Romance Reader's Guide to Life (Pywell)

The Romance Reader's Guide to Life 
Sharon Pywell, 2017
Flatiron Books
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250101754


Summary
As a young girl, Neave was often stuck in a world that didn’t know what to do with her. As her mother not unkindly told her, she was never going to grow up to be a great beauty.

Her glamorous sister, Lilly, moved easily through the world, a parade of handsome men in pursuit. Her brother didn’t want a girl joining his group of friends.

And their small town of Lynn, Massachusetts, didn’t have a place for a girl whose feelings often put her at war with the world — often this meant her mother, her brother, and the town librarian who wanted to keep her away from the Dangerous Books she really wanted to read.

But through an unexpected friendship, Neave finds herself with a forbidden copy of The Pirate Lover, a steamy romance, and Neave discovers a world of passion, love, and betrayal. And it is to this world that as a grown up she retreats to again and again when real life becomes too much.

Neave finds herself rereading The Pirate Lover more than she ever would have expected because as she gets older, life does not follow the romances she gobbled up as a child. When Neave and Lilly are about to realize their professional dream, Lilly suddenly disappears.

Neave must put her beloved books down and take center stage, something she has been running from her entire life. And she must figure out what happened to Lilly — and if she’s next.

Who Neave turns to help her makes Sharon Pywell's The Romance Reader's Guide to Life one of the most original, entertaining, exciting, and chilling novels you will read this year. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Sharon Pywell grew up on the edge of the snow belt in upstate New York. She has published in a number of literary quarterlies and held residencies at the MacDowell Colony. Her previous novels include What Happened to Henry and Everything After. Professionally, she has run dog kennels and dance companies, though she now teaches and writes in Boston. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
A lively blend of suspense, comedy, and paranormal fiction and women’s fiction, Romance Reader’s Guide to Life pulls the reader into the post WW II life of two sisters, one a daring, world wise woman eager to find and exercise her power as an adult, the other a shy bookworm who never quite manages to fit in neatly with what the world expects of a woman. With touching irony, it turns out that the more experienced of the two is not as adept at seeing people for who they are as her less worldly sister. Fans of Hoffman’s Practical Magic will appreciate the touch of whimsy that turns what might have been a heavy handed sermon of a story in the hands of a less adroit writer into a touching portrayal of the bond sisters share.  Read more…
Clara Kless - LitLovers


Beautiful and perfectly paced.
People


Haunting yet touching.… Equal parts beautiful and heartbreaking, rippling outward like a pebble in a lake.
Charleston Post and Courier


One of those books that pulls and tugs at you.
Denver Post


[A] tongue-in-cheek commentary on the influence of romances on societal expectations.… This is simultaneously the leisurely coming-of-age of two sisters, a bodice-ripper pastiche, and a psychological thriller that never truly embraces its romantic aspects.
Publishers Weekly


A compelling mix of mystery, love, family dynamics, and growing up. Smart and smartly told.… A pirate romance novel, as unlikely as that seems, plays an important role, revealing to Neave some of the secrets of life.
Library Journal


Equal parts mystery, romance, and family saga, with a dash of dark comedy, this book has something for fans of all genres.
Booklist


[A] zesty fictional stew. The author throws us off balance from the get-go, as older sister Lilly opens the story by revealing that she’s dead.… Smart, funny, and compulsively readable: this one may finally win the under-recognized author the wider audience her talent deserves.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Discuss Mrs. Daniels’s defense of romance novels: "The first thing that might happen to you is that people mock you for reading them. They think that women who read romances are idiots. I assure you, they are not…They are people who trust that love exists and that it is more powerful than bad logic or bad writing." What do you think? Did The Romance Reader’s Guide to Life change your opinion of romance novels?

2. When Electra Gates meets Basil Le Cherche, her mood is that "of a huntress who, at the same moment that she understood herself to be engaged in a blood sport, felt that she was the hunted as well as the hunter." She revels in these new feelings. Discuss the power dynamics within The Pirate Lover and how they compare to those within Neave and Lilly’s stories.

3. Neave tells us: "This was the first time in my life, listening to Mrs. Daniels with The Pirate Lover and Leaves of Grass all tangled up in my head, that I felt the truth of this — everybody died. Such a dark discovery, but also so wild and satisfying. There was a pull toward dark things in the poem and in the romance, both. What did it mean that there was this terrible sweet pull?" How is that "terrible sweet pull" explored in The Romance Reader’s Guide to Life? What is the connection between pleasure and danger for the various characters?

4. Neave’s mother often criticizes her daughter’s outspokenness and lack of femininity: "Happy women aren’t like that, Neave. They understand that others depend on them and they shape themselves to others. You’re just going to make yourself unhappy by insisting on your own way. Smart women don’t do that…You’re going to have to start damping yourself down. You’ll do yourself mischief if you don’t. You’ll end up alone. You’ll be too hard to love." Discuss how this novel explores and subverts traditional gender roles. Would you consider it feminist?

5.  Neave is shocked to learn that Snyder read The Pirate Lover, too: "My brother had turned the same pages that I had, but read an entirely different story." Compare and contrast the romance novels and comics that are so important to the siblings growing up. Have you ever experienced men and women interpreting the same thing very differently?

6. From "Where She Is Now," Lilly wryly remarks: "If you’ve never been treated like a goddess, I’ll tell you, it messes with your judgment. You forget, if you ever knew it to begin with, that lots  of goddesses end up sacrificed on some altar or other." Do you agree? Can you think of a modern-day "altar" and a modern-day "goddess" who sits upon it?

7. Lilly tells Boppit: "Neave’s so vulnerable…. You know that book she rereads every year? The one with the pirate? She actually thinks that that book is the truth: good triumphing over evil, love triumphing over everything." He responds: "But that is the truth, Lilly." Do you agree? Does The Romance Reader’s Guide to Life argue that good is the more powerful force in the universe, or evil?

8. Boppit argues that "glamour has always required a little touch of tramp. It’s why your ‘Fast Girl’ hot pink and ‘Vampy Red’ flew out the door. Every girl wants a little Pirate Lover in her life." Be Your Best cosmetics is in large part about female empowerment, encouraging women to achieve success in business, but it stands out from its competitors largely because of its "bad girl" line of makeup. Are those contradictory impulses?

9. The Pirate Lover is very much Electra’s coming-of-age story: "That young woman was gone, and here in her place was a creature who could embrace both battle and lovemaking, and the only opinion in the world besides her own that swayed her was his — because he was hers, chosen with the full freedom of her heart and soul, given to him with the surging fullness of her own desires." Discuss how her story’s resolution compares to Neave’s and Lilly’s. What can they teach us about the relationship between being in love and being independent?

10. The Romance Reader’s Guide to Life plays with genre in surprising ways, juxtaposing the romance novel with the more traditional historical narrative, and including a talking, cross-dressing dog and narration from the afterlife. Did this unconventional structure work for you? What does it suggest about the difficulty (or futility) of categorizing books or elevating certain genres above others?

11. In her author’s note, Sharon Pywell writes: "In Romancelandia, sex and power were tangled, even interdependent. But wasn’t that the way it really was? Weren’t they also linked in The Taming of the Shrew, in Wuthering Heights, in the evening news reports of recent domestic murders?" Neave discovers this, too, when she has similar kinds of revelations reading The Pirate Lover and books by Walt Whitman and Charlotte Bronte. Do you agree with the suggestion that romance novels are rooted in the classics, in some universally shared idea of the mating dance?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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