So Big Review

There are three possible morals of the book and I can't decide which is the right one. The first moral is to listen to your mother, she is always right. The mother, Selina, who is my favorite character of the book, gives her son some advice and of course it pans out exactly the way she says. This goes along with the second moral, which is: if you want something, work for it. Selina's son, Dirk, studies to be an architect and gets frustrated because it's not going anywhere and the woman he is in love with, Paula, won't marry anyone who isn't making millions; she just wants him if he is making money. After the war he decides to give up his goal of being an architect to sell bonds because he can make his yearly salary from his architect job in two months time. Unfortunately, Paula marries an older man who is a multimillionaire. The third moral is to be yourself and not follow the crowd. This is something I've noticed happening around me. Many of the homes I go into look so similar, there is no personality. I couldn't tell you what the people love or who they are except that they are following the trends and are trying to be like everyone else. The author, Edna Ferber, feels the same way about the wealthy people she writes about in her book. She paints them all as just trying to be like the others in the way they dress and act, and the activities they partake in. Dirk gets caught up in all this crowd. He becomes very successful and many of the young women would like to catch his eye. Paula and Dirk begin to spend lots of time together, she starts to control him, and they start meeting in secret places. It never actually says that they have an affair, but it's heading that way when Dirk meets another woman. Her name is Dallas O'Mara, she is an artist and is not concerned with what other people are doing; she's her own person. She is much like Selina in that she looks for the beauty in everything and sees it in places the rest of society doesn't. Dirk realizes that this woman is who he wants to be with and Paula begins to get on his nerves. What was the advice his mother gave him? "Someday you will want beauty and she will not want you." This is how the book ends. Dirk views Dallas as beauty, he loves all that she is and how she looks at the world. He loves how she doesn't follow the crowd and how she is her own person. He loves her, she likes him but chooses to go to Paris to study portrait painting. Her reason for not loving him back? He didn't work for what he wanted. He gave up architecture because he wasn't successful fast enough, she wished he would have stuck it out and worked hard for it. She mentions his hands how they're smooth and not bumpy from work, she would like his hands to be bumpy.

This story is actually only about the last third of the book. The beginning of the book is a portrait of the Dutch culture and the life of truck farmers. It's a story of a woman Selina, who is told life is an adventure and she should try other things, when she does just that she ends up married to a poor farmer and shortly after that a widow. She takes those lemons and makes lemon crème pie out of it. I love her attitude, her love of beauty in everything, her strength and her intelligence. If the story was all about her I would have given the book five balls of yarn, she is a great character and one I will remember.