Ce site utilise des cookies pour fournir nos services, optimiser les performances, pour les analyses, et (si vous n'êtes pas connecté) pour les publicités. En utilisant Librarything, vous reconnaissez avoir lu et compris nos conditions générales d'utilisation et de services. Votre utilisation du site et de ses services vaut acceptation de ces conditions et termes.
Résultats trouvés sur Google Books
Cliquer sur une vignette pour aller sur Google Books.
Histoire d'amour, drames, secrets inavouables : à travers le destin d'une famille de Pennsylvanie, Anna Quindlen donne à lire tout un pan de l'histoire américaine de la seconde moitié du XXe siècle. 1966. À onze ans, Margaret Ann Miller, dite Mimi, coule des jours heureux dans son petit village de Miller's Valley. La journée, Mimi étudie dans l'espoir de devenir infirmière, comme sa mère. En rentrant de l'école, l'adolescente vend des épis de maïs avec ses amis Donald et LaRhonda, pour se faire de l'argent de poche. Mais c'est le soir que Mimi attend avec impatience. Là, l'oreille collée au tuyau de chauffage, elle peut écouter les conversations de ses parents. Les ragots du village, les esclandres de son indomptable frère Tommy, les tensions avec Ruth, sa tante qui vit en face et ne quitte jamais sa maison : Mimi sait tout. C'est ainsi qu'elle découvre l'étonnant projet du gouvernement de submerger la vallée pour en faire un barrage. Doucement les années passent, et peu à peu tout change : Ruth devient de plus en plus folle, Tommy sombre dans la délinquance au retour du Vietnam, leur père tombe gravement malade, les amis s'éloignent. Et l'impensable se produit : les maisons de la vallée se vident peu à peu. Et bientôt, ne restent plus que Mimi et sa mère pour s'accrocher à leur ferme, à leurs terres. Mais pour combien de temps encore ? Car Mimi rêve de partir elle aussi, de devenir médecin ; de retrouver Donald, son amour d'enfance, parti en Californie. Qui pour défendre la vallée, alors ? Qui pour veiller sur les secrets qu'elle abrite ?… (plus d'informations)
Sad tone to this story of a smart girl in a small town in PA that's heading towards its end because the government plans to flood it to create a recreation area.
It was a slow start but by the end I was very sad to see it come to an end. ( )
Protagonist Mimi Miller reflects on her life growing up on a farm in Pennsylvania in the 1960’s. Miller’s Valley is a rural community targeted by the government to be flooded and turned into a reservoir, which involves invoking eminent domain and removing people from homes their families have lived in for generations. Mimi relates her life as she matures, makes mistakes, and takes charge at home when needed at a great personal cost.
It is a contemplative, slow-paced story where the characters take center stage, particularly Mimi and her family members. This novel explores what makes a place feel like home, mother-daughter relationships, and how external factors can significantly change lives. Mimi is a likeable character and it is easy to root for her. She is trying to find her place in the world, even as she loses her childhood home. I enjoyed it, but the flow was choppy, almost as if it were too heavily edited, and one of her significant relationships is given only cursory coverage.
If you appreciate quiet novels about people, family, community, or life in a small town, you may enjoy this one. ( )
I’m a fan of Anna Quindlen. She writes books that move fluidly through the story, with realism, a bit of suspense, and deft character development. I never think of deserting her work or close the book thinking I have wasted my time by reading her.
Miller’s Valley is about the displacement of a community in the interest of flooding the valley to extend the dam reservoir of the Roosevelt Dam. The story centers on the Miller family who have occupied the farm at the heart of the valley for hundreds of years. The youngest Miller is Mimi, and it is through her eyes that we see this complicated family and unravel their quirks and personalities.
Perhaps this novel is mostly about home. What makes a place a home? In what ways are you shaped by the place you are from? Is it something physical or something emotional? And, how much of home is about the people who share your life? Your family, friends, neighbors? Can you carry that with you, even if the place and the people exist no more?
If you are familiar with Quindlen, you will understand when I say she builds this novel around living--the stuff of ordinary days, people who could be your neighbors or your own family members--but she makes you feel how tenuous and fragile life can be and how easily success or failure can turn on a dime. I truly love that she doesn’t do any Perry Mason revelations at the end. Some questions in life are not answered, some mysteries are left unsolved, some people do not reveal all their secrets, but at the same time she never makes you feel there are loose ends that need tying. This is life, it can be marvelous, but it is always messy.
I thought this was Quindlen at her best, and her best is worth reading. ( )
I liked the characters, the stage, the atmosphere. But nothing really happens. And speaking about family secrets in the summary is pretty misleading, I think. In the end it's a book about a family. ( )
I've lost track of how many Anna Quindlen novels I've read (Her NY Times columns were what first hooked me way back when.), but this is definitely my favorite since Blessings. Nice pace, good story, interesting characters, lovely writing. She works a few hot-button topics into the story but handles them with unflinching grace, and somehow avoids being preachy or making them the sole focus. She creates such a strong sense of place too. Good stuff. ( )
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition. ---James Baldwin
Dédicace
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
For my mother and father Blessed forever in both
Premiers mots
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
It was a put-up job, and we all knew it by then.
