Girl in Translation 
Jean Kwok, 2010
Penguin Group USA
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594487569


Summary
Introducing a fresh, exciting Chinese-American voice, an inspiring debut about an immigrant girl forced to choose between two worlds and two futures.

When Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to Brooklyn squalor, she quickly begins a secret double life: exceptional schoolgirl during the day, Chinatown sweatshop worker in the evenings. Disguising the more difficult truths of her life-like the staggering degree of her poverty, the weight of her family's future resting on her shoulders, or her secret love for a factory boy who shares none of her talent or ambition—Kimberly learns to constantly translate not just her language but herself back and forth between the worlds she straddles.

Through Kimberly's story, author Jean Kwok, who also emigrated from Hong Kong as a young girl, brings to the page the lives of countless immigrants who are caught between the pressure to succeed in America, their duty to their family, and their own personal desires, exposing a world that we rarely hear about.

Written in an indelible voice that dramatizes the tensions of an immigrant girl growing up between two cultures, surrounded by a language and world only half understood, Girl in Translation is an unforgettable and classic novel of an American immigrant—a moving tale of hardship and triumph, heartbreak and love, and all that gets lost in translation. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Hong Kong, China
• Raised—Brooklyn, New York City, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard University; M.F.A., Columbia   
  University
• Currently—lives in the Netherlands

Jean Kwok was born in Hong Kong and immigrated to Brooklyn as a young girl. Jean received her bachelor's degree from Harvard and completed an MFA in fiction at Columbia. She worked as an English teacher and Dutch-English translator at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and now writes full-time. She has been published in Story magazine and Prairie Schooner. (From the publisher.)

More
Her own words:

Although Girl in Translation is a work of fiction and not a memoir, the world in which it takes place is real.

The youngest of seven children and a girl at that, I was a dreamy, impractical child who ran wild through the sunlit streets of Hong Kong. No one was more astonished than my family when I turned out to be quite good at school. We moved to New York City when I was five and my only gift was taken from me. I did not understand a word of English

We lost all our money in the move to the United States. My family started working in a sweatshop in Chinatown. My father took me there every day after school and we all emerged many hours later, soaked in sweat and covered in fabric dust. Our apartment swarmed with insects and rats. In the winter, we kept the oven door open day and night because there was no other heat in the apartment.

As I slowly learned English my talent for school re-emerged. When I was about to graduate from elementary school, I was tested by a number of exclusive private schools and won scholarships to all of them. However, I'd also been accepted by Hunter College High School, a public high school for the intellectually gifted, and that was where I wanted to go.

By then, my family had stopped working at the sweatshop and we'd moved to a run-down brownstone in Brooklyn Heights that had been divided into formerly rent-controlled apartments. It was a vast improvement, but there was still no money to spare. If I didn't get into a top school with a full financial aid package, I wouldn't be able to go to college. Although I loved English, I didn't think it was a practical choice and devoted myself to science instead. In my last year in high school, I worked in three laboratories: the Genetic Engineering and Molecular Biology labs at Sloan-Kettering Cancer Research Center and the Biophysics/Interface Lab at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Brooklyn.

I was accepted early to Harvard and I'd done enough college work to take Advanced Standing when I entered, thus skipping a year and starting as a sophomore in Physics. It was in college that I realized that I could follow my true calling, writing, and switched into English and American Literature.

I put myself through Harvard, working up to four jobs at a time to do so: washing dishes in the dining hall, cleaning rooms, reading to the blind, teaching English, and acting as the director of a summer program for Chinese immigrant children.  I graduated with honors, then took a job as a professional ballroom dancer in New York City: waltzing in high heels by day and writing by night. After a few years, I left ballroom dance and went to Columbia to do my MFA in fiction. Before I graduated from Columbia, two stories of mine had been published in Story. In my last year at Columbia, I worked fulltime for a major investment bank as a member of a five-person computer team that addressed the multimedia needs of the Board of Directors.

I then moved to Holland for love and went through the process of adjusting to another culture and learning another language again. Since then, my work has also been published in Prairie Schooner and the Nuyorasian Anthology, and I am a Featured Writer in the Holt high school textbook Elements Of Literature (eds. 2007, 2009, 2011), in which my story appears alongside those of authors such as Alice Walker, Pearl S. Buck, and Sandra Cisneros. I taught English at Leiden University in the Netherlands and worked as a Dutch-English translator until I finished Girl in Translation. After it was accepted for publication, I quit to write fulltime. I live in the Netherlands with my husband and two sons. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
Jean Kwok takes two well-trod literary conceits - coming of age and coming to America - and renders them surprisingly fresh in her fast-moving, clean-prosed immigrants' tale, Girl in Translation. Along with her widowed mother, 11-year-old Kimberly (Ah-Kim) Chang is transported from the balmy familiarity of her native Hong Kong to the icy, inhospitable projects of 1980s Brooklyn—a girl with little grasp of the language and cultural mores of her newly adopted homeland, and even less financial means. How Kimberly fights through almost obscene marginalization to forge her own version of the American dream is consistently compelling, even if Girl's needlessly soapy conclusion seems unworthy of what came before.
Entertainment Weekly

A resolute yet naïve Chinese girl confronts poverty and culture shock with equal zeal when she and her mother immigrate to Brooklyn in Kwok's affecting coming-of-age debut. Ah-Kim Chang, or Kimberly as she is known in the U.S., had been a promising student in Hong Kong when her father died. Now she and her mother are indebted to Kimberly's Aunt Paula, who funded their trip from Hong Kong, so they dutifully work for her in a Chinatown clothing factory where they earn barely enough to keep them alive. Despite this, and living in a condemned apartment that is without heat and full of roaches, Kimberly excels at school, perfects her English, and is eventually admitted to an elite, private high school. An obvious outsider, without money for new clothes or undergarments, she deals with added social pressures, only to be comforted by an understanding best friend, Annette, who lends her makeup and hands out American advice. A love interest at the factory leads to a surprising plot line, but it is the portrayal of Kimberly's relationship with her mother that makes this more than just another immigrant story.
Publishers Weekly

Living in squalor among rats and roaches in a virtually abandoned unheated apartment building in Brooklyn, NY, 11-year-old Kimberly Chang narrates how, after recently immigrating from Hong Kong, she and her mother strive to eke out a life together working in an illegally run sweat shop. Though she was once the top-ranked pupil in her class in Hong Kong, Kimberly's English skills are so limited that she must struggle to keep up in school while still translating for her mother and attempting to hide the truth of her living situation from her well-to-do classmates and only true friend, Annette. Drawing on her own experiences as an immigrant from Hong Kong (though she herself went to Harvard and Columbia, while Kimberly earns a spot at Yale), Kwok adeptly captures the hardships of the immigrant experience and the strength of the human spirit to survive and even excel despite the odds. Verdict: Reminiscent of An Na's award-winning work for younger readers, A Step from Heaven, this work will appeal to both adults and teens and is appropriate for larger public libraries, especially those serving large Asian American populations. —Shirley N. Quan, Orange Cty. Lib., Santa Ana, CA
Library Journal

An iteration of a quintessential American myth—immigrants come to America and experience economic exploitation and the seamy side of urban life, but education and pluck ultimately lead to success. Twelve-year-old Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong and feel lucky to get out before the transfer to the Chinese. Because Mrs. Chang's older sister owns a garment factory in Brooklyn, she offers Kimberly's mother—and even Kimberly—a "good job" bagging skirts as well as a place to live in a nearby apartment. Of course, both of these "gifts" turn out to be exploitative, for to make ends meet Mrs. Chang winds up working 12-hour-plus days in the factory. Kimberly joins her after school hours in this hot and exhausting labor, and the apartment is teeming with roaches. In addition, the start to Kimberly's sixth-grade year is far from prepossessing, for she's shy and speaks almost no English, but she turns out to be a whiz at math and science. The following year she earns a scholarship to a prestigious private school. Her academic gifts are so far beyond those of her fellow students that eventually she's given a special oral exam to make sure she's not cheating. (She's not.) Playing out against the background of Kimberly's fairly predictable school success (she winds up going to Yale on full scholarship and then to Harvard medical school) are the stages of her development, which include interactions with Matt, her hunky Chinese-American boyfriend, who works at the factory, drops out of school and wants to provide for her; Curt, her hunky Anglo boyfriend, who's dumb but sweet; and Annette, her loyal friend from the time they're in sixth grade. Throughout the stress of adolescence, Kimberly must also negotiate the tension between her mother's embarrassing old-world ways and the allurement of American culture. A straightforward and pleasant, if somewhat predictable narrative, marred in part by an ending that too blatantly tugs at the heartstrings.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Throughout Girl in Translation, the author uses creative spelling to show Kimberly’s mis-hearing and misunderstanding of English words. How does the language of the novel evolve as Kimberly grows and matures? Do you see a change in the respective roles that English and Chinese play in the narrative as it progresses?

2. The word "translation" figures prominently in the title of the novel, and learning to translate between her two languages is key to Kimberly’s ability to thrive in her new life. Does she find herself translating back and forth in anything other than language? Clothing? Priorities? Expectations? Personality or behavior? Can you cite instances where this occurs, and why they are significant to the story as a whole?

3. Kimberly has two love interests in the book. How are the relationships that Matt and Curt offer different? Why do you think she ultimately chooses one boy over the other? What does that choice say about her? Can you see a future for her with the other boy? What would change?

4. In many ways Kimberly takes over the position of head of household after her family moves to New York. Was this change in roles inevitable? How do you imagine Ma feels about it? Embarrassed? Grateful? In which ways does Ma still fulfill the role of mother?

5. Kimberly often refers to her father, and imagines how her life might have been different, easier, if he had lived. Do you think she is right?

6. Kimberly’s friend Annette never seems to grasp the depths of Kimberly’s poverty. What does this say about her? What lesson does this experience teach Kimberly? Is Kimberly right to keep the details of her home life a secret?

7. Kimberly believes that devoting herself to school will allow her to free her family from poverty. Does school always live up to her expectations? Where do you think it fails her? How does it help her succeed? Can you imagine the same character without the academic talent? How would her life be different? What would remain the same? Is Kimberly right to believe that all of her potential lies in her talent for school? Must qualities like ambition, drive, hope, and optimism go hand in hand with book smarts?

8. Think about other immigrant stories. How is Kimberly’s story universal? How is it unique? How does Kimberly’s Chinese-American story compare to other immigrant stories? Would it change if she were from a different country or culture?

9. Kimberly lives in extreme poverty. Was anything about her circumstances surprising to you? How has reading Girl in Translation affected your views of immigration? How can you apply these lessons in your community?

10. The story is set in the 1980s. Do you think immigrant experiences are much different today? What has changed? What has remained the same?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Girl on the Train 
Paula Hawkins, 2015
Penguin Group (USA)
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594633669


Summary
A debut psychological thriller that will forever change the way you look at other people's lives.

Rachel takes the same commuter train every morning. Every day she rattles down the track, flashes past a stretch of cozy suburban homes, and stops at the signal that allows her to daily watch the same couple breakfasting on their deck.

She’s even started to feel like she knows them. "Jess and Jason," she calls them. Their life—as she sees it—is perfect. Not unlike the life she recently lost.

And then she sees something shocking. It’s only a minute until the train moves on, but it’s enough. Now everything’s changed. Unable to keep it to herself, Rachel offers what she knows to the police, and becomes inextricably entwined in what happens next, as well as in the lives of everyone involved. Has she done more harm than good?

Compulsively readable, The Girl on the Train is an emotionally immersive, Hitchcockian thriller and an electrifying debut. (From the publisher.)

See the 2016 film version with Emily Blunt.
Listen to our Movies Meet Book Club Podcast as Hollister and O'Toole discuss the movie and book.

Author Bio
• Birth—August 26, 1972
• Where—Harare, Zimbabwe
• Education—Oxford University
• Currently—lives in London, England, UK

Paul Hawkins was born and raised in Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe). Her father was an economics professor and financial journalist. In 1989, when she was 17, she moved to London to study for her A-Levels at Collingham College, an independent college in Kensington, West London. She later read philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford Unviersity. After graduation, she spent 15 years as a journalist — as a business reporter for The Times and later as a freelancer for a number of publications. She also wrote a financial advice book for women, The Money Goddess.

Sometime in 2009, Hawkins began to write romantic comedy under the pen name Amy Silver. She wrote four novels, including Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista, but none ever achieved commercial success. Eventually, she decided to challenge herself by writing in a darker mode. Giving up her freelance work to write full-time on fiction, Hawkins ended up borrowing money from her family to make ends meet.

But after only six months, Hawkins finished her novel, and in 2015 The Girl on the Train was published. A complex thriller, with themes of domestic violence, alcohol, and drug abuse, the book became an instant bestseller. It has sold close to 20 million copies in 15 countries and 40 languages and in 2016 was adapted to film starring Emily Blunt. Hawkin's second novel, Into the Water, was released in 2017. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/28/2017.)

Book Reviews
The Girl on the Train has more fun with unreliable narration than any chiller since Gone Girl…. Paula Hawkins [is] no slouch when it comes to trickery or malice…. Ms. Hawkins scrambles the timing of scenes, with Megan gone in one chapter and then present in the next. She also shifts well among her narrators' points of view to keep the reader on edge, and only as the book progresses do these different perspectives begin to dovetail. Scrambling a story is easy, but it's done here to tight, suspenseful effect.
Janet Maslin - New York Times


Paula Hawkins has come up with an ingenious slant on the currently fashionable amnesia thriller.... Hawkins juggles perspectives and timescales with great skill, and considerable suspense builds up along with empathy for an unusual central character.
Guardian (UK)


Like its train, the story blasts through the stagnation of these lives in suburban London and the reader cannot help but turn pages.... The welcome echoes of Rear Window throughout the story and its propulsive narrative make The Girl on the Train an absorbing read.
Boston Globe


Given the number of titles that are declared to be "the next" of a bestseller...book fans have every right to be wary. But Paula Hawkins’ novel The Girl on the Train just might have earned the title of "the next Gone Girl."
Christian Science Monitor


[A] twisty thriller.... It’s being called the next Gone Girl.
USA Today


[The Girl on the Train] pulls off a thriller's toughest trick: carefully assembling everything we think we know, until it reveals the one thing we didn't see coming.
Entertainment Weekly


Gone Girl fans will devour this psychological thriller.... Hawkins’s debut ends with a twist that no one—least of all its victims—could have seen coming.
People


Hawkins’s taut story roars along at the pace of, well, a high-speed train.... Hawkins delivers a smart, searing thriller that offers readers a 360-degree view of lust, love, marriage and divorce.
Good Housekeeping


There’s nothing like a possible murder to take the humdrum out of your daily commute.
Cosmopolitan


Rachel takes the same train into London every day, daydreaming about the lives of the occupants in the homes she passes. But when she sees something unsettling from her window one morning, it sets in motion a chilling series of events that make her question whom she can really trust.
Woman’s Day


(Starred review.) [A] psychologically astute debut.... [Hawkins] deftly shifts between the accounts of the addled Rachel, as she desperately tries to remember what happened, Megan, and, eventually, Anna, for maximum suspense. The surprise-packed narratives hurtle toward a stunning climax, horrifying as a train wreck and just as riveting.
Publishers Weekly


[U]nfortunately, by using [different narrators for each chapter], debut author Hawkins confuses the reader. With only a brief look into backstory, undeveloped characters offer no reason or motivation for their actions, and none of them is likable. [A] disappointing psychological thriller. —Marianne Fitzgerald, Severna Park H.S., MD
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Desperate to find lives more fulfilling than her own, a lonely London commuter imagines the story of a couple she's only glimpsed through the train window in Hawkins' chilling, assured debut.... Even the most astute readers will be in for a shock as Hawkins slowly unspools the facts, exposing the harsh realities of love and obsession's inescapable links to violence.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We have 2 sets of questions: one from the publisher and a second set graciously offered to LitLovers by Jennifer Johnson, ML, MLIS, Reference Librarian, Springdale (Arkansas) Public Library. Thank you, Jennifer.

1. We all do it—actively watch life around us. In this way, with her own voyeuristic curiosity, Rachel Watson is not so unusual. What do you think accounts for this nosy, all-too-human impulse? Is it more extreme in Rachel than in the average person? What is so different about her?

2. How would you have reacted if you’d seen what Rachel did from her train window—a pile of clothes—just before the rumored disappearance of Megan Hipwell? What might you or she have done differently?

3. In both Rachel Watson’s and Megan Hipwell’s marriages, deep secrets are kept from the husbands. Are these marriages unusual or even extreme in this way? Consider how many relationships rely on half-truths? Is it ever necessary or justifiable to lie to someone you love? How much is too much to hide from a partner?

4. What about the lies the characters tell to themselves? In what ways is Rachel lying to herself? Do all people tell themselves lies to some degree in order to move on with their lives? Is what Rachel (or any of the other characters) is doing any different from that? How do her lies ultimately affect her and the people around her?

5. A crucial question in The Girl on the Train is how much Rachel Watson can trust her own memory. How reliable are her observations? Yet since the relationship between truth and memory is often a slippery one, how objective or "true" can a memory, by definition, really be? Can memory lie? If so, what factors might influence it? Consider examples from the book.

6. One of Rachel’s deepest disappointments, it turns out, is that she can’t have children. Her ex-husband Tom’s second wife Anna is the mother to a young child, Evie. How does Rachel’s inability to conceive precipitate her breakdown? How does the topic of motherhood drive the plot of the story? What do you think Paula Hawkins was trying to say about the ways motherhood can define women’s lives or what we expect from women’s domestic lives, whether as wives, mothers, or unmarried women in general?

7. Think about trust in The Girl on the Train. Who trusts whom? Who is deserving of trust? Is Rachel Watson a very trustworthy person? Why or why not? Who appears trustworthy and is actually not? What are the skills we use to make the decision about whether to trust someone we don’t know well?

8. Other characters in the novel make different assumptions about Rachel Watson depending on how or even where they see her. To a certain extent, she understands this and often tries to manipulate their assumptions—by appearing to be a commuter, for instance, going to work every day. Is she successful? To what degree did you make assumptions about Rachel early on based on the facts and appearances you were presented? How did those change over time and why? How did your assumptions about her affect your reading of the central mystery in the book? Did your assumptions about her change over its course? What other characters did you make assumptions about? How did your assumptions affect your interpretation of the plot? Having now finished The Girl on the Train, what surprised you the most?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

Jennifer's Questions
1. Discuss the voyeuristic curiosity of Rachel. Through these internal and dialog interactions with three different women throughout the book, the author has forced the reader to become guilty of similar curiosity. What does this reflect about reality and society? How reflective is this book on the current societal situation?

2. What similarities can we identify about Anna, Rachel, and Megan? What differences can we identify and how, as the book progress, do those differences fade away as they become more similar?

3. Paula Hawkins’ book has been identified as a “Hitchcockian thriller.” What characteristics make this statement due? How different is the book from Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Psycho?

4. Paula Hawkins has 15 years’ experience as a journalist. Does Girl on the Train reflect a journalistic style?

5. Born and raised in Zimbabwe and living in London since 1989, what can we identify from the book that shows her diverse cultural background?

6. Which of the below photos represent how you viewed Rachel?


(Questions by Jennifer Johnson. Please feel free to use them, online of off, with attribution to both Jennifer and LitLovers. Thanks.)

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The Girl She Used to Be
David Cristofano, 2009
Grand Central Publishing
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780446582216


Summary
When Melody Grace McCartney was six years old, she and her parents witnessed an act of violence so brutal that it changed their lives forever. The federal government lured them into the Witness Protection Program with the promise of safety, and they went gratefully. But the program took Melody's name, her home, her innocence, and, ultimately, her family. She's been May Adams, Karen Smith, Anne Johnson, and countless others—everyone but the one person she longs to be: herself. So when the feds spirit her off to begin yet another new life in another town, she's stunned when a man confronts her and calls her by her real name.

Jonathan Bovaro, the mafioso sent to hunt her down, knows her, the real her, and it's a dangerous thrill that Melody can't resist. He's insistent that she's just a pawn in the govern-ment's war against the Bovaro family. But can she trust her life and her identity to this vicious stranger whose acts of violence are legendary? (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Education—University of Maryland
• Currently—lives in Washington, DC

David Cristofano has earned degrees in Government & Politics and Computer Science from the University of Maryland at College Park and has worked for different branches of the Federal Government for over a decade. 

His short works have been published by Like Water Burning and McSweeneys.  He currently works in the Washington, D.C. area where he lives with his wife, son and daughter.  The Girl She Used to Be is his first novel. (From Amazon.)

Summary
[R]eaders who like vampire stories should go for this romantic fairy tale. But before he went all goofy on us, Cristofano seemed to be headed somewhere more interesting than the Lifetime network.
Marilyn Stasio - New York Times

Intense...the emotions of a woman caught in Melody's unlikely scenario ring deliciously, scarily true.
People

Cristofano's intense, romantic debut revolves around the Federal Witness Protection Program. When Melody Grace McCartney is six, she and her family witness mobster Tony Bovaro gut Jimmy "the Rat" Fratello at a restaurant in New York's Little Italy. They go into WITSEC in exchange for testifying against Bovaro. Eight years later, due to a foolish slip on Melody's part, a Bovaro goon finds her parents and kills them, but WITSEC whisks Melody to safety. By the time she's an adult, Melody has gone through a numbing parade of eight identities, the latest as a math teacher. She's about to enter yet another new life when she meets John Bovaro (aka Jonathan), who at age 10 also saw his father slicing up Jimmy. Jonathan, who's been tracking Melody's movements ever since and is obsessed with making things right, persuades her to run off with him. Despite Melody's questionable attraction to Jonathan, Cristofano's mad love scenario sizzles like garlic in hot olive oil.
Publishers Weekly

This is a compulsively readable, skillfully constructed first novel with well-drawn characters and a plot that twists and turns to what seems the best possible conclusion, marking Cristofano as a writer to watch. —Michele Leber
Booklist

Discussion Questions
1. From the first sentence of the story, the narrator asks you to take part in the action. Why do you suppose David Cristofano decided to tell this story in the first person from the point of view of a woman? Who would have more at stake in witness protection, a man, woman, or child?

2. Early in the novel, Melody appears conflicted in having feelings for both Sean and Jonathan. What is driving her need for affection? When does she realize she has made a decision? What solidifies this decision?

3. At various points in the novel, the reader is given a glimpse into the previous six identities Melody has had. Which identity acts as a turning point? What event occurred that changed the trajectory of her life?

4. The roles of good and evil are repeatedly swapped in Melody’s life. Do both sides—the Feds and the Mafia—possess both good and evil, or are they really polar opposites of one another? How does Melody influence your view of each side?

5. Though romantically inexperienced, Melody longs to be noticed by both Sean and Jonathan, trying different ways to capture their eyes. In what ways has she felt invisible to men her whole life? How has she overcompensated?

6. Due to her constant relocation, lack of parental guidance and inability to form lasting relationships, Melody has the body of a woman but the emotional and experiential psyche of a girl. How is this dangerous? What additional problems does this pose for her, given the life she must lead? How does it influence her interaction with all of the men in her life?

7. Melody’s initial interplay with every authority figure—Farquar, Sean, Donovan, Sanchez—is semi-hostile. What makes Melody react this way? How does Jonathan’s influence have her responding differently by the time she meets his family?

8. Melody and Sean share a few conversations that expose the failings of WITSEC for both the protectors and the protected. From each of their points of view, how is the system not working? How does it work as intended? How is WITSEC more or less vital to the Justice Department today?

9. Jonathan tries to distinguish himself from his Mafia ties in several ways. How has he successfully achieved this? In what ways is he a typical Mafioso?

10. Melody is scarred by the explicit violence she witnesses at age six. Repeatedly, she attempts to rid Jonathan of his reactionary viciousness to seemingly topical problems. Though later in the story, she finds security in his violent behavior. What changes her mind? Would you react the same way? Why or why not?

11. Throughout the entire novel, the importance of identity is explored. How is the life Melody has led different from that of a foster child? Of a prisoner? Of an individual living under communist rule? How are they the same?

12.How do the tangible things in Melody’s story—the food, clothes, cars, hotels—reflect her happiness, security and satisfaction? Are these things metaphorical or incidental? Would her story be different if things were reversed? Why or why not?

13. Being in WITSEC for twenty years has had a negative impact on Melody. In what ways has it made her stronger?

14. What is the significance of the chapter titles? How do they differ? What is the special significance of the final chapter’s title?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Girl Through Glass 
Sari Wilson, 2016
HarperCollins
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062326270


Summary
An enthralling literary debut that tells the story of a young girl’s coming-of-age in the cutthroat world of New York City ballet—a story of obsession and perfection, trust and betrayal, beauty and lost innocence.

In the roiling summer of 1977, eleven-year-old Mira is an aspiring ballerina in the romantic, highly competitive world of New York City ballet.

Enduring the mess of her parents’ divorce, she finds escape in dance—the rigorous hours of practice, the exquisite beauty, the precision of movement, the obsessive perfectionism. Ballet offers her control, power, and the promise of glory. It also introduces her to forty-seven-year-old Maurice DuPont, a reclusive, charismatic balletomane who becomes her friend and mentor.

Over the course of three years, Mira is accepted into the prestigious School of American Ballet, run by the legendary George Balanchine, and eventually becomes one of “Mr. B’s girls”—a dancer of rare talent chosen for greatness. As she ascends in the ballet world, her relationship with Maurice intensifies, touching dark places within herself and sparking unexpected desires that will upend both their lives.

In the present day, Kate, a professor of dance at a midwestern college, embarks on a risky affair with a student that threatens to obliterate her career and capsize the new life she has painstakingly created for her reinvented self.

When she receives a letter from a man she’s long thought dead, Kate is hurled back into the dramas of a past she thought she had left behind.

Moving between the past and the present, Girl Through Glass illuminates the costs of ambition, perfection, secrets, and the desire for beauty, and reveals how the sacrifices we make for an ideal can destroy—or save—us. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Oberlin College; Stanford University (Fellowship)
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City


Sari Wilson grew up in a Victorian brownstone in Brooklyn Heights in New York City and has also lived in San Francisco, Chicago, and Prague. She now lives in Brooklyn, again, with her husband, the cartoonist Josh Neufeld, and their daughter.

Wilson's debut novel Girl Through Glass (2016) is, in many ways, a deeply personal book based on her early experiences in the classical dance world. As a child, she studied ballet at Neubert Ballet Theater, a once-storied Carnegie Hall studio.

Later, she studied at Harkness Ballet and as a scholarship student at Eliot Feld’s New Ballet School. She went on to study and perform modern dance with Stephan Koplowitz and at Oberlin College, where she majored in history and minored in dance.

In an NPR interview, Wilson talked about having to leave the world of dance:

It was my life, and I hit puberty and then sort of the dark side of things revealed themselves, and I struggled through for a long time, and then finally left that world after a second career-ending surgery. And then I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what had happened, and [Girl Through Glass] is really my investigation into that.

After college—and after dance—Wilson attended Stanford University (1997-1999) as a Wallace Stegner Fellow, where she was a teaching assistance for Tobias Wolff.

She went on to work for some 10 years as a writer, editor, and curriculum developer. She has had a particular interest in interactive narrative and story design, championing graphic literature as an educational tool. Along with her husband, she started Dojo Graphics, a studio creating comics and motion comics for television, film, and the Internet. Their clients have included Lion Television/PBS, ABC, and Lifetime.

Wilson has also been a Fine Arts Work Center Fellow in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and has received a residency from The Corporation of Yaddo.Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in literary journals such as Agni, Oxford American, and Slice. (Adapted from the author's website. Retrieved 2/22/2016.)

Book Reviews
A tragic depiction of a girl adored far too soon by a grown-up world…. Artfully rendered through the viewpoint of an adolescent dancer who performs with great maturity while remaining fatefully naive.... So visceral, so real.
Washington Post


[T]he story is a uniformly engrossing look into the fabled world of hypercompetitive 1970s ballet. Mira and Maurice’s relationship has the fairy tale feel of Beauty and the Beast, but the pages brim with the realism of the gritty.... Wilson writes lovingly of ballet and elevates the coming-of-age story with a dark undercurrent about the cost of obsession.
Publishers Weekly


[A]n absorbing novel, rich with detail both about ballet and New York. Alongside the unusual setting of Mira's realm of dance are the more familiar emotional struggles of a young woman dealing with adolescence, complicated by precocious talent. —Melanie Kindrachuk, Stratford P.L., Ont.
Library Journal


(Starred review.) A nimble, nuanced psychological drama that leaps through time and place with an appropriate and assured agility.... Wilson speaks with vibrant authority and acute vulnerability as she exposes the conflicted and competitive behind-the-scenes world of professional ballet.
Booklist

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available. In the meantine, use these LitLovers talking points to kick-start a discussion for Girl Through Glass...then take off on your own:

1. Girl Through Glass alternates between two time frames, an adult Kate and young Mira. Describe "both characters—how does the older Kate differ from her younger self?

2. Follow-up to Question 1: How does Kate's past life, as Mira, shape her present life—including her bitterness, her lackluster career, and her current relationship with a student?

3. Talk about the world behind the scenes at the American Ballet Theater and/or the American Ballet School. How does Girl Through Glass portray the life of the dancers, including the competition among them and their physical ordeals?

4. Other stories, both books and film, have explored the obsessive, competitive, and sometimes seamy side of the ballet world—Hans Christian Andersen's The Red Shoes (and film, 1948 ), Turning Point (film, 1977), Center Stage (film, 2000), Black Swan (film, 2010), Breaking Pointe (TV, 2012), Flesh and Bone (TV 2015), and Maggie Shipstead's Astonish Me (novel, 2014). If you have read or watched any of those, how does Girl Through Glass compare?

5. What does the world of dance offer Mira as she navigates her way through her parents' unraveling marriage? Talk about the ways in which the dance world saves and/or fails her.

6. What drives balletomanes and the character of Maurice? Does he make you feel uneasy, even queasy...or not? What does Mira gain from Maurice...and vice versa? What does Maurice's infatuation with Mira suggest about the power of a young body? Describe the nuances of the relationship between Maurice and Mira? Who is in control? Does the power equation change?

7. Maurice instills in Mira the "understanding of what you have to give up to be beautiful." What does Mira (and any other dancer) have to give up, and is the sacrifice worth it?

8. Where you surprised by what Kate uncovers when she returns to New York? Does the revelation address unanswered questions or tie up loose ends? Does the conclusion feel overly coincidental...or does it work?

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

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Girl Waits with Gun  (Kopp Sisters Series, 1)
Amy Stewart, 2015
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780544409910


Summary
An enthralling novel based on the forgotten true story of one of the nation’s first female deputy sheriffs.

Constance Kopp doesn’t quite fit the mold.

She towers over most men, has no interest in marriage or domestic affairs, and has been isolated from the world since a family secret sent her and her sisters into hiding fifteen years ago.

One day a belligerent and powerful silk factory owner runs down their buggy, and a dispute over damages turns into a war of bricks, bullets, and threats as he unleashes his gang on their family farm. When the sheriff enlists her help in convicting the men, Constance is forced to confront her past and defend her family—and she does it in a way that few women of 1914 would have dared.  (From the publisher.)

This is the first novel in the series. Lady Cop Makes Trouble (2016)  is the second.

Author Bio
• Born—ca. 1968-69
• Where—N/A
• Education—B.S., M.S., University of Texas-Austin
• Awards—(See below)
• Currently—lives in Eureka, California


Amy Stewart is the author of eight books. Her debut novel Girl Waits With Gun, based on a true story, was published to wide acclaim in 2015. Lady Cop Makes Trouble, the second in the Kopp Sisters series, came out in 2016, also to favorable reviews.

She has also written six nonfiction books on the perils and pleasures of the natural world, including four New York Times bestsellers: The Drunken Botanist (2013), Wicked Bugs (2011), Wicked Plants (2009), and Flower Confidential (2009).

She lives in Eureka, California, with her husband Scott Brown, who is a rare book dealer. They own a bookstore called Eureka Books. The store is housed in a classic nineteenth-century Victorian building that Amy very much hopes is haunted.

Media
Since her first book was published in 2001, Stewart has appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition and Fresh Air, she’s been profiled in the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle, and she’s been featured on CBS Sunday Morning, Good Morning America, the PBS documentary The Botany of Desire, and—believe it or not—TLC’s Cake Boss.

Amy has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, and many other newspapers and magazines. She is the co-founder of the popular blog GardenRant.

Honors & Awards
Amy’s books have been translated into twelve languages, and two of them—Wicked Plants and Wicked Bugs—have been adapted into national traveling exhibits that appear at botanical gardens and museums nationwide.

She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the American Horticulture Society’s Book Award, and an International Association of Culinary Professionals Food Writing Award. In 2012, she was invited to be the first Tin House Writer-in-Residence, a partnership with Portland State University, where she taught in the MFA program.

Lectures & Events
Amy travels the country as a highly sought-after public speaker whose spirited lectures have inspired and entertained audiences at college campuses such as Cornell and the University of Minnesota, corporate offices, including Google (where she served tequila and nearly broke the Internet), conferences and trade shows, botanical gardens, bookstores, and garden clubs nationwide. Go here to find out where she’s heading next. (Author bio from the author's website.)

Book Reviews
A fine, historically astute novel…. The sisters' personalities flower under Stewart's pen, contributing happy notes of comedy to a terrifying situation…. Stewart integrates the beliefs and conditions of a vanished way of life into the story, enriching it without playing the intrusive docent. Transportation, domestic arrangements, dress, food, the place of women and the lot of the worker are neatly stitched in, as are the isolation of the country and the public glare of the city, and, most entertainingly, sensational, inaccurate newspaper accounts of events. And then there is Constance: sequestered for years in the country and cowed by life, she develops believably into a woman who comes into herself, discovering powers long smothered under shame and resignation. I, for one, would like to see her return to wield them again in further installments.
New York Times


Constance Kopp, the feisty heroine of Amy Stewart’s charming novel Girl Waits With Gun, sounds like the creation of a master crime writer. At nearly 6 feet tall, Constance is a formidable character who can pack heat, deliver a zinger and catch a criminal without missing a beat. Based on the little-known story of the real Constance Kopp, one of America’s first female deputy sheriffs, the novel is an entertaining and enlightening story of how far one woman will go to protect her family.
Washington Post


The Kopps are the stars of Stewart's new zippy, winsome novel, Girl Waits With Gun. Filled with historical detail without being weighed down by it, the novel is a cinematic story of the women, the siege instigated by their powerful enemy, and their brave efforts in the face of real violence.
Los Angeles Times


Well-written with sharply drawn characters and the occasional plot twist, Girl Waits With Gun is an absorbing throwback to a bygone era.
Associated Press


[A] confident, charming, sure-footed debut—a fresh, winning and delightful mystery with a warm heart, impish humor and a heroine who quietly shatters convention.
Dallas Morning News

Stewart gives us three sisters whose bond—scratchy and well-worn but stronger for it, as can happen with family ties—is unspoken but effortless. Girl Waits With Gun might sometimes be a story in which truth is stranger than fiction, but it also makes for pretty charming fiction.
NPR

 
This rollicking western about a woman who'll do anything to save her family is based on the true tale of one of the country's first female deputy sheriffs.
People


[A]n unforgettable, not-to-be-messed-with heroine—one of the nation’s first female deputy sheriffs. It all begins circa 1910 when an earnest request entangles a family with the town thug. The rest is kickass history.
Marie Claire

Fans of strong female characters will find their new favorite heroine in Constance Kopp, who takes a bold stand against a gang that is threatening her family. Debut novelist Amy Stewart's Girl Waits With Gun is a historical thrill ride, racing through funny, tragic, and terrifying scenes. Even better, it's based on the true story of one of the United States' first female deputy sheriffs and her brave, amazing sisters.
Cosmopolitan


If fictional accounts of real women are your thing, then settle in with Girl Waits With Gun and you won't be let down. Amy Stewart recreates one of the world's first female deputy sheriffs, set in the early 1900s, and you will be cheering Constance Kopp on through every page. The race to catch a murderer is thrilling in itself, but the powerful woman driving the book is what will really keep readers turning pages!
Bustle


(Starred review.) Hardened criminals are no match for pistol-packing spinster Constance Kopp and her redoubtable sisters in this hilarious and exciting period drama by bestseller Stewart (The Drunken Botanist).... A surprising Kopp family secret, a kidnapped baby, and other twists consistently ratchet up the stakes throughout, resulting in an exhilarating yarn.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) [E]ngaging.... Stewart...creates a welcome addition to the genre of the unconventional female sleuth. Colorful, well-drawn characters come to life on the page, and historical details are woven tightly into the narrative. —Sarah Cohn, Manhattan Coll. Lib., Bronx, NY
Library Journal


(Starred review.) A sheer delight...[Girl Waits with Gun] packs the unexpected, the unconventional, and a serendipitous humor into every chapter. Details from the historical record are accurately portrayed by villains and good guys alike, and readers will cross their fingers for the further adventures of Constance and Sheriff Heath.
Booklist


(Starred review.) Stewart crafts a solid, absorbing novel based on real-life events—though they're unusual enough to seem invented.... Stewart deftly tangles and then unwinds a complicated plot with nice period detail.... More adventures involving gutsy Constance...and a lively cast of supporting characters would be most welcome.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. From horse-drawn wagons to carrier pigeons, the norms of 1914 obviously no longer exist today. Talk about the world Constance and her sisters live in, in New Jersey and on their farm.  Are there any aspects of life in 1914 you wish had survived?

2. After Henry Kaufman’s first visit to their farm, Constance views her sisters from afar and thinks, "They looked like those fuzzy figures in a picture postcard, frozen in place, staring out from some world that no longer existed" (p. 52). What does Constance mean? What is the world that no longer exists? Why is it gone, and what has replaced it?

3.  What is it about Lucy Blake's story that haunts Constance so? Why do you think she helps her when interfering with Henry Kaufman has already brought a threat to her family?

4. It’s clear that Constance is a unique woman for her time. But Sheriff Heath is also unusual in that he takes the Kopp sisters seriously when no one else would. Why do you think he helps them? Discuss their unlikely friendship.  Were you surprised at the conditions under which both the Kopp sisters and Sheriff Heath are forced to pursue justice? What would you have done in their shoes? Did you spot the chemistry between Constance and Sheriff Heath?

5. At their Wyckoff farm, both Norma and Constance were encouraged to continue their mother’s "family tradition" of fear and distrust. Constance remembers how she used to struggle with this as a girl in Brooklyn. Identify some of the ways that the Kopp sisters were taught to protect themselves, and from what. How do you feel about Mother Kopp’s instruction? In what ways did the sisters fall in line, and in what ways did they fail to heed her warnings? Do you think they felt justified in ignoring her warnings?

6. Francis reminds Constance of a day in New York when their mother nearly yanked his arm out of its socket to keep him from picking up an errant onion, spilled on the street by another boy. How is this story emblematic of the way the Kopps--and, perhaps, many women of the era—were taught to view the world? Thinking of this story, what does Constance wish differently for Fleurette, and why?

7. On page 384, Fleurette suggests that their year of harassment at the hands of Henry Kaufman was also the most interesting year of their lives, and therefore might not have been such a bad thing in the end. She asks her sisters, "Can you honestly say that you wish Henry Kaufman had never run us down on Market Street?" What do you think Constance's answer is? What if it were you—would you agree with Fleurette?

8. The Kopps’ sister-in-law Bessie brings over a picnic near the end of the book that includes, among other delicacies, aspic. Have you ever tried aspic? Would you? What other foods from the past are you happy to see gone?

9. The author created a signature cocktail for the book called the New Jersey Automobile based on an actual 1910s-era cocktail called the Automobile. What would Norma think about an alcoholic beverage being named after their run-in with Henry Kaufman?

10. There’s a lot of talk these days about characters’ likability. Would you call the Kopp sisters likable? Do you think they even liked each other? Does it matter?

11. Did you suspect the family secret? When did you figure it out?
(Questions issued from the author's website.)

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The Girl Who Came Home:  A Novel of the Titanic
Hazel Gaynor, 2014
William Morrow
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062316868


Summary
A novel inspired by true events surrounding the Addergoole 14.

Members of a church parish in County Mayo, Ireland, set sail together on RMS Titanic, all hoping to find a brighter future in America. It is believed that the losses suffered by the parish in the Titanic disaster were the largest proportionate loss of life from any locality.

Seventeen year old Maggie Murphy feels bittersweet about her journey across the Atlantic Ocean. While her future lies in an unknown new place, her heart remains in the country with Seamus, the sweetheart she is leaving behind. Maggie is one of the fortunate few passengers in steerage who survives on April 15th, 1912. Waking up alone in a New York hospital, she vows never to speak of the terror and panic of that night again.

Weaving in and out of Maggie’s voyage and Chicago, 1982, Gaynor introduces the reader to twenty-one year old Grace Butler. When her Great Nana Maggie shares the painful secret she harbored for almost a lifetime about Titanic, the revelation gives Grace new direction—and leads her and Maggie to unexpected reunions with those thought to be lost long ago.

Gaynor’s poignant tale seamlessly blends fact and fiction, exploring the tragedy’s impact and its lasting repercussions on survivors and their descendants. With snippets of actual Marconigrams—telegrams sent through the Marconi Company between Titanic and Carpathia and between Carpathia and the White Star Line office—The Girl Who Came Home is a story of enduring love and forgiveness, spanning seventy years, and a real source of fascination for history buffs and Titanic enthusiasts. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 16, 1971
• Where—Yorkshire, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Manchester Metropolitan University
• Award—Cecil Day Lewis Award for Emerging Writers
• Currently—lives in County Kildare, Ireland


Hazel Gaynor is an author and freelance writer in Ireland and the UK and was the recipient of the Cecil Day Lewis Award for Emerging Writers. The Girl Who Came Home: A Novel of the Titanic is her first novel. Her second novel, published in 2015, is A Memory of Violets: A Novel of London's Flower Sellers.

Hazel is a regular guest blogger and features writer for national Irish writing website for which she has interviewed authors such as Philippa Gregory, Sebastian Faulks, Cheryl Strayed, and Mary Beth Keane.

Hazel has appeared on TV and radio and her writing has been featured in the Irish Times and the Sunday Times Magazine. Originally from Yorkshire, England, Hazel now lives in Ireland with her husband, two young children and an accident-prone cat. (From the author.)

Visit the author's webpage.
Follow Hazel on Facebook.

Book Reviews
A beautifully imagined novel rich in historic detail and with authentic, engaging characters—I loved this book. Hazel Gaynor is an exciting new voice in historical fiction.
Kate Kerrigan, author of Ellis Island and City of Hope

Discussion Questions
1. We all know the fate of Titanic. What impact does this knowledge have on you as you read the book? How do you feel about the Ballysheen group as they leave their homes and as they board Titanic at Queenstown?

2. Kathleen Dolan is single-minded in her decision to take her niece back to America with her. Discuss Kathleen’s role in Maggie’s life and also her role in influencing the others in the Ballysheen group to travel to America.

3. Grace makes a brave decision to drop out of her college course to stay at home with her mom. Does Grace have a choice in this? How does her decision and the sacrifices she makes for her family contrast with the decisions forced upon Maggie in 1912.

4. Who are you rooting for as the drama of the events of April 14th unfold?

5. Many of the warnings and predictions of disaster which the Ballysheen group experience i.e. the reading of the tea leaves, the warning from the stranger at Queenstown, the dropped "lucky" sovereign, the "belly up" fish in the Holy Well are all based in recorded facts. The "near miss" with the moored boat in Southampton docks at the very start of Titanic’s journey is also an event which really happened. Discuss the many aspects of superstition and myth which surround Titanic.

6. Maggie and the other survivors were in their lifeboat for eight hours before they were picked up by The Carpathia and they were then on board The Carpathia for several days. Had you considered the experience of the survivors before reading the book? Are you surprised at the extent of their ordeal, after getting safely off Titanic?

7. There are several key relationships in the novel. Discuss your thoughts on the relationship between any of these: Grace and Maggie; Maggie and Seamus; Maggie and her Aunt Kathleen; Catherine Kenny and her sister Katie; Maggie, Peggy and Katie; Harry and Peggy.

8. Emigration was very common in Ireland in 1912 with many families separated by the belief and hope that there was a better standard of living to be found in America. The "American wakes" were a common occurrence across the country, marking the departure of loved ones. Have you experienced emigration in your own family? How would you feel if you had to make a similar decision to that made by the Irish emigrants who set sail on Titanic?

 9. There have been many other shipping tragedies since Titanic. Cunard’s passenger liner, RMS Lusitania (travelling from New York to Liverpool), sank off the coast of Ireland in 1915 when the liner was struck by a torpedo fired from a German submarine. 1,198 civilians lost their lives in the event. In the light of many tragedies with great loss of life, why do you think people continue to be so fascinated by Titanic, a hundred years on?

10. Australian businessman, Clive Palmer, is currently starting construction on a replica of Titanic—Titanic II—which is scheduled to re-create Titanic’s maiden voyage in 2016? There have been very mixed reactions to this among relatives and descendants of Titanic’s passengers and Titanic enthusiasts. What are your thoughts on the project?
(Questions provided by publisher.)

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The Girl Who Chased the Moon
Sarah Addison Allen, 2010
Random House
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780553385595


Summary
In her latest enchanting novel, New York Times bestselling author Sarah Addison Allen invites you to a quirky little Southern town with more magic than a full Carolina moon. Here two very different women discover how to find their place in the world—no matter how out of place they feel.

Emily Benedict came to Mullaby, North Carolina, hoping to solve at least some of the riddles surrounding her mother’s life. Such as, why did Dulcie Shelby leave her hometown so suddenly? And why did she vow never to return? But the moment Emily enters the house where her mother grew up and meets the grandfather she never knew—a reclusive, real-life gentle giant—she realizes that mysteries aren’t solved in Mullaby, they’re a way of life: Here are rooms where the wallpaper changes to suit your mood. Unexplained lights skip across the yard at midnight. And a neighbor bakes hope in the form of cakes.

Everyone in Mullaby adores Julia Winterson’s cakes—which is a good thing, because Julia can’t seem to stop baking them. She offers them to satisfy the town’s sweet tooth but also in the hope of rekindling the love she fears might be lost forever. Flour, eggs, milk, and sugar.... Baking is the only language the proud but vulnerable Julia has to communicate what is truly in her heart. But is it enough to call back to her those she’s hurt in the past?

Can a hummingbird cake really bring back a lost love? Is there really a ghost dancing in Emily’s backyard? The answers are never what you expect. But in this town of lovable misfits, the unexpected fits right in. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Aka—Katie Gallagher
• Birth—ca. 1972
• Where—Ashville, North Carolina, USA
• Education—B.A., University of North Carolina, Asheville
• Currently—lives in Asheville, North Carolina


Garden Spells didn't start out as a magical novel," writes Sarah Addison Allen. "It was supposed to be a simple story about two sisters reconnecting after many years. But then the apple tree started throwing apples and the story took on a life of its own... and my life hasn't been the same since."

North Carolina novelist Sarah Addison Allen brings the full flavor of her southern upbringing to bear on her fiction—a captivating blend of fairy tale magic, heartwarming romance, and small-town sensibility.

Born and raised in Asheville, in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Allen grew up with a love of books and an appreciation of good food (she credits her journalist father for the former and her mother, a fabulous cook, for the latter). In college, she majored in literature—because, as she puts it, "I thought it was amazing that I could get a diploma just for reading fiction. It was like being able to major in eating chocolate."

After graduation in 1994, Allen began writing seriously. She sold a few stories and penned romances for Harlequin under the pen name Katie Gallagher; but her big break occurred in 2007 with the publication of her first mainstream novel, Garden Spells, a modern-day fairy tale about an enchanted apple tree and the family of North Carolina women who tend it. Booklist called Allen's accomplished debut "spellbindingly charming," and the novel became a BookSense pick and a Barnes & Noble Recommends selection.

The Sugar Queen followed in 2008, The Girl Who Chased the Moon in 2009, The Peach Keeper in 2011; and Lost Lake in 2014. Allen's 2015 novel First Frost returned to some of her charaters in Garden Spells.

Since then, Allen has continued to serve heaping helpings of the fantastic and the familiar in fiction she describes as "Southern-fried magic realism." Clearly, it's a recipe readers are happy to eat up as fast as she can dish it out.

Extras
From a 2007 Barnes and Noble interview:

• I love food. The comforting and sensual nature of food always seems to find its way into what I write. Garden Spells involves edible flowers. My book out in 2008 involves southern and rural candies. Book three, barbeque. But, you know what? I'm a horrible cook.

• In college I worked for a catalog company, taking orders over the phone. Occasionally celebrities would call in their own orders. My brush with celebrity? I took Bob Barker's order.

• I was a Star Wars fanatic when I was a kid. I have the closet full of memorabilia to prove it — action figures, trading cards, comic books, notebooks with ‘Mrs. Mark Hamill' written all over the pages. I can't believe I just admitted that.

• While I was writing this, a hummingbird came to check out the trumpet vine outside my open window. I stopped typing and sat very still, mesmerized, my hands frozen on the keys, until it flew away. I looked back to my computer and ten minutes had passed in a flash.

• I love being a writer.

