At one point the main character says that he should never have expanded his home in the meadow as he ended up there alone with no need for all the extra was an insightful comment which we all ask ourselves at some time in our lives.did we really improve anything through our lifelong struggles? The answer, of course, is that the journey was the important element not the end result. It is a beautiful allegory of the soul moving towards higher consciousness through interaction with natural elements and each other.

Most of all I love that the characters do not place blame for their struggles in life. The Meadow, lush and lyrical, elegizes a vanishing relationship between humans and the weather, characterized by the fading away of an agrarian attentiveness to the patterns and cycles of the seasons. Right off the bat, Galvin says, The story of the meadow is a litany of loosely patterned weather, a chronicle of succession (3). I love the clarity of the characters and the overriding theme of man in nature. The Meadow by James Galvin is full of patterns and repetition, one main recurring theme is the weather. It's an odd book in the sense that it isn't a novel in the traditional sense but is only partly a novel and partly other things, including natural history descriptions and the evocation of the daily lives of the inhabitants of a place. Its an odd book in the sense that it isnt a novel in the traditional sense but is only partly a novel and partly other things, including natural history descriptions and the evocation of the daily lives of the inhabitants of a place. The Meadow transports us back in time to the events that have shaped the American west and so vividly recreates the sense of wonder that humans must have felt while in those wild environs. THE MEADOW is quite stunning and a complete original. THE MEADOW is quite stunning and a complete original. My passion is hiking and exploration and I often think to myself that it would be exquisite to somehow be able to time travel at a waterfall or mountaintop to see the events that have taken place over time. I will recommend this book to anyone who has a love of nature and of the history of the settlement of America.

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why? Reading the Meadow is almost like reading a poem.