Citations
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
They decide what they want and then they try to make you believe you want it, too.
I always wondered if they wrote him off because his name was Elmer. The government people talked a lot about the future. Elmer was such an old guy's name, a piece of the past.
My mother was a person of stature in Miller's Valley. She'd lived there all her life. Her mother had raised her and her younger sister, Ruth, in a one-story three-room house at the edge of the valley with a pitted asphalt roof and a falling-down porch, and when she'd married my father and become a Miller she'd moved to his family's farm, right at the center of the valley, in its lowest place, where the fog lay thick as cotton candy on damp mornings.
The night was so quiet you could hear the wood doves comforting themselves with their own soft voices in the fields.
A deer ran through my headlights like a ghost, and I slowed down because, like my father always said, there's almost never just one.
I would have felt sorry for him except that he was so good-natured that lots of times he didn't even recognize meanness when it was coming right at him.
I was the closest thing my aunt Ruth had to the outside world.
When I was a kid it seemed like God's will was always that bad things happened, mostly to nice people.
I figured that most of being a kid consisted of eavesdropping, trying to figure older people out and understand what they were going to do next, because whatever they were going to do next was surely going to have some effect on you.
My mother had never bought me a dress that didn't have a hem three inches deep so it could be let down, with a tidewater mark that showed where the old hem used to be.
I didn't need to see my father's face to know he was smiling.
I remember I leaned so hard against the refrigerator that I could feel it humming through the backs of my legs.
Since he'd left, the house seemed like a baby's rattle with all the jingly things inside gone.
And then it was all over, or just beginning.
When it was time for him leave again my mother hugged him hard in the kitchen while Tommy sobbed on her shoulder like some tormented version of his old self.
He pulled himself together and tried to pretend like nothing had happened, but it was one of those moments you can't ever take back, that you remember forever.
I believe in love at first sight.
The funny thing was, a lot of people had come to believe it was a war wound. I guess it was. I guess Tommy's whole life now was a war wound.
He made it feel like life was a party, and he was hosting it.
The good thing about a small town is the same thing that's a bad thing about a small town, and that's that everybody knows your business.
I don't even think she cried in my father's hospital room, or maybe she did when she was alone, when there was no one to see, like that thing about a tree falling in the forest.
I'll remember the quiet in that kitchen for the rest of my life. It felt like it went on and on, filling the room from floor to ceiling, almost like it was a gas or a fog or something. It had weight and mass.
But Tommy had been that way even before, a guy who showed up, drunk or sober, with the whites of his eyes hatched in red and fading marks on his hands and arms, a guy who was living in ways you could only imagine and then didn't want to.
Sometimes there are things that you've rehearsed so many times, thought about so often, that when they happen it's like they already happened a long long time ago.
"You don't have to like somebody to look after them. If you're going to be a nurse you better learn that fast."
and I just sat there, amazed at the way the whole world had just tilted while we were sitting at that table.
He looked like Jesus if Jesus were hungover.
The whole crowd of guys around Tommy had disappeared, as though I'd made some sort of force field that drove them away.
Derniers mots
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
Références à cette œuvre sur des ressources externes.
Wikipédia en anglais
Aucun
▾Descriptions de livres
Histoire d'amour, drames, secrets inavouables : à travers le destin d'une famille de Pennsylvanie, Anna Quindlen donne à lire tout un pan de l'histoire américaine de la seconde moitié du XXe siècle. 1966. À onze ans, Margaret Ann Miller, dite Mimi, coule des jours heureux dans son petit village de Miller's Valley. La journée, Mimi étudie dans l'espoir de devenir infirmière, comme sa mère. En rentrant de l'école, l'adolescente vend des épis de maïs avec ses amis Donald et LaRhonda, pour se faire de l'argent de poche. Mais c'est le soir que Mimi attend avec impatience. Là, l'oreille collée au tuyau de chauffage, elle peut écouter les conversations de ses parents. Les ragots du village, les esclandres de son indomptable frère Tommy, les tensions avec Ruth, sa tante qui vit en face et ne quitte jamais sa maison : Mimi sait tout. C'est ainsi qu'elle découvre l'étonnant projet du gouvernement de submerger la vallée pour en faire un barrage. Doucement les années passent, et peu à peu tout change : Ruth devient de plus en plus folle, Tommy sombre dans la délinquance au retour du Vietnam, leur père tombe gravement malade, les amis s'éloignent. Et l'impensable se produit : les maisons de la vallée se vident peu à peu. Et bientôt, ne restent plus que Mimi et sa mère pour s'accrocher à leur ferme, à leurs terres. Mais pour combien de temps encore ? Car Mimi rêve de partir elle aussi, de devenir médecin ; de retrouver Donald, son amour d'enfance, parti en Californie. Qui pour défendre la vallée, alors ? Qui pour veiller sur les secrets qu'elle abrite ?
▾Descriptions provenant de bibliothèques
Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque
▾Description selon les utilisateurs de LibraryThing
)
)
Google Books — Chargement...
2
It was a slow start but by the end I was very sad to see it come to an end.
(