There are no guns or murders, no wars or mysteries - instead Plainsong is, as the title suggests, a 'plain song' - where every word is painstakingly chosen yet sounds absolutely real and right, a hymn to what makes us human. Plainsong tells of six months in the lives of two sets of brothers - one old, one young - a father, an expectant mother and a teacher looking after her elderly dad, in Holt, Colorado. Utterly true to the rhythms and patterns of life, Plainsong is a novel to care about, believe in, and learn from. As the milieu widens to embrace fully four generations, Kent Haruf displays an emotional and aesthetic authority to rival the past masters of a classic American tradition. From these unsettled lives emerges a vision of life, and of the town and landscape that bind them together - their fates somehow overcoming the powerful circumstances of place and station, their confusion, curiosity, dignity and humor intact and resonant. And out in the country, two brothers, elderly bachelors, work the family homestead, the only world they've ever known. A teenage girl - her father long since disappeared, her mother unwilling to have her in the house - is pregnant, alone herself, with nowhere to go. In the small town of Holt, Colorado, a high school teacher is confronted with raising his two boys alone after their mother retreats first to the bedroom, then altogether. A heartstrong story of family and romance, tribulation and tenacity, set on the High Plains east of Denver.

Plainsong by kent haruf review