Customer Reviews

American Cream: A Novel

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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Catherine uses a rural setting, Tenney's Landing (the fictional setting of her previous work), to portray the deep connections between the townspeople and Virginia, the main character, especially focusing on the Virginia's physical and emotional journey beginning with her mother's death and her father's remarriage. The amazing restraint of the text reveals the emotional struggles between families and friends, the loyalties of a woman to her family, her friends and herself, and the humor of the author. Each sentence has a sense of motion and action that is inspiring.
I would recommend this novel to anyone who's beyond teenage fiction. Try to find her for a live reading as well, the author has an amazing presence, reserved and humerous like her novel. You do not need to read Tenney's Landing, her collection of short stories, to read this novel.

I loved this book! One of the most memorable and powerful characters in this book is the country life and landscape, lovingly described, and within which much happens. There are many well drawn characters , people you know well by the end. This book and its setting grows out of a book of short stories by Tudish that I also recommend highly-"Tenney's Landing"

American Cream is a beautifully written and deeply rewarding novel. Tudish portrays her characters with such wit and compassion that the reader comes to feel a real tenderness for them. And the novel is so emotionally rich and compelling that it is hard to put down. What a lovely book!

Catherine Tudish's book takes its title from a breed of draft horse that makes its appearance late in the novel. The setting, in rural Pennsylvania, is familiar to readers of Tudish's stellar collection of stories, Tenney's Landing, and is richly rendered. The focus is on Virginia Rownd MacLeod and her family, especially Virginia's efforts to deal with changes in the present and unresolved issues of the past. The characters are engaging and sympathetic, the dialog convincing, and poignant emotions are balanced with quiet humor. Altogether a great read.

These are just a few of the words I could use to describe this beautifully written story of return. If you're reading Catherine Tudish's work for the first time, you'll be astonished by what you discover. Welcome to her growing fanclub!

This book, as well as her earlier "Tenney's Landing" are profound in their use of quotidian situations explore profound human dilemmas. Terrific character development, the juxtaposition of the bucolic and the horrific and the hilarious and the poignant make her the most recent addition to my list of favorite writers

Tudish brings to vivid life a cast of endearing but slightly eccentric characters, each one with difficult choices to make. Although the book's country settings, chores, and folkways are described in loving detail, this is not a sentimental story. Bad things happen, people get hurt, and a way of life seems to be falling apart. Readers will root for Virginia, Tudish's plucky central character, who returns to her rural childhood home to confront all manner of social and family upheaval. Is this a tale of paradise lost or regained? Readers will have to decide for themselves. Enjoyable, thought provoking, and highly recommended.

Ms. Tudish's cousin is my friend and member of my book club. She chose "American Cream" for our October 2008 selection. I was a bit skeptical - given the possibility of familial bias. However, the writing is very good, and the story and characters are compelling. It has enough complexity to keep it interesting, but it also a straightforward, interesting read.

Highly recommended!

If wishes were horses, they'd be American Cream draft horses in Catherine Tudish's debut novel, American Cream. Evocative and beautifully written, American Cream is a gem of book that will draw you in and transport you as only a well-told story can.

Virginia McLeod has returned to the farm in southwestern Pennsylvania where she grew up. Her father Nathan, nearing 70, fell off the tractor and broke his arm; no milking cows or haying fields for him this summer. So Virginia packed up her teenage son, left her surgeon husband in Maryland, and headed back to the life she left as a young woman when she went off to college.

Virginia's mother Caroline died a couple of years ago, and now Nathan is married to Lydia, the woman who used to work in the school cafeteria. As the summer unfolds and her father recovers, Virginia grapples with her father's new life, reconnects with her best friend Henny, and faces her first true love, West.

Most of all, Virginia must confront her unacknowledged desire to keep the past alive, a hope that is embodied for her by American Cream horses. With white manes and cream-colored coats, they are smaller than some draft horses but smart, sweet tempered, and beautiful to see. They are at once a link to history, when plows were pulled by such horses, and a gambit for the future, that may or may not pay off.

American Cream captures life on the American family-owned farm--a hard way of life that is giving way to modern commerce and concerns--but it transcends place and could be the story of any woman's loves and losses. The writing is graceful, smooth as silk and light as real whipped cream. The narrative focuses on Virginia, but Tudish adopts the interesting convention of interspersing chapters here and there in the other characters' voices, a technique that is extremely effective. The result is both down-to-earth and literary, with characters that are completely human and utterly believable and themes that are as deep and rich as the western Pennsylvania soil.

American Cream is the kind of book where you get swept up into the lives of the characters and you miss them when you're done. I, for one, would love to hear more farmlands southeast of Pittsburgh. Happily, Tudish has also published a collection of short stories set in the same area, called Tenney's Landing. I also look forward to wherever Catherine Tudish takes us in the future.

The cream of the crop of 2007 novels. Tudish doesn't write about mammals or freaks but about "folks," and she has the ability to make readers care deeply about her people. The novel returns to "Tenney's Landing," scene of her stellar 2005 story collection TENNEY'S LANDING. The novel's heroine Virginia Rownd navigates through the thicket of the past in a return to roots and traditions that bind as well as fulfill. Tudish's crystal clear prose is unadorned yet elegant.