Possibly one of the saddest books I’ve ever read, but beautifully written, of course, somehow simultaneously capturing the innocence of a young boy and the perspective of time passed. Maxwell depicts the unrelentingly hard life of Illinois farmers at the turn of the century, not the idyllic life of the American myth, but a life dominated by unfulfilled expectations, poverty, exhaustion, conformity, and violence. When Cletus Smith’s mother gives in to the interest shown to her by her husband’s best friend, neighbor Fred Wilson, both families are destroyed, and the affair ends in two deaths. Attorneys, ministers, farm-owners (because these men are tenants), and their overburdened families fail the two couples involved. “It would have been a help if at some time some Baptist preacher, resting his forearms on the pulpit and hunching his shoulders, had said ‘People neither got what they deserved nor deserve what they get…’ On the other hand, how could any preacher, Baptist or otherwise, say this?” (123-24). Maxwell delicately explores the internal landscapes of these seemingly implacable farm people, and his occasional references to Freudianism suggest the legacy that their children were left to deal with. So moving and thought-provoking.