Grace B’s Reviews > Crossing to Safety > Status Update

So many ways I see myself in these characters (and so many ways I do not as well).

SMALL complaint: I feel he had the kids’ ages wrong in the timeline for when they were in Florence. How could Hallie have been 14 but Lang was in college? And if Hallie was 14, how could Barney have been in grad school? And how could this have been 20 years before 1972? Lang and David were born in March 1938…

Just beautifully written

Charity is like a real-life friend. At times impossible to love, at times impossible not to love.

Stegner’s prose remains pitch perfect.

The serpent in Eden metaphor…striking.

I’m more than a little uneasy about how parenting/children are depicted. Is it because Stegner is a man? Is it because of the era? Is it because of Charity’s very rigid, stereotypically New Englander attitudes about intellectualism? Even GREAT men were once children, and children ARE people. This is the one real complaint I have about this book.

Being able to shrug off the difference between $3 million and $4 million in 1933 is pretty wild.

Also childbirth from a father’s perspective is pretty harrowing.

Every time it mentions Aunt Emily’s knitting, I’m struck with the urge to take up knitting again.

This is a marvel of a book—really loving it.