Inferno (a Robert Langdon novel)
Dan Brown, 2013
Knopf Doubleday
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385537858
Summary
In his international blockbusters The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons, and The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown masterfully fused history, art, codes, and symbols. In this riveting new thriller, Brown returns to his element and has crafted his highest-stakes novel to date.
In the heart of Italy, Harvard professor of symbology, Robert Langdon, is drawn into a harrowing world centered on one of history’s most enduring and mysterious literary masterpieces…Dante’s Inferno.
Against this backdrop, Langdon battles a chilling adversary and grapples with an ingenious riddle that pulls him into a landscape of classic art, secret passageways, and futuristic science. Drawing from Dante’s dark epic poem, Langdon races to find answers and decide whom to trust…before the world is irrevocably altered. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 22, 1964
• Where—Exeter, New Hampshire
• Education—B.A., Amherst College; University
of Seville, Spain
• Currently—lives in New England
Novelist Dan Brown may not have invented the literary thriller, but his groundbreaking tour de force The Da Vinci Code—with its irresistible mix of religion, history, art, and science—is the gold standard for a flourishing genre.
Born in Exeter, New Hampshire in 1964, Brown attended Phillips Exeter Academy (where his father taught), and graduated from Amherst with a double major in Spanish and English. After college he supported himself through teaching and enjoyed moderate success as a musician and songwriter.
Brown credits Sidney Sheldon with jump-starting his literary career. Up until 1994, his reading tastes were focused sharply on the classics. Then, on vacation in Tahiti, he stumbled on a paperback copy of Sheldon's novel The Doomsday Conspiracy. By the time he finished the book, he had decided he could do as well. There and then, he determined to try his hand at writing. His first attempt was a pseudonymously written self-help book for women co-written with his future wife Blythe Newlon. Then, in 1998, he published his first novel, Digital Fortress—followed in swift succession by Angels and Demons, Deception Point, The Lost Symbol, and most recently Inferno.
Then, in 2003, Brown hit the jackpot with his fourth novel, a compulsively readable thriller about a Harvard symbiologist who stumbles on an ancient conspiracy in the wake of a shocking murder in the Louvre. Combining elements from the fields of art, science, and religion, The Da Vinci Code became the biggest bestseller in publishing history, inspiring a big-budget movie adaptation and fueling interest in Brown's back list.
In addition, The Da Vinci Code became the subject of raging controversy, inspiring a spate of books by scholars and theologians who disputed several of the book's claims and accused Brown of distorting and misrepresenting religious history. The author, whose views on the subject are stated clearly on his website, remains unperturbed by the debate, proclaiming that all dialogue, even the most contentious, is powerful, positive, and healthy.
More
Brown revealed the inspiration for his labyrinthine thriller during a writer's address in Concord, New Hampshire. "I was studying art history at the University of Seville (in Spain), and one morning our professor started class in a most unusual way. He showed us a slide of Da Vinci's famous painting "The Last Supper"... I had seen the painting many times, yet somehow I had never seen the strange anomalies that the professor began pointing out: a hand clutching a dagger, a disciple making a threatening gesture across the neck of another... and much to my surprise, a very obvious omission, the apparent absence on the table of the cup of Christ... The one physical object that in many ways defines that moment in history, Leonardo Da Vinci chose to omit." According to Brown, this reintroduction to an ancient masterpiece was merely "the tip of the ice burg." What followed was an in-depth explanation of clues apparent in Da Vinci's painting and his association with the Priory of Sion that set Brown on a path toward bringing The Da Vinci Code into existence.
If only all writers could enjoy this kind of success: in early 2004, all four of Brown's novels were on the New York Times Bestseller List in a single week!
Extras
From a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview:
• If I'm not at my desk by 4:00 a.m., I feel like I'm missing my most productive hours. In addition to starting early, I keep an antique hourglass on my desk and every hour break briefly to do push-ups, sit-ups, and some quick stretches. I find this helps keep the blood—and ideas—flowing.
• I'm also a big fan of gravity boots. Hanging upside down seems to help me solve plot challenges by shifting my entire perspective.
