So Big

Rating:
Summary: An excelent and inspiring Pulitzer Prize winning novel
Review: An interesting story of a woman's life and her struggle to raise her only son and teach him what is valuable in life. The Story is set in the late 1800 and early 1900's in rural and urban Chicago. The author called it "a book about cabbages..." but really, it's a story about Selina DeJong, orphaned as a young, wealthy child, who struggles to make a life for herself and her only child Dirk whom she has nicknamed "sobig". She marries a dolt for a husband and begins to work on a farm. Her husband is a small man with a small brain and is afraid of his own shadow which limits and frustrates Selina and keeps her from accomplishing anything for many years. Fortunately, her husband suffers an accidental death and she is fianlly able to make some necessary improvements which allow her son (who otherwise would have been a cabbage farmer his whole life) to attend college in the city. He succeeds in college, but when he gets out he sacrifices his dream profession(architecture) to make a lot of money doing something boring in finance, and in doing so, he misses the point his mother tried to teach him about success. (i.e. that money doesn't equal it.) This is a really good book with a wonderful and inspiring ending. If the whole book had been as good as the last couple chapters, I would have given it five stars easily. Although "So Big" isn't a famous book, Edna Ferber made it big with most of her others... You may have heard of a couple of them... "Giant" from which the Rock Hudson, James Dean film was made, and "Showboat", which was made into a sprawling musical. (My head aches just to think about it).

Rating:
Summary: A timeless message
Review: Edna Ferber's book is touching and timeless. The themes of money, working hard, family, and real "living" are as appropriate today as when the book was written. You can't help but be taken in by the inspirational story of Selina Peake...don't miss it.

Rating:
Summary: The Story Stays With Me
Review: I read So Big literally decades ago, and the story has stuck with me through all that time.

Selina DeJong's positive and hard working attitude is inspirational. Ferber does her justice in the end, when Selina achieves "gravitas," the state of being satisfied with her life and wise in old age.

Typically, her son doesn't appreciate what his mother has given him until his is older and can see her through his girlfriend's eyes. Suddenly she becomes clear to him as a heroine.

This story even inspired me to each vegetables more! I can only hope you enjoy this book as much as I did.

Rating:
Summary: The Story Stays With Me
Review: I read So Big literally decades ago, and the story has stuck with me through all that time.

Selina DeJong's positive and hard working attitude is inspirational. Ferber does her justice in the end, when Selina achieves "gravitas," the state of being satisfied with her life and wise in old age.

Typically, her son doesn't appreciate what his mother has given him until his is older and can see her through his girlfriend's eyes. Suddenly she becomes clear to him as a heroine.

This story even inspired me to each vegetables more! I can only hope you enjoy this book as much as I did.

Rating:
Summary: One of the best books I've read.
Review: I throughly enjoyed ths book. It was the second Ferber novel I had read, and truly, I don't think there are many that top this one. I laughed, I cried. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in meeting an incredible woman who takes what she gets in life and makes the best that she can. A truly compelling novel.

Rating:
Summary: One of the best books I've read.
Review: I throughly enjoyed ths book. It was the second Ferber novel I had read, and truly, I don't think there are many that top this one. I laughed, I cried. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in meeting an incredible woman who takes what she gets in life and makes the best that she can. A truly compelling novel.

Rating:
Summary: A great Novel
Review: This book is a great story and also very well written. The story about Selina Peake is touching if not inspirational. This book would be great for highschool book reports because of the strong themes and characters. I think the main story in the book is with Dirk Dejong Selina's son. Dirk starts of and goes to college and becomes an architect, but then drops that to sell bonds, simply for money. The book winds different plots together but in the end Dirk isn't happy, and other people who, well you could say "followed the dreams" (not so trite though) found happiness even though they might not have been rich. Wonderful book. One might wonder what Amazon.com is thinking about with their reading level of ages 4-8, the books not profane so a reader of 4-8 could read it, but the book is probably a little advanced for reader 4-8 I would say more like Highschool and on. If your looking for novels by Ferber try Giant or some of her plays. (her other big novel is Showboat, I'll just say the musical is better!)

Rating:
Summary: Prairie Courage
Review: With the death of her father when she is 19, idealistic and poetical Selina finds herself working as a prairie school teacher. She falls in love with a farmer, marries, gives birth to a son, and is widowed in short succession. Selina finds farming desperately hard work, and she expends every effort possible towards ensuring that life will be better for her boy. What happens to both of them as he grows up is the subject of this book, So Big. I loved this book as a sample of what life was like in bygone years, and an encouraging story to always be true to your inner values. I've read this book several times.

Rating:
Summary: Prairie Courage
Review: With the death of her father when she is 19, idealistic and poetical Selina finds herself working as a prairie school teacher. She falls in love with a farmer, marries, gives birth to a son, and is widowed in short succession. Selina finds farming desperately hard work, and she expends every effort possible towards ensuring that life will be better for her boy. What happens to both of them as he grows up is the subject of this book, So Big. I loved this book as a sample of what life was like in bygone years, and an encouraging story to always be true to your inner values. I've read this book several times.

Rating:
Summary: Pulitzer Prize Winner
Review: Without a doubt, _So Big_ is the best of all Edna Ferber's novels, and it was awarded the 1924 Pulitzer prize. It contains a strong portrayal of early 20th century midwestern agricultural life, which Ferber borrowed from her observations as a young women in Appleton, Wisconsin.

_So Big_ is the story of Dirk DeJong, and his mother Selina. After a colorful and tragic girlhood, she arrived as a schoolteacher in a Dutch farming community south of Chicago. She didn't quite fit in with the narrow-minded farmers and their overworked wives, yet she married a handsome farmer with notoriously unproductive land.

After his early death, she spends the next decades finding a market and coaxing a crop to grow in soggy land. By the time Dirk grows up, the "DeJong asparagus" is a success, and it enables his banking career. Yet he loses a sense of empathy and beauty, which Selina retains, despite her difficult path in life.

Ferber is the author who wrote _Show Boat_ and _Giant_. She could grind out popular dramatic fiction with loads of stock characters in a sentimentalized historic setting. But her later work loses the art found in _So Big_, which is peopled with multi-dimensional characters and a story which touches the reader's heart.

I highly recommend this book.