This is a captivating book that takes you back to the great depression. I enjoyed reading about Lila who grew up a nomad without a real family. Seeing the world through her eyes was so interesting. I grew up in the Midwest and it's easy to see the picture Marilynne paints of customer cutters and families asking for work each day pulling weeds, picking apples, or doing practically anything to eat. You get transported to a different era. ( )

This follow up to Gilead is as wonderful as a book could be. ( )

I certainly won't detract from my praise for Marilynne Robinson (see my review of Home), but I had a bit more trouble with this third part of the Gilead series. Once again Robinson changes the perspective, now to Lila, the young wife of the much older reverend John Ames. As an orphan she has had a quite poor and eventful childhood, living the life of a vagabond, ending up in a marginal gang, and even in a brothel. The atmosphere in this novel is strongly reminiscent of John Steinbeck, with even explicit references to the Depression and Dust Bowl period (i.e. the 1930s) that is so powerfully drawn in Grapes of Wrath.

During her lonely wanderings, Lila by chance ends up in Gilead, Iowa, and thus inevitably comes into contact with Reverend John Ames, who had lost his wife and child a long while ago and seemed exhausted. Ames and Lila seem like two extremes: he a thoughtful, struggling intellectual, she a rude and bruised orphan girl. Yet a moving dynamic arises between the two; the way they interact is so careful, thoughtful, and tactful that it almost physically hurts to follow. Quite unexpectedly, for both of them, they even get married. Surprising also for the reader, because we constantly see Lila deliberating whether she should move on or not. Even when she becomes pregnant by Ames those doubts remain, and the great thing is that Ames appears to be all too aware of them.

Especially in the second half of the book, Lila continues to muse about her turbulent past, about the dramatic events in it, and about the main characters of that period, especially her surrogate mother Doll. That past continues to pull at her persistently, especially because of the knife she received from Doll, with which the latter had stabbed to death a man who might have been Lila's father. The Calvinist religious-moral framework in which Robinson places her stories obviously plays an important role in all this. From that light, you can see Lila as a kind of Mary Magdalene, who is carefully guided by Ames to the right path, but who also has a moral compass that is so strong that, eventually, she can appreciate the uniqueness of what is happening between them. From Lila's point of view, there is the constant threat of damnation, a pull to evil even, that she actively struggles with. And with that Robinson brings us to territory that is pretty familiar to her.

Once again: this third Gilead part also plays at a very high level in terms of literature, and in terms of content, the sketch of Lila's gradual redemption is particularly existentially relevant. But I did have some difficulty with the structure of this novel: the accumulation of constant flashbacks and streams of consciousness make this book very difficult to read. In 'Home' you still had the sublime dialogues between the protagonists to keep the story bearable, and that is much more lacking here, especially in the second half of the book. Hence my slightly lower rating. But that does not detract from the fact that Robinson with Lila has created a character that, in terms of psychological and existential depth, can compete with the most striking of Greek or Shakespearean tragedies. ( )

There are stories and there are story tellers that seem destined for each other. As Robinson spins the tale of Lila, stitching together scenes of her as a child and a woman, and makes her rise from the page, I shook my head with admiration and delight. I devoured the fluid, confident writing with pleasure. Oh, to write so well!

Lila, and each of the characters she meets, spoke to me in unexpected ways of grace and redemption. One more splendid summer read.

Now to talk it all over with another reader. ( )

Lila is a prequel to Marilynne Robinson's prize-winning novel Gilead; as I read it, I could not shake the feeling that I was missing something because I had not read Gilead first. So I think my rating may be lower than it would be otherwise.

Lila is set in rural Iowa in the Dustbowl period of the '20s. Lila is a stolen child, snatched from outside of a house by drifter Doll. Lila is raised by Doll as part of a wandering group of workers living hand to mouth during the Depression, doing whatever it takes to get by.

Once Lila grows to womanhood she separates from the group and makes her own life. Circumstances bring her to the town of Gilead, where she encounters an old preacher, John Ames, and suggests that he marry her. Ames agrees, and soon a child is on the way.

One of my demurrals about this book is that I could never really identify a good reason why Ames would want to marry Lila; possibly this is covered in Gilead, but I don't think that Robinson makes his acceptance of her proposal convincing, given the complications that it clearly involves.

The great thing about Lila is how well Robinson gives a voice to her undereducated heroine without making her seem either unrealistically sophisticated or excessively dumb. It's a very true to life narrative voice, bolstered by Lila's talismanic knife, her only connection with the wandering life that she would like to leave behind, but is never quite certain that she has.
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