The Land

Rating:
Summary: Really Opens your Eyes
Review: The Land really opens your eyes to a child, then a mans point of lifestyle and life back then. Im speaking about a colored man. It was very unfortunate what those people had to do back then all because of they color. I am just now starting Roll of Thunder, Hear my cry. Now that im introduced to Cassie, I cant wait to start it even more! It was hard to stop every night before bed. It was very hard! I wish Mildred D. Taylor the best!

Rating:
Summary: The Greatest Story Of All Times
Review: The Land Was based upon a family that came together. The husband was a plantation owner in Mississippi but they did not particapate in slavery any more. His wife was a slave and her children were mixed they were black and white. The wife was Just a home maker and could not sit at the same table when white folks came to their house because she was a slave. many events happen through the story where they would get in trouble and they would run away and start their own families. It's an excellent book and I guarantee any one who reads it will never be able to put it down. So please read this book.

Rating:
Summary: Beautifully Written!
Review: This book is the prequel to the award-winning Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry. The story is told in 1st person by Paul-Edward, Cassie's grandpa in later books. It tells his hardships on living with his daddy, who is white, and having a black mom. After having trouble w/his dad he runs away. Then the story is about how he trys to get land as good as his daddy's. It is excellent work even though the book is a little predictable.

Rating:
Summary: READ THIS BOOK
Review: When I discovered, through the note provided by Mildred Taylor, that The Land was more than five years in the making, I literally swooned in admiration of the freshness of the story. Any book which takes half a decade to research and write evolves with a certain degree of vulnerability. How can any author sustain such an endeavor, especially in the face of her readership, so familiar with her own impossibly hard acts to follow, and emerge holding such a live treasure as The Land, in the end?
The Land is a prequel, in that it tells the stories of the Logan family that chronologically came before those of her beloved, already known, characters. What sets this novel apart from typical prequel status, in my mind, is the electricity between its pages. The Land is filled with its own magical energy. Paul-Edward's many adventures, his beliefs in himself and his family (as well as his view of all the other people living on his father, Edward's, land) his complex relationships with his white father, his African-Indian mother, his white brother (Robert), and his African-American friend (Mitchell) are exclusively important. They are exclusive in that they are whole, in and of themselves, and a reader can appreciate their strengths without prior knowledge of Taylor's previous work. They are important in that they can and should be told, breathe, and stand on their own. I feel that comparing them might fail them, to a certain degree. That said, the stories of the life of Paul-Edward are certainly crucial... beyond their status as prequel. The private pain and pride of Paul-Edward that we come to know, as we follow his evolution into the young landowner we reluctantly must depart at book's end, all the great sorrows and victories that spill before him in his quest to, in his mother's apt words, have "something for himself"-his own land-while caring for Caroline, her brother, and Mitchell are wondrous, well told, at times lyrically rich.
There is nothing, in The Land, of the staleness that can threaten to tinge any writer's work when she is forced to write a prequel, by her readership, critics, or heart. Perhaps the staleness comes when a writer is not certain of the very something she must be precise about, as she attempts to trace steps prior to the heart of her matter (previous, related book(s)). I have come to believe that a great many prequels and sequels are created not in order to answer an author's own calling, but to answer the call of the readership. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Still, in Taylor's writing of The Land as a whole thing, contained in one book, which tells a before so well, as well, is wholly felt, the mold of the prequel is broken. The Land is exceptionally revealing for those who have known and loved the Logans. The Land is also its own, gorgeous, story.
I believe the heart of Mildred Taylor's matter is, actually, those family stories she finally tells, through fiction twinned with the breath of heritage, in The Land. The novel has clarity and life and a protagonist we love, and a singular life-almost as if The Land contained the most essential things the writer (the niece, the daughter, the landowner) needed to write; almost as if all those stories she'd already made were leading us to this great center.