This deceptively simple tale contains depths of heart, empathy, and grace. The story is told by Jim Burden, a young boy being raised by his grandmother and grandfather on a remote Nebraska farm in the 1880s, but he shares protagonist duties with Antonia (pronounced an-toe-nee-ah), the daughter of an immigrant family struggling, like so many others immigrant at that time, to realize the American Dream.

Jim and Antonia are thrown together by proximity, but end up forging a friendship that is sweetly innocent and that endures over decades. The key is the depth of respect they have for each other, Antonia admiring Jim for his intelligence and character, Jim admiring Antonia for her transparent generosity and goodness.

Along the way Cather introduces us to the denizens of Black Hawk, a rural township populated by a melting pot of Americans and immigrants, primarily Scandinavians, Bohemians (modern day Czechia), and Russians. Make no mistake, the lives they live can be harsh: grueling (seemingly ceaseless) physical labor, bitter weather, poverty, homesickness, disappointment, loss. Yet somehow Cather's characters also find time to laugh, sing, dance, and acknowledge the profound beauty of the natural world that surrounds them.

I loved everything about this novel. I loved the authenticity of the characters. I loved the vignettes of small town rural life - the dress shops and dance tents, clotheslines and cowhands, sod houses and sleighs. I love Cather's bold choice to make her tale character- rather than plot-driven. Her respect and empathy for the the immigrants she portrays. Her effortless storytelling and gorgeous portrayals of the beauty of midwestern prairies. Most of all, I loved witnessing the beautiful relationship between Jim and Antonia, and how their friendship helps to forge their characters.

Part coming-of-age tale, part homage to the American Dream (hard work = prosperity), part celebration of the beauty of the American Midwest, part panegyric to the power of human connection, this truly is an American classic. ( )

Unfortunately, I had a lot of several-day breaks in re-reading this book, which I had first read nearly half a century ago. Knowing so much more about cultural history now increased my enjoyment of this work significantly, but also knowing more about gender bias rendered Jim Burden a far less credible narrator than I thought he was in my early adolescence. Nevertheless, this novel tells a tale about loss and change at a time in which developments in communications and transportation changed the pace of life at dizzying speeds. Willa Cather beautifully knitted together the sense of loss — former homelands, pioneering agrarian life, childhood past — with ongoing life. ( )

This was such a gorgeous book. I was sorry to get to the end. Cather evokes the time and place so wonderfully. I will seek out more of her work. ( )

The word for this novel is "exquisite". There isn't a lot of story, but there is deft characterization, and beautiful descriptive language that turns the commonplace into the iconic. Page after page I marveled at Cather's ability to show the beauty of landscape, the vitality of young children at play, the difficulties of early 20th century life on the prairies of North America...all in terms that sound both original and inevitable. And by the time I reached the last chapters, the adult Antonia was speaking in my Slovak grandmother's voice. I said somewhere else that this book feels like Little House on the Prairie for adults. That's a bit glib, perhaps, but true still. And I hate to leave this world of hers, hard as it sometimes is to live in it. "Brilliant" is another word for it. All five stars.
January 2014 ( )

My copy of [My Antonia] is a warped paperback “Enriched Classic” picked up at the neighborhood used bookstore. In some of the later chapters words are underlined, sometimes with what I assume are annotations in Korean characters; the book was once read by a Korean immigrant reading a novel about an immigrant from what was then called Bohemia (Czech Republic?). A scan of Goodreads reviews indicated that a number of people were introduced to the book in high school & hated Willa Cather’s books ever since. I wonder what the original owner thought about the novel? (It ended up in a used bookstore, after all) As most Americans are, I’m a descendant of immigrants & the book touched my heart. Reading it over Christmas at age 74, I was sorry I waited so long to read it – Cather was probably considered to be too alien for youthful readers in my progressive Honolulu school. Been trying to catch up on authors I never got around to, Cather being one; got to this only after [O Pioneers] & [Death Comes for the Archbishop]; not surprised that this one was good too. At first it seems a collection of vivid character & scene sketches, but some homespun Proust in there, too – though the unexpected changes of fortune reminded me of Larry McMurtry. Reading about the characters – they seemed so real, there were times I was disappointed that the narrator didn’t always tell what happened to them: Antonia’s little sister, Jim’s grandmother & grandfather. They’re like the hired hands that go off to the West never to be heard from again, after the grandparents sell the farm & move to town. The stories of the hired girls don’t disappoint, though. And it seems lifelike that we only get the life histories of people closest to our hearts only in fragments of filtered stories. ( )