Where We Belong (Giffin)

Where We Belong
Emily Giffin, 2012
St. Martin's Press
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312554187 

Summary
The author of five blockbuster novels, Emily Giffin, delivers an unforgettable story of two women, the families that make them who they are, and the longing, loyalty and love that binds them together.

Marian Caldwell is a thirty-six year old television producer, living her dream in New York City. With a fulfilling career and satisfying relationship, she has convinced everyone, including herself, that her life is just as she wants it to be. But one night, Marian answers a knock on the door... only to find Kirby Rose, an eighteen-year-old girl with a key to a past that Marian thought she had sealed off forever.

From the moment Kirby appears on her doorstep, Marian’s perfectly constructed world—and her very identity—will be shaken to its core, resurrecting ghosts and memories of a passionate young love affair that threaten everything that has come to define her.For the precocious and determined Kirby, the encounter will spur a process of discovery that ushers her across the threshold of adulthood, forcing her to re-evaluate her family and future in a wise and bittersweet light.

As the two women embark on a journey to find the one thing missing in their lives, each will come to recognize that where we belong is often where we least expect to find ourselves—a place that we may have willed ourselves to forget, but that the heart remembers forever. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—March 20, 1979
• Where—Baltimore, Maryland, USA
• Raised—Naperville, Illinois
• Education—B.A., Wake Forest University; J.D., University of Virginia
• Currenbtly—lives in Atlanta, Georgia


Emily Giffin is the bestselling American author of eight novels commonly categorized as "chick lit." More specifically, Giffin writes stories about relationships and the full array of emotions experienced within them.

Giffin earned her undergraduate degree at Wake Forest University, where she also served as manager of the basketball team, the Demon Deacons. She then attended law school at the University of Virginia. After graduating in 1997, she moved to Manhattan and worked in the litigation department of Winston & Strawn. But Giffin soon determined to seriously pursue her writing.

In 2001, she moved to London and began writing full time. Her first young adult novel, Lily Holding True, was rejected by eight publishers, but Giffin was undaunted. She began a new novel, then titled Rolling the Dice, which became the bestselling novel Something Borrowed.

2002 was a big year for Emily Giffin. She married, found an agent, and signed a two-book deal with St. Martin's Press. While doing revisions on Something Borrowed, she found the inspiration for a sequel, Something Blue.

In 2003, Giffin and her husband left England for Atlanta, Georgia. A few months later, on New Year's Eve, she gave birth to identical twin boys, Edward and George.

Something Borrowed was released spring 2004. It received unanimously positive reviews and made the extended New York Times bestsellers list. Something Blue followed in 2005, and in 2006, her third, Baby Proof, made its debut. No new hardcover accompanied the paperback release of  in 2007. Instead, Giffin spent the year finishing her fourth novel and enlarging her family. Her daughter, Harriet, was born May 24, 2007.

More novels:
2008 - Love the One You're With
2010 - Heart of the Matter
2012 - Where We Belong
2014 - The One & Only
2016 - First Comes Love
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia.)

Visit the author's website.
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Book Reviews
Book clubs will have a field day with this one. Thorny mother-daughter relationships and secrets we keep from loved ones burn up the pages.
USA Today

 
After five charming relationship-themed hits, Emily Giffin had a lot to live up to with Where We Belong.  Luckily, the author executes with a thoughtful finesse that makes this easily her best work yet.  [Where We Belong] is that special type of story that takes priority over getting to bed on time. And the payoff is well worth it.
Boston Globe


The issue about secrets isn’t about keeping them.  It’s the reveal and its consequences.  That’s the challenge faced by the characters in Emily Giffin’s new, briskly paced…Where We Belong.  Taking a somewhat more somber tone than she did in her [previous] bestselling novels, Giffin’s approach and style mature in this latest effort.
Philadelphia Inquirer
 

Emily Giffin ranks as a grand master.  Over the course of five best-selling novels, she has traversed the slippery slopes of true love, lost love, marriage, motherhood, betrayal, forgiveness and redemption that have led her to be called ‘a modern-day Jane Austen.’  With Giffin’s use of humor, honesty, originality and, like Austen, a biting social commentary, this modern-day ‘woman’s novel’ sits easily on nightstands and in beach bags.  Even Austen would find it hard to put down.
Chicago Sun-Times


Emily Giffin’s Where We Belong is a literary Rorschach test.  The book, while thoroughly entertaining, will also prod readers to examine choices they’ve made in their lives.  It will compel them to muse about things they’d like to do over, to do differently, to do better…[and] gracefully examines themes of identity, family and forgiveness.
Miami Herald

 
Emily Giffin has a wonderful way with words.  [Where We Belong] is an emotionally powerful story that will ring true with women who have given a child away and with those who grew up wondering where they came from.  Giffin may be working with a premise and plot that is fairly simple, but there’s nothing lightweight about the emotional turbulence she creates.
Ft. Worth Star-Telegram


Emily Giffin’s new novel about the legacy of adoption, Where We Belong, imagines what happens when an 18-year-old girl tracks down her birth mother…the latest in a string of provocative, imaginative novels that began in 2004 with SOMETHING BORROWED.  All the characters [here] are on a journey to find ‘where we belong,’ and Giffin knits together their journeys with a masterly hand.
Seattle Times


[T]oo suspenseful to be called chick lit and too relationship-centered to be labeled a thriller. But most readers will have little time to think of a genre for Emily Giffin’s latest novel as they race through this gripping story about the reunion of a high school senior and the woman who put her up for adoption 18 years earlier.
Connecticut Post


Graceful and inviting prose, careful plotting and vivid characterizations…The coming together of two people who share a genetic heritage and little else is dramatically and emotionally risky.  But Giffin makes the most of the opportunity, and Where We Belong had me riveted.
Winston-Salem Journal


Kirby Rose turns 18, hops on a Greyhound bus from St. Louis to Manhattan and with no warning, knocks on the Fifth Avenue apartment door of her birth mother, Marian Caldwel.... Giffin's moving storyline offers great pacing, believable, disparate characters and a plot that could easily careen into maudlin territory, unlikable stereotypes or over-the-top emotionalism but never does: a sweet, even-keeled winner
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. One of the themes in Where We Belong is what happens when we keep secrets. Discuss the reasons people keep secrets. Describe the secrets in this book and the reasons various characters had for keeping them. Do you think secrets and lies are one in the same? How do the characters in the novel accept or come to terms with the secrets they've kept or the ones that have been kept from them?

2. Discuss the issue of forgiveness in the book. Which character has the most to forgive? Do you think Conrad will ever be able to fully forgive Marian? Has Marian forgiven her parents? Has Kirby forgiven hers?

3. Kirby and Marian both change over the course of this story. What are the most significant ways they've changed? What risks do they each take? Was there any decision or action you disagree with on the part of Marian or Kirby?

4. Are people more influenced by their genes or their upbringing? How does this question relate to the events in the novel? How do you think the various characters in this book might define family?

5. Why do you think the author chose the title "Where We Belong"? What meaning, or meanings, does the title have in relation to the story and characters?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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