About Book Marks


Lila

Buy Now

Publisher
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Date
Award Winners
Fiction
Literary
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction

The third of the Gilead novels, Lila is the story of a girlhood lived on the fringes of society in fear, awe, and wonder.

Embed our reviews widget for this book

What is this?
Positive
Based on 15 reviews

Rave

Flag 0Flag 1Flag 2Flag 3Flag 4Flag 5Flag 6Flag 7Flag 8Flag 9

Positive

Flag 0Flag 1Flag 2Flag 3Empty FlagEmpty FlagEmpty FlagEmpty FlagEmpty FlagEmpty Flag

Mixed

Empty FlagEmpty FlagEmpty FlagEmpty FlagEmpty FlagEmpty FlagEmpty FlagEmpty FlagEmpty FlagEmpty Flag

Pan

Flag 0Empty FlagEmpty FlagEmpty FlagEmpty FlagEmpty FlagEmpty FlagEmpty FlagEmpty FlagEmpty Flag
What The Reviewers Say
Rave
The New York Times Sunday Book Review
With Lila, the third novel about these families and this town, we understand more clearly the metaphorical nature of the landscape, the era and the history … Told with measured and absorbing elegance, this account of the growing love and trust between Lila and Reverend Ames is touching and convincing. The stages of Lila’s strengthening sense of security are carefully delineated, physical relations and her pregnancy handled with careful tact … Lila is not so much a novel as a meditation on morality and psychology, compelling in its frankness about its truly shocking subject: the damage to the human personality done by poverty, neglect and abandonment.
Read Full Review >>
Positive
The New Yorker
Few people who have read Gilead will forget Ames’s description of his and Lila’s decision, among the roses, to get married—the speed, the wildness of it—but I hope nobody ever asks me to choose between that and the version that Lila, in Lila, gives of the same event. In her version, she is not in a nice, symbolic garden … Lila is less concerned with race than just with poverty—indeed, starvation—among the migrant workers of the Midwest … Most of the time Robinson’s people aren’t actually starving; they’re just alone. That is the final meaning of her insistence on her characters’ own point of view: because they don’t see the same reality, they are consigned to solitude.
Read Full Review >>
Rave
The Washington Post
These three exquisite books constitute a trilogy on spiritual redemption unlike anything else in American literature … Lila crawls into Gilead from another world altogether, a realm of subsistence living where the speculations of theologians are as far away — and useless — as the stars … Robinson has constructed this novel in a graceful swirl of time, constantly moving back to Lila and Doll’s struggles with starvation, desperate thieves and vengeful relatives. We see that dark past only intermittently, as a child’s clear but fragmentary memories or a trauma victim’s flashbacks.
Read Full Review >>
See All Reviews >>

What did you think of Lila?

If you buy books linked on our site, Lit Hub may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.