• When asked what book most influenced her career as a writer, here is her response:

Every book I've ever read has influenced me in some way. Paddington Bear books and Beverly Cleary in elementary school. Nancy Drew and Judy Blume in middle school. The sci-fi fantasy of my teens. The endless stream of paperback romances I devoured as I got older. Studying world literature and major movements in college. Who I am, what I am, is the culmination of a lifetime of reading, a lifetime of stories. And there are still so many more books to read. I'm a work in progress. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
Allen's latest (after The Sugar Queen) takes the familiar setup of a young protagonist returning to the small town where her elusive mother was raised, and subverts it by sprinkling just enough magic into the narrative to keep things lively but short of saccharine. Seventeen-year-old Emily Benedict, intent on learning more about her mother, Dulcie, moves in with her grandfather, but is disappointed to find that her grandfather doesn't want to talk much about Dulcie. She soon discovers, though, that many still hold a grudge against Dulcie for the way she treated an old sweetheart before dumping him and disappearing. Luckily, Dulcie's high school adversary, Julia Winterson, back in town to pay down her deceased father's debt, takes a shine to Emily. She's working another quest as well: baking cakes every day with the hope that they'll somehow attract the daughter she gave up for adoption years ago. There are love interests, big family secrets, and magical happenings (color-changing wallpaper, mysterious lights) aplenty as Allen charts the spiraling inter-generational stories, bringing everything together in an unexpected way.
Publishers Weekly

After the death of her mother, Dulcie, Emily moves in with her grandfather in Mullaby, NC, and learns of her mother's part in the Coffey family tragedy. Fortunately, not everyone holds Dulcie's past against Emily—Julia welcomes Emily with a cake and offers a shoulder to lean on, but Julia has troubles, too. She's working off the debt on her father's restaurant so she can sell it and open a bakery far from the town that dismissed her so easily as a teen. Things may change if the romantic Sawyer can persuade Julia to trust him with her heart or if Win Coffey can help Emily expose the truth of her mother's deepest secret. Wallpaper that changes with mood, a sweet scent to call one home, and boys who glow in the moonlight will make readers jealous they can't live in a magical world like Allen's. Verdict: That it is never too late to change the future and that high school sins can be forgiven—these are wonderful messages, but Allen's warm characters and quirky setting are what will completely open readers' hearts to this story. Nothing in it disappoints. Fans of Allen's Garden Spells will snap this up. —Stacey Hayman, Rocky River P.L., OH
Library Journal

In Allen's newest sugar-and-spice Southern fantasy (The Sugar Queen, 2008, etc.), a teenage girl comes to live with her grandfather in a small town where oddity is a way of life. Raised by her selfless, politically active mother Dulcie in Boston, Emily has never met or heard about her grandfather until she comes to live with him in Mullaby, N.C., after Dulcie's sudden death. Emily immediately confronts unexplainable peculiarities: Grandfather Vance turns out to be a shy giant over eight feet tall; the wallpaper in Emily's room changes at will; strange white lights materialize at night in the woods outside her window; objects appear and disappear without reason. And then there are the locals' less-than-warm memories of Dulcie. Emily makes friends with Win, a teenage boy whose family secret requires him to stay inside at night. Win tells Emily that his uncle committed suicide because Dulcie cruelly exposed his secret to the town. Grandfather Vance's neighbor Julia, who has also befriended Emily, was Dulcie's classmate and acknowledges that in high school Dulcie-spoiled, rich and popular-mercilessly teased Julia, then a troubled teen who dyed her hair pink and cut herself. Julia left Mullaby when she was 16 and has come back for a temporary stay only because her father died. Until she pays off his debts, she is running his barbecue restaurant, where she has added cakes and pastries to the menu. What Julia doesn't tell Emily is that the night before she left Mullaby to attend a school for troubled girls in Baltimore, she made love with handsome preppy Sawyer and ended up pregnant. Sawyer, who assumed she had an abortion, is now pursuing Julia again, but there is a secret she has not told him. As the parallel romances of Emily and Win and Julia and Sawyer evolve, the secrets of Mullaby become sources of happiness rather than pain. Fans of Allen's brand of romantic whimsy won't mind the inconsistencies and lapses of logic, but others may cringe at the implausibility.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The legend of the Mullaby lights is front and center in this story. How do legends come to pass? What do they say about a culture or community? Can you imagine something like this happening in your town? Have you ever had a haunting or whimsical experience that led you to a valuable discovery?

2. In Mullaby, barbecue is a celebratory food, meant to be shared. It brings people together. On the other hand, for Julia, cake-baking is a solitary activity, a ceremony she performs alone to feel connected to someone she has lost. Why do you think food is so central to this story? What kind of meaning can cooking, baking, and food take on? What do they mean to you? What kind of food is your city/state known for?

3. Julia finds that baking cakes is the only way she can comfortably express what is truly going on in her heart. What hobby or talent allows you to reveal yourself more clearly to others? Is there something specific about you or something you are good at that you feel draws others to you?

4. From the moment they meet, Win and Emily seem unavoidably drawn to one another. What do you think is the cause of this connection and why does the bond between them grow so quickly? Do you think that this kind or romance would be possible if they were older?

5. Julia takes an immediate liking to Emily, assuming a motherly role. What do you think drews Julia to Emily? Could it be that Julia needed Emily just as much as Emily needed Julia? Have you ever taken a nurturing stance in someone else's life only to find that they were truly the ones rehabilitating you? Furthermore, do you think the relationship between Emily and Julia helped open Julia up to Sawyer? If so, how?

6. Despite the fact that Sawyer mistreated Julia in a painful way, she ultimately forgives him. Do you think that Sawyer deserved Julia’s forgiveness? Do you think that you would forgive someone who had abandoned you in the same way? Do you think that there are limits on what a person can forgive?

7. In the story, we see different characters mourning the loss of loved ones (Emily with her mother, Vance with his wife and daughter, and Julia with her daughter and father). What are the different ways these characters cope with their losses? What do you think their coping mechanisms say about who they are?

8. Julia only moves back to Mullaby under the self-enforced condition that she will leave in two years. Why do you think she returned to Mullaby to save her father’s restaurant when their relationship had been so tenuous? Other than Sawyer, what persuades her to stay in her hometown?

9. Emily has one view of her mother, while the town has a very different view. And Grandpa Vance has yet another understanding. Who is/was the real Dulcie? Do you believe a person can truly change? How might Emily's life have been different if she had known the truth of her mother's past before coming to Mullaby?

10. Many people in Mullaby could be considered misfits. From the most prominent family in town to Julia and Vance, there are a multitude of characters who have the experience of not fitting in. How does this affect their lives? How do some manage to use this to their advantage while others seem to suffer for it? What does this say about the power of belonging? Why do many people, particularly young people, feel the need to belong while others are determined to stand out? Which kind of person are you?

11. Emily's grandfather is a loveable giant. She is completely taken aback when she first sees him. Have you ever met someone who did not meet your expectations at all? How so? Much the same, Julia and Stella's friendship seems like an unlikely pairing. What do you think they gain from their differences? What do you gain from the opposites in your life?

12. At the end of the story, when Vance reveals the truth behind Dulcie’s motivations for the midnight show in the park, Emily is at first incredulous that he has kept this secret for so long. Why do you think he took so long to reveal this? Do you think it was right of him to allow the town to think of her negatively? What would you have done if Dulcie were your daughter?

13. At the beginning of the novel, Emily discovers the grandfather she didn’t know she had, and at the very end, Maddie embarks on a relationship with Julia. What does this story tell us about our blood connections? Do you think that being related to someone binds you to them whether you know them personally or not? What do you think Julia and Maddie’s relationship will look like five or ten years down the road?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Girl Who Fell From the Sky
Heidi W. Durrow, 2010
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781616200152


Summary
Rachel, the daughter of a danish mother and a black G.I., becomes the sole survivor of a family tragedy after a fateful morning on their Chicago rooftop.

Forced to move to a new city, with her strict African American grandmother as her guardian, Rachel is thrust for the first time into a mostly black community, where her light brown skin, blue eyes, and beauty bring a constant stream of attention her way. It’s there, as she grows up and tries to swallow her grief, that she comes to understand how the mystery and tragedy of her mother might be connected to her own uncertain identity.

This searing and heartwrenching portrait of a young biracial girl dealing with society’s ideas of race and class is the winner of the Bellwether Prize for best fiction manuscript addressing issues of social justice. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—June 21, 1969
• Where—N/A
• Raised—Turkey; Germany; Denmark; and
   Portland, Oregon, USA
• Education—B.A., Stanford University; M.S.,
   Columbia University; J.D., Yale Law School
• Awards—Bellwether Prize
• Currently—N/A


Heidi W. Durrow is an American writer, author of The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, and the winner of the 2008 Bellwether Prize for Fiction.

Early Life and Education
Durrow, the daughter of a white Danish immigrant and an African-American Air Force man, grew up in part overseas in Turkey, Germany, and Denmark. In 1980 her family settled in Portland, Oregon, where she attended Jefferson High School. She majored in English at Stanford University and wrote a weekly column for the Stanford Daily graduating in 1991 with Honors. Durrow continued her education at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and received a M.S. in 1992. She then attended Yale Law School and received her J.D. in 1995.

Career
Durrow’s career began at Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York City where she worked as a corporate litigator on antitrust, commercial contracts, and employment discrimination cases. She left Cravath in 1997 to pursue a literary career.

Durrow worked as a consultant to the National Basketball Association and National Football League as a Life Skills trainer from 2000-2006.

Durrow’s first literary publication, “Light-skinned-ed Girl,” appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review Spring/Summer 2005. The story was shortlisted as one of the Top 100 Stories in Best American Short Stories 2006 ed. Ann Patchett. Her writing has also appeared in The Literary Review, Smokelong Quarterly, and Poem/Memoir/Story.

Durrow is a host of the award-winning weekly podcast Mixed Chicks Chat focused on issues of being racially and culturally mixed.

In 2008 Durrow became a founder of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival. An annual free public event, the Festival celebrates stories of the Mixed experience including stories about biracial identity, transracially adopted families, and interracial and intercultural relationships and friendships. The Festival, a fiscally sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts, presents films, readings, workshops, a family event, and the largest West Coast "Loving Day celebration". The Festival also presents the annual Loving Prize for storytellers and community leaders who have shown exceptional dedication to sharing and illuminating the Mixed experience. Past Loving Prize recipients include: writer James McBride, Hapa artist Kip Fulbeck, TV producer and writer Angela Nissel, and scholar Maria P. P. Root. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Although there's a plot twist at the end, the novel isn't driven by suspense. Instead, its energy comes from its vividly realized characters, from how they perceive one another. Durrow has a terrific ear for dialogue, an ability to summon a wealth of hopes and fears in a single line.
Louisa Thomas - New York Times


The Girl Who Fell from the Sky can actually fly.... Its energy comes from its vividly realized characters, from how they perceive one another. Durrow has a terrific ear for dialogue, an ability to summon a wealth of hopes and fears in a single line.
New York Times Book Review


A heartbreaking debut.... Keeps the reader in thrall.
Boston Globe


Death, disappointment and loss are constants. The characters all struggle to make sense of a world they can't seem to belong in, racially or economically. And the structure of the novel, with each chapter told from a different character's viewpoint, has a sort of "Rashomon" quality that builds tension around the rooftop mystery. Durrow's novel is an auspicious debut, winner of the Bellwether Prize for socially conscious fiction. She has crafted a modern story about identity and survival, although some of the elements come together a little too neatly. Still, this is a fresh approach to an old idea. The Girl Who Fell From the Sky is not just a tale of racial ambiguity but a human tragedy.
Lisa Page - Washington Post


[An] affecting, exquisite debut novel.... Durrow's powerful novel is poised to find a place among classic stories of the American experience.
Miami Herald


Like Catcher in the Rye or To Kill a Mocking Bird.... A captivating tale that shouldn't be missed.
Denver Post


Hauntingly beautiful prose.... Exquisitely told.... Rachel's tale has the potential of becoming seared in your memory.
Dallas Morning News


Durrow fashions a classic fish-out-of-water tale in her brilliant debut, which some compare to Toni Morison's The Bluest Eye in its exploration of race and identity. It comes as no surprise that The Girl Who Fell from the Sky was awarded the 2008 Bellwether Prize, the award founded by author Barbara Kingsolver to support literature of social responsibility. This is certainly not an easy read, with each chapter told from a different character's viewpoint with a "Rashomon quality that builds tension around the ... mystery," and readers may have to schedule some time for emotional recovery (Washington Post). However, Durrow's novel is ultimately a powerful and ultimately uplifting work of fiction.
Bookmarks Magazine


Stunning.... What makes Durrow’s novel soar is her masterful sense of voice, her assured, nuanced handling of complex racial issues—and her heart.
Christian Science Monitor


Durrow has written a story that is quite literally breathtaking. There were times when I found myself gasping out loud.... I was pulled along each step of the way, wanting to know more.
Elle


The Girl Who Fell from the Sky is that rare thing: a post-postmodern novel with heart that weaves a circle of stories about race and self-discovery into a tense and sometimes terrifying whole.
Ms. Magazine


Rachel’s voice resonated in my reading mind in much the same way as did that of the young protagonist of The House on Mango Street. there’s an achingly honest quality to it; both wise and naive, it makes you want to step between the pages to lend comfort.
NPR's Morning Addition


Rachel survived. At age eleven, she lived through a family tragedy and started life over with her paternal grandmother in Portland, Oregon. Set in the 1980s, this debut novel tells of community, family, and self, as blue-eyed, brown-skinned Rachel is forced to examine who she is, and "what" she is, as defined by the people around her and by herself. Told through frequent shifts of time and perspective, the interwoven stories of Rachel, Brick, Laronne, Roger, and Nella offer readers different pieces of the whole, each perspective showing another piece of Rachel's story, as well as the other characters'. This is a tale of self-discovery and coming of age, of honoring the good of the past and letting go. Rachel's story is moving and unsettling—it is also hopeful and healing. The themes addressed are not new, but they raise questions and issues that are relevant and timely. There is no lack of conflict in this novel, but Durrow is not heavy handed with the messages. The characters and their stories are compelling and flawed, but full of strength, intelligence, grace, and beauty. Feelings of love, desperation, and the need to belong are almost palpable. Readers will appreciate the complexity of relationships and perhaps take a closer look at their own beliefs and prejudices. Thoughtful and thought provoking, the book may be challenging for some, both in its nonlinear storytelling and its topic, but it is written with simple eloquence.
VOYA


Durrow's debut draws from her own upbringing as the brown-skinned, blue-eyed daughter of a Danish woman and a black G.I. to create Rachel Morse, a young girl with an identical heritage growing up in the early 1980s. After a devastating family tragedy in Chicago with Rachel the only survivor, she goes to live with the paternal grandmother she's never met, in a decidedly black neighborhood in Portland, Ore. Suddenly, at 11, Rachel is in a world that demands her to be either white or black. As she struggles with her grief and the haunting, yet-to-be-revealed truth of the tragedy, her appearance and intelligence place her under constant scrutiny. Laronne, Rachel's deceased mother's employer, and Brick, a young boy who witnessed the tragedy and because of his personal misfortunes is drawn into Rachel's world, help piece together the puzzle of Rachel's family. Taut prose, a controversial conclusion and the thoughtful reflection on racism and racial identity resonate without treading into political or even overtly specific agenda waters, as the story succeeds as both a modern coming-of-age and relevant social commentary.
Publishers Weekly


Durrow's first novel, inspired by a real event, won the 2008 Bellwether Prize for best fiction manuscript addressing issues of social justice. The young protagonist, Rachel, is the only survivor after her mother apparently threw her and her two siblings from a roof and then jumped to her own death. Like a good mystery, this book builds to the startling revelation of what really happened and why a loving mother would kill her children. But there's much more, and if the novel has a weakness, it's that it oozes conflict. Rachel, who is biracial, is abandoned by her father; a boy who witnesses the rooftop incident has his own difficulties, including a neglectful mother who's also a prostitute. But one can't help but be drawn in by these characters and by the novel's exploration of race and identity. Verdict: With similar themes to Zadie Smith's White Teeth and a tone of desolation and dislocation like Graham Swift's Waterland and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, this is also recommended for readers intrigued by the psychology behind shocking headlines.—Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC
Library Journal


(Starred review.) [An] insightful family saga of the toxicity of racism and the forging of the self.... Durrow brings piercing authenticity to this provocative tale, winner of the Bellwether Prize for Fiction.
Booklist


The grim, penetratingly observed story of a half-black teen and her struggles with racial identity in 1980s America.... Nothing especially groundbreaking here, but the author examines familiar issues of racial identity and racism with a subtle and unflinching eye.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. What is Rachel's central dilemma?

2. What prevented Nella from returning to her family in Denmark?

3. Why does Brick become fascinated with Rachel? What does he ultimately hope for his relationship with her?

4. How do you make sense of Roger's absence from his daughter's life?

5. Why does Rachel develop such a strong bond with Aunt Loretta?

6. Grandma is a church-going woman. But what is most important to her about her religion? What does she want Rachel to value about religion?

7. What does Rachel make of being told she's beautiful?

8. "Grandma's dreams come from hearing about Up North when she was growing up in Texas on a farm, on a road that had no name. Grandma's dream is bigger than her life. I guess at Mor's dreams; having a husband, a family, love. That's the way I would list them. But then I think about it again—her dream maybe was feeling the way she felt with Doug—the way she would smile easy; she would laugh easy; she would play. At least at first. Then the sky in her dream got low too." How would you describe Grandma's dreams? Nella's? Rachel's?

9. If Rachel had a theme song, what would it be?

10. What difference, if any, does it make knowing that the book is inspired by a real event?

11. Do you think that in the age of Obama, biracial/bicultural people will continue to experience the same kinds of stereotypes and stigma that Rachel did?
(Questions from the author's website.)

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The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Millenium Trilogy , 3)
Stieg Larsson, 2007 (Eng. trans., 2009)
Random House
576 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307454560


Summary
The third and final novel in Stieg Larsson’s internationally best-selling Millennium trilogy.

Lisbeth Salander—the heart of Larsson’s two previous novels—lies in critical condition, a bullet wound to her head, in the intensive care unit of a Swedish city hospital. She’s fighting for her life in more ways than one: if and when she recovers, she’ll be taken back to Stockholm to stand trial for three murders.

With the help of her friend, journalist Mikael Blomkvist, she will not only have to prove her innocence, but also identify and denounce those in authority who have allowed the vulnerable, like herself, to suffer abuse and violence. And, on her own, she will plot revenge—against the man who tried to kill her, and the corrupt government institutions that very nearly destroyed her life. (From the publisher.)

Larsson's Millennium trilogy includes The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.

Author Bio 
• Birth—August 15, 1954
• Where—Vasterbotton, Sweden
• Death—November 9, 2004
• Where—Stockholm Sweden

Born in Västerbotten in northern Sweden in 1954, Stieg Larsson had a professional career that bears a striking resemblance to that of the protagonist of his Millennium thrillers, Mikael Blomkvist. Beginning as a graphic designer for the news agency Tidningarnas Telegrambyra (TT), Larsson went on to become the chief editor of Expo, the magazine published by the Expo Foundation, an organization he helped establish in 1995 to combat racism and the Swedish right-wing extremist movement.

Inspired by an old joke shared with a colleague at TT, Larsson admitted he started writing the Millennium novels—The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest—just for fun. Describing them as "pension insurance," Larsson said he enjoyed the process of fiction writing so much that he didn't make contact with a publisher until he had completed the first two and had a third under way.

Though Larsson died of a heart attack in 2004 and never saw any of his books in print, all three were subsequently published in Scandinavia and continental Europe to great acclaim. He left behind the unfinished manuscript for a fourth book in the series. (From Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews 
A thoroughly gripping read that shows off the maturation of the author's storytelling talents…Larsson effortlessly constructs an immensely complicated story line that owes less to the Silence of the Lambs horror genre than to something by John le Carre.... Cutting nimbly from one story line to another, Larsson does an expert job of pumping up suspense while credibly evoking the disparate worlds his characters inhabit.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

Salander is a magnificent creation: a feminist avenging angel.... I cannot think of another modern writer who so successfully turns his politics away from a preachy manifesto and into a dynamic narrative device. Larsson's hatred of injustice will drive readers across the world through a three-volume novel and leave them regretting the final page; and regretting, even more, the early death of a mastery storyteller just as he was entering his prime.
Observer (UK)

[These are] extraordinary novels [with] astonishing impact... breakneck plotting, sympathetic characterization and the kind of startling denouements that occur more frequently than is conventionally considered possible. There is a comparison with that other great work of contemporary entertainment, The Wire, in the rage and clarity with which injustice becomes the driver of a novel way of looking at a society. Be warned: the trilogy...is seriously addictive.
Guardian (UK)

Fans will not be disappointed: this is another roller-coaster ride that keeps you reading far too late into the night. Intricate but flawlessly plotted, it has complex characters as well as a satisfying, clear moral thrust.
Evening Standard (UK)

The exhilarating conclusion to bestseller Larsson's Millennium trilogy (after The Girl Who Played with Fire) finds Lisbeth Salander, the brilliant computer hacker who was shot in the head in the final pages of Fire, alive, though still the prime suspect in three murders in Stockholm. While she convalesces under armed guard, journalist Mikael Blomkvist works to unravel the decades-old coverup surrounding the man who shot Salander: her father, Alexander Zalachenko, a Soviet intelligence defector and longtime secret asset to Säpo, Sweden's security police. Estranged throughout The Girl Who Played with Fire, Blomkvist and Salander communicate primarily online, but their lack of physical interaction in no way diminishes the intensity of their unconventional relationship. Though Larsson (1954–2004) tends toward narrative excess, his was an undeniably powerful voice in crime fiction that will be sorely missed.
Publishers Weekly

[Larsson] is remarkably agile at keeping multiple balls in the air. But it wouldn’t really matter if he weren’t a skilled craftsman because Salander is such a bravura heroine—steel will and piercing intelligence veiling a heartbreaking vulnerability—that we’d willingly follow her through any bramble bush of a plot.... There are few characters as formidable as Lisbeth Salander in contemporary fiction of any kind. She will be sorely missed. —Bill Ot
Booklist

Lisbeth Salander is in big trouble. Again. In the third installment of the late journalist Larsson's unpretty expose of all that is rotten in Sweden, Lisbeth meets her father, who, we learned a couple of books back, is not just her sire but also her mortal enemy. Pater shares her sentiments, so much so that, at the beginning of this trilogy-closer—though there's talk that a fourth Salander novel has been found on Larsson's laptop and is being squabbled over in lawyers' offices—he's apparently tried to exterminate the fruit of his loins. Being the resourceful lass that she is, Lisbeth rises from the grave to take her vengeance. Or, as longtime Larsson hero/alter ego Mikael Blomkvist tells us, she somehow managed to "get back to the farm and swung an axe into Zalachenko's skull." Adds Blomkvist, helpfully, "She can be a moody bitch." So she can, but that's the manner of avenging angels, and Lisbeth has lots of avenging to do. She also has lots of help. Blomkvist, a little mystified as always, runs on the sidelines along with girlfriend and publisher Erika Berger, while some favorite figures from the first installment, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, return to do their bit, among them fellow uberhacker Plague, who still hasn't taken a shower nearly 1,000 pages later. There are some new or hitherto minor players along for the ride, including another Zalachenko creation, a German very-bad-guy named Niedermann, who covers his tracks pretty well. Writes Larsson, "The problem with Niedermann was that he had no friends, no girlfriend and no listed cell phone, and he had never been in prison," which makes life difficult even for a master tracker-downer such as Lisbeth—whom, unhappily, Niedermann is trying to do in as well. It's a delicious mayhem, where no man is quite good and no rich person has the slightest chance of entering the kingdom of heaven. Oh, there are lots of very bad bikers, too. Patented Larsson, meaning fast-paced enough to make those Jason Bourne films seem like Regency dramas.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions 
1. Have you read the two previous novels in the trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire? Which of the three did you find the most compelling, and why?

2. What is the “hornet’s nest” of the title?

3. Each part of Hornet’s Nest begins with a brief history lesson about women warriors. What was Larsson trying to say? Is Salander a modern-day equivalent of these women? Is Berger?

4. What are some of the major themes of this novel? Of the trilogy?

5. How does Larsson’s background as an expert in right-wing extremist organizations inform this novel, and the trilogy as a whole?

6. Many characters in Larsson’s trilogy have some good and some bad in them. Can you name a few? What makes them different from the clear heroes or villains in the books?

7. After everything that happened in the first two novels, why does Salander still distrust Blomkvist? How would you describe their relationship?

8. On page 134, Clinton describes the Section: “What you have to understand is that the Section functions as the spearhead for the total defence of the nation. We’re Sweden’s last line of defence. Our job is to watch over the security of our country. Everything else is unimportant.” Aside from Clinton, who else believes this? Why are they so convinced?

9. Can you imagine a group like the Section operating in this country? Why, or why not?

10. On Berger’s first day at her new job, the departing editor in chief offers his theory about why she was hired (page 152). Do you agree with his assessment? How does this notion play out?

11. Armansky tells Blomkvist, “For once you’re not an objective reporter, but a participant in unfolding events. And as such, you need help. You’re not going to win on your own” (page 159). Why is this situation different from those in the previous two novels? How does becoming a participant change Blomkvist’s behavior? Does Blomkvist cross any ethical lines?

12. On page 168, Larsson writes about Salander, “She wondered what she thought of herself, and came to the realization that she felt mostly indifference towards her entire life.” What has made her feel this way? Do her feelings change by the end of the novel?

13. Again and again, men underestimate Salander because of her size. Why do they make these assumptions? How does she turn this into an advantage?

14. What is the significance of Borgsjö’s involvement with a company that uses child labor? How does this tie in to Larsson’s overall themes?

15. On page 295, Salander discovers a gruesome fact about Teleborian. “She should have dealt with Teleborian years ago. But she had repressed the memory of him. She had chosen to ignore his existence.” How does this jibe with Salander’s behavior in the present day? When did she decide to stop letting people get away with things?

16. Discuss the notion of revenge in this novel, and throughout the trilogy. Who, besides Salander, exacts revenge? What motivates them?

17. What role does Annika play in the novel? And Ekström?

18. On page 359, Salander reaches out to Berger and offers to help. Why?

19. What is the significance of the subplot about Berger’s stalker?

20. During his interview with She, Blomkvist agrees with the host’s suggestion that the Section’s behavior is akin to mental illness. Do you agree with that idea? How are accusations of mental illness wielded elsewhere in the trilogy?

21. “When it comes down to it, this story is not primarily about spies and secret government agencies; it’s about violence against women, and the men who enable it.” So says Blomkvist on page 514. What else is it about?

22. If she’s not in love with Miriam, why does Salander go to Paris?

23. When deciding what to do about Niedermann, Salander thinks of Harriet Vanger. Where do their stories diverge?

24. The very last sentence of the trilogy is, “She opened the door wide and let him into her life again.” How do you imagine things proceed from here for Salander? For Blomvkist?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Girl Who Played with Fire (Millenium Trilogy, 2)
Stieg Larsson, 2006 (Eng. trans., 2009)
Knopf Doubleday
512 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307476159


Summary  
The second novel in Stieg Larsson’s internationally best-selling Millennium trilogy.

Mikael Blomkvist, crusading journalist and publisher of the magazine Millennium, has decided to run a story that will expose an extensive sex trafficking operation between eastern Europe and Sweden, implicating well-known and highly placed members of Swedish society, business, and government.

But he has no idea just how explosive the story will be until, on the eve of publication, the two investigating reporters are murdered. And even more shocking for Blomkvist: the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to Lisbeth Salander—the troubled, wise-beyond-her-years genius hacker who came to his aid in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and who now becomes the focus and fierce heart of The Girl Who Played with Fire.

As Blomkvist, alone in his belief in Salander's innocence, plunges into an investigation of the slayings, Salander herself is drawn into a murderous hunt in which she is the prey, and which compels her to revisit her dark past in an effort to settle with it once and for all. (From the publisher.)

Larsson's Millennium trilogy includes The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.

Author Bio 
• Birth—August 15, 1954
• Where—Vasterbotton, Sweden
• Death—November 9, 2004
• Where—Stockholm Sweden

Born in Västerbotten in northern Sweden in 1954, Stieg Larsson had a professional career that bears a striking resemblance to that of the protagonist of his Millennium thrillers, Mikael Blomkvist. Beginning as a graphic designer for the news agency Tidningarnas Telegrambyra (TT), Larsson went on to become the chief editor of Expo, the magazine published by the Expo Foundation, an organization he helped establish in 1995 to combat racism and the Swedish right-wing extremist movement.

Inspired by an old joke shared with a colleague at TT, Larsson admitted he started writing the Millennium novels—The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest—just for fun. Describing them as "pension insurance," Larsson said he enjoyed the process of fiction writing so much that he didn't make contact with a publisher until he had completed the first two and had a third under way.

Though Larsson died of a heart attack in 2004 and never saw any of his books in print, all three were subsequently published in Scandinavia and continental Europe to great acclaim. He left behind the unfinished manuscript for a fourth book in the series. (From Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews 
Lisbeth Salander was one of the most original and memorable heroines to surface in a recent thriller: picture Angelina Jolie’s Lara Croft endowed with Mr. Spock’s intense braininess and Scarlett O’Hara’s spunky instinct for survival.... Now Salander is back in an even more central role.... The reason it works is the same reason that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo worked: Salander and Blomkvist transcend their genre and insinuate themselves in the reader’s mind through their oddball individuality, their professional competence and, surprisingly, their emotional vulnerability.”
Michiko Kakutani - The New York Times

The Girl Who Played with Fire confirms the impression left by The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Here is a writer with two skills useful in entertaining readers royally: creating characters who are complex, believable, and appealing even when they act against their own best interest; and parceling out information in a consistently enthralling way.”
Washington Post

These books grabbed me and kept me reading with eyes wide open with the same force as the best of the series on the TV monitor.... Move over, Tony Soprano.... Blomkvist is a wonderfully appealing character. And the girl of the title is one of the most fascinating characters in modern genre fiction.
Alan Cheuse - San Francisco Chronicle

Lisbeth Salander [is] one of the most startling, engaging heroines in recent memory . . . Some of the books’ appeal comes from the Swedish setting, but most of it is a result of the author writing from the heart, not from a formula. Larsson clearly loved his brave misfit Lisbeth. And so will you
USA Today

Fans of intelligent page-turners will be more than satisfied by Larsson's second thriller, even though it falls short of the high standard set by its predecessor, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which introduced crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist and punk hacker savant Lisbeth Salander. A few weeks before Dag Svensson, a freelance journalist, plans to publish a story that exposes important people involved in Sweden's sex trafficking business based on research conducted by his girlfriend, Mia Johansson, a criminologist and gender studies scholar, the couple are shot to death in their Stockholm apartment. Salander, who has a history of violent tendencies, becomes the prime suspect after the police find her fingerprints on the murder weapon. While Blomkvist strives to clear Salander of the crime, some far-fetched twists help ensure her survival. Powerful prose and intriguing lead characters will carry most readers along.
Publishers Weekly

Lisbeth Salander, the antisocial but brilliant computer hacker who helped journalist Mikael Blomkvist uncover a serial killer on a remote Swedish island in Larsson's acclaimed The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, takes center stage in this second volume of his "Millenium" trilogy. Opening 18 months after the events of the first book, the novel finds our heroine lounging by the pool at a Caribbean hotel, reading a math textbook, and watching a woman who may be a victim of domestic abuse, while in Sweden, Blomkvist, bewildered by Salander's abrupt disappearance from his life, is set to publish a magazine exposé on the sex trade. Impatient readers may chafe at this seemingly irrelevant prolog, but like the mathematical puzzles Salander enjoys solving, there is a logic to the clues that Larsson carefully drops—integral to understanding his protagonist as we gradually learn her back story. The main plot takes off with the murders of Salander's legal guardian and the two writers of the article, and her fingerprints are found on the gun used in the killings. Verdict: Although the pace slows when the police investigation takes precedence and Salander briefly disappears from the action, we are well-rewarded in the exciting final section when she finally confronts her dark past. This is complex and compelling storytelling at its best, propelled by one of the most fascinating characters in recent crime fiction.
Wilda Williams - Library Journal

A suspenseful, remarkably moving novel.... This is the best Scandinavian novel to be published in the U.S. since Smilla’s Sense of Snow.... Salander is one of those characters who come along only rarely in fiction: a complete original, larger than life yet firmly grounded in realistic detail, utterly independent yet at her core a wounded and frightened child.... One of the most compelling characters to strut the crime-fiction stage in years.
Booklist

Tangled but worthy follow-up to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008), also starring journo extraordinaire Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, the Lara Crofts of the land of the midnight sun. That's not quite right: Lisbeth is really a Baltic MacGyver with a highly developed sense of outrage, a sociopathic bent and brand-new breast implants, to say nothing of a well-stuffed bankbook. The late Larsson's sequel does not absolutely require knowledge of its predecessor, but it helps, given the convoluted back story and the allusive, sometimes loopy structure of the present book. In all events, Lisbeth bears her trademark dragon tattoo still, but her wasp is gone, for a curious reason: "The wasp was too conspicuous and it made her too easy remember and identify. Salander did not want to be remembered or identified." She cuts a fine figure all the same on the beach at Grenada, where she falls into a sticky skein of intrigue involving the usual suspects: self-righteous crusaders, bored Club Med types and some very nasty characters on both sides of what used to be called the Iron Curtain. So sticky is the plot, in fact, that Lisbeth finds herself accused of committing murder. It's a predicament that the utterly self-reliant but unworldly hacker (when we catch up with her, she's reading a mathematics treatise picked up during one of her frequent visits to university bookshops) needs Blomkvist's help to get out of. Some of the traditional elements of the espionage thriller turn up in Larsson's pages, while others are turned on their head-sometimes literally, at least where the romantic bits come in. Still, while endlessly complex, the plot has the requisite chases, cliffhangers and bloodshed. Not to mention Fermat's theorem. Fans of postmodern mystery will revel in Larsson's latest.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions 
1. Have you read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? How did your knowledge-or lack of knowledge-about that novel affect your reading of this one?

2. Discuss the prologue. What did you think was going on? At what point did you fully understand it?

3. On page 22, Larsson writes, “Within mathematics, asser-tions must always be proven mathematically and expressed in a valid and scientifically correct formula.” What does this have to do with the plot of the novel? Why is Salander so intrigued by mathematics?

4. Outwardly, Salander is supremely self-assured. Why does she have breast augmentation surgery?

5. Ultimately, does Salander's agreement with Nils Erik Bjurman pay off? In what ways?

6. Revenge is a major theme of the novel. Who seeks it, and what are the results?

7. Discuss gender politics as they affect the plot: the treatment of Salander, Erika Berger, Miriam Wu, and Sonja Modig and the trafficking of Eastern European women. What do you think Larsson was trying to say about the role of women in society?

8. On page 105, Berger thinks about Blomkvist: “He was a man with such shifting traits that he sometimes appeared to have multiple personalities.” Given that the reader is allowed inside Blomkvist's head, does this seem like an accurate description to you? How is Berger right in her assessment, and how is she wrong?

9. Twice in the novel, Salander and Blomkvist refer to his assertion that “friendship is built on two things-respect and trust.” Who is a true friend to Salander? Is she a true friend to anyone? What about Blomkvist? Is he a good friend to Salander, to Berger, and to others?

10. Discuss the arrangement agreed to by Berger, Blomkvist, and Gregor Beckman. How does this benefit each of them? Does it hurt them?

11. When Dag Svensson and Mia Johansson were murdered, what was your first response? Who did you think was the killer? Who did you think was Bjurman's killer?

12. Why does Blomkvist give Salander the benefit of the doubt, when so many others don't?

13. When newspaper articles begin to appear featuring interviews with long-ago acquaintances of Salander, did it change your perception of her character? Discuss the nature of truth in these instances: Is it possible both sides were remembering accurately?

14. Discuss Dr. Peter Teleborian. What role does he play, and why?

15. Why does Berger put off telling Blomkvist about her new job? What will the ramifications of the new job be?

16. On page 323, Salander thinks, “There are no innocents. There are, however, different degrees of responsibility.” What is the significance of this statement? How does Salander use this notion to guide her actions?

17. On page 463, Blomkvist calls Salander “the woman who hated men who hate women.” Is this an accurate assessment? How did she end up this way? How does it affect her behavior?

18. In what ways is Salander like her father and half brother? In what ways is she different?

19. Toward the end of the novel, does Blomkvist do the right thing by having Berger deliver only part of the story to Jan Bublanski and Modig? What do you think he should have done

20. Holger Palmgren tells Dragan Armansky on page 490, “What happens tonight will happen, no matter what you or I think. It has been written in the stars since [Salander] was born.” Why does he feel this way? Is he right? How does his inaction affect the outcome of the story?

21. Discuss the ending. Were you satisfied? What more, if anything, would you like to have had happen?

22. If Stieg Larsson were still alive, what one question would you most like to ask him?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Girl Who Stopped Swimming
Joshilyn Jackson, 2008
Grand Central Publishing
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780446697828


Summary
Laurel Gray Hawthorne needs to make things pretty.

Coming from a family with a literal skeleton in their closet, she's developed this talent all her life, whether helping her willful mother to smooth over the reality of her family's ugly past, or elevating humble scraps of unwanted fabric into nationally acclaimed art quilts.

Her sister Thalia, an impoverished "Actress" with a capital A, is her opposite, and prides herself in exposing the lurid truth lurking behind life's everyday niceties. And while Laurel's life was neatly on track, a passionate marriage, a treasured daughter, and a lovely home in lovely suburban Victorianna, everything she holds dear is thrown into question the night she is visited by an apparition in her bedroom.

The ghost appears to be her 14-year-old neighbor Molly Dufresne, and when Laurel follows this ghost, she finds the real Molly floating lifeless in her swimming pool.

While the community writes the tragedy off as a suicide, Laurel can't. Reluctantly enlisting Thalia's aid, Laurel sets out on a life-altering investigation that triggers startling revelations about her own guarded past, the truth about her marriage, and the girl who stopped swimming.

Richer and more rewarding than any story from Joshilyn Jackson, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming is destined both to delight Jackson's loyal fans and capture a whole new audience. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—February 27, 1968
• Where—Fort Walton Beach, Florida, USA
• Education—B.A., Georgia State University; M.A., University of Illinois
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Decatur, Georgia


Joshilyn Jackson is the author of several novels, all national best sellers. She was born into a military family, moving often in and out of seven states before the age of nine. She graduated from high school in Pensacola, Florida, and after attending a number of different colleges, earned her B.A. from Georgia State University. She went on to earn an M.A. in creative writing from University of Illinois in Chicago.

Having enjoyed stage acting as a student in Chicago, Jackson now does her own voice work for the audio versions of her books. Her dynamic readings have won plaudits from AudioFile Magazine, which selected her for its "Best of the Year" list. She also made the 2012 Audible "All-Star" list for the highest listener ranks/reviews; in addition, she won three "Listen-Up Awards" from Publisher's Weekly. Jackson has also read books by other authors, including Lydia Netzer's Shine Shine Shine.

Novels
All of Jackson's novels take place in the American South, the place she knows best. Her characters are generally women struggling to find their way through troubled lives and relationships. Kirkus Reviews has described her writing as...

Quirky, Southern-based, character-driven...that combines exquisite writing, vivid personalities, and imaginative storylines while subtly contemplating race, romance, family, and self.

2005 - Gods in Alabama
2006 - Between, Georgia
2008 - The Girl Who Stopped Swimming
2010 - Backseat Saints
2012 - A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty
2013 - Someone Else's Love Story
2005 - Gods in Alabama
2006 - Between, Georgia
2008 - The Girl Who Stopped Swimming
2010 - Backseat Saints
2012 - A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty
2013 - Someone Else's Love Story
2016 - The Opposite of Everyone
2017 - The Almost Sisters
2019 - Never Have I Ever

Awards
Jackson's books have been translated into a dozen languages, won the Southern Indie Booksellers Alliance's SIBA Novel of the Year, have three times been a #1 Book Sense Pick, twice won Georgia Author of the Year, and three times been shortlisted for the Townsend Prize. (Author's bio adapted from the author's website.)

Book Reviews
Buoyant and moving...beautifully balanced between magical and realist fiction...closer in tone and voice to Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones or Richard Ford's "Frank Bascombe trilogy."
Atlanta Journal Constitution

A great tale [that] builds to an exciting and violent ending, one that surprises and yet seems to fit.
USA Today

A ghost story, family psychodrama, and murder mystery all in one. Jackson's latest is a wild, smartly calibrated achievement.
Entertainment Weekly

(Audio version.) [E]motionally taut.... Jackson's honey-sweet tones heat up into panic and confusion as everything Laurel depends on falls away. While set in the languid deep South, the pace is rapid. Jackson's reading keeps things brisk without going too swiftly.
Publishers Weekly

With the appearance of a ghost on the first page, you'll feel compelled to race to the end, but slow down for Jackson's great descriptions—you'll be rewarded for the effort. Jackson illuminates not just the complexities of family love as a source of safety and support but also the complexities of danger and death.
Library Journal

Ghosts, more figurative that literal, haunt Jackson's third novel. Laurel is meant to be the heroine but she's such a dolt, readers may not feel she deserves her happy ending. The tragic figure, Bet, gets short shrift, as if Jackson doesn't quite know what to do with her. An entertaining but shallow spin on a Southern Gothic.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Art, and what constitutes true art, is one of the earliest questions raised in The Girl Who Stopped Swimming. Thalia clearly dismisses Laurel's quilts as handicraft, not art. What, in your opinion, is "true art?" Is there such a thing?

2. Laurel's mother brings canned goods and toys to DeLop, but she has severed all emotional connections. Does this disconnect compromise her good works? Do you think a person's motives and feelings make a difference to how valuable a "charitable act" is? Why or Why not?

3. On p. 65, Thalia explains "Mother is Cowslip." Do you know anyone who is prone to "cowslipping?" Can you think of situations where you yourself have cowslipped?

4. The tension between what is on the surface and what lies beneath is dominant in this book. Can you think of some examples of this dichotomy in the text? What statement do you think the author is trying to make by highlighting these dichotomies?

5. The title clearly refers to the discovery of Molly Dufresne in the first chapter of the book. But is there another interpretation you could offer?

6. Thalia consistently needles, pushes, or blasts Laurel out of her comfort zone, usually for what she considers to be Laurel's own good. Do you have a "Thalia" in your life?

7. One particular bone of contention for Laurel and Thalia is Shelby—Thalia clearly believes Laurel is doing her great harm by overprotecting her and keeping her "safe" at home. How do you feel about Laurel's relationship with her daughter—is it as close as Laurel believes, or as false as Thalia insists? Did your view change throughout the book as events unfolded?

8. Laurel and Thalia do not understand each other' marriages; both would say their marriage is better. Thalia's marriage is certainly untraditional, but it seems to work for her. Do you think Thalia's relationship can be considered a good marriage? Does Laurel have a good marriage at the beginning of the book? In what ways? Has there been significant change in that relationship by the end of the book?

9. Laurel makes decisions using intuition and emotion, David through logic and reason. What does Thalia use to make decisions? Is she closer to David or Laurel, or does she have a system of her own?

10. Laurel is her mother's quietly acknowledged favorite, and Thalia seems to belong to Daddy. Is this a "normal" or healthy family dynamic? How does this divided favoritism shape the sisters? Do you think this causes "sibling rivalry?" Have you seen this dynamic at work in your own family, and do you think it affected the way you interact with your parents or siblings? With your own children?

11. Jackson has said in interviews, "At its heart, this is a book about poverty." Do you agree? If not, what did you think the book was about? Do you think she means only literal poverty? What other kinds of poverty did you notice in the book?

12, Thalia provides a logical explanation for all of Laurel's ghosts, assuming her visions have more to do with psychology and the subconscious than the supernatural.. Do you think there are real ghosts in this book? Do you believe in ghosts, or have there been times in your life when you have been convinced of their presence?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Girl With a Pearl Earring
Tracy Chevalier, 2000
Penguin Group USA
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780452282155


Summary 
In mid-career, the renowned 17th century Baroque artist Johannes Vermeer painted "Girl with a Pearl Earring," which has been called the Dutch Mona Lisa. Girl with a Pearl Earring tells the story behind the advent of this famous painting, all the while depicting life in 17th century Delft, a small Dutch city with a burgeoning art community.

The novel centers on Griet, the Protestant daughter of a Delft tile painter who lost his sight in a kiln accident. In order to bring income to her struggling family, Griet must work as a maid for a more financially sound family. When Jan Vermeer and his wife approve of Griet as a maid for their growing Catholic household, she leaves home and quickly enters adult life. The Vermeer household, with its five children, grandmother and long-time servant, is ready to make Griet's working life difficult. Though her help is sorely needed, her beauty and innocence are both coveted and resented. Vermeer's wife Catharina, long banished from her husband's studio for her clumsiness and lack of genuine interest in art, is immediately wary of Griet, a visually talented girl who exhibits signs of artistic promise. Taneke, the faithful servant to the grandmother, proves her protective loyalty by keeping a close eye on Griet's every move.

The artist himself, however, holds another view entirely of the young maid. Recognizing Griet's talents, Vermeer takes her on as his studio assistant and surreptitiously teaches her to grind paints and develop color palettes in the remote attic. Though reluctant to overstep her boundaries in the cagey Vermeer household, Griet is overjoyed both to work with her intriguing master and to lend some breath to her natural inclinations—colors and composition—neither of which she had ever been able to develop. Together, Vermeer and Griet conceal the apprenticeship from the family until Vermeer's most prominent patron demands that the lovely maid be the subject of his next commissioned work. Vermeer must paint Griet—an awkward, charged situation for them both.

Chevalier's account of the artistic process—from the grinding of paints to the inclusion and removal of background objects—lay at the core of the novel. Her inventive portrayal of this tumultuous time, when Protestantism began to dominate Catholicism and the growing bourgeoisie took the place of the Church as patrons of the arts, draws the reader into a lively, if little known, time and place in history. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio 
• Birth—October 19, 1962
• Where—Washington, D.C., USA
• Education—B.A., Oberlin College (USA); M.A., University of
  East Anglia (UK)
• Currently—lives in London, UK

Raised in Washington D.C., Tracy Chevalier moved to England in 1984 after graduating from Oberlin College in Ohio. Initially intending to attend one semester abroad, she studied for a semester and never returned. After working as a literary editor for several years, Chevalier chose to pursue her own writing career and in 1994, she graduated with a degree in creative writing at the University of East Anglia.

The Virgin Blue (her first novel), was chosen by W. H. Smith for its Fresh Talent promotion in 1997. She lives in London with her husband and son and hopes to see all of Vermeer's thirty-five known paintings in her lifetime (thus far, she's seen twenty-eight of them). Tracy Chevalier first gained attention by imagining the answer to one of art history's small but intriguing questions: Who is the subject of Johannes Vermeer's painting "Girl with a Pearl Earring"?

It was a bold move on Chevalier's part to build a story around the somewhat mysterious 17th-century Dutch painter and his unassuming but luminous subject; but the author's purist approach helped set the tone. In an interview with her college's alumni magazine, she commented:

I decided early on that I wanted [Girl] to be a simple story, simply told, and to imitate with words what Vermeer was doing with paint. That may sound unbelievably pretentious, but I didn't mean it as "I can do Vermeer in words." I wanted to write it in a way that Vermeer would have painted: very simple lines, simple compositions, not a lot of clutter, and not a lot of superfluous characters.

Chevalier achieved her objective expertly, helped by the fact that she employed the famous Girl as narrator of the story. Sixteen-year-old Griet becomes a maid in Vermeer's tumultuous household, developing an apprentice relationship with the painter while drawing attention from other men and jealousy from women. Praise for the novel poured in: "Chevalier's exploration into the soul of this complex but naïve young woman is moving, and her depiction of 17th-century Delft is marvelously evocative," wrote the New York Times Book Review. The Wall Street Journal called it "vibrant and sumptuous."

Girl with a Pearl Earring was not Chevalier's first exploration of the past. In The Virgin Blue, her U.K.-published first novel (U.S. edition, 2003), her modern-day character Ella Turner goes back to 16th-century France in order to revisit her family history. As a result, she finds parallels between herself and a troubled ancestor — a woman whose fate had been unknown until Ella discovers it.

With 2001's Falling Angels, Chevalier — a former reference book editor who began her fiction career by enrolling in the graduate writing program at University of East Anglia — continued to tell stories of women in the past. But she has been open about the fact that compared to writing Girl with a Pearl Earring, the "nightmare" creating of her third novel was difficult and fraught with complications, even tears. The pressure of her previous success, coupled with a first draft that wasn't working out, made Chevalier want to abandon the effort altogether. Then, reading Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible led Chevalier to change her approach. "[Kingsolver] did such a fantastic job using different voices and I thought, with Falling Angels, I've told it in the wrong way," Chevalier told Bookpage magazine. "I wanted it to have lots of perspective."

With that, Chevalier began a rewrite of her tale about two families in the first decade of 20th-century London. With more than ten narrators (some more prominent than others), Falling Angels has perspective in spades and lots to maintain interest over its relatively brief span: a marriage in trouble, a girlhood friendship born at Highgate Cemetery, a woman's introduction to the suffragette movement. A spirited, fast-paced story, Falling Angels again earned critical praise. "This moving, bittersweet book flaunts Chevalier's gift for creating complex characters and an engaging plot," Book magazine concluded.

Chevalier continues to pursue her fascination with art and history in her fourth novel, on which she is currently at work. According to Oberlin Alumni Magazine, she is basing the book on the "Lady and the Unicorn" medieval tapestries that hang in Paris's Cluny Museum.

Extras
From a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview:

• Chevalier's interest in Vermeer extends beyond a fascination with one painting. "I have always loved Vermeer's paintings," Chevalier writes on her Web site. "One of my life goals is to view all thirty-five of them in the flesh. I've seen all but one — ‘Young Girl Reading a Letter' — which hangs in Dresden. There is so much mystery in each painting, in the women he depicts, so many stories suggested but not told. I wanted to tell one of them."

• Chevalier moved from the States to London in 1984. "I intended to stay six months," she writes. "I'm still here." She lives near Highgate Cemetery with her husband and son.

• The film version of Girl with a Pearl Earring was released 2003 with Scarlett Johansson in the role of Griet and Colin Firth playing Vermeer.

