A review by msmandrake
Early Warning by Jane Smiley

3.0

I loved "Some Luck" but sadly was not quite so engaged with this next volume. I guess some of this is inevitable, characters are of course going to die off and be replaced by new ones, but one hopes the new ones are at least as compelling and these were not so much, partly because there were too many to be able to spend enough time on individually. The farm setting which I liked pretty much disappeared, again, inevitable, but I missed it. Also it seemed in this book, more so than in the other, currents events took center stage . I was around for these years, and Reaganomics and Jimmy Carter and even Watergate do not seem "historical" so much as old tedious news. Everything was squeezed in, Jim Jones, even. And when it hit 1980 I thought, oh NO there is a gay character which means we are going to have to deal with AIDS and sure enough, here it is. I know this is what was going on, I just wish the story could have been a little more timeless. It started to feel like a checklist.. everything bad from those decades has to happen to at least one character. Am I whining? Perhaps, but I wanted to like this book as much as I liked the first one and I'm crabby that I didn't. (I will read the third one, though.)