Crossing to Safety

Beautifully written. Sensitive, honest and rich characters, and thoughtful about the foibles we all carry with us. Reads a bit like a paean to old New England. Wonderful read.

Top ten read.

Wallace Stegner has a special place in my heart as an author I read upon the recommendation of an adult I admired while I was in college, figuring out my own adult reading by choice. I'll always remember the summer I read Angle of Repose. When my book club chose this, I was excited. And it did not disappoint. This is not the sort of book that would be popular today, but the quiet insights, the (for me) nostalgic language and assumptions, all give me a comfortable and also compelling experience. He understood relationships. I'm looking forward to seeing how my book club of academic women discusses his understanding of gender and place.

A story about two couples and their friendship over the years. There are trials and tribulations - tragic sickness, dreams dashed, lives unlived - but the real life kind rather than the overly dramatic kind.

Turns out, when captured perfectly, regular friendships with regular difficulties become beautifully poignant and profound.

Debating 5 stars for this one. Now officially love Wallace Stegner and have to read all he's written.

One uncomfortable consequence of reading works by African-American writers in the last year: difficulty relating to more classic literature. “White man fails to get tenure at midwestern university” does not elicit the sympathetic agony in me that it might once have.

But that's not fair. This book is much more than that: it's Stegner, after all. Warm, tender, and thoughtful. A gentle tale of a rare and exquisite friendship between only-too-human (and real) characters. Of strength and weakness, loss, forgiveness, acceptance of others and oneself. Stegner has such a mature voice, capturing life's arc from energy and hope all the way to contemplation and then different forms of hope. There are many forms of love to be found here.

Near the end the narrator reflects on the chance saving of a mouse from drowning: “Survival, it is called. Often it is accidental, sometimes it is engineered by creatures or forces that we have no conception of, always it is temporary.” He thus humbly acknowledges our smallness and lack of control over fortune, along with our power to control our outlook. This was a beautiful experience; I may want to reread it if/when I reach my sixties.

I read this for book club this past month, and loved it. We read a variety of books for our book club, and everyone agreed that the writing in this book was exceptional. Stegner is skilled at seamlessly telling a story between places and times without giving the reader whiplash, at describing location in a way that allows the reader to ‘visit' and understand, and in developing characaters that are real and relatable and complex. I became invested in the characters and the story, and this will be a book I keep to re-read in the future.

Beautifully written story about people I don't relate to, doing very little.

A beautiful book about life, death, and friendship. Wallace Stegner is such an excellent writer and tells a relatively simple story with such intricacy and grace. Truly a pleasure to read.

I can't imagine a book that could portray everyday life more faithfully and more poetically than Crossing to Safety. Some of my admiration for the book probably comes from the fact that I fall right in the middle of the target audience. I'm white, married with children, middle class, about the same age as the main characters are for a large part of the story, went to college and have lived in both the East and Western United States. Being so perfectly aligned with the demographics of the main characters in the book, I felt that with every page and every scene, something that could have happened to me or to my friends or family was happening. The only difference was the time period in which the story takes place, and this difference was enough to take what otherwise could have been mundane and made it fascinating and intimate. I felt I was transported back a couple generations to what life could have been for me.

I don't know how this book would be received by someone from another country or someone who grew up differently in the US, but for me, it's a story of friendships and experiences that I are close enough to home as to make them something I can aspire to live for myself.

Some interesting and poignant moments, and plenty to think about. It seemed to be a work of poetry in itself, in that it analysed and exposed the human condition. When reflecting on whether it was a great book, I can't say there was enough in there to make me want to keep picking it up, or even finishing it for that matter, apart from the fact it was our book club choice.