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An Unfinished Season
A Novel
by Ward Just
From a distinguished chronicler of American social history and the political world, An Unfinished Season, set in 1950's Chicago, is an exploration of culture, politics, and the individual conscience. [Houghton Mifflin]
Houghton Mifflin, 256 pages
07/08/2004
$24.00
ISBN: 0618036695
Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Booklist Donna Seaman
Just masterfully evokes the bittersweet beauty of city and suburb, the immensity of solitude, the fortitude life requires, and death's ever-present shadow. [15 May 2004, p.1612]
Chicago Sun-Times Mark Athitakis
Every Chicagoan understands how fractured and stratified the city is, but only the best writers can articulate it as well as Just does here.
Entertainment Weekly Ken Tucker
It is the intricate contrasts between the fathers and their children, young adults who exulst and err in love, that give "Season" a melancholy lushness tempered by a fierce, unforgiving realism.
Kirkus Reviews
One of Just's best works: stuffed with surprises, sparkling with insights.
Publishers Weekly
This novel, with its resonant questions about the class divisions that most Americans refuse to acknowledge, is one of [Just's] most trenchant works to date.
USA Today Kathy Balog
Stunning and complex.
Village Voice Alec Michod
What sets An Unfinished Season apart is how subtly the author infuses the personal with the political and the way he steeps his sentences in the rhythms of 1950s jazz.
Washington Post Jonathan Yardley
A splendid piece of work: leisurely in pace and meditative in tone, as is much of Just's writing, but also emotionally freighted, witty and sophisticated, and powerfully evocative of both the time (the early 1950s) and the place (Chicago) in which it is set.
The Economist
What sets Mr Just's work apart is its prose. His writing is old-fashioned in the finest sense -- graceful, articulate, full but not fussy.
The New York Times Book Review Jack Miles
This enlargement of the stage at the denouement and a certain autumnal elevation of tone are no less effective for being familiar. But most readers, I suspect, will fidget when they reach it, wishing they had heard less about Teddy Ravan and the hard-bitten newsroom types and more about Aurora, Consuela and Jack.
Los Angeles Times Neil Gordon
There is, as Just's fiction powerfully demonstrates, no guiding intelligence, no narrative epiphany, no national identity or noble mission. There's just an intricately woven fabric of relationships and expectations out of which grows our political and ethical identity, and one can neither step out nor redirect the course of one's life.
Boston Globe John Hough Jr.
There's no better prescription for a good novel.
Christian Science Monitor Ron Charles
It's not so much that you can't put it down, but that you shouldn't put it down because the moment you stop reading, the spell breaks and you're left with the aftertaste of pretentious insight.
San Francisco Chronicle David Kipen
Unfortunately, the new novel has a couple of recurring vices, too. Just's characters do tend to speechify, as if they were discussing the book at hand instead of peopling it.
The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Mark Jarman
The novel sags a bit after these initial chapters, but the strike episode is a strong set-piece, a story on its own. Like Graham Greene or Robert Stone, Just is astute at finding the political hidden in the personal, in the living room, in the heart.
 The average user rating for this book is 9.0 (out of 10) based on 1 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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