Best book I have read in years!!

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	• A Sudden Country: A Novel Karen Fisher Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2006 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 29 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Best book I have read in years!!

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I loved the author's writing style.I found myself seeing everything as she described it..no fluff..which I loved for a change. Her raw, lean descriptions of the way things were for this group of characters was so real and accurate that it made for a great read. I found myself having such empathy for Lucy and McLaren and even for Lucy's husband...but understanding why it ended the way it did. I just loved every bit of this book..would recomend it to anyone who loves true history, and the outdoors and dosn't mind getting dirty.

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Outstanding Prose

I was very impressed by this woman's first novel. The lyricism of the language was striking, and best of all, her writing style brought a quality of fierce beauty to the characters and the landscape that I found uplifting and powerful.

Also, the sex scenes are gorgeous and erotic. I am a big fan of Cormac McCarthy as well, but this woman's prose leaves you with a strong sense of possibility and hope; McCarthy's prose is darker and more angst-ridden.

I recommend this book heartily. Its originality is remarkable.

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A Sudden Delight

This is a novel of the American West in the mid-1800s, but we're not talking cowboys. We're talking about Lucy Mitchell, a woman, a mother, uprooted from her civilized Iowa home by her second husband, Israel, to go west to the Oregon Territory. Along the way, they are met by James MacLaren, a man for whom learning to live again is nearly impossible, after the deaths of his children from disease during a harsh winter, and the desertion of him by his Indian wife with another man.

I don't want to spoil the storyline for you, but suffice to say, this is an incredible read. Lean. Gorgeous. Prose near poetry. Fisher's evocation of the landscape and brutal beauty here in the Pacific North West is spot on. There isn't an ounce of fat in this book; Fisher has carved the beauty from the stone and shows it to us, unadorned and unapologetically. Don't expect to be spoonfed, either; this is a book where the author expects you to be able to draw conclusions from facts left like coins in a fountain. It is literary fiction at its finest. Please enjoy, and support a new woman author whose rich voice needs to be heard and shared.

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Good, but could have been great

The story involves the dissatisfied wife of a man, who insists they leave everything behind and take off for Oregon in the 1840s. She's keeping an "accounting" of all the things this husband has done to her, for which she's one day going to extract compensation. Still, she recalls the romantic love she felt toward her first husband, now deceased, and obviously misses it.

Meanwhile, a man who has lost his wife to another man, and all his children to smallpox, joins their circle and helps them make the trip. Lucy, the unhappy wife, has an immediate attraction for him, primarily because he's so unlike her husband.

Another reviewer mentioned not caring for the writing style, and I have to agree. The work would be outstanding if not for the author's excessive use of incomplete sentences (which the reviewer tried to emulate in that review, to demonstrate).

Writers use incomplete sentences to occasionally convey a sense of startled afterthought or abruptness. They're a useful tool, SOMETIMES, but when they're overused they make reading a jarring, often irritating chore. Everyone in A Sudden Country views everything in jerky half-thoughts so that the tool not only loses its effectiveness, but its purpose. (If it ceases to have a purpose, don't use the tool at all.) I found myself frequently mentally combining two incomplete phrases with a comma (it's the editor in me), which is often all it would have taken to make a really beautiful sentence and to keep the words moving more fluidly and smoothly. Just a little technical maintenance and the book might have read like poetry.

The writing in A Sudden Country otherwise is very lyrical, and as I said, just shy of outstanding. The author is undoubtedly a talented writer, and has a very promising future.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5, 6

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