From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Jesse Larsen
Housekeeping begins "My name is Ruth." It ends with Ruth remarking that she had "never distinguished readily between thinking and dreaming" and realizing that her "life would be much different if I could ever say, This I have learned from my senses, while that I have merely imagined." Although Ruth and her sister Lucille spend most of their childhood in one house near a lake in Idaho - terrain described at length through poignant and radiant prose - Ruth never loses the feeling of being a homeless woman, a person who, with her sister, "had spent our lives watching and listening with the constant sharp attention of children lost in the dark. It seemed that we were bewilderingly lost in a landscape that, with any light at all, would be wholly unfamiliar." In Housekeeping, lives change drastically just when nothing seems to be happening. Marilynne Robinson's vibrant and visual language floats and flows out of Ruth's most secret self, only to remind us how impossible it is to ever really get under another person's skin. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14.


Review
"So precise, so distilled, so beautiful that one doesn't want to miss any pleasure it might yield."
--Le Anne Schreiber, The New York Times Book Review
"Here's a first novel that sounds as if the author has been treasuring it up all her life . . . You can feel in the book a gathering voluptuous release of confidence, a delighted surprise at the unexpected capacities of language, a close, careful fondness for people that we thought only saints felt."
--Anatole Broyard, The New York Times
"I found myself reading slowly, than more slowly—this is not a novel to be hurried through, for every sentence is a delight."
--Doris Lessing



Review
"So precise, so distilled, so beautiful that one doesn't want to miss any pleasure it might yield."--The New York Times Book Review

"Here's a first novel that sounds as if the author has been treasuring it up all her life...You can feel in the book a gathering voluptuous release of confidence, a delighted surprise at the unexpected capacities of language, a close, careful fondness for people that we thought only saints felt."--Anatole Broyard, The New York Times

"I found myself reading slowly, than more slowly--this is not a novel to be hurried through, for every sentence is a delight."--Doris Lessing



Book Description
A modern classic, Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, their eccentric and remote aunt. The family house is in the small Far West town of Fingerbone set on a glacial lake, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck, and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience.



About the Author
MARILYNNE ROBINSON is the author of the novel Gilead and two books of nonfiction, Mother Country and The Death of Adam. She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

ANNOTATION

Marilyn Robinson's acclaimed coming of age story set in Idaho mountain lake country.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, their eccentric and remote aunt. The family house is in the small Far West town of Fingerbone, which is set on a glacial lake, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

A reissue of the contemporary feminist classic. (Sept.)

Charles McGrath

....The language is so precise, so distilled and so beautiful one does not want to miss any pleasure it might yield up to patience. -- The New York Times Books of the Century

Hamill - Hungry Mind Review