- Paperback: 400 pages
- Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (Jun 27 2006)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0812973437
- ISBN-13: 978-0812973433
- Product Dimensions: 13.3 x 2.2 x 20.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 340 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #646,651 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Fisher builds a grand, mesmerizing novel on the bare chronicle left by her ancestor Emma Ruth Ross Slavin, who was 11 when her family joined the 1847 Oregon migration. Emma's mother, Lucy Mitchell, is a widow, remarried despite her grief for her first husband and resenting the decision of her second husband, Israel Mitchell, to emigrate. James McLaren is a Scottish trapper for the Hudson Bay Company, uneasy both with the emigrants and with the Native Americans, whose fate is bound up with his own. When McLaren loses his children to smallpox and his Nez Perce wife to another trapper, he tracks the trapper to Lucy Mitchell's wagon train. Lucy and McLaren's charged encounter opens her up to the land and him to his own need for roots as he signs on to guide her little band on their trek from the Iowa banks of the Missouri to the Columbia River in Oregon. Fisher tells their storires, past and present, with a poet's sense of the sound and heft of each word. Her compassionate, unsentimental eye makes even minor characters unforgettable. She reveals the labor of running a household when there is no house; equally well, she shows us mountains of death and splendor. In the collision between household and wilderness, Fisher brilliantly illuminates both the tragedy and the new life wrought by manifest destiny. This is a great novel of the American West.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
In 1846, pioneers traveling west to Oregon passed through strange, barren landscapes and experienced weather inconceivable to those raised in the East. Lucy Mitchell talks her husband, Israel, into hiring a skilled frontiersman to lead them and aid them in the journey. The story of Lucy, wife and mother of five, and James MacLaren, a frontiersman, shows how their furtive relationship rescues James from despair and almost destroys Lucy's family. The landscape is a character, shaping and scarring migrants who cling to their culture and customs in the wilderness of the antebellum West. The author's style, consisting of short paragraphs that skip from one character's point of view to another's, requires a careful reader; it's a technique that occasionally disrupts the narrative flow and causes loose threads in the story's texture. However, Fisher's love of the land and history of the western U.S. shows through every line of this story based on her family's history. A serious, finely written novel. Ellen Loughran
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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Customer Reviews
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.1 out of 5 stars (39 customer reviews)
21 of 22 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Virtual Reality Experience of the Oregon Trail Migration., Feb 5 2006
By Judith C. Oswood - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: A Sudden Country: A Novel (Hardcover)
For the most part, I really enjoyed this book--once I got into it. Israel and Lucy Mitchell and children are headed from Iowa to Oregon. Lucy does not want to go, but she gives in to her husband, who is a descendent of Daniel Boone and has the spirit of adventure in his blood. Along the way they meet James McLaren, a man grieving the abandonment of his wife and the loss by death of his 3 children. He consents to drive one of the Mitchell's wagons. A predictable romance springs up between Lucy and James. The bulk of the story covers the daily grind of the trip in an extremely interesting way. The author's style of writing was a little hard to get used to, however. At times I found myself rereading several passages to try to get the meaning that was not readily evident. All is all, it was a great story.
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Sudden Delight, Sep 11 2005
By Washington Reader - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: A Sudden Country: A Novel (Hardcover)
This is a novel of the American West in the mid-1800s, but we're not talking cowboys. We're talking about Lucy Mitchell, a woman, a mother, uprooted from her civilized Iowa home by her second husband, Israel, to go west to the Oregon Territory. Along the way, they are met by James MacLaren, a man for whom learning to live again is nearly impossible, after the deaths of his children from disease during a harsh winter, and the desertion of him by his Indian wife with another man.I don't want to spoil the storyline for you, but suffice to say, this is an incredible read. Lean. Gorgeous. Prose near poetry. Fisher's evocation of the landscape and brutal beauty here in the Pacific North West is spot on. There isn't an ounce of fat in this book; Fisher has carved the beauty from the stone and shows it to us, unadorned and unapologetically. Don't expect to be spoonfed, either; this is a book where the author expects you to be able to draw conclusions from facts left like coins in a fountain. It is literary fiction at its finest. Please enjoy, and support a new woman author whose rich voice needs to be heard and shared.
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Outstanding Prose, Sep 9 2005
By Helen Mckay Sanders - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: A Sudden Country: A Novel (Hardcover)
I was very impressed by this woman's first novel. The lyricism of the language was striking, and best of all, her writing style brought a quality of fierce beauty to the characters and the landscape that I found uplifting and powerful.Also, the sex scenes are gorgeous and erotic. I am a big fan of Cormac McCarthy as well, but this woman's prose leaves you with a strong sense of possibility and hope; McCarthy's prose is darker and more angst-ridden.
I recommend this book heartily. Its originality is remarkable.
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