• When asked what book most influenced his career as a writer, here is his response:
Until I graduated from college, I had read almost no modern commercial fiction at all (having focused primarily on the "classics" in school). In 1994, while vacationing in Tahiti, I found an old copy of Sydney Sheldon's Doomsday Conspiracy on the beach. I read the first page...and then the next...and then the next. Several hours later, I finished the book and thought, Hey, I can do that. Upon my return, I began work on my first novel—Digital Fortress—which was published in 1996.
(Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Inferno is jampacked with tricks. And...[t]o the great relief of anyone who enjoys him, Mr. Brown winds up not only laying a breadcrumb trail of clues about Dante (this is “Inferno,” after all) but also playing games with time, gender, identity, famous tourist attractions and futuristic medicine.... And it all ties together. Dante’s nightmare vision becomes the book’s visual correlative for what its scientific calculations suggest. And eventually the book involves itself with Transhumanism, genetic manipulation and the potential for pandemics.... [But] there is the sense of play that saves Mr. Brown’s books from ponderousness.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
No matter what the critics might say about his overwriting, his overuse of cliches, his paper-thin characterizations, and his impenetrably murky plots, Brown...isn’t just a novelist; he’s a crossover pop culture sensation.... Plot predictability aside, Brown really does deliver the kind of exotically situated entertainment his fans expect. The formula has become a formula for a reason: It works in getting readers to turn the page.
Chuck Leddy - Boston Globe
Despite all the predictability, Brown’s art reigns over boredom. He manages to keep the reader glued.... But as long as Brown has a die-hard readership that enjoys the conspiracy theory formula, he is still in the running, and some of the flack he gets is a bit unfair, as his novels are fun reads.
Samra Amir - International Herald Tribune
Yet, as I continued to turn the pages almost against my will, I wondered whether [Brown's] crimes against English prose might actually be a brilliant literary masterstroke. Brown's fusion of gothic hyperbole with a pedant's tour-guide deliberately restrains the imagination through its awkward awfulness. Once the plot finally kicks in, you are suddenly released like a stone from a blockbusting catapult.... Inferno moves with enhanced feelings of velocity, excitement and fun.
James Kidd - Independent (UK)
If Mr. Brown intended to use the plot as a wakeup call in light of today's global disasters, it certainly worked. I imagine that there will be some debate over his mathematical projections (and the interpretations of this data), but at the same time, controversy may arise when some readers are tempted to agree with the villain.... Inferno can still qualify as vacation reading, redeemed by the sweeping spectacle of the story. The ending is both startling and far more frightening than his other plots—and he does a good job of connecting the medieval world to the modern, where science fiction apocalyptic nightmares are becoming a living reality.
Rebecca Denova - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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 using these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for The Inferno:
1. You might begin a book discussion by providing some background on Dante's Divine Comedy—a review of the poem, as well as its historical influence on the development of art and literature.
2. Follow-up to #2: Before reading Dan Brown's thriller, how familiar, if at all, were you with the The Divine Comedy and its "Inferno" Cantica? Have you come away with a better understanding of the work? What are the ways in which the author uses Dante's great classic as a framework for his thriller?
3. Robert Langdon and Sienna Brooks race to save the world from a crazed scientist who plans to unleash his solution to the world's overpopulation. To what extent, if any, do you (secretly) agree with the Bertrand Zobrist in his desire, if not his methods, to control overpopulation?
How do you feel about this statement by Brooks:
As a species, humans were like the rabbits that were introduced on certain Pacific islands and allowed to reproduce unchecked to the point that they decimated their ecosystem and finally went extinct.
To what extent is overpopulation a real-life global problem? You might do a bit of research on overpopulation and look at some of the countervailing predictions, suggesting that the global population will actually begin to collapse after 2050.
4. Talk about the real possibility of a worldwide epidemic. How plausible is the threat as portrayed Brown's book?
5. Talk about Transhumanism. What is it, and does it pose a boon—or a threat—to the future of humanity?
6. Follow-up to Question 5: At the end of the book WHO Director Elizabeth Sinskey says, "We’re on the verge of new technologies that we can’t yet even imagine.” Those technologies come with dangers but also with hope.
