Next

Book One

Chapters 1–5

Summary: Chapter 1

Ginny, the oldest daughter of Larry Cook, describes the land her parents’ farm sits on in Zebulon County, Iowa. She also describes the other two families who live nearby: the Ericsons and the Clarks. Her father bought his first car in 1951 when Ginny was eight. 

Summary: Chapter 2

When Jess Clark returns to Iowa after being away for thirteen years, his father, Harold, throws a pig roast in his honor. Rose, thirty-four, has had a double mastectomy to treat breast cancer. Ginny helps Rose and her husband Pete out, along with taking care of her father and her husband, Ty. Rose has sent her two teenage daughters, Linda and Pammy, to boarding school in West Branch. Ginny has had several miscarriages but has no children. Caroline unexpectedly shows up for the party. She is a lawyer in Des Moines and is about to marry another lawyer. Ginny and Rose admire Jess’s appearance. 

Summary: Chapter 3

In 1890 Ginny’s great grandparents, Sam and Arabella Davis, bought the farm’s land when it was all underwater. With a young man named John Cook, they built a system of tiles, wells, and cisterns that drained the marsh and turned it into fertile farmland. They built a bungalow and then a larger house from Sears, the house that Larry still lives in. John Cook married the Davises’ daughter, Edith, when she was fifteen.

Summary: Chapter 4

Larry is rankled when Harold buys a new tractor without sharing the details. At the party, Ty, Pete, Rose, and Caroline talk to Larry on the porch. Larry drunkenly announces his plan to avoid inheritance taxes by incorporating the farm and giving each daughter one-third. Rose and Ginny reply positively, but Caroline says she doesn’t know, a response that comes back to haunt her. Larry quickly responds that if Caroline doesn’t want it, she’s simply out of the plan. In the kitchen, Ginny admits to Jess that she suspects that Larry did not think of the idea to give up the farm on his own and that it’s going to result in a complex and difficult mess. That night, Ginny and Ty talk about the future and what Larry’s offer will mean for them. Ty wants to increase the hog business and makes wishes aloud. Ginny thinks about her five miscarriages. She has told Ty about only three of them, letting pregnancy be her secret project. Ginny looks out the window at her father’s house and the peaceful calm of the vista. Caroline stays at Rose’s, not with her father. 

Summary: Chapter 5

The next morning, Ginny goes to her father’s house to find out that he’s not there. Marv Carson, a banker, drives up with Larry in the car, and Marv stays for breakfast. Marv is obsessed with avoiding toxins. Larry drinks every night and is gruff every morning. Ginny thinks about Pete, formerly a musician, who has never gotten along well with Larry although he works hard. Pete has a bad temper, also drinks, and once broke Rose’s arm, but he has not hurt her since. Larry tells Ginny to gather the family together that afternoon so they can sign the papers to transfer the farm. 

Analysis: Chapters 1–5

The first five chapters of A Thousand Acres introduce the main characters and set the stage for the novel’s plot. Readers learn about family history and geography, the two forces that will determine the conflicts and their resolutions. At the end of Chapter 2, Ginny remarks that she has looked back on the day of the pig roast searching for clues that might have signaled what will happen but found none. However, there are clues for the reader in these early pages, clues about the characters and their relationships that foreshadow key events. However, like Ginny, readers might not recognize them yet as the pointers that they are.

Ginny refers to her mother’s death as something that happened years before, when she was a child, before her mother could influence her daughters’ opinions of their father. Mrs. Cook is a presence throughout the novel although she never actually appears in the narrative present. Her daughters face Larry, their father, alone without the buffer of a female role model. They refer to their mother, but readers learn very little about her except that she, like her daughters, stood in her husband’s huge and domineering shadow. Ginny refers to their father’s fearsomeness and admits that her earliest memories of him are his enormous size and his deep voice. As a child, Ginny avoided eye contact with him and shunned his hugs and kisses. She also admits that she’s never fully understood him, even though she’s never left him for very long. In these early chapters, Ginny signals a complex and challenging relationship. In their father’s eyes and their interactions with him, the girls are always daughters, never women in their own rights.

Although she is the narrator, Ginny is not always forthright. By her own admission, she has a secret world that she keeps from others, even herself. Ginny keeps her fourth miscarriage from her husband but shares it with Rose. The fifth one she keeps entirely to herself, literally and figuratively burying the evidence under the dirt floor of the old dairy barn. Ginny knows how to live two distinct lives, to exist as two versions of one person, a skill that serves her daily life fairly well. She knows how to split herself in half to maintain a calm, peaceful exterior even in the face of extreme tragedy and pain.

Ginny’s encounter with the prodigal Jess is, from the start, sexually charged. She admires his good looks, especially his waist and thighs that show the muscles inside his jeans. When Jess refers to the missing cylinder of bull semen in the Clarks’ kitchen, it catches Ginny off guard, but she opens up to him in the conversation that ensues and finds him reassuring. Ginny believes everything Jess tells her, even though she hasn’t seen him in thirteen years.

The main plot line initiates with a single moment of conversation in Chapter 4 in which the three sisters all react to their father’s sudden announcement that he’s decided to relinquish his farm while still alive. Although their reactions are not entirely different, their words are. While Rose and Ginny reveal they think the decision is acceptable, Caroline answers with ambiguity, a response their father interprets as disinterest bordering on betrayal. At that moment, Caroline’s fate in the family is sealed. Even before, she is the only one who has left home, gone to college, and chosen to marry someone who is not a farmer. Even before the fateful moment, Caroline is the black sheep of the family, even though she is the youngest.

Next section Chapters 6–10

Take a Study Break