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    Lila (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel
    Lila (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel
    Lila (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel
    Audiobook8 hours

    Lila (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel

    Written by Marilynne Robinson

    Narrated by Maggie Hoffman

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    A new American classic from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gilead and Housekeeping

    Marilynne Robinson, one of the greatest novelists of our time, returns to the town of Gilead in an unforgettable story of a girlhood lived on the fringes of society in fear, awe, and wonder.
    Lila, homeless and alone after years of roaming the countryside, steps inside a small-town Iowa church—the only available shelter from the rain—and ignites a romance and a debate that will reshape her life. She becomes the wife of a minister, John Ames, and begins a new existence while trying to make sense of the life that preceded her newfound security.
    Neglected as a toddler, Lila was rescued by Doll, a canny young drifter, and brought up by her in a hardscrabble childhood. Together they crafted a life on the run, living hand to mouth with nothing but their sisterly bond and a ragged blade to protect them. Despite bouts of petty violence and moments of desperation, their shared life was laced with moments of joy and love. When Lila arrives in Gilead, she struggles to reconcile the life of her makeshift family and their days of hardship with the gentle Christian worldview of her husband which paradoxically judges those she loves.
    Revisiting the beloved characters and setting of Robinson's Pulitzer Prize–winning Gilead and Home, a National Book Award finalist, Lila is a moving expression of the mysteries of existence that is destined to become an American classic.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Audio
    Release dateOct 7, 2014
    ISBN9781427251725
    Lila (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel
    Author

    Marilynne Robinson

    Marilynne Robinson is the author of Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Home (2008), winner of the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Lila (2014), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Jack (2020), a New York Times bestseller. Her first novel, Housekeeping (1980), won the PEN/Hemingway Award. Robinson’s nonfiction books include The Givenness of Things (2015), When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012), Absence of Mind (2010), The Death of Adam (1998), and Mother Country (1989). She is the recipient of a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama, for “her grace and intelligence in writing.” Robinson lives in California

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    Reviews for Lila (Oprah's Book Club)

