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Island: The Complete Stories (2000)

by Alistair MacLeod(Favorite Author)

4.2 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0393341186 (ISBN13: 9780393341188)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

W. W. Norton & Company

review 1: I am not a short story reader. This book of short stories had me mesmerized from the first story. At the end of almost all of the stories the tears came before I knew I was crying. His characters are so fully rounded that I felt I knew them. Each story was told from one point of view. This allowed the feelings and the errors of their thinking to be much more pronounced. The family connections were well established. I am unfamiliar with the terrain and the weather. He put me into the story with magnificent details. The children were totally in the moment and their thoughts during complicated situations were riveting.
review 2: Immigrants to Nova Scotia, starving, settle in order to feed themselves across the ocean in view of the old country. Their lot -- farmi... moreng, fishing and mining all subject to the earth's climatic changes -- these humans labor under harsh conditions and face mortality front on as do their livestock. Here are stories of the basic fate of humans, and quite, perhaps, apart from the divine explanation of our existence. The divine here in this book is in the starkness and luck, or malchance, in the beauty of some god's wild country in which the characters manoeuvre around to guide or justify their choices, often heart breaking choices. I would not advise to read this if you are undergoing heartbreak. The story of Scott the mine horse was excruciating, making me stop many times to put the book down for in the story the intertwining the a being's - animal's - date of calling to see the Almighty as it were, showed just how tenuous our hold is on ourselves and others. There the cruel power bestowed to humans over animals and then the mere will of blinding the mind, a painful moment of tactical reasoning and the forgiveness given by love or violence, when needed was never more well presented. less

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