Pearl S. Buck and Stephanie Reents - Good Earth: Study Guide

Pros: Insight into an unfamiliar time and place with excellent narrative style.
Cons: Author is vague on how typical some of her portrayals are, leading to some confusion.

In this novel we are presented with the entire adult life of peasant farmer Wang Lung, inhabitant of the Chinese interior at the end of the nineteenth century. The story begins with Wang Lung’s wedding day, and his collecting from the local lord his ...

Pros: Characters, life story
Cons: None

Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth to me is a novel about life - Life has cycles - seasons, years, and generations. We see these cycles take place through one family, actually one man, a poor farmer named Wang Lung.

The novel opens on Wang...

Pros: Great Characters
Cons: none

For me, The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck is a magical book. The characters come to life as you read about them. Even though the setting is China before the People's Revolution, there is a wonderful sense of familiarity to the story. The characters you...

Pros: Real characters
Cons: none

Pearl Buck was born in West Virginia (also my home state) and I have always been interested in her life. She was raised in China, and even spoke Chinese before English. She is known for trying to improve relations between the two racial groups. In...

Pros: It is an accurate tale of life in 1900s China
Cons: Lengthy, uses a different type of writing style, may bore some people

I honestly must admit it now. The Good Earth, by today's standards, is kind of dull. The only reason I read the book was because my English I Honors class had to for mandatory literature. But as I read it, I could see why it was appealing and a best...

Pros: addresses many important issues, very interesting book
Cons: none

Actually, this is not a good book, it is a great book. This is a story of a man named Wang Lung. This peasant farmer gets married to a slave in the beginning of the book. He comes across many conflicts that lead to the climax. After the climax point,...

Pros: Amazing characters, great description and a terrific journey.
Cons: Not a thing.

Not only did Pearl S. Buck win the Pulitzer Prize for The Good Earth, she also later won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Born to American missionaries, she spent most of her life in China. Only someone with that kind of experience could've written ...

Pros: It gets you involved
Cons: None that I can think of

Warning: This review tells a lot about the story.

Written by Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth has been well known for decades for the story it tells of a Chinese farmer. It won the Pulitzer Prize; in fact, Pearl S. Buck was the...

Pros: interesting, interesting characters, plot changes several times
Cons: Some chapters take too long to develop

I'm reading The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck for my High School Sophomore Honors English Class. I've read a lot of books in the past year in my English classes, none really interesting as The Good Earth. This novel actually made me want to read it.
...

Pros: Gives you a better understanding about life for different kinds of people!!
Cons: Sometimes goes through the same details over and over again!

Although I probably would not have read this book if it wasn’t assigned to me at school, I found it to some extent fascinating! When I first started to read this book I found it somewhat boring but then as you keep reading on it gets more and ...

Pros: beautiful and amazing work
Cons: you feel helplessly sad reading it

This book is so very moving and powerful, and often it's hard to pinpoint why that is. The Good Earth catches the very soul of early 1900s China. The book starts with Wang Lung, a young farmer in his early 20s, whose father has arranged for ...

Pros: Interesting, educational, well written
Cons: Some people may not like the writing style, even though I thought it was fine

The Good Earth is a great book. People of all ages could enjoy it. It's education, as it provides insight into what it was like to live in China during the reign of the last emperor, but don't let that throw you. It is very interesting and at times even scandalous.