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    599 ratings77 reviews

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    • 2/5
      I finished the book by skimming through much of the last 40% or so, just to see how it ended.The story had a lot of promise but I was distracted by the jumpy, fidgety, disjointed way in which it was told. Not a book I can put on my "recommend to friends" shelf.
    • 2/5
      Evokes compassion and empathy for the homeless and down and out. I almost need to reread Gilead again after reading Lila. Some violence and much use of "damn" and not a clear, spiritually sound ending were reasons I don't promote this book.
    • 5/5
      Lila by Marilynne Robinson; (5+*)Marilynne Robinson, I consider to be in a class all her own. There is no one out there today who writes quite like her.My first Robinson was Gilead followed by Housekeeping and then Home. I have loved each of them. Gilead is a love-letter from an elderly preacher, John Ames, to his 7 year old son and there is much in the book about his preacher friend, Robert Boughton. When I moved along to the second of the Gilead Trilogy, Home, I was surprised to find that the Reverend Ames was not the main character but his dear friend, the Reverend Robert Boughton was. Boughton's 38 year old spinster daughter, Glory, has come home to take care of her aged and failing father. So I thought Boughton had gone 'to glory'. (pun intended)Now I have come to Lila and find that both the Reverends Ames and Boughton are still alive and kicking. But this book is focused on the Ames family though Boughton appears now and then and is lovely as a back burner character.Lila is the story of a child taken from her 'home', by a drifter named Doll. She was treated more poorly that a cur. One day Doll just picked Lila up, wrapped her in a shawl and they took to the road to meet others like themselves. Homeless and always looking for transient work and meals, Lila was very well cared for by Doll though they had nothing in the way of a roof over their heads nor any possessions.With Lila and Doll, Marilynne Robinson has come full circle back to Gilead, the fictional but memorable setting of her earlier books Gilead and Home. Lila continues the story of Reverend John Ames, his neighbors, and how Lila's story is interwoven with theirs.Now pushing well into his seventies, Ames finds himself in awe that love has come to him again. (His young wife and baby lay out in the family graveyard.) The heart of this story is how John's life is so totally changed when one Sunday morning Lila walks into his church. In the sunset years of his life Lila has changed everything.......for him much sooner than for herself.Lila keeps much to herself and to trust does not come easily to her. She was raised up thusly by Doll. Robinson shows us a life of deprivation and hardship as she narrates the story of Lila and Doll. Lila is a story of shame, denial and redemption. It is a story that explores important social mores and is a stunning and beautifully told story that will break your heart and at the same time give you a hope for mankind.I very highly recommend Lila for all readers. I am in love with this book and it's characters.
    • 4/5
      This is the third, and the saddest, in the series of interconnected books that started withGilead. The book is the story of Lila, a neglected child, growing up in poverty, who, by seeming chance, becomes the wife to Reverend John Ames. I really liked this book, but cried a lot reading it. It's a book about redemption, and so I think there are things I would understand better if I were more religious. Lila's life before John Ames was so hard and traumatic, but with elements of grace and love. Lila is trying to figure out if it's possible to make a new life without giving up the things she values from her old life. Robinson is showing us that the suffering and blessings are mixed-up in our lives, and sometimes it's hard to pull them apart.Again, I enjoyed reading the same story from a different perspective. Having Lila's perspective on her marriage deepens the account previously given by John Ames, and reminds us of how we each construct our own story and history. Gilead remains my favorite of the three books, although I am glad that I read all three. But how can you top a one-eyed abolitionist grandfather who is always stealing from people?
    • 3/5
      Robinson is a great interior writer, capturing the rhythms of the stories we tell ourselves, moving over time, circling important events, leaving us never quite "all here" but also living in our pasts. And she writes a much more lucid sentence than the previous. That said, I don't always completely believe in her characters as real people. The combination of the Iowa setting (where I grew up)and a minister as a main character (I am a minister) made me pick this up right away, not to mention that I've read all Robinson's other novels. Some beautiful passages (thoughts) and scenes...well worth the price of admission (e.g. time/attention).
    • 5/5
      Though a little repetitive in places, a beautiful dream of a narrative, beautiful writing about very real things. Why aren't there more books like this?
    • 4/5
      15. Lila by Marilynne Robinson (2014, 262 page hardcover, Read Feb 14-27)This novel focuses on the Lila, John Ames's much younger wife. It's not narrated by her, but her unschooled voice is prevalent. It's her story and memories and perspective. And her life is rough and really sad and Ames is really nice. And they do have something to offer each other. And it's interesting as she ponders over certain striking lines in Ezekiel and Genesis. It's a nice story and a tragic one. The effect for me was softer than that of her other two books in this trilogy. I love [Home] and I find [Gilead] fascinating in a couple different ways. All three books have the same soft subtle prose that quietly contains an interesting and colorful complexity. They can surprise on re-reading. But somehow [Lila] was less then those first two to me. I think the combination of Robinson's prose and the character Lila's very rough not-at-all subtle life felt a little artificial to me. “It felt very good to have him walking beside her. Good like rest and quiet, like something you could live without but you needed anyway. That you had to learn how to miss, and then you'd never stop missing it.”