• When asked what book most influenced her life as a writer, here is her response:

It's impossible to list just one! I would say more generally— books that I read when I was a girl, that showed me how different worlds can be brought to life for a reader. My aunt likes to quote that when I was young I once said I was never alone when I had a book to read. (I don't remember saying that, but my aunt isn't prone to lying.) Those companions would be books like the Laura Ingalls Wilder series; Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery; A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle; The Egypt Game by Zylpha Keatley Snyder; "The Dark Is Rising" series by Susan Cooper; The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken plus subsequent books in that series; and of course The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien.

• Other favorite books include: Pride and Prejudice (Austen), The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner), Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger), Alias Grace (Atwood), and Song of Solomon (Morrison). (Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews 
Thank goodness a picture can be worth more than a thousand words. Tracey Chevalier has written a vibrant, sumptuous novel about the enigmatic subject of a painting. Ms. Chevalier doesn't put a foot wrong in this triumphant work, the latest of several recent novels based on Vermeer paintings. It is a beautifully written tale that mirrors the elegance of the painting that inspired it.
Katie Flatley - Wall Street Journal

Absorbing novel ... as Chevalier's writing skill and her knowledge of seventeenth-century Delft are such that she creates a world reminiscent of a Vermeer interior: suspended in a particular moment, it transcends its time and place.
The New Yorker

Girl With a Pearl Earring is an engaging fictionalization. Fittingly, Chevalier's writing style adopts a painterly approach: The elegant prose evokes contemplation, the pace is slow and cumulative the drama emotional rather than visceral. Looking at the painting after having read the novel. The reader thinks, Yes, Chevalier got it right - that was the story hidden behind those eyes, silent for centuries.
San Francisco Chronicle

It's great strength is its projection of a complex, emotional universe onto an intimate canvas. The details, like the world of colors that Vermeer found in a single fold of white cloth, add up to more than the sum of their parts.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Set in 17th-century Delft, this historical novel intertwines the art of Johannes Vermeer with his life and that of a maiden servant in his household. From the few facts known about the artist, Chevalier creates the reality of the Netherlands. The parallel themes of tradesman/artist, Protestant/Catholic, and master/servant are intricately woven into the fabric of the tale. The painters of the day spent long hours in the studio, devising and painting re-creations of everyday life. The thrust of the story is seen through the eyes of Griet, the daughter of a Delft tile maker who lost his sight and, with it, the ability to support his family. Griet's fate is to be hired out as a servant to the Vermeer household. She has a wonderful sense of color, composition, and orderliness that the painter Vermeer recognizes. And, slowly, Vermeer entrusts much of the labor of creating the colored paints to Griet. Throughout, narrator Ruth Ann Phimister gives a strong performance as the enchanting voice of Griet. Highly recommended. —Kristin M. Jacobi, Eastern Connecticut State Univ., Willimantic
Library Journal

After her father is hurt in an accident, sixteen-year-old Griet helps support her family by working as a maid for the Johannes Vermeer family. Griet's life there is difficult because she is Protestant and the Vermeer family is Catholic, and also because both Vermeer's wife, Catharina, and one of his daughters seem to resent the young maid. As Griet gradually learns more about Vermeer's methods of painting, the artist begins to take an interest in the girl. He even allows her to help grind the colors used in his paints and asks for her thoughts on his work. When Vermeer offers Griet the chance to pose as the model for one of his paintings, the girl makes a decision that changes her life forever as she becomes the girl with a pearl earring. Author Chevalier has woven a lyrical story of art and one girl's coming of age in seventeenth-century Holland. Chevalier's writing glows with the same luminosity that infuses Vermeer's paintings, and she skillfully evokes the book's historical setting and gives readers a fascinating protagonist. Teens, especially those who enjoy historical fiction, are certain to be drawn to Griet's story as she struggles with her responsibilities to her family, deals with the romantic attentions of a local merchant's son, and tries to find her own place in the world.
John Charles - VOYA

Discussion Questions 
1. Do you think Griet was typical of other girls her age? In what ways? How did she differ? Did you find her compassionate or selfish? Giving or judgmental?

2. In many ways, the primary relationship in this novel appears to be between Griet and Vermeer. Do you think this is true? How do you feel about Vermeer's relationship with his wife? How does that come into play?

3. Peering into 17th century Delft shows a small, self-sufficient city. Where do you think the many-pointed star at the city's center pointed toward? What was happening elsewhere at that time?

4. Discuss the ways religion affected Griet's relationship with Vermeer. His wife? Maria Thins?

5. Maria Thins obviously understood Vermeer's art more than his wife did. Why do you think this was the case? Do you think she shared Griet's talents?

6. Do you think Griet made the right choice when she married the butcher's son? Did she have other options?

7. How is Delft different to or similar to your town or city? Are the social structures comparable?

7. Though Girl with a Pearl Earring appears to be about one man and woman, there are several relationships at work. Which is the most difficult relationship? Which is the most promising?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Millenium trilogy, 1)
Stieg Larsson, 2005 (Eng. Trans., 2008)
Knopf Doubleday
480  pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307473479

Summary  
The first novel in Stieg Larsson’s internationally best-selling Millennium trilogy.

It’s about the disappearance forty years ago of Harriet Vanger, a young scion of one of the wealthiest families in Sweden...and about her octogenarian uncle, determined to know the truth about what he believes was her murder.

It’s about Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently at the wrong end of a libel case, hired to get to the bottom of Harriet’s disappearance...and about Lisbeth Salander, a twenty-four-year-old pierced and tattooed genius hacker possessed of the hard-earned wisdom of someone twice her age—and a terrifying capacity for ruthlessness to go with it—who assists Blomkvist with the investigation.

This unlikely team discovers a vein of nearly unfathomable iniquity running through the Vanger family, astonishing corruption in the highest echelons of Swedish industrialism—and an unexpected connection between themselves.

It’s a contagiously exciting, stunningly intelligent novel about society at its most hidden, and about the intimate lives of a brilliantly realized cast of characters, all of them forced to face the darker aspects of their world and of their own lives. (From the publisher.)

Larsson's Millennium trilogy includes The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.

Author Bio 
• Birth—August 15, 1954
• Where—Vasterbotton, Sweden
• Death—November 9, 2004
• Where—Stockholm Sweden

Born in Västerbotten in northern Sweden in 1954, Stieg Larsson had a professional career that bears a striking resemblance to that of the protagonist of his Millennium thrillers, Mikael Blomkvist. Beginning as a graphic designer for the news agency Tidningarnas Telegrambyra (TT), Larsson went on to become the chief editor of Expo, the magazine published by the Expo Foundation, an organization he helped establish in 1995 to combat racism and the Swedish right-wing extremist movement.

Inspired by an old joke shared with a colleague at TT, Larsson admitted he started writing the Millennium novels—The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest—just for fun. Describing them as "pension insurance," Larsson said he enjoyed the process of fiction writing so much that he didn't make contact with a publisher until he had completed the first two and had a third under way.

Though Larsson died of a heart attack in 2004 and never saw any of his books in print, all three were subsequently published in Scandinavia and continental Europe to great acclaim. He left behind the unfinished manuscript for a fourth book in the series. (From Barnes & Noble.)

Book Review
The ballyhoo is fully justified.... At over 500 pages this hardly sagged.... The novel scores on every front—character, story, atmosphere.
The Times (London)

Combine the chilly Swedish backdrop and moody psycho-drama of a Bergman movie with the grisly pyrotechnics of a serial-killer thriller, then add an angry punk heroine and a down-on-his-luck investigative journalist, and you have the ingredients of Stieg Larsson's first novel.... It's Mr. Larsson's two protagonists—Carl Mikael Blomkvist, a reporter filling the role of detective, and his sidekick, Lisbeth Salander, a k a the girl with the dragon tattoo—who make this novel more than your run-of-the-mill mystery: they're both compelling, conflicted, complicated people, idiosyncratic in the extreme.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

This remarkable first novel by the Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson…has been a huge bestseller in Europe and will be one here if readers are looking for an intelligent, ingeniously plotted, utterly engrossing thriller that is variously a serial-killer saga, a search for a missing person and an informed glimpse into the worlds of journalism and business…It's hard to find fault with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. One must struggle with bewildering Swedish names, but that's a small price to pay. The story starts off at a leisurely pace, but the reader soon surrenders to Larsson's skillful narrative. We care about his characters because we come to know them so well. The central question—what happened to Harriet?—is answered in due course, and other matters involving romance and revenge are wrapped up as well. It's a book that lingers in the mind.
Patrick Anderson - Washington Post

It’s like a blast of cold, fresh air to read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.... What separates Stieg Larsson’s work from [other Swedish crime fiction] is that it features at its center two unique and fascinating characters: a disgraced financial journalist and the absolutely marvelous 24-year-old Lisbeth Salander–a computer-hacking Pippi Longstocking with pierced eyebrows and a survival instinct that should scare anyone who gets in her way.
Chicago Tribune

(Starred review.) Cases rarely come much colder than the decades-old disappearance of teen heiress Harriet Vanger from her family's remote island retreat north of Stockholm, nor do fiction debuts hotter than this European bestseller by muckraking Swedish journalist Larsson. At once a strikingly original thriller and a vivisection of Sweden's dirty not-so-little secrets (as suggested by its original title, Men Who Hate Women), this first of a trilogy introduces a provocatively odd couple: disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist, freshly sentenced to jail for libeling a shady businessman, and the multipierced and tattooed Lisbeth Salander, a feral but vulnerable superhacker. Hired by octogenarian industrialist Henrik Vanger, who wants to find out what happened to his beloved great-niece before he dies, the duo gradually uncover a festering morass of familial corruption—at the same time, Larsson skillfully bares some of the similar horrors that have left Salander such a marked woman. Larsson died in 2004, shortly after handing in the manuscripts for what will be his legacy.
Publishers Weekly

Ever since Knopf editor Sonny Mehta bought the U.S. rights last November, the prepublication buzz on this dark, moody crime thriller by a Swedish journalist has grown steadily. A best seller in Europe (it outsold the Bible in Denmark), this first entry in the "Millennium" trilogy finally lands in America. Is the hype justified? Yes. Despite a sometimes plodding translation and a few implausible details, this complex, multilayered tale, which combines an intricate financial thriller with an Agatha Christie-like locked-room mystery set on an island, grabs the reader from the first page. Convicted of libeling a prominent businessman and awaiting imprisonment, financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist agrees to industrialist Henrik Vanger's request to investigate the 40-year-old disappearance of Vanger's 16-year-old niece, Harriet. In return, Vanger will help Blomkvist dig up dirt on the corrupt businessman. Assisting in Blomkvist's investigation is 24-year-old Lisbeth Salander, a brilliant but enigmatic computer hacker. Punkish, tattooed, sullen, antisocial, and emotionally damaged, she is a compelling character, much like Carol O'Connell's Kathy Mallory, and this reviewer looks forward to learning more of her backstory in the next two books (The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest). Sweden may be the land of blondes, Ikea, and the Midnight Sun, but Larsson, who died in 2004, brilliantly exposes its dark heart: sexual violence against women, a Nazi past, and corporate corruption.
Library Journal

Discussion Questions 
1. Careful observation is the foundation of any successful journalist's or private investigator's career. Discuss how the various characters' outward appearance aligned with their true personality in this novel.

2. Lisbeth Salander's character is enigmatic and antisocial throughout much of the book. What do you see as the catalyst for the slow emergence of her personality?

3. Lisbeth judges everyone harshly, including herself. What do you think of her assessment of Blomkvist?

4. While poverty, social injustice, parental abuse, and difficult childhoods are often cited as explanations for criminal behavior, Lisbeth believes in free will and choice. Do you agree?

5. What propels Blomkvist to lay aside his professional ethics and take on the investigation proposed by Vanger?

6. The relationship between Blomkvist and Cecilia is fraught from the beginning. How does Cecilia come to terms with it? What do you think about her decision?

7. How successfully does Larsson develop Lisbeth's connection to her mother? Is there anything about their relationship that helps shed light on Lisbeth's behavior?

8. Were you surprised by the book's portrayal of right-wing fanaticism and violence against women in a country known for its liberal views?

9. Which character's duplicity -- or innocence -- did you find the most unexpected? Which one emerged as your favorite?

10. Discuss Mikael Blomkvist's role in the investigation. Do you feel that he made as important a contribution as Lisbeth? Why or why not?

11. The narrative contained a number of plot twists. Who did you imagine sent the framed flowers to Vanger each year?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Girl with the Louding Voice 
Abi Daré, 2020
Penguin Publishing
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781524746025


Summary
A powerful, emotional debut novel told in the unforgettable voice of a young Nigerian woman who is trapped in a life of servitude but determined to fight for her dreams and choose her own future.
 
Adunni is a fourteen-year-old Nigerian girl who knows what she wants: an education. This, her mother has told her, is the only way to get a "louding voice"—the ability to speak for herself and decide her own future.

But instead, Adunni's father sells her to be the third wife of a local man who is eager for her to bear him a son and heir.

When Adunni runs away to the city, hoping to make a better life, she finds that the only other option before her is servitude to a wealthy family. As a yielding daughter, a subservient wife, and a powerless slave, Adunni is told, by words and deeds, that she is nothing.

But while misfortunes might muffle her voice for a time, they cannot mute it.

And when she realizes that she must stand up not only for herself, but for other girls, for the ones who came before her and were lost, and for the next girls, who will inevitably follow; she finds the resolve to speak, however she can—in a whisper, in song, in broken English—until she is heard. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Lagos, Nigeria
• Education—J.D., University of Wolverhampton; M.Sc, Glasgow Caledonian University; M.A., University of London
• Currently—lives in Essex, England


Abi Daré grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, and has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years.

She studied law at the University of Wolverhampton and has an MSc in International Project Management from Glasgow Caledonian University, as well as an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London.

The Girl with the Louding Voice won the Bath Novel Award for unpublished manuscripts in 2018 and was also selected as a finalist in the 2018 Literary Consultancy Pen Factor competition.

Abi lives in Essex with her husband and two daughters, who inspired her to write her debut novel. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Desperate for an education, which is the only way to get the "louding" voice that will let her speak for herself, 14-year-old Nigerian Adunni is instead sold by her father to a local man looking for a male heir. Running away to the city, she… never gives up her dream.
Library Journal


Captivating… Daré's arresting prose provides a window into the lives of Nigerians of all socioeconomic levels and shows readers the beauty and humor that may be found even in the midst of harrowing experiences.
Booklist


Adunni's dialect will be unfamiliar to some readers, but the rhythm of her language grows easier to follow the more you read, and her courage and determination to make her own way in life despite terrible setbacks are heartbreaking and inspiring.
Kirkus Reviews


[H]eartwarming, enlightening.… [A] skillful examination of the causes and effects of corruption, child labor and child marriage…. The story is told in a distinctive, grammatically imperfect style by an innocent but perceptive main character… [who] brings deep, significant issues into focus.
BookPage


The narrator's attempts to make the unknown familiar often come across like metaphors in poetry. Readers leave Adunni knowing that she has the intellectual resources and the guts to face whatever challenges she must in order to attain her goals.
Shelf Awareness

Discussion Questions
1. What do you think Adunni’s comparison of her mother to a rose flower ("a yellow and red and purple rose with shining leafs") symbolizes? She also remembers her mother having a sweet smell like a rosebush. Why do you think she compares her mother to this particular type of flower? And how do you think our five senses play into our memories?

2. Adunni dreads her upcoming marriage to Morufu, but her friend Enitan is genuinely excited for Adunni, believing that her life will be improved after the wedding. Why do you think there is a disconnect between Adunni’s and Enitan’s points of view? Can you draw any comparisons between cultural attitudes toward marriage in America and Nigeria?

3. Compare and contrast Khadija with the glimpses we get of Adunni’s mother. How were their lives similar or different from one another?

4. Why do you think Bamidele doesn’t return for Khadija? What do you think he whispers in her ear before leaving her for the last time?

5. Why do you think Adunni is closer with Kayus than Born-boy? What is it that makes their sibling bond so deep?

6. Why do you think bathing is such an important symbol in Nigerian folklore and in the novel? Discuss the similarities and differences between the bath that Kadija believes will save her and her baby’s life, and the bath that Ms. Tia’s mother-in-law believes will help her get pregnant.

7. Adunni has dreamed of leaving Ikati and seeing "the big, shining city" of Lagos since she was young, though when she actually arrives it’s not under the circumstances she envisioned. How do you think her perception of the city changes once she is there? And how does her experience of Lagos relate to Big Madam’s or Ms. Tia’s? Compare and contrast the ways all three women view the city and experience the opportunities it offers.

8. Though they have dissimilar personalities, are not close in age, and have lived very different lives by the time they meet, Adunni and Ms. Tia have an instant connection that deepens over time. What do you think it is that drew each of them to the other? How do you think their friendship will evolve after the book is over? Will they continue to be friends even though their worlds seem incompatible?

9. What is the significance of the moment when Ms. Tia turns to look at Adunni right after the bath ceremony is over? Why do you think it affects Adunni so strongly? 

10. After Ms. Tia’s bath, Adunni wants "to ask, to scream, why are the women in Nigeria seem to be suffering for everything more than the men?" What specific moments have brought her to this question? What do the events of the book reveal about cultural attitudes toward women?

11. Adunni remembers her mother saying, "Adunni, you must do good for other peoples, even if you are not well, even if the whole world around you is not well." How do you think this factors into the choices she makes and her dreams for the future?

12. The first time Big Madam hears Adunni singing she slaps her and says, "This is not your village. Here we behave like sane people." Later, when Adunni is comforting Big Madam after she has forced Big Daddy out of her house, Big Madam wants Adunni to sing to her. Discuss the significance of that moment. Why do you think Big Madam’s attitude toward Adunni’s singing has changed?

13. At first, knowing and reading English is a source of pride for Adunni. But later, she says, "English is only a language, like Yoruba and Igbo and Hausa. Nothing about it is so special, nothing about it makes anybody have sense." What do you think she means by this?

14. How do you feel about the ending? Do you think it is a happy ending for Adunni? Despite the fact that she gets to follow her dream of returning to school, there are bittersweet moments, too—she must contend with the fact that she’s left her family behind, her husband might have stopped supporting her family, and the mystery of what happened to Rebecca remains partially unsolved. How do you think these loose ends will affect Adunni as she grows into adulthood?

15. After embarking on this journey with Adunni, what does a "louding voice" mean to you and how does one achieve it? What sort of future do you imagine for Adunni
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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The Girl You Left Behind 
Jojo Moyes, 2013
Pamela Dorman Books
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780670026616


Summary
A spellbinding love story of two women separated by a century but united in their determination to fight for what they love most

Jojo Moyes’s bestseller, Me Before You, catapulted her to wide critical acclaim and has struck a chord with readers everywhere. Moyes returns with another irresistible heartbreaker that asks, “Whatever happened to the girl you left behind?”

France, 1916:  Artist Edouard Lefevre leaves his young wife, Sophie, to fight at the front. When their small town falls to the Germans in the midst of World War I, Edouard’s portrait of Sophie draws the eye of the new Kommandant. As the officer’s dangerous obsession deepens, Sophie will risk everything—her family, her reputation, and her life—to see her husband again.

Almost a century later, Sophie’s portrait is given to Liv Halston by her young husband shortly before his sudden death. A chance encounter reveals the painting’s true worth, and a battle begins for who its legitimate owner is—putting Liv’s belief in what is right to the ultimate test.

Like Sarah Blake’s The Postmistress and Tatiana de Rosnay’s Sarah’s Key, The Girl You Left Behind is a breathtaking story of love, loss, and sacrifice told with Moyes’s signature ability to capture our hearts with every turn of the page. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1969
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—B.A., London University
• Awards—Romantic Novel of the year (twice)
• Currently—lives in Essex, England


Jojo Moyes is a British journalist and the author of 10 novels published from 2002 to the present.  She studied at Royal Holloway, University of London and Bedford New College, London University.

In 1992 she won a bursary financed by The Independent newspaper to attend the postgraduate newspaper journalism course at City University, London. She subsequently worked for The Independent for the next 10 years (except for one year, when she worked in Hong Kong for the Sunday Morning Post) in various roles, becoming Assistant News Editor in 1988. In 2002 she became the newspaper's Arts and Media Correspondent.

Moyes became a full-time novelist in 2002, when her first book Sheltering Rain was published. She is most well known for her later novels, The Last Letter From Your Lover (2010), Me Before You (2012), and The Girl You Left Behind ( 2013), all of which were received with wide critical accalim.

She is one of only a few authors to have won the Romantic Novelists' Association's Romantic Novel of the Year Award twice—in 2004 for Foreign Fruit and in 2011 for The Last Letter From Your Lover. She continues to write articles for The Daily Telegraph.

Moyes lives on a farm in Saffron Walden, Essex with her husband, journalist Charles Arthur, and their three children. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
(Starred review.) [E]nchanting...entwines two love stories set 90 years apart, connected by a painting called The Girl You Left Behind. In 1916, 22-year-old Sophie Lefevre struggles against a new German commandant...in her occupied village in northern France.... Jumping ahead to London in 2006, the story turns to 32-year-old Liv Halston, whose architect husband David bought Sophie’s painting.... An unfortunate coincidence twists the knife deeper, and Liv is forced to fight tooth and nail for what she has come to love most in the world. Lovely and wry, Moyes’s newest is captivating and bittersweet.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Moyes has created a riveting depiction of a wartime occupation that has mostly faded from memory. Liv and Sophie are so real in their faults, passion, and bravery that the reader is swept along right to the end. This one is hard to put down
Library Journal


Moyes’ latest is made heartwarming, thanks to the vibrancy of its main characters, both of whom will keep readers on their toes with their chemistry and witty repartee....humorous and romantic through and through.
Booklist


Moyes’ twisting, turning, heartbreaking novel raises provocative moral questions while developing a truly unique relationship between two people brought together by chance. With shades of David Nicholls’ beloved One Day, Me Before You is the kind of book you simply can’t put down—even when you realize you don’t want to see it end.... A big-hearted, beautifully written story that teaches us it is never too late to truly start living.
BookPage


The newest novel by Moyes (Me Before You, 2012, etc.) shares its title with a fictional painting that serves as catalyst in linking two loves stories, one set in occupied France during World War I, the other in 21st-century London. In a French village in 1916, Sophie is helping the family while her husband, Edouard, an artist who studied with Matisse, is off fighting.... Cut to 2006 and....Edouard's descendants recently hired [Paul] to find the painting.... Moyes is a born storyteller who makes it impossible not to care about her heroines.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. At one point, the Kommandant asks Sophie if they can just “be two people” (p. 72). What did you make of this—did you ever find yourself sympathizing with the Kommandant or any of the German soldiers? Is there room for sympathy on both sides?

2. Does Edouard’s portrait of Sophie capture who she already was or who she had the potential to become?

3. Before you knew the truth about Liliane Bethune, how did you feel about the treatment she received at the hands of the other villagers?

4. Sophie strikes a deal with the Kommandant in hopes that he, in turn, will reunite her with Edouard. Would you be willing to make a similar trade? Would most men appreciate Sophie’s sacrifice?

5. Unlike Helene, Aurelien angrily condemns Sophie’s relationship with the Kommandant. Why do you think Aurelien reacted as he did?

6. Have you ever experienced real hunger? If you were a French villager in St. Peronne, how far might you go in order to feed yourself and your loved ones?

7. How did you think Sophie’s story would end? Were you surprised by what Liv uncovered?

8. When Liv takes a group of underprivileged students on a tour of Conaghy Securities, most of them had never considered architecture as an art form. Why is this type of cultural exposure important for young people of all backgrounds?

9. Liv feels that she cannot go on without the portrait of Sophie—it is that important to her. Do you think a material object should hold such significance? Have you ever loved a piece of art or another object so much that you couldn’t bear to part with it?

10. Do you think the present–day Lefevre family’s interest in the financial worth of The Girl You Left Behind—and their apparent lack of interest in its beauty—made their claim any less worthy?

11. Why does Liv ultimately choose to try to save the painting rather than her home? What would you have done in her position?

12. Is Paul right to fear that Liv would eventually resent him for the loss of the painting?

13. In general, if a stolen artwork is legally acquired by its current owner, whose claim is more legitimate: the new owner or the original owner and his or her descendants? Should there be a statute of limitations? What if the current owner is a museum?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Girlchild
Tupelo Hassman, 2012
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250024060


Summary
Rory Hendrix, the least likely of Girl Scouts, hasn’t got a troop or a badge to call her own. But she still borrows the Handbook from the elementary school library to pore over its advice, looking for tips to get off the Calle—the Reno trailer park where she lives with her mother, Jo, the sweet-faced, hard-luck bartender at the Truck Stop.

Rory’s been told she is one of the “third-generation bastards surely on the road to whoredom,” and she’s determined to break the cycle. As Rory struggles with her mother’s habit of trusting the wrong men, and the mixed blessing of being too smart for her own good, she finds refuge in books and language.

From diary entries, social workers' reports, story problems, arrest records, family lore, and her grandmother’s letters, Tupelo Hassman's Girlchild crafts a devastating collage that shows us Rory's world while she searches for the way out of it. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Tupelo Hassman's first novel, girlchild, was published in 2012 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and released in paperback by Picador in 2013.

Her work has appeared in The Boston Globe, Harper's Bazaar, The Independent, The Portland Review Literary Journal, sPARKLE & bLINK, We Still Like, ZYZZYVA, and by 100WordStory.org, FiveChapters.com, and Invisible City Audio Tours, among others. More is forthcoming from The Arroyo Review Literary Journal, Girls on Fire: Stories of and for Teen Girls, and This Land.

Tupelo was the first American ever to win London's Literary Death Match. She lives in San Francisco's East Bay where she can be found, most days, having a root beer on tap at The Hog's Apothecary. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
A voice as fresh as hers is so rare that at times I caught myself cheering.... I’d go anywhere with this writer.
Susannah Meadows - New York Times
 

Moments of strange beauty enhance our sense of the Calle community….[Hassman] makes Rory’s milieu feel universal.
Megan Mayhew Bergman - New York Times Book Review


So fresh, original, and funny you’ll be in awe…. Tupelo Hassman has created a character you’ll never forget. Rory Dawn Hendrix of the Calle has as precocious and endearing a voice as Holden Caulfield of Central Park.
Boston Globe


Powerful.... Rory transcends her bleak situation through dark humor and unaccountable smarts.
San Francisco Chronicle

 
A lyrical and fiercely accomplished first novel...In Hassman’s skilled hands, what could have been an unrelenting chronicle of desolation becomes a lovely tribute to the soaring, defiant spirit of a survivor.
People
 

Blighted opportunity and bad choices revisit three generations of women in a Reno, Nev., trailer park in these affecting dispatches by debut novelist Hassman. Narrator Rory Dawn Hendrix, “R.D.,” is growing up in the late ’60s on the dusty calle, where families scrape.... Poring over a secondhand copy of The Girl Scout Handbook, with its how-to emphasis on honor and duty, comforts R.D.... Hassman’s characters are hounded by a relentless, recurring poverty and ignorance, and by shame, so that the sins of the mothers keep repeating, and suicide is often the only way out. Despite a few jarring moments of moralizing, this debut possesses powerful writing and unflinching clarity.
Publishers Weekly


Bright young girl must endure family dysfunction and sexual abuse while coming of age in a Reno trailer park during the late 1980s.... Taking inspiration from a battered library copy of The Girl Scout Handbook, Rory does a remarkable job raising herself, while trying to let go of the people (and hurts) that no longer serve her. With a compelling (if harrowing) story and a wise-child narrator, Hassman's debut gives voice—and soul—to a world so often reduced to cliche. A darkly funny and frequently heartbreaking portrait of life as one of America's have-nots.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Girlchild is set in a “town just north of Reno and just south of nowhere.” If the story were set elsewhere, how would the challenges Rory Dawn faces change? Or would they? What direct impact does geography have on Rory’s life? What about where the story is located in time? Could Girlchild be set in  the 1970s? In the 2010s?

2. Girlchild is told in short, and sometimes extremely short, chapters. How does this method serve to impact the story? How would it feel to stay with any of these  ssenes longer than we do? How would that change the overall impact of the novel?

3. There are many stories about Rory Dawn and the Hendrix family that combine in girlchild, including the social service report on the Hendrix family, Shirley Rose’s hopes for Rory’s future, Jo’s fears for Rory, the government’s position on Rory’s culture, and Roscoe Elementary and Junior High schools’ opinions of Rory’s academic gifts and adventures. Rory Dawn takes each of these for a spin. Why might she do this? What does she gain? Lose?

4. Vivian Buck is, perhaps, Rory Dawn’s only friend. Is Vivian real? Historical? Imaginary? All of the above? Do we have any reason to think that Vivian exists for other Calle residents? What does it say about Rory Dawn if Vivian doesn’t exist for others? Does it matter whether Vivian actually exists in real time on the Calle?

5. Dennis is a regular at the Truck Stop and he is one of the few nonvillainous Calle men whose life we see in detail, in the chapter “The Great Strain of Being.” What is the importance of Dennis for Rory Dawn? How does he reflect the trajectory of many of the Calle men; for example, Timmy, or Rory’s neighbor Marc?

6. Rory Dawn and Timmy have history together on the Calle brought by riding the shifting tide of babysitters. When it is announced that Rory Dawn is advancing to the  next level in the spelling bee, she loses her temper with Timmy, throwing his toy truck over the school fence. What other circumstances surround this act of  Rory’s, and what part of it leads her to turn against Timmy?

7. Jo, Rory Dawn’s mother, is a bartender, but this career wasn’t always her goal. What do we learn about Jo’s early aspirations and why they changed? Does she deserve a second chance? If she were given one, would she take it?

8. Rory Dawn is academically gifted, but instead of this being a boon, it increases her isolation, both from her peers and her mother. Does she find any refuge in this gift? What is the significance of Rory Dawn’s throwing the final round of the spelling bee? What does her choice in the misspelling of the word “outlier” (she spells it “outliar”) reveal about her feelings with regard to the stratification of her culture? What does it reveal about her place in it?
(Questions issued by Picador, the publisher.)

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The Girls at 17 Swann Street 
Yara Zgheib, 2019
St. Martin's Press
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250202444


Summary
Yara Zgheib’s poetic and poignant debut novel is a haunting portrait of a young woman’s struggle with anorexia on an intimate journey to reclaim her life.

The chocolate went first, then the cheese, the fries, the ice cream. The bread was more difficult, but if she could just lose a little more weight, perhaps she would make the soloists’ list.

Perhaps if she were lighter, danced better, tried harder, she would be good enough. Perhaps if she just ran for one more mile, lost just one more pound.

Anna Roux was a professional dancer who followed the man of her dreams from Paris to Missouri. There, alone with her biggest fears—imperfection, failure, loneliness—she spirals down anorexia and depression till she weighs a mere eighty-eight pounds.

Forced to seek treatment, she is admitted as a patient at 17 Swann Street, a peach pink house where pale, fragile women with life-threatening eating disorders live. Women like Emm, the veteran; quiet Valerie; Julia, always hungry. Together, they must fight their diseases and face six meals a day.

Every bite causes anxiety. Every flavor induces guilt. And every step Anna takes toward recovery will require strength, endurance, and the support of the girls at 17 Swann Street. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Yara Zgheib is a Fulbright scholar with a Masters degree in Security Studies from Georgetown University and a PhD in International Affairs in Diplomacy from Centre D'etudes Diplomatiques et Strategiques in Paris. She is the author of The Girls at 17 Swann Street (2019) and writes on culture, art, travel, and philosophy on her blog, "Aristotle at Afternoon Tea."

Zgheib is fluent in English, Arabic, French, and Spanish. She is a writer for several US and European magazines, including The Huffington Post, The Four Seasons Magazine, A Woman’s Paris, The Idea List, and Holiday Magazine.  (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
★ In her powerful debut, Zgheib masterfully chronicles the pain of an anorexic’s distorted thinking and intense fear of food in a riveting diarylike structure.… This is an impressive, deeply moving debut.
Publishers Weekly


Zgheib's lyrical, dream-like style will resonate with fans of Wally Lamb's and Anne Tyler's novels and Augusten Burroughs' memoirs.
Booklist


[T]he novel's greatest strength is its simplicity. There is no unusually dramatic backstory.… Anna is, in all but her Frenchness, unexceptional. It's a story we've read before; it's moving nonetheless. A nuanced portrait of a woman struggling against herself.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points help start a discussion for THE GIRLS AT 17 SWANN STREET … and then take off on your own:

1. Talk about Anorexia Nervosa (AN) as an illness. What preconceptions of AN did you have prior to reading The Girls of 17 Swann Street? What have you learned that surprises you—symptoms, perhaps, which you were unaware of?

2. Anna says, "I am twenty-six years old. My body feels sixty-two." What does she mean? Ever feel that way?

3. What do readers learn about Anna's background that might have led her to become anorexic? What, for instance, does AN have to with the need for control in ones life … or a lack of self-acceptance?

4. What has the medical/scientific community learned about the causes of AN?

5. What is the difference between Bulimia and Anorexia?

6. How does Anna's disease affect her relationship with her husband?

7. Readers have talked about the authenticity contained in Yara Zgheib's handling of the story. Do you agree? If so, in what makes the novel feel "authentic"?

8. Anna says, “I have books to read, places to see, babies to make, birthday cakes to taste. I even have unused birthday wishes to spare.”

So what am I doing here?”

If you were a friend, or a counselor, to Anna, what would you say to her?

9. Have you, or people you know, suffered from eating disorders? Can you talk about those experiences? How do Anna's experiences compare?

10. Does the book's structure—told through a series of vignettes from Anna's past, as well as her experiences at the treatment center—enhance or disrupt your reading experience? Would you have preferred a more continuous narrative flow? Why or why not?

11. Talk about the other characters' struggles with their illness? Do you find one character more sympathetic than others?

12. How do the other patients at 17 Swann Street help one each other overcome their illnesses? How do they support and learn from one another?

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

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Girls Burn Brighter 
Shobha Roa, 2018
Flatiron Books
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250074256


Summary
An electrifying debut novel about the extraordinary bond between two girls driven apart by circumstance but relentless in their search for one another.

Poornima and Savitha have three strikes against them: they are poor, they are ambitious, and they are girls.

After her mother's death, Poornima has very little kindness in her life. She is left to care for her siblings until her father can find her a suitable match.

So when Savitha enters their household, Poornima is intrigued by the joyful, independent-minded girl. Suddenly their Indian village doesn't feel quite so claustrophobic, and Poornima begins to imagine a life beyond arranged marriage.

But when a devastating act of cruelty drives Savitha away, Poornima leaves behind everything she has ever known to find her friend.

Her journey takes her into the darkest corners of India's underworld, on a harrowing cross-continental journey, and eventually to an apartment complex in Seattle.

Alternating between the girls' perspectives as they face ruthless obstacles, Girls Burn Brighter introduces two heroines who never lose the hope that burns within.a (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Shobha Rao moved to the U.S. from India at the age of seven. She is the winner of the 2014 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction, awarded by Nimrod International Journal. She has been a resident at Hedgebrook and is the recipient of the Elizabeth George Foundation fellowship. Her story "Kavitha and Mustafa" was chosen by T.C. Boyle for inclusion in the Best American Short Stories 2015. She lives in San Francisco. Girls Burn Brighter (2018) is her debut novel. (From the publihser.)

Book Reviews
Shobha Rao writes cleanly and eloquently about women who, without their brightness, might have been left to die in their beds. She writes them into life, into existence, into the light of day.
Los Angeles Times


A confident debut novel set in India and America about the unbreakable bond between two girls. From the menacing nooks of India's underworld to the streets of Seattle, this searing novel traces the nuances of adulthood and the enduring power of childhood bonds.
Chicago Review


Incandescent.… A searing portrait of what feminism looks like in much of the world.
Vogue


A definite must-read for readers who love authors like Nadia Hashimi and Khaled Hosseini.
Bustle


A treat for Ferrante fans, exploring the bonds of friendship and how female ambition beats against the strictures of poverty and patriarchal societies.
Huffington Post


[S]tirring.… [E]motional urgency will pull readers along. Vivid depictions of contemporary Indian culture and harrowing accounts of human trafficking…will leave readers, and book clubs, with much to ponder and discuss.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Incredible storytelling immerses readers in the world of Poornima and Savitha, two poor girls from India.… Without descending into sentimentality, Rao relates this story with real power and humanity.… [N]ot to be missed. —Lisa Rohrbaugh, Leetonia Community P.L., OH
Library Journal


(Starred review.) This powerful, heart-wrenching novel and its two unforgettable heroines offer an extraordinary example of the strength that can be summoned in even the most terrible situations.
Booklist


(Starred review.) Enchanting… The resplendent prose captures the nuances and intensity of two best friends on the brink of an uncertain and precarious adulthood… An incisive study of a friendship's unbreakable bond.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the novel's title. What does it mean to you? How is the experience of being a girl portrayed here? Did you find it eye-opening?

2. Why do you think the author chose to begin with the story about the old woman and the temple doors? What tone does that set for the rest of the novel?

3. How is friendship depicted in these pages? Why do you think Poornima and Savitha are so drawn to each other? What qualities do they share, and what qualities distinguish each of them? Do they change over the course of the novel?

4. Savitha tells Poornima about encountering an owl on the road in Indravalli. The owl tells Savitha,

If two people want to be together, they'll find a way. They'll forge a way. It may seem ludicrous, even stupid, to work so hard at something that is, truly, a matter of chance, completely arbitrary, such as staying with someone—as if "with" and "apart" have meaning in and of themselves … but that's the thing with you humans. You think too much, don't you?

Discuss the owl's words. What does this novel have to say about willpower versus fate or coincidence?

5. Poornima and Savitha have very different relationships with their fathers. How do those relationships shape their childhoods and their worldviews? Do you feel any sympathy or understanding toward Poornima's father?

6. Savitha's last words to Poornima are "I'm the one with wings." What do you think she means by that? How are bird and flight imagery used throughout the novel?

7. On her wedding night, Poornima remembers a story from childhood, when she stole a candy and her mother told her to never take what isn't hers. She reflects, "Don't you see, Amma, if only I had taken the things I wasn't meant to take. If only I'd had the courage." Are there examples after this moment in her story when she does take what she isn't supposed to? How does she exercise control over her own life?

8. In her husband's house, after she has been terribly burned, Poornima imagines the banks of the Krishna river:

When she closed her eyes, there were the saris drying on the opposite shore. Every color, fluttering in the river breeze, fields of wildflowers.

Saris and weaving play an important role throughout the novel. What do they represent for Poornima and Savitha? Why does Savitha guard the fragment of cloth from Poornima's sari so closely?

9. Discuss Savitha's thoughts on bananas:

Yogurt rice with a banana was like life, simple, straightforward, with a beginning and an end, while the other—the banana split—was like death, complex, infused with a kind of mystery that was beyond Savitha's comprehension, and every bite, like every death, dumbfounding.

Do you think her views on life and death make her more resilient and able to face adversity?

10. Savitha tells Poornima a story about a crow and an elephant, which Poornima thinks about often as she is searching for her friend. Savitha says,

Here's what matters. Understand this, Poornima: that it's better to be swallowed whole than in pieces. Only then can you win. No elephant can be too big. Only then no elephant can do you harm.

What do you think she means? Do you think Poornima and Savitha are swallowed whole by their experiences? Why or why not?

11. Savitha and Poornima both have complicated relationships with Mohan. Why do you think they are both drawn to him? Do you find him sympathetic?

12. Poornima finds a collection of poetry in Mohan's coat, and reads the most dog-eared page, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." When she discusses the poem with Mohan, he claims "it's about the struggle to find courage" and that his favorite lines are:

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare," and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair.

Mohan tells Poornima they are both like Prufrock, but Poornima disagrees: "No, she thought, you're wrong. You're wrong. He's nothing like me." Why do you think they have such different reactions to the poem? How is courage portrayed in this novel?

13. Discuss the two stories Savitha hears from the men with whom she hitchhikes: the multi-generational story that ends in the propane gas explosion, and the story about the daughter who is half black and half white. Why do you think the men decided to share those particular stories with Savitha, especially knowing that she can't understand English? What do they add to the novel as a whole?

14. Girls Burn Brighter addresses some of the most difficult issues facing women and girls today: rape, domestic violence, prostitution, sex trafficking, and abuse. Did Poornima's and Savitha's stories change the way you think about these issues? Did you find the novel's ultimate message to be at all optimistic or hopeful? Why or why not?

15. The novel's final scene is left ambiguous: we don't actually see if Poornima and Savitha reunite. How did you feel about the ending? What do you imagine happening to Poornima and Savitha next? Do you think there is the possibility of a new life for them in America?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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The Girls in the Garden 
Lisa Jewell, 2015 (2016, U.S.)
Atria Books
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781476792217


Summary
Imagine that you live on a picturesque communal garden square, an oasis in urban London where your children run free, in and out of other people’s houses. You’ve known your neighbors for years and you trust them. Implicitly.

You think your children are safe. But are they really?

On a midsummer night, as a festive neighborhood party is taking place, preteen Pip discovers her thirteen-year-old sister Grace lying unconscious and bloody in a hidden corner of a lush rose garden.

What really happened to her? And who is responsible?

Dark secrets, a devastating mystery, and the games both children and adults play all swirl together in this gripping novel, packed with utterly believable characters and page-turning suspense. Fans of Liane Moriarty and Jojo Moyes will be captivated by The Girls in the Garden. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 19, 1968
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—Epsom School of Art & Design
• Awards—Melissa Nathan Award For Comedy Romance
• Currently—lives in London, England


Lisa Jewell is a British author of popular fiction. Her books number some 15, including most recently The House We Grew Up In (2013), The Third Wife (2014), The Girls in the Garden (U.S. title of 2016), I found You (2016), and Watching You (2018).

She was educated at St. Michael's Catholic Grammar School in Finchley, north London, leaving school after one day in the sixth form to do an art foundation course at Barnet College followed by a diploma in fashion illustration at Epsom School of Art & Design.

She worked in fashion retail for several years, namely Warehouse and Thomas Pink.

After being made redundant, Jewell accepted a challenge from her friend to write three chapters of a novel in exchange for dinner at her favourite restaurant. Those three chapters were eventually developed into Jewell's debut novel Ralph's Party, which then became the UK's bestselling debut novel in 1999.

Jewell is one of the most popular authors writing in the UK today, and in 2008 was awarded the Melissa Nathan Award For Comedy Romance for her novel 31 Dream Street.

She currently lives in Swiss Cottage, London with her husband Jascha and two daughters. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 6/22/2016.)

Visit the author's website.

Book Reviews
Jewell expertly mines the relationships of her compelling, multilayered characters for a perfect pack-for-vacation read.
Fort-Worth Star Telegram


Another winner. Beautiful writing, believable characters, a pacy narrative and dark secrets combine to make this a gripping read.
London Daily Mail


Jewell expertly builds suspense by piling up domestic misunderstandings and more plot twists than an SVU episode. It’s a page-turner for readers who like beach reads on the dark side.
People


An intoxicating, spellbinding read that will make readers entranced with Lisa Jewell’s wicked and gorgeous prose…raw, intense, gritty, dark and suspenseful. If you are looking for a looking for a psychological thriller that will unfold secrets and truths in a shocking manner, this book is for you.
Manhattan Book Review


Jewell pens a psychological thriller that leaves readers wondering if they really know all the answers. Children can be more frightening than adults, as she demonstrates in her brilliant portrayal of youthful deceit and jealousy. Each individual is vividly described and counterbalanced by their strengths and weaknesses.
Romance Times Magazine


A suspenseful mystery.
Womans Day


(Starred review.) Rich characterization and intricate plot development are combined with mid-chapter cliffhangers...resulting in a riveting pace. Vivid descriptions of the bucolic park contrast with [lurking] evil...a pervasive atmosphere of unease in this well-spun narrative.
Publishers Weekly


[A] page-turner that keeps the suspense flowing.... Jewell sharply evades the truth while bouncing the story among multiple character.... The book's conclusion will leave readers saying, "Of course that's whodunit" after ricocheting about with uncertainty. —Jennifer M. Schlau, Elgin Community Coll., IL
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Full of suspense yet emotionally grounded…Fans of Liane Moriarty, Paula Hawkins, and Carla Buckley will adore this peek inside a gated community that truly takes care of its own, no matter the consequences.
Booklist


Jewell...ultimately fails to develop a climax that would bring together the several dramatic tropes at work.... [The author] offers an intriguing premise and characters but has difficulty maintaining plot momentum and creating depth of character.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Who did you first suspect of attacking Grace? Did your suspicions change over the course of the book? Were there clues that pointed you toward the perpetrator? What were some of the red herrings that misdirected your attention?

2. Adele has a very lenient, alternative parenting style, homeschooling and preferring to let her children make their own choices, whatever they are. She repeatedly suggests that she feels judged by others for her lifestyle. How did you feel about how she is raising her children? Were there points in the book you felt supportive or critical of her maternal choices?

3. The police suggest that Grace is "mature for her age" (page 206). Do you agree that Grace is (or is acting) more mature than her age? If so, how? How do Grace’s or Pip’s experiences compare with your own experience of being twelve and thirteen?

4. A major issue in this book is that of growing up. What growth do you see in Pip from the beginning to the end of The Girls in the Garden? Compare and contrast Pip’s development with the ways in which Grace matures.

5. Do you think Clare made the right decision in keeping Pip and Grace’s father’s release from the hospital a secret? Why or why not?

6. Adele asserts that "with parenting there’s a long game and a short game. The aim of the short game is to make your children bearable to live with. Easy to transport. Well behaved in public place . . . But the aim of the long game is to produce a good human being" (page 150). Do you agree with her belief that you can "skip" the short game? Is there a middle ground between her viewpoint and Gordon’s discipline-focused approach?

7. What draws Clare to Leo? Is her attraction to him based more on her own circumstances or something about him?

8. Why do you think Lisa Jewell wrote primarily from Pip, Clare, and Adele’s perspectives? What do these narrators have in common? What is unique about their different standpoints, and how does this affect the story?

9. Did you relate to any of the girls or parents more than the others? In what ways?

10. Do you think you would enjoy living in a home with a communal garden like the one described? What are some of the benefits and drawbacks?

11. What drives Catkin and Fern to follow Tyler’s lead? What do you think were their motivations for taking the actions they took?

12. Why does Adele ultimately look after Tyler? Are her motives purely selfless?

13. Do you think Adele does the right thing by keeping quiet after she discovers what happened to Grace? What would you have done in her position?

14. All of the girls go through both traumatic and formative experiences during the course of the book. What do you think the various girls will be like when they are grown up?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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The Girls in the Picture 
Melanie Benjamin, 2018
Random House
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781101886809


Summary
A fascinating novel of the friendship and creative partnership between two of Hollywood’s earliest female legends—screenwriter Frances Marion and superstar Mary Pickford

It is 1914, and twenty-five-year-old Frances Marion has left her (second) husband and her Northern California home for the lure of Los Angeles, where she is determined to live independently as an artist.

But the word on everyone’s lips these days is "flickers"—the silent moving pictures enthralling theatergoers. Turn any corner in this burgeoning town and you’ll find made-up actors running around, as a movie camera captures it all.

In this fledgling industry, Frances finds her true calling: writing stories for this wondrous new medium. She also makes the acquaintance of actress Mary Pickford, whose signature golden curls and lively spirit have given her the title of America’s Sweetheart. The two ambitious young women hit it off instantly, their kinship fomented by their mutual fever to create, to move audiences to a frenzy, to start a revolution.

But their ambitions are challenged both by the men around them and the limitations imposed on their gender—and their astronomical success could come at a price.

As Mary, the world’s highest paid and most beloved actress, struggles to live her life under the spotlight, she also wonders if it is possible to find love, even with the dashing actor Douglas Fairbanks. Frances, too, longs to share her life with someone. As in any good Hollywood story, dramas will play out, personalities will clash, and even the deepest friendships might be shattered.
 
With cameos from such notables as Charlie Chaplin, Louis B. Mayer, Rudolph Valentino, and Lillian Gish, The Girls in the Picture is, at its heart, a story of friendship and forgiveness. Melanie Benjamin perfectly captures the dawn of a glittering new era—its myths and icons, its possibilities and potential, and its seduction and heartbreak. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Aka—Melanie Hauser
• Birth—November 24. 1962
• Where—Indianapolis, Indiana, USA
• Education—Indiana University (Purdue University at Indianapolis)
• Currently—lives near Chicago, Illinois


Melanie Benjamin is the pen name of American writer, Melanie Hauser (nee Miller). Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, Melanie is one of three children. Her brother Michael Miller is a published non-fiction author and musician. Melanie attended Indiana University—Purdue University at Indianapolis then married Dennis Hauser in 1988; they presently reside in the Chicago, Illinois area with their two sons.

Early writing
As Melanie Hauser, she published short stories in the In Posse Review and The Adirondack Review. Her short story "Prodigy on Ice" won the 2001 "Now Hear This" short story competition that was part of a WBEZ (Chicago Public Radio) program called Stories on Stage, where short stories were performed and broadcast.

When Melanie sold her first of two contemporary novels, she had to add Lynne to her name (Melanie Lynne Hauser) to distinguish her from the published sports journalist Melanie Hauser.

The first of Melanie's contemporary novels, Confessions of Super Mom was published in 2005; the sequel Super Mom Saves the World came out in 2007.  In addition to her two contemporary novels, Melanie also contributed an essay to the anthology IT'S A BOY and maintained a popular mom blog called The Refrigerator Door.

Fictional biographies
Under the pen name Melanie Benjamin (a combination of her first name and her son's first name), she shifted genres to historical fiction. Her third novel, Alice I Have Been, was inspired by Alice Liddell Hargreaves's life (the real-life Alice of Alice in Wonderland). Published in 2010, Alice I Have Been was a national bestseller and reached the extended list of The New York Times Best Seller list.

