Book: So Big by Edna Ferber
Finished: January 2008
Pages: 272
Challenges:
** Decades
** Winter Reading Challenge

First Sentence: Until he was almost ten the name stuck to him.

Last Sentence: He was lying there half and hour later when he heard the telephone's shrill insistence and Saki's gentle deferential rap at the bedroom door.

From Amazon:
"In So Big Edna Ferber provides us with a fascinating insight into life in Chicago and the nearby prairies from the gay nineties through the roaring twenties. Ms Ferber brought her characters to life in such a way as to make them easily identifiable to twenty-first century readers. She wrote in the same times and of the same times as Willa Cather (the other female Pulitzer winning novelist from the prairies). Ferber's skills at characterization, however, make the people of her novels appear real enough to transcend the elapsed century.

So Big is the story of a widow raising a young son on a small Illinois truck farm and the decisions they make and how their disparate choices impact the quality of their lives. Ms Ferber craftily sets characters into the tableaus of turn-of-the-century Chicago and the outlying Dutch farming community. She is so successful in painting her scenes that the authenticity of them is never in doubt. The reader (me) is thrilled to have such a detailed view of city and country life of these times."

I really enjoyed this book of a mother and all that she sacrificed for her son. Edna Ferber truly captures a mother's heart in this novel. I have, in the past, read Willa Cather, a contemporary of Ferber's and I have concluded that I enjoyed Ferber more than Cather.