Michelle Hoover
Author of The Quickening
Works by Michelle Hoover
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Hoover, Michelle
- Birthdate
- 1972-08-27
- Gender
- female
- Occupations
- professor (Boston University)
- Organizations
- Grub Street writers, PEN New England, SCBWI
- Agent
- Esmond Harmsworth
- Short biography
- Michelle Hoover teaches writing at Boston University and Grub Street and has published fiction in Confrontation, The Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, and Best New American Voices, among others. She has been a Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference scholar, the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University, a MacDowell Fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and in 2005 the winner of the PEN/New England Discovery Award for Fiction. She was born in Ames, IA, the granddaughter of four longtime farming families.
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Ames, Iowa, USA
- Places of residence
- Boston, Massachusetts, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- USA
Members
Discussions
Michelle Hoover, author of The Quickening (July 19-26) in Author Chat (September 2010)
Reviews
If any writer could ever convince you that life on a farm is completely, impossibly difficult, in ANY era, it's Michelle Hoover, the granddaughter of four farm families. This solid novel centers on two neighbor women: Eddie, strong as a man, and Mary, devious and discontent. Their lives weave disturbing patterns around each other and their growing families, town, and church. They are dependent and resentful of each other and envious of each other's lives and circumstances. However, there is show more also love and attachment and respect, and the contradictory feelings lead to a great deal of trouble and to bad, bad outcomes.
The story is told in alternating chapters in the women's voices. It is refreshing to have rural lives told solely by women. Husbands and sons are present but their thoughts are hidden from the tale. There is also a mystical air of "unknown knowns" that leaves the reader very satisfied at the end.
I would compare Hoover to Jane Smiley, Conrad Richter, and Timothy Egan as fine storytellers of this most difficult of American lives. show less
The story is told in alternating chapters in the women's voices. It is refreshing to have rural lives told solely by women. Husbands and sons are present but their thoughts are hidden from the tale. There is also a mystical air of "unknown knowns" that leaves the reader very satisfied at the end.
I would compare Hoover to Jane Smiley, Conrad Richter, and Timothy Egan as fine storytellers of this most difficult of American lives. show less
[The Quickening] reads like a prayer or a meditation.
Enidina Current and Mary Morrow couldn’t be more different. Enidina, a stout, scrapping woman, seems to have grown directly out of the rich soil of the farm, her legs rooting her to the nurture and goodness of the earth. The fragile Mary, though, seems constantly in danger of breaking against either the hard land or the people who make their lives from it. The hardscrabble and lonely life of a Midwestern farm in the early 1900’s show more requires these two opposites to cling to each other for survival and sanity. Their dark destinies spring out of the land like two shoots from a common root, twisting and pushing one against the other.
Hoover has crafted a soft-spoken, deceptively powerful tale with her debut novel, [The Quickening]. The elegance and directness of her writing barely conceal the erupting souls of her characters.
A favorite for the year!
5 bones!!!!! show less
Enidina Current and Mary Morrow couldn’t be more different. Enidina, a stout, scrapping woman, seems to have grown directly out of the rich soil of the farm, her legs rooting her to the nurture and goodness of the earth. The fragile Mary, though, seems constantly in danger of breaking against either the hard land or the people who make their lives from it. The hardscrabble and lonely life of a Midwestern farm in the early 1900’s show more requires these two opposites to cling to each other for survival and sanity. Their dark destinies spring out of the land like two shoots from a common root, twisting and pushing one against the other.
Hoover has crafted a soft-spoken, deceptively powerful tale with her debut novel, [The Quickening]. The elegance and directness of her writing barely conceal the erupting souls of her characters.
A favorite for the year!
5 bones!!!!! show less
This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
There is something about Enidina that kept her in my mind long after I closed this book. Writing to a grandson she doesn’t know, in the first five pages she tells about herself up to where she just got married in her early thirties. How, as a child, her mother wiped dirt in her mouth ‘so I could taste the dust and seed we lived on.” How she sat alone in her bare home on her new Iowa farm and ate from a jar of rhubarb jam with her large fingers, having just cleaned the blood from her show more marital sheets. This was 1913.