In 2011, Benjamin fictionalized another historical female. Her novel The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb focuses on the life of Lavinia Warren Bump, a proportionate dwarf featured in P.T. Barnum's shows.

Her third fictionalized biography, The Aviator's Wife, was released in 2013 and centers on Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife of famed aviator, Charles Lindberg.

The Swans of Manhattan, published in 2016, revolves around the Truman Capot-Babe Paley friendship and the glitterati of Manhattan during the 1950s and '60s. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/14/2016.)

Book Reviews
It is not a spoiler to share that the first scene of THE GIRLS IN THE PICTURE is the beginning of the final chapter—a genius move by author Melanie Benjamin. I flipped through the pages enthralled, needing to understand how the great Mary Pickford, a glamorous 1920s actress, had happened upon such a sad ending personally.… This timely, well-crafted piece of historical fiction is absolutely worth the read. MORE…
Abby Fabiaschi, author - LitLovers


In the era of #MeToo, Girls could not be more timely—or troubling—about the treatment of women in the workplace.… [Melanie] Benjamin portrays the affection and friction between Pickford and Marion with compassion and insight.… As Hollywood preps for an Oscar season riven with the sexual mistreatment scandal, the rest of us can settle in with this rich exploration of two Hollywood friends who shaped the movies.
USA Today


A boffo production.… One of the pleasures of The Girls in the Picture its no-males-necessary alliance of two determined females—#TimesUp before its time.… Inspiration is a rare and unexpected gift in a book filled with the fluff of Hollywood, but Benjamin provides it with The Girls in the Picture.
NPR
 

Full of Old Hollywood glamour and true details about the pair’s historic careers, The Girls in the Picture is a captivating ode to a legendary bond.
Real Simple


The heady, infectious energy of the fledgling film industry in Los Angeles is convincingly conveyed—and the loving but competitive friendship between these two women on the rise in a man’s world is a powerful source of both tension and relatability.
Publishers Weekly


Benjamin immerses readers in the whirlwind excitement of Mary’s and Frances’ lives while portraying a rarely seen character, an early woman screenwriter, and deftly exploring the complexities of female friendship.
Booklist


A smart, fond backward glance at two trailblazers from an era when being the only woman in the room was not only the norm, but revolutionary.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Frances and Mary, especially in their younger years, feel they have to choose between pursuing careers and fulfilling traditional expectations of marriage. Did these conversations surprise you? Do you think these pressures still exist for women today?

2. How did you react to the sexism Frances and Mary face in the movie industry? How do the women confront their male superiors, and do they ever prove the men who doubted them wrong?

3. Mary’s role as an actress places her in the spotlight while Frances works behind the scenes as her "scenarist." Does Mary’s fame work for or against her? What about Frances’s relative anonymity?

4. Did you identify more with Frances or Mary? Why? Whose chapters were more intriguing to you?

5. Benjamin references many movies produced in the early days of Hollywood, such as The Birth of a Nation, The Poor Little Rich Girl, and The Big House. Have you seen or heard of any of these movies? If not, did the novel make you want to seek them out?

6. Have you ever had a friendship as supportive, productive, and collaborative as Frances and Mary’s? Do you think that kind of friendship can only thrive between the young and ambitious, or can you find it at any age?

7. Are Frances and Mary truly equal creative partners or does one woman hold more power over the other? How do the power dynamics of their partnership change over the course of their lives?

8. Consider the opening line of Mary’s first chapter: "Mama, I made a friend!" How does Mary’s relationship with her mother affect her throughout her career? Does Mary feel as though she needs to prove something to her—and if so, what?

9. Seeing the frontlines of the war—and the war’s brutal ramifications for women—is a turning point for Frances. Why do you think Frances makes the decision to leave her flourishing career and go to war? How did Mary’s decision to stay in Hollywood and work on her movies affect her relationship with Frances?

10. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks were the most celebrated couple of their age. Can you think of a similarly iconic couple alive today?

11. Despite their remarkable success, Frances and Mary experience anxiety in their personal and professional lives. What is Frances most insecure about? What makes Mary feel imprisoned?

12. What do you think causes Frances and Mary’s friendship to fracture? Do you think it was one incident or many over time? Was it inevitable?

13. Throughout the novel, Benjamin sprinkles appearances from well-known celebrities and illuminating details about the time and place of the story. What did you learn about early Hollywood and the naissance of the movie industry?

14. What female screenwriters or directors do you know of? How do sexism, gender bias, and inequality manifest in the film industry today?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Girls in Trucks
Katie Crouch, 2008
Little, Brown & Company
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316002127


Summary
Sarah Walters is a less-than-perfect debutante. She tries hard to follow the time-honored customs of the Charleston Camellia Society, as her mother and grandmother did, standing up straight in cotillion class and attending lectures about all the things that Camellias don't do. (Like ride with boys in pickup trucks.)

But Sarah can't quite ignore the barbarism just beneath all that propriety, and as soon as she can she decamps South Carolina for a life in New York City. There, she and her fellow displaced Southern friends try to make sense of city sophistication, to understand how much of their training applies to real life, and how much to the strange and rarefied world they've left behind.

When life's complications become overwhelming, Sarah returns home to confront with matured eyes the motto "Once a Camellia, always a Camellia"—and to see how much fuller life can be, for good and for ill, among those who know you best.

Girls in Trucks introduces an irresistable, sweet, and wise voice that heralds the arrival of an exciting new talent. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Reared—Charleston, South Carolina, USA
• Education—Brown University; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Awards—Sewanee Walter Dakin and MacDowell Fellowships
• Currently—lives in San Francisco, California

Katie Crouch is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Girls in Trucks and Men and Dogs (2010)

Her writing has also appeared in the New York Observer, Tin House, Glamour, and McSweeney's. She received her M.F.A. at Columbia University, and was awarded a Sewanee Walter Dakin Fellowship and a MacDowell Fellowship. She currently lives in San Francisco. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
In the book's final scene, she leaves her characters in a shared moment of new joy, one that may or may not last, no guarantees, just like in life and in good literature.
San Francisco Chronicle

Lucky for her readers, Crouch put to use all her cotillion-girl knowledge when she wrote her debut novel, Girls in Trucks.... In her acknowledgements, Crouch thanks her fifth-grade teacher, Dorothy Rhett, who told Crouch she was a writer. Rhett is surely proud. Maybe her cotillion teacher will be, too.
Charlotte Observer

Sarah's voice is a funny, slim stiletto to the heart of friendship, desire and love. Her spare prose and sharp dialogue flay open a universal need to belong, whether to a place, a person or your own true self.
The Oregonian

An unenthusiastic Southern debutante copes with the cruelties of postcollege New York life in Crouch's amusing debut. Sarah Walters is neither a misfit nor the queen of the Camellia Society cotillion scene growing up in Charleston, S.C. But when she and her fellow Camellias try to make a life in New York City, they find themselves coping in unexpectedly dangerous ways—from standard substance addictions to Sarah's fixation on preppy ex-boyfriend Max, a smooth and sadistic child of wealth. While the formula of young women in the big city seems destined for cliché, Crouch subverts most expectations; Sarah almost purposely misses an opportunity for happiness and stability with the gentle lover she met in Europe, and her ploy to ignite sparks with a college friend goes painfully awry. When Sarah goes back to Charleston and faces a perhaps too over-the-top family crisis (it involves suicide and lesbianism), the reader's left with the hope that the worst is over. Though this feels almost like a collection—each chapter its own story with its own narrative technique—Crouch's portrayal of a young woman's self-sabotage and the pitfalls facing young women in a cold world is wise, wry and heartbreaking.
Publishers Weekly

Crouch's debut novel-in-linked-stories chronicles the life of Charleston debutante Sarah Walters from her learning the fox trot in grade school to her finding out family secrets in her mid-thirties. The narrative is as raw, frank, and underdeveloped as the characters within, each of whom makes decisions that are difficult to understand. For example, when Sarah's relationship with an abusive man ends and he starts dating someone else months later, she stalks him. She also plunges into excessive alcohol and drug use, which only further clouds her judgment. Unfortunately, Sarah does not have any Southern "sisters" in whom she can confide, as she and her "Camellias" talk more out of Camellia Society obligation than from any actual affinity; they, too, struggle with unhealthy relationships and addictions. In the end, Crouch's portrait of a lady lacks a distinct Southern charm and does not show contemporary women in a positive light. Stylistically, the book resembles Melissa Bank's The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, but the unexpectedly abrupt ending may confuse readers and leave them wanting more.
Library Journal

Wry, rueful tales of a Southern debutante's mostly disappointing love life. The unifying motif of Crouch's debut is the Charleston Cotillion Training School, where South Carolina girls and boys of a certain class are taught ballroom dance in preparation for the girls' coming out parties. Prominent among the debutantes are the Camellias, a sorority of women whose mission is to "prepare their daughters for marriage to a decent man." For Sarah Walters and her friends Bitsy, Charlotte and Annie, Camellia membership will mark their most permanent attachment; it seems that for latter-day debutantes there's a shortage of decent men. The novel is comprised of linked short stories, some veering off into the equally problematic amours of peripheral characters including Sarah's brilliant older sister Eloise and their mother. After college, Sarah moves to New York City seeking a writer's life. While working lowly editorial positions, she rooms with Charlotte, a fledgling fashion designer who's in and out of rehab. Sarah's man-that-got-away is blue-blooded Max, who "made money with money." His casual cruelty is not tempered by any redeeming appeal, and Sarah's intractable obsession with him beggars belief. She attempts, vainly, to settle for guys from home, or guys she thought of as just friends but was holding in reserve as fallback lovers. Annie, who never leaves Charleston, survives a relationship with a feckless artist to find love and financial stability. Bitsy marries money, which is scant consolation for her husband's callousness—his infidelities persist as she dies of cancer. Charlotte chooses first drugs, then entrepreneurial success, over relationships. Sarah, finding at 31 that she's"missed [her] window" of opportunity with the fallback guys, has a child by an extremely casual acquaintance. By age 35 she's accepted the fact that neither she nor the men in her life will ever measure up to debutante standards. Gentle humor and sharp observation couched in straightforward prose with none of the preening preciosity so often seen in Southern fiction.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. To be a member of the Camellia Society, one has to be born into it.  How do the themes of “membership” and exclusivity play out in Girls in Trucks?  What would you say the “dues” are for being a Camellia?

2. One of the implicit goals of the Camellia Society—as is particularly evident in the Cotillion dances—is to prepare its young ladies for marriage.  Over the course of the novel, how does her Camellia upbringing prepare Sarah Walters for dating, courtship, and love?

3. Love is manifested in many different ways in the book, sometimes tragically. Which examples surprised you? Why do you think Sarah seems to have such bad luck with men?

4. Sarah’s older sister, Eloise, is the black sheep of the family. How does she differ from Sarah and how is she similar? How does Sarah see Eloise as a model—either to follow or not to follow?

5. Later on in the novel, Sarah is invited to a party at her friend Bitsy’s. Even though she didn’t always get along with Bitsy, she attends because Camellias are “friends for life.” What do you think of this die-hard loyalty? How do Sarah’s attitudes toward Bitsy and Charlotte change?

6. There is a distinction made by some of the Camellia matrons between what is decorous and “civilized” and what is “common.” When in the novel does this distinction begin to break down—or become subverted entirely?

7. One of the sayings from Sarah’s youth is “Once a Camellia, always a Camellia.” To what extent does this mantra hold true for Sarah

8. Sarah heads North for college, in part to escape the Camellia Society. Does she succeed?

9. In many ways, this is a novel about home. When she’s living in New York, how is Sarah pulled toward home and toward the past?

10. One of the curveballs that life throws at Sarah is the baby she has by a man she hardly knows. How does having this child change her? Were you surprised by this turn of events?

11. Another surprise of the book is Sarah’s mother’s relationship with her lifelong friend, Georgia. How would you reconcile Sarah’s mother’s staunch Southern gentility with this unconventional romance?

12. Toward the end of the book we meet J.T., a classic Southern man from Sarah’s youth, with the truck to prove it. How does J.T. differ from the other men in the novel, and why is Sarah drawn to him—is it just nostalgia or something deeper?

13. What other books did Girls in Trucks remind you of? What was similar or different about them?

14. If you had to write an epilogue to the book, how would you imagine Sarah’s life five years from now?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Girls in White Dresses
Jennifer Close, 2011
Knopf Doubleday
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307596857


Summary
Wickedly hilarious and utterly recognizable, Girls in White Dresses tells the story of three women grappling with heartbreak and career change, family pressure and new love—all while suffering through an endless round of weddings and bridal showers.

Isabella, Mary, and Lauren feel like everyone they know is getting married. On Sunday after Sunday, at bridal shower after bridal shower, they coo over toasters, collect ribbons and wrapping paper, eat minuscule sandwiches and doll-sized cakes.

They wear pastel dresses and drink champagne by the case, but amid the celebration these women have their own lives to contend with: Isabella is working at a mailing-list company, dizzy with the mixed signals of a boss who claims she’s on a diet but has Isabella file all morning if she forgets to bring her a chocolate muffin.

Mary thinks she might cry with happiness when she finally meets a nice guy who loves his mother, only to realize he’ll never love Mary quite as much. And Lauren, a waitress at a Midtown bar, swears up and down she won’t fall for the sleazy bartender—a promise that his dirty blond curls and perfect vodka sodas make hard to keep.

With a wry sense of humor, Jennifer Close brings us through those thrilling, bewildering, what-on-earth-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life years of early adulthood. These are the years when everyone else seems to have a plan, a great job, and an appropriate boyfriend, while Isabella has a blind date with a gay man, Mary has a crush on her boss, and Lauren has a goldfish named Willard.

Through boozy family holidays and disastrous ski vacations, relationships lost to politics and relationships found in pet stores, Girls in White Dresses pulls us deep inside the circle of these friends, perfectly capturing the wild frustrations and soaring joys of modern life. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1979
• Where—Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., Boston College; M.F.A., The New School
• Currently—lives in Washington, DC


Jennifer Close is the American author of four novels, including her well known 2011 debut, Girls in White Dresses.

Close was raised in Chicago, Illinois, and attended Boston College. After earning her B.A., she headed to New York to get her M.F.A. at The New School where, according to an interview in the Washington Post, she wrote in a male voice to "avoid being too revelatory."

After an internship at The New Yorker, she spent another year at Vogue, then landed a job with a startup magazine called Portfolio. She rose to become the assistant managing editor before the magazine closed in 2009. It was at Portfolio, while waiting for proofs to be delivered late at night, that she began typing stories about her life and the lives of her friends who found themselves on an endless cycle of weddings, showers, and bachelorette parties—events which left them exhausted and broke. Those stories eventually became the 2011 novel, Girls in White Dresses.

When her boyfriend and now husband, Tim Hartz, joined the Obama White House, Close moved to D.C. to be with him. That life has also proven a rich lode to mine—this time for her fourth book, The Hopefuls.

Novels
2011 - Girls in White Dresses
2013 - The Smart One
2013 - The Things We Need
2016 - The Hopefuls

Book Reviews
Close’s witty voice...charts the romantic shenanigans of a bevy of New York women in their 20s, before career success or Botoxed foreheads. Dating is a phenomenon to be analyzed in improvised group therapy over cocktails.
New York Times

Follows three women and peripheral friends as they alternately flounder and flourish through their 20s. Weddings provide the backdrop as the women feel their way in and out of inert relationships and crappy jobs, trying to figure out who they want to be.
Washington Post


Anyone who has seen The Sound of Music—that is, everyone—will likely recognize the title of Jennifer Close’s Girls in White Dresses as a certain Oscar Hammerstein lyric. But given the tone and tenor of this debut novel, it shouldn’t surprise that the reference isn’t particularly affectionate.... Close, who is 32, captures the extended post-collegiate ennui associated with her generation.... Quite endearing.
Elysa Gardner - USA Today

Close straddles the line between melancholy and breeziness as she chronicles the exploits of recent college grads trying to make it in New York City . . . Hints at something deeper and truer: not just the adventure of being young, but the unmooring of it, too.
Leah Greenblatt - Entertainment Weekly


Jennifer Close’s debut, Girls in White Dresses, follows a group of young women doing all the things they know they shouldn’t—falling for one’s boss, dating gay men—all while drinking far too many mimosas at other people’s weddings.
Vogue


Artfully spare prose adds a literary tinge to the chick lit staples—navigating relationships, bridesmaid duties, disappointing first jobs—explored in Close's debut collection. At their weakest, the stories owe too much to their predecessors: "The Showers," in which the recurring characters travel to a suburban bridal shower, is essentially a retelling of a snappier Sex and the City episode, and Isabella's boss in "Blind" has the dark shades of The Devil Wears Prada. The standout moments come in "The Peahens," when Abby reveals her unusual family and her struggle to fit in (she "studied hard, taking notes on the silver link bracelets all the girls wore"), and the sharp "Hope," when Shannon takes a backseat to her boyfriend's naïve political passion for "the Candidate" of a presidential campaign. Occasionally funny (as when Isabella refers to her dinner dates as "parallel eating"), but without the risk taking of The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing or the deeply explored emotion of Prep, these stories will resonate with readers in the throes of the quarter-life churn who can see themselves in the cast.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Isabella, Mary, and Lauren are three friends in New York City navigating relationships, careers, early adulthood, and other people's weddings. Lauren is a real-estate agent who meets a man who could be Mr. Right—or a sociopath. Isabella is an assistant at a publishing house who suffers through a bad relationship, then meets a man who seems perfect until he asks her to move to Boston with him. Mary is a serious lawyer, married with two kids, whose husband is a perennial mama's boy incapable of grocery shopping on his own. Mixed in with the trials and tribulations of the protagonists are humorous vignettes from the lives of some of their other friends and acquaintances—many of whom are on their way to the altar or trying to find a way to get there. Verdict: This series of linked short stories is reminiscent of Melissa Bank's The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing. It is modern and funny, with original, wry observations. Close's debut novel will appeal to both fans of contemporary women's fiction with a hip vibe and readers who enjoy old-school chick lit.
Library Journal


With a light touch and utterly believable characters, Close’s...appealing debut manages to capture the humor, heartache and cautious optimism of her protagonists.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Which character did you relate to most closely, and why?

2. How does Close use humor to convey character? Are the women themselves funny, or the situations they find themselves in?

3. Ambivalence—toward jobs, men, apartments, and children—is a recurring theme in Girls in White Dresses. Why do you think that is?

4. What did Isabella learn from JonBenét?

5. Several of the characters keep some pretty big secrets, such as the way Abby keeps her friends away from her hippy parents. How does this affect Abby’s life? How do the book’s other secrets affect the characters?

6. What is the metaphor of the peahen?

7. On page 98, Isabella thinks about her young nephew, Connor, “All he wanted was to know what to expect. His world didn’t look like he’d thought it would, and she understood. How could he keep calm if he couldn’t see?” Who else does this describe?

8. Why does “the ham” become so significant for Lauren?

9. Mary wonders why nobody warned her that during her first year as a lawyer, “You will be constantly afraid.” (page 120) What role does fear play in the women’s lives?

10. “Kristi and Todd stood with their shoulders touching, wrapped in the cloth. It reminded Isabella of the way that Lauren and Kristi used to huddle together, whispering and laughing at jokes that only they understood.” (page 174) Why does Isabella get so emotional during the “chuppah within a chuppah” wedding scene?

11. Connect the dots between Shannon, Dan, Barack Obama, and the contestants on “The Biggest Loser.” Why is hope so important?

12. Throughout the book, questions of identity pop up. For example, when a friend gets divorced and decides to keep her married name, Isabella thinks it may be because, “She’s afraid no one will remember who she is.” (page 249) How do these characters determine who they are? By the end, who seems to have created the strongest sense of self?

13. What is the turning point for Isabella in her relationship with Harrison?

14. Why is Lauren ready to call the turtle Mark gives her Rudy, when she wouldn’t use that name for the goldfish?

15. Discuss the last scene. How have the women changed over the course of the book? Who is the most satisfied with her life?

16. Where do you imagine Isabella, Mary, and Lauren will be in five years?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Girls on Fire 
Robin Wasserman, 2016
HarperCollins
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062415486


Summary
On Halloween, 1991, a popular high school basketball star ventures into the woods near Battle Creek, Pennsylvania, and disappears.

Three days later, he’s found with a bullet in his head and a gun in his hand—a discovery that sends tremors through this conservative community, already unnerved by growing rumors of Satanic worship in the region.

In the wake of this incident, bright but lonely Hannah Dexter is befriended by Lacey Champlain, a dark-eyed, Cobain-worshiping bad influence in lip gloss and Doc Martens. The charismatic, seductive Lacey forges a fast, intimate bond with the impressionable Dex, making her over in her own image and unleashing a fierce defiance that neither girl expected.

But as Lacey gradually lures Dex away from her safe life into a feverish spiral of obsession, rebellion, and ever greater risk, an unwelcome figure appears on the horizon—and Lacey’s secret history collides with Dex’s worst nightmare.

By turns a shocking story of love and violence and an addictive portrait of the intoxication of female friendship, set against the unsettled backdrop of a town gripped by moral panic, Girls on Fire is an unflinching and unforgettable snapshot of girlhood: girls lost and found, girls strong and weak, girls who burn bright and brighter—and some who flicker away. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 31, 1978
• Where—near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—Bachelor's, Harvard University; Master's, University of California, LA
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City, New York


Robin Wasserman is an American young adult novelist. Her first adult book, Girls on Fire, was published in 2016.

Wasserman grew up outside of Philadelphia and graduated from Harvard University and UCLA. Before she was an author she was an associate editor at a children's book publisher. She is currently living in Brooklyn, New York. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/11/2016.)

Visit the author's website.

Book Reviews
Part murder mystery, part love story, this page-turner explores the dark side of the all-consuming friendship between a wide-eyed good girl and a grunge-worshipping rebel.
Cosmopolitan


An intense whirlwind of love, violence, and obsession in a small town.
Redbook


Robin Wasserman may be known for her YA novels, but her foray into the adult genre is well worth your time
InStyle


Girls on Fire is an enthralling, gritty, and altogether unpredictable read that holds nothing back.... You will be utterly riveted.
BuzzFeed


With its narrative witchcraft, conjures up the ghost of the decade [the 90s] to full effect.
Flavorwire


A chilling mix-tape of love, girl crushes, secrets, and revenge… Read it on vacation; read it on the train; read it at the beach; read it at a campfire just about to burn out—but don’t miss it.
Ploughshares


[O]verwrought if intermittently powerful.... Wasserman attempts to imbue her keenly observed junior Thelma and Louise with broader social resonance about girlhood and empowerment, but for many readers the take-home message may instead be that not all unhappy lives prove compelling
Publishers Weekly


[E]xplores the fraught relationship between two teenage girls.... Although her subject matter is bleak, Wasserman writes with knowing clarity about teenage friendship and the emotional land mines of high school. Recommended for fans of Megan Abbott. —Amy Hoseth, Colorado State Univ. Lib., Fort Collins
Library Journal


The story unfolds as a maddening tease, with shocking events waiting around every corner-and an ending that will leave readers stunned.
Booklist


Successful YA novelist Wasserman makes her adult debut with this edgy portrayal of a passionate, obsessive female friendship set in the grunge era ("9 Women to Watch in 2016").
BookPage


Girls behaving very, very badly.... Reading this overstuffed and overwrought book is, more often than not, as tiresome as paging through a high school diary. The fact that it's set in the 1990s doesn't help.... Simultaneously overwhelming and underwhelming.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher. In the meantime, use our generic mystery questions.)

GENERIC DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Mystery / Crime / Suspense Thrillers

1. Talk about the characters, both good and bad. Describe their personalities and motivations. Are they fully developed and emotionally complex? Or are they flat, one-dimensional heroes and villains?

2. What do you know...and when do you know it? At what point in the book do you begin to piece together what happened?

3. Good crime writers embed hidden clues in plain sight, slipping them in casually, almost in passing. Did you pick them out, or were you...clueless? Once you've finished the book, go back to locate the clues hidden in plain sight. How skillful was the author in burying them?

4. Good crime writers also tease us with red-herrings—false clues—to purposely lead readers astray? Does your author try to throw you off track? If so, were you tripped up?

5. Talk about the twists & turns—those surprising plot developments that throw everything you think you've figured out into disarray.

1. Do they enhance the story, add complexity, and build suspense?
2. Are they plausible or implausible?
3. Do they feel forced and gratuitous—inserted merely to extend the story?

6. Does the author ratchet up the suspense? Did you find yourself anxious—quickly turning pages to learn what happened? A what point does the suspense start to build? Where does it climax...then perhaps start rising again?

7. A good ending is essential in any mystery or crime thriller: it should ease up on tension, answer questions, and tidy up loose ends. Does the ending accomplish those goals?

1. Is the conclusion probable or believable?
2. Is it organic, growing out of clues previously laid out by the author (see Question 3)?
3. Or does the ending come out of the blue, feeling forced or tacked-on?
4. Perhaps it's too predictable.
5. Can you envision a different or better ending?

8. Are there certain passages in the book—ideas, descriptions, or dialogue—that you found interesting or revealing...or that somehow struck you? What lines, if any, made you stop and think?

9. Overall, does the book satisfy? Does it live up to the standards of a good crime story or suspense thriller? Why or why not?

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

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Give Me Your Hand 
Megan Abbott, 2018
Little, Brown &Company
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316547208


Summary
You told each other everything. Then she told you too much.

Kit has risen to the top of her profession and is on the brink of achieving everything she wanted. She hasn't let anything stop her.

But now someone else is standing in her way: Diane. Best friends at seventeen, their shared ambition made them inseparable. Until the day Diane told Kit her secret—the worst thing she'd ever done, the worst thing Kit could imagine—and it blew their friendship apart.

Kit is still the only person who knows what Diane did. And now Diane knows something about Kit that could destroy everything she's worked so hard for.

How far would Kit go to make the hard work, the sacrifice, worth it in the end? What wouldn't she give up? Diane thinks Kit is just like her. Maybe she's right. Ambition: it's in the blood. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1971
• Where—near Detroit, Michigan, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Michigan; Ph.D., New York University
• Awards—Edgar Award for Outstanding Fiction
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York


Megan Abbott is an American author of crime fiction and a non-fiction analyst of hardboiled crime fiction. Her novels and short stories have drawn from and re-worked classic subgenres of crime writing, with a female twist.

Abbott grew up in suburban Detroit and graduated from the University of Michigan. She is married to Joshua Gaylord, a New School professor who writes fiction under his own name and the pseudonym "Alden Bell."

Abbott was influenced by film noir, classic noir fiction, and Jeffrey Eugenides's novel The Virgin Suicides. Two of her novels reference notorious crimes. The Song is You (2007) is based around the disappearance of Jean Spangler in 1949, and Bury Me Deep (2009) is based on the 1931 case of Winnie Ruth Judd, who was dubbed the "Trunk Murderess."

Abbott has won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for outstanding fiction. Time named her one of the "23 Authors That We Admire" in 2011.

Book Reviews
Abbott excels in evoking the strange mix of camaraderie and rivalry that exists in academic research…. Female friendship and ambition are threaded throughout her work, and here they form a rich tapestry…. Ultimately, though, the reason to read this compelling and hypnotic novel is… Abbott’s expert dissection of women’s friendships and rivalries. She is…one of the most intelligent and daring novelists working in the crime genre today.
Ruth Ware - New Times Book Review


Give Me Your Hand steadily intensifies its atmosphere of claustrophobia to the point of constriction.… Abbott deliciously draws out tension by hopping back and forth in time, slowly disclosing Diane’s skeleton-in-the-closet while divulging Kit’s moral failings that will inadvertently add to the body count.… Give Me Your Hand, like so many of Abbott’s disturbing tales, dramatizes the adage, "Be careful what you wish for."
Maureen Corrigan - Washington Post


Abbott strongly dissects obsessions that easily morph into destruction and aspirations that spiral into blind ambition. The personalities of Diane and Kit are manifested through their work.… Abbott again shows why she’s one of our best story tellers.
Associated Press


Abbott isn’t just any crime writer. She earned a Ph.D. from New York University studying noir literature and has built a blockbuster caree.… Abbott couldn’t resist the idea of a condition that could be both an explanation for bad behavior and an excuse that ignores the complexity of female killers. She masterfully mines that gray area to build tension.… Abbott’s talent lies in dissecting the complicated tension between women at any age.
Time


(Starred review) When Diane’s secret pulses to the surface, lives are lost and futures are put in doubt in a mad rush to keep the past in its place. No writer can touch Abbott in the realm of twisted desire and relationships between women, both intimate and feral.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review) [A] vividly realized world of intense competition and creates life-or-death stakes where we wouldn’t have known to look for them…. Procedural fans may have a few nitpicks, but this is a brilliant riff on… the ultimate unknowability of the human brain.
Booklist


(Starred review) In Abbott’s deft hands, friendship is fused to rivalry, and ambition to fear, with an unsettling level of believability. It will take more than a cold shower to still the blood thumping in your ears when you finish this.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use our GENERIC MYSTERY QUESTIONS to start a discussion for GIVE ME YOUR HAND … then take off on your own:

GENERIC DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Mystery / Crime / Suspense Thrillers

1. Talk about the characters, both good and bad. Describe their personalities and motivations. Are they fully developed and emotionally complex? Or are they flat, one-dimensional heroes and villains?

2. What do you know...and when do you know it? At what point in the book do you begin to piece together what happened?

3. Good crime writers embed hidden clues in plain sight, slipping them in casually, almost in passing. Did you pick them out, or were you...clueless? Once you've finished the book, go back to locate the clues hidden in plain sight. How skillful was the author in burying them?

4. Good crime writers also tease us with red-herrings—false clues—to purposely lead readers astray? Does your author try to throw you off track? If so, were you tripped up?

5. Talk about the twists & turns—those surprising plot developments that throw everything you think you've figured out into disarray.

1. Do they enhance the story, add complexity, and build suspense?
2. Are they plausible or implausible?
3. Do they feel forced and gratuitous—inserted merely to extend the story?

6. Does the author ratchet up the suspense? Did you find yourself anxious—quickly turning pages to learn what happened? A what point does the suspense start to build? Where does it climax...then perhaps start rising again?

7. A good ending is essential in any mystery or crime thriller: it should ease up on tension, answer questions, and tidy up loose ends. Does the ending accomplish those goals?

1. Is the conclusion probable or believable?
2. Is it organic, growing out of clues previously laid out by the author (see Question 3)?
3. Or does the ending come out of the blue, feeling forced or tacked-on?
4. Perhaps it's too predictable.
5. Can you envision a different or better ending?

8. Are there certain passages in the book—ideas, descriptions, or dialogue—that you found interesting or revealing...or that somehow struck you? What lines, if any, made you stop and think?

9. Overall, does the book satisfy? Does it live up to the standards of a good crime story or suspense thriller? Why or why not?

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

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The Given Day
Dennis Lehane, 2008
HarperCollins
720 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780380731879


Summary
Set in Boston at the end of the First World War, Dennis Lehane's eighth novel unflinchingly captures the political and social unrest of a nation caught at the cross-roads between past and future.

The Given Day tells the story of two families— one black, one white—swept up in a maelstrom of revolutionaries and anarchists, immigrants and ward bosses, Brahmins and ordinary citizens, all engaged in a battle for survival and power. Beat cop Danny Coughlin, the son of one of the city's most beloved and powerful police captains, joins a burgeoning union movement and the hunt for violent radicals. Luther Laurence, on the run after a deadly confrontation with a crime boss in Tulsa, works for the Coughlin family and tries desperately to find his way home to his pregnant wife.

Here, too, are some of the most influential figures of the era—Babe Ruth; Eugene O'Neill; leftist activist Jack Reed; NAACP founder W. E. B. DuBois; Mitchell Palmer, Woodrow Wilson's rudthless Red-chasing attorney general; cunning Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge; and an ambitious young Department of Justice lawyer named John Hoover.

Coursing through some of the pivotal events of the time—including the Spanish Influenza pandemic—and culminating in the Boston Police Strike of 1919, The Given Day explores the crippling violence and irrepressible exuberance of a country at war with, and in the thrall of, itself. As Danny, Luther, and those around them struggle to define themselves in increasingly turbulent times, they gradually find family in one another and, together, ride a rising storm of hardship, deprivation, and hope that will change all their lives. (From the publisher

Author Bio
• Birth—August 4, 1965
• Where—Dorchester, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Eckerd College; M.F.A., Florida International University
• Awards—Shamus Award, Best First Novel; Anthony Award; Dilys Award
• Currently—lives in Boston, Massachusetts


Dennis Lehane is an American author. He has written several award-winning novels, including A Drink Before the War and the New York Times bestseller Mystic River, which was later made into an Academy Award-winning film.

Another novel, Gone, Baby, Gone, was also adapted into an Academy Award-nominated film. His novel Shutter Island was adapted into a film by Martin Scorsese in 2010. Lehane is a graduate of Florida International University in Miami, Florida.

Personal Life
Lehane was born and reared in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, and continues to live in the Boston area, which provides the setting for most of his books. He spent summers on Fieldston Beach in Marshfield. Lehane is the youngest of five children. His father was a foreman for Sears & Roebuck, and his mother worked in a Boston public school cafeteria. Both of his parents emigrated from Ireland. His brother, Gerry Lehane, who is two and a half years older than Dennis, is a veteran actor who trained at the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence before heading to New York in 1990. Gerry is currently a member of the Invisible City Theatre Company.

He was previously married to Sheila Lawn, formerly an advocate for the elderly for the city of Boston but now working with the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office as an Assistant District Attorney. Currently, he is married to Dr. Angela Bernardo, with whom he has one daughter.

He is a graduate of Boston College High School (a Boston Jesuit prep school), Eckerd College (where he found his passion for writing), and the graduate program in creative writing at Florida International University in Miami, Florida. He occasionally makes guest appearances as himself in the ABC comedy/drama TV series Castle.

Literary Career
His first book, A Drink Before the War, which introduced the recurring characters Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, won the 1995 Shamus Award for Best First P.I. Novel. The fourth book in the series, Gone, Baby, Gone, was adapted to a film of the same title in 2007; it was directed by Ben Affleck and starred Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan as Kenzie and Gennaro. Reportedly, Lehane "has never wanted to write the screenplays for the films [based on his own books], because he says he has 'no desire to operate on my own child.'"

Lehane's Mystic River was made into a film in 2003; directed by Clint Eastwood, it starred Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, and Kevin Bacon. The novel itself was a finalist for the PEN/Winship Award and won the Anthony Award and the Barry Award for Best Novel, the Massachusetts Book Award in Fiction, and France's Prix Mystère de la Critique.

Lehane's first play, Coronado, debuted in New York in December 2005. Coronado is based on his acclaimed short story "Until Gwen," which was originally published in The Atlantic Monthly and was selected for both The Best American Short Stories and The Best Mystery Short Stories of 2005.

Lehane described working on his historical novel, The Given Day, as "a five- or six-year project" with the novel beginning in 1918 and encompassing the 1919 Boston Police Strike and its aftermath. The novel was published in October, 2008.

On October 22, 2007 Paramount Pictures announced that they had optioned Shutter Island with Martin Scorsese attached as director. The Laeta Kalogridis-scripted adaptation has Leonardo DiCaprio playing U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels, "who is investigating the disappearance of a murderess who escaped from a hospital for the criminally insane and is presumed to be hiding on the remote Shutter Island." Mark Ruffalo played opposite DiCaprio as U.S. Marshal Chuck Aule. Shutter Island was released on February 19, 2010.

Teaching Career
Since becoming a literary success after the broad appeal of his Kenzie and Gennaro novels, as well as the success of Mystic River, Lehane has taught at several colleges. He taught fiction writing and serves as a member of the board of directors for a low-residency MFA program sponsored by Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. He has also been involved with the Solstice Summer Writers' Conference at Boston's Pine Manor College and taught advanced fiction writing at Harvard University, where his classes quickly filled up.

In May 2005, Lehane was presented with an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Eckerd College and was appointed to Eckerd's Board of Trustees later that year. In Spring 2009, Lehane became a Joseph E. Connor Award recipient and honorary brother of Phi Alpha Tau professional fraternity at Emerson College in Boston, MA. Other brothers and Connor Award recipients include Robert Frost, Elia Kazan, Jack Lemmon, Red Skelton, Edward R. Murrow, Yul Brynner, and Walter Cronkite. Also in Spring 2009, Lehane presented the commencement speech at Emmanuel College in Boston, Massachusetts, and was awarded an honorary degree.

Film Career
Lehane wrote and directed an independent film called Neighborhoods in the mid 1990s. He joined the writing staff of the HBO drama series The Wire in 2004. Lehane returned as a writer for the fourth season in 2006 Lehane and the writing staff won the Writers Guild of America (WGA) Award for Best Dramatic Series at the February 2008 ceremony and the 2007 Edgar Award for Best Television Feature/Mini-Series Teleplay for their work on the fourth season. Lehane remained a writer for the fifth and final season in 2008. Lehane and the writing staff were nominated for the WGA Award award for Best Dramatic Series again at the February 2009 ceremony.He served as an executive producer for Shutter Island. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Bibliography
The Kenzie-Gennaro Novels
1994 - A Drink Before the War
1996 - Darkness, Take My Hand
1997 - Sacred
1998 - Gone, Baby, Gone
1999 - Prayers for Rain
2010 - Moonlight Mile

Joe Coughlin Novels
2008 - The Given Day
2012 - Live by Night
2015 - World Gone By

Stand-alones
2001 - Mystic River
2003 - Shutter Island
2006 - Coronado

Book Reviews
No more thinking of Mr. Lehane as an author of detective novels that make good movies (Gone, Baby, Gone) and tell devastatingly bleak Boston stories (Mystic River). He has written a majestic, fiery epic that moves him far beyond the confines of the crime genre…The Given Day is a huge, impassioned, intensively researched book that brings history alive by grounding the present in the lessons of the past.
Janet Maslin - New York Times

Not only is Lehane working on a larger historical scale, he has turned up the volume on his prose, setting a tone of epic exaggeration…Lehane has created a novel of such momentum we cannot help cheering Danny on in his impossible fight. On this front and others The Given Day, like John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy, is a human meat-grinder of a book. Throughout men, women and children are burned, blown up, shot, punched, head-butted, run over by police cruisers, even vaporized by a tidal wave of hot molasses when an industrial tank explodes. "All you'd need would be a general strike," says one character in Dos Passos' great work. "If people only realized how…easy it would be." Here are some people who would tell you otherwise.
John Freeman - New York Times Book Review

Lehane has done something brave and ambitious: He has written a historical novel that unquestionably is his grab for the brass ring, an effort to establish his credentials in literary as well as commercial terms. Immense in length and scope, it is set at the end of World War I, a time when "people were angry, people were shouting, people were dying in trenches and marching outside factories," and it culminates in one of the most traumatic events in Boston's history, the policemen's strike of 1919…It's a powerful moment in history, and Lehane makes the most of it.
Jonathan Yardley - Washington Post

The Given Day serves up the historical novel's signature pleasures: sweeping narrative, period detail, entertaining cameos by real-life figures and the thrill of not knowing what's going to happen even when you know what's going to happen.
Chicago Tribune

Steeped in history but wearing its research lightly, The Given Day is a meaty, rich, old-fashioned and satisfying tale. I'd call it Lehane's masterpiece, but he's still young and, it is devoutly to be wished, ready to give us much more.
Seattle Times

(Starred review.) In a splendid flowering of the talent previously demonstrated in his crime fiction (Gone, Baby, Gone; Mystic River), Lehane combines 20th-century American history, a gripping story of a family torn by pride and the strictures of the Catholic Church, and the plot of a multifaceted thriller. Set in Boston during and after WWI, this engrossing epic brings alive a pivotal period in our cultural maturation through a pulsing narrative that exposes social turmoil, political chicanery and racial prejudice, and encompasses the Spanish flu pandemic, the Boston police strike of 1919 and red-baiting and anti-union violence.Danny Coughlin, son of police captain Thomas Coughlin, is a devoted young beat cop in Boston's teeming North End. Anxious to prove himself worthy of his legendary father, he agrees to go undercover to infiltrate the Bolsheviks and anarchists who are recruiting the city's poverty-stricken immigrants. He gradually finds himself sympathetic to those living in similar conditions to his fellow policemen, who earn wages well below the poverty line, work in filthy, rat-infested headquarters, are made to pay for their own uniforms and are not compensated for overtime. Danny also rebels by falling in love with the family's spunky Irish immigrant maid, a woman with a past. Danny's counterpart in alienation is Luther Laurence, a spirited black man first encountered in the prologue when Babe Ruth sees him playing softball in Ohio. After Luther kills a man in Tulsa, he flees to Boston, where he becomes intertwined with Danny's family. This story of fathers and sons, love and betrayal, idealism and injustice, prejudice and brotherly feeling is a dark vision of the brutality inherent in human nature and the dire fate of some who try to live by ethical standards. It's also a vision of redemption and a triumph of the human spirit. In short, this nail-biter carries serious moral gravity.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) Shamus Award winner Lehane's first historical novel is a clear winner, displaying all the virtues the author (Mystic River) has shown in his exceptional series of crime novels: narrative verve, sensitivity to setting, the interweaving of complicated story lines, an apt and emotionally satisfying denouement-and, above all, the author's abiding love for his characters and the human condition. In 1917, the Great War in Europe is still being waged, but with America's entry into the conflict, people expect it to end soon. Boston's policemen have a grievance. With their wages scaled to the cost of living in 1905, earnings lie well below the poverty level, and working conditions are appalling. The city government has reneged on its promise to readjust wages after the war. With anarchists planting bombs and social unrest in the air, there is little sympathy in Boston for the policemen's threat to strike. When the strike finally breaks in 1919, the strikers receive an object lesson in the bitter truth that "different sets of rules [apply] for different classes of people." Against this background of turmoil, an unexpected friendship develops between Irish American policeman Danny Coughlin and African American Luther Laurence, on the run from gangsters and police. Lehane's long-awaited eighth novel is as good as it gets. Enthusiastically recommended for all fiction collections.
Library Journal

Discussion Questions
1. The Given Day transports readers to 1918 Boston and touches on the lives of two families—one black, one white—as they are swept up in the maelstrom of history. How are their experiences similar? How are they different?

2. Dennis Lehane writes The Given Day from the perspectives of two very different men. What brings Luther Laurence and Danny Coughlin together? Does their friendship ring true?

3. One of the themes of the book is the notion of family—both the blood kind and the kind a person willingly creates on his own. How are these ideas of family manifested? Do you see one as being more important than the other? Can a person belong to two kinds of family at the same time?

4. The Given Day centers on the Boston Police Strike of 1919 at a time when fiercely held convictions about work and freedom underwent enormous change at great cost to human life and relationships. Nearly a century later, what is the role of unions in America today? How do the working conditions for Luther and Danny compare to contemporary conditions? Do you think unions are necessary today?

5. How do the themes in the book—race, politics, class, family, immigration, nepotism, corruption—reflect issues facing America today?

6. Injustice is another theme that Lehane explores in the novel. How does injustice manifest itself in democratic societies? Can it be redressed? If so, how?

7. What role does Babe Ruth play in the narrative? What did the introduction of his character add to your understanding of the novel's main themes?

8. Who do you think is the most sympathetic character in the story? Why?

9. What is the relationship between Danny Coughlin and his brothers Connor and Joe? What role does Danny play in each character's development? How do they, in turn, influence him?

10. Talk about the relationship of Danny and his father. How are they alike? How are they different? How do their similarities and differences shape their relationship?

11. What role do women play in the novel? How do they impact the men?

12. How are anarchists and immigrants portrayed in the novel? Do you see any echoes of the government's response to events then in the America in which we live today?

13. Consider your own life experiences. How would you have fared in the America of a century ago? If Danny and Luther were transported to 21st-century America, what might they think of our world?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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The Giver  (The Giver Quartet, 1)
Lois Lowry, 1993
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
192 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780440237686


Summary
December is the time of the annual Ceremony at which each twelve-year-old receives a life assignment determined by the Elders. Jonas watches his friend Fiona named Caretaker of the Old and his cheerful pal Asher labeled the Assistant Director of Recreation. But Jonas has been chosen for somthing special. When his selection leads him to an unnamed man—the man called only the Giver—he begins to sense the dark secrets taht underlie the fragile perfection of his world.

Given his lifetime assignment at the Ceremony of Twelve, Jonas becomes the receiver of memories shared by only one other in his community and discovers the terrible truth about the society in which he lives. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—March 20, 1937
• Where—Hawaii, USA
• Education—B.A., M.F.A., University of
   Southern Maine
• Awards—Newbery Medal (2)
• Currently—lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts


Lois Lowry is an American author of children's literature. She began her career as a photographer and a freelance journalist during the early 1970s. Her work as a journalist drew the attention of Houghton Mifflin and they encouraged her to write her first children's book, A Summer to Die, which was published in 1977 (when Lowry was 40 years old). She has since written more than 30 books for children and published an autobiography. Two of her works have been awarded the prestigious Newbery Medal: Number the Stars in 1990, and The Giver in 1993.

As an author, Lowry is known for writing about difficult subject matters within her works for children. She has explored such complex issues as racism, terminal illness, murder, and the Holocaust among other challenging topics. She has also explored very controversial issues of questioning authority such as in The Giver quartet. Her writing on such matters has brought her both praise and criticism. In particular, her work The Giver has been met with a diversity of reactions from schools in America, some of which have adopted her book as a part of the mandatory curriculum, while others have prohibited the book's inclusion in classroom studies. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
A powerful and provocative novel
New York Times


Jonas lives in a perfect society. There is no pain, poverty, divorce, delinquency, etc. One's life's work is chosen by the Elders. At the Ceremony of 12, Jonas is shocked to learn that he has been awarded the most prestigious honor. His assignment will be that of Receiver of Memories. He studies with "the Giver," a man he comes to love. Within time he learns the horrifying secrets of his community and must make a decision that will test his courage, intelligence, and stamina. This is a stunning, provocative science fiction story that will inspire discussion.
Children's Literature


Winner of the 1994 Newbery Medal, Lowry's thought-provoking fantasy challenges adolescents to explore important social and political issues. The Giver trains twelve-year-old Jonas as the next Receiver of Memory, the community's receptacle of past memories. This seemingly utopian society (without pain, poverty, unemployment, or disorder) is actually a body- and mind-controlling dystopia (without love, colors, sexual feelings, or memories of the past). In an exciting plot twist, Jonas courageously resolves his moral dilemma and affirms the human spirit's power to prevail, to celebrate love, and to transmit memories. From the book jacket's evocative photographic images—The Giver in black and white; trees in blazing color—to the suspenseful conclusion, this book is first-rate. Just as Lowry's Number the Stars (which received the 1990 Newbery Medal) portrays the Danish people's triumph over Nazi persecution, The Giver engages the reader in an equally inspiring victory over totalitarian inhumanity.
The ALAN Review


Winner of the 1994 Newbery Medal, this thought-provoking novel centers on a 12-year-old boy's gradual disillusionment with an outwardly utopian futuristic society.... Lowry is once again in top form...unwinding a tale fit for the most adventurous readers.
Publishers Weekly


In a complete departure from her other novels, Lowry has written an intriguing story set in a society that is uniformly run by a Committee of Elders. Twelve-year-old Jonas's confidence in his comfortable "normal" existence as a member of this well-ordered community is shaken when he is assigned his life's work as the Receiver. The Giver, who passes on to Jonas the burden of being the holder for the community of all memory "back and back and back,'' teaches him the cost of living in an environment that is "without color, pain, or past.'' The tension leading up to the Ceremony, in which children are promoted not to another grade but to another stage in their life, and the drama and responsibility of the sessions with The Giver are gripping. The final flight for survival is as riveting as it is inevitable. The author makes real abstract concepts, such as the meaning of a life in which there are virtually no choices to be made and no experiences with deep feelings. This tightly plotted story and its believable characters will stay with readers for a long time. —Amy Kellman, The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
School Library Journal


The simplicity and directness of Lowry's writing force readers to grapple with their own thoughts.
Booklist


In a radical departure from her realistic fiction and comic chronicles of Anastasia, Lowry creates a chilling, tightly controlled future society where all controversy, pain, and choice have been expunged, each childhood year has its privileges and responsibilities, and family members are selected for compatibility.... Wrought with admirable skill—the emptiness and menace underlying this Utopia emerge step by inexorable step: a richly provocative novel.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. In The Giver, each family has two parents, a son, and a daughter. The relationships are not biological but are developed through observation and a careful handling of personality. In our own society, the makeup of family is under discussion. How are families defined? Are families the foundations of a society, or are they continually open for new definitions?

2. In Jonas’s community, every person and his or her experience are precisely the same. The climate is controlled, and competition has been eliminated in favor of a community in which everyone works only for the common good. What advantages might “Sameness” yield for contemporary communities? Is the loss of diversity worthwhile?

3. Underneath the placid calm of Jonas’s society lies a very orderly and inexorable system of euthanasia, practiced on the very young who do not conform, the elderly, and those whose errors threaten the stability of the community. What are the disadvantages and benefits of a community that accepts such a vision of euthanasia?

4. Why is the relationship between Jonas and The Giver dangerous, and what does this danger suggest about the nature of love?

5. The ending of The Giver may be interpreted in two very different ways. Perhaps Jonas is remembering his Christmas memory—one of the most beautiful that The Giver transmitted to him—as he and Gabriel are freezing to death, falling into a dreamlike coma in the snow. Or perhaps Jonas does hear music and, with his special vision, is able to perceive the warm house where people are waiting to greet him. In her acceptance speech for the Newbery Medal, Lois Lowry mentioned both possibilities but would not choose one as correct. What evidence supports each interpretation?

