, and all die. None died prematurely, for death battened on only the living, and all of those, at any age" (pp. 150-51). Dillard's characteristic attention to detail is evident on every page. Her novel includes salty rocks, sawdust, black snails, drizzling rain, dark, dripping trees, choirs of frogs, "the slushy sky," gulls, and the solitary, white summit of Mt. Baker "above the sky, higher than the clouds." At times the movement of the plot seems to slow to the point of no plot, but never to the point of stopping death, for "death was ready to take people, of any size, always, and so was the broad earth ready to receive them" (p. 156). Dillard's writing here is so real that it is hard to believe this novel is pure fiction. This is a 5-star book. I've given it four stars only when measured by most of Dillard's other books. G. Merritt
Rating:
Summary: Start "living." Read Dillard.
Review: Reading a book rarely gets better than reading Annie Dillard. I often reread her nonfiction books. Her writing is insightful, poetic, and moves from page to page with a sustaining ring of truth. Midway through "The Living," Dillard's main character, Clare, thinks to himself, "set thine house in order; for thou shalt die, and not live." "The Living" is Dillard's only novel. It is set in the last fifty years of the 19th century, on the Washington coast, roughly twenty miles south of Canada. As Dillard's novel gradually unfolds, we witness her characters enduring the hardships of living and dying as they struggle out their interrelated lives deep in the unsettled Pacific Northwest. "Accidents happened," Dillard observes, "and human bodies were thin-skinned parcels out of which the force of life leaked at a prick . . .all deaths were accidental, or none was, for disease was just as random an accident as injury, and all die. None died prematurely, for death battened on only the living, and all of those, at any age" (pp. 150-51). Dillard's characteristic attention to detail is evident on every page. Her novel includes salty rocks, sawdust, black snails, drizzling rain, dark, dripping trees, choirs of frogs, "the slushy sky," gulls, and the solitary, white summit of Mt. Baker "above the sky, higher than the clouds." At times the movement of the plot seems to slow to the point of no plot, but never to the point of stopping death, for "death was ready to take people, of any size, always, and so was the broad earth ready to receive them" (p. 156). Dillard's writing here is so real that it is hard to believe this novel is pure fiction. This is a 5-star book. I've given it four stars only when measured by most of Dillard's other books. G. Merritt
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