Finished: A Thousand Acres (Smiley) Pulitzer Prize winner about a rigid, unbearable Iowa farmer in the early 1970's who decides to divide his farm up between his three daughters ala King Lear. When the youngest daughter balks at the idea, she is immediately cut out of the discussion and the farm is divided up between the two remaining daughters and their husbands. In a fascinating story that I couldn't put down, their lives go downhill immediately. The overbearing father treats them all like they've stolen the farm from him, and lets the surrounding community think so as well. He acts so crazy that he even runs out into a dangerous storm in the night and then has a nasty confrontation with his daughters. He and his equally manipulative neighbor and best friend, who has two sons, are constantly trying to one up each other and succeed in basically ruining their grown children's lives. Both mothers have long since been dead, leaving the farm kids to have been raised in the tough environment with only their fathers. This book is still swirling around inside of me, so I'm not going to try and lay the plot line all out. I just can't believe how things deteriorate and how everyone turns against the daughters and their husbands when it was the father's crazy (drunken) idea in the first place to "gift" them with the farm. Of course, the youngest daughter, who had the initial reservations, ends up helping her father with a lawsuit to try and win the farm back, alienating herself from the sisters who practically raised her, but they don't succeed. And, the oldest son of the neighbor comes back home after being gone for fourteen years only to have both of the father's daughters fall for him with various degrees of heartbreak, happiness and marriage degradation. And, the huge topper is that we find out the father sexually abused the two oldest daughters from the time they were teenagers until the time they left the house to be married. Oh, and the daughters are Ginny, Rose and Caroline....much like Lear's own Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. And, the father is Larry. Hmmm.....I can't say that the story mirrors King Lear, but the tragedy of the story certainly does. :-( A book with heart wrenching, exceptional writing, with many deep, resounding, familiar thoughts! I've really loved all the books I've read by Jane Smiley.