Book Review: Homestead by Rosina Lippi

I'm having a hard time starting this review of Homestead by Rosina Lippi. It's definitely a good, well-written book. Its characters are extremely vivid and real to life. This summer I spent a couple of days in a small Austrian village near the area where Homestead is set and can imagine the women and men and the hardships they endure. I can imagine the geographica setting all the more because I've been there, but even if I hadn't the isolated mountain village is clearly wrought. Lippi even deals with very difficult topics--like war and how it affects small towns.

However, there was just something about this book that I wasn't crazy about and the more I think about it the more I'm convinced it isn't just me not being in a good mood. The book, overall, is depressing. While I've read depressing books before (Fair and Tender Ladies by Lee Smith comes to mind first), at least the characters who were depressed in that book, or had sad lives, tried to overcome their problems. Lippi's characters, for the most part, feel as if they're simply stuck and have no control over their lives. They live their depressing lives because they have no choice. It's simply sad.

That said, I left each chapter wanting more from these characters. I wanted more than just the quick little snapshot of their lives, probably because I wanted to believe they'd overcome. But also because the characters were so vivid and real that I wanted to believe that they had more to their lives than just the few pages dedicated to them. While a few of them may have come back in later chapters (Johanna is one example, and she is an enjoyable one. In fact, one of the few characters embracing life), most were simply mentioned in an aside so that we had to piece together the story of the village. And while I don't mind having to work for the books I read, I did mind the ambiguity that I felt at the end of each chapter.

So, for the first time, I'm saying that I'm not crazy about a book that Lippi/Donati wrote. While I didn't hate it, I certainly didn't love it the way I have everything else.