My “early warning” came in the first chapter of Jane Smiley’s second volume of the Last Hundred Years trilogy when I could scarcely keep track of the characters. Everyone had gathered for the funeral of Walter Langdon, who died abruptly at the end of “Some Luck,” a ripe opportunity to re-introduce the family members we knew and to meet the first of the third generation. Once the group dispersed, it was a bit easier to keep the who’s who straight, but then the family kept multiplying. “Early Warn...

Book two - straight into it while I can still remember all the characters. It picks right up - at the funeral of the family patriarch. A sombre way to start, and certainly, book two and three are more sober than the first.What is profoundly clear in the next two books is the rapid passage of time - and how little of it we truly have. How lucky we are to experience what we do - even the hardships, as the alternative is very bleak and finite.The cast comes and goes. Children have grown up and are

3.5 StarsI didn't enjoy this quite as much as the first one. It kind of felt more haphazard. But, at the same time, I think that is necessary to convey the Langdon family as it begins to spread out from the main family core.I did enjoy how current events were intertwined withing the Langdon Family Saga.

Not your usual family saga. Year by year, the best and the worst of the family stories. Constantly engaging, disturbing, moving, and thought-provoking. A classic. A masterpiece.

Back in the fall, I compared Jane Smiley's Some Luck, the first volume in The Last Hundred Years trilogy, to a fat album of family photos. The book spanned 1920 to 1953, and each chapter was a snapshot of a year in the life of Iowa farmer Walter Langdon, his wife Rosanna and their five children. The shifting perspective -- sometimes close-up, sometimes wide-angle -- made for a saga both epic and intimate. I liked it very much. Ditto for the second book, Early Warning (Knopf Doubleday, digital ga...

Fantastic continuation of this family saga. Smiley has an uncanny ability to select an enchanting combination of mundane, unusual and puzzling moments in time that, over the course of the book, cohere to become a complete picture of a sprawling family.

Classic Smiley. Must be read in order, though.

The problem with writing a series that tracks a family over successive generations is that your characters tend to multiply, and it gets harder and harder to make each new person as persuasive and realized a human. But the necessity of giving everyone screen time means that many of the characters that readers of the first book know and love are crowded out or pushed into the background. The episodic structure continues to work well, and there are lots of things to like about this book, but it a...

(Sequel to Some Luck.) This second book covers 1953 to 1986. The family loses one member to Vietnam, one to cancer, and one to the easiest, simplest death you could imagine. There’s a shotgun wedding, a divorce, and several affairs. In short, it feels like a real family, like your family. Events seem arbitrary at the time but later take on the cast of inevitability. Historical landmarks are there as background information, not as clichéd points of action (a good example is the JFK assassination)...

Early Warning covers the years 1953-1986. The second generation of the Langdon family is now in their sixties and the third and fourth generations are making a much larger appearance. I love how these books move the family's stories forward by devoting each chapter to a specific year. In doing so, Smiley showcases the highlights (or low lights in some cases) of not only the family members, but the current world events of the time. Moving, joyful, sorrowful and still surprising, this was a great

I usually don't write reviews, but Smiley's writing is amazing. I loved the pacing and the character development over the course of the two novels. The story could be any family history but her deft touches of character and their relation to events in America create a portrait with depth and veridity.I plan to read the both the firts and second books again when the third is released to enjoy the flow.

After Some Luck, I chafed to wait for the further installment of what I hoped would be a family story of depth and heart. Instead, I got an episodic death march through the decades, with no character development, and historic events exploding along the periphery like a trailer for Forrest Gump. The musings about farmland, the cycle of nature, the growth of hedgerows and babies that enlivened and made human the events in the first book are missing here, as the second generation has moved off the

"Early Warning", is just as enjoyable and well written as Jane Smiley's first book in the Last Hundred Years Trilogy, "Some Luck". As with the first, I appreciated the one-year-per-chapter pace of this story of the Langdon family from 1953 to 1986. In the first book, the Langdon farm was the centerpiece of both setting and action, but the post-WWII time frame of "Early Warning" follows the progression of the US from the farms into the cities as the returning soldiers start families and enter bus...

This is the second novel in the trilogy and I liked it just as much as the first. Smiley writes excellent dialogue and her characters are portrayed as rich and full of the best and worst of humanity.

“If you lived in the same place long enough, everything reminded you of everything else.”“Early Warning” begins where “Some Luck” left off, 1953, family gathers for the funeral of the family patriarch. As I began the second in Jane Smiley’s trilogy, I thought momentarily that it would be a good idea to have made a poster size family tree of the family, their children, and perhaps a brief note about some characters. With the funeral, it’s easy to be reminded right off that your most difficult tas...

The second book in the Langdon family trilogy isn't quite as sharp as the first one, but still compelling. It takes some time to get used to the growing cast of characters as the family expands, but Smiley provides a helpful family tree. She ends the book with the Langdons in the 1980s--I can't wait for the third book, which will come out later this year. I admit she had me in tears near the end.

Early Warning follows Some Luck as Book two in Jane Smiley’s planned trilogy, a trio of books that follows a farm family, the Langdons, and their offspring through an entire century. In fact this bucolic verbal tryptic is called The Last Hundred Years Trilogy. As more and more offspring choose to leave the farm, the lives of the Langdon offspring obviously become less and less rural.Walter and Rosanna are the founders of this Midwestern dynasty and the offspring become so numerous that it become...

This second book of Jane Smiley's trilogy was much more interesting to me and I read it twice as fast as I did Some Luck. This is certainly because the book takes place during the first 35 years of my life. I was fascinated to see which events Ms. Smiley chose as important in her continuing saga of the 20th Century, as well as which children and grandchildren of Rosanna and Walter Langdon she placed into which events. As in the first book, Ms. Smiley does not give the reader one character to lov...

Setting: USA; 1953-1986. This is the second book in The Hundred Years trilogy, following on from the first book, Some Luck. As the Langdon family's children spread their wings, the action moves from the largely farming-based Iowa community. Against a backdrop of political uprising and anti-Vietnam rallies, the children and grandchildren of the original Langdon family try to make their mark. Another excellent instalment in this trilogy and looking forward to reading the third part - 8/10.

I've loved some of Smiley's work, but I was disappointed in this book. Like the first book in the series, Some Luck, Smiley covers too many characters too thinly. I didn't really care about any of them, because I didn't feel like I knew much about their motivations and inner lives. A lot of what they did just seemed random. And it annoyed me that almost all of them are rich in this book. If you're telling the story of the 20th century family, the rise of the middle class is the real story. She s...