6. There are groups in the United States today that actively seek to maintain an identity outside the mainstream culture: the Amish, the Mennonites, Native American tribes, and the Hasidic Jewish community. What benefits do these groups expect from defining themselves as “other”? What are the disadvantages? How does the mainstream culture put pressure on such groups?

7. Lois Lowry helps create an alternate world by having the community use words in a special way. Though that world stresses what it calls "precision of language," in fact it is built upon language that is not precise but deliberately clouds meaning. What is the danger of such misleading language?

8. Examine the ways in which Jonas’s community uses euphemism to distance itself from the reality of "Release." How does our own society use euphemism to distance us from such realities as aging and death, bodily functions, and political activities? What are the benefits and disadvantages of such uses of language?
(Questions courtesy of Gary D. Schmidt, Calvin College, author and 2-time Newbery Honor winner.)

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The Giver of Stars 
Jojo Moyes, 2019
Penguin Publishing
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780399562488


Summary
From the author of Me Before You, set in Depression-era America, a breathtaking story of five extraordinary women and their remarkable journey through the mountains of Kentucky and beyond.

Alice Wright marries handsome American Bennett Van Cleve hoping to escape her stifling life in England. 

But small-town Kentucky quickly proves equally claustrophobic, especially living alongside her overbearing father-in-law. So when a call goes out for a team of women to deliver books as part of Eleanor Roosevelt’s new traveling library, Alice signs on enthusiastically.

The leader, and soon Alice's greatest ally, is Margery, a smart-talking, self-sufficient woman who's never asked a man's permission for anything. They will be joined by three other singular women who become known as the Packhorse Librarians of Kentucky.

What happens to them—and to the men they love—becomes an unforgettable drama of loyalty, justice, humanity and passion.

These heroic women refuse to be cowed by men or by convention. And though they face all kinds of dangers in a landscape that is at times breathtakingly beautiful, at others brutal, they’re committed to their job: bringing books to people who have never had any, arming them with facts that will change their lives.

Based on a true story rooted in America’s past, The Giver of Stars is unparalleled in its scope and epic in its storytelling. Funny, heartbreaking, enthralling, it is destined to become a modern classic—a richly rewarding novel of women’s friendship, of true love, and of what happens when we reach beyond our grasp for the great beyond. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1969
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—B.A., London University
• Awards—Romantic Novel of the year (twice)
• Currently—lives in Essex, England


Jojo Moyes is a British journalist and the author of 10 novels published from 2002 to the present.  She studied at Royal Holloway, University of London and Bedford New College, London University.

In 1992 she won a bursary financed by The Independent newspaper to attend the postgraduate newspaper journalism course at City University, London. She subsequently worked for The Independent for the next 10 years (except for one year, when she worked in Hong Kong for the Sunday Morning Post) in various roles, becoming Assistant News Editor in 1988. In 2002 she became the newspaper's Arts and Media Correspondent.

Moyes became a full-time novelist in 2002, when her first book Sheltering Rain was published. She is most well known for her later novels, The Last Letter From Your Lover (2010), Me Before You (2012), and The Girl You Left Behind ( 2013), all of which were received with wide critical accalim.

She is one of only a few authors to have won the Romantic Novelists' Association's Romantic Novel of the Year Award twice—in 2004 for Foreign Fruit and in 2011 for The Last Letter From Your Lover. She continues to write articles for The Daily Telegraph.

Moyes lives on a farm in Saffron Walden, Essex with her husband, journalist Charles Arthur, and their three children. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Moyes paints an engrossing picture of life in rural America, and it's easy to root for the enterprising librarians.
New York Times Book Review


Though she made her mark writing contemporary romance, Moyes proves just as adept at historical fiction…. The Giver of Stars is a celebration of love, but also of reading, of knowledge, of female friendship, of the beauty of our most rural corners and our enduring American grit: the kind of true grit that can be found in the hills of Kentucky and on the pages of this inspiring book.
Washington Post


The Giver of Stars is a richly rewarding exploration of the depths of friendship, good men willing to stand up to bad and adult love. Moyes celebrates the power of reading in a terrific book that only reinforces that message.
USA Today


Moyes stays true to her narrative and takes full advantage of the sense of place she gained from repeated trips to the area…. riveting. A stirring novel sure to please Moyes’ many fans.
Minnesota Star Tribune


A captivating tale of love, friendship, and self-actualization.
People


Bestselling author Jojo Moyes has a unique way of using her prose to make her readers feel great emotions—love, passion, sadness, and grief—and her latest novel, The Giver of Stars, does not disappoint in that respect.
Parade


An adventure story grounded in female competence and mutual support, and an obvious affection for the popular literature of the early 20th century, give this Depression-era novel plenty of appeal.… There’s plenty of drama, but the reader’s lasting impression is one of love.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review) Rich in history, with well-developed characters and a strong sense of place, this book will fit well in any library’s fiction collection. For fans of Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants or Catherine Marshall’s Christy. —Terry Lucas, Shelter Island P.L., NY
Library Journal


(Starred review) [A] homage to the power of reading and the strength of community.… A must-read for women's fiction.
Booklist


Moyes brings an often forgotten slice of history to life.… the true power of the story is in the bonds between the women of the library…. A love letter to the power of books and friendship.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. While writing and researching The Giver of Stars, author Jojo Moyes visited Kentucky several times, stayed in a tiny cabin on the side of a mountain, rode horses along the trails, and met the people of Kentucky. Did the characters and sense of place feel authentic to you?

2. Alice, a Brit, is an outsider, but eventually acclimates to her new home in Appalachia, and even falls in love with her new home. She grew up in a rarefied world in England, so the change to "unremarkable" Baileyville proved quite the shock to her system. Have you ever moved to a distinctly different location? What was that transition like? How did you adapt?

3. Literacy and censorship are significant issues in The Giver of Stars, issues that affect the women of the novel very differently from the men. Why do you think Moyes chose to focus on these topics?

4. Moyes has said she wanted to write a book about women who had agency and who actually did something worthwhile, rather than simply existing in a romantic or domestic plotline. Margery is the unofficial leader of the librarians and Alice eventually inherits that role when Margery is jailed. Yet throughout the book, most of the women do have their moments of agency. Which of these moments struck you most intensely? Did you ever wish a character had taken action when she hadn’t? If so, when, and what could she have done different?

5. The novel features families from vastly different backgrounds, and one of the central issues in the book is that of class inequality. In which scenarios did you see these dynamics play out, and between which characters?

6. There are numerous ways in the book in which the acquisition of knowledge changes characters’ lives: protecting their homes, educating their families, liberating themselves from marriages. Have you ever experienced such a shift—after gaining new knowledge—in your own life? How did it happen? If not, what held you back from making a change?

7. The relationships between men and women in this book vary greatly—from Margery and Sven’s loving, mutual respect and passion, to Bennett and Alice’s bewildered lack of understanding to the true love affair that blossoms between Alice and Fred. How did you come to understand the differences among these relationships? Did you relate to any of them in particular or to any of the problems these women faced in their romantic relationships?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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The Glass Hotel 
Emily St. John Mandel, 2020
Knopf Doubleday
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525521143


Summary
From the award-winning author of Station Eleven, an exhilarating novel set at the glittering intersection of two seemingly disparate events—a massive Ponzi scheme collapse and the mysterious disappearance of a woman from a ship at sea.

Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby's glass wall: "Why don't you swallow broken glass."

High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis is running an international Ponzi scheme, moving imaginary sums of money through clients' accounts. When the financial empire collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives.

Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan's wife, walks away into the night. Years later, a victim of the fraud is hired to investigate a strange occurrence: a woman has seemingly vanished from the deck of a container ship between ports of call.

In this captivating story of crisis and survival, Emily St. John Mandel takes readers through often hidden landscapes: campgrounds for the near-homeless, underground electronica clubs, the business of international shipping, service in luxury hotels, and life in a federal prison.

Rife with unexpected beauty, The Glass Hotel is a captivating portrait of greed and guilt, love and delusion, ghosts and unintended consequences, and the infinite ways we search for meaning in our lives. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1979-80
• Where—Comox, British Columbia, Canada
• Education—Toronto Dance Theater.
• Awards—Prix Mystere de la Critique (France)
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York, USA


"St. John's my middle name. The books go under M."

Emily St. John Mandel was born and raised on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada. She studied contemporary dance at the School of Toronto Dance Theatre and lived briefly in Montreal before relocating to New York.

Mandel's latest novel, The Glass Hotel, was released in 2020 to high praise and numerousf starred reviews. Her fourth novel, Station Eleven, published in 2014 was long listed for the National Book Award. All three of her previous novels—Last Night in Montreal, The Singer's Gun, and The Lola Quartet—were Indie Next Picks, and The Singer's Gun was the 2014 winner of the Prix Mystere de la Critique in France.

Mandel's short fiction and essays have been anthologized in numerous collections, including Best American Mystery Stories 2013. She lives in New York City with her husband. (Adapted from the author's website.)

Book Reviews
The question of what is real—be it love, money, place or memory—has always been at the heart of Ms. Mandel’s fiction... her narratives snake their way across treacherous, shifting terrain. Certainties are blurred, truth becomes malleable, and in The Glass Hotel the con man thrives…. Ms. Mandel invites us to observe her characters from a distance even as we enter their lives, a feat she achieves with remarkable skill. And if the result is a sense not only of detachment but also of desolation, then maybe that’s the point.
Anna Mundow - Wall Street Journal


The Glass Hotel may be the perfect novel for your survival bunker…. Freshly mysterious…. Mandel is a consummate, almost profligate world builder. One superbly developed setting gives way to the next, as her attention winds from character to character, resting long enough to explore the peculiar mechanics of each life before slipping over to the next…. That Mandel manages to cover so much, so deeply is the abiding mystery of this book. The 300 pages of The Glass Hotel work harder than most 600-page novels…. The disappointment of leaving one story is immediately quelled by our fascination in the next…. The complex, troubled people who inhabit Mandel’s novel are vexed and haunted by their failings, driven to create ever more pleasant reflections of themselves in the glass.
Ron Charles - Washington Post


[E]erie, compelling…. The ghosts in  The Glass Hotel are directly connected to its secrets and scandals, which mirror those of our time…. Like all Mandel’s novels, The Glass Hotel is flawlessly constructed…. The Glass Hotel declares the world to be as bleak as it is beautiful, just like this novel.
Rebecca Steinitz - Boston Globe


Mandel’s prose is such a pleasure to read… [I] gave way to real delight in the skill with which Mandel brings together themes that have occupied previous sections of the novel, revisiting earlier characters and incidents from surprising new perspectives in a narrative sleight of hand…. Mandel’s conclusion is dazzling.
Chris Hewitt - Minneapolis Star Tribune


An ephemeral quality permeates the novel…. It’s a thrill when the puzzle pieces start to fit together…. The final chapter is haunting, taking readers full circle…. It’s a sense readers will enjoy as well when they lose themselves in Mandel’s novel.
Associated Press


[S]triking… and timely…. In Vincent and Paul, Mandel has created two of the most memorable characters in recent American fiction…. Mandel's writing shines throughout the book, just as it did in Station Eleven. She's not a showy writer, but an unerringly graceful one, and she treats her characters with compassion but not pity. The Glass Hotel is a masterpiece… a stunning look at how people react to disasters, both small and large, and the temptation that some have to give up when faced with tragedy.
Michael Shaub -  NPR


One effect of Mandel’s book is to underscore the seemingly infinite paths a person might travel…. There is a suggestion, toward the end of The Glass Hotel, that frequent commerce with the dead (or the imaginary) might reconnect us to the living…. Perhaps it is with this in mind that Mandel has constructed a fantasy for our temporary habitation. Her story offers escape, but the kind that depends on and is inseparable from the world beyond it.
Katy Waldman - New Yorker


Mandel... specializes in fiction that weaves together seemingly unrelated people, places and things. The Glass Hotel... is no exception... Kaleidoscopic... Mandel dissects the surreal division between those who are conscious of ongoing crimes, and those who are unwittingly brought into them... The Glass Hotel... examine[s]  how we respond to chaos after catastrophe.
Annabel Gutterman - Time


Deeply imagined, philosophically profound…. The Glass Hotel moves forward propulsively, its characters continually on the run…. Richly satisfying… [and] ultimately as immersive a reading experience as its predecessor [Station Eleven], finding all the necessary imaginative depth within the more realistic confines of its world…. Revolutionary.
Ruth Franklin - Atlantic


(Starred review) [W]onderful…. [A] brother and sister… navigate heartache, loneliness, wealth, corruption, drugs, ghosts, and guilt.… This ingenious, enthralling novel probes the tenuous yet unbreakable bonds between people and the lasting effects of momentary carelessness.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review) Highly recommended; with superb writing and an intricately connected plot that ticks along like clockwork, Mandel offers an unnerving critique of the twinned modern plagues of income inequality and cynical opportunism
Library Journal


(Starred review) Another tale of wanderers whose fates are interconnected.… [With] nail-biting tension… Mandel weaves an intricate spider web of a story.… A gorgeously rendered tragedy.
Booklist


(Starred review) Long-anticipated.… [A] ghost story in which every boundary is blurred, from the moral to the physical.… In luminous prose, Mandel shows how easy it is to become caught in a web of unintended consequences… . A strange, subtle, and haunting novel.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers Book Club Resources. They can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

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

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A Glass of Blessings
Barbara Pym, 1958
Moyer Bell
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781559213530


Summary
Well dressed and looked after, Wilmet, the novel's heroine, is married to Rodney, a handsome army major, who works nine thirty to six at the Ministry. Wilmet's interest wanders to the nearby Anglo-Catholic church, where at last she can neglect her comfortable household in the company of a cast of characters, including three priests.

Set in 1950s London, this witty novel is told through the narration of the shallow and self-absorbed protagonist who, despite her flaws, begins to learn something about love and about herself. Through Wilmet's superficial monologues readers are exposed to Barbara Pym's clever commentary on class, the church, and her engaging characterizations. Readers will become captivated, as is Wilmet, with the lives and personalities of characters such as the kleptomaniac Wilf Bason, the priests Keith, and Piers Longridge.

She fancies herself in love with Piers, the brother of a close friend, and imagines he is her secret admirer (the admirer is in fact her friend's husband). Wilmet fails to realise that Piers is gay until she becomes aware of his relationship with Keith, a young man she regards as rather common. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Full name—Barbara Mary Crampton Pym
• Birth—June 2, 1913
• Where—Shropshire, England, UK
• Death—January 11, 1980
• Where—Finstock, Oxfordshire, England
• Education—Oxford University

Pym was born in Oswestry, Shropshire. She was privately educated at Queen’s Park School, a girls school in Oswestry and from the age of twelve attended Huyton College, near Liverpool. After studying English at St Hilda's College, Oxford, she served in the Women's Royal Naval Service during World War II. Her literary career is noteworthy because of the long hiatus between 1963 and 1977, when, despite early success and continuing popularity, she was unable to find a publisher for her richly comic novels.

The turning point for Pym came with an influential article in the (London) Times Literary Supplement in which two prominent names, Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin, nominated her as the most underrated writer of the century. Pym and Larkin had kept up a private correspondence over a period of many years. Her comeback novel, Quartet in Autumn, was nominated for the Booker Prize. Another novel, The Sweet Dove Died, previously rejected by many publishers, was subsequently published to critical acclaim, and several of her previously unpublished novels were published after her death.

Pym worked at the International African Institute in London for some years, and played a large part in the editing of its scholarly journal, Africa, hence the frequency with which anthropologists crop up in her novels. She never married, despite several close relationships with men, notably Henry Harvey, a fellow Oxford student, and the future politician, Julian Amery.

After her retirement, she moved into Barn Cottage at Finstock in Oxfordshire with her younger sister, Hilary. In 1980, Barbara Pym died of breast cancer, aged 66. Following her death, her sister Hilary continued to champion her work, and the Barbara Pym Society was set up in 1993. Hilary remained at Barn Cottage until her own death in February 2005. A blue plaque was placed on the cottage in 2006. The sisters played an active role in the social life of the village, and are both buried in Finstock churchyard.

All told, Barbara Pym published 12 novels:

Crampton Hodnet (circa 1940) *
Some Tame Gazelle (1950)
Excellent Women (1952)
Jane and Prudence (1953)
Less than Angels (1955) 
A Glass of Blessings (1958) 
No Fond Return Of Love (1961)
An Unsuitable Attachment (1963) *
An Academic Question (1970-72) * 
Quartet in Autumn (1977)
The Sweet Dove Died (1978)
A Few Green Leaves (1980) *

* Published posthumously (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
(Older books have few if any online reviews from mainstream press. See customer reviews at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.)

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for A Glass of Blessings:

1. How would you describe Wilmet Forsyth...and the kind of life she leads? Does she make an interesting heroine? A likeable one? What are her views on love and marriage, including her own marriage to Rodney?

2. What makes Wilmet believe that Piers Longridge might be in love with her? Is there evidence to suggest that either Piers or Rowan is pursuing her?

3. Pym is described, like Jane Austen, as an astute observer of British life. How does Pym present her small slice of life in A Glass of Blessings? How would you describe her Britain? Is it a time and place in which you would enjoy living?

4. Much is made of Pym's gentle but pointed humor. What or whom did you find particularly funny in this novel? Where does Pym direct her satirical eye?

5. Wilment attends the Christmas Eve service alone? Why don't Sybil and Rodney accompany her? What are their religious views? Do you find those views unusual? How does Wilmet experience the service?

6. Were you satisfied by the ending, especially the way in which the couples come together?

7. How (or why) does Pym treat the subject of homosexuality, a subject not openly dealt with in the mid-20th century? Were you surprised by Pier's and Keith's relationship?

8. Pym's Wilmet has been compared to Austen's Emma Woodhouse (in her masterpiece, Emma). If you've read that work, what parallels do you see between the two heroines... or perhaps the two plots?

9. What does our heroine come to learn at the end of the novel? Have her views on love and marriage altered. Has she changed...or matured?

10. The book's title comes from "The Pulley," a poem by 17th-century poet, George Herbert:

When God at first made man,
Having a glasse of blessings standing by;
Let us (said he) poure on him all we can:
Let the worlds riches, which dispersed lie, 
       Contract into a span.

That is only the first stanza. What is the significance of Herbert's "glasse of blessings standing by" to Pym's book?

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

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The Glass of Time
Michael Cox, 2008
W.W. Norton & Co.
544 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393337167


Summary
Like The Meaning of Night, its "beguiling" and "intelligent" (New York Times Book Review) predecessor, The Glass of Time is a page turning period mystery about identity, the nature of secrets, and what happens when past obsessions impose themselves on an unwilling present.

In the autumn of 1876, nineteen year-old orphan Esperanza Gorst arrives at the great country house of Evenwood to become a lady's maid to the twenty-sixth Baroness Tansor. But Esperanza is no ordinary servant. She has been sent by her guardian, the mysterious Madame de l'Orme, to uncover the secrets that her new mistress has sought to conceal, and to set right a past injustice in which Esperanza's own life is bound up. At Evenwood she meets Lady Tansor's two dashing sons, Perseus and Randolph, and finds herself enmeshed in a complicated web of seduction, intrigue, deceit, betrayal, and murder.

Few writers are as gifted at evoking the sensibility of the nineteenth century as Michael Cox, who has made the world of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins his own. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Aka—Matthew Ellis; Obie Clayton
• Birth—1948
• Where—Northamptshire, England, UK
• Education—Cambridge University
• Currently—lives in Northamptonshire, England

Michael Cox was born in Northamptonshire in 1948. After graduating from Cambridge in 1971, he went into the music business as a songwriter and recording artist, releasing two albums and a number of singles for EMI under the name Matthew Ellis and a further album, as Obie Clayton, for the DJM label. In 1977, he took a job in publishing, with the Thorsons Publishing Group (now part of HarperCollins). In 1989, he joined Oxford University Press, where he became Senior Commissioning Editor, Reference Books.

His first book, a widely praised biography of the scholar and ghost-story writer M.R. James, was published by Oxford University Press (OUP) in 1983. This was followed by a number of Oxford anthologies of short fiction, including The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories (1986) and The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories (1991), both co-edited with R.A. Gilbert, The Oxford Book of Victorian Detective Stories (1992) and The Oxford Book of Spy Stories (1997). In 1991 he compiled A Dictionary of Writers and their Works for OUP and in 2002 The Oxford Chronology of English Literature, a major scholarly resource containing bibliographical information on 30,000 titles from 4,000 authors, 1474–2000.

In April 2004, he began to lose his sight as a result of cancer. In preparation for surgery he was prescribed a steroidal drug, one of the effects of which was to initiate a temporary burst of mental and physical energy. This, combined with the stark realization that his blindness might return if the treatment wasn't successful, spurred Michael finally to begin writing in earnest the novel that he had been contemplating for over thirty years, and which up to then had only existed as a random collection of notes, drafts, and discarded first chapters. Following surgery, work continued on what is now his debut novel, The Meaning of Night. His second novel, The Glass of Time, was published in 2008.

Michael Cox still lives in his native Northamptonshire with his wife Dizzy. (From Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reivews
An entirely wonderful mock Victorian novel, written in something like the style of...Wilkie Collins, author of The Moonstone and The Woman in White. It's a melodrama, of course, chock-full of revenge, romance, duplicity, concealed identities and murder most frequent—but melodrama on a grand scale. By any sensible standard, Englishman Michael Cox's convoluted plot is somewhere between outrageous and preposterous. Few characters are who or what they seem, and one key figure has five distinct identities. And yet the novel's fierce suspense and endless surprises, burnished by Cox's gorgeous prose, make it irresistible.
Patrick Anderson - Washington Post

Those who have not yet encountered the author's erudite and intricate fictions have a treat in store.... This is a mystery worthy of Wilkie Collins, combining all the ingredients of a Gothic romance—disinherited heroines, dissolute heroes, revenge and remorse—with a very modern sense of pace.
London Times

Brilliant storyteller.... He crafts an intelligent page-turner with the sorts of dark, dirty secrets that modern readers have come to expect of the supposedly virtuous Victorians.... [No one] manages to better his exquisite period detail, scope and sheer readability.
Independent (UK)

A terrific modern-day Victorian novel, and a true page-turner in the manner of the great works of that era.... The author has woven an enormous and intricate tapestry.... Take a chance and dive into Cox's delightful and deep sea of words.
Edmonton Journal (Canada)

(Starred review.) Set in 1876, Cox's gripping second gothic thriller (after The Meaning of Night) follows the fortunes of 19-year-old orphan Esperanza Gorst, whose guardian charges her to go undercover as a lady's maid. Without knowing precisely why she's doing so, Gorst insinuates herself into the inner circle of Baroness Tansor, the fiancée of the preceding volume's villain, Phoebus Daunt. The fake maid soon learns that her mistress has many secrets, and may, in fact, have been complicit in the death of a former servant. Cox excels at conveying his heroine's conflict over deceiving her employer, especially after learning the role the lady played in her own difficult personal history. While readers unfamiliar with the first book will find themselves deeply engaged by the elegant descriptive prose, those with the benefit of the full context and nuances of The Meaning of Night will better appreciate this sequel.
Publishers Weekly

When orphaned 19-year-old Esperanza Gorst is hired as a lady's maid by Baroness Tansor of Evenwood in 1876, she does not understand her role in a complex plan to restore the Duport family succession. Lady Tansor, the former Emily Carteret, still mourns for her fiancé, Phoebus Daunt, murdered two decades earlier. Through clever spying, Esperanza uncovers information about the murders of Emily's father and Daunt and about Emily's marriage and children. Letters and documents from Esperanza's guardian and others reveal the stories of her own parents and how she had been cheated of her inheritance. Yet, despite realizing that she cannot trust Emily or her unscrupulous associates, Esperanza feels affection and sympathy for the beleaguered Lady. Jealousies among Emily's sons and Esperanza fuel more misunderstandings. Speculations and explanations fill the pages of this novel, which is depicted as Esperanza's secret notebook discovered and annotated by the same editor who presented The Meaning of Night, Cox's debut, which was written from the perspective of Daunt's killer. Cox neatly incorporates the discovery of that manuscript into Esperanza's account, one of myriad connections of plot and characters that make this book an essential read for fans of the first novel. But this atmospheric and engrossing work also can stand alone as a treat for anyone who enjoys Victorian thrillers. Strongly recommended.
Kathy Piehl - Library Journal

(Starred review.) Cox so cleverly incorporates the plot of his first novel that his new one can be read by both those who are familiar with The Meaning of Night and those who have never read it. Great period atmosphere, a cunning plot, and an intelligent narrator make this one a special treat for those who like some history with their mystery. —Joanne Wilkinson.
Booklist

Cox's second pastiche of Victorian sensational fiction is doubly remarkable for its sure grasp of the genre's idiom and its strange relationship to his first (The Meaning of Night, 2006). Nineteen-year-old Esperanza Gorst arrives at Evenwood on September 4, 1876, to interview for the position of personal maid to Emily Duport, the widowed Baroness Tansor. The advertisement in which Esperanza announced her search for such a post constitutes the first of many deceptions Cox's characters practice on each other, for it was placed not by her, but by her Parisian guardian, Madame de l'Orme, and her old friend Basil Thornhaugh, Esperanza's tutor. Their successful attempt to insinuate Esperanza into Lady Tansor's service is only the first step in what they call "the Great Task," a plot so deep-laid that they can disclose its terms to her only over a period of months. Esperanza, whom everyone recognizes as far too cultured and perceptive to be a lady's maid, soon catches the eyes of both Tansor sons, the Byronic heir Perseus and his more easygoing brother Randolph, and cultivates an ever more intimate relationship with Lady Tansor, still mourning her fiance Phoebus Daunt, a bombastic poet who was murdered by his estranged Eton friend Edward Glyver more than 20 years ago. All the while Esperanza burns with curiosity to know the reason her protectors have sent her into this haunted household. But readers who recognize Daunt, Glyver et al. will be far ahead of Esperanza, who doesn't realize that her author has pressed the plot of The Meaning of Night into service as the backstory of what would otherwise be a mystery in the mold of Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. A sequel that will provide utterly different but equally rewarding experiences for readers who have and haven't read its equally leisurely predecessor.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Meaning of Night:

1. On his website, Michael Cox says that The Glass of Time is concerned with the nature of identity. How does Esperanza discover her own identity and its connection with Lady Tansor? Did you figure it out before she does? Actually, though, what is even meant by "the nature" of identity? Is identity provisional, i.e., temporary, open to change? Is it fluid, changing with circumstances or knowledge? Is it definitive—we are who we are?

2. What is "The Great Task" which Esperanza is sent to Evenwood to complete? Talk about her divided loyalties, her moral dilemma at the heart of the story.

3. Another theme Cox says he explores in the novel is the "enduring power of the past." How does that theme play out in The Glass of Time? In other words, how does the past continually interrupt and affect the present? Notice, too, how the narrative jumps between time periods. Did that enhance the story for you...or did you find it distracting? And, of course, talk about the significance of the book's title.

4. The novel also explores, as Cox puts it, "the corrosive effects of concealing guilty secrets." What does he mean by that statement as it relates to The Glass of Time?

5. The novel's characters are rich and memorable. Which ones did you sympathize with, dislike, distrust, find fascinating?

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

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The Glass Palace
Amitav Ghosh, 2000
Random House
486 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375758775


Summary
Set in Burma during the British invasion of 1885, this masterly novel by Amitav Ghosh tells the story of Rajkumar, a poor boy lifted on the tides of political and social chaos, who goes on to create an empire in the Burmese teak forest.

When soldiers force the royal family out of the Glass Palace and into exile, Rajkumar befriends Dolly, a young woman in the court of the Burmese Queen, whose love will shape his life. He cannot forget her, and years later, as a rich man, he goes in search of her.

The struggles that have made Burma, India, and Malaya the places they are today are illuminated in this wonderful novel by the writer Chitra Divakaruni calls “a master storyteller.” (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1956
• Where—Kolkata, India
• Education—St. Stephen's College, Deli; Delhi University;
   Ph.D., Oxford University.
• Awards—see below
• Currently—lives in New York City; Kolkata and Goa, India

Amitv Ghosh is the internationally bestselling author of many works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Glass Palace, and is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes. Ghosh divides his time between Kolkata and Goa, India, and Brooklyn, New York. (From the publisher.)

More
Ghosh was born in Kolkata (Calcutta) and was educated at The Doon School; St. Stephen's College, Delhi; Delhi University; and St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where he was awarded a Ph.D. in social anthropology.

Ghosh lives in New York with his wife, Deborah Baker, author of the Laura Riding biography In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding (1993) and a senior editor at Little, Brown and Company. They have two children, Lila and Nayan.

He has been a Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. In 1999, Ghosh joined the faculty at Queens College, City University of New York as Distinguished Professor in Comparative Literature. He has also been a visiting professor to the English department of Harvard University since 2005. Ghosh has recently purchased a property in Goa and is returning to India.

Sea of Poppies (2008), the first installment of a planned trilogy, is an epic saga, set just before the Opium Wars, which encapsulates the colonial history of the East. The second in the trilogy, River of Smoke was published in 2011.

His previous novels are The Circle of Reason (1986), The Shadow Lines (1990),  In an Antique Land (1992), The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma (1998),  Countdown (1999), The Glass Palace (2000) and The Hungry Tide (2004). Ghosh's fiction is characterised by strong themes that may be somewhat identified with postcolonialism but could be labelled as historical novels. His topics are unique and personal; some of his appeal lies in his ability to weave "Indo-nostalgic" elements into more serious themes.

In addition to his novels, Ghosh has written The Imam and the Indian (2002), a large collection of essays on different themes such as fundamentalism, history of the novel, Egyptian culture, and literature).

In 2007, he was awarded the Padma Shri by the Indian government.

Amitav Ghosh's literary awards include:
• Prix Medicis Etranger (French; for Circle of Reason)
• Sahitya Akademic and Ananda Pursaskar Awards (Indian;
  for The Shadow Lines)
• Arthur C. Clarke Award (UK; for The Calcutta Chromosome)
• Grand Prize-Fiction, Frankfurt International e-Book Awards
  (for The Glass Palace)
• Hutch Crossword Book Prize (Indian; for The Hungry Tide)
• Grinzane Cavour Prize (Italian)
• Shortlisted for Man Booker (UK; for Sea of Poppies)

(Author bio from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Amitav Ghosh is one of the many Indian writers to have emerged in the 1980's, after the publication of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children; but he is among the very few to have expressed in his work a developing awareness of the aspirations, defeats and disappointments of colonized peoples as they figure out their place in the world. There isn't much easy politics or sermonizing in his work; there is, instead, a concern for the individual, a curiosity about the workings of alien societies and, often, an honest examination of colonial neuroses. In this, as in his preference for a plain ungimmicky prose, Ghosh follows the example of V. S. Naipaul, although his instinct for storytelling on a grand scale owes much more to Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Pankaj Mishra - New York Times

A rich, layered epic that probes the meaning of identity and homeland—a literary territory that is as resonant now, in our globalized culture, as it was when the sun never set on the British Empire.
Los Angeles Times

This sprawling narrative, inspired by stories passed down in the author's family, stretches from the British invasion of Burma, in 1885, through the country's independence, to the uneasy military rule of the present day. The novel is presided over by the Indian-born Rajkumar, a poor orphan, who falls for Dolly, a servant of the exiled queen. Ghosh renders the polite imprisonment of the Burmese royal family in India and the lush, dangerous atmosphere of teak camps in the Burmese forest with fine detail—a perfect balance for the broad strokes of romance and serendipity that drive the story forward. The book's memorial power is so strong that, near the end, when Rajkumar, an old man, reflects, "Ah, Burma—now Burma was a golden land," the reader catches himself nodding in recognition of what was lost.
The New Yorker

Ghosh's epic novel of Burma and Malaya over a span of 115 years is the kind of "sweep of history" that readers can appreciate—even love—despite its demands. There is almost too much here for one book, as over the years the lives and deaths of principal characters go flying by. Yet Ghosh (The Calcutta Chromosome; Shadow Lines) is a beguiling and endlessly resourceful storyteller, and he boasts one of the most arresting openings in recent fiction: in the marketplace of Mandalay, only the 11-year-old Indian boy Rajkumar recognizes the booming sounds beyond the curve of the river as English cannon fire. The year is 1885, and the British have used a trade dispute to justify the invasion and seizure of Burma's capital. As a crowd of looters pours into the fabled Glass Palace, the dazzling throne room of the nine-roofed golden spire that was the great hti of Burma's kings, Rajkumar catches sight of Dolly, then only 10, nursemaid to the Second Princess. Rajkumar carries the memory of their brief meeting through the years to come, while he rises to fame and riches in the teak trade and Dolly travels into exile to India with King Thebaw, Burma's last king; Queen Supayalat; and their three daughters. The story of the exiled king and his family in Ratnagiri, a sleepy port town south of Bombay, is worth a novel in itself, and the first two of the story's seven parts, which relate that history and Rajkumar's rise to wealth in Burma's teak forests, are marvelously told. Inspired by tales handed down to him by his father and uncle, Ghosh vividly brings to life the history of Burma and Malaya over a century of momentous change in this teeming, multigenerational saga. Novels by Indian authors continue to surge in popularity here, and this title not only ranks among the best but differs from the pack for its setting of Burma rather than India.... [T]his book should be read widely and with enthusiasm stateside.
Publishers Weekly

In an industry not known for risk-taking, the publisher is to be congratulated for offering Ghosh (The Calcutta Chromosome) a contract on his as-yet-unwritten novel. Set primarily in Burma, Malaya, and India, this work spans from 1885, when the British sent the King of Burma into exile, to the present. While it does offer brief glimpses into the history of the region, it is more the tale of a family and how historical events influenced real lives. As a young boy, Rajkumar, an Indian temporarily stranded in Mandalay, finds himself caught up in the British invasion that led to the exile of Burma's last king. In the chaos, he spies Dolly, a household maid in the royal palace, for whom he develops a consuming passion and whom years later he tracks down in India and marries. As their family grows and their lives intersect with others, the tangled web of local and international politics is brought to bear, changing lives as well as nations. Ghosh ranges from the condescension of the British colonialists to the repression of the current Myanmar (Burmese) regime in a style that suggests E.M. Forster as well as James Michener. Highly recommended, especially for public libraries. —David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, FL
Library Journal

Starting with the threads of his own family memories, Indian author Ghosh has created a rich tapestry of a novel, set in the Indian subcontinent and spanning more than a century.... Although events in the lives of characters and countries must be compressed to bring the story nearly to the present, this does not interrupt the narrative flow. This illuminating saga should find an appreciative audience. —Michele Leber
Booklist

Discussion Questions
1. In an interview, Amitav Ghosh said of his work, The Glass Palace, “one can examine the truths of individuals in history definitely more completely in fiction than one can in history.” Discuss this statement as it pertains to the novel. Which truths do his characters reveal?

2. Look closely at the characters whom Ghosh envisions in the most detail, Rajkumar, Dolly, Uma, Arjun, to name a few. They become extraordinary in our minds of the reader, as we travel with them through a century of social upheaval and political turmoil. But according to the social structure, they are all, or once were, relatively ordinary individuals. What is the effect of focusing a novel of such grand, epic sweep, on members of common society? How does this very subtle choice affect the story’s shape? What does it tell us about history, and how we have always been taught to remember it?

3. Memory could almost be considered a character unto itself in Ghosh’s novel. For instance, Rajkumar’s life is utterly driven and shaped by his one, striking, boyhood memory of Dolly in the plundered Glass Palace during the invasion of Burma. How does memory play into the lives of Ghosh’s other characters? Can you think of examples where memory compelled a character to action, or impeded him from recognizing a particular truth? To what extent does Ghosh suggest the existence of collective memory?

4. Ghosh raises several debates over the course of the novel, one central to the political subtext being that of Imperialism vs. Fascism. Why does society not look upon Imperial soldiers with the same scorn it holds for those soldiers committing atrocities under fascistregimes? Should these Imperial mercenaries be considered willing and conscious henchmen, or were they merely following orders? What stance does Ghosh take on this issue, if any? What other debates were you able to extract from the book? What techniques does Ghosh use to bring these issues and their various arguments to light?

5. Ghosh constructs several unique, remarkable, and strong female characters: Dolly, Uma, Queen Supayalat, even the First Princess, who becomes pregnant out of wedlock. Each of these women tells us something different and important about the time and place in which she was living. What strengths do these women express, and at what points are they identified and illuminated in the novel? In examining the range and evolution of Ghosh’s female characters, what could we conclude about the relationship between feminine domesticity and empire? Where and how do the two intersect? What role do women play under colonialism, and how do Ghosh’s characters either reflect or reject it?

6. Uma is a particularly interesting character, as she illuminates one of the ideas central to Ghosh's novel. When we first encounter her, she is constantly worried about being the proper memsahib, following traditional domestic etiquette, and living up to the standards of her husband, the Collector. She soon realized, however, that her husband’s dream was not in accordance with the rules of Indian custom, he longed “to live with a woman as an equal in spirit and intellect, ” and she could never, according to custom, fulfill those expectations. We see a monumental change in her disposition when she returns to India from New York. How has she transformed, and by what force? What does Uma’s character tell us about the nature of history and the power of social forces as factors in everyday life?

7. Over the course of the novel, the division between conquerors and conquered becomes increasingly hard to distinguish. The inevitable ethical dilemma faced by Indian soldiers in the British army comes to the foreground of the novel, as one member of the INA challenges Indian soldiers in the British army, “Do you really wish to sacrifice your lives for an Empire that has kept your country in slavery for two hundred years?” Can you think of any other episodes in which Ghosh highlights this argument? How does this debate affect the course and scope of the story?

8. In several episodes, Ghosh asks the question, both of his readers and of his characters; can submission to an oppressor, in certain instances, be a sign of strength, rather than weakness? For example, at the very outset of the novel, Rajkumar is heartbroken when he sees Dolly marching out of Burma in the royal procession, offering the sweets he gave her as a token of his affection to one of the British guards. Was this a sign of strength on Dolly’s part? How does this foreshadow other events in the novel? What do such episodes tell us about the effect of colonialism, both on the individual and the collective?

9. In The Glass Palace Ghosh examines the individual, psychological dilemmas posed by colonialism. At one point, an Indian officer in the British army during World War II exclaims, “What are we? We’ve learned to dance the tango and we know how to eat roast beef with a knife and fork. The truth is that except for the color of our skin, most people in India wouldn’t even recognize us as Indians.” This quest for and recognition of personal identity, both lost and found, figures prominently in the novel. Where do we see this pursuit played out? How does Ghosh reconcile the notions of personal identity and national identity? Is one derivative of the other?

10. Exile and return are themes that lie at the core of The Glass Palace. We see King Thebaw and Queen Supayalat living out their exiles in Ratnagiri, we also experience Dolly’s flight from and return to Burma. Even Rajkumar appears in a constant state of escape and return, from his early abandonment at age 11. What other stories of exile and return play out over the course of the book? How do these individual cycles contribute to the overall structure of the novel?

11. At various points in the book, Ghosh invokes the art of photography. We are encounter photographers throughout the novel, and find ourselves in a photography shop at the story’s close. Where else does photography enter the story, and how does it serve as a thematic thread? How does Ghosh weave the theme of photography into the overarching ideas about history and memory that permeate his novel? How does the photographer’s art relate to Ghosh’s conception of the human heart and mind?

12. The style of The Glass Palace is elliptical, and at times, uneven. Ghosh dedicates an entire paragraph to describing the camera with which Mrs. Khambatta photographed Dolly and Rajkumar’s wedding, yet the actual ceremony takes place, elliptically, when Ghosh writes, “At the end of the civil ceremony, in the Collector’s ‘camp office’, Dolly and Rajkumar garlanded each other, smiling like children.” Other such major life events occur in only sentences, the births of children, the deaths of loved ones, wars, and other national catastrophes. Do you think this was an intentional literary choice on Ghosh’s part? What effect does it have on the book as a whole, on your perception of the characters and their stories?

13. As much defeat as there is present in The Glass Palace, there are also extraordinary tales of survival and hope. Can you think of some examples by which devastating defeat is countered by enormous hope? What claims does Ghosh make about the human spirit in this novel?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Glass Room  
Simon Mawer, 2009
Little, Brown & Co.
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781590513965


Summary 
Honeymooners Viktor and Liesel Landauer are filled with the optimism and cultural vibrancy of central Europe of the 1920s when they meet modernist architect Rainer von Abt. He builds for them a home to embody their exuberant faith in the future, and the Landauer House becomes an instant masterpiece. 

Viktor and Liesel, a rich Jewish mogul married to a thoughtful, modern gentile, pour all of their hopes for their marriage and budding family into their stunning new home, filling it with children, friends, and a generation of artists and thinkers eager to abandon old-world European style in favor of the new and the avant-garde.

But as life intervenes, their new home also brings out their most passionate desires and darkest secrets. As Viktor searches for a warmer, less challenging comfort in the arms of another woman, and Liesel turns to her wild, mischievous friend Hana for excitement, the marriage begins to show signs of strain. The radiant honesty and idealism of 1930 quickly evaporate beneath the storm clouds of World War II. As Nazi troops enter the country, the family must leave their old life behind and attempt to escape to America before Viktor's Jewish roots draw Nazi attention, and before the family itself dissolves.

As the Landauers struggle for survival abroad, their home slips from hand to hand, from Czech to Nazi to Soviet possession and finally back to the Czechoslovak state, with new inhabitants always falling under the fervent and unrelenting influence of the Glass Room. Its crystalline perfection exerts a gravitational pull on those who know it, inspiring them, freeing them, calling them back, until the Landauers themselves are finally drawn home to where their story began.

Brimming with barely contained passion and cruelty, the precision of science, the wild variance of lust, the catharsis of confession, and the fear of failure—The Glass Room contains it all. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1948 
• Where—England (UK)
• Education—Oxford University
• Awards—McKitterick Prize for First Novels; Boardman Tasker
   Prize for Mountain Literature
• Currently—lives and teaches in Rome, Italy

Simon Mawer is a British author who currently lives in Italy.

Educated at Millfield School in Somerset and at Brasenose College, Oxford, Mawer took a degree in Zoology and has worked as a biology teacher for most of his life.

He published his first novel, Chimera, (1989) at the comparatively late age of thirty-nine. It won the McKitterick Prize for first novels. Mendel's Dwarf followed three works of modest success and established him as a writer of note on both sides of the Atlantic. The New York Times judged it one of the "books to remember" of 1998.

The Gospel of Judas and The Fall followed, with the latter winning the 2003 Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature. More recently, he published Swimming to Ithaca, a novel partially inspired by his childhood on the island of Cyprus. A book called A Place in Italy (1992), written in the wake of A Year in Provence, recounts the first two years in the village in Italy he went to live in.

He has mounted one other foray into the field of non-fiction, Gregor Mendel: Planting the Seeds of Genetics, which was published in conjunction with the Field Museum of Chicago as a companion volume to the museum's current exhibition of the same name.

In 2009, Mawer published The Glass Room, a novel about a modernist villa built in a Czech city in 1928. Mawer has acknowledged that the book was primarily inspired by the Villa Tugendhat which was designed by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and built in Brno in the Czech Republic in 1928-30. The novel was nominated for the 2009 Man Booker Prize.

Mawer has lived in Italy since 1977, teaching biology at St. George's British International School in Rome. He is married and has two children. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews 
[A] stirring new novel...The Glass Room works so effectively because Mawer embeds…provocative aesthetic and moral issues in a war-torn adventure story that's eerily erotic and tremendously exciting.... Mawer, an Englishman living in Italy, has written this novel as though it were a translation, endowing his prose with a patina of Old World formality that sounds all the more romantic. He claims he doesn't know Czech or German, but his characters speak both fluently, and his attention to foreign languages enriches every episode.
Ron Charles - Washington Post

[The Glass Room is] a thing of extraordinary beauty and symmetry... a novel of ideas, yet strongly propelled by plot and characterised by an almost dreamlike simplicity of telling. Comparisons with the work of Michael Frayn would not be misplaced, and there are occasional moments of illuminating brilliance.
The Guardian (UK)

In Mawer's hands [The Glass Room] becomes a means for exploring the way people's hopes for the future become part of their history. This he does beautifully.
Times Literary Supplement (UK)

The Jewish fates of Viktor, Kata and others are lightly handled, which seems just right in this optimistic, joyful but never facile vision of human achievement. Mawer's perfect pacing clinches a wholly enjoyable and moving read.
The Independent (UK)

The Glass Room['s] poetic success is to remind us of two great gilt-edged ironies: that whatever is held to be the height of modernity is already en route to the museum, and that even 'cold' art is the embodiment of its maker's passion—one that can prove contagious.
Financial Times (UK)

Simon Mawer's grasp of period and place achieves what all great novels must: the creation of an utterly absorbing world the reader can scarcely bear to leave. Exciting, profoundly affecting and altogether wonderful.
Daily Mail (UK)

Engrossing.... Mawer explores his themes with a subtle intelligence. A novel of ideas, but one driven by character and story.
Literary Review

The writing, as sensual and sophisticated as its subjects, keeps us firmly within the house's elegant parameters, caught up in the touch and taste and roiling emotions of the characters living through these events. Seeing clearly, Mawer shows us, is never an option, no matter how large and expensive your windows. Every era thinks it has achieved transparency, complete with modern fixtures and sundry decorations. But we can't ever actually see out, because our damned humanity keeps misting up the glass.
Time Out London

The latest from novelist Mawer (The Fall) begins with great promise, as Jewish newlyweds Viktor and Liesel Landauer meet with architect Rainier von Abt, not just an architect but "a poet...of light and space and form," who builds their dream home, a "modern house...adapted to the future rather than the past, to the openness of modern living." World events, however, are about to overtake 1930s Czechoslovakia. Viktor, like most in the community, dismisses rumors of impending pogroms-"The only people who hold the German economy together are the Jews"—but once the signs of Nazi occupation become impossible to ignore, the Landauers must abandon their beloved home. In a bizarre twist of fate, however, Liesel insists on rescuing single mother Katra, unaware that Katra is Viktor's new mistress. As the world spins into chaos, the highly symbolic Landauer house is the only constant; though it shifts identities more than once, the house remains "ageless," a place "that defines the very existence of time." Mawer's writing and characters are rich, but his twisty plot depends too often on unbelievable coincidences, especially in the conclusion.
Publishers Weekly

Discussion Questions 
1. Why are the Landauers so devoted to modernity? What makes them so intent on shedding the past, and how is this tied to their country's history or future? 

2. What was your first impression of Rainer von Abt? What did you think of his minimalist approach? Why do you think it appealed to Liesel and Viktor?

3. The characters are constantly fluctuating between languages-specifically German and Czech. How do these characters use or manipulate language to express themselves?

4. During the housewarming party at the Glass Room, von Abt speaks of his masterpiece, saying, "A work of art like this demands that the life lived in it be a work of art as well." Do you think this prophecy comes to fruition?

5. Why does Viktor initially approach Kata in Vienna? What is he looking for in her? How is she different from Liesel?

6. The Glass Room takes on many personas throughout the book, moving from a home to a laboratory to a gymnasium to a museum. Does the original concept of the house remain intact through all of its internal transformations? Does the house ever become part of the past?

7. Do you believe that Viktor is in love with both Liesel and Kata? Does he fall for Kata before or after she comes to live with the family? What does the scene at the train station reveal about both him and Liesel?

8. Coincidence plays an important role in the novel. Does the Glass Room encourage it? If so, how?

9. Why do you think Hana agrees to be examined by Stahl and his crew? Why do you think the house is seen as an ideal place for a scientific laboratory?

10. What image or scene within the novel haunted or stayed with you the most?

11. Tomas, much like Viktor, is always looking toward the future. But with yet another love triangle in the Glass Room—this time between Zdenka, Tomas, and Eve—do things really change in this society obsessed with the future? Can history be erased if it is constantly being repeated?

12. What is Hana searching for in all of her love affairs? Do you think she is truly in love with Zdenka? Is it the Glass Room's influence or is Zdenka just a replacement for Liesel?

13. When Hana and Liesel are reunited at the novel's end, both women gloss over the tragedies in their past. Why do you think they hold back?

14. Does The Glass Room tell the story of a house or a family? What story do you think Mawer set out to tell?

15. Mawer constantly shifts the perspective from character to character, often leaving the reader wanting more. Which character's outcome or emotions did you wish you knew more about by the novel's end-Katalin's? Von Abt's? Viktor's? Stahl's? Oskar's?

16. Why do you think Mawer chose to conclude the book with Ottilie and Maria reuniting? What, if anything, does this new generation represent?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Glimpses of the Moon
Edith Wharton, 1922
200-300 pp. (varies by publisher)


Summary
Nick Lansing and Susy Branch are young, attractive, but impoverished New Yorkers. They are in love and decide to marry, but realize their chances of happiness are slim without the wealth and society that their more privileged friends take for granted.

The two agree to separate when either encounters a more eligible proposition. However, as they honeymoon in friends' lavish houses, from a villa on Lake Como to a Venetian palace, jealous passions and troubled consciences cause the idyll to crumble.

Edith Wharton has perceptively described the choices faced by Nick and Susy; the same dilemma still facing those seduced by the pleasures of society. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—January 24, 1862
• Where—New York, NY
• Death—August 11, 1937
• Where—Paris, France
• Education: Educated privately in New York and Europe
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence, 1921,
   French Legion of Honor, 1916

One of America's most important novelists, Edith Wharton was a refined, relentless chronicler of the Gilded Age and its social mores. Along with close friend Henry James, she helped define literature at the turn of the 20th century, even as she wrote classic nonfiction on travel, decorating and her own life.

More
Edith Newbold Jones was born January 24, 1862, into such wealth and privilege that her family inspired the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses." The youngest of three children, Edith spent her early years touring Europe with her parents and, upon the family's return to the United States, enjoyed a privileged childhood in New York and Newport, Rhode Island. Edith's creativity and talent soon became obvious: By the age of eighteen she had written a novella (as well as witty reviews of it) and published poetry in the Atlantic Monthly.

