“A few days later, the horse returned, accompanied by 20 more horses.
‘Oh, I don't know,’ said the farmer, ‘maybe it's a bad thing and maybe it's not.’ All the people in the town came to console him because of the loss. To read an excerpt from Some Luck, click here.I recently came across this story online: “There once was a farmer who owned a horse. To read my review of A Thousand Acres, click here.įor Jane Smiley’s own ‘Top 100 novels’ list, click here. Don’t read it in short snatches, it deserves more than that and it will get beneath your skin. Some Luck is a book to be read over a quiet winter weekend, hunkered down on the sofa with an endless supply of mugs of hot chocolate. Will I be reading the next two books in the trilogy? Definitely. As a reader, I trust both authors to deliver in the end. Both writers excel at the detail, building the story slowly, like layers of frost thickening on a window in winter which starts off looking cloudy and finishes as an intricate design. Reading Jane Smiley is a little like reading a novel by Colm Tóibín. I came to this book fresh after reading A Thousand Acres and eager for more. And so more babies arrive into the Langdon’s household, and the family’s life expands from Iowa as this next generation lives in a world Lillian, ‘God’s own gift’, the beautiful daughter, meets a man and goes to Washington DC. His younger brother Joe shows no inclination to leave the farm. The eldest child Frankie goes away to college and then to war, becoming a sniper in Africa and Europe. Steadily the chapters, and years, march on. Smiley is so good at the detail: of Walter farming, Rosanna doing the laundry, babies being born, growing into toddlers and then pupils walking the track to the tiny school where they are taught with their neighbours in one classroom, all ages together.
Chapter-by-chapter it tells of the family’s life, their farm, the ups and downs of daily life, births and deaths, and always the land.Īt first it feels as if not much is happening. And so starts the first book in this trilogy about the Langdon family. The first two pages of Some Luck by Jane Smiley are a wonderful description of him watching a pair of owls nesting in a big elm tree. It is 1920, the eve of Walter Langdon’s 25 th birthday and he is walking the fields of his Iowa farm.
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