Excellent Lombards (Hamilton)

The Excellent Lombards 
Jane Hamilton, 2016
Grand Central Publishing
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781455564224


Summary
A heartfelt coming-of-age story that Karen Joy Fowler calls "a timeless classic...a book you will read and reread."

Mary Frances "Frankie" Lombard is fiercely in love with her family's sprawling apple orchard and the tangled web of family members who inhabit it.

Content to spend her days planning capers with her brother William, competing with her brainy cousin Amanda, and expertly tending the orchard with her father, Frankie desires nothing more than for the rhythm of life to continue undisturbed. But she cannot help being haunted by the historical fact that some family members end up staying on the farm and others must leave.

Change is inevitable, and threats of urbanization, disinheritance, and college applications shake the foundation of Frankie's roots. As Frankie is forced to shed her childhood fantasies and face the possibility of losing the idyllic future she had envisioned for her family, she must decide whether loving something means clinging tightly or letting go. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 13, 1957
• Where—Oak Park, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., Carleton College
• Awards—Hemingway/PEN Award, 1988
• Currently—lives in Rochester, Wisconsin


Her first published works were short stories, "My Own Earth" and "Aunt Marj's Happy Ending", both published in Harper's Magazine in 1983. "Aunt Marj's Happy Ending" later appeared in The Best American Short Stories 1984.

Her first novel, The Book of Ruth, was published in 1988 and won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award, and the Wisconsin Library Association Banta Book Award in 1989. The Book of Ruth was an Oprah's Book Club selection in 1996, and it was the basis for a 2004 television film of the same title.

In 1994, she published A Map of the World, which was adapted for a film in 1999 and, the same year, was also an Oprah's Book Club selection. Her third novel, The Short History of a Prince, published in 1998, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998. This book was also shortlisted for the 1999 Orange Prize. In 2000, Hamilton was named a Notable Wisconsin Author by the Wisconsin Library Association.

All of her books are set, at least in part, in Wisconsin.

In an interview with the Journal Times in Racine, Wisconsin, in November 2006, Hamilton talked about her early inspiration for writing novels. As a student at Carleton College, she overheard a professor say she would write a novel one day. Hamilton had written only two short stories for the professor's class. Overhearing the conversation gave her confidence. "It had a lot more potency, the fact that I overheard it, rather than his telling me directly," she said. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
[A] tender, astute look behind the scenes at a small-scale family farm in the years when the locavore movement was just taking hold…Mary Frances goes by many names—Francie to her mother, Marlene to her father, Frankie or Imp to her brother—but as expertly rendered by Hamilton…she's a storybook character, an inquisitive, imperious but lovable girl akin to Harper Lee's Jean Louise Finch, Rumer Godden's Cecil Grey or Ian McEwan's Briony Tallis. Like them, she absorbs and channels emotion and drama, processing it for the reader as a vested outsider: an outsider because she's a child, but vested because she wants to have this land, and the life she lives on it, remain unchanged forever.
New York Times Book Review - Mary Pols


Ms. Hamilton has written what's known as a "quiet" novel, yet this beautiful coming-of-age story offers a more trenchant narrative on the sustainability of family farming.
New York Times - Carmela Ciuraru


A powerful coming-of-age story.... [Hamilton's] penetration into the hearts of her characters is as profound, perhaps more so, than ever before.... This is a very fine novel: Its people, their individual predicaments and their relationships with one another and with the land stay with the reader long after that last page has been turned.
Minneapolis Star Tribune


Funny and heartbreaking, colored with a palpable wistfulness...deeply affecting, a moving elegy for an idyllic way of life that's slipping away as development and technology encroach and children grow up and away from rural pleasures.
Miami Herald


Despite the growing threat of urbanization and her sharp-tongued librarian mother’s attempts to steer her toward university, Francie clings obsessively to the orchard.... [Eventually, she] learns that sometimes loving a person and a place means letting go. The novel ends a little abruptly, but Hamilton’s coming-of-age story is written with humour and compassion
Toronto Star


A poignant coming-of-age tale that resonates with readers...beautiful.
Romantic Times


This coming-of-age story is captivating and passionate, taking us back to being a child and believing in one thing wholeheartedly. Simply put, this is a book you won't be able to put down.
BookPage


(Starred review.) Hamilton's lushly pleasurable novel of radiant comedy, deep emotions, and resonant realizations considers the wonders of nature, the boon and burden of inheritance, and the blossoming of the self.
Booklist


A Wisconsin girl reluctantly comes of age in Hamilton's tender and rueful latest. A suspenseful opening chapter, with the Lombards racing to get their freshly baled hay into the barn...deftly sets the scene for the fraught family drama..... Richly characterized, beautifully written, and heartbreakingly poignant—another winner from this talented and popular author.
Kirkus Reviews

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