Then comes a spell of uncertainty (when he's sober), where he begins to talk about and act like the two daughters are taking the farm away from him, taking advantage of him. My favorite remains The All True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton, which I highly recommend.Ī Thousand Acres is a takeoff on King Lear, where a farmer who has three daughters, of whom the youngest is his favorite, in a drunken spell signs over his farm to his daughters, and when the youngest one questions it, he says fine! and signs it over to the two older ones. I am slowly making my way through Jane Smiley’s catalogue. This book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992. It is not essential to know ahead of time in order to enjoy it however, if I had figured it out sooner, some of the plot transitions, which seem to come out of the blue, would have made more sense.

I liked the first half of the story better than the second. The plot is about a farming life and the relationships among the characters. It is character driven and none of the characters is particularly likeable. Several female characters have experienced abuse.

Her mother died at an early age and she has had to play a motherly role in her sisters’ lives.

Protagonist Ginny, eldest of three sisters, is the narrator. It is set in 1979, a time when family farming was becoming increasingly difficult. A neighbor’s son, who had gone to Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft, returns to the area and develops relationships with two women. A dysfunctional Iowa farming family falls apart when the patriarch decides to leave his thousand-acre property to two of his three daughters.

A thousand acres smiley