After a failed engagement, Edith married a wealthy sportsman, Edward Wharton. Despite similar backgrounds and a shared taste for travel, the marriage was not a success. Many of Wharton's novels chronicle unhappy marriages, in which the demands of love and vocation often conflict with the expectations of society.

Wharton's first major novel, The House of Mirth, published in 1905, enjoyed considerable literary success. Ethan Frome appeared six years later, solidifying Wharton's reputation as an important novelist. Often in the company of her close friend, Henry James, Wharton mingled with some of the most famous writers and artists of the day, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, André Gide, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Cocteau, and Jack London

In 1913 Edith divorced Edward. She lived mostly in France for the remainder of her life. When World War I broke out, she organized hostels for refugees, worked as a fund-raiser, and wrote for American publications from battlefield frontlines. She was awarded the French Legion of Honor for her courage and distinguished work.

The Age of Innocence, a novel about New York in the 1870s, earned Wharton the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1921 — the first time the award had been bestowed upon a woman.

Wharton traveled throughout Europe to encourage young authors. She also continued to write, lying in her bed every morning, as she had always done, dropping each newly penned page on the floor to be collected and arranged when she was finished. Wharton suffered a stroke and died on August 11, 1937. She is buried in the American Cemetery in Versailles, France.

Extras
• Surprisingly, in addition to her career as a fiction writer, Wharton was also a well-known interior designer. Her book, The Decoration of Houses was widely read and is today considered the first modern manual of interior design.

• Upon the publication of The House of Mirth in 1905, Wharton became an instant celebrity, and the the book was an instant bestseller, with 80,000 copies ordered from Scribner's six weeks after its release.

• Wharton had a great fondness for dogs, and owned several throughout her life. (From Barnes and Noble.)

Book Reviews
(Older works have few online reviews by mainstream press. See customer reviews at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.)

(Audio version.) Anna Fields reads this edition with precision. The novel's premise is simple: a man and a woman who are financially strapped decide to marry to remain in the high society circles to which they have become accustomed. They will use their wedding gifts to better position one another's opportunity to remarry for money. The dilemma, of course, comes when they discover separately that their love for each other is far greater than the false, pretentious, and self-indulgent lives they are seeking. Wharton strikes a balance between the superficial and the genuine, and between dependency and freedom that allows the reader to observe the foibles and follies of life and learn from them.
Library Journal

Wharton's novel opens with a sentence that seems to have been written for the opening voice-over of a movie: "It rose for them—their honeymoon—over the waters of a lake so famed as the scene of romantic raptures that they were rather proud of not having been afraid to choose it as the setting of their own." But Nick and Susy Lansing, each suffering from a genteel lack of money, have married out of convenience rather than romantic rapture. Intending to live off the generosity of wealthy acquaintances, they have also agreed that each shall be free to pursue a more socially desirable mate. What they didn't anticipate is that they would fall genuinely in love with each other. As Wharton tells their story, the sharp irony of both her prose and her characters bleeds into pools of true feeling.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Glimpses of the Moon:

1. Do you find Susy and Nick sympathetic characters? Do your attitudes toward them change during the course of the novel?

2. Talk about the reason the two marry and the bargain they strike with one another. Do you consider their plan morally bankrupt...or not? If Susy and Nick exist in a social strata that privileges material wealth above all else, are they dishonest ...cynical... opportunistic...simply besting their social "betters" at their own game...or what?

3. Susy says to Nick that "we're both rather unusually popular." What is it about the two that makes them so appealing to others?

4. Nick and Susy seem to occupy two ends of a spectrum in terms of character values. How would you define the difference between them?

5. Ellie Vanderlyn asks Susy to help her deceive Nelson Vanderlyn, her husband. Was Ellie right to agree to help, given that she and Nick are dependent on Ellie's hospitality? What are her options? What would you have done?

6. In what way does Susy's participation in Ellie's scheme undermine her relationship with Nick?

7. How does Wharton portray those of the moneyed class, their values and lifestyle? Does she draw them affectionately...satirically...scornfully? How do you feel about the fact that Wharton, herself, is part of that social milieu?

8. Both Susy and Nick undertake a personal journey. Trace the journey they both make—where they start from and where they end up? How does each change...what does each come to learn about him/herself and about the world in which they live?

9. What is the significance of the book's title? What does the moon represent symbolically?

10. What "lesson" is learned by the book's end? Are you satisfied with how The Glimpses of the Moon ended? Is the conclusion "earned" — in other words, does it flow naturally from what precedes it, or does it feel forced and tacked on?

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

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The Global War on Morris 
Steve Israel, 2014
Simon & Schuster
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781476772233


Summary
A witty political satire ripped from the headlines and written by Congressman Steve Israel, who’s met the characters, heard the conversations, and seen the plot twists firsthand.

Meet Morris Feldstein, a pharmaceutical salesman living and working in western Long Island who loves the Mets, loves his wife Rona, and loves things just the way they are. He doesn’t enjoy the news; he doesn’t like to argue. Rona may want to change the world; Morris wants the world to leave him alone. Morris does not make waves.

But one day Morris is seduced by a lonely, lovesick receptionist at one of the doctors’ offices along his sales route, and in a moment of weakness charges a non-business expense to his company credit card. No big deal, you might think. Easy mistake. But the government’s top-secret surveillance program, anchored by a giant, complex supercomputer known as NICK, thinks differently. Eventually NICK begins to thread together the largely disparate and tenuously connected strands of Morris’s life—his friends, family, friends’ friends, his traffic violations, his daughter’s political leanings, his wife’s new patients, and even his failed romantic endeavors—and Morris becomes the US government’s new public enemy number one.

A hilarious, debut novel from a charismatic author, The Global War on Morris toes the line between recent breaking headlines and a future that is not that difficult to imagine. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 30, 1958
• Where—Brooklyn, New York, New York, USA
• Raised—Wantagh, Long Island, New York
• Education—B.A., George Washington University
• Currently—lives on Long Island, New York, and Washington, D.C.


Steven Israel is the United States Representative for New York's 3rd congressional district, serving in the United States Congress since 2001. The district, numbered as the 2nd district from 2001 to 2013, includes portions of northern Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island, as well as a tiny portion of Queens in New York City. He is a member of the Democratic Party and was head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee until November 2014. Before serving in Congress, he served on the Huntington, New York town board. He is a native of New York.

Early life, education, and career
Israel was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Wantagh, on Long Island. He graduated from Nassau Community College and George Washington University. At George Washington University, he worked as an aide for Robert Matsui and then Richard Ottinger. Israel went on to become Suffok County director of the American Jewish Congress. In 1987 he unsuccessfully ran for a seat in the county legislature. After this defeat, he spent three years working as an aide to the Suffolk County executive and founded a PR and marketing firm.[2]

He was elected to the town council in Huntington, New York, in 1993. While there, he reportedly convinced the Republican supervisor to switch parties. A town official said that he persuaded colleagues to move for pay raises while opposing them himself, which was seen as a politically safer move.

U.S. House of Representatives
After Rick Lazio left his House seat to run for the United States Senate in 2001, Israel was elected to his seat, receiving 48% of the vote, defeating Republican Joan Jonhson, who received 34%, and four independent candidates. He has been reelected six times with relatively little difficulty, despite representing a district that is a swing district on paper.

—Committee on Appropriations
        Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development
        Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs
        Subcommittee on Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies

—Caucus membership
    Co-chair and founder of Congressional Center Aisle Caucus
    House Cancer Caucus (Co-chair)
    Long Island Sound Caucus (Co-chair)

—Party leadership
    Assistant Democratic Whip
    House Democratic Caucus Task Force On Defense and the Military (Chair)
    House Democratic Study Group on National Security Policy (Co-chair)

(From Wikipedia. Retrieved 12/29/14.)

Book Reviews
[I]t’s an unexpected delight to find The Global War on Morris, a political satire by Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), so spirited and funny.... [A]t the center of a network of sycophants, [Vice President] Cheney stirs the cauldron of our nation’s anxieties about “terrorists, jihadists, liberals.” He whines about how soft Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has gone, snickers at constitutional rights and calculates how best to manipulate the terror alert system before the Republican convention.... a perfect storm of ineptitude, fervency and technophilia.
Ron Charles - Washington Post


[A] laugh-out-loud funny book. I don’t mean a chuckle here or there. This yarn by Congressman Steve Israel is downright hilarious....a race between laughter and absurdity with you as the referee.
Chris Matthews - Hardball


When he's not debuting as a novelist, Israel represents New York's third Congressional District. Naturally, his book has a political bent. After unassuming pharmaceutical salesman Morris Feldstein makes a hasty decision to charge a nonbusiness expense to his company credit card, he's tracked by the government's top-secret surveillance program, which manages to turn him into the new public enemy number one.
Library Journal


When he's not debuting as a novelist, Israel represents New York's third Congressional District. Naturally, his book has a political bent. After unassuming pharmaceutical salesman Morris Feldstein makes a hasty decision to charge a nonbusiness expense to his company credit card, he's tracked by the government's top-secret surveillance program, which manages to turn him into the new public enemy number one.
Booklist


Israel has fun with the bureaucratic side of national security but offers few surprises, while his political jabs are rather flat and facile, and, after all, a decade late....[and] at a time when refugees, casualties and decapitations can make it hard to see the lighter side of any aspect of the war on terror.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)

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Glorious 
Bernice L. McFadden, 2010
Akashic Books
250 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781936070114


Summary
Glorious is set against the backdrops of the Jim Crow South, the Harlem Renaissance, and the civil rights era. Blending the truth of American history with the fruits of Bernice McFadden’s rich imagination, this is the story of Easter Venetta Bartlett, a fictional Harlem Renaissance writer whose tumultuous path to success, ruin, and revival offers a candid portrait of the American experience in all its beauty and cruelty.

Glorious is ultimately an audacious exploration into the nature of self-hatred, love, possession, ego, betrayal, and, finally, redemption. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A 
• Where—Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA
• Education—NYC Fashion College - Laboratory Institute of
   Merchandising; Marymount College, Fordham University
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York

Bernice L. McFadden is the author of seven critically acclaimed novels, including the classic Sugar, Nowhere Is a Place, (a 2006 Washington Post Best Fiction title), and Gathering of Waters in 2012.

She is a two time Hurston/Wright award fiction finalist as well as the recipient of two fiction honor awards from the BCALA. McFadden lives in Brooklyn, New York. (From the publisher.)

More
Bernice L. McFadden was born, raised and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is the eldest of four children and the mother of one daughter, R'yane Azsa. Ms. McFadden attended grade school at P.S. 161 in Brooklyn and Middle School at Holy Spirit, also in Brooklyn. She attended high school at St. Cyril Academy an all-girls boarding school in Danville, Pa.

In the Fall of 1983 she enrolled in the noted NYC fashion college: Laboratory Institute of Merchandising, with dreams of becoming an international clothing buyer.

She attended LIM for two semesters and then took a position at Bloomingdale's and later with Itokin, a Japanese owned retail company.

Disillusioned and frustrated with her job, she signed up for a Travel & Tourism course at Marymount College where she received a certificate of completion. After the birth of her daughter in 1988, Bernice McFadden obtained a job with Rockresorts a company then owned by the Rockefeller family.

The company was later sold and Ms. McFadden was laid off and unemployed for one year. She sights that year as the turning point in her life because during those twelve months Ms. McFadden began to dedicate herself to the art of writing. During the next nine years she held three jobs, always looking for something exciting and satisfying. Forever frustrated with corporate America and the requirements they put on their employees, Ms. McFadden enrolled at Fordham University. Her intention was to obtain a degree that would enable her to move up another rung on the corporate ladder.

She signed up for courses that concentrated on Afro-American history and literature, as well as creative writing, poetry and journalism. She credits the two years spent under the guidance of her professors as well as the years spent lost in the words of her favorite author's, to the caliber of writer she has become.

During those years, Ms. McFadden made a conscious effort to write as much as possible and began to send out hundreds of query letters to agents and publisher's attempting to sell one of her short stories or the novel she was working on.

In 1997, Ms. McFadden quit her job and dedicated seven months to re-writing the novel that would become, Sugar. In May of 1998, after depleting her savings, she took her last and final position within corporate America.

On Feb 9th, 1999, her daughter's eleventh birthday (and Alice Walker's birthday—one of Ms. McFadden's favorite author's) she sent a query letter to an agent who signed her two weeks later and the rest is literary history!

Bernice L. McFadden also writes racy, humorous fiction under the pseudonym, Geneva Holliday. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
McFadden's lively and loving rendering of New York hews closely to the jazz-inflected city of myth.... [She] has a wonderful ear for dialogue, and her entertaining prose equally accommodates humor and pathos.
Gregory Beyer - New York Times

McFadden, in her powerful seventh novel, tells the story of Easter Bartlett as she journeys from the violent Jim Crow South to the promise of the Harlem Renaissance and the civil rights movement. Along the way, Easter forms relationships with both products of McFadden's imagination and actual historical figures: Rain, the sensuous and passionate dancer in Slocum's Traveling Brigade, a troupe that traveled the backwoods “entertaining negroes”; Colin, Easter's husband, who is provoked by a duplicitous friend into assassinating the Universal Negro Improvement Association leader, Marcus Garvey; Meredith, Easter's untrustworthy benefactor; and many more, including poet Langston Hughes, pianist Fats Waller, and shipping heiress Nancy Cunard. McFadden (Sugar) weaves rich historical detail with Easter's struggle to find peace in a racially polarized country, and she brings Harlem to astounding life: “The air up there, up south, up in Harlem, was sticky sweet and peppered with perfume, sweat, sex, curry, salt meat, sautéed chicken livers, and fresh baked breads.” Easter's hope for love to overthrow hate—and her intense exposure to both—cogently stands for America's potential, and McFadden's novel is a triumphant portrayal of the ongoing quest.
Publishers Weekly

After her sister's rape and her mother's death of a broken heart, Easter walked away from Waycross, Georgia, and spent most of the rest of her life trying to walk away from pain and hate..... McFadden interweaves fiction with the historic period of the Harlem Renaissance in this novel about a woman's struggle against hate and disappointment. —Vanessa Bush
Booklist

Discussion Questions
1. Why did the author choose to name the protagonist Easter? How does her name relate to the story?

2. Describe the setting of Glorious. Why might the author have chosen to write about this time period and these places and events?

3. Why do you think Easter continuously chooses to walk away from people, places and situations instead of confronting them head-on?

4. McFadden chooses to incorporate historical figures in a fictional context. Who does she include? Does her portrayal of them match historical accounts?

5. What does the historical narrative of Glorious reveal about contemporary society?

6. The quest for love and acceptance is a key theme of Glorious. How does the author use the cast of characters to highlight the complexity of this quest?

7. The characters in Glorious are from different classes, backgrounds, and ethnic groups but they share may commonalities. What are some of those shared characteristics?

8. What imagery does the author use in the prologue to set the scene? Does this imagery appear again in the story?

9. Why is Easter attracted to Mama Rain and then later, Getty Wisdom? Do the two have common qualities that draw Easter to them? Did her husband Colin Gibbs have any of those same qualities?

10. In Harlem, Easter tells Rain that she was writing to "Keep a grip on life." At the end of the book though, when Easter has given up writing, does this mean that she has also given up on life?

11. The author presents many representations of friendship and relationships. Describe some. Which are most successful? Why do you think these relationships are able to endure?

12. The story begins and ends in Waycross, Georgia. Why did the author choose to close the story in a place that held so many bad memories for Easter? Is there symbolism in this?

13. Does Easter Bartlett obtain justice? What does she sacrifice in the process?

14. Why do you think that the author chose the quotations by T.S. Eliot and Zora Neale Hurston as the novel's epigraphs? What do they signify?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Go Set a Watchman 
Harper Lee, 2015
HarperColllins
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062409867


Summary
From Harper Lee comes a landmark new novel set two decades after her beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird.

Maycomb, Alabama. Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch—"Scout"—returns home from New York City to visit her aging father, Atticus. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise's homecoming turns bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town, and the people dearest to her.

Memories from her childhood flood back, and her values and assumptions are thrown into doubt. Featuring many of the iconic characters from To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman perfectly captures a young woman, and a world, in painful yet necessary transition out of the illusions of the past—a journey that can only be guided by one's own conscience.

Written in the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman imparts a fuller, richer understanding and appreciation of Harper Lee. Here is an unforgettable novel of wisdom, humanity, passion, humor, and effortless precision—a profoundly affecting work of art that is both wonderfully evocative of another era and relevant to our own times.

It not only confirms the enduring brilliance of To Kill a Mockingbird, but also serves as its essential companion, adding depth, context, and new meaning to an American classic. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—April 28, 1926
• Where—Monroeville, Alabama, USA
• Education—B.A. (later studied law), University of Alabama
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize, 1961; Presidential Medal of Freedom, 2007
• Currently—Monroeville, Alabama


Harper Lee, known to friends and family as Nelle, was born in the small southwestern Alabama town of Monroeville, Alabama, on April 28, 1926, the youngest of four children. Her father, a former newspaper editor and proprietor, was a lawyer who also served on the state legislature from 1926 to 1938. As a child, Lee was a tomboy and a precocious reader, and enjoyed the friendship of her schoolmate and neighbor, the young Truman Capote.

While pursuing a law degree at the University of Alabama, she wrote for several student publications and spent a year as editor of the campus humor magazine, Ramma-Jamma. Though she did not complete the law degree, she pursued studies for a summer in Oxford, England, before moving to New York in 1950, where she worked as a reservation clerk with Eastern Air Lines and BOAC in New York City. Lee continued working as a reservation clerk until the late 50s, when she resolved to devote herself to writing.

She lived a frugal lifestyle, traveling between her cold-water-only apartment in New York to her family home in Alabama to care for her ailing father. Having written several long stories, Harper Lee located an agent in November 1956. The following month at the East 50th townhouse of her friends writer Michael Brown and Joy Williams Brown, she received a gift of a year's wages with a note: "You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas." Within a year, she had a first draft. Working closely with J. B. Lippincott & Co. editor Tay Hohoff, she completed To Kill a Mockingbird in the summer of 1959.

Published July 11, 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird was an immediate bestseller and won her great critical acclaim, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. It remains a bestseller today, with over 30 million copies in print. In 1999, it was voted "Best Novel of the Century" in a poll conducted by the Library Journal.

After completing To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee accompanied Capote to Holcomb, Kansas, to assist him in researching what they thought would be an article on a small town's response to the murder of a farmer and his family. Capote expanded the material into his best-selling book, In Cold Blood (1966). The experiences of Capote and Lee in Holcomb were depicted in two different films, Capote (2005) and Infamous (2006).

Lee said of the 1962 Academy Award–winning screenplay adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird by Horton Foote: "If the integrity of a film adaptation can be measured by the degree to which the novelist's intent is preserved, Mr. Foote's sceen-play should be studied as a classic." She also became a close friend of Gregory Peck, who won an Oscar for his portrayal of Atticus Finch, the father of the novel's narrator, Scout. She remains close to the actor's family. Peck's grandson, Harper Peck Voll, is named after her.

Later honors and recognition
In June 1966, Lee was one of two persons named by President Lyndon B. Johnson to the National Council on the Arts. On May 21, 2006, she accepted an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame. To honor her, the graduating seniors were given copies of Mockingbird before the ceremony and held them up when she received her degree. In a letter published in Oprah Winfrey's magazine O (May 2006), Lee wrote about her early love of books as a child and her steadfast dedication to the written word: "Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books." In 2007 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush.

Go Set a Watchman
According to Lee's lawyer Tonja Carter, following an initial meeting to appraise Lee's assets in 2011, she re-examined Lee's safe-deposit box in 2014 and found the manuscript for Go Set a Watchman. After contacting Lee and reading the manuscript, she passed it on to Lee’s agent Andrew Nurnberg.

On February 3, 2015, it was announced that HarperCollins would publish Go Set a Watchman, which includes versions of many of the characters in To Kill a Mockingbird. According to a HarperCollins press release, it was originally thought that the Watchman manuscript was lost. According to Nurnberg, Mockingbird was originally intended to be the first book of a trilogy: "They discussed publishing Mockingbird first, Watchman last, and a shorter connecting novel between the two."

Jonathan Mahlers account of how Watchman was only ever really considered to be the first draft of Mockingbird, however, makes this assertion seem unlikely at best. Evidence where the same passages exist in both books, in many cases word for word, also further refutes this assertion.

The book was published to controversy in July, 2015, as a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, though it has been confirmed to be only the first draft of the latter, with many narrative incongruities, repackaged and released as a completely separate work.

The book is set some 20 years after the time period depicted in Mockingbird, when Scout returns as an adult from New York to visit her father in Maycomb, Alabama. It alludes to Scout's view of her father, Atticus Finch, as the moral compass ("watchman") of Maycomb, and, according to the publisher, how she finds upon her return to Maycomb, that she...

is forced to grapple with issues both personal and political as she tries to understand her father's attitude toward society and her own feelings about the place where she was born and spent her childhood.

The publication of the novel (announced by her lawyer) raised concerns over why Lee, who for 55 years had maintained that she would never write another book, would suddenly choose to publish again.

In February 2015, the State of Alabama, through its Human Resources Department, launched an investigation into whether Lee was competent enough to consent to the publishing of Go Set a Watchman. The investigation found that the claims of coercion and elder abuse were unfounded,  and, according to Lee's laywer, Lee is "happy as hell" with the publication.

This characterisation, however, has been contested by many friends of Lee. Marja Mills, author of, The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee, a friend and former neighbor of Lee and her older sister Alice, paints a very different picture. In her piece for The Washington Post, "The Harper Lee I Knew," she quotes Lee's sister Alice, whom she describes as "gatekeeper, advisor, protector" for most of Lee's adult life, as saying...

Poor Nelle Harper can't see and can't hear and will sign anything put before her by anyone in whom she has confidence.

She makes note that Watchman was announced just two and a half months after Alice's death and that all correspondence to and from Lee goes through her new attorney. She describes Lee as...

in a wheelchair in an assisted living center, nearly deaf and blind, with a uniformed guard posted at the door [and visitors] restricted to those on an approved list.

New York Times columnist Joe Nocera supports this argument. He also takes issue with how the book has been promoted by the "Murdoch Empire" as a "newly discovered" novel, attesting that the other people in the Sothebys meeting insist that Lee's attorney Carter was present when the manuscript was first found—in 2011, not 2014—by Lee's former agent (who was subsequently fired) and the Sotheby's specialist. They claim Carter knew full well that it was the same one submitted to Tay Hohoff in the 1950's and reworked into Mockingbird—and that Carter has been sitting on the discovery, waiting for the moment when she, not Harper's sister Alice, would be in charge of Harper Lee's affairs.

Stephen Peck, son of actor Gregory Peck has also expressed concern. Responding to the question of how he thinks his father would have reacted to the book, he says that his father "would have appreciated the discussion the book has prompted, but would have been troubled by the decision to publish it."

Peck notes that his father considered Lee a dear friend. She gave him the pocket watch that had belonged to her father, on whom she modeled Atticus and that Gregory wore it the night he won an Oscar for the role. Stephen, who is president and chief executive of the United States Veterans Initiative, goes on to say, “I think he would have felt very protective of her,” and he believed his father would have counseled Lee not to publish Watchman because it could taint Mockingbird, one of the most beloved novels [in] American history.

Later in the same article, which was posted in The Wall Street Journal, Stephen Peck says,

To me, it was an unedited draft. Do you want to put that early version out there or do you want to put it in the University of Alabama archives for scholars to look at?

(Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/16/2015.)

Book Reviews
Don’t let Go Set a Watchman change the way you think about Atticus Finch…the hard truth is that a man such as Atticus, born barely a decade after Reconstruction to a family of Southern gentry, would have had a complicated and tortuous history with race.
Los Angeles Times


[Go Set a Watchman] contains the familiar pleasures of Ms. Lee’s writing—the easy, drawling rhythms, the flashes of insouciant humor, the love of anecdote.
Wall Street Journal


Watchman is compelling in its timeliness.
Washington Post


A significant aspect of this novel is that it asks us to see Atticus now not merely as a hero, a god, but as a flesh-and-blood man with shortcomings and moral failing, enabling us to see ourselves for all our complexities and contradictions.
Washington Post


The success of Go Set a Watchman... lies both in its depiction of Jean Louise reckoning with her father’s beliefs, and in the manner by which it integrates those beliefs into the Atticus we know.
Time


Go Set a Watchman’s greatest asset may be its role in sparking frank discussion about America’s woeful track record when it comes to racial equality.
San Francisco Chronicle


Go Set a Watchman comes to us at exactly the right moment. All important works of art do. They come when we don’t know how much we need them.
Chicago Tribune


[T]he voice we came to know so well in To Kill a Mockingbird—funny, ornery, rulebreaking—is right here in Go Set a Watchman, too, as exasperating and captivating as ever.
Chicago Tribune


What makes Go Set a Watchman memorable is its sophisticated and even prescient view of the long march for racial justice. Remarkably, a novel written that long ago has a lot to say about our current struggles with race and inequality.
Chicago Tribune


[Go Set a Watchman] captures some of the same small-town Southern humor and preoccupation with America’s great struggle: race.
Columbus Dispatch


Go Set a Watchman’s gorgeous opening is better than we could have expected.
Vanity Fair


Go Set a Watchman is more complex than Harper Lee’s original classic. A satisfying novel… it is, in most respects, a new work, and a pleasure, revelation and genuine literary event.
Guardian (UK)


Lee’s ability with description is evident… with long sentences beautifully rendered and evoking a world long lost to history, but welcoming all the same.
CNN.com


A coming-of-age novel in which Scout becomes her own woman…. Go Set a Watchman’s voice is beguiling and distinctive, and reminiscent of Mockingbird. (It) can’t be dismissed as literary scraps from Lee’s imagination. It has too much integrity for that.
Independent (UK)


Go Set a Watchman provides valuable insight into the generous, complex mind of one of America’s most important authors.
USA Today


Atticus’ complexity makes Go Set a Watchman worth reading. With Mockingbird, Harper Lee made us question what we know and who we think we are. Go Set a Watchman continues in this noble literary tradition.
New York Post


A deftly written tale…there’s something undeniably comforting and familiar about sinking into Lee’s prose once again.
People


As Faulkner said, the only good stories are the ones about the human heart in conflict with itself. And that’s a pretty good summation of Go Set a Watchman.
Daily Beast


Go Set a Watchman offers a rich and complex story… To make the novel about pinning the right label on Atticus is to miss the point.
Bloomberg View


Harper Lee’s second novel sheds more light on our world than its predecessor did.
Time


[Go Set a Watchman is a] brilliant book that ruthlessly examines race relations.
Denver Post


Go Set a Watchman is such an important book, perhaps the most important novel on race to come out of the white South in decades…
New York Times Opinion Pages: Taking Note

In this powerful newly published story about the Finch family, Lee presents a wider window into the white Southern heart, and tells us it is finally time for us all to shatter the false gods of the past and be free.
NPR's "Code Switch"


[Go Set a Watchman is] filled with the evocative language, realistic dialogue and sense of place that partially explains what made Mockingbird so beloved.
Buffalo News


The editor who rejected Lee's first effort had the right idea. [Watchman] is clearly the work of a novice, with poor characterization (how did the beloved Scout grow up to be such a preachy bore, even as she serves as the book's moral compass?), lengthy exposition, and ultimately not much story, unless you consider Scout thinking she's pregnant because she was French-kissed...compelling.... The temptation to publish another Lee novel was undoubtedly great, but it's a little like finding out there's no Santa Claus.
Publishers Weekly


Scout...[is] returning home from New York to Maycomb Junction, AL, post-Brown v. Board of Education and encountering strongly resistant states'-rights, anti-integrationist forces that include boyfriend Henry and, significantly, her father, Atticus Finch.... Readers shocked by that revelation must remember that...the work in hand is not a sequel but served as source material for Lee's eventual Pulitzer Prize winner, with such reworked characters a natural part of the writing and editing processes. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal


[Go Set a Watchman] too often reads like a first draft, but Lee's story nonetheless has weight and gravity.... As Scout wanders from porch to porch and parlor to parlor on both the black and white sides of the tracks, she hears stories that complicate her—and our—understanding of her father. To modern eyes, Atticus harbors racist sentiments.... Lee...writes of class, religion, and race, but most affectingly of the clash of generations and traditions.... It's not To Kill a Mockingbird, yes, but it's very much worth reading.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Go Set a Watchman takes place more than twenty years after To Kill a Mockingbird begins. When Wa t c h m a n opens, Jean Louise Finch—now twenty-six and living in the North, in New York City—is returning to her hometown of Maycomb, Alabama. Describe the Maycomb of Go Set a Watchman. If you have read Mockingbird, has the town changed in the intervening years? If so, how?

2. Harper Lee writes, “Until comparatively recently in its history, Maycomb County was so cut off from the rest of the nation that some of its citizens, unaware of the South’s political predilections over the past ninety years, still voted Republican.” What are these predilections, and where do they originate? What is Harper Lee telling us about the period and the politics and attitudes of this small Southern town?

3. Maycomb is a town without train service, and its bus service “was erratic and seemed to go nowhere.” How does this lack of connection isolate the citizens of Maycomb, and how does that isolation affect how they see themselves and outsiders? Early in the novel, her longtime friend Henry Clinton tells her “you’re gonna see Maycomb change its face completely in our lifetime.” What does he foresee that Jean Louise cannot—or perhaps does not want to see?

4.Think about the extended Finch family. What is their status in Maycomb? What is the significance of being a Finch in this small Southern town? Does it afford them privileges—as well as expectations of them and responsibilities—that other families do not share? Do the Finches have freedoms that others do not enjoy?

5. Describe the Jean Louise Finch of Watchman. How does this grown-up woman compare to her younger self ? How does Jean Louise conform—or not—to the ideal of womanhood in the 1950s? What was that ideal? Compare her to her Aunt Alexandra and the women of Maycomb. Does she fit in with these women? What did you learn about them at the Coffee social that Aunt Alexandra hosts in Jean Louise’s honor? In both Mockingbird and Watchman, Alexandra tells Jean Louise that she is part of a genteel family and that she must at like a “lady.” How did ladies “act” in the first half of the twentieth century and is there such a thing as a “lady” today?

6. Has living away from Maycomb—and in a place like New York—had an impact on Jean Louise? What does she think about New York and life there? What does the big city offer her that Maycomb does not—and vice versa? Now that Atticus is older and suffering from arthritis, why doesn’t Jean Louise move back to Maycomb permanently? “Maycomb expected every daughter to do her duty. The duty of his only daughter to her widowed father after the death of his only son was clear: Jean Louise would return and make her home with Atticus; that was what a daughter did, and she who did not was no daughter.” What responsibilities do children—especially female children—owe their parents?

7. Describe the relationship between Jean Louise and Atticus at the beginning of the novel. Does Jean Louise idealize her father too much? How does she react when she discovers that her father is a flawed human being? How does this discovery alter her sense of herself, her family, and her world? By the novel’s end, how do father and daughter accommodate each other?

8. Talk about the Atticus portrayed in Go Set a Watchman. If you read Watchman first, how might the novel color your ideas about the Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird? What was your reaction to some of the opinions he voices in Watchman? Do they make him a more realistic—if less heroic—character than that portrayed in Mockingbird? Is Atticus racist? Would he consider himself to be racist?

9. “Integrity, humor, and patience were the three words for Atticus Finch.” After your reading of Watchman, do these three words still hold true? What words would you use to describe him?

10. What are Jean Louise’s feelings toward Henry Clinton? Would he make a good husband for her? Both her aunt and her uncle tell her that Henry isn’t “suitable,” that he “is not her kind.” What do they mean, and what does it mean to Jean Louise? Is it strictly because of Henry’s background or is there something more? What adjectives would you use to describe Henry’s character?

11. Is Henry like Atticus, his mentor and friend? Is Jean Louise’s assessment of Henry later in the novel correct? Are Henry and Atticus good men? Can you be a moral person and hold views that may be unacceptable to most people? How do Atticus’s actions toward the blacks of Maycomb compare with his views about them?

12. Why does Maycomb have a citizens’ council, and why does this upset Jean Louise when she discovers that nearly everyone in town belongs to it? By allowing the likes of a racist segregationist like Grady O’Hanlon to speak at the meeting, are Atticus and Henry defending O’Hanlon’s First Amendment right to free speech—or are they condoning his message?

13. Harper Lee writes, “Had she been able to think, Jean Louise might have prevented events to come by considering the day’s occurrences in terms of a recurring story as old as time: the chapter which concerned her began two hundred years ago and was played out in a proud society the bloodiest war and harshest peace in modern history could not destroy, returning, to be played out again on private ground in the twilight of a civilization no wars and no peace could save.” Why would this realization have helped Jean Louise? Are we still fighting the Civil War today?

14. Harper Lee offers a window into Jean Louise’s turmoil after she attends the citizens’ council meeting. “Had she insight, could she have pierced the barriers of her highly selective, insular world, she may have discovered that all her life she had been with a visual defect which had gone unnoticed and neglected by herself and by those closest to her: she was born color blind.” Why is Jean Louise’s color blindness a “visual defect”? How does being color blind shape who she is and how she sees the world?

15. Trying to reconcile the knowledge Jean Louise has learned with her views of those she loves forces her to confront painful questions. “What was this blight that had come down over the people she loved? Did she see it in stark relief because she had been away from it? Had it percolated gradually through the years until now? Had it always been under her nose for her to see if she had only looked? No, not the last.” What makes her say no to this question? And finally, “What turned ordinary men into screaming dirt at the top of their voices, what made her kind of people harden and say ‘nigger’ when the word had never crossed their lips before?” What answers can you give her?

16. What kind of reception does Jean Louise receive in the Quarters when she visits Calpurnia, the Finches’ retired housekeeper? How does Calpurnia react to seeing Jean Louise, and what is Calpurnia’s response when Jean Louise asks her how she truly felt about her family? Would Calpurnia have answered the same way if asked that question a few years earlier—or if asked a few years later?

17. Near the novel’s end, Jean Louise questions herself. “Everything I have ever taken for right and wrong these people have taught me—these same, these very people. So it’s me, it’s not them. Something has happened to me.” Do you agree with her? Has she changed—or is she truly the person who she was raised to be? Atticus tells her, “I’ve killed you, Scout. I had to.” What does he mean?

18. Do you think that the white community of Maycomb sees itself as being victimized in Go Set a Watchman? How do these people justify this belief—and how does this belief justify their attitude and behavior toward the emerging Civil Rights movement and those who are a part of it, especially the black people of Maycomb?

19. Go Set a Watchman was written three years after the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. the Board of Education. How did that decision impact the nation and especially the South? What is Jean Louise’s opinion of that decision? What about Atticus’s? How do their responses reflect comments about Supreme Court decisions involving minority rights in our own time? What does this tell us about ourselves as Americans and about our views of race today?

20. Consider the novel’s title, Go Set a Watchman. What is its significance? Why do you think Harper Lee chose this as her title for the book? Though it is fiction, the book is a historical document of its time. What does reading it tell us about the modern Civil Rights movement and its effect on the South? What lessons does the book offer us in understanding our own turbulent times?

21. How have our attitudes about race evolved since the 1950s when Watchman was written? In what ways have we progressed? Is the stain of racism indelible in our national character, or can it eventually be erased? Can it be eradicated for good?

22. Late in the novel, Uncle Jack tells his niece, “Every man’s island, Jean Louise, every man’s watchman, is his conscience.” What wisdom is he imparting to her? Uncle Jack also calls Jean Louise a “turnip-sized bigot.” Is she? Why?

23. Did reading Go Set a Watchman deepen your understanding of To Kill a Mockingbird? How are the two books linked thematically? Talk about the experience of reading Go Set a Watchman. Does it stand as a companion to Mockingbird?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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God Help the Child 
Toni Morrison, 2015
Knopf Doubleday
192 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307594174


Summary
Spare and unsparing, God Help the Child—the first novel by Toni Morrison to be set in our current moment—weaves a tale about the way the sufferings of childhood can shape, and misshape, the life of the adult.

At the center: a young woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life, but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest forms of love.

There is Booker, the man Bride loves, and loses to anger. Rain, the mysterious white child with whom she crosses paths. And finally, Bride’s mother herself, Sweetness, who takes a lifetime to come to understand that "what you do to children matters. And they might never forget."

A fierce and provocative novel that adds a new dimension to the matchless oeuvre of Toni Morrison. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Aka—Chloe Anthony Wofford
• Birth— February 18, 1931
• Where—Lorain, Ohio, USA
• Education—B.A., Howard University; M.A., Cornell University
• Awards—Nobel Prize, 1993, National Book Critics' Circle Award, 1977; Pulitzer Prize, 1988.
• Currently—lives in Princeton, NJ and New York, NY


Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford) is an American novelist, editor, and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed characters. Among her best known works are The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved.

Early life and career
Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio, to Ramah (nee Willis) and George Wofford. She was the second of four children in a working-class family. Her parents moved to Ohio to escape southern racism and instilled a sense of heritage through telling traditional African American folktales.

Morrison read frequently as a child; among her favorite authors were Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy. According to a 2012 interview in The Guardian, she became a Catholic at the age of 12 and received the baptismal name "Anthony," which later became the basis for her nickname "Toni."

In 1949 Morrison went to Howard University, graduating in 1953 with a B.A. in English; she went on to earn a Master of Arts from Cornell University in 1955. She taught English, first at Texas Southern University in Houston for two years, then at Howard for seven years.

At Howard, she met Jamaican architect Harold Morrison, whom she married in 1958. The couple had two children and divorced in 1964. After the break up of her marriage, she  worked as an editor, first in Syracuse and later in New York City where she worked for a textbook publisher as a senior editor.

Morrison later went to work as an editor for Random House. That position enabled her to play a vital role in bringing black literature into the mainstream, working with authors such as Henry Dumas, Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, and Gayl Jones.

Writing career
Morrison began writing fiction as part of an informal group of poets and writers at Howard University who met to discuss their work. She attended one meeting with a short story about a black girl who longed to have blue eyes. She later developed the story into her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970)—writing it while raising two children and teaching at Howard. (Years later, in 2000, the book became a selection for Oprah's Book Club.)

Her novel Sula (1973) was nominated for the 1975 National Book Award. However, it was her third novel, Song of Solomon (1977) that brought her national attention. The book was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, the first novel by a black writer to be so chosen since Richard Wright's Native Son in 1940. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In 1987 Morrison's novel Beloved became a critical and popular success. When the novel failed to win the National Book Award as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award, 48 black critics and writers protested the omission. Shortly afterward, it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the American Book Award. That same year, Morrison took a visiting professorship at Bard College.

Beloved was adapted into the 1998 film of the same name starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover. Morrison later used Margaret Garner's life story again in the libretto for a new opera, Margaret Garner, with music by Richard Danielpour.

In May 2006, the New York Times Book Review named Beloved the best American novel published in the previous 25 years.

In addition to her novels, Morrison has written books for children with her younger son, Slade Morrison, who worked as a painter and musician. Slade died of pancreatic cancer in 2010 at the age of 45. Morrison's novel Home, half-written when Slade died, is dedicated to him.

Her 11th novel, entitled God Help the Child, was published in 2015. It is the first of her novels to be set in contemporary time.

Relationship to feminism
Although her novels typically concentrate on black women, Morrison does not identify her works as feminist. When asked in a 1998 interview "Why distance oneself from feminism?" she replied:

In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can't take positions that are closed. Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book—leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity.

She went on to state that she thought it off-putting to some readers

...who may feel that I'm involved in writing some kind of feminist tract. I don't subscribe to patriarchy, and I don't think it should be substituted with matriarchy. I think it's a question of equitable access, and opening doors to all sorts of things.

Critics, however, have referred to her body of work as exemplifying characteristics of "postmodern feminism" by "altering Euro-American dichotomies by rewriting a history written by mainstream historians" and by her usage of shifting narration in Beloved and Paradise.

Later life
Morrison taught English at two branches of the State University of New York and at Rutgers University: New Brunswick Campus. In 1984 she was appointed to an Albert Schweitzer chair at the University at Albany, The State University of New York. From 1989 until her retirement in 2006, Morrison held the Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities at Princeton University.

Though based in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton, Morrison did not regularly offer writing workshops to students after the late 1990s, a fact that earned her some criticism. Rather, she has conceived and developed the prestigious Princeton Atelier, a program that brings together talented students with critically acclaimed, world-famous artists. Together the students and the artists produce works of art that are presented to the public after a semester of collaboration. In her position at Princeton, Morrison used her insights to encourage not merely new and emerging writers, but artists working to develop new forms of art through interdisciplinary play and cooperation.

Honors
At its 1979 commencement ceremonies, Barnard College awarded her its highest honor, the Barnard Medal of Distinction.

She won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1988 for Beloved

In 1993 Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her citation reads: Toni Morrison,who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality." Morrison is currently the last American to have been awarded the honor.

In 1996 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. Morrison's lecture, entitled "The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations," began with the aphorism, "Time, it seems, has no future." She cautioned against the misuse of history to diminish expectations of the future.

That same year, 1996, Morrison was honored with the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. The medal is awarded to a writer "who has enriched our literary heritage over a life of service, or a corpus of work."

Oxford University awarded her an honorary Doctor of Letters degree in June 2005.

In November 2006, Morrison visited the Louvre Museum in Paris as the second in its "Grand Invité" program to guest-curate a month-long series of events across the arts on the theme of "The Foreigner's Home." Inspired by her curatorship, Morrison returned to Princeton in Fall 2008 to lead a small seminar, also entitled "The Foreigner's Home."

Also that year, the New York Times Book Review named Beloved the best novel of the past 25 years.

She continued to explore new art forms, writing the libretto for Margaret Garner, an American opera that explores the tragedy of slavery through the true life story of one woman's experiences. The opera debuted at the New York City Opera in 2007.

In May, 2010, Morrison appeared at PEN World Voices for a conversation with Marlene van Niekerk and Kwame Anthony Appiah about South African literature, and specifically, van Niekerk's novel Agaat.

In May, 2011, Morrison received an Honorable Doctor of Letters Degree from Rutgers University during commencement where she delivered a speech of the "pursuit of life, liberty, meaningfulness, integrity, and truth."

In March, 2012, Morrison established a residency at Oberlin College.In addition to Home, Morrison also debuted another work in 2012: She worked with opera director Peter Sellars and songwriter Rokia Traoré on a new production inspired by William Shakespeare's Othello. The trio focused on the relationship between Othello's wife Desdemona and her African nurse, Barbary, in Desdemona, which premiered in London in the summer of 2012.

Also, in 2012, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Morrison serves as a member of the editorial board of The Nation magazine.

Papers
Morrison's papers are part of the permanent library collections of Princeton University.

Her decision to add her papers to Princeton rather than Howard University, her alma mater, was met with criticism from the Historical Black College and University community. Vice-President of Content with HBCU Buzz Inc., Robert K. Hoggard wrote in his article "Toni Morrison's Papers Will Go to Princeton? Not Howard":

For far too long, White America has found a way to miss-tell our story. Because of this, it’s more important now than ever to unapologetically support our own Black institutions.... Public White institutions do not need our support, they will thrive without. If we are courageous enough to support our own institutions the sky is the limit for what they can continue to do across America.

(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/6/2015.)

Book Reviews
Nobel laureate Morrison continues to add to her canon of eloquent, brilliantly conceived novels defining the crises and cultural shifts of our times.... Yet another finely distilled masterpiece.
Jane Ciabattari - BBC


Sly, savage, honest, and elegant.... Morrison spikes elements of realism and hyperrealism with magic and mayhem, while sustaining a sexily poetic and intoxicating narrative atmosphere.... Once again, Morrison thrillingly brings the storytelling moxie and mojo that make her, arguably, our greatest living novelist.
Lisa Shea - Elle


(Starred review.) Emotionally-wrenching... [Morrion’s] literary craftsmanship endures with sparse language, precise imagery, and even humor. This haunting novel displays a profound understanding of American culture and an unwavering sense of justice and forgiveness.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) "What you do to children matters. And they might never forget." That's the lesson finally learned by light-skinned Sweetness, who rejects her daughter Bride because of her blue-black skin. That luminous skin leads Bride to triumph.... Another dazzler from Nobel laureate Morrison. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Brutality, racism and lies are relieved by moments of connection in Morrison's latest. A little girl is born with skin so black her mother will not touch her. Desperate for approval...she tells a lie that puts an innocent schoolteacher in jail for decades.... A chilling oracle and a lively storyteller, Nobel winner Morrison continues the work she began 45 years ago with The Bluest Eye.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)

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A God in Ruins  (Todd Family, 2)
Kate Atkinson, 2015
Little, Brown and Compay
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316176507


Summary
The stunning companion to Kate Atkinson's #1 bestseller Life After Life, "one of the best novels I've read this century" (Gillian Flynn).

"He had been reconciled to death during the war and then suddenly the war was over and there was a next day and a next day. Part of him never adjusted to having a future."

Kate Atkinson's dazzling Life After Life explored the possibility of infinite chances and the power of choices, following Ursula Todd as she lived through the turbulent events of the last century over and over again.

A God in Ruins tells the dramatic story of the 20th Century through Ursula's beloved younger brother Teddy—would-be poet, heroic pilot, husband, father, and grandfather—as he navigates the perils and progress of a rapidly changing world. After all that Teddy endures in battle, his greatest challenge is living in a future he never expected to have.

An ingenious and moving exploration of one ordinary man's path through extraordinary times, A God in Ruins proves once again that Kate Atkinson is one of the finest novelists of our age. (From the publisher.)

This is the companion book to Atkinsons's Life After Life, published in 2013.

Author Bio
• Birth—1951
• Where—York, England, UK
• Education—M.A., Dundee University
• Awards—Whitbread Award; Woman's Own Short Story Award; Ian St. James Award;
   Saltire Book of the Year Award; Prix Westminster
• Currently—lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK


Kate Atkinson was born in York, and studied English Literature at the University of Dundee, gaining her Masters Degree in 1974. She subsequently studied for a doctorate in American Literature which she failed at the viva stage. During her final year of this course, she was married for the first time, although the marriage lasted only two years.

After leaving the university, she took on a variety of miscellaneous jobs from home help to legal secretary and teacher. She lived in Whitby, Yorkshire for a time, before moving to Edinburgh, where she taught at Dundee University and began writing short stories. She now lives in Edinburgh.

Writing
She initially wrote for women's magazines after winning the 1986 Woman's Own Short Story Competition. She was runner-up for the Bridport Short Story Prize in 1990 and won an Ian St James Award in 1993 for her short-story "Karmic Mothers," which she later adapted for BBC2 television as part of its Tartan Shorts series.

Atkinson's breakthrough was with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, which won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year award, ahead of Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh and Roy Jenkins biography of William Ewart Gladstone. The book has been adapted for radio, theatre and television. She has since written several more novels, short stories and a play. Case Histories (2004) was described by Stephen King as "the best mystery of the decade." The book won the Saltire Book of the Year Award and the Prix Westminster.

Her work is often celebrated for its wit, wisdom and subtle characterisation, and the surprising twists and plot turns. Four of her novels have featured the popular former detective Jackson Brodie—Case Histories (2004), One Good Turn (2006), When Will There Be Good News (2008), and Started Early, Took My Dog (2010). She has shown that, stylistically, she is also a comic novelist who often juxtaposes mundane everyday life with fantastic magical events, a technique that contributes to her work's pervasive magic realism.

Life After Life (2013) revolves around Ursula Todd's continual birth and rebirth. Janet Maslin of the New York Times called it "a big book that defies logic, chronology and even history in ways that underscore its author's fully untethered imagination."

A God in Ruins (2015), the companion book to Life After Life, follows Ursula's brother Todd who survived the war, only to succumb to disillusionment and guilt at having survived.

Atkinson was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2011 Birthday Honours for services to literature. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
(Starred review.) [A]s in Life After Life, Atkinson isn’t just telling a story: she’s deconstructing, taking apart the notion of how we believe stories are told. Using narrative tricks that range from the subtlest sleight of hand to direct address, she makes us feel the power of storytelling not as an intellectual conceit, but as a punch in the gut.
Publishers Weekly


Here's a sequel to Atkinson's remarkably shape-shifting Costa Award winner, Life After Life, telling the story of Ursula Todd's brother Teddy. Teddy is an RAF bomber pilot and aspiring poet for whom warfare was nothing compared with the struggle to adjust to different expectations in peacetime.
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Atkinson constantly keeps us guessing, the story looping over itself in time ("This was when people still believed in the dependable nature of time—a past, a present, a future—the tenses that Western civilization was constructed on") and presenting numerous possibilities for how Teddy's life might unfold depending on the choices he makes.... A grown-up, elegant fairy tale.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The sacrifices one generation makes for the next is a major theme of the novel. How does Teddy view the sacrifices that he made in his life to provide a future for Viola, Sunny and Bertie? In what ways do Viola, Sunny and Bertie recognize Teddy’s sacrifices in their own lives and set out to ensure they give them meaning? In what ways do they disrespect his sacrifices?

2. Teddy views the outbreak of war as a relief—a higher duty that will save him from the monotony of everyday life. Why does Teddy fear settling into a stable existence? Does the war provide the sense of purpose that Teddy was searching for? Paradoxically, does the adventure of war prepare him for a settled adulthood as the "Voice of Reason"?

3. Izzie was awarded the Croix de Guerre during her time as an ambulance driver in the First World War, a fact that her family only discovered following her death. Why does Izzie keep her honor a secret from the family? What other secrets do characters in the book guard closely? Why?

4. Speaking of Hugh’s refusal to return to his boarding school, Sylvie says, "going back is usually more painful than going forward" (p. 10). The narrative structure of A God in Ruins moves back and forth time to give a fuller picture of its characters. How does this technique influence how you view the book and its characters? Are all returns to the past painful?

