Summary and Reviews of The Maytrees by Annie Dillard

The Maytrees by Annie Dillard

The Maytrees

A Novel

by Annie Dillard
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  • Critics' Consensus (11):
  • First Published:
  • Jun 12, 2007, 216 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Jun 2008, 240 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

In spare, elegant prose, Dillard traces the lives of Toby and Lou Maytree. She presents willed bonds of loyalty, friendship, and abiding love. Warm and hopeful, The Maytrees is the surprising capstone of Annie Dillard's original body of work.

Toby Maytree first sees Lou Bigelow on her bicycle in postwar Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her laughter and loveliness catch his breath. Maytree is a Provincetown native, an educated poet of thirty. As he courts Lou, just out of college, her stillness draws him. Hands-off, he hides his serious wooing, and idly shows her his poems.

In spare, elegant prose, Dillard traces the Maytrees' decades of loving and longing. They live cheaply among the nonconformist artists and writers that the bare tip of Cape Cod attracts. Lou takes up painting. When their son Petie appears, their innocent Bohemian friend Deary helps care for him. But years later it is Deary who causes the town to talk.

In this moving novel, Dillard intimately depicts nature's vastness and nearness. She presents willed bonds of loyalty, friendship, and abiding love. Warm and hopeful, The Maytrees is the surprising capstone of Annie Dillard's original body of work.

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Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

.... If this all sounds too serious for you, fear not, although there are no laugh out loud moments in this slim novel, there are many moments of wry humor and subtle ironies. In many ways, it is the perfect beach read - curl up on a sun-warmed dune and read a few pages and then lie back and contemplate the wonders of the world around you and how good it is to be alive!..continued

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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).

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Beyond the Book



Annie Dillard has written eleven books, including the memoir of her parents, An American Childhood; the Northwest pioneer epic The Living; and the nonfiction narrative Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. A gregarious recluse, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

She was born in April 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Best known for her narrative nonfiction, she has also published poetry, essays, literary criticism, autobiography and fiction. She is married to the ...

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