    • 4/5
      Should be considered with appropriate guilt, that this is a story that frames with enjoyment, the terror of a boy, so abused by his own father, that after killing him, is curled up on the floor of a cold falling-in shed in a biting wind, with nothing at all except the coat of a passing merciful stranger to cover him, only to be frightened away back to his hanging by the comfortable who fear him. And that one soul who attempted to help him, losing the fight to her physical condition, left to wonder all the rest of her days, and in her helplessness to convert the truth into a religious fiction. An old man with a view to giving up to fate, a life he is responsible for, even after rescuing just one whom that he could. He only, after all, has the power to leave them his friends. This book can only be seen as a prequel as far as I could tell, because that’s my experience of it, but it does, overall, stand by itself as an elegy to guilt... that we all have it, and that we are powerless to do anything about it at all, besides let it go. It is a terrible fact of life. That’s what this book is about, that the only alternatives, all just lead us, regardless and inexorably, to our own various deaths. I wasn’t depressed by it though. I came out of the door at the end without any emotion whatsoever. That’s why I liked it.
    • 5/5
      Without a doubt, this was a 5-star read for me. My first one of the year that is given without reservations. Oh my, how that Marilynne Robinson can write and touch my heart. She did it with her previous fiction books as well. I think the thing I liked best about the character of Lila was her way of trying to figure out life and her part in it. She would spend hours at a time pondering deep subjects such as existence, forgiveness, and the nature of God. For a young girl who had barely survived her first four years and then was raised by living off the land, she turned into a wise woman. She learned that "there was no way to abandon guilt, no decent way to disown it. All the tangles and knots of bitterness and desperation and fear had to be pitied. No, better, grace had to fall over them."For Lila, grace came in the form of Reverend John Ames, the beloved pastor from Gilead and Home. He was an old man when they married to try and keep the loneliness at bay. He loved her wholeheartedly, though it was a gradual process for Lila to learn to trust him. I just can't say enough good words about this book. I read a library edition, but I will soon own my own copy to go with the two companion books and Housekeeping which had a similar story about growing up without roots.I am so grateful to Ms. Robinson for her gift of writing stories about grace and redemption.
    • 4/5
      In the 1920s, a sickly young girl, about four years old or so, is abandoned by her family at a house for migrant workers in the rural Midwest. She surely would have died until she is taken away one night by Doll, an itinerant woman with a shady past of her own. Doll becomes a surrogate mother to the girl—who, lacking another name, is called Lila Dahl—and the two spend the next several years wandering the countryside, working when they can and living off the land otherwise. Three decades later, after Doll is no longer around, Lila finds herself in the small Iowa town of Gilead. There, she meets and marries (and eventually falls in love with) John Ames, an elderly preacher who has been a widower for many years. Lila and “the old man” share a touching, if brief, relationship, even having a baby boy along with countless theological discussions.In Lila, Marilynne Robinson concludes her sparkling Gilead Trilogy (which also includes the novels Gilead and Home) by focusing on the backstory of the minister’s young wife, who was often seen in the wings of those earlier dramas. At one level, reading this book was like visiting dear old friends you have not seen for a while and getting to know them all a little better. However, in this installment, Robinson also transports the reader well beyond the comfortable boundaries of Gilead into a wider, sadder, and more unseemly world that is crucial to understanding how Lila’s mindset develops and why she appears to be so resistant to trusting people or even wanting to be rescued from the hard and lonely life she has had to lead. Although not all of this part of the story was convincing (e.g., Lila’s time “in service” while living in St. Louis), it nevertheless contributes to the creation of a memorable character study.As always, the author’s prose borders on being brilliant: it is subtle, confident, insightful, and deeply moving. I have to confess to being a huge fan of Robinson’s work and I have always taken great pleasure in settling into the slower reading tempo that it takes to truly savor her fiction. That said, though, I enjoyed this last book in the series a bit less than I did the two that preceded it, perhaps because of the somewhat disjointed narrative structure that bounced between Lila’s past and her present. That is a very small quibble, however, as this is a novel that I can definitely recommend without hesitation.
    • 5/5
      Ah, it's so lovely and bittersweet to visit Iowa with Marilynne Robinson's characters again! I think of it, and I feel inspired to take a deep breath and let it out slowly, just being in Robinson's beautiful and painful world.

