Kent Haruf - Plainsong

Pros: The stories are simple but meaningful. Stark but powerful prose.

Cons: I would have liked more stories, but that might have ruined the effect.

The Bottom Line: Plainsong is like a pot of vegetable soup. None of the ingredients stand out. It's the mixture that works.

Review: Kent Haruf defines plainsong as “any simple and unadorned melody,” and the description aptly captures the essence of his novel by the same name. This simple slice-of-life glimpse at a year in a small Colorado town is more cotton sheets than ...

Pros: Simple and powerful language and style. Ordinary people made into fascinating characters. Seamless structure.

Cons: None for me. Some may not like the changing narrative focus or limitations.

The Bottom Line: Plainsong is a beautifully written, interesting read with memorable characters set in small town America.

Review: This book tricked me. It fooled me into thinking at first that it was about mostly small things, really not much more than brief glimpses into the lives of a few characters. I was also caught off guard by how carefully structured the novel is. The...

Pros: excellently portrayed characters, good organization, easy to catch symbolism, beautiful imagery

Cons: not long enough! ;)

Review: Plainsong is a joyful tale of an unexpected family of unrelated people bound together for their common need to love and be loved. The very small east Colorado town of Holt is the setting. All inhabitants know each other's histories and current status....

Pros: memorable characters

Cons: story will feel monotonous to some

Review: Sure, "Plainsong" is about a small town and its inhabitants, but at its core this novel shows that people need to feel protected, loved, and, well, mothered. Written in the third person without quotation marks (a style that flows beautifully...

Pros: The end of each chapter compels you to read the next.

Cons: None

The Bottom Line: Plainsong is the kind of novel that you can't put down until it is finished. It is amazing how two storylines are weaved into one.

Review: I was able to read this book in a week. Although for some that may not be saying much, but I am a slow reader, and to read a novel in a period of a week means there was definitely something special about this book. What I found I enjoyed the most was...

Pros: Absorbing story, masterfully written

Cons: Nary a one

Review: According to the frontispiece, Plainsong is any simple and unadorned melody or air. Simple and unadorned are terms that perfectly describe this tale of rural/small town life in eastern Colorado. Unadorned not because the lives of its characters are...

Pros: Beautifully written. Simple and true.

Cons: none

Review: This is a spellbinding work. There are times when I found myself closing the book so I could take a break, afraid to read it all at once. It's that good. The writing is spare and fluid, eloquent even. I never thought I'd say this about a novel and mean...

Pros: Clear, precise and simple writing style.

Cons: None, unless an absence of violence is a con.

Review: Haruf's novel is an elegantly sparse description of a series of colliding lives in a small town on the eastern Colorado plains. A high school girl becomes pregnant and is provided shelter by two aging bachelor farmers. The lives of all concerned are...

Pros: beautiful writing

Cons: there's no punctuation marks, so be warned

Review: There have been many small towns that have been created in literature: Larry McMurtry's Thalia, James Wilcox's Tula Springs, Garrison Keilor's Lake Wobbegon Days. It's time to add another title to this list: Kent Haruf's Holt, Colorado.

Haruf...

Pros: The story will make you feel good.

Cons: It has to end.

Review: Kent Haruf's 1999 novel Plainsong is a quietly beautiful tale about seven residents of a small Colorado plains town whose lives intertwine (improbably and otherwise) and grow richer because they're thrown together. They include a pregnant high...