Helpful Score: 5
The story of a friendship between two couples. Joys, sorrows and adventures experty described.
Helpful Score: 4
An elegant, beautifully written novel about a long friendship between two couples. I finished the book in awe of the author's wisdom on a diverse number of subjects, his rendering of unforgettable characters, and his masterly achievement of his craft.
This is the only book I've given five stars this year.
This is the only book I've given five stars this year.
Helpful Score: 4
As with much of Stegner's work this is a magnificently told story of relationships and characters relationship with place.
Helpful Score: 3
This a wonderful deep book about love and relationships written in a past time of positive outlooks and good people
Helpful Score: 2
I had never heard of this author and felt that I had discovered gold reading this very real and moving story of two couples and their friendship over many years. The writing is beautiful and strong and I found the story moving and deeply thought provoking.
I'm looking forward to reading more of Stegner's works.
I'm looking forward to reading more of Stegner's works.
Helpful Score: 2
This is lovely book about a young couple beginning in the Depression. He is an academic, and gets a job teaching in a small college in WI. There they meet a couple and become friends for life. The story concerns the friendship between the two couples, and how this friendship affects their lives.
Stegner is a wonderful writer, and you are really in the story with these characters. It really is about LIFE...all the ups and downs included.
I recommend this book for lovers of good literature, and a good story.
Stegner is a wonderful writer, and you are really in the story with these characters. It really is about LIFE...all the ups and downs included.
I recommend this book for lovers of good literature, and a good story.
Helpful Score: 2
"A grand, rich, beautifully written novel about a long, not always easy friendship between two couples.
Helpful Score: 1
One of the best novels I have ever read. Poetical language, in-depth analysis of relationships.
Helpful Score: 1
I could not stand being away from this book even for a few hours. I had read an excerpt from this book years ago, loved the author and put this book on my wishlist. Now that I have read the whole book, I am so glad I did. This author shares every gesture, facial expression, spoken word and behavior in the most actual and genuine way I have ever experienced while reading any book, past or present. I can't wait to "wishlist" more of his novels. I highly recommend you read this!
This book is a gift to everyone who is a friend or has a friend - basically everyone. It is the beautifully-written story of two couples who remain close despite changes in physical location and life-altering situations. Wallace Stegner writes of each couple's unfailing courtesy toward and compassion for the other in truly memorabe prose. The reader is able clearly to see each person individually, as part of a couple and as a member of their quartet. I truly hated to see this book end and I already look forward to reading it again and again.
A friend recommended this as a fave book and I hadn't ready any Wallace Stegner. He does an amazing job narrating life in its different circumstances, about those who are born to have life be easy for them and those who struggle with each day. It is an extended story about families, traditions and long-enduring friendship. I'll have to try another Stegner book.
Wallace Stegner was a fantastic writer.
Stegner's "Crossing to Safety" is a quiet, mostly internalized book about friendship and self-discovery, and dealing with what life throws at us. It centers on two couples whom we meet at the beginnings of their careers â the men both instructors in a small Wisconsin college, the wives both beginning pregnancies â Sally's first and Charity's third. That coincidence of meeting at that time in their lives, under those circumstances, sets in motion a deep and abiding friendship that spans decades and brings them, at last, to an inevitable parting as one of the four faces life's end, each in their own characteristic and unique way.
To me, Charity Lang was the most interesting character. It is certainly she who drives most of the action â rushing into what seems an impetuous marriage and then taking her husband's career in hand, driving the friendship between the Langs and the Morgans through actions large and small, ranging from incredibly generous to utterly self-serving. Charity wants to run things. She is intelligent and organized, irresistable on a force-of-nature scale, and driven to have events and individuals line up just so. And perhaps the most infuriating thing about her is that she is so often right, even when the targets of her indomitable will think they want something entirely different than she has in mind for them. Is she a monster? Is she a mother-hen? Utterly selfish, or ultimately selfless?
That's part of the fascination, and it all unfolds in Stegner's impeccable prose. This is writing that does not knock your socks off. Rather it knits itself around your soul, cocooning and protecting and warming and sometimes threatening to smother. And then Stegner will step back and put to paper the very questions the reader may have been asking â âHow do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the suburban infidelities, the promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends? Where are the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power? Where are speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are and makes us recognize ourselves in fiction?â
Because none of these things are present in âCrossing to Safetyâ. And yet one does want to read it. Wants to know how these very approachable characters will organically grow into each others' lives and make them fuller and richer and more satisfying. Wants to get through the heartbreak of loss and resolve the anger one feels toward the ways in which we try, each in our own way, to manage the end of our lives.
But this is not a book about death. It's a book about life, with its pleasures and pains and the way it can intertwine with other lives in enriching and unexpected ways. About the difference between burden and blessing, and about those essential, unchanging memories, qualities, beliefs that we carry with us all our lives, through whatever crossings fortune throws at us as we seek shelter and safety and completion.