Sienna Brooks adds this about Transhumanism...
One of its fundamental tenets is that we as humans have a moral obligation to participate in our evolutionary process...to use our technologies to advance the species, to create better humans—healthier, stronger, with higher-functioning brains. Everything will soon be possible.
She then says...
If we don’t embrace [these tools], then we are as undeserving of life as the caveman who freezes to death because he’s afraid to start a fire.
What do you think?
7. Have you traveled to any of the three sites of the novel: Florence, Venice, or Istanbul? If so, how accurate is Brown's depiction of these cities? If you haven't been to Italy or Turkey, does the author bring the cities to life? Are they places you would like to visit?
8. Is this book a page-turner? Did you find yourself unable to put it down? If so, what makes it enthralling? If you didn't find Inferno an engaging read, what put you off the book?
9. Follow-up to Question 8: Brown uses a 4-part pattern for the episodes in his book: 1) Langdon is presented with a clue he must interpret, 2) he has a "eureka" moment, 3) he is pursued by villains who make a sudden appearance, and 4) he escapes after a hair-raising chase. Try going through the book to identify the pattern in various episodes.
10. What about the book's ending? Do you find it predictable ... surprising ... shocking ... frightening ... satisfying?
11. Have you read other Dan Brown thrillers? If so, how does this compare?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Infinite Home
Katlhleen Alcott, 2015
Penguin
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594633638
Summary
A beautifully wrought story of an ad hoc family and the crisis they must overcome together.
Edith is a widowed landlady who rents apartments in her Brooklyn brownstone to an unlikely collection of humans, all deeply in need of shelter.
Crippled in various ways—in spirit, in mind, in body, in heart—the renters struggle to navigate daily existence, and soon come to realize that Edith’s deteriorating mind, and the menacing presence of her estranged, unscrupulous son, Owen, is the greatest challenge they must confront together.
Faced with eviction by Owen and his designs on the building, the tenants—Paulie, an unusually disabled man and his burdened sister, Claudia; Edward, a misanthropic stand-up comic; Adeleine, a beautiful agoraphobe; Thomas, a young artist recovering from a stroke—must find in one another what the world has not yet offered or has taken from them: family, respite, security, worth, love.
The threat to their home scatters them far from where they’ve begun, to an ascetic commune in Northern California, the motel rooms of depressed middle America, and a stunning natural phenomenon in Tennessee, endangering their lives and their visions of themselves along the way.
With humanity, humor, grace, and striking prose, Kathleen Alcott portrays these unforgettable characters in their search for connection, for a life worth living, for home. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1988-89
• Where—Petaluma, California, USA
• Education—Chapman University
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York, New York
Kathleen Alcott is the author of the 2012 novel The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets, which was translated into several languages. Her second novel Infinite Home was released in 2015.
Alcott's fiction, criticism, and essays appear in publications including the Los Angeles Review of Books, Coffin Factory, Rumpus, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. Born in Northern California, she currently resides in Brooklyn. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Kathleen Alcott's second novel takes on a big question—what makes a "home" a "home"?—and answers with stunning originality.... Beyond this compelling story, Alcott's incredibly accomplished prose is good reason to put Infinite Home at the very top of your to-read list.
Bustle.com
Alcott’s new novel takes place in a sprawling Brooklyn brownstone, offering a peek into the complicated lives of the tenants who have come to live in it.... The writing is dreamy and easy to inhabit, but is occasionally undermined by its tendency toward abstraction, when it would benefit more from precise plot development. Nevertheless, Alcott’s writing is generous, and her peculiar cast of characters memorable.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) In her quietly wonderful second book, Alcott displays a deft hand with every one of her odd and startlingly real characters.... Their situation may not be enviable, but Alcott's handling of it is. The voices in this book speak volumes. A luminous second novel from a first-class storyteller.
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.)
