Just Finished Reading My Ántonia by Willa Cather

Willa Cather is another author that I had never heard of...until I happened to be browsing at my local Books-a-Million store when I came across her 1918 novel My Ántonia.  Flipping through it, I saw it dealt with rural pioneer farming life in Nebraska around the turn of the century...not exactly something I was at all familiar with.  So I decided to read it and just finished.: here's my reaction...

The way Cather set up the narrative to this story is interesting.  The "original" anonymous narrator runs into an old friend, Jim Burden, and together they recall their childhood life in a rural Nebraska town years earlier.  The name of a Bohemian immigrant girl named Ántonia gets brought up, and Jack reveals that he is close to finishing writing her story.  Later he sends a completed copy, which forms the body of the book, written in the first person from Jim's perspective...

After he was orphaned in Virginia, ten-year-old Jim rides a train west to Nebraska to his grandparents' farm to live with them, accompanied by a farmhand boy named Jake Marpole.  The hard work there shapes Jim's character and he grows close to his grandmother and grandfather.  Down the road a bit, a new family has just immigrated from Bohemia (the Czech-speaking part of the then-Austria-Hungary Empire) and are living in poor conditions in their shack of a home with poor food...the Burdens set out to meet and help the Shimerda family.  Fourteen-year old Ántonia is one of the children, and, like many others in this family, is rather headstrong and proud.  But a friendship forms between her and Jim as they learn each other's culture and language.  In spite of the book's title, though, the story isn't as much about Ántonia per se as it is about how immigrant families deal with their often very difficult adjustment to a different life in America.  Sometimes one of the spouses didn't want to move...the father in this case...and, at least as was the case back then, people with high professional and social standing in the "old country" found themselves either disrespected according to their former position or even placed by others as being "lower class", quite a drop and a problem many had to deal with, along with language barriers.  But Jim, his grandparents, and others in the community pitch in to help this family survive and have a more optimistic future after that first dismal (and tragic) winter...

My Ántonia is not exactly what you would call an action thriller, but rather a literary snapshot of an era in our history in which life was tough and people took responsibility for their own lives while pulling together in times of trouble to help each other out.  I found it refreshing and liked it...maybe you would, too...