5. How would you characterize Teddy’s relationship with his sister Ursula? How does it compare to his relationships with the other members of his family?

6. Teddy feels adrift returning o daily life. The horrors of combat force him to reexamine everything he though about the world around him:  "The whole edifice of civilization turned out to be constructed from an unstable mix of quicksand and imagination" (p. 116). What does Teddy mean by this? Do you agree?

7. Teddy’s relationship with Nancy changes following the war: "before the war he did know her—but now she was a continual surprise" (p. 73). Has Nancy herself changed, or has Teddy’s perception of her changed? Did Teddy still want to marry Nancy when he returned from the war? Returning to the theme of sacrifice, what sacrifices does Nancy make for Teddy?

8. How does Atkinson port love throughout the book? What relationships illustrate the difference between love and desire?

9. When Teddy visits the cemetery where Hugh is buried, he says to Bertie "Promise me you’ll make the most of your life" (p. 124). Does Teddy feel like he was able to make the most out of his own life?

10. Time is another major theme that Atkinson explores throughout A God in Ruins. Does Teddy’s journey through time make you view the passage of time in your own life differently?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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The God of Animals
Aryn Kyle, 2007
Simon & Schuster
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781416533252


Summary
When her older sister runs away to marry a rodeo cowboy, Alice Winston is left to bear the brunt of her family's troubles — a depressed, bedridden mother; a reticent, overworked father; and a run-down horse ranch. As the hottest summer in fifteen years unfolds and bills pile up, Alice is torn between dreams of escaping the loneliness of her duty-filled life and a longing to help her father mend their family and the ranch.

To make ends meet, the Winstons board the pampered horses of rich neighbors, and for the first time Alice confronts the power and security that class and wealth provide. As her family and their well-being become intertwined with the lives of their clients, Alice is drawn into an adult world of secrets and hard truths, and soon discovers that people — including herself — can be cruel, can lie and cheat, and every once in a while, can do something heartbreaking and selfless. Ultimately, Alice and her family must weather a devastating betrayal and a shocking, violent series of events that will test their love and prove the power of forgiveness.

A wise and astonishing novel about the different guises of love and the often steep tolls on the road to adulthood, The God of Animals is a haunting, unforgettable debut. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio 
• Birth—January 22, 1978
• Where—Peoria, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., Colorado State University; M.F.A.,
   University of Montana, 2003
• Awards—The Rona Jaffe Award, 2005; National Magazine
   Award in Fiction, 2005
• Currently—lives in Missoula, Montana

Aryn Kyle is a graduate of the University of Montana writing program. Her first published short story, "Foaling Season" (which became the first chapter of her debut novel, The God of Animals), won a National Magazine Award for Fiction for the Atlantic Monthly in 2004. Other stories by her have appeared in the Georgia Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New American Voices 2005, and Ploughshares.

In 2005 she was awarded the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, which is given to women writers at an early stage in their careers who demonstrate exceptional talent and promise. She was born in Illinois, but spent most of her childhood in Grand Junction, Colorado, and now lives in Missoula, Montana. (Author biography courtesy of MacMillan.)

Extras
From a 2007 Barnes & Noble interview:

When asked what book influenced her career as a writer, here is her response:

It's impossible to name one. There have been so many books that have influenced my life—so many books that have influenced the way that I think about the world.

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood—is probably the first book that I remember as being truly important to me. I was fourteen when I read it, and when I finished, I remember feeling like the world was a larger place than it had been before. Like I was seeing it all for the first time. For weeks afterward, I walked around feeling like I had been asleep for a long time and was suddenly wide awake. It was one of the first books I'd read that really made me want to be a writer. Other favorites would include...

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson—Her prose is perfection. I was assigned this novel for a college class, and during that time I followed my roommate around our apartment, reading lines aloud to her while she was trying to do laundry or clean the kitchen. I think she wanted to strangle me.

That Night by Alice McDermott—McDermott takes a subject so familiar and makes it absolutely mythic through her telling. I first read this on an overseas flight. It's such a slim little novel that I finished it long before my plane landed. I was so overwhelmed by the book that after I finished it, I turned back to the first page and read it a second time through.

Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides—The scope of point of view throughout this novel is really incredible. I don't use the term "Great American Novel" lightly, but I can think of no other to describe this book. If I didn't love it so much, I'd be insanely jealous.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf— It seems that everyone I meet prefers Mrs. Dalloway, which I liked just fine. But there are parts of To the Lighthouse which have stayed with me long after. I love the way that the abandoned summer house becomes its own character and the deaths of people become, literally, parenthetical.

Escapes by Joy Williams—Oh, Joy Williams is my hero! Seriously, I want to be her when I grow up. Her short stories are absolutely devastating (in a good way).

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov— I won't embarrass myself by trying to say anything new or insightful about Lolita. It's simply an amazing, beautiful book. I reread it every few years or so, and I always have a moment or two when I think I should just give up on writing altogether. With books like this already out there, I wonder sometimes if we really need more.

Alice In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll—This is a favorite of mine from childhood, but I've read it more than once as an adult and I still love it. I can't explain exactly why, but there's something about the darkness and nonsense that, for me, really captures the isolation and confusion of childhood.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller—In general, I'm not a big fan of war books, which is why you should trust me when I say that this book is something remarkable. I first read it at seventeen and was literally awed by the impact it had on me. Heller was writing about World War II, but really, he could have been writing about any war. Every war. Especially in our current political climate, I think that this book goes beyond great; it's important.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen—I'm a true fan of each of Jane Austen's books, but this is my favorite. I love the sharpness of Austen's wit, the snarky bite of her humor. I wish she was alive so that we could be friends.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt —I started reading this book and didn't come up for air until I had finished. Clear the decks before you read it. Really. If you have to put it down to go to work, feed the kids, answer the phone, or bathe, you're going to curse your life. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
Some people seem fated to live in untenable situations. In this beautiful first novel, Alice Winston, 12 years old, has grown up in one. She lives in a town in the Western American desert, which — although it can be exquisite — doesn't always take kindly to the existence of humans. Her mother has been a victim of something like postpartum depression for as long as Alice can remember, and stays in a back bedroom for weeks on end. Her father, Joe, whom some would call a dreamer, maintains a stable for show horses, except that not many customers want to share in the show horse dream. Joe dwells in an imagined world where he gets to do exactly what he wants to do: purchase horses, breed them, break them, train them, then wait for a steady stream of wealthy little girls to ride them in shows. It should make him rich. It worked, more or less, for his father and grandfather.
Carolyn See - Washington Post

Horses and lost love propel this confident debut novel about Alice Winston, a 12-year-old loner with family troubles in Desert Valley, Colo. Her mother hasn't left her bed since Alice was a baby; her father struggles to keep their horse ranch solvent; and her beautiful older sister, Nona, has eloped with a rodeo cowboy. Alice resists befriending the rich girl who takes riding lessons from her father, becomes obsessed with a classmate who drowns in a nearby canal and entangles herself with adults whose motives are suspect. Kyle imbues her protagonist with a genuine adolescent voice, but for all its fluidity, her prose lacks punch, and too often, somber descriptions of Colorado's weather and landscape are called upon to underscore themes of human isolation, jealousy and pain ("Tomorrow, the sun would rise and deaden the land beneath its indifference"). The coupling of female adolescence with the stark West produces its share of harsh truths, though Kyle overstates the moral: love hurts, it's a dangerous world and the truth is hard to swallow.
Publishers Weekly

Kyle's novel begins as adolescent narrator Alice Winston recounts the almost simultaneous departure of her sister, Nona, who elopes with a rodeo cowboy, and the drowning of Polly Cain, one of Alice's classmates. These events loom like specters over the rest of the novel, which brims with a confidence and assuredness atypical of a debut. In light of Nona's exodus, Alice becomes her father's primary assistant in tending the family's barn and her bedridden mother's intermediary to the outside world. Alice's penchant for prevarication-she makes a pretense of having been Polly Cain's best friend-helps her repel this harsh reality. In Alice, Kyle has created an adolescent voice that is charming and authentic but that also has its irksome tics: surprising events always inspire such hyperbolic responses as "the air around me sucked to the rims of the earth" and "Everything was coming undone the entire world breaking into pieces beneath me." In the long run, though, this is a carp, as the voice exerts an irresistible pull. The prospect of other people leaving—Alice's father with a woman he trains—and the revelation of characters' secrets keep the reader glued to the story. Highly recommended for all public libraries. — David Doerrer, Library Journal
Library Journal

Growing pains and the loss of innocence on a desert ranch. Kyle's debut tracks the complicated, often punitive business of love from the preternaturally mature perspective of 12-year-old Alice Winston, whose father, Jody, knows more about horses than he does about running a successful business. After Alice's older sister Nona—a brilliant rider and useful advertisement for the ranch—runs off to marry a cowboy, Jody is reduced to stabling boarders (the fine horses of bored, rich women) and trying to teach untalented but wealthy Sheila Altman to win at horse shows. Alice's mother Marian is a bed-ridden depressive; Alice herself is preoccupied by the drowning of her schoolmate Polly Cain, who was in the habit of making phone calls to her English teacher, Mr. Delmar. Alice, lonely as well as sensitive to her father's financial problems and her mother's emotional ones, starts to make secret calls to Delmar herself. Kyle delivers the story in graceful, translucent prose, while the mood of the book is overwhelmingly bleak and steadily focused on the gathering storm. Fearful expectations are eventually realized as a sequence of disasters unfolds, starting with a horrific riding accident that leaves Jody's possible lover Patty Jo badly damaged. Next, Delmar leaves and Alice, in distress, reveals to Sheila her father's infidelities. Patty Jo's accident precipitates the ranch's ruin and a family argument brings about further cruelty, this time leading to the agonizing destruction of a horse. Although an unlikely gift leaves Alice with enough money to go to college, and Kyle wraps up by offering some perspective, it's not exactly a happy ending. A talented writer's lyrical but oppressive first work.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Aryn Kyle chose to tell her story through the eyes of Alice, a twelve-year-old girl just learning about the adult world. What do you think of that choice? Does her youth and inexperience make her vision clearer? More vivid?

2. What is the significance of the title? Who or what is the God of animals? What do the characters' interactions with horses demonstrate about human nature, power, and the natural world?

3. Alice struggles to make sense of her family and her world, andthe Winstons' tendency to keep secrets and withhold the truth doesn't make it easy for her. What does she learn about her family, and in turn, about herself as the novel progresses? What did you think was most revelatory?

4. Alice fixates on her dead classmate, Polly Cain, and invents a friendship with her that never existed. Why do you think she seeks entrance into the life Polly left behind? What conclusion does Alice reach about what happened to Polly?

5. "My mother had spent nearly my whole life in her bedroom" (3). Discuss how this affects the Winston family dynamic. Why do you think Marian choose to live this way? Is it fair? Do you think her family accepts her or enables her? Or neither?

6. Joe Winston's plans for the ranch often don't come to fruition, yet he stays hopeful that his fortune will change. How would you describe Joe? What ties him to the ranch? What does Alice see that he doesn't?

7. What draws Alice to Mr. Delmar? She keeps calling him, though she acknowledges that "in some way I could not name, we weren't playing by the rules. Eventually, there would have to be a price." (185) What is the price? Does their relationship do Alice harm or good?

8. Patty Jo separates herself from the Catfish. Why is she different? How do she and Joe help, but also hurt, each other? How does she affect Alice?

9. Alice surprises everyone, most of all herself, when she rides Darling at the horse show. What does she discover in "that moment of connection" (194) that she had never understood before? Is she better able to understand her father and Nona's connection with horses? Why do you think she's unable to replicate that moment with Darling again?

10. Patty Jo states, "Marriage is the most expensive ticket to nowhere" (262). Does her bleak characterization of marriage hold true for the other married couples in the novel? Consider the marriages of Joe and Marian, Nona and Jerry, and Mr. and Mrs. Altman.

11. At the end of the novel, Alice says "the places we come from don't leave us as easily as we leave them" (304). For which character is this most true? What hold does the ranch have on each of the sisters?

12. Over the course of the summer, the lifestyles of the Altmans, Patty Jo, and the Catfish come into sharp contrast. What does Alice observe about what wealth and class can provide, and what they can't? What happens when some of the characters reach for something beyond what they are accustomed to?

13. Discuss the role of violence and cruelty in the novel. Is there something about the harshness of life on a ranch, or working with animals, that brings them closer to the surface? How does Alice deal with her father and grandfather's brutal acts? How might her own actions ultimately figure in to her feelings? Does she forgive them? Does she forgive herself? Why?

14. Horses play a part in some of the novel's most moving scenes. Take, for instance, when Alice retrieves Yellow Cap, Patty Jo's accident, and the weaning of the foals. Which were the most powerful? What did you learn about the characters in those scenes?

15. Kyle uses the changing seasons to give a loose structure to the novel, and the extremes of the climate and Colorado setting often coincide with pivotal events. How does Kyle use imagery and descriptions of the conditions to enhance the plot? Did you find this effective?

16. The God of Animals may be considered a coming-of-age novel in that many of its events force Alice to leave the innocence of childhood behind. Was there one that stood out? Does Kyle succeed in her portrayal of a girl on the brink of adulthood? What part of her portrayal felt most authentic to you?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy, 1997
HarperCollins
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812979657



Summary
Winner, 1997 Man Booker Prize

Set in Kerala, India, in 1969, The God Of Small Things is the story of seven-year-old twins Rahel and Estha, born of a wealthy family and literally joined at the soul. Rahel and Estha are cared for by a host of compelling characters: their beautiful mother, Ammu, who has left a violent husband; their Marxist uncle, Chacko, still pining for his English wife and daughter who left him; their prickly grandaunt, Baby Kochamma, pickling in her virginity; and the volatile Veluth, a member of the Untouchable caste. When Chacko's ex-wife, Margaret, and lovely daughter, Sophie, unexpectedly return, the household is thrown into disarray. Tragedy strikes in the form of an accident (that may not have been accidental) and a terrifying murder.

Tremendously powerful and lushly romantic, The God Of Small Things effectively shifts between two time periods: Rahel's present-day trip home to see her mute, haunted twin brother, and a December day 20 years before — the tumultuous day that tears the family apart. With mesmerizing language that brings to mind such authors as Salman Rushdie, Gabriel García Márquez, and William Faulkner, The God Of Small Things ambitiously tackles such profound issues as family, race, and class, the dictates of history, and the laws of love. Rahel and Estha learn too soon that love and life can be lost in a millisecond. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—November 21, 1961
• Where—Shillong, Meghalaya, India
• Education—School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi
• Awards—Booker Prize, 1997
• Currently—lives in New Dheli, India

Arundhati Roy was trained as an architect and is also an award-winning screenwriter. The God of Small Things is her first novel. Like her twin protagonists, she was raised near her grandmother's pickle factory in Kerala, India. She now resides in New Delhi.

Suzanna Arundhati Roy is an Indian novelist, writer and activist. She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her first novel, The God of Small Things and in 2002, the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize.

Roy was born in Shillong, Meghalaya to a Keralite Syrian Christian mother, the women's rights activist Mary Roy, and a Bengali Hindu father, a tea planter by profession. She spent her childhood in Ayamenem in Kerala, and went to school in Corpus Christi, Kottayam, followed by The Lawrence School, Lovedale in the Nilgiris, Tamil Nadu. She then studied architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, where she met her first husband, architect Gerard DaCunha.

Roy met her second husband, filmmaker Pradip Krishen, in 1984, and became involved in film-making under his influence. She played a village girl in the award-winning movie Massey Sahib.

Roy is a niece of the prominent media personality Prannoy Roy and lives in New Delhi.

Roy began writing her first novel, The God of Small Things in 1992, completing it in 1996. The book is semi-autobiographical and a major part captures her childhood experiences in Ayemenem. The book received the 1997 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, was listed as one of the New York Times Notable Books of the Year for 1997. The book reached fourth position in the New York Times Bestsellers list for Independent Fiction. She received half a million pounds as an advance, and rights to the book were sold in 21 countries.

The God of Small Things received good reviews, including one from John Updike in The New Yorker. Carmen Callil, chair of the Booker judges panel in 1996 though, called The God of Small Things "an execrable book" and said it should never have reached the shortlist.

Roy wrote the screenplays for In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones (1989) and Electric Moon (1992) and a television serial The Banyan Tree. She also wrote the documentary DAM/AGE: A Film with Arundhati Roy (2002).

The God of Small Things is the only novel written by Roy. She has since devoted herself solely to nonfiction and politics, publishing two more collections of essays, as well as working for social causes. She is a figure-head of the anti-globalization/alter-globalization movement and a vehement critic of neo-imperialism and of the global policies of the United States. She also criticizes India's nuclear weapons policies and the approach to industrialization and rapid development as currently being practiced in India, including the Narmada Dam project and the power company Enron's activities in India.

More
Roy has campaigned along with activist Medha Patkar against the Narmada dam project, saying that the dam will displace half a million people, with little or no compensation, and will not provide the projected irrigation, drinking water and other benefits. Roy donated her Booker prize money as well as royalties from her books on the project to the Narmada Bachao Andolan.

Arundhati Roy's opposition to the Narmada Dam project has been criticised as "anti-Gujarat" by Congress and BJP leaders in Gujarat.

In 2002, Roy was convicted of contempt of court by the Indian Supreme Court for accusing the court of attempting to silence protests against the Narmada Dam Project. In its judgement, the Supreme Court Of India noted "we feel that the ends of justice would be met if she is sentenced to symbolic one day's imprisonment besides paying a fine of Rs. 2000." Roy served the prison sentence and paid the fine.

Environmental historian Ramachandra Guha has been critical of Roy's Narmada dam activism. While acknowledging her "courage and commitment" to the cause, Guha writes that her advocacy is hyperbolic and self-indulgent, "Ms. Roy's tendency to exaggerate and simplify, her Manichean view of the world, and her shrill hectoring tone, have given a bad name to environmental analysis". He faults Roy's criticism of Supreme Court judges who were hearing a petition brought by the Narmada Bachao Andolan as careless and irresponsible.

Roy counters that her writing is intentional in its passionate, hysterical tone — "I am hysterical. I'm screaming from the bloody rooftops. And he and his smug little club are going 'Shhhh...you'll wake the neighbours!' I want to wake the neighbours, that's my whole point. I want everybody to open their eyes." (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
The quality of Ms. Roy’s narration is so extraordinary—at once so morally strenuous and so imaginatively supple—that the reader remains enthralled all the way through.
New York Times Book Review

With sensuous prose, a dreamlike style infused with breathtakingly beautiful images and keen insight into human nature, Roy's debut novel charts fresh territory in the genre of magical, prismatic literature. Set in Kerala, India, during the late 1960s when Communism rattled the age-old caste system, the story begins with the funeral of young Sophie Mol, the cousin of the novel's protagonists, Rahel and her fraternal twin brother, Estha. In a circuitous and suspenseful narrative, Roy reveals the family tensions that led to the twins' behavior on the fateful night that Sophie drowned. Beneath the drama of a family tragedy lies a background of local politics, social taboos and the tide of history all of which come together in a slip of fate, after which a family is irreparably shattered. Roy captures the children's candid observations but clouded understanding of adults' complex emotional lives. Rahel notices that "at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. The Big Things lurk unsaid inside." Plangent with a sad wisdom, the children's view is never oversimplified, and the adult characters reveal their frailties and in one case, a repulsively evil powerin subtle and complex ways. While Roy's powers of description are formidable, she sometimes succumbs to overwriting, forcing every minute detail to symbolize something bigger, and the pace of the story slows. But these lapses are few, and her powers coalesce magnificently in the book's second half. Roy's clarity of vision is remarkable, her voice original, her story beautifully constructed and masterfully told.
Publishers Weekly

This piercing study of childhood innocence lost mirrors the growing pains of modern India. Twin sister and brother Rahel and Estha are at the center of a family in crisis and at the heart of this "moving and compactly written book.
Library Journal

It's easier to talk about small things because the big things in life are far too complex and painful. But even small things can loom large, and everything can change, radically, in a day, a moment. These are the sort of big things first-time novelist Roy ponders in this highly original and exquisitely crafted tale.... Roy's intricate, enchanting, and often wry tale is positively mythical in its cosmic inevitability, evocative circularity, and paradoxical wisdom. —Donna Seaman
Booklist

A brilliantly constructed first novel that untangles an intricate web of sexual and caste conflict in a vivid style reminiscent of Salman Rushdie's early work. The major characters are Estha and Rahel, the fraternal twin son and daughter of a wealthy family living in the province of Kerala. The family's prosperity is derived from a pickle factory and rubber estate, and their prideful Anglophilia essentially estranges them from their country's drift toward Communism and their "inferiors" hunger for independence and equality. The events of a crucial December day in 1969—including an accidental death that may have been no accident and the violent consequences that afflict an illicit couple who have broken "the Love Law"—are the moral and narrative center around which the episodes of the novel repeatedly circle. Shifting backward and forward in time with effortless grace, Roy fashions a compelling nexus of personalities that influence the twins' "eerie stealth" and furtive interdependence. These include their beautiful and mysteriously remote mother Ammu; her battling "Mammachi" (who runs the pickle factory) and "Pappachi" (an insufficiently renowned entomologist); their Oxford-educated Marxist Uncle Chacko and their wily "grandaunt" Baby Kochamma; and the volatile laborite "Untouchable" Velutha, whose relationship with the twins' family will prove his undoing. Roy conveys their explosive commingling in a vigorous prose dominated by odd syntactical and verbal combinations and coinages (a bad dream experience during midday nap-time is an "aftermare") reminiscent of Gerard Manly Hopkins's "sprung rhythm," incantatory repetitions, striking metaphors (Velutha is seen "standing in the shade of the rubber trees with coins of sunshine dancing on his body") and sensuous descriptive passages ("The sky was orange, and the coconut trees were sea anemones waving their tentacles, hoping to trap and eat an unsuspecting cloud"). In part a perfectly paced mystery story, in part an Indian Wuthering Heights: a gorgeous and seductive fever dream of a novel, and a truly spectacular debut.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Who—or what—is the God of Small Things? What other names and what divine and earthly attributes are associated with this god? What-or who-are the Small Things over which this god has dominion, and why do they merit their own god?

2. What are the various laws, rules, and regulations-familial, social, cultural, political, and religious-including "the Love Laws," to which Roy makes repeated references?

3. Various dwellings are important to the unfolding of Roy's story. How is each described? To what extentdoes each embody or reflect the forces and burdens of history, social order, and custom?

4. How does the river that flows through Ayemenem in 1969 differ from the river in 1992? What is its importance in the lives and histories of the two families and in the twins' childhood?

5. To what extent are race, social class, and religion important? What specific elements of each take on predominant importance, and with what consequences? How do the concept and the reality of "the Untouchable" function in the novel?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The God-Shaped Hole
Tiffanie DeBartolo, 2002
Sourcebooks
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781570719585

In Brief 
Tired of the usual dating politics, Beatrice "Trixie" Jordan follows an impulse and replies to a personal ad: "If your intentions are pure, I'm seeking a friend for the end of the world." In doing so, she meets Jacob Grace, a charming young writer, a passionate seeker of life. Despite their jaded views of the world, they fall immediately in love.

Trixie and Jacob begin an emotionally charged and tumultuous affair; one they try desperately to keep sacred. As they struggle to carve out a future beyond the Los Angeles hills, Trixie and Jacob face family secrets that threaten to keep the two close to home...or at least apart from one another.

With brash humor and a bit of heartbreak, wry and vulnerable Trixie leads us through the joys and furies of her wrenching romance, leaving behind a raw vision of the love and loss of a lifetime. (From the publisher.)

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About the Author 

• Birth—November 27, 1970
• Where—Youngstown, Ohio, USA
• Education—B.A., University of California at Berkeley
• Currently—lives in Boulder, Colorado and New York City

Tiffanie DeBartolo is an American novelist and filmmaker. Her fiction includes The God-Shaped Hole and How To Kill A Rock Star, and one film credit, Dream for an Insomniac.

Born in Youngstown, Ohio, she attended the all-girls Villa Maria High School and dropped out her senior year when they wouldn't let her graduate early. She eventually went to college and moved to Los Angeles. She currently spends her time between New York City and Boulder, Colorado. (From Wikipedia.)

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Critics Say . . .
In the brief prelude to this conventional contemporary love story, a fortune-teller predicts that Beatrice Jordan (then 12) will meet a soul mate whom she'll lose to tragedy. Fifteen years later, lonely and feeling like an outsider in her hometown of Los Angeles, this self-professed "cynical but lovable...chick" impulsively answers a personal ad in a weekly newspaper. Jacob Grace is two years her senior, a freelancer with a novel called Hallelujah in progress; Beatrice's work as a jewelry designer gives her life meaning, as do music, books and sex, not necessarily in that order. Both of their fathers, hers a workaholic lawyer, his an alcoholic author decamped, and they still feel abandoned; they also both feel that music is "a cosmic language" and that people are "all searching to fill up" the titular hole in their souls. Jacob renames Beatrice "Trixie" and takes her for a midnight swim in the frigid Pacific before they bed down in her apartment. Their ensuing relationship is sensuous, but marred by her jealousy of his former girlfriend, his fondness for taking solo sojourns without notice and their shared antagonism toward their fathers. Beatrice comes across as bright but brittle, independent but superstitious, sophisticated but trailer-park profane. Jacob is Byronic, misunderstood and (of course) destined for tragedy. For readers compelled by bedroom athletics and the self-destructive tendencies of free spirits, and unopposed to prose that's not much better than competent, this first novel offers some appeal.
Publishers Weekly

Beatrice "Trixie" Jordan, a lonely, 27-year-old jewelry designer living in Los Angeles, responds to a personal ad from a man "seeking a friend for the end of the world." The man is Jacob Grace, a 30-year-old writer. They fall madly in love and believe they are soul mates. Abandoned by their fathers, they spend much of their time helping each other come to terms with their feelings. After enduring some emotionally desperate times, they hope better days are ahead and plan to leave L.A. and spend the rest of their lives together. However, when Beatrice was 12, a fortune-teller told her that her true love would die young. First-time novelist DeBartolo, writer and director of the film Dream for an Insomniac, has written an edgy story of love and fate rife with expletives and sex. This is a love story in which a happy ending isn't guaranteed. Some readers may be unfamiliar with some of the pop-culture references and may not appreciate the frank and brutally honest tone, but overall this is an engaging first novel. For public libraries. —Samantha J. Gust, Niagara Univ. Lib., NY.
Library Journal

DeBartolo's screenwriting experience (Dream for an Insomniac) shows in her debut novel, a star-crossed romance in the hipper outreaches of Los Angeles. The first sentence tells the whole tale: "When I was twelve, a fortune-teller told me that my one true love would die young and leave me all alone." Beatrice Jordan was at a splashy Hollywood bash with her entertainment lawyer father when she heard that fortune. She is now your typical jaded and cynical twentysomething child of LA riches. She hasn't spoken to her father since he left the family, and she doesn't think so highly of her mother either. A designer of one-of-a-kind jewelry selling to places like Barney's, Beatrice proclaims her outsider status with great pride and no apparent sense of irony. She is also lonely, so she answers a personal ad (readers' responses to the book may be gauged by whether they find the ad charmingly deep or pretentiously dumb) that's been placed by one Jacob Grace. Jacob and Beatrice recognize quickly that they're soulmates: he's a romantic ideal-kind, witty, intense, and troubled by his father's abandonment when he was an infant. He and Trixie (that's what he calls her) make love a lot (graphically described), eat at wonderfully quirky restaurants, share their intellectual pretensions (much hip namedropping-Nick Drake, John Fante, etc.), and help each other come to terms with their fatherly pasts. The romance has rough patches, but it's true love, and, not so gradually, Jacob wears down Beatrice's cynical resistance to trusting him not to leave her the way her father did. When he sells his first novel, they plot their escape from Los Angeles. But all along Beatrice has had troubling dreams of Jacob being swallowed by a whirlpool, and, sure enough, with only 30 pages to go, tragedy strikes. DeBartolo's combination of one-liners and three-hankie tearjerking is skillful-and transparently manipulative. This generation's Love Story.
Kirkus Reviews

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Book Club Discussion Questions 

Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

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Gods in Alabama
Joshilyn Jackson, 2005
Grand Central Publishing
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780446178167

Summary
When Arlene Fleet headed off to college in Chicago, she made three promises to God: She would never again lie, never fornicate outside of marriage, and never, ever go back to her tiny hometown of Possett, Alabama (the "fourth rack of Hell").

All God had to do in exchange was to make sure the body of high school quarterback Jim Beverly was never found.

Ten years later, Arlene has kept her promises, but an old schoolmate has recently turned up asking questions. And now Arlene’s African American beau has given her a tough ultimatum: introduce him to her family, or he’s gone.

As she prepares to confront guilt, discrimination, and a decade of deception, Arlene is about to discover just how far she will go to find redemption—and love. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—February 27, 1968
• Where—Fort Walton Beach, Florida, USA
• Education—B.A., Georgia State University; M.A., University of Illinois
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Decatur, Georgia


Joshilyn Jackson is the author of several novels, all national best sellers. She was born into a military family, moving often in and out of seven states before the age of nine. She graduated from high school in Pensacola, Florida, and after attending a number of different colleges, earned her B.A. from Georgia State University. She went on to earn an M.A. in creative writing from University of Illinois in Chicago.

Having enjoyed stage acting as a student in Chicago, Jackson now does her own voice work for the audio versions of her books. Her dynamic readings have won plaudits from AudioFile Magazine, which selected her for its "Best of the Year" list. She also made the 2012 Audible "All-Star" list for the highest listener ranks/reviews; in addition, she won three "Listen-Up Awards" from Publisher's Weekly. Jackson has also read books by other authors, including Lydia Netzer's Shine Shine Shine.

Novels
All of Jackson's novels take place in the American South, the place she knows best. Her characters are generally women struggling to find their way through troubled lives and relationships. Kirkus Reviews has described her writing as...

Quirky, Southern-based, character-driven...that combines exquisite writing, vivid personalities, and imaginative storylines while subtly contemplating race, romance, family, and self.

2005 - Gods in Alabama
2006 - Between, Georgia
2008 - The Girl Who Stopped Swimming
2010 - Backseat Saints
2012 - A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty
2013 - Someone Else's Love Story
2005 - Gods in Alabama
2006 - Between, Georgia
2008 - The Girl Who Stopped Swimming
2010 - Backseat Saints
2012 - A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty
2013 - Someone Else's Love Story
2016 - The Opposite of Everyone
2017 - The Almost Sisters
2019 - Never Have I Ever

Awards
Jackson's books have been translated into a dozen languages, won the Southern Indie Booksellers Alliance's SIBA Novel of the Year, have three times been a #1 Book Sense Pick, twice won Georgia Author of the Year, and three times been shortlisted for the Townsend Prize. (Author's bio adapted from the author's website.)

Book Reviews
Arlene Fleet, the refreshingly imperfect heroine of Jackson's frank, appealing debut, launches her story with a list of the title's deities: "high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus." The first god, also a date rapist by the name of Jim Beverly, she left dead in her hometown of Possett, Ala., but the last she embraces wholeheartedly when high school graduation allows her to flee the South, the murder and her slutty reputation for a new life in Chicago. Upon leaving home, Arlene makes a bargain with God, promising to forgo sex, lies and a return home if he keeps Jim's body hidden. After nine years in Chicago as a truth-telling celibate, an unexpected visitor from home (in search of Jim Beverly) leads her to believe that God is slipping on his end of the deal. As Arlene heads for the Deep South with her African-American boyfriend, Burr, in tow, her secrets unfold in unsurprising but satisfying flashbacks. Jackson brings levity to familiar themes with a spirited take on the clichés of redneck Southern living: the Wal-Mart culture, the subtle and overt racism and the indignant religion. The novel concludes with a final, dramatic disclosure, though the payoff isn't the plot twist but rather Jackson's genuine affection for the people and places of Dixie.
Publishers Weekly

Forget steel magnolias-meet titanium blossoms in Jackson's debut novel, a potent mix of humor, murder, and a dysfunctional Southern family. After high school, Arlene Fleet left tiny Possett, AL, for Chicago, vowing never to return. Despite pleas over the decade to come home, Arlene reconsiders only after a sudden visit from a former classmate. In chapters alternating between 1997 and 1985, the story of what prompted the murder of a football hero in Arlene's hometown unfolds tantalizingly. Arlene's not a saint (even if she has made three vows to God), but is she a murderer? Abrlene's boyfriend, Burr, is a saint—he's a black man willing to tolerate her bigoted relatives while also honoring her unusual pact with God (which doesn't, by the way, exclude swearing). While written for adults, this novel reminds us again that the teenage subculture is complex and powerful and that unholy acts may be committed in the name of love. Recommended for most collections. —Rebecca Kelm, Northern Kentucky Univ. Lib., Highland Heights
Library Journal

Arlene Fleet likes to make deals with God and play road-trip games. In this absorbing first novel, deals and games guide all the characters' actions, but the reader won't know the real deal or the name of the game until the last page.... Cleverly disguised as a leisurely paced southern novel, this debut rockets to the end, even as the plot turns back on itself, surprising characters and readers alike. Book clubs will enjoy this saucy tale, as will fans of southern fiction with a twist. —Kaite Mediatore
Booklist

Date-rape and murder color the life of a high-school sophomore. Years later, she returns to her hometown to exorcise the demons, in a first novel based on delayed revelations. Sophomore Arlene Fleet made a deal with God. She would stop being a slut, never lie or fornicate again, and leave town for good after graduation. All He had to do was hide the body of the boy she'd killed. True to her word, Arlene left tiny Possett, Ala., in 1987 and hightailed it to Chicago, for Jim Beverly had indeed vanished without a trace. Ten years later, Arlene is still in Chicago, a teacher and a Ph.D. candidate with a steady boyfriend, Burr. Then Jim's old girlfriend, Rose Mae Lolley, materializes on Arlene's doorstep, and Arlene realizes she must return to Alabama for damage control. In chapters that from this point on alternate between the present and the past, Arlene is an engaging narrator whom we want to trust, though that can be difficult. Take the murder. Jim, the heartthrob quarterback, had behaved horribly to Clarice, Arlene's lovely cousin (the girls are as close as sisters). Arlene had pursued the sloppy-drunk Jim and knocked him out with his tequila bottle. Had one blow really killed him? Why wasn't his body ever found? Why has it taken ten years for Rosa Mae to get on the case? There are questions in the present, too. Because of her "no fornication" pledge to God, Arlene's two-year relationship with Burr has been touchy-feely but not sexual. Just how credible is that? Arlene and Burr drive down to Alabama to visit with Arlene's formidable Aunt Florence, who raised her after her father died and her mother sank into a permanent, pill-popping depression. The homecoming is frosty, for Burr is blackand Florence is a dyed-in-the-wool racist. But racial tensions take a back seat to a minute reconstruction of the past and a final Southern Gothic flourish. A likable new talent chained to a creaky old plot.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Who or what are the gods that the title refers to? Who are the gods in your hometown, workplace, or culture?

2. Arlene finds an imperfect but workable way to live around her family's deeply ingrained racism while maintaining the two most important relationships in her life. How satisfying is this compromise? Is it fair to Burr? To Florence? Should Arlene have asked for and expected more?

3. In what ways does Arlene's "deal with God" allow her to protect herself? How much of it is true penance and how much is a defense mechanism?

4. Arlene has painted a picture of Clarice as beautiful, pure, passive, and wholesome. How does idealizing Clarice influence Arlene's own behavior and sexuality?

5. Arlene's biological mother is almost a non-person in the book, and Arlene has surrounded herself with replacement mothers. Who are these replacements, and what aspects of mothering does she get from each of them?

6. The women in this novel generally tend to overpower the men, whether in conversation, romance, or physical altercations. Is this indicative of Southern society in general? What point might the author be making about gender relations in an outwardly traditional society?

7. The main character in this book is alternately known as Arlene and Lena. What are the distinguishing characteristics of Arlene? Of Lena? How do you think she would identify herself? By the end of the book, had she changed in your mind from one to the other, or had the two been integrated?

8. Arlene has clearly rehearsed a confession for years and years. How do you think her commitment to this retelling of the events of the past has shaped her current course of action?

9. Who is Jim Beverly? How do you reconcile the "pure-hearted, sole good man" Rose Mae Lolley has ever known with the scoundrel on Lipsmack Hill that fateful night?

10 What role does the Southern locale play in the novel? Could such a story take place in another region? Why or why not?

11. Forgiveness and atonement are two of the major themes in this novel. Who do you believe has done the most genuine atoning in this story? Who has the biggest sin to forgive?

12. Arlene baldly states that she is a game player, and she plays both literal and metaphorical games with Burr and the other characters throughout the novel. She is also, on some level, playing a game with the reader. How did you react to this? Do you think she played "fair"?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Gods of Gotham
Lyndsay Faye, 2012
Penguin Group USA
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780425261255


Summary
1845. New York City forms its first police force. The great potato famine hits Ireland. These two seemingly disparate events will change New York City. Forever.

Timothy Wilde tends bar near the Exchange, fantasizing about the day he has enough money to win the girl of his dreams. But when his dreams literally incinerate in a fire devastating downtown Manhattan, he finds himself disfigured, unemployed, and homeless. His older brother obtains Timothy a job in the newly minted NYPD, but he is highly skeptical of this new "police force." And he is less than thrilled that his new beat is the notoriously down-and-out Sixth Ward-at the border of Five Points, the world's most notorious slum.

One night while making his rounds, Wilde literally runs into a little slip of a girl-a girl not more than ten years old-dashing through the dark in her nightshift, covered head to toe in blood.

Timothy knows he should take the girl to the House of Refuge, yet he can't bring himself to abandon her. Instead, he takes her home, where she spins wild stories, claiming that dozens of bodies are buried in the forest north of 23rd Street. Timothy isn't sure whether to believe her or not, but, as the truth unfolds, the reluctant copper star finds himself engaged in a battle for justice that nearly costs him his brother, his romantic obsession, and his own life. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1980
• Raised—Pacific Northwest, USA
• Education—B.A., Notre Dame de Namur University
• Currently—lives in Ridgewood, Queens, New York City

Lyndsay Faye is the American author of several crime novels with an historical-fiction bent. She was born in Northern California, raised in the Pacific Northwest, and graduated from Notre Dame de Namur University in the San Francisco Bay Area with a dual degree in English and Performance.

Her early career kept her in the Bay Area working as a professional actress, "nearly always," she says, "in a corset, and if not a corset then… heels and lined stockings." In 2005 she made the move to Manhattan to audition for acting jobs, working in a restaurant as her day job...until it was bulldozed to the ground by developers.

Novels
Sans restaurant job, and with more time on her hands, an initial foray into writing payed off. In 2009 Faye published her first novel, Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson. The book pays tribute to Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick Watson, the duo whose adventures first captivated Faye as a child.

Faye's innate curiosity next spurred her to delve into the history of the New York Police Department, by which she learned that the department's founding coincided with the Irish Potato Famine in 1845. That research inspired her three Timothy Wilde novels—The Gods of Gotham (2012), Seven for a Secret (2013), and The Fatal Flame (2015). The novels follow ex-bartender Timothy Wilde as he learns the perils of police work in a violent and racially divided city during the pre-Civil War era.

Her next novel Jane Steele, released in 2016, re-imagines Jane Eyre as a gutsy, heroic serial killer who battles for justice with methods inspired by Darkly Dreaming Dexter.

Faye has been nominated for an Edgar Award, a Dilys Winn Award, and is honored to have been selected by the American Library Association's RUSA Reader's List for Best Historical. She is an international bestseller and her Timothy Wilde Trilogy has been translated into 14 languages.

Lyndsay and her husband Gabriel live in Ridgewood, Queens, a borough of New York. They have two cats, Grendel and Prufrock. She is a member of Actor’s Equity Association, the Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes, the Baker Street Babes, the Baker Street Irregulars, Mystery Writers of America, and Girls Write Now. And always, she is hard at work on her next novel. (Adapted from the author's website.)

Book Reviews
rollicking…juicy…Faye's canvas is a crowded one, with vibrant characters jumping out of the plot to contribute local color.
Marilyn Stasio - New York Times


[Faye's] newly minted investigators in 19th-century Gotham will bring to mind works such as Caleb Carr's The Alienist and E.L. Doctorow's The Waterworks. Faye thrillingly evokes the full range of megalopolitan horrors…She artfully weaves history and politics, particularly the age's ugly sectarianism, adding literary heft without weighing the novel down…there's enough excitement here to cause anyone's veins to quiver, and the plot hurtles along like…stampeding cattle
Ross King - Washington Post


It's been almost twenty years since Caleb Carr's bestselling Olde New York crime novel, The Alienist, was published, and I cant count the number of times since then that someone has asked me if I can recommend a suspense story anything "like it." Well, New York has inspired lots of terrific thrillers, but I've just stumbled on one of the worthiest successors yet—Lyndsay Faye's novel, The Gods of Gotham.
Maureen Corrigan - NPR's Fresh Air


Set in 1845 New York City, Faye’s knockout first in a new series improves on her impressive debut, Dust and Shadow (2009), which pitted Sherlock Holmes against Jack the Ripper. As Irish immigrants pour into the city, fleeing the potato famine in their homeland, Timothy Wilde, a 27-year-old former bartender, adjusts to life as a policeman in New York’s newly formed police force. As one of the first to wear the copper star, Wilde soon discovers more than one unwelcome surprise. In short order on his lower Manhattan beat, he runs across an infanticide and the body of a 12-year-old Irish boy whose spleen has been removed. The investigation the novice detective launches into the boy’s murder brings him deep into the heart of human darkness. Vivid period details, fully formed characters, and a blockbuster of a twisty plot put Faye in a class with Caleb Carr. Readers will look forward to the sequel.
Publishers Weekly


Faye's new novel, after the Sherlockian thriller Dust and Shadow, focuses on the growing distrust toward Irish Catholic immigrants in 1840s New York. Badly scarred and rendered destitute after a city fire, barman Timothy Wilde takes a job on the newly formed police force at the urging of his politically connected older brother, Valentine. As a "Copper Star," Tim is well suited to investigation, and he stumbles on a mystery involving murdered children and one of New York's most infamous brothels. Mercy Underhill, a devoted social worker and the object of Tim's unspoken affection, is drawn into the case as she tries to protect her wards. Tim searches for answers amid political scheming, nativist sentiments, and anti-Catholic riots. Verdict: The Wilde brothers are a valiantly flawed pair (commiting illegal acts for good reason) whose adventures dramatically light up this turbulent era. Faye's use of flash, an underground language akin to thieves' cant (British criminal jargon), further enriches this engrossing historical thriller, the first in a new series. —Catherine Lantz, Morton Coll. Lib., Cicero, IL
Library Journal


[A] top-notch historical thriller.... In July 1845, Timothy Wilde is a successful bartender who's accumulated $400 in silver—just about enough, he figures, to ask minister's daughter Mercy Underhill to marry him. But the conflagration that sweeps through Manhattan that night consumes Timothy's savings and disfigures his face.... Timothy [destitute, joins the police force and] stumbles across a young girl covered with blood, who leads him to the mass grave of 20 kinchin horribly disfigured.... No one is precisely what they seem in Faye's richly imagined, superbly plotted narrative, which delivers not one, not two, but three bravura twists as Timothy tracks the killer.... Faye's damaged but appealing hero seems likely to have more adventures ahead, and they'll be welcomed by anyone who appreciates strong, atmospheric storytelling.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1.Timothy Wilde’s understanding is deeply hampered by his own misconceptions about his loved ones—in particular, Mercy Underhill and his brother Valentine. How unreliable a narrator is Tim? In what ways is he careful to present the whole story, and in what ways does he fail to do so?

2. The city of New York itself is a significant character in The Gods of Gotham. How would you characterize Timothy’s uneasy relationship with New York? How is it affected by the fact that he was born there? How do you feel about New York City, either as a native, a transplant, a visitor, or a complete stranger, and did that feeling change your perception of the novel?

3. In reference to an Irish laborer being taunted by an American in Chapter Seven, Tim says, “It’s always someone in these parts, being made small, being made to wear that look.” Does this idea reflect you or your family’s immigration experience? In what ways were the hardships endured by the Irish immigrants comparable to or different from later groups like Hispanics, Asians, and Middle Easterners? Have we overcome xenophobia, or does it still plague immigrant Americans?

4. Timothy watches the unfolding battle between the Catholic and the Protestant Gods with a certain detachment, but he is constantly making moral judgment calls. How spiritual a man is Timothy? What role do you think religion plays in his life? How has it affected him to grow up in two worlds, one Protestant and one highly secular?

5. Mercy Underhill and Silkie Marsh are very different women, but each is immensely affected by the narrow role relegated to females in the 19th century. How does each make her own bid for independence? How closely are economics tied to autonomy for Mercy and for Silkie, and in what ways?

6. Valentine Wilde’s list of “dubious pastimes,” according to Timothy, includes narcotics, alcohol, bribery, violence, whoring, gambling, theft, cheating, extortion, and sodomy. Despite this, Timothy often defines himself in direct comparison to Valentine’s attributes. Do you find Val a sympathetic character? What is the true north of Valentine’s moral compass, and how does he adhere to it? Which of his “dubious pastimes” are ethically defensible?

7. Did the ambitious and semi–lawless world of the thuggish Democratic Party seem foreign to you, or familiar? How do religion and politics intersect in The Gods of Gotham, and how do they intersect in our current political system?

8. In what ways is flash language a dialect? A code? A lifestyle? A community? Are people defined by their language in The Gods of Gotham, and are they still defined by language today?

9. In the 19th century, children were often required to earn their own livelihoods, both on the streets and in other settings. In what ways do characters like Bird, Neill, Ninepin, and the other newsboys and child prostitutes act like adults? Would their behavior seem strange to the modern observer? Many types of class warfare are delineated in The Gods of Gotham; is the struggle of children vs. adult predators another example?

10. During the 1830’s into the 1840’s, child prostitution was considered a vice that strongly weighed upon the public face of New York City. Upwards of 380 “juvenile harlots,” according to historian Timothy Gilfoyle in City of Eros, could be found plying their wares in a single police district. He also reports that reformer and ex-mayor Stephen Allen, when addressing the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents, argued that most children had entered prostitution by way of “poverty, neglect, ignorance, and bad company, rather than because of individual or moral depravity.” What do you make of Allen’s opinion? Does it surprise you that many imagined children entered prostitution willingly?

11. The Reverend Underhill is a mentor of sorts to Timothy, and yet he proves to be Tim’s adversary. To what extent are Tim’s feelings about Mercy mixed up with his final treatment of the Reverend? Is the Reverend ever a positive force? To what extent are Thomas Underhill’s actions motivated by love? To what extent are Timothy’s, and how do his actions differ from the Reverend’s?

12. George Washington Matsell was a very divisive figure during his era. Were you surprised to find that so many were against the formation of a police force? Matsell was also a student of popular civics and family planning, which were both scandalous reading material at the time. How do you feel about the first NYC Chief of Police endorsing birth control? Do you think Matsell was socially or politically ahead of his time?

13. In the 19th century, people looked upon the possibility of being dissected after death with the greatest aversion, setting guards over new graves until the body had begun decomposition and inventing unbreakable locks for coffins. Dr. Palsgrave wants more than anything to cure children, and thus buys corpses from an utterly ruthless woman. Do his ends justify his means? Do you think Timothy’s idealism caused him to let Dr. Palsgrave off too easily? Dr. Palsgrave is unaware that Silkie’s children know about him, and equally unaware that she speeds their deaths. Do you find the doctor an intelligent character, or a naïve one? Were you surprised to learn that alchemy and science were once closely tied?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Gods of Jade and Shadow 
Silvia Moreno-Garcia, 2019
Random House
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525620761


Summary
The Mayan god of death sends a young woman on a harrowing, life-changing journey in this dark, one-of-a-kind fairy tale inspired by Mexican folklore.

The Jazz Age is in full swing, but Casiopea Tun is too busy cleaning the floors of her wealthy grandfather’s house to listen to any fast tunes.

Nevertheless, she dreams of a life far from her dusty small town in southern Mexico. A life she can call her own.

Yet this new life seems as distant as the stars, until the day she finds a curious wooden box in her grandfather’s room. She opens it—and accidentally frees the spirit of the Mayan god of death, who requests her help in recovering his throne from his treacherous brother.

Failure will mean Casiopea’s demise, but success could make her dreams come true.

In the company of the strangely alluring god and armed with her wits, Casiopea begins an adventure that will take her on a cross-country odyssey from the jungles of Yucatan to the bright lights of Mexico City—and deep into the darkness of the Mayan underworld. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Silvia Moreno-Garcia is the author of Signal to Noise (2015), named one of the best books of the year by BookRiot, Tordotcom, BuzzFeed, io9, and other publications; Certain Dark Things (2016), one of NPR’s best books of the year, a Publishers Weekly top ten, and a VOYA "Perfect Ten"; the fantasy of manners The Beautiful Ones (2017); and the science fiction novella "Prime Meridian" (2018).

She has also edited several anthologies, including the World Fantasy Award winning She Walks in Shadows (aka Cthulhu’s Daughters). She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
A dark, dazzling fairy tale… [and] a whirlwind tour of a 1920s Mexico vivid with jazz, the memories of revolution, and gods, demons, and magic.
NPR


(Starred review) A magical novel…. [Its] seamless blend of mythology and history provides a ripe setting for Casiopea’s stellar journey of self-discovery…. Readers will gladly immerse themselves in [this] rich, complex tale of desperate hopes and complicated relationships.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review) [A] stirring historical fantasy set in the Roaring Twenties and steeped in Mayan mythology…. Snappy dialog, stellar worldbuilding, lyrical prose, and a slow-burn romance make this a standout
Library Journal


Moreno-Garcia has a talent for taking Mexican folklore, customs, and mythology, twisting them around, and turning out fascinating stories immersed in different genre tropes…. Fans of lush, evocative language will be thoroughly delighted.
Booklist


A multi-layered book… about the power of stories and narratives and how they feed into myth-making.… There are parts of this novel that made me literally hug my e-reader. They were sigh-worthy.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. What were your first impressions of Casiopea? Hun-Kame? Martin? How did you feel about them by the end of the book?

