The Cider House Rules

Daniel writes:

The cider house rules

Love, learning, and friendship, to my thinking, Is the key concept of the novel. The novel mainly focuses deeply on the protagonist Homer Wells and the people he meet or affects him in any way throughout the novel. In the beginning we are introduced to the main characters and their origins, personality, and occupation, and then in the middle chunk of the novel, Homer Wells is a young man and moves out of his home (St. Clouds) and goes out to the real world for the first time. We have to understand, and if you didn’t read the book, you will, but Homer was isolated from the real world, he doesn’t know what a lobster is or what a camel is, he never even seen a African American before, why? He spent his entire childhood life at St. Clouds. The beginning tells us his childhood, and how Dr. Larch treats him. Now the entire scene shifts suddenly to when now Homer Wells is grown up. The middle and end is both about Homer Wells’s life as a grown man, about 20 to 30 years old. He meets two other important and very nice couple, Wally and Candy who adopt him and gives him a job of working the apple plantation. The ironic thing is, the couple as about his age, and Homer Wells falls in love, or thinks he’s in love with Candy who is already going out with Wally. The scene of this story is also in 19__ the time of WW2, so since Wally and Homer are both young they would be most likely to be drafted, Wally does end up getting drafted, but Homer doesn’t, and that is another significant story. As a result, many things happen to homer, he’s thinking of abortion (he is a abortionist), Dr. Larch, Candy, and future characters and past scenes change and we later know why, or at least have a cloudy understanding of it. Homer Wells, then has a baby with Candy, and hides a “secret” from Wally, and the baby (Angel) shares a deep relation with Homer Wells throughout the end of the novel.

          Overall the cider house rules gave me a huge sense of the style of writing John Irving writes. The novel is very broad and just freefall to the end, he writes very openly and has no hesitation at all to some things that might be a bit awkward or shy to us like sex, abortion, and male/women genitals. He also goes very fast, for example he might be talking about Homer Wells, then the next paragraph, all of a sudden he goes to a different character. He’s very descriptive and shows a lot of detail and personification, for example I felt very innocent towards Homer Wells, and I hate Melony because she is a bitch and a problem to everyone, he makes me feel that way. The book itself is advance, wonderfully written and one of the type of books in which its winter, your in a small cottage and your all cozy, with a cup of tea with a fireplace right next to you and your sitting in this big comfy chair reading a cozy book. I had trouble sometimes understanding what was going on, and it was a bit boring here and there. I would give it a rating of 9, and recommend it to advance readers.