The Grapes of Wrath-- A Book Review by Emma Cerra

       For the book comparison assignment, I read The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. To summarize it, the book is about a struggling farming family from Oklahoma's Dust Bowl, who, during the Great Depression, traveled to California in hopes of a better future and stable jobs. Tom Joad, who recently had gotten out of prison (for beating a man to death with a shovel), is the main character, and while he does a number of illegal things like attacking a policeman, they are deemed morally just.
      Steinbeck uses simple words and doesn't tend to drag on sentences describing something, but rather he's to the point about everything in his novel; he doesn't use 'fluff'. Which made sense to me since he wrote the whole book over a span of around one hundred and fifty days! Besides his style of writing, the only thing that might be a little difficult to comprehend are the accents that they have. Steinbeck literally writes how they'd sound. That was a little frustrating to read...
      On the grounds of how entertaining the book was, I'd say not very. It's more thought-provoking. Steinbeck properly portrayed an event in American history that affected millions of people across the country. In this book, he managed to capture all of the people whose lives had been devastated by what was happening in the country and their flight to find work and comfortable living.
    With all of this in mind, Steinbeck does include some graphic scenes (as you probably would've guessed when I mentioned Tom Joad beat someone to death with a shovel). There are scenes of a stillborn baby, of a man getting hit in the head with an axe... those scenes are somewhat few and far between, but still there nonetheless.
    For me, the book was a bit boring but I appreciated Steinbeck's portrayal of the hardships those people went through. I don't think I'd recommend it to a friend unless they're looking for a thoughtful book. I'd give it a 3.5/5.