This is my all-time favorite book. If you like "Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek," be sure to read "Inland Island" by Josephine Johnson. She has the same unromanticized view of nature's uncompromising rule (whatever survives, works), and she has the mind of an agnostic poet expressed in prose. Example: I think it is disgusting to praise God for making us acknowledge His presence by a poke in our eyeballs with His sharp stick.

And: All day, a rain of life and death goes on. A catbird crashed against the pane and fell gasping. Then it gathered itself in a narrow canoe shape and lay there patiently waiting to recover or die. Awareness is a name of agony. I wish there was something to pray to for its life. But one must not get excited. One must not grieve. Nature, Mom, all-powerful, monstrous and monolithic Mother sits and chooses.

The whole book is wonderful! I wish I could read it again for the first time just for the pleasure of its discovery.

Yet in a way, I don't think much more could have been said in Johnson's novel. The story of a period in the life of a family of farmers in the Depression era raises some interesting questions on life and the reasons for why things happen the way they do. Often lonely and sad in its tone, Johnson still tries to instill in her narrator a sense of not hope, but not despair either. It's an interesting work but not one of my favorites.

One of the great experiences of my life was reading this book for the first time. It breaks my heart that English teachers are wasting time on second tier works, or repeating the same novels each year for decades, when there is a work of exquisite literary beauty full of strange and ambivalent revelations languishing and underappreciated. Please, if you are an English teacher, read it and recognize its perfection. Three sisters... a dirt farm... the depression... language that shimmers before your eyes on every page. Introduce this American masterwork back into the high school literary canon!

Everyone I ask about this book has never heard of it. I am flabbergasted on why noone has ever read Now in November! This piece of work is beautiful, enchanting and most of all in tune with the human condition. It goes beyond the usual depiction of the dust bowl era and portrays what it means to yearn for knowledge and seek out pleasure when it is cruely restricted. This novel completely deserves a Pulitzer Prize just for the poetic language alone. Josephine Johnson, girl you should be proud!!!