2. How did you feel about the relationship between Casiopea and Hun-Kame?

3. What did you think about the historical period and setting of the book? Could you see this as a modern-day adventure?

4. What did you think about the ending? Do you wish anything had been different? Would you read a sequel to this story? If so, would you prefer it feature Casiopea and Hun Kame, or would you prefer a story in the same world with new characters?

5. Discuss Martin’s perception of the world versus Casiopea’s. Why do you think, raised under the same roof, they see things so differently?
(Questions from author's website; don't miss the gorgeous book club kit.)

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Gods Without Men
Hari Kunzru, 2011
Knopf Doubleday
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307946973


Summary
Jaz and Lisa Matharu are plunged into a public hell after their son, Raj, vanishes during a family vacation in the California desert. However, the Mojave is a place of strange power. Before Raj reappears—inexplicably unharmed, but not unchanged—the fate of this young family will intersect with that of many others, both past and present, who have traveled through this odd, remote town in the shadow of a mysterious rock formation known as the Pinnacles.

Among them are an 18th-century Spanish missionary, a former WWII aviation engineer turned desert-cult messiah, and an incognito rock star on the run. As their stories collide and build upon one another, Gods Without Men becomes a heartfelt exploration of the search for meaning in a chaotic universe. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1969
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Oxford University; M.A., University
   of Warwick
• Awards—John Llewellyn Rhys (refused); Betty Trask
   Award; Somerset Maugham Award; Granta, Best of
   Young British Novelists Award
• Currently—lives in New York, New York, USA


Hari Mohan Nath Kunzru is a British Indian novelist and journalist of Kashmiri Pandit origin, author of the novels The Impressionist, Transmission, My Revolutions and Gods Without Men. His work has been translated into twenty languages.

Kunzru was born in London and grew up in Essex to a Kashmiri Pandit father and a British Anglican Christian mother. He was educated at Bancroft's School, Essex. He studied English at Wadham College, Oxford, then gained an MA in Philosophy and Literature from University of Warwick.

During his teens, Hari decided that he did not believe in formal religion or God, saying he was "opposed to how religion is used to police people." Kunzru is fascinated with UFOs and as a youngster often imagined a close-encounter type experience with them.

Career
From 1995 to 1997 he worked on Wired UK. Since 1998, he has worked as a travel journalist, writing for such newspapers as The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, was travel correspondent for Time Out magazine, and worked as a TV presenter interviewing artists for the Sky TV electronic arts programme The Lounge. From 1999–2004 he was also music editor of Wallpaper magazine and since 1995 he has been a contributing editor to Mute, the culture and technology magazine.

His first novel, The Impressionist (2003), had a £1 million-plus advance and was well received critically with excellent sales. His second novel, Transmission, was published in 2004. In 2005 he published the short story collection Noise. His third novel, My Revolutions, was published in 2007, and his fourth, Gods Without Men, in 2011. Set in the American south-west, it is a fractured story about multiple characters across time. It has been compared to David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas.

Among other awards, he was also awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys prize for writers under 35, the second oldest literary prize in the UK. He turned it down, however, on the grounds that it was backed by the Mail on Sunday whose "hostility towards black and Asian people" he felt was unacceptable. A statement, read on his behalf, said, "As the child of an immigrant, I am only too aware of the poisonous effect of the Mail's editorial line... The atmosphere of prejudice it fosters translates into violence, and I have no wish to profit from it." He further went on to recommend that the award money be donated to the charity Refugee Council (UK).

He is Deputy President of English PEN.

In 2009, he donated the short story "Kaltes klares Wasser" to Oxfam's Ox-Tales project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Kunzru's story was published in the Water collection.

In 2012 at the Jaipur Literature Festival, he, along with three other authors, Ruchir Joshi, Jeet Thayil and Amitava Kumar, risked arrest by reading excerpts from Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, which remains unpublished in India due to fear of controversy. Kunzru later wrote, "Our intention was not to offend anyone's religious sensibilities, but to give a voice to a writer who had been silenced by a death threat." The reading drew sharp criticism from Muslim groups as being a deliberately provocative move to gain publicity for the four authors. Kunzru himself admitted in an interview that he was asked to leave by the festival organizers as his presence was likely to "inflame an already volatile situation." (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Mr. Kunzru uses his extraordinary gifts as a storyteller — his brightly textured prose, his empathetic understanding of his characters, his narrative flair—to turn a tabloidy tale into a genuinely moving portrait of a marriage and the difficulties of parenthood.... Unfortunately for the reader, Mr. Kunzru has awkwardly tried to inflate the importance of the story of Jaz, Lisa and Raj with parallel tales about other visitors to the desert.... In the end, all the philosophizing and subplots are never persuasively integrated here: they attest to this immensely gifted writer’s ambitions but end up doing a disservice to his talents.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


This is Kunzru’s fourth novel. It is many things, and it is certainly a reflection and an embodiment of our new world of flattened time and space. Its multiple substories span the years 1775 to 2009, and geographically cut between Manhattan, Southern California and Iraq—or rather, a simulation of Iraq. Reading this book is not unlike watching a TV show that’s simultaneously happening on multiple channels, a story filmed in different eras using differing technologies, but which taken together tell the same single story, echoing and reinfecting itself.
Douglas Coupland - New York Times Book Review


Quite a ride: This is a book in which monks of the 18th century trudge the Mojave with drug-sodden hippies from the Summer of Love. A book in which Native Americans poised at the twilight of a dying culture try valiantly to guard their myths from relentlessly literal-minded anthropologists.... Here are cynical veterans from World War II, hard-bitten GIs fresh from Iraq, randy communards, washed-up bankers, wasted groupies whose only thought is their next roach or a place to park their sleeping bag. Here is death, sex, and rock-and-roll. And all of it, as random as it may sound, is a fitting paean to this jittery world.
Washington Post


[Kunzru’s] deft descriptions of contemporary life capture attention, but what impresses at the end of this novel is its sense of history as a mosaic of endless variations on the human effort to make sense of the world.
Washington Times


A powerful excavation of the frayed nerves of New Age America. Whether dealing in UFOs, Indian legends or derivative trading systems, Gods Without Men is a novel about the need for faith in a fragmented, postmodern world shorn of grand narratives and credible belief systems.
New York Observer


Simultaneously simple and complex, clear and ambiguous.
Philadelphia Inquirer


Ambitious and wonderfu.... Rather than looking for easy answers, Kunzru suggests, we should read instead for the questions—remembering that when you travel in the desert, what looks like an oasis is usually just a mirage.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel


Mind-blowing.... One of the most original novels I have read in years, daringly imaginative, funny and troublesome, and above all a commentary on certain kinds of lunacy that helps define the American character.... The ride the writer takes us on up until the final page is one hell of a hair-raising experience, almost every scene demonstrating Kunzru’s extraordinary virtuosity.
Counterpunch


As characters in acclaimed British novelist Kunzru’s pitch-perfect masterwork tinker with machines for communicating with an interplanetary craft circling the Earth, their desperate quest for meaning is interrupted by a nonlinear mélange of other strange endeavors that span centuries and cross the Mojave Desert: British rocker Nicky Capaldi’s escape from L.A. in a convertible with a gold-plated Israeli handgun stowed in the glove box; beleaguered parents Jaz and Lisa Matharu’s disastrous vacation with their autistic four-year-old, Raj; former hippie commune “Guide” Judy’s return to the desert, strung out on meth; and traumatized Iraqi teen Laila’s participation as an actor in U.S. army war game facsimiles of Iraq. Presiding over it all are the Pinnacles, three fingers of rock that bear mute witness to Raj’s disappearance and the ensuing frantic search. Also on board are Fray Francisco Hermenegildo Tomás Garcés, a half-mad Jesuit missionary intent on converting Native Americans at the close of the 18th century; Deighton, a disfigured ethnologist, annoyed by the young, “half-educated” Eliza’s failure to recognize “the distinction he’d conferred on her by asking her to be his wife”; an aircraft mechanic named Schmidt working in the ’40s who feels betrayed by what the Enola Gay unleashed over Hiroshima; a working-class mother seduced by the possibility of fellowship with benevolent otherworldly beings; and a local girl who once lived with the hippies and who—even though she returns years later to run the motel where Nicky, Jaz, Lisa, and Raj briefly stay—suspects she has never quite returned. Kunzru’s (My Revolutions) ear for colloquial speech creates a cacophony that overlays his affectionate descriptions of the desolate landscape, creating a powerful effect akin to the distant cry of urgent voices crackling up and down the dial on a lonely drive through an American wasteland.
Publishers Weekly


At first somewhat slow as the various stories are laid out, this extraordinary novel by the estimable Kunzru (My Revolutions) gathers momentum, power, and a fierce clarity to deliver a rich panorama while detailing our mutual antagonisms and deepest spiritual needs (met, perhaps, with "a vast emptiness, an absence").  Highly recommended. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal


Hopscotching across time, looking quizzically at space, Kunzru's marvelous novel uses diverse cultures (Native American, Catholic, Mormon, Wall Street, hippie UFO believers) to speculate on the nature of reality and religion, magic and mystery. The novel is anchored by a time, a place and a relationship. The core year is 2008; we visit several other time periods. The place is the Three Pinnacles rock formation in the Mojave Desert. The relationship involves Jaz, an assimilated American Sikh, and his Jewish-American wife Lisa. Instead of a linear narrative, we have the energizing cross-currents of history.... Ironies abound; mysteries multiply; there's a cliffhanger ending for Jaz and Lisa. Kunzru (My Revolutions, 2007, etc.) just gets better and better. This fourth novel is an astonishing tour de force.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Gods Without Men brings us into the consciousness of nine fictional characters, among them a hedge fund executive; a UFO cult leader; a dissolute British rock star; a homesick Iraqi teenage girl; one historical character, the eighteenth-century Spanish missionary Fray Francisco Hermenegildo Tomás Garcés; and one deity, Coyote, the trickster in many Native American traditional stories.  Why does Hari Kunzru embrace such a wide and diverse cast of characters?

2. Do these characters from different historical eras and different echelons of society share any of the same aspirations? What draws them to the Pinnacle Rocks?

3. Which character or characters do you most identify with? Why?

4. Why do you think Kunzru set this novel in the desert? Could he have told the same story in a different landscape?

5. After reading Gods Without Men do you agree with Honoré de Balzac’s description of the desert: “In the desert, you see, there is everything and nothing.... It is God without men,” one of the epigraphs of this novel? Has your conception of the desert changed? Do you think “wasteland” is an appropriate synonym for “desert”?

6. Dawn joins the Ashtar Galactic Command in 1970 when she is a teenager because she wants “to be part of something bigger than herself” (page 155). Does she achieve that goal? Thirty-eight years later, teenage Laila draws comfort from the Ashtar record she buys at a thrift shop. Why?

7. Several characters in the novel possess arcane knowledge of mathematics, alchemy, aerodynamics, electrical engineering, or entertainment marketing that enables them to manipulate the material world in their favor, yet they don’t seem satisfied with their achievements. What are the sources and consequences of their dissatisfaction?

8. The character Coyote appears intermittently throughout the novel as an animal, a man, and a deity. What do his appearances herald?  Are other characters comparably skilled at transforming themselves? 

9. Kunzru references three international conflicts in this novel—World War I, World War II, and the second Iraq War. What do the characters Deighton, Schmidt, and Laila, who had firsthand experiences of those wars, have in common?

10. Lisa views Raj’s disappearance as her punishment for her wild night in town. Dawn thinks she was responsible because by taking Lisa to Judy’s place “she’d got her family involved. They were mixed up with Coyote, mixed up in the paths and flows” (page 343). Do you believe that either character is responsible for Raj’s disappearance?

11. Does the little glowing boy Laila finds in the desert at night (page 297) bear any relation to the “glow boy” (page 64) Joanie’s daughter, Judy, was seen playing with before she disappeared in 1958?

12. Why do you think Lisa is able to gratefully accept her son’s seemingly miraculous return and his recovery from autism, whereas Jaz cannot bear not knowing what happened to his son and is frightened by Raj’s changed behavior, believing the boy who was returned to them is not Raj; “It’s as if—as if something is wearing his skin” (page 357)?

13. Toward the end of the novel, Lisa believes she has learned a lesson: “true knowledge is the knowledge of limits, the understanding that at the heart of the world . . . is a mystery into which we are not meant to penetrate.... Now she could call it God...confident that though the world was unknowable, it had a meaning, and that meaning would keep her safe and set her free” (page 345). Does Jaz experience his own epiphany at the end of the novel when he stands holding hands with Lisa and Raj looking out over the desert?

14. Why does the novel begin and end with an explosion? At the end of the novel, do you gain a clearer understanding of what Coyote was up to in the first chapter?

15. Do you think Kunzru’s postmodernist storytelling technique of presenting the reader with pieces of a puzzle without providing explicit explanations of how the pieces fit together is appropriate for a novel that explores the search for pattern and meaning? Would the story be more or less realistic if he had limited himself to traditional forms of storytelling?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Godshot 
Chelsea Bieker, 2020
Catapult Books
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781948226486


Summary
Drought has settled on the town of Peaches, California. The area of the Central Valley where fourteen-year-old Lacey May and her alcoholic mother live was once an agricultural paradise.

Now it’s an environmental disaster, a place of cracked earth and barren raisin farms.

In their desperation, residents have turned to a cult leader named Pastor Vern for guidance. He promises, through secret "assignments," to bring the rain everybody is praying for.

Lacey has no reason to doubt the pastor. But then her life explodes in a single unimaginable act of abandonment: her mother, exiled from the community for her sins, leaves Lacey and runs off with a man she barely knows.

Abandoned and distraught, Lacey May moves in with her widowed grandma, Cherry, who is more concerned with her taxidermy mouse collection than her own granddaughter. As Lacey May endures the increasingly appalling acts of men who want to write all the rules and begins to uncover the full extent of Pastor Vern’s shocking plan to bring fertility back to the land, she decides she must go on a quest to find her mother no matter what it takes.

With her only guidance coming from the romance novels she reads and the unlikely companionship of the women who knew her mother, she must find her own way through unthinkable circumstances.

Possessed of an unstoppable plot and a brilliantly soulful voice, Godshot is a book of grit and humor and heart, a debut novel about female friendship and resilience, mother-loss and motherhood, and seeking salvation in unexpected places. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1988-89 (?)
• Raised—Fresno, California, USA
• Education—B.S., Poly Cal, San Luis Obispo; M.F.A., Portland State University
• Currently—lives in Portland, Oregon


Chelsea Bieker is from California’s Central Valley. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award and her fiction and essays have been published in Granta, McSweeney’s, Catapult magazine, Electric Literature, and Joyland, among other publications.

She was awarded a MacDowell Colony fellowship and holds an MFA in creative writing from Portland State University. Godshot is her first novel, inspired by her own mother's fleeing an abusive husband, Bieker's father. Read her heart-rending essay in The Paris Review.

Bieker lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and children, where she teaches writing. (Adapted from the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Fiercely written and endlessly readable, a novel like this is a godsend.
Entertainment Weekly


[P]ropulsive, ambitious…. Bieker straddles the line between darkly comic and downright dark, and excels in portraying female friendships…. Bieker’s excellent debut plants themes seen in… The Handmaid’s Tale into a realistic California setting that will linger with readers.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review) Lacey May’s is an irresistible voice, part gullible believer, part whip-smart independent spirit who surprises at every turn. Debut novelist Bieker weaves in the political battles being fought on multiple fronts.
Library Journal

(Starred review) [A] vivid and cutting exploration of…  how mothers shape daughters, biological or otherwise, and how daughters must ultimately learn to mother themselves. Young readers will admire Lacy May’s resilience, moxie, and ability to survive in a world she did not choose.
Booklist


(Starred review) Lacey May is such a strong narrator, at once deeply insightful and painfully naïve, that readers will eagerly want to follow all the threads to the breathless conclusion. A dark, deft first novel about the trauma and resilience of both people and the land they inhabit.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers Book Club Resources. They can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

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

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Going on Nine
Catherine Underhill Fitzpatrick, 2014
Familius
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781939629128


Summary
At the dawn of a heat-soaked St. Louis summer, in a suburban neighborhood no different from any other, eight-year-old Grace Mitchell embarks on a doomed quest, searching for what is right under her nose: A better family than her own wonderful family.

As the summer of 1956 stretches, long and languid, before them, Grace and her pals on Thistle Way are soon virtually feral, roaming unfettered from apricot dawn to lavender dusk. They entertain themselves by popping tar bubbles in the street, playing tag across eight back yards, plundering forts in the verges and catching tadpoles in creeks, by swiping Popsicle from freezers humming in musty darkness and snatching root beer barrels from open boxes up at Snyder’s Five and Dime. It’s the suburbs, and the Fifties.

The mothers and fathers of Thistle Way do not hover, counting their children’s every breath. One day in early June, Grace  swipes her mother’s diamond engagement ring, snatches her sister’s new white nightgown, and runs outside to play bride. In short order, she loses the ring, rips the gown, correctly assumes it’s about to rain daggers, and marches off to find somewhere else to live, somewhere better. When her parents, in their wisdom, suggest Grace test the waters by spending two nights with each family on Thistle Way, the child bolts upstairs to pack her red plaid suitcase.

Going on Nine is the story of an eight-year-old girl’s serial encampments as she samples life within the households of a dozen friends and neighbors―each at a turning point. On her journeys, Grace travels on foot and on horseback, rides shotgun in a new Plymouth Belvedere and hunkers in the back of a rattletrap vegetable truck. One day she crawls into a crumbling tunnel. Following that, she treks out to a fire in the hinterlands, explores the closet of a prom queen, keeps vigil in the bedroom of a molestation victim, tames a killer dog, and holds an old woman’s life in the palm of her hand. With good reason, Grace remembers that long-ago summer for the rest of her life, and looks back on it with wise perspective as a mature woman decades later.

At summer’s end, the Mitchell family  moves to a new neighborhood. With her days on Thistle Way drawing to a close, Grace is devastated. But she’s learned a timeless truth: Families and friendships are nuanced in ways imperceptible to their neighbors, judging at a distance.

Written for adult readers, each chapter of Going on Nine is a story unto itself, told in the unique, real-time voice of eight-year-old Grace and, alternately, in wise hindsight by the adult Grace today.

Peppered with humor, leavened with adversity, nostalgic but not cloying, Going on Nine explores universal themes of childhood longing and parental love, and shows the 1950s for what they truly were―an era as fabled and flawed as any other.

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—St. Louis, Missouri, USA
• Education—B.J., University of Missouri, Columbia
• Currently—lives in Chicago, Illinois, and Bonita Springs, Florida


Catherine Underhill Fitzpatrick was born, reared, and schooled during the 1950s and 1960s in and around St. Louis, the second of six kids in her family. After graduating from the University Of Missouri-Columbia School Of Journalism, she worked on the features staff of metro daily newspapers in Hannibal, St. Louis, and Milwaukee.

In September of 2001, Catherine was in Manhattan to cover New York Fashion Week. At first word of the terrorist attacks, she rushed to Ground Zero and filed award-winning eyewitness dispatches from the chaotic streets near the tragedy. Today, portions of her reportage are memorialized in Washington D.C.’s Newseum and in the archives of the Women in Journalism Collection of the State Historical Society of Missouri.

Catherine’s articles, stories, and essays have appeared in five anthologies, in online literary reviews, and in national magazines. The author of two published novels, she is a board member of the Chicago-based TallGrass Writers Guild. She and her husband have two daughters and last summer welcomed into the breathing world their first granddaughter, Lillian. Catherine and Dennis divide their time between rush hour traffic in Chicago and fairway bunkers in Bonita Springs, FL. (From the author.)

Visit the author's website.
Follow Catherine on Facebook.

Book Reviews
A child swipes her mother's ring, snatches her sister's nightgown, and runs outside to play "bride." She soon loses the ring, rips the gown, correctly assumes it's about to rain daggers, and runs away from home to find a better; family. What happens next is a summer-long journey in which Grace Mitchell rides shotgun in a Plymouth Belvedere, and hunkers in the back of a rattletrap vegetable truck, crawls into a crumbling tunnel, dresses up with a prom queen, and keeps vigil in the bedroom of a molestation victim. There are reasons why Grace remembers the summer of 1956 for the rest of her life. Through the eyes of a child and the mature woman she becomes, we make the journey with Grace and discover important truths about life, equality, family, and the soul-searching quest for belonging.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel


Going on Nine....is set in Underhill Fitzpatrick's native St. Louis. Alternating between the childhood voice of 8-year-old heroine Grace Mitchell and the character's adult self, it follows Grace through an idyllic summer in 1956.... The theme that runs through the whole book and is absolutely from my childhood is how unstructured and unfettered we were as children in the '50s," Underhill Fitzpatrick said. Through the novel, Grace finds humor and danger as she lives with other families in an effort to escape her own. "Grace learns families and friendships are nuanced," Underhill Fitzpatrick said. "They were likelier than not to be misjudged by those observing them at a distance."
Ft. Myers FL News Press


[B]eautifully-written tale of a young girl coming of age in the summer of 1956. Reminiscent of Ray Bradbury’s classic, Dandelion Wine, Going on Nine takes readers on an unforgettable journey back in time to an era of drinking from garden hoses, catching fireflies in jars, licking cake batter from wooden spoons and enjoying the unbridled freedom to explore the world and all its wonders.”
Island Reporter (Florida)


Fitzpatrick… attended summer camp regularly as a child and as a teen in Missouri, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, culminating her summer camp career as a counselor, where she taught archery. Later, she sent her two daughters to Camp Minnikani on Amy Belle Lake, and has recently written a novel, Going on Nine.... The book written for adult readers, recounts the adventures of Grace Mitchell during the summer of 1956, including a stint at summer camp.
M Milwaukee Magazine

Discussion Questions
1. Grace Mitchell is meant to embody many of the aspects of a child of eight (going on nine). Give examples from the story that illustrate her personal strengths and her weaknesses.

2. Going on Nine is told from two perspectives: the adult Grace looking back on the summer of 1956, and the child Grace experiencing it. What are the advantages and disadvantages of this dual-timeline format? In what ways would the story have been different if it were told only from the child’s viewpoint?

3. Except for three chapters, the entire story takes place on Thistle Way, a quiet neighborhood in a suburb of St. Louis. Why do you think the author chose this location?

4. Going on Nine is imbued with a sense of time. The Fifties is a fabled era in the communal memory, but one that, in reality, was as flawed as any other. Give examples from the story that illustrate this.

5. At the beginning of the summer, Grace yearns to live with a family that’s “better” than her own. Give examples of how the Mitchells are, in fact, a pretty terrific family.

6. Each stop along Grace’s journey is a story unto itself, peopled with characters in turning-point situations. Which character or family did you find most memorable and why? Which characters or families does Grace discover are different from how the neighbors of Thistle Way perceive them?

7. Several chapters deal with sensitive and even tragic events. How do think these events affected the story, which is essentially sweet and nostalgic?

8. In the end, Grace comes to realize that the place she belongs—the place she wants to be—is with her own wonderful family. In a coming-of-age novel, we more or less expect this. What revelations in the Epilogue did you not expect?

9) At age eight, going on nine, Grace had mastered the art of making excuses for her behavior. In several instances, the adult Grace acknowledges that, ruefully. “It was not my finest hour,” she says at one point. Did Going on Nine bring back remembrances of your own childhood? Does the long lens of time afford a clearer view about that period of your life?

10. Many novelists draw on their personal observances and experiences in developing plots and characters. In the Author’s Note, Catherine Underhill Fitzpatrick mentions that a few aspects of Grace’s life seem to track with her own childhood. What are the risks in writing a novel that reads like a memoir? How is this different from writing an autobiography? A biography?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)

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Gold
Chris Cleave, 2012
Simon & Schuster
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781451672732


Summary
What would you sacrifice for the people you love? Kate and Zoe met at nineteen when they both made the cut for the national training program in track cycling—a sport that demands intense focus, blinding exertion, and unwavering commitment.

They are built to exploit the barest physical and psychological edge over equally skilled rivals, all of whom are fighting for the last one tenth of a second that separates triumph from despair.

Now at thirty-two, the women are facing their last and biggest race: the 2012 Olympics. Each wants desperately to win gold, and each has more than a medal to lose.

Kate is the more naturally gifted, but the demands of her life have a tendency to slow her down. Her eight-year-old daughter Sophie dreams of the Death Star and of battling alongside the Rebels as evil white blood cells ravage her personal galaxy—she is fighting a recurrence of the leukemia that nearly killed her three years ago. Sophie doesn’t want to stand in the way of her mum’s Olympic dreams, but each day the dark forces of the universe seem to be massing against her.

Devoted and self-sacrificing Kate knows her daughter is fragile, but at the height of her last frenzied months of training, might she be blind to the most terrible prognosis?

Intense, aloof Zoe has always hovered on the periphery of real human companionship, and her compulsive need to win at any cost has more than once threatened her friendship with Kate—and her own sanity. Will she allow her obsession, and the advantage she has over a harried, anguished mother, to sever the bond they have shared for more than a decade?

Echoing the adrenaline-fueled rush of a race around the Velodrome track, Gold is a triumph of superbly paced, heart-in-throat storytelling. With great humanity and glorious prose, Chris Cleave examines the values that lie at the heart of our most intimate relationships, and the choices we make when lives are at stake and everything is on the line. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio 
• Birth—1973
• Where—London, England, UK
• Where—raised in both Buckinghamsire (UK) and Cameroon
• Education—Oxford University
• Awards—Somerset Maughm Award; Prix des Lecteurs
• Currently—lives in London

Chris Cleave is a British author of four novels and has been a journalist for London's Guardian newspaper, where from 2008 until 2010 he wrote the column "Down With the Kids."

Novels
His first novel, Incendiary, was published in 2005 and released in 20 countries. It won the 2006 Somerset Maugham Award and the Prix Special du Jury at the 2007 French Prix des Lecteurs. In 2008, the novel was adapted to film starring Ewan McGregor and Michelle Williams.

His second novel, Little Bee, was inspired by his childhood in West Africa. It was shortlisted for the prestigious Costa Award for Best Novel. Gold, his third novel, came out in 2012, and his fourth, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, was published in 2016. That novel is based on his grandparents' experience during the London Blitz of World War II.

Cleave lives in London with his French wife and three mischievous Anglo-French children. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/24/2016.)

Visit the author's website.

Book Reviews
Like the best-selling Little Bee, Cleave’s new book, Gold, is highly emotionally charged.... Cleave immersed himself in the world of track cycling and makes the most of his research in scenes of stunning athletic endurance, but it’s the trials of the human spirit that are his real material in a novel meant to move you. And it does.
New York Daily News


Cleave kick-starts his stories from the first breath and never takes his feet off the pedals.
Washington Post


If Olympic medals were awarded for dramatic stories about what drives athletes to compete and succeed, Cleave would easily ascend the podium. Gold does for sport racing what Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild did for high-risk adventure: It demystifies its allure, giving readers an inside track on a certain type of compulsive mindset. But Gold is also about time, ambition and love, three life forces continuously jockeying for supremacy. Novels, like racing, depend on careful pacing, and Cleave calibrates his performance with the skill of a real pro, carefully ratcheting up the intensity as he finesses curves and heads into his final laps.... Cleave spins a doozy of a plot, with enough drama and sentiment to sustain a soap opera. His characters are humanized by their struggle with their personal demons.... With Gold, Cleave unleashes megawatts of power in yet another triumphant dash toward literary success.
NPR


Cleave again displays a remarkable aptitude for rendering female characters with startling realism, one of the strengths of his previous novels (particularly 2009’s Little Bee). He conjures Sophie’s traumatized yet resilient young mind as deftly as he does the complex interior narratives of high-strung Zoe and the more philosophical Kate... In these breathless portrayals of sport and spirit, Gold illuminates the stories of courage, loss, and commitment that are behind each of the seemingly invincible Olympians we root for every four years.
Elle


Emotionally arresting (and exquisitely timed). Cleave shines when he focuses on the cyclists’ sacrifices, including training sessions in which they push themselves to the brink of blacking out.... Cleave’s fine novel will give you an appreciation for all that London’s Olympians have gone through as you watch them contort their bodies, leap for the heavens or pedal round and round and round.
Sports Illustrated


Chris Cleave’s latest novel lives and breathes, sweats and suffers at the harrowing place where ambition collides with sacrifice. That it arrives on the eve of the 2012 Olympic Games in London is perfect timing..., but Gold would be first class anytime, anywhere. It’s an adrenaline-fueled drama about winning and losing, in the velodrome and daily existence, an explosive exploration of the cost of success and the way sports competition can spill unhappily into life. It will force you to reconsider the definition of “victory,” and it will leave you breathless.... Cleave proves again that if writing were an Olympic sport, he’d be vying for a medal.
Miami Herald


Gold wins a medal for impressive timing: Chris Cleave’s adrenalized novel—which breathlessly tracks the complicated friendship and furious competition between two speed cyclists, Kate and Zoe, as they train for a fictional London 2012 Olympics—arrives just a month before the opening of the actual London 2012 Olympics... As Cleave demonstrated in his best-seller Little Bee, he is a full-hearted writer.
Entertainment Weekly


Cleave (Little Bee) goes for the gold and brings it home in his thrillingly written and emotionally rewarding novel about the world of professional cycling. Zoe Castle and Kate Meadows met at age 19 trying out for the British Cycling Team and have been friends and rivals for 13 years now. Kate might have more natural ability, but Zoe is the more driven of the two. Kate is married to a fellow racer, Jack Argall, and they have an eight-year-old daughter, Sophie, who suffers from leukemia. Zoe is pursued by her own demons and has a tabloid reputation for sleeping around, which doesn’t sit well with her agent. Things begin to heat up when the International Olympic Committee changes its rules so that only one cyclist, either Zoe or Kate, will be eligible to compete in the 2012 London Games. Cleave expertly cycles through the characters’ tangled past and present, charting their ever-shifting dynamic as ultra-competitive Zoe and Kate are forced to decide whether winning means more to them than friendship, building to a winner-take-all race at the Manchester Velodrome. Cleave likewise pulls out all the stops getting inside the hearts and minds of his engagingly complex characters. The race scenes have true visceral intensity, leaving the reader feeling as breathless as a cyclist. From start to finish, this is a truly Olympic-level literary achievement.
Publishers Weekly


Timed to publish with the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, Cleave's latest novel demonstrates the determination of three extraordinary athletes in a story about true sacrifice. Kate and Jack Argall are Olympic-level cyclists from Manchester, England, gearing up for the 2012 Olympic Games. Kate and her close friend Zoe Castle share a coach, Tom Voss, who had a shot at the gold in cycling in the 1968 Olympics but lost by one-tenth of a second. Now in his sixties, with bad knees and false teeth, he knows London is their last Olympics. However, Kate and Jack have the added responsibility of caring for their eight-year-old daughter, Sophie, who was diagnosed with leukemia four years before when they were all competing in the Beijing games. Sophie, now bald and frail, but with championship grit, blocks out her illness by imagining herself a part of Star Wars scenarios. The life of these three committed athletes is so intertwined, so complex, that the outcome is sure to be a surprise. Verdict: Close on the heels of his international best seller Little Bee, British author Cleave has written another story so riveting that it is impossible to put down. —Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Grand Junction, CO
Library Journal


British author Cleave turns to the world of Olympic speed cyclists to explore the shifting sands of ambition, loyalty and love. Tom, who just barely missed his own medal in 1968, is coaching Kate and Zoe to represent Britain at the 2012 Olympics, which the 32-year-old women know will be their last. They are best friends but fierce rivals.... Tom must choose whether Kate or Zoe is going to the Olympics. In weaker hands this would seem a bit contrived, but Cleave knows how to captivate with rich characters and nimble plotting.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the opening scene of Gold where Kate and baby Sophie are watching Zoe win the gold at the 2004 Olympics. What did you learn about Kate’s personality as a wife, mother, and athlete in this one scene? How does this scene set the stage for the rest of the novel?

2. According to Sophie, “You could play boys’ games like Star Wars that had fighting and spaceships and made you look tough, even if you weren’t tough enough to ride a bike.” Consider Sophie’s obsession with Star Wars. What attracts her to these movies? What does she have to prove by playing “tough” boys’ games?

3. Consider Tom’s first impressions of his two star athletes: “Bit by bit, race by race, year by year, a girl like Zoe would stay afloat in the sport while Kate slowly sank under the weight of real life. Tom had seen it a hundred times.” How well does Tom predict their career successes and failures? In what ways does he underestimate Kate?

4. When Tom watches his group of teen recruits, he notices “Kate’s latent strength, and Zoe’s perfect flow, and Jack’s incandescent energy.” Compare Kate, Zoe, and Jack’s athletic strengths to their personalities. How do Kate’s strength, Zoe’s flow, and Jack’s energy help them face everyday life off the track?

5. Compare how Zoe and Kate handle the costs and benefits of being Olympic athletes. How does the press treat each of them? How do Zoe and Kate handle the media attention? What could they learn from the other about fame?

6. Discuss Zoe and Kate’s competition for Jack’s attention. Why does Zoe pursue Jack when he is in the hospital? Do you think it was just another opportunity to compete? Were you surprised by Jack and Zoe’s relationships?

7. If you were in Kate’s situation, would you forgive Jack for his affair with Zoe? Would you be able to raise Sophie as your own, knowing about the affair? Explain your answer.

8. Zoe realizes, “It was ordinary days now that frightened her—the endless Tuesday mornings and Wednesday afternoons of real life, the days you had to steer through without the benefit of handlebars.” How does Zoe handle real life? What is she afraid will happen to her when her racing career is over?

9. Discuss the lasting impact of Adam’s death on Zoe. Why hasn’t she forgiven herself for her brother’s accident? How does she punish herself? How does she finally come to terms with his death?

10. When Jack decides to let Kate race Zoe without knowing that Sophie is in the hospital, “He smiled because he had given her something rarer than gold: an hour outside time.” Did you agree with his decision? In what ways have these characters been racing against time their entire life?

11. During their final race, Zoe waits for Kate after Kate crashes on the track. How is that decision out of character for Zoe? Would you expect Kate to do the same for Zoe, if the situation were reversed? Why or why not?

12. At the end of the novel, Zoe’s role is as Sophie’s coach, not her mother. What kind of coach do you imagine Zoe to be? What kind of mother do you think she would have been to Sophie? Do you think she could have handled Sophie’s illness?

13. After winning gold in Athens, Zoe realizes, “Gold came out of the ground, and she had felt the weight of it dragging her back down there.” What does “gold” mean to Zoe, Kate, Jack, and Tom? What other types of gold (besides Olympic medals) do each of these characters strive for? Do they achieve it?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Gold Coast
Nelson DeMille, 1990
Grand Central Publishing
626 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780446360852


Summary
Welcome to the fabled Gold Coast, that stretch on the North Shore of Long Island that once held the greatest concentration of wealth and power in America.

Here two men are destined for an explosive collision: John Sutter, Wall Street lawyer, holding fast to a fading aristocratic legacy; and Frank Bellarosa, the Mafia don who seizes his piece of the staid and unprepared Gold Coast like a latter-day barbarian chief. Bellarosa draws Sutter and his regally beautiful wife, Susan, into his violent world.

Told from Sutter's sardonic and often hilarious point of view, and laced with sexual passion and suspense, The Gold Coast is Nelson DeMille's captivating story of friendship and seduction, love and betrayal. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Aka—Jack Cannon, Kurt Ladner, Brad Matthews, Michael
   Weaver, Ellen Kay
• Birth—August 22, 1943
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A. Hofstra University
• Awards—Estabrook Award
• Currently—lives on Long Island, New York


Nelson DeMille has a dozen bestselling novels to his name and over 30 million books in print worldwide, but his beginnings were not so illustrious. Writing police detective novels in the mid-1970s, DeMille created the pseudonym Jack Cannon: "I used the pen name because I knew I wanted to write better novels under my own name someday," DeMille told fans in a 2000 chat.

Between 1966 and 1969, Nelson DeMille served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam. When he came home, he finished his undergraduate studies (in history and political science), then set out to become a novelist. "I wanted to write the great American war novel at the time," DeMille said in an interview with January magazine. "I never really wrote the book, but it got me into the writing process." A friend in the publishing industry suggested he write a series of police detective novels, which he did under a pen name for several years.

Finally DeMille decided to give up his day job as an insurance fraud investigator and commit himself to writing full time—and under his own name. The result was By the Rivers of Babylon (1978), a thriller about terrorism in the Middle East. It was chosen as a Book of the Month Club main selection and helped launch his career. "It was like being knighted," said DeMille, who now serves as a Book of the Month Club judge. "It was a huge break."

DeMille followed it with a stream of bestsellers, including the post-Vietnam courtroom drama Word of Honor (1985) and the Cold War spy-thriller The Charm School (1988) Critics praised DeMille for his sophisticated plotting, meticulous research and compulsively readable style. For many readers, what made DeMille stand out was his sardonic sense of humor, which would eventually produce the wisecracking ex-NYPD officer John Corey, hero of Plum Island (1997) and The Lion's Game (2000).

In 1990 DeMille published The Gold Coast, a Tom Wolfe-style comic satire that was his attempt to write "a book that would be taken seriously." The attempt succeeded, in terms of the critics' response: "In his way, Mr. DeMille is as keen a social satirist as Edith Wharton," wrote the New York Times book reviewer. But he returned to more familiar thrills-and-chills territory in The General's Daughter, which hit no. 1 on the New York Times' Bestseller list and was made into a movie starring John Travolta. Its hero, army investigator Paul Brenner, returned in Up Country (2002), a book inspired in part by DeMille's journey to his old battlegrounds in Vietnam.

DeMille's position in the literary hierarchy may be ambiguous, but his talent is first-rate; there's no questioning his mastery of his chosen form. As a reviewer for the Denver Post put it, "In the rarefied world of the intelligent thriller, authors just don't get any better than Nelson DeMille."

Extras
(From a Barnes & Noble interview)

• DeMille composes his books in longhand, using soft-lead pencils on legal pads. He says he does this because he can't type, but adds, "I like the process of pencil and paper as opposed to a machine. I think the writing is better when it's done in handwriting."

• In addition to his novels, DeMille has written a play for children based on the classic fairy tale "Rumpelstiltskin."

• DeMille says on his web site that he reads mostly dead authors—"so if I like their books, I don't feel tempted or obligated to write to them." He mentions writing to a living author, Tom Wolfe, when The Bonfire of the Vanities came out; but Wolfe never responded. "I wouldn't expect Hemingway or Steinbeck to write back—they're dead. But Tom Wolfe owes me a letter," DeMille writes.

• When asked what book most influenced his career as a writer, here is what he said:

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I read this book in college, as many of my generation did, and I was surprised to discover that it said things about our world and our society that I thought only I had been thinking about, i.e., the ascendancy of mediocrity. It was a relief to discover that there was an existing philosophy that spoke to my half-formed beliefs and observations. (Bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
The Gold Coast'' glitter is Nelson DeMille's sharp evocation of the vulpine Bellarosa and of Sutter, a wonderfully sardonic, self-mocking man betrayed by a midlife crisis. In his way, Mr. DeMille is as keen a social satirist as Edith Wharton....The novel bogs down only when Mr. DeMille insists—all too frequently—on ending chapters with heavy-handed portents. The reader does just fine without them.
Joanne Kaufman - New York Times


What happens to a priggish, WASPy, disillusioned Wall Street lawyer when a Mafia crime boss moves into the mansion next door in his posh Long Island neighborhood? He ends up representing the gangster on a murder rap and even perjures himself so the mafioso can be released on $5 million bail. That's the premise of DeMille's (The Charm School) bloated, unpersuasive thriller. Attorney John Sutter has problems that would daunt even Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby. His marriage is crumbling, despite kinky sex games with his self-centered wife, Susan, who's the mistress of his underworld client Frank Bellarosa. The IRS is after Sutter, and his law firm wants to dump him. As a sardonic morality tale of one man's self-willed disintegration, the impact is flattened by its elitist narrator's patrician tones. A comic courtroom scene and some punches at the end, however, redeem the novel somewhat.
Publishers Weekly

Discussion Questions
1. The Gold Coast is in many ways an heir to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The Great Gatsby. How are Frank Bellarosa and Jay Gatsby alike? How do DeMille’s and Fitzgerald’s depictions of American society differ? How are they similar?

2. Toward the beginning of the novel, Frank Bellarosa says to John, “In this country, I see the kids getting more interested in the old ways…At first they don’t want to be Italian, then they get more Italian when they get older…people are looking for something. Because maybe American culture doesn’t have some things that people need.” What do you think Bellarosa means by this? What might American culture lack?

3. Toward the middle of the novel, Susan asks John, “So, how will we treat Mr. Bellarosa? As a crass, unprincipled interloper, or as an American success story?” How do Susan and John end up treating Bellarosa? What is your opinion of him?

4. DeMille has said that he believes there is “great affinity, duality between the demise of the ‘old’ Mafia and the old-money WASP world.” Do you agree? Are there parallels between John Sutter’s and Frank Bellarosa’s seemingly opposed worlds?

5. After John and Susan make love on the beach, John muses about F. Scott Fitzerald’s Jay Gatsby and says, “I’m not sure what that green light meant to Jay Gatsby nor what it symbolized beyond the orgiastic future…The green light that I see at the end of Daisy’s vanished pier is not the future; it is the past, and it is the only comforting omen I have ever seen.” What does the “green light” represent to John and why is it important to him? How is John’s “green light” different from Gatsby’s?

6. While sailing with his family around the north coast of Long Island, John says, “I couldn’t help but reflect on the ancient idea that land is security and sustenance, that land should never be sold or divided. But even if that were true today, it were true only as an ideal, not a practicality.” Why is the “ancient idea” of land ownership so important to John? What does he fear will happen after all the Gold Coast land has been sold and divided?

7. After John gets in trouble with the IRS, he says, “It was then, I suppose, that a strange thing began to happen to me: I started to lose faith in the system.” Does this moment in the novel constitute a turning point for John? How do John’s notions about law, society, and justice begin to shift here?

8. Bellarosa quotes Machiavelli many times throughout the course of the novel and he
seems to believe that most people are driven by their desire for power. Do you agree? Who has power in this novel and what gives them this power – is it money, respectability, force?

9. Bellarosa is in many ways a hard-edged criminal, but both John and Susan admit to being seduced by him. What is seductive about him and why are both John and Susan so taken with him?

10. John makes a surprising choice during Bellarosa’s murder trial. Reflecting on his decision, he says, “The history of the world is filled with dead martyrs who would not compromise. I used to admire them. Now I think that most of them were probably very foolish.” Do you think John made a smart decision during Bellarosa’s trial or do you think he could have or should have acted differently?

11. What do you make of Susan Sutter? How do you understand her actions at the end of the novel?

12. At the end of the novel, John says: “There is an ebb and flow in all human events, there is a building up and a tearing down, there are brief enchanted moments in history and in the short  lives of men and women, there is wonder and there is cynicism, there are dreams that can come true, and dreams that can’t.” What do you make of the ending of the novel? Does DeMille leave us with a bleak or hopeful vision for the future?

13. The Gold Coast was written in 1990—almost twenty years ago. Do you think this novel’s depiction of American society is still relevant today?

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Gold Fame Citrus 
Claire Vaye Watkins, 2015
Penguin
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594634239


Summary
A love story set in a devastatingly imagined near future. Watkin's debut novel harnesses the same sweeping vision and deep heart that made her prize-winning story collection so arresting.

Unrelenting drought has transfigured Southern California into a surreal, phantasmagoric landscape. With the Central Valley barren, underground aquifer drained, and Sierra snowpack entirely depleted, most "Mojavs," prevented by both armed vigilantes and an indifferent bureaucracy from freely crossing borders to lusher regions, have allowed themselves to be evacuated to internment camps.

In Los Angeles' Laurel Canyon, two young Mojavs—Luz, once a poster child for the Bureau of Conservation and its enemies, and Ray, a veteran of the "forever war" turned surfer—squat in a starlet’s abandoned mansion. Holdouts, they subsist on rationed cola and whatever they can loot, scavenge, and improvise.

The couple’s fragile love somehow blooms in this arid place, and for the moment, it seems enough. But when they cross paths with a mysterious child, the thirst for a better future begins.

They head east, a route strewn with danger: sinkholes and patrolling authorities, bandits and the brutal, omnipresent sun. Ghosting after them are rumors of a visionary dowser—a diviner for water—and his followers, who whispers say have formed a colony at the edge of a mysterious sea of dunes.

Immensely moving, profoundly disquieting, and mind-blowingly original, Watkins’s novel explores the myths we believe about others and tell about ourselves, the double-edged power of our most cherished relationships, and the shape of hope in a precarious future that may be our own. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1984
• Where—Bishop, California, USA
• Raised—Mojave Desert (in California and Nevada)
• Education—B.A., University of Nevado-Reno; M.F.A., Ohio State University
• Awards—(below)
• Currently—teaches at the University of Michigan


Claire Vaye Watkins is an American author, whose 2012 story collection, Battleborn, swept nearly every award for short fiction.

Born in Bishop, California, Watkins was raised in the Mojave Desert—first in Tecopa, California, and then across the state line in Pahrump, Nevada. A graduate of the University of Nevada Reno, Claire earned her MFA from the Ohio State University, where she was a Presidential Fellow.

Writing
Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, One Story, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Best of the West 2011, New Stories from the Southwest 2013, New York Times and elsewhere. A recipient of fellowships from the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, Claire was also one of the National Book Foundation’s "5 Under 35."

In 2015 she released her debut novel Gold Fame Citrus to wide accclaim, praised for its originality and masterful writing.

Awards
Her collection of short stories, Battleborn, won the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame.

A Guggenheim Fellow, Claire is on the faculty of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. She is also the co-director, with Derek Palacio, of the Mojave School, a free creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada. (Adapted from the author's website.)

Book Reviews
Watkins has never been afraid to take structural risks in her work. Her...novel is interspersed with sections that break abruptly away from the story of Luz and Ray’s flight into sand, expanding the scope of the novel well beyond their lives. These leaps usually pay off—a chapter set in a psychiatric ward saves the latter half of the book from nihilism, for instance, and the section involving the businessman on the plane is spectacular. But not all of the stand-alone chapters connect.... But if this book is sometimes frustrating, it’s also fascinating. A great pleasure of the book is Watkins’s fearlessness, particularly in giving her characters free rein to be themselves.
Emily St. John Mandel - New York Times Book Review


A gripping, provocative debut novel.
Boston Globe


A beautiful debut novel.... Watkins' vision is profoundly terrifying. It's a novel that's effective precisely because it's so realistic—while Watkins' image of the future is undeniably dire, there's nothing about it that sounds implausible.... She also writes with a keen understanding of human nature, both good and bad. She has a genuine compassion for the Angelenos who have chosen to remain in their dying, desiccated city as well as for the ones who have evacuated.... The prose in Gold Fame Citrus is stunningly beautiful, even when—especially when—Watkins is describing the badlands that Southern California has become…. One might think there are only a few ways to portray a landscape that has become, essentially, nothing, but Watkins writes with a brutal kind of beauty, and even in the book's darkest moments, it's impossible to turn away. It's an urgent, frequently merciless book, as unrelenting as it is brilliant. Watkins forces us to confront things we'd probably rather ignore, but because we're human, we can't.
Los Angeles Times


Watkin’s narrative is mythic and speculative, its sediment forming and re-forming in lists, treatises, and reports. The writing, with its tough sentimentality, is reminiscent of Denis Johnson’s, but Watkins has a style of mordant observation all her own.
Harper's


[Gold Fame Citrus] burns with a dizzying, scorching genius.
Vanity Fair


At once beautiful and profoundly unsettling, [Gold Fame Citrus] sears its way into the brain, burning hot through the devastating journey and lingering long after the last page is turned.
Elle


Unsettingly resonant.... Watkins, whose brilliant short-story collection, Battleborn, revealed a deep understanding of the darker American mythologies, finds it’s not simply water we’re thirsty for.
Vogue


Watkins is at her best here, characterizing the easy slide from isolation to the open arms of an accepting, if ultimately wayward, community.... Gold Fame Citrus is a different kind of dystopia; one that illuminates the spiritual coping mechanisms of those living in an apocalyptic wasteland.
Huffington Post


(Starred review.) It's the near future: water is running out and a vast sand dune that covers whole towns is growing.... [Watkin's] book is packed with persuasive detail, luminous writing, and a grasp of the history (popular, political, natural, and imagined) needed to tell a story that is original yet familiar, strange yet all too believable.
Publishers Weekly



(Starred review.) Plagued by severe water shortages, the residents of California (already dwindling in number) are subjected to a forced evacuation.... [W]ith its damaged and complicated heroine and multiple voices, shifting perspectives, and unconventional narrative devices, [Gold Fame Citrus] is a wholly original work. —Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., Holbrook, NY
Library Journal



(Starred review.) Spectacular… In Margaret Atwood mode, Watkins spikes this fast-moving, high-tension, sexyecocrisis saga with caustic parodies and resounding allusions that cohere into a knowing and elegiac tale of scrappy adaptation and epic loss.
Booklist


(Starred review.) A tour-de-force first novel.... Watkins writes an unforgettable scene with a carousel; another in a dank tunnel where the couple seeks contraband blueberries. The author freckles her fiction with incantations, odd detours, hallucinations, and jokes.... [M]agnificently original.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)

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