      Reading this book, I'm struck by the idea that "right" and "wrong" are relative to some degree, or at the very least difficult to classify, and the idea that redemption can be gained by choosing whether to continue or break the patterns of one's earlier life. There's also this element of how anticipating previous patterns can produce the very outcome that we're dreading, as with Lila and John's anticipation of her and the baby's leaving (by various routes). I also find it interesting that although Lila hears and follows the call towards love all along, she can't perceive it with any clarity until she moves to Gilead, away from all of the people and patterns and history that's been obscuring her vision.

      I love how Lila reflects so personally on the stories in the Bible. She's like a natural seminarian (at least in my limited experience of seminarians). Lila seems much rougher in this book than I thought of her in Gilead and Home, perhaps because in this one we see Lila more through her own eyes than through others', and she's much less forgiving of herself than those around her are. Now I need to go back and re-read Gilead and Home with this new perspective.

      This is a difficult book to quote, but I've picked out one that speaks to me that I think will hold up well even pulled out of the context of the whole story. It's from when Lila observes John Ames performing the baptism at the river. She sees him as: "A preacher doing what preachers do to give you what safety they can." (100) That one partial sentence describes for me both the powerlessness of the preacher and the profound hope that he has to keep people safe despite this powerlessness. It's not magic, but only words and ritual, and it's amazing not just that the preacher continues offering these things despite his awareness of their limited power but also that sometimes this offering seems to work.

    • 4/5
      Book Club February 2016. Strong sense of the scriptures and morality. A difficult yet compelling read. Sad and a bit frustrating at times. Skillful and careful writing.
    • 5/5
      Lila is for me the last book in the Gilead series which is certainly one of the canons of American literature. I tend to enjoy novelist who revisit their characters or settings. Some of my favorites include Harry Angstrom of the Rabbit novels, Elizabeth Strout's Olive and Lucy Barton, Sully from Russo's Bath novels and maybe include Jennifer Egan's revisit of the Good Squad. It's like returning home from a long trip. With Robinson even she doesn't worry about chronologically charting her characters so I don't think reading Lila after Jack is not a problem; each novel reveals little insights into the history of the Ames and Broughton families from Iowa. Perhaps there is still room for Broughton's son who is becoming a doctor. In this wonderful novel we learn about how Lila, neglected as a baby, is stolen by Doll who acts as her mother while they wander about looking for work and trying to survive. Doll teaches Lila the difference between them and the real poor: "the ones who never touched a comb to their hair and who always had shadows of grimne on their necks and wore unmended clothes till they were falling off them’. " They travel for a time with another family until the Crash of '29 when work ended. Robinson takes the entire narrative to gradually reveal some parts of Lila's history, especially an unhappy stay inn St. Louis, but her chance encounter of stopping in the Reverend Ames's church will change both their lives forever. "He looked as if he’d had his share of loneliness, and that was all right. It was one thing she understood about him.""It felt very good to have him walking beside her. Good like rest and quiet, like something you could live without but you needed anyway. That you had to learn how to miss, and then you'd never stop missing it.” The relationship between the two is immensely satisfying as it is revealed in snippets of conversations and gestures. The writing is thoughtful, forcing the reader to slow down and savor the use of language. Highly recommend all of her novels.Lines:I was working in a whorehouse because the woman who stole me when I was a child got blood all over my clothes when she came to my room after she killed my father in a knife fight. I've got her knife here in my garter. I was meaning to steal a child for myself, but I missed the chance and I couldn't stand the disappointment, so I got a job cleaning in a hotel.That sound of settling into the sheets and the covers has to be one of the best things in the world. Sleep is a mercy. You can feel it coming on, like being swept up in something.She knew better than to waste that time. There isn't always someone who wants you singing to him or nibbling his ear or brushing his cheek with a dandelion blossom. Somebody who knows when you're being silly, and laughs and laughs. So long as he was little enough to carry, she could hardly bring herself to put him down.She thought, If I’m crazy, I may as well do what I feel like doing. No point being crazy if you have to worry all the time about what people are thinking anyway.She thought, if we stay here, soon enough it will be you sitting at the table and me, I don't know, cooking something, and the snow flying, and the old man so glad we're here he'll be off in his study praying about it. And geraniums in the window. Red ones.
    • 4/5
      Incredible use of language. Each sentence, each paragraph a jewel. A story of great hardship, followed by some sense of peace.There's much discussion of existence, spiritual language framed in terms of the Christian bible and its traditions, which I did not always understand. I'm drawn to read more of Robinson, at least her novel Housekeeping, if not her other three stories about some of the people in Lila, and the town of Gilead.
    • 4/5
      As I usually find with Robinson's books, I had to slow down and read this at a much more leisurely pace than I normally would. The language and the story, I find, work best when savored. Another wonderful addition to this slowly unfolding family saga.
    • 4/5
      a little tedious to be honest but has moments of almost alarming gorgeousness
    • 5/5
      I am stingy with my stars, but this one deserves 5 more than any book I've read in a while. I also don't buy many books, but think I need to own this one.
    • 5/5
      Lila is stolen away from her extremely poor and abusive family by Doll. They survive as they can on the road. And then something happens to Doll, Lila's one real connection in the world. Eventually, Lila finds a place for herself in Gilead. An unlikely one. (Don't want to be a spoiler!). The writing is phenomenal. It is essentially Lila's stream of consciousness, constantly moving back and forth in time as she is haunted by the pain and fears of roaming and surviving during the depression. Her introduction to religion plunges into the comforts and questions of belief. Don't miss this one! Sure to read Gilead and other books by Robinson soon.
    • 4/5
      Lila is perhaps the most mysterious figure in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead world. How she found John Ames, married him, and bore his child with his impending death looming over him is one of the most touching untold stories of *Gilead.* So Robinson focuses on her, telling the story of a child plucked from abuse and neglect and into a hard life, but one filled with awe and wonder at the very nature of existence. 4.5 stars.
    • 3/5
      By this point, I'm mainly interested in what Robinson is doing with form. I know what I'll get intellectually (and I like it), I know what I'll get in terms of character. This is my least favorite of the Gilead novels, but, dear reader, it might well be your favorite for the very same reasons I'm unmoved.

