Recent Reading List - Conrad Richter

I've been looking back through my recent posts and noticed that they are primarily about babies. Surprise, surprise, right? I spend all day with a 1 year old and I'm expecting another in 3 months. But just so no one thinks I've totally succumbed to "baby brain," let me refresh my skills in non-baby talk.

I'm always reading some book (keeps me sane) and lately, I've been reading Conrad Richter's American pioneer trilogy (backwards) and The Mother Knot by Jane Lazarre. Two pretty different books, but similar in their featuring what Netflix calls a "strong female lead." Richter's books are The Trees, The Fields, and The Town. He traces the fictional settlement of Ohio from the point of view of his heroine, Sayward Luckett. In the first book, her family migrates from Pennsylvania to the dense woods of Ohio. Here they settle and in this book, she watches her siblings grow up, and she also marries her husband. The Fields is about Sayward's experience as a young mother of many children and the development of a town around her farm. The Town finds Sayward nurturing her youngest child and follows her life into old age, where she sees the end of the Ohio wilderness.

Of the three, The Town is the best. The character development and the conflict between Sayward and her youngest son is realistic and relevant to any generation. Unlike her older children, who witnessed their mother literally create a living for her family with her own hands, Sayward's youngest son, Chancey, grows up in a settled environment. He does not see or experience privation firsthand, which causes him to reject the "old fashioned" work ethos of his pioneer mother. His philosophy of life fights that of his mother's, who believes in the virtue of hard work, whether or not it is necessary. Chancey believes that work denigrates the human person and that less work for all creates freedom for all. I got a sniff of early socialist and communist ideas in this... which makes sense because the books were published in the 40's through 50's. My only qualm with the books, and the reason I'm not plowing through the first book (which just arrived in the mail) is because of the male/female relationships. Women, at least this one, were very stoic and appeared to expect a lot less from their men than we do today. There are many things I would have said to Sayward's husband that she does not. But oddly enough, the book helped me to appreciate, if not understand how men and women of my grandparents' generation stayed married .