As she goes on Enidina seems to grow larger in our minds, creating a presence of a sort, one that is anchored to the ground and with her flaws firmly woven in and unalterable. She is a strong character who, when life should shake her to her core, simply carries on, emotionally empty, but stoic and tough as before, hovering, somehow making us look and wonder what it is her existence has to offer us.
This is a great and layered work, a first novel by Hoover. That is not to say it didn’t have its flaws. The book is narrated by two characters—Enidina, who I adored, and who is based on the journal of Hoover's great grandmother, and Mary who is Enidina’s opposite. Mary was raised in town, learned to play piano on a sketch of piano keys and never took to her own farm. She lived there, but stayed in her house, cleaning furiously. We learn not to trust what she says; that there is a disconnect between voice and reality that somewhat echoes her detachment from that land. I didn’t like Mary because I saw through her almost immediately, despite her internal complexity, and found her voice predicable. Also, as an anchorless personality she floated too freely, becoming a plot device. I wanted to cut her narrative out of the book and then re-read just Enidina. (Hoover discussed considering this herself! See her LT chat, post #6: http://www.librarything.com/topic/95157#2092493 )
But, alas, I’m too hard on Mary, who is critical to the effect Hoover is making here. In a way we're all Mary, especially today, in that we're too materialistic and disconnected from the ground around us and worried about the wrong things. Enidina corrects all that, and the contrast highlights her purity. I’ve thought of Enidina as maybe holding out something like a truth for us, the reader. But, thinking this over now, I think it’s her purity that maybe attracts us, or at least me, a sort of quiet solid place we, with our mental storms, like to know, or at least imagine, is there.
2010
http://www.librarything.com/topic/90167#2167922 show less
As she goes on Enidina seems to grow larger in our minds, creating a presence of a sort, one that is anchored to the ground and with her flaws firmly woven in and unalterable. She is a strong character who, when life should shake her to her core, simply carries on, emotionally empty, but stoic and tough as before, hovering, somehow making us look and wonder what it is her existence has to offer us.
This is a great and layered work, a first novel by Hoover. That is not to say it didn’t have its flaws. The book is narrated by two characters—Enidina, who I adored, and who is based on the journal of Hoover's great grandmother, and Mary who is Enidina’s opposite. Mary was raised in town, learned to play piano on a sketch of piano keys and never took to her own farm. She lived there, but stayed in her house, cleaning furiously. We learn not to trust what she says; that there is a disconnect between voice and reality that somewhat echoes her detachment from that land. I didn’t like Mary because I saw through her almost immediately, despite her internal complexity, and found her voice predicable. Also, as an anchorless personality she floated too freely, becoming a plot device. I wanted to cut her narrative out of the book and then re-read just Enidina. (Hoover discussed considering this herself! See her LT chat, post #6: http://www.librarything.com/topic/95157#2092493 )
But, alas, I’m too hard on Mary, who is critical to the effect Hoover is making here. In a way we're all Mary, especially today, in that we're too materialistic and disconnected from the ground around us and worried about the wrong things. Enidina corrects all that, and the contrast highlights her purity. I’ve thought of Enidina as maybe holding out something like a truth for us, the reader. But, thinking this over now, I think it’s her purity that maybe attracts us, or at least me, a sort of quiet solid place we, with our mental storms, like to know, or at least imagine, is there.
2010
http://www.librarything.com/topic/90167#2167922 show less
This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
Midwestern farms will never ‘look’ the same to me again. I don’t say that lightly, for I am a Midwestern gal, grown up on a farm, and chose to raise my own children on an acreage in farmland in order to give them a similar experience. I had an idyllic childhood; many chores, of course – household, garden, field and livestock. But in addition – a gorgeous old Victorian farmhouse filled with family, friends and great food, and shaded by huge old elms whose branches supported many show more hours of childhood reading.
