Steinbeck does a great job of building characters and forcing you to change your mind about them as they grow. He has a knack for seeing into human nature.

But his writing is mediocre at best. This would have had more emotional impact if it had been interlinked short stories and about 200 pages total. It just feels like a product of its time that didn't age super well. Like, the narrator's sister wants to be a boy, which was fascinating because it means enough people were trans back in the day that it was an unremarkable thing to put in a novel -- but Steinbeck ruins it by saying she grows up to be glad she is a girl, and then never mentioning her again. So.