The Angry Wife by Pearl S. Buck

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Buck sure knows how to leap from comfort to great complexity of ideas. Though issues in this book are pondered in her others. With this book she moves it all to post-War Between the States. She’s structured the plot and story to explore her views of race, the South, America and the Civil War. She does this all very well by creating an epic story of a family.

The examination of the family unfolded is accomplished extremely well. Buck vastly complicates the tale by pulling the family apart in a particularly difficult way that leads to Buck having to move characters around in all sorts of directions. She does all of this very clearly and leaves the reader intrigued to move the pages. Excellent writing and plotting.

The characters are well written and distinctly different. Something hard to do in a book that includes so many children. Many, many books have broods of kiddies, but Buck includes the same and makes each interesting and separate from another.

A note about the time I wrote this: Today’s (Not long ago or time to come) American population is extremely ignorant to the time period that is the basis of the book. Points of history presented in the book, once taught in public school,today is almost entirely not taught or mis-taught. Some might read this and react emotionally without the knowledge of what Buck is writing about. Certainly Buck took extreme melodramatic license to create the book and never intended for readers to believe the families in this book were representative of all in the South or the North. Buck’s goal was to complete a book that could be sold and read. Not sculpt factual history.

I think the only draw back to the book is, while trying to string so many characters together, Buck dropped the ball in some consistency and leaving some holes in the story never filled. Tiny stuff when paired with the whole. Also the title is silly.

Bottom line: I recommend this book. 9 out of 10 points.



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