Willa Cather's masterful portrait of prairie culture, based on her own life. Against Nebraska's panoramic landscape, Cather recreates the life of an immigrant girl who becomes, in the memories of narrator Jim Burden, the epitome of strong and dignifed womanhood.
It seems almost sacrilege to infringe upon a book as soulful and rich as Willa Cather's My Ántonia by offering comment. First published in 1918, and set in Nebraska in the late 19th century, this tale of the spirited daughter of a Bohemian immigrant family planning to farm on the untamed land ("not a country at all but the material out of which countries are made") comes to us through the romantic eyes of Jim Burden. He is, at the time of their meeting, newly orphaned and arriving at his grandparents' neighboring farm on the same night her family strikes out to make good in their new country. Jim chooses the opening words of his recollections deliberately: "I first heard of Ántonia on what seemed to be an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America," and it seems almost certain that readers of Cather's masterpiece will just as easily pinpoint the first time they heard of Ántonia and her world. It seems equally certain that they, too, will remember that moment as one of great light in an otherwise unremarkable trip through the world.

Ántonia, who, even as a grown woman somewhat downtrodden by circumstance and hard work, "had not lost the fire of life," lies at the center of almost every human condition that Cather's novel effortlessly untangles. She represents immigrant struggles with a foreign land and tongue, the restraints on women of the time (with which Cather was very much concerned), the more general desires for love, family, and companionship, and the great capacity for forbearance that marked the earliest settlers on the frontier.

As if all this humanity weren't enough, Cather paints her descriptions of the vastness of nature--the high, red grass, the road that "ran about like a wild thing," the endless wind on the plains--with strokes so vivid as to make us feel in our bones that we've just come in from a walk on that very terrain ourselves. As the story progresses, Jim goes off to the University in Lincoln to study Latin (later moving on to Harvard and eventually staying put on the East Coast in another neat encompassing of a stage in America's development) and learns Virgil's phrase "Optima dies ... prima fugit" that Cather uses as the novel's epigraph. "The best days are the first to flee"--this could be said equally of childhood and the earliest hours of this country in which the open land, much like My Ántonia, was nothing short of a rhapsody in prairie sky blue. --Melanie Rehak

Customer Rating:
Summary: Finally a good American Novel.
Comment: I read this book because it's on the Modern Library's Top 100 List. This book is about a young boy sent to live with his Grandparents in Nebraska, and his life growing up there. It sounds boring, but it really is a facinating novel. The characters are all very strong-natured and interesting, and in the end everyone pretty much ends up successful in living the ways they want to live. I would definitely recommend it as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Beautiful writing, but the lack of plot means it's not for everyone
Comment: I loved this story of a time and place that is gone. It's elegiac and fond, and beautifully written. Characters are sketched out sparsely but intact, and her phrasing made me gasp with pleasure at times.

But it has no plot. I cringe to think that children might be forced to read this. People who want to learn how to write should read this - Willa Cather writes beautifully. People who like character sketches or prose that captures a time and place unknown to them will like this. Things happen, as they do in a life. But not everything that happens is interesting (as in life.)

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Enduring Story
Comment: My parents had an old copy of this book lying around and I picked it up and starting reading it over winter break one year. It drew me in. I don't know why, since it wasn't particularly warm or filled with likeable characters or funny or scary or any of the things that normally draw me in. It was just interesting - and different. It seemed so real - you could feel the harsh winters. And all these years, the story, the characters have stayed with me - for me, a sure sign of a great book.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Beautiful new edition
Comment: The edition of this book that has a cover painting of Antonia in a white dress (ISBN 1438242905) has a fresh new design, inside and out. It's also a substantial size (6"x9") and printed on high-quality paper, unlike the small mass-market editions printed on newsprint. A great bargain at this low price!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Only read it if you have to for school!
Comment: Required reading for my kids their junior year. My kids love to read everything they can get their hands on. This was pure torture! Had to look up summaries online to help get the ideas flowing on what to write about after reading this. Books like this are enough to make kids not want to read any more!

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