** spoiler alert **
I read The Good Earth Trilogy: The Good Earth, Sons, and A House Divided when I was in high school. I picked up The Good Earth because it appeared on classics reading lists. I think I was vaguely aware when I began it that it took place in China. It was a great story, and I subsequently read the other two books of the trilogy, Sons and A House Divided. They're pretty much smooshed together in my memory, so this one review will serve for all three. The plot synopses on the individual book pages will give you a fairly good idea of how the story is divided up between them.
So, fundamentally, The Good Earth Trilogy is a familiar story. It's one of those old stories that gets told again and again through time. Specially, it is the "rise and fall of a family" story. Other examples that come immediately to mind are Buddenbrooks, The Thorn Birds, and A Dream of Red Mansions. Among these The Good Earth is a little unusual in that it explicitly chronicles the rise of the farmer Wang Lung to wealth. (In Buddenbrooks and Dream of Red Mansions, in contrast, the rise of the family is in the past and is recounted only in the memories of older family members.)
Wang is a farmer with a deep connection to the land, hence the title. He marries a Hakka woman O-lan, who was a slave to a wealthy nearby wealthy family. She describes herself repeatedly as "ugly", she has dark skin and big feet. When Wang comes to take her away, her old mistress admonishes her "Obey him and bear him sons and yet more sons." This she does. Three sons -- also daughters, but they barely count. Daughters are routinely referred to as "slaves". Still, Wang loves his wife and daughters, although he is almost ashamed of it.
Because of his connection to the Earth and his skill as a farmer and O-lan's support, Wang is successful and he becomes wealthy, wealthy enough to purchase the land of the formerly rich family whose slave O-lan was. He now can afford to buy slaves of his own, and in addition take a second wife. Wang's wealth begins to separate him from the Earth, and thus the decline of the family begins. His sons, having grown up in wealth, have expensive tastes and little inclination for hard work. The final book, A House Divided, depicts a country at war. Soldiers are depicted here as the worst possible scourge of a country. They eat and steal everything. This is a hard book to read.
As an American myself, I can only guess whether this is an accurate or sympathetic portrayal of China. Pearl S. Buck was an American, but when she wrote The Good Earth at the age of 39, she had lived almost her entire life in China, and she in fact wrote it in Nanking. (This and other biographical details come from her Wikipedia page.) She was the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries, but she had little respect for the mission -- in fact, little more than a year after publication of The Good Earth she left The Presbyterian Board after giving a speech in which she argued that "China did not need an institutional church dominated by missionaries who were too often ignorant of China and arrogant in their attempts to control it." It seems quite certain that Buck knew and loved China well. But, in addition to a classical Chinese education, she received a Western (meaning, of course, European) education. She vocally opposed the Chinese communists, and therefore was viewed as an enemy. I do not know what the Chinese now think of her, if they do at all.
Well, that interesting question aside, The Good Earth is a beautiful novel.
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![Sons (The Good Earth Trilogy Book 2) by [Pearl S. Buck]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/515F8McZJbL._SY346_.jpg)
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From the Publisher
From the Illustrated Biography
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Portrait of Pearl S. BuckJohann Waldemar de Rehling Quistgaard painted Buck in 1933, when the writer was forty-one years old-a year after she won the Pulitzer Prize for The Good Earth. The portrait currently hangs at Green Hills Farm in Pennsylvania, where Buck lived from 1934 and which is today the headquarters for Pearl S. Buck International. (Image courtesy of Pearl S. Buck International.) |
Buck Addresses Poverty in AsiaBuck addresses an audience in Korea in 1964, discussing the issues of poverty and discrimination faced by children in Asia. She established the Orphanage and Opportunity Center in Buchon City, Korea, in 1965. |
Buck and FamilyBuck with her husband, Richard J. Walsh, and their daughter, Elizabeth. |
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The book is good, but this gets a 1 star because this listing seems to be some weird version of the book. What really threw me off is that there's a title page but it only has the author and title of the work. There's usually a copyright and dedication after this page but the only thing this book has is a weird page at the very end that tells me it was made in Monee Illinois and for some reason the date I bought it? I thought that was really bizarre but I checked and somebody else left a 1 star review where they also had the same thing with their copy but it was made in Orlando Florida. Overall it is a good read, just don't get this copy, I'm not sure what's going on with this unnamed publisher but there's too much text on one page making it hard on the eyes — just look elsewhere.
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Top reviews from other countries
GColl
Good continuation of The Good Earth
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 29, 2021Amazon Customer
Fantastic overview of the period
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 1, 2021Betty O'Mahony
The style of writing
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 28, 2020Fran
A reasonable follow-on to the Good Earth
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 3, 2013
