It has nothing superfluous and every word is perfectly in its place as a crafted piece of fiction, it’s absolutely superlative. The book is a fast, easy read, but it has stayed with me for years and reading it again, I found it to be even better than I remembered. Her eye for detail and her mastery of descriptive prose create a real, evocative atmosphere that just really shoots through the book in a really powerful way.

The character conversations and characters ring absolutely true and with her beautiful prose, Cather really places us in the landscape of the story. This book is shot through with vivid scenes that I still remembered in a very detailed way from my first read-through of this book, well over ten years ago now. One of the best scenes in the book is a late scene between Alexandra & Frank, a scene that really digs into their heads into deep & challenging ways. It would be easy to create a kind of a cardboard villain in Frank as the vile husband who is cruel to his young wife, but Cather makes him more complicated and gets inside his head more. Her younger brother Emil, the object of Emil’s affection Marie and Marie’s husband Frank are also quite complicated. Her friend Carl is a man torn between the desire for security and the desire for adventure it’s not a particularly unique character type, but Cather makes him really work. The secondary characters are also really great. She’s representative of an ideal for Cather, the strong, self-sufficient woman making her way in a world controlled by men by being more persistent than those men. Alexandra is Cather’s first full-blooded character she just comes to life and leaps off the page. It revolves specifically around her relationship to two men, her younger brother and a friend from childhood and the relation of her younger brother to a young married woman of the community. It’s the story of Alexandra Bergson, an immigrant farmer in Nebraska. It’s under 200 pages in the edition that I read, but it’s as close to perfect as novels get, I think there’s not a single word that’s out of place or wasted. This short novel is, I think, Cather’s first pure masterpiece.

1913 novel by willa cather