Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie

Giants in the Earth

1) Per Hansa is a man best fit to be a pioneer. He is hard-working, honest, thoughtful, caring, and many other things that help him to get ahead in life on the prairie. Just by the way that he goes about everything with such joy, one can see that his body has been programmed to live on the Great Plains. He takes pleasure in doing his chores and daily work on the farm because he knows that it will cause him to prosper further on in life. He treats his kids and wife with respect and only uses harshness and strictness after exhausting all other options. He is thoughtful in the sense that, while his companions are thinking about only what is happening right then in their lives, he is always thinking about the big picture and trying to prepare for what will come next. This allows him to be one step ahead of his neighbors in everything that he does. An example of this is how he buys furs from the Indians and sends them back to Minnesota to sell for a high profit, while his neighbors sit around and wait for the planting season to start. All of this helps him to become a very prosperous farmer.

2) Beret Hansa is the character who changes the most throughout the book. At the beginning of the novel, she seems to be just as joyous as Per Hansa, her husband, to be moving out West to the Great Unknown. After they get there, however, she becomes very troubled. She begins to hate everything about the prairie and see evil in everything, including her own child. She starts to see her dead mother in hallucinations that she has and in these hallucinations, tells her mother of all the evil around her. Her relationship with Per Hansa becomes cold, and with her kids she begins to punish them more severely. She become...

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9) I absolutely loved the setting of this book. I love to read historical fiction about America and especially the Plains. As I mentioned before, Centennial is one of my favorite books of all time because it was able to capture all of Colorado beautifully and wonderfully in the pages of a book, which I thought Giants in the Earth did well too. The Plains of America are some of the most interesting places in the world in my mind, especially in the pioneer times, that I love reading anything about them, granted that it is historical fiction. I could not have been more pleased with the setting of this story.

Works Cited

Dickens, Charles, Hablot Knight Browne, and Frederick Barnard. A Tale of Two Cities. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1942. Print.

Rølvaag, O. E., and Lincoln Colcord. Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie. New York: Harper, 1927. Print.