Customer Reviews

Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres: A Reader's Guide

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I teach this novel at a local college, and this book has given me a lot of new angles to take, for which I'm grateful. It's particularly good on the ecological aspects of the novel. The author packs a lot of material into a short space. And I recommend it to my students with the proviso that they don't copy it for their essays.

Susan Farrel has created an informative, easy to read, and scholarly guide to Smiley's "A Thousand Acres." Farrell both points out significant parallels with Shakespeare's King Lear and shows how the novel is a masterpiece in its own right. Her discussion does a marvelous job with three themes: appearance vs reality, environmental concerns, and gender politics. I recommend this book to readers who want to delve more deeply into the novel and to teachers of Smiley's wonderful book.

I used this book to guide my book group through a discussion of the book, A Thousand Acres. It gave me many leads to pursue, and I used those that seemed most relevant. The author did an especially good job of drawing the parallels between the book and Shakespeare's King Lear.

I want to re-title this book, Jinxed, as that's how I feel each time I read it. I threw this book across the room after finishing it, but after a few days realize perhaps Jane was trying to tell us how important a mother is in our lives. I grew up on a farm, my mother had a grave illness, but survived and lived as a disabled person all her life. My father brought her home from hospital and he and extended family (but mostly my dad) dedicated theirselves to making a normal successful life for us. I want to write an answer to Jane's novel that tells the story of how adversity can bring out the best --not the worst -- in people.