Love and duty are the animating agents of Mr. Berry’s tremendous body of writing ... [Berry's] writing conjures the connectedness and simple moral clarity that the people of Port William imperfectly aspire to ... Gratitude seems like an appropriate response to this short and heartfelt work, which further develops a vision of Americanness that eschews the familiar values of progress, mobility and power ... Mr. Berry’s fictional world is flawed, hard and deeply cherishable.
Proves that [Berry] is still penning stories worth telling ... By highlighting the culture in agriculture and the beauty in knowing how to do a particular kind of work, Berry directs our attention to what we have lost ... Poetic invocations of another time and pass on of a way of life Berry doesn’t want us to forget.
Every detail is captured, the story's pace as deliberate as the steps of Marce's horse in the dark and as quiet as Marce's neighbor and companion ... Tender ... Wendell Berry returns to his beloved Port William, offering a kind of benediction full of longing for a former life threaded with wonder at its beauty and its humble persistence.
Wistful ... In granular, Melville-esque depictions of the process by which tobacco was once cultivated, Berry crafts a paean to a distant way of life. The author’s fans will love this.
Vintage Berry, elegiac and elegant, with a profound sense of all that has been lost ... Berry’s novel is very much of a piece with his celebrated essays on culture and agriculture, almost to the point of didacticism; what saves the book from becoming an extended sermon...is Berry’s ability to construct a good story that circles through time.