To me, Charity Lang was the most interesting character. It is certainly she who drives most of the action â rushing into what seems an impetuous marriage and then taking her husband's career in hand, driving the friendship between the Langs and the Morgans through actions large and small, ranging from incredibly generous to utterly self-serving. Charity wants to run things. She is intelligent and organized, irresistable on a force-of-nature scale, and driven to have events and individuals line up just so. And perhaps the most infuriating thing about her is that she is so often right, even when the targets of her indomitable will think they want something entirely different than she has in mind for them. Is she a monster? Is she a mother-hen? Utterly selfish, or ultimately selfless?
That's part of the fascination, and it all unfolds in Stegner's impeccable prose. This is writing that does not knock your socks off. Rather it knits itself around your soul, cocooning and protecting and warming and sometimes threatening to smother. And then Stegner will step back and put to paper the very questions the reader may have been asking â âHow do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the suburban infidelities, the promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends? Where are the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power? Where are speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are and makes us recognize ourselves in fiction?â
Because none of these things are present in âCrossing to Safetyâ. And yet one does want to read it. Wants to know how these very approachable characters will organically grow into each others' lives and make them fuller and richer and more satisfying. Wants to get through the heartbreak of loss and resolve the anger one feels toward the ways in which we try, each in our own way, to manage the end of our lives.
But this is not a book about death. It's a book about life, with its pleasures and pains and the way it can intertwine with other lives in enriching and unexpected ways. About the difference between burden and blessing, and about those essential, unchanging memories, qualities, beliefs that we carry with us all our lives, through whatever crossings fortune throws at us as we seek shelter and safety and completion.
My second Stegner novel (read Angle of Repose first) and can't wait to read my next one. He's such a good writer! His descriptions of people and places are so clear and perfect. He keeps my attention from beginning to end, and then I want more.
Fabulous story of the decades-long friendship between two couples. Wonderful writing.
an intense character analysis and story of how complicated relationships can be.
Too kooky to suit my taste.
I hadn't read anything beyond Stegner's short stories and was pleasantly surprised that this novel holds up every bit as well as those. At first, I thought that part of his writing was a bit stilted or reserved, perhaps maybe even a little "beyond the grasp of the unacademic," but once I got into the flow, I revised this opinion. He did handle his women subjects well, something that I think a lot of male authors either over-do or under-do. The telling of the tale in remembrance form (flashback) was the only way to handle the story, in my opinion. All in all, I very much enjoyed the book and will look for another of his novels.
Another Wallace Stegner classic. A wonderful family saga.
A brilliant book on the friendships we wish for and the extent of the impact on our lives.
Simply brilliant.
Simply brilliant.
Interesting story about 2 couples and their devotion to their spouses and each other. The writer gives good destriptions of the areas where the scenes take place. This book is slow going at times. The ladies in my book club really enjoyed it.
Two couples demonstrate what real friendship is about: loving and helping each other no matter what as they face career, economic, relational and health issues. Written in the spare style similar to Ivan Doig's with flights of brilliance.
Excellent writing, about a love story between two couples, and their friendship. Academicians, two rich, and two just starting their married lives. Really a wonderful read.
This is a quiet book about the long term friendship between two married couples. It is beautifully descriptively written with completely interesting characters. It's one you want to read in front of a warm fire where you can settle in and read for a long time.
A little sad, but well written
This book is why I love book club - I never would have picked this on my own, and I would have missed out on an absolute gem.
This is something of a "book about nothing." It is simply a love letter about friendship in all of its glory and its grief.
Stegner has a true gift for storytelling and character development. He can turn a phrase with the subtlety of a master and he is able to turn the mundane of life into something quietly profound.
This is a painfully beautiful story about a once-in-a-lifetime friendship between two couples that started during The Great Depression. It is both a book to treasure and a book to share. I'm so glad that I didn't miss out on this wonderful reading experience.
This is something of a "book about nothing." It is simply a love letter about friendship in all of its glory and its grief.
Stegner has a true gift for storytelling and character development. He can turn a phrase with the subtlety of a master and he is able to turn the mundane of life into something quietly profound.
This is a painfully beautiful story about a once-in-a-lifetime friendship between two couples that started during The Great Depression. It is both a book to treasure and a book to share. I'm so glad that I didn't miss out on this wonderful reading experience.
Story of the decades long friendship of two couples.
"Crossing to Safety" is a work of great distinction. It is the semi-autobiographical story of a lifelong friendship between two academic couples. When I sat down to read this Wallace Stegner masterpiece, I would not have thought that the the unadorned lives of two couples who were young during the Depression years would hold my interest as to dod. However, I began to feel that I knew these individuals as if they were a members of my own family. I understood why they held to each other and what drew them apart. I understood all these things while having the privilege of reading glorious literature. My only wish is that I had a stronger classical education so that I could grasp the full intellectual depth of everything Stegner had to write.
I loved this book and so did my book club.
Tracing the lives, loves, and aspirations of two couples who move between Vermont and Wisconsin, this book is a work of quiet majesty, deep compassion, and powerful insight into the alchemy of friendship and marriage.
