Do Not Become Alarmed (Meloy)

Do Not Become Alarmed 
Maile Meloy, 2017
Penguin Publishing Group
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780735216525


Summary
From a beloved, award-winning writer, the much-anticipated novel about what happens when two families go on a tropical vacation—and the children go missing.

When Liv and Nora decide to take their families on a holiday cruise, everyone is thrilled. The ship's comforts and possibilities seem infinite. The children—two eleven-year-olds, an eight-year-old, and a six-year-old—love the nonstop buffet and the independence they have at the Kids' Club.

But when they all go ashore in beautiful Central America, a series of minor misfortunes leads the families farther and farther from the ship's safety. One minute the children are there, and the next they're gone.

What follows is a riveting, revealing story told from the perspectives of the adults and the children, as the once-happy parents—now turning on one another and blaming themselves—try to recover their children and their lives.

Celebrated for her ability to write vivid, spare, moving fiction, Maile Meloy shows how quickly the life we count on can fall away, and how a crisis changes everyone's priorities.

The fast-paced, gripping plot of Do Not Become Alarmed carries with it an insightful, provocative examination of privilege, race, guilt, envy, the dilemmas of modern parenthood, and the challenge of living up to our own expectations.
 (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—February 15, 1972
• Where—Helena, Montana, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard University; M.F.A., University of California-Irvine
• Awards—PEN/Malmud Award (more below)
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California


Maile Meloy (pronounced MY-lee) is an Americcan novelist and short story writer. Her novels include Do Not Become Alarmed (2017), A Family Daughter (2006), Liars and Saints (2003). She has published the story collections, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (2009) and Half in Love (2002). Both Ways was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review and one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times.

She has also written a well regarded trilogy for young readers, starting with The Apothecary (2011), a New York Times bestseller and winner of the 2012 E.B. White Award. Next in the series came The Apprentice (2013) and, finally, The After-Room (2017).

Meloy’s short stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, and Best American Short Stories 2015. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Slate, and O.

Recognition
Meloy has received The Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as two California Book Awards, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2007, she was chosen as one of Granta’s 21 Best Young American Novelists. (Adapted from Wikipedia and the author's website. Retrieved 6/19/2017.)

Book Reviews
[A]n earnest and surprisingly generic children-in-jeopardy novel, one that makes few demands on us and doesn’t deliver much, either…[although] Meloy pokes around in some profound subject matter.… Meloy’s portrait of well-meaning but still ugly Americans resonates.… Near the end of this novel, one of the luckier parents thinks: "He and his family had escaped, leaving chaos behind them. It was the American way." 
Dwight Garner - New York Times


[I]t should be a literary event, a big summer book.… [I]t has a strong premise…; it addresses big topics…. Its writing is uniformly excellent. So what happened?… [D]espite these moments, the book is essentially a write-off. To begin with, it’s a thriller without thrills.... Again and again, Do Not Become Alarmed trots out a vague sense of social responsibility, while focusing emotionally on a handful of nervous Americans.
Charles Finch - Washington Post


This is one of those can’t-stop-turning-the-pages novels, which quickly reveals itself to be something more than a page-turner… [Meloy] writes with breathless tension yet lets her characters breathe; you believe these children and their desperate parents, and find yourself utterly entrenched in their fate.
Seattle Times


A taut, nervy thriller.… Meloy has a keenly intuitive ear for family dynamics, first-world privilege, and all the ways that human nature can adapt to the unthinkable.
Entertainment Weekly


A marital reboot becomes a zip line to disaster in Maile Meloy’s holiday cruise-set thriller Do Not Become Alarmed, in which the children’s moral complexity outstrips that of their parents.
Vogue


Nothing pairs better with summer than a suspense that will keep you guessing (especially when it involves a cruise ship). The pulse-inducing unputdownable tale about the disappearance of four children on a family cruise, Do Not Become Alarmed is a powerful suspense that will leave readers asking themselves if family truly keeps us safe.
Redbook


In crafting this high-stakes page-turner, Meloy excels as a master of suspense. Though some of the circumstances seem piled on for the sake of melodrama…, the story is nonetheless engrossing for all its nerve-racking twists and turns.
Publishers Weekly


A taut, gripping thriller…[an] entertaining examination of privileged, modern families.
Library Journal


[A] propulsive drama…infusing literary fiction with criminality and terror.…Meloy compounds the suspense in this gripping and incisive tale by orchestrating a profoundly wrenching shift in perspective…. Meloy’s commanding, heart-revving, and thought-provoking novel has enormous power and appeal.
Booklist


(Starred review.) The plot unfolds with terrifying realism.… This writer can apparently do it all—New Yorker stories, children's books, award-winning literary novels, and now, a tautly plotted and culturally savvy emotional thriller. Do not start this book after dinner or you will almost certainly be up all night.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for Do Not Become Alarmed …then take off on your own:

1. What do you think of the characters at the book's onset? Consider all four (or six) of the adults, as well as the children. Do you prefer some over others? Do any of the characters change over the course of the novel? Do your opinions of them change?

2. Talk about the ways in which three of the characters — the autistic, the actor, and the diabetic — require specialized attention and love from Liv and Nora. How do their needs affect the dynamics of the group as a whole? How do they affect the two women?

3. In what ways does the author Maile Meloy (pronounced MY-lee) first begin to ratchet up the sense of peril before the actual disappearance of the children?

4. How does each adult respond/react to the missing children? Are their reactions appropriate? Are they believable (in terms of how actual human beings, rather than fictional characters would react)? What fault lines are exposed in the adults' relationships by the kidnapping?

5. Liv thinks "The karmic bus had mowed her down." What does she mean? In what way does she feel she is being punished for the disaster? What about the other two women?

6. The book deals in serious topics, especially having to do with rich Americans who use the poverty-ridden Latin America as a playground. Does this issue resonate with you? Or do you consider that American tourists offer poorer cultures an economic opportunity?

7. Can/should the children's disappearance be laid at the feet of any of the women? Does their lack of caution border on neglect or carelessness? Or could something like this happen without anyone being "to blame"?

8. A couple of references (hints) are made that the children are too soft and that their parents have not prepared them adequately for the world. Is that criticism or observation fair or not—are these children coddled? Are American children in general overprotected? Or has, say, the media made them smarter or savvier than you were as a child?

9. Have you ever been on a cruise before? Does the author do a good job of portraying the sense of pleasure in which the travelers are enveloped? Has reading Do Not Become Alarmed made you think twice about taking another cruise...or ever taking a first one?

10. What do you make of the book's title? What is its significance?

11. The novel allows different characters to express their point of view. Did you find the shifting perspectives confusing, enriching, distracting …or something else?

12. What was your experience reading the novel? Were you on the seat of your pants? What about the ending—do you find it satisfying? 

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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