Simple Gifts

Although billed as a comedy, Simple Gifts, despite its comedic elements, is really quite serious. It's about a family who lives on a "backward" ranch in the rural mountains of Colorado, and are struggling to make it financially in the modern and fast-paced world (of the 1980s). They still do many things the old-fashioned way, and haven't gotten with the technical times - and are socially ostracized for it. Their backwardness proves to be their "luck," however, because they are discovered by a goverment agency that wants to send rich and fancy city visitors to live in a true-to-life ranch setting that replicates life of 100 years earlier. The family agrees to go for it, and their ranch is converted to all things 1880s - they rid themselves of all modern appliances, and truly approximate living as people did back then. That's the set-up for the book. It might seem a little hokey or uninteresting at face value, but in Joanne Greenberg's hands anything can be become gold. And this book does. Her main gift is for creating beautiful, detailed, flesh-and-blood characters that have real, human, living interactions that pull you right in. You empathize with them, with their struggles and dilemmas and pain - and their successes. She is a writer of great dimension, and her characters reflect that. I learn from them, and I love that. Greenberg writes each chapter from a different person's perspective, mostly from the persective of the two parents and four kids, but also from the perspective of various secondary characters in the story. And man, it works! My disbelief was suspended, and I couldn't put the book down. Overall, Greenberg comments on the value of being true to ourselves in this life, on growing and finding our path in an unsupportive world, and on deciding what we value most - and what is worth sacrificing. And she sets all these lessons-to-be in what proves to be a very worthhwhile tale. I expected to laugh while reading this book, but instead I was drawn more to the shadow side of the comedy. I cried several times in the book, and any author who can do that to me is my hero! Enjoy!