My Antonia (Enriched Classics (Pocket))
by Willa Cather

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Book Reviews of My Antonia (Enriched Classics (Pocket))

Book Review: Antonia, "who seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood."
Summary: 5 Stars

Summary of My Antonia (Enriched Classics (Pocket))

The moving portrait of an orphan boy and immigrant girl who find hardship -- and love -- on the American prairie.

EACH ENRICHED CLASSIC EDITION INCLUDES:

? A concise introduction that gives readers important background information

? A chronology of the author's life and work

? A timeline of significant events that provides the book's historical context

? An outline of key themes and plot points to help readers form their own interpretations

? Detailed explanatory notes

? Critical analysis, including contemporary and modern perspectives on the work

? Discussion questions to promote lively classroom and book group interaction

? A list of recommended related books and films to broaden the reader's experience

Enriched Classics offer readers affordable editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and insightful commentary. The scholarship provided in Enriched Classics enables readers to appreciate, understand, and enjoy the world's finest books to their full potential.

SERIES EDITED BY CYNTHIA BRANTLEY JOHNSON

Ántonia, who, even as a grown woman somewhat downtrodden by circumstance and hard work, "had not lost the fire of life," lies at the center of almost every human condition that Cather's novel effortlessly untangles. She represents immigrant struggles with a foreign land and tongue, the restraints on women of the time (with which Cather was very much concerned), the more general desires for love, family, and companionship, and the great capacity for forbearance that marked the earliest settlers on the frontier.

As if all this humanity weren't enough, Cather paints her descriptions of the vastness of nature--the high, red grass, the road that "ran about like a wild thing," the endless wind on the plains--with strokes so vivid as to make us feel in our bones that we've just come in from a walk on that very terrain ourselves. As the story progresses, Jim goes off to the University in Lincoln to study Latin (later moving on to Harvard and eventually staying put on the East Coast in another neat encompassing of a stage in America's development) and learns Virgil's phrase "Optima dies ... prima fugit" that Cather uses as the novel's epigraph. "The best days are the first to flee"--this could be said equally of childhood and the earliest hours of this country in which the open land, much like My Ántonia, was nothing short of a rhapsody in prairie sky blue. --Melanie Rehak

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