In Country

by Bobbie Ann Mason

Book Overview

Bobbie Ann Mason's debut novel--"a brilliant and moving book... a moral tale that entwines public history with private anguish." --Los Angeles Times Book Review"How Ms. Mason conjures a vivid image of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0701130342
• ISBN13: 9780701130343
• Release Date: January 1986
• Publisher: Trafalgar Square
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Don't pass this one by!

This is a beautifully written book. Some may argue that it does not have a point, yet consider--did Vietnam have a point? Did teens Sam's age have a point in the mid-80's on their lazy summer vacations? Did Sam have any real point in mind in finding out more about her late father? No. The beauty of this book lies in discovery--of the past, of the present, and the future. Mason's characters are rich with personality, humor, and emotion as they each journey to discover something more than what today holds. A must read for anyone interested reading the best of American literature.

Some people apparently don't get it. . .

After reading numerous reviews that refer to this book as "boring," I felt I needed to speak up against some of the semi-literate reviewers. "In Country" is not an action novel. It's not meant to be a moral guide to living as a teenager. It's more than that, a complex, beautiful novel with multiple threads: about growing up, idenitity, place, war, and legacy. Mason is excellent at capturing the time and place of Western Kentucky; even though the town is never named, I'm certain she's writing about Mayfield, near where my husband grew up. If you can't pass high school English, you probably won't enjoy "In Country." If you can appreciate a complex, emotional novel, one that makes you think, then this book is a modern classic.

This is a great book

In Country is a great coming of age novel as well as an anti-war story. Sam, our lead character, has to come to terms with the Vietnam War killing her father, and what he had to do over ther, and seriously messing up her uncle and several other veterans. It is a great story along the lines of The Bell Jar or any other coming of age story. It is good. I highly recommend it. This is Mason at her best.

More good, solid work from Bobbie Ann Mason.

People who read for plot only, as have, apparently, some of the previous reviewers, are missing many other elements of the novel, any novel. Bobbie Ann Mason often writes about the Southern female and her transformation through discovery. Exactly what that woman discovers changes from story to story, but Sam is definitely one of Mason's dynamic Southern females. I am sorry, too, that some reviewers don't seem to appreciate Mason's use of contextual details to provide a landscape against which these transformations take place. I just really appreciate her willingness to refer to anything from Pop Tarts to Avon Products. That's the environment within which many of us do experience our lives. And Emmett? He's my uncle ... or my cousin . . . or my brother . . .

one of the most important American novels of the century

"In Country" is several books at once: among them, a chronicle of a significant era in American history, a rumination on the evaporation of American regionalism, and a standard coming of age novel. The story revolves around Samantha Hughes,unusually bright and aware for a teenager growing up in a western Kentucky backwater (probably not unlike Bobbie Ann Mason herself). Born in 1966, Sam's father died in Vietnam before she could meet him. When she turns 18, it occurs to her that no one in the family has ever really told her anything about him -- like American society, which wanted to forget about the dirty little war in southeast Asia, her family had more or less swept him under the rug. But Sam decides to go on her own journey to discover who her dad was, and what that senseless conflict might have been about.On her way, Mason weaves a brilliant tapestry of American culture in the mid-1980s, in which cable television and the proliferation of gigantic shopping malls have flattened out distictions between regions and the peculiar quality of rural existence. At the climax of the story, Sam travels to Washington with her beloved uncle and her paternal grandmother to visit the Vietnam memorial; when she finds her own name inscribed on the wall, it hammers home the message that the Vietnam experience is about all of us. "In Country" may have less impact now than before it was published; subsequently, many works of popular culture (the films "Platoon" and "Casualties of War" as well as the television series "China Beach") have carried similar messages. But few have done so as elegantly and compellingly as this book.