Never once had it crossed my mind, “what stories have these old walls to tell?” But those old farms have long histories. Michelle Hoover tells some of these events in her debut novel ‘The Quickening’. Told in reminiscences looking back from 1950 to events in their young womanhood, and straddling the years from 1913 to 1939, two neighbors, Enidina Current and Mary Morrow expose their need of and bitterness toward each other over the circumstances in their lives and times and how each one’s actions impacted the other and their families.
I knew nothing of Agriculture Secretary Wallace and his order to kill six million pigs in 1933. But how it ripped apart the lives of small farmers in that day, Ms. Hoover gives us a picture. And many more pictures – of a hardscrabble life of raising your every morsel; of a hard day’s physical work dawn to dark; of neighbors few and far between; of loneliness and misunderstandings; of childbearing and child rearing.
As a mother, ‘quickening’ is a familiar term to me and the date was recorded for each of my children. But how different my time is from what these ladies experienced. For me, medical care is just moments away. For their time and place, quickening did not always end with a baby in their arms. My grandmother was the age of Enidina and Mary and must have faced many of the same things. How I wish I had her here to ask! About birth, though, we did get to talk once. She was horrified that I chose to have some of my babies at home, for she almost died with her first child (my father), bleeding so badly that she soaked completely through the straw of her mattress into the storage boxes below it.
In this story, it seems to me that, while ‘the quickening’ is obviously used in the maternal sense, in another sense (‘to stir up, rouse or stimulate’) it refers to those incidents on which turn the lives of these two ladies. In Mary’s life, it seemed she never felt what should have been her quickenings, or if felt, not nurtured. The author got Mary’s last chapter perfectly. Enidina’s final quickening tore my heart; I had not anticipated that turn of story.
As I pass these old farms now, I imagine the hard work and hard times that their previous owners endured in creating their life from the land. I loved this book. Ms. Hoover has written a moving story, in a vividly painted setting, with heartbreakingly real characters.
Highly, highly recommended. show less
Never once had it crossed my mind, “what stories have these old walls to tell?” But those old farms have long histories. Michelle Hoover tells some of these events in her debut novel ‘The Quickening’. Told in reminiscences looking back from 1950 to events in their young womanhood, and straddling the years from 1913 to 1939, two neighbors, Enidina Current and Mary Morrow expose their need of and bitterness toward each other over the circumstances in their lives and times and how each one’s actions impacted the other and their families.
I knew nothing of Agriculture Secretary Wallace and his order to kill six million pigs in 1933. But how it ripped apart the lives of small farmers in that day, Ms. Hoover gives us a picture. And many more pictures – of a hardscrabble life of raising your every morsel; of a hard day’s physical work dawn to dark; of neighbors few and far between; of loneliness and misunderstandings; of childbearing and child rearing.
As a mother, ‘quickening’ is a familiar term to me and the date was recorded for each of my children. But how different my time is from what these ladies experienced. For me, medical care is just moments away. For their time and place, quickening did not always end with a baby in their arms. My grandmother was the age of Enidina and Mary and must have faced many of the same things. How I wish I had her here to ask! About birth, though, we did get to talk once. She was horrified that I chose to have some of my babies at home, for she almost died with her first child (my father), bleeding so badly that she soaked completely through the straw of her mattress into the storage boxes below it.
In this story, it seems to me that, while ‘the quickening’ is obviously used in the maternal sense, in another sense (‘to stir up, rouse or stimulate’) it refers to those incidents on which turn the lives of these two ladies. In Mary’s life, it seemed she never felt what should have been her quickenings, or if felt, not nurtured. The author got Mary’s last chapter perfectly. Enidina’s final quickening tore my heart; I had not anticipated that turn of story.
As I pass these old farms now, I imagine the hard work and hard times that their previous owners endured in creating their life from the land. I loved this book. Ms. Hoover has written a moving story, in a vividly painted setting, with heartbreakingly real characters.
Highly, highly recommended. show less
This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.Lists
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Statistics
- Works
- 5
- Also by
- 1
- Members
- 405
- Popularity
- #60,013
- Rating
- 3.5
- Reviews
- 46
- ISBNs
- 22
