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O Pioneers! is about the Bergson family and their lives as farmers outside Hanover, Nebraska. Alexandra Bergson is the oldest child in the family and she is held responsible for the family farm after her father dies. It is her goal to make her farm successful because it was her father's wish. Even though two of her younger brothers want to leave when times get hard, Alexandra keeps them together and it leads to them being very successful farmers.

The book also focuses on two romantic relationships. One relationship is between Alexandra and Carl, who were friends when they were young and reconnect after Carl's family leaves their farm. The other romantic relationship is between Alexandra's youngest brother Emil and their married neighbor Marie. When Emil comes back to visit after being at school, he finally pursues his feelings for Marie and they are both shot and killed by Frank, Marie's husband. Frank was always jealous of Marie being around men, and he shot them when he was frantically looking for her one night. He never meant to kill them, and Alexandra forgives him for killing her brother and friend. Alexandra and Carl are brought together after Emil's death and it seems as thought Alexandra can finally live a happy life with the man she loves.

This book provides accounts of debt, wind, death, and demoralized farmers. A couple quotes stuck out to me. The first, "But this land was an enigma. It was like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks things to pieces. He had an idea that no one knew how to farm it properly…" gives an example of how hard farmers had it. Farmers were coming to unfamiliar territory and terrain, and it was hard for some of them to be successful because they didn't know what needed to be done to tame the land. Another quote that stood out to me was "She had never quite forgiven John Bergson for bringing her to the end of the earth; but, now that she was there, she wanted to be let alone to reconstruct her old life in so far that was possible." This quote points out that Alexandra's mother never got over the feeling that she was in a strange land, but she tried as hard as possible to make it feel like home. I think this is something that a lot of immigrants had to deal with when they moved to the Plains. It also seemed to me that Willa Cather tries to identify the ties that she feels towards the land through her characters. In My Antonia, Antonia could never move away from the farm to a city, and in O Pioneers!, Alexandra seems like she could go away from the land for awhile, but it would always be apart of her, and she would always want to return.