13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
More good, solid work from Bobbie Ann Mason., August 27, 1998
By A Customer
People who read for plot only, as have, apparently, some of the previous reviewers, are missing many other elements of the novel, any novel. Bobbie Ann Mason often writes about the Southern female and her transformation through discovery. Exactly what that woman discovers changes from story to story, but Sam is definitely one of Mason's dynamic Southern females. I am sorry, too, that some reviewers don't seem to appreciate Mason's use of contextual details to provide a landscape against which these transformations take place. I just really appreciate her willingness to refer to anything from Pop Tarts to Avon Products. That's the environment within which many of us do experience our lives. And Emmett? He's my uncle ... or my cousin . . . or my brother . . .
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
one of the most important American novels of the century, January 14, 1997
By A Customer
"In Country" is several books at once: among them,
a chronicle of a significant era in American history, a
rumination on the evaporation of American regionalism,
and a standard coming of age novel. The story revolves
around Samantha Hughes,unusually bright and aware
for a teenager growing up in a western Kentucky backwater
(probably not unlike Bobbie Ann Mason herself). Born in
1966, Sam's father died in Vietnam before she could meet
him. When she turns 18, it occurs to her that
no one in the family has ever really told her anything
about him -- like American society, which wanted to forget
about the dirty little war in southeast Asia, her family
had more or less swept him under the rug. But Sam
decides to go on her own journey to discover who
her dad was, and what that senseless conflict might have
been about.On her way, Mason weaves a brilliant tapestry of American
culture in the mid-1980s, in which cable television and
the proliferation of gigantic shopping malls have flattened
out distictions between regions and the peculiar quality
of rural existence. At the climax of the story, Sam travels
to Washington with her beloved uncle and her paternal
grandmother to visit the Vietnam memorial; when she finds
her own name inscribed on the wall, it hammers home the
message that the Vietnam experience is about all of us. "In
Country" may have less impact now than before it was
published; subsequently, many works of popular culture (the
films "Platoon" and "Casualties of War" as well as the
television series "China Beach") have carried similar
messages. But few have done so as elegantly and compellingly
as this book.
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17 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Some people apparently don't get it. . ., May 18, 2006
This review is from: In Country: a novel (Paperback)
After reading numerous reviews that refer to this book as "boring," I felt I needed to speak up against some of the semi-literate reviewers.
"In Country" is not an action novel. It's not meant to be a moral guide to living as a teenager. It's more than that, a complex, beautiful novel with multiple threads: about growing up, idenitity, place, war, and legacy. Mason is excellent at capturing the time and place of Western Kentucky; even though the town is never named, I'm certain she's writing about Mayfield, near where my husband grew up.
If you can't pass high school English, you probably won't enjoy "In Country." If you can appreciate a complex, emotional novel, one that makes you think, then this book is a modern classic.
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