The Fields of Home | Ralph Moody | Wonderfully evocative

The Fields of Home | Ralph Moody | Great Book Great Author

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The Fields of Home

	The Fields of Home Ralph Moody Bison Books, 1993 - 335 pages average customer review:based on 9 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The fatherless Moody family moves from Colorado to Massachusetts in 1912, when Ralph enters his teens. There, he discovers that "just little things that would have been all right in Colorado" now get him into trouble. He is sent to his grandfather's farm in Maine, where he finds adventures every bit as colorful as those described in Little Britches and Man of the Family. Illustrated.

Wonderfully evocative

I cannot praise Ralph Moody enough. This book is so well structured and well written that it is obviously a "made" work, but that certainly doesn't make it false. It is a truthful story inasmuch as the characters speak as they should, and the times are brought alive as good writing should do.
An emotion-packed experience perfect for taking us back one hundred years. Highly recommended!

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Great Book Great Author

I recommend this series as a great alternative for boys who just don't like the idea of the Little House series. It is a well written series that really keeps the young and old alike interested in the way life was 100yrs ago.

Best of the Set (so far)

Having read the first several volumes of Ralph Moody's works, I didn't think they could get any "better" than they already were. "Fields of Home" is better though, although perhaps I feel that way because it struck a chord with me in where I live, in the cold northernmost part of New York State. The descriptions of the farming and other activities resonated with stories of my grandparents, my parents and my childhood experiences. The characters seem to be people I know. Awesome book in a great series of books that are appropriate for all ages (my parents love them too).

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Learning to love the land

This is the chronological fifth in Ralph Moody's series of memoirs, and while I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as I have the previous titles, it definitely chronicles a major phase in his life. In 1912, at age fourteen and a half, he has repeatedly run afoul of the police chief in Medford, who seems to think he's bound for reform school, so his mother sends him to Maine to stay on her father's farm. Unfortunately she neglects to explain to her father exactly why she's doing it, and Grandfather labors under the delusion that she wants him to "make a man of him." And there Ralph's troubles begin.

Grandfather Gould is perhaps the most vivid character I've found yet in Moody's books. Past 70, he is (as his younger brother, Uncle Levi, explains to Ralph) bound by his position as a son born when his father was even older than himself (and already had a grown-up "first family") and "spoiled rotten" in consequence. "Father and the Almighty stand about shoulder to shoulder in Thomas's eyes," says Levi, "and the land they left him is holy ground." He can't see any way of doing things except the way his father taught him--the old, pre-industrial, farm-by-hand way--and as age closes in on him he has let the place go back mostly to pasture. Ralph sometimes comes close to tears at being called useless and worthless and a "tarnal fool boy," getting senseless jobs to do and being rebuked for "wastin'" or wanting to use "work-saving contraptions." Cranky, erratic, often laid low by the chronic malaria that is his legacy from a term in a Confederate prison camp, Grandfather succeeds in driving away just about everyone who cares about him, including his brother and his long-suffering housekeeper Millie. Another splendid character, as well drawn as any human in the book, is "the yella colt," an irascible buckskin work horse who's far from being a colt but apparently was never told so; to save his own hide Ralph is forced to improvise a way of teaching him who's boss, though Grandfather keeps undoing his efforts.

In this book, Moody admits for the first time how difficult it was for him to adjust to life in the East after his years in Colorado and how much he missed both the "wide open spaces" and his work with his understanding father. More than once his grandfather's ways rub him so raw that he makes plans to run away and go back to the West he loves. Yet he also experiences the innocent joys of first love, and in the end he realizes how truly alike he and Grandfather are and how Maine has a beauty of its own, and the book ends on a positive note as the two seem to reconcile, having finally agreed to try some of the boy's ideas.

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reviews: page 1, 2

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