_O Pioneers!_ is utterly different. Some one has said that reading a novel by Miss Cather gives you no assurance at all as to what her next novel will be like. That seems to be true. It is the stamp, we may add, of a very original gift--talent--genius; the degree of her endowment is not precisely determinable even yet. In _O Pioneers!_ it is a woman who dominates the whole story, tall, strong, sensible, not so much kind-hearted as human-hearted, which means a great comprehension with sympathy to serve it. We see the girl Alexandra and her two brothers left by a dying father with the charge to hold to the land, the untamed soil of the prairie. The father has made his daughter the head of the family because she has intelligence and her brothers have not. They work well, but they do not use their heads in their work. The girl justifies her father’s faith in her and by her intelligent anticipation makes her brothers prosperous and herself rich. There is a third brother, distinctly younger than the others, whom she has under her especial care and upon whom she lavishes the maternal affection that is in her. The terrible tragedy which involves him would have blasted irretrievably a woman less strong, less intelligent than Alexandra. She survives it as she would survive anything that life could do to her. The quality of the story is dual. There is the fidelity to character which marks the true novelist, the resolute putting through of what these people, in contact with each other, will certainly bring about. That calls for courage! How severe the temptation to shirk an inevitable but bitter event! It is so easy to persuade yourself that this and that will not mean disaster, that such and such chemicals when joined need not explode, that oil and water will mix this once, that two and two may for the moment make five! Why must there be a blighting catastrophe? Why cannot a happy ending be a truthful ending? The answer is that sometimes it can, but when it can’t you mustn’t make it so. Miss Cather’s _O Pioneers!_ doesn’t try to. The second aspect of this novel we have already named. It is cyclic, that is, it sums up an era. Such a quality always gives a book a historical value; where it is wedded to high fictional art, as here, the satisfaction of the reader is complete.