Helpful Score: 1
Excellent book. Like a lot of other folks, I read it in high school, i re-read it now, and it stands up pretty well. She wrote it in 1931, and she uses a King James Version Old Testament style of writing, starting a lot of paragraphs with conjunctions-type words (and, but, then, now). Since it is something of a moralistic tale (a lot of what an American would recognize as being valued American traits), it works.
It mostly takes place in Anhui province (the wife O-Lan comes from Shandong), covering a period from the main character's wedding day until his old age approximately 30 years later, I perused looking for hints, it would appear to start at around 1900, since about 10 years in they take a train to an unnamed city in the south, and there were very few lasting train lines before 1900. But then she wrote a sequel to this called "Sons", which took the family story many years further (from Buck's perspective, that would have been the future), so the dates are a little of a mystery. However, that isn't really the key focus of the book.
It mostly takes place in Anhui province (the wife O-Lan comes from Shandong), covering a period from the main character's wedding day until his old age approximately 30 years later, I perused looking for hints, it would appear to start at around 1900, since about 10 years in they take a train to an unnamed city in the south, and there were very few lasting train lines before 1900. But then she wrote a sequel to this called "Sons", which took the family story many years further (from Buck's perspective, that would have been the future), so the dates are a little of a mystery. However, that isn't really the key focus of the book.
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