Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I am an avid reader - I never review books, but this one is different. Twelve years ago I found a battered, old copy of this book in my local library, read it casually and then returned it. The book haunted me ever since. I would wake up in the middle of the night thinking about this story. I never completely got it out of my head or stopped remembering it. I went back to the library looking for it again, and it had been removed from circulation. I thought about this book and looked for this book for a decade. I could never find it so much as listed on the internet in bibliographies of Pearl S. Buck's work. Sometimes I thought I just dreamed up this amazing, singular story that never let me forget it. There was something about it that literally never let me go. It was so lovely, so painful, so true - a simple story that reflected the agony of youth's unmet need and the peaceful anguish of adult life lived day by day in patient hope. Everything that happened to the protagonist rang so truthfully and painfully in my heart, perhaps because (as I later learned) this book appears to be heavily autobiographical. If there's one thing that Pearl S. Buck seems to have fully understood, it's the suffering of the lonely and self-sufficient soul. I finally found this book again in the Kindle store, bought and re-read it immediately. It was every bit as moving as I remembered it, and with an entire decade of life lived in-between readings, more haunting and meaningful than ever. Finding this book again was a huge, literary sigh of relief for me. I truly can't think of a single book, out of the thousands I've read, that has impacted me quite like this amazing novel.