      "Gilead" is a letter written by a well-read pastor; "Home" is a third person novel about more than usually intelligent people. "Lila" is a very close third person novel about a woman who, through no fault of her own, has not had the opportunities given to Ames and the Boughton family. This is a perfect third novel, then, since it gives us a slightly different form (Home is about Jack's return home, mainly from Glory's point of view; this is about Lila from Lila's point of view), and a very different kind of subject (not the well-read pastor, not the looks-bad-but-is-good-at-heart returning son). Lila--a vagrant raised by atheists--and Ames struggle, in a suitably low-key way, to make their relationship work. There are lots of striking, emotional moments.

      But heavens above did this novel induce my claustrophobia. Robinson does a great job telling this tale exclusively from the perspective of a person who lacks all the resources of her earlier characters; in terms of craft, it's a marvel. But do want to *read* so much wide-eyed wonder at big words, and distrust of everyone and everything, told in a determinedly circular way? Do I want to hear, over and over and over again, about the same events, gaining only a tiny morsel of understanding with each retelling? Not really.

      All of that said, if you really like Housekeeping, you should probably read this novel rather than the other two Gileads. It has the same feel, many of the same themes, and only a tiny bit of the later books' theological matter. There is, however, a lot of bible quoting, as Lila teaches herself to read (= teaches herself to love others = teaches herself to be a human subject). I kind of enjoyed that, but a lot of people might find it off-putting.
    • 5/5
      Lila by Marilynne Robinson is a continuation of the story of Gilead. She is a homeless migrant worker who finds herself in Gilead and married to Reverend John Ames, who was the main character in the first book. This is a character driven story and the language of the author is poetic.
    • 5/5
      It is a beautifully presented audiobook, the text flowing and the narrator Maggie Hoffman giving the characters individual voices.The story of Lila is heartbreaking. She was a neglected child stolen from her family by a woman who shows her the only love and care she experiences before meeting John Ames, the narrator of Robinson's novel Gilead. Lila grew up a migrant, outside of society and untutored in religion. But her native intelligence brings her to struggle with the Big Questions of life.Lila is a survivor who relies only on herself after losing her surrogate mother, Doll. On her own, she works in a St. Louis brothel, becoming the maid when the men don't want her.She goes on the road again, stopping in Gilead, a town she despises. She wanders into church one day to escape the rain. The minister notes her and pursues her, showing her consideration and Christian love, with patience and acceptance she has never experienced before.The 'beautiful old man,' the Rev. John Ames, want to help her. She asks Ames to marry her.Ames had lost his wife and child as a young man, and assumed his golden years would be as lonely and cold as they had been ever since. He loves Lila, but understands she may flit away back into her accustomed life on the road where she does not have to rely on anyone else. She struggles to trust even Ames.Lila's struggle to understand baptism, the Bible and the mystery of life, takes up a great deal of the book.Lila's life as a migrant worker, the utter poverty, was relieved by a spunky friend and Doll's love. Lila worries about what happened to them, and puzzles over the fate of their unbaptized souls.When Lila becomes pregnant, Ames feels blessed at this second chance. Even in the womb, Lila talks to her child, vowing to protect it and care for it. She thinks about stealing off with her baby, still uncertain about human love's immutability.This is a novel that offers a great deal to contemplate. I do not feel adequate to delve into its deeper meanings after only one reading.I prefer reading books to listening, but have found audiobooks useful for getting in more reading. I am a quick reader, so spending eight hours listening to a book I could read in four means the story felt dragged out, the introspection endless. Also, I can't note places I want to return to or quote!I was surprised to hear John Ames voice as quivering. It was not how I have heard it in my head over my three readings of Gilead.This may not have been the best book for me to listen to. But I am glad to have finally encountered Lila.
    • 4/5
      A very poetic, stream-of-consciousness novel, following Lila- a neglected child of unknown parentage, snatched away and brought up as an itinerant farm worker. A life of poverty and exclusion, loneliness and fragility finds her as a disturbed adult, living in a shack in the Idaho town of Gilead.Telling two stories simultaneously- Lila's past intercuts with her new experiences- as she is befriended by the elderly widowed local Reverend.This could have been such an implausible relationship, but the author makes Lila a very believable person, always thinking of escape and getting back on the road, while Rev Ames never comes across as sanctimonious or patronising.Religion cuts through the whole thing, but again in a delicate way, with Lila having little belief in anything, and many hard questions.Quite beautifully written.
    • 4/5
