Reviews for Ramona

The average rating for Ramona based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-08-24 00:00:00 Richard Kraft Go with me on this. It's the year 2060. We have our flying cars, vat-grown replacement organs and Kim Kardashian's Skanky Grannies reality TV - but you know what we don't have? Anybody that remembers The Great Gatsby. Not the book, not the movies - nothing. That seems like an almost impossibility, right? Having finished Ramona, and then reading about the success of this novel and its almost complete obscurity in 2014, I'm not so sure. This is a romance novel, no doubt about it - my first foray into that genre. Helen Hunt Jackson's book was pulled on my random selection of the 500 Great Books by Women, and despite that I can now say that romance novels aren't my thing, I'm very glad I read it. Racial discrimination against Native Americans (first by Mexicans, and then by white Americans) is a theme played large against the backdrop of the love story that moves the action of the book - and it is what HHJ does with the oppression of the natives of Southern California that is the best part of the story. Written in 1884, Ramona has sold hundreds of thousands of copies and has never been out of print. It has been adapted into a film four times and an outdoor play based upon the novel has been in production since 1923. The book's impact on southern California was significant - as the railroads into that area began to open in the early 1900s, fans of the novel traveled across the country to visit the land of Ramona. HHJ's depiction of the mission-era SoCal environment is beautifully written; you can almost smell the sage and trail dust. Have you ever heard of this book? I hadn't, nor had any of my well-read friends. It is an important work - I really hope people continue to read it and it doesn't go the way of 2060 Gatsby. 3rd book read of 500 Great Books by Women

Review # 2 was written on 2010-02-17 00:00:00 Tahosa Callahan As many of you know, one of my hobbies is to read books that were once popular but have now fallen into obscurity, trying to understand the past through what excited people at the time. Ramona, a book that has appeared in more than 300 editions since it was first published, was made into a movie four times, and inspired an entire tourist industry in the late 19th and early 20th century, is surely such a book. I've had a copy for years, one belonging to my father-in-law, and it's long been on my to-read list. It's quite a lovely book - a romance of the old west, and a strong indictment of the treatment of the American Indian (and to a lesser extent, the Mexicans) by the conquering Americans, who brought a long period of California history to a close. As I wrote in the book's description (see above), the book was written after the failure of Hunt's earlier non-fiction book, A Century of Dishonor to raise consciousness about the plight of the American Indian and their disgraceful treatment by the United States government. However, the charming romance (which turns darker as the story progresses) was what caught people's imagination. Still, it's an eye-opening look at how the conquering Americans treated the Indian and Mexican inhabitants of California. We like to think we're better than the ethnic cleansers of today's world, but our country was built on ethnic cleansing. For all its storybook romance and idealization of the Franciscan missions and the life on the Mexican ranchos, this book is a great reminder of our own history. P.S. People who enjoyed this book might also look for The Splendid Idle Forties by Gertrude Atherton, a collection of romantic stories about old California. Another, perhaps more realistic view of old California can be found in Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana. I love the descriptions in Dana's book of San Francisco in 1837 as a wooded peninsula populated by deer and bears, with a tiny fishing village and port, but it's also great to see him refer to this area as the northern part of Mexico, and to meditate on how the things we take for granted weren't always so, and won't always continue to be so.