Brief Summary of School Reading List Books - Ievgen Sykalo 2026

The Cider House Rules by John Irving

In the beginning — and the beginning is important, because Homer Wells will later spend much of his life trying to rebegin it — there was the orphanage. St. Cloud’s. Snow-thick Maine. A place where unwanted boys and girls were born or dropped or misdelivered, and where Dr. Wilbur Larch reigned not as a father but as something both more merciful and more cruel.

Dr. Larch, obstetrician, abortionist, addict, man of godless mercy, was a physician who delivered babies when women wanted babies and terminated them when they didn’t. “Here is the boy,” he said, holding newborn Homer up to no one. “Here is the ether.” He believed in rules, but also in exceptions. He wore righteousness like a coat he could take off if the weather turned.

Homer Wells was never adopted — or rather, always unadopted. Sent out, brought back. There was the couple who raised turkeys and thought Homer didn’t talk enough, and the family who liked him just fine until their own child arrived. He became the orphanage’s permanent resident, like an old rug nobody moves because it already fits the room. Larch loved him for it. Called him a “prince of Maine, king of New England.” A hollow crown, but still.

Homer, all gangly limbs and wistful eyes, grew up among the etherized women, the crisp smell of antiseptic, and the soft sobs of lives rearranged. He watched Larch work — learned more than he should’ve. Larch insisted he be trained in obstetrics. “You must be of use,” Larch said. “Being of use is the only rule.” A rule, Homer thought later, that stung like a slap when love got in the way.

But Homer, devout in his own way, balked at the abortions. He wouldn’t do them. Couldn’t. It wasn’t morality in the rigid sense. More a kind of numb reverence. He believed in babies, maybe because no one had believed enough in him to keep him.

And then Candy and Wally came in — golden, coastal, meant-for-each-other. Wally, the war-bound apple farmer’s son with movie-star teeth; Candy, his girlfriend, luminous in the distracted way of someone whose future is already drawn. They arrived to deal with an unwanted pregnancy. Candy left without the baby. Homer stayed behind in their lives.

When Wally left for World War II, Homer went to work on the Worthingtons’ apple farm — Ocean View. There was sunshine and cider, the warm breath of cows, a gentler pace than the antiseptic corridors of St. Cloud’s. Mr. Rose ran the cider house where the migrant Black workers stayed, and the cider house had its own rules tacked on the wall, typed and yellowing. Nobody read them. They were written by white men in offices, rules for people who didn’t live there.

Homer didn’t fit easily into the Worthington world. He was too gentle, too precise. But Candy stayed. And they — how to say it — drifted. Into each other. First with guilt, then with grace. And then back into guilt again. The kind of love that can’t wear daylight but doesn’t need darkness either. Just rooms without clocks. She cried the first time. Then not again.

When Wally’s plane went down over Burma and he was presumed dead, Candy and Homer let their love bloom in earnest. A child came: Angel. But the lie was already being born alongside him. They told the world Angel was adopted from St. Cloud’s. And to preserve the myth, Homer returned — not as an orphan, now, but as its director.

Dr. Larch had died. Ether overdose. Or maybe grief overdose. Or maybe both. He left Homer his practice, and a falsified medical degree. “Be of use,” the note read. The paperwork — forged. The intention — unshakable. Homer became the doctor he had refused to be. He performed abortions now. He delivered babies. He stitched up the world, quietly, one woman at a time.

Meanwhile, the cider house simmered.

Mr. Rose, all slow drawl and unspoken pain, had a daughter, Rose Rose — yes, her real name — who one day turned up pregnant. She wouldn’t say who the father was. But her body said enough. And when it became clear it was her own father, Homer — now less naive, more scarred — performed the abortion. And then helped her run. Somewhere else. Anywhere else.

Not long after, Mr. Rose slit his own throat.

The rules on the wall stayed there. Unread. The cider house emptied. The rules had never been made for the people who lived there. Homer, who had tried to follow rules, who had tried to make his own — he now saw their failure up close. There are no rules for incest. No rules for war. No rules for love that’s both wrong and necessary.

Then Wally came home. Alive. But not whole. Burma had left him sterile. No children. But here was Angel, the adopted boy. His boy, by another man’s blood. Everyone kept the secret.

Candy married Wally. Homer remained at St. Cloud’s. Angel grew up believing Homer was just a dear old friend.

And so Homer Wells, born unclaimed, stayed among the unclaimed. King of the orphans. Prince of unwanted choices. He became the man Larch hoped he’d be, but not in the way Larch had imagined. He did the work — the abortions, the deliveries, the gentle kindness of hands that know both birth and grief. He never left. He never told.

And that — that’s the knot at the center of The Cider House Rules. The thing that Irving never says aloud, but whispers through all the ether and apples and silences: that moral clarity is often a lie, a luxury of the distant. That the people who write the rules are not always the ones who must live under them. That mercy, when it comes, wears dirty hands.

Homer never got adopted, but he did become something better. Something harder. A man who could live inside contradiction, not solve it. A man who made peace with the rules he broke.

The orphans kept coming. The women kept coming. Homer, always waiting.

“You are of use,” he’d whisper.
And mean it.