      I’m still not entirely convinced by Robinson’s books, but they’re so beautifully written I’m prepared to forgive them much. Lila is written from the point of view of the wife of John Ames, the protagonist of Gilead and the patriarch depicted in Home. She was stolen as child, a neglected child, by a woman who calls herself Doll (and who gave Lila her name), and subsequently dragged about the Midwest looking for work. This was during the Great Depression, and anyone who has read Steinbeck, or even seen the film of The Grapes of Wrath, will have some idea of the abject poverty these people experienced. Eventually, Lila fetches up in Gilead as a young woman, and slowly, in much the same way a wild animal would, begins to explore the small town and its inhabitants. She starts working in the pastor’s garden, in return for his unprovoked acts of kindness toward her, and the two sort of drift together until he asks her to marry him and she says yes. While both Lila and Ames are drawn with an impressive amount of sensitivity – and Ames is clearly a remarkably, perhaps a little too remarkably, sensitive man for his time – and the interactions between the two are beautifully-written… but there’s that leap from friends who know very little about each other to marriage that seems somewhat ungrounded. I really do like Robinson’s prose – it’s deceptively simple – and I also really like the gentle pace of her novels, and the depth to which she explores her cast and their various interactions. But… they do also feel like they’re missing an edge, a bit of bite to temper the smoothness. The depiction of Lila’s childhood during the Great Depression is too bland to do the job. It means Robinson’s novels can feel a bit too, well, too pleasant. But still worth reading.
    • 4/5
      2014, MacMillian Audio, Read by Maggie HoffmanSet in the small Iowa town, and revisiting the familiar characters of Gilead and Home before it, Lila is a moving conclusion to Robinson’s trilogy. Abandoned as a toddler, Lila is rescued by Doll, a wily drifter – and the two share a hardscrabble existence made bearable by mutual affection. Illiterate and on the run, they life hand-to-mouth, with nothing to their names but a rough blade for protection. When Lila arrives in Gilead, she steps into the town’s small church, seeking shelter from the weather. A romance is ignited between her and Reverend John Ames, which will completely reshape both of their lives. As the two begin a new existence, Lila struggles to reconcile the hardships of her past life with the gentle Christian life she now shares with her husband. I think both the strength, and perhaps the weakness, of Lila, is the absolute oddity of the marriage between Lila and Ames. Robinson manages the mystery of their existence expertly, but I found the pairing so odd that it almost defied believability. While I personally did not care for Gilead, certainly Jack Boughton and Lila Ames are characters I won’t soon forget. Both Lila and the Gilead trilogy is recommended.
    • 3/5
      I do not have the Marilynne Robinson gene, to the point that I'm not even sure it's fair for me to review this book. The writing seems just too precious to me; the world she describes too romanticized. It's possible that I'm too close to the subject matter in some ways, and too far away in others, to read the book objectively. At any rate, it did not work for me.
    • 3/5
      This just didn't work for me. Maybe I was expecting too much after having loved both Gilead and Home, but Lila really came off as a huge letdown for me. Granted, Robinson continues to craft an entirely new story from a completely different point of view without leaving the small town of Gilead or her handful of familiar characters, but I found myself getting rather muddled while listening to this one. I never got comfortable with Lila as a character. She always seemed ready to bolt, like some wild animal that discovers too late that they have left their comfortable and familiar countryside and strayed into the heart of a community. Maybe that is the point Robinson is trying to convey, but I just never settled into this story like I did the other two, even though I did like getting glimpses of Ames and Reverend Boughton from a different point of view.
    • 5/5
      Sometimes when I read a book I love I'm like, "Man, how could anyone not love this book! It's so good and so vast and so fast-paced and the writing is lovely yet tight and it's just a winner all around!" I loved Lila deeply but I can absolutely understand why others wouldn't. It's slow. Not a lot happens. Basically, it's like every other Marilynne Robinson book I've ever read, and like ever other book of hers I've read, I loved it so much!The language is beautiful. The characters are rich and lovely and I just . . . what do you say about Ms. Robinson? If you've read and loved the other two in this Gilead sort-of-series then you know what to expect and I can't imagine you being disappointed. If you've read and disliked / felt indifferent about them, then there's nothing here that's going to redeem her for you. If you've never read Robinson, I'd suggest giving Gilead a shot first. Another reviewer asked, "Have you ever read a book so good it hurt?" and I think that's as good a way as any to describe my experience reading this book. I live in the same Iowa town that Robinson lives in and I sincerely hope I never run into her because I'm pretty sure I'd either start weeping or yelling at her, such is the deepness of the emotions her works get out of me.
    • 5/5
      Marvelous! So many new ways of looking at the world that inspired me to question some of my cultural assumptions and prejudices. The people felt real, superbly drawn, so interesting and deep. Really liked the setting, the time period, the remarkable crisp clarity of the writing. A fine book! Can’t wait to gobble up the other Gilead books.
    • 5/5
      After repeated suggestions to read Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer prize winning novel, I gave in and picked up the book’s prequel, Lila, a 2014 National Book Award Finalist itself, as a starting point. I picked it up and, in a sense, I don’t think I will ever put it down. It did what an excellent book should do: it twisted my heart and in so doing challenged my way of thinking, and my compassion.

      “Lila” follows the inward and outward journey of a wandering street girl to whom hardship is just a way of life. She has endured childhood abuse, the shame of a whore house, and the hunger pains and hardness of a life on the run. This background has become more than an experience but an identity. Though Lila’s particular tragedies are hers alone, her questions and struggles strike a universal cord and make her achingly relatable. Which of us has not felt alone in a room of friends, or tried to earn the gifts of love and acceptance even when freely given? Which of us do not doubt our place in the world, or try to self-purge shame and fear? When Lila unexpectedly finds herself in the kind, small town of Gilead with the new comforts of a house, family, and community, she now wrestles with receiving this grace of the present. It seems unfitting to the tainted Lila she sees herself to be.

      Lila slowly transforms as she works through an unlikely romance with an aging pastor who does not view her colored by her past, and offers her Hosea-like love. Far from stereotypical, rather than sermonizing the reader and wrapping up answers to age-old questions with a bow, this pastor is raw and human with his own pains and his own searchings. Together with us this pair considers troublesome questions that remain unsatisfied with trite answers. Questions such as what do we make of a world of suffering? What would it look like to be made new? How do we love flawed people who can display towards us both good and evil? And how do we live in light of loss? Together they learn to receive grace for themselves, and allow grace to transform their scars into compassion for others.

      Marilynne Robinson has given us a book that is raw, humble, honest, and beautiful. Through her I am learning compassion for those I relate to least. Her wisdom challenges me to resist simplifying knotted questions, and in the not knowings to live in light of the gifts of grace.

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