The Inheritance of Loss
Kiran Desai, 2006
Simon & Schuster
357 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780802142818
Summary
Winner, 2006 Man Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award
Kiran Desai's first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, was published to unanimous acclaim in over twenty-two countries. Now Desai takes us to the northeastern Himalayas where a rising insurgency challenges the old way of life. In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga lives an embittered old judge who wants to retire in peace when his orphaned granddaughter Sai arrives on his doorstep. The judge's chatty cook watches over her, but his thoughts are mostly with his son, Biju, hopscotching from one New York restaurant job to another, trying to stay a step ahead of the INS, forced to consider his country's place in the world. When a Nepalese insurgency in the mountains threatens Sai's new-sprung romance with her handsome Nepali tutor and causes their lives to descend into chaos, they, too, are forced to confront their colliding interests. The nation fights itself.
The cook witnesses the hierarchy being overturned and discarded. The judge must revisit his past, his own role in this grasping world of conflicting desires—every moment holding out the possibility for hope or betrayal. A novel of depth and emotion, Desai's second, long-awaited novel fulfills the grand promise established by her first. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September 3, 1971
• Where—New Delhi, India
• Education—in the USA: Bennington College, Hollins
University, Columbia University
• Awards—Man Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle
Award, 2006
• Currently—lives in the US
Kiran Desai was born in India in 1971 and educated in India, England, and the United States. She studied creative writing at Columbia University, where she was the recipient of a Woolrich fellowship. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and Salman Rushdie's anthology Mirrorwork: Fifty Years of Indian Writing. In 2006 Desai won the Man Booker Prize for her novel The Inheritance of Loss. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Although it focuses on the fate of a few powerless individuals, Kiran Desai's extraordinary new novel manages to explore, with intimacy and insight, just about every contemporary international issue: globalization, multiculturalism, economic inequality, fundamentalism and terrorist violence. Despite being set in the mid-1980's, it seems the best kind of post-9/11 novel.
Pankaj Mishra - The New York Times
The writing has a melancholy beauty here, especially in its sensuous evocations of the natural world: "white azaleas in flower, virginal yet provocative like a good underwear trick"; "mountains where monasteries limpet to the sides of rock." Her keen appreciation of contradiction enriches the book, and, if the integrity of her narrative is less than perfect, the integrity of her ideological convictions is absolute.
Donna Rifkind - THe Washington Post
Desai’s second novel is set in the nineteen-eighties in the northeast corner of India, where the borders of several Himalayan states—Bhutan and Sikkim, Nepal and Tibet—meet. At the head of the novel’s teeming cast is Jemubhai Patel, a Cambridge-educated judge who has retired from serving a country he finds “too messy for justice.” He lives in an isolated house with his cook, his orphaned seventeen-year-old granddaughter, and a red setter, whose company Jemubhai prefers to that of human beings. The tranquillity of his existence is contrasted with the life of the cook’s son, working in grimy Manhattan restaurants, and with his granddaughter’s affair with a Nepali tutor involved in an insurgency that irrevocably alters Jemubhai’s life. Briskly paced and sumptuously written, the novel ponders questions of nationhood, modernity, and class, in ways both moving and revelatory.
The New Yorker
This stunning second novel from Desai (Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard) is set in mid-1980s India, on the cusp of the Nepalese movement for an independent state. Jemubhai Popatlal, a retired Cambridge-educated judge, lives in Kalimpong, at the foot of the Himalayas, with his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, and his cook. The makeshift family's neighbors include a coterie of Anglophiles who might be savvy readers of V.S. Naipaul but who are, perhaps, less aware of how fragile their own social standing is—at least until a surge of unrest disturbs the region. Jemubhai, with his hunting rifles and English biscuits, becomes an obvious target. Besides threatening their very lives, the revolution also stymies the fledgling romance between 16-year-old Sai and her Nepalese tutor, Gyan. The cook's son, Biju, meanwhile, lives miserably as an illegal alien in New York. All of these characters struggle with their cultural identity and the forces of modernization while trying to maintain their emotional connection to one another. In this alternately comical and contemplative novel, Desai deftly shuttles between first and third worlds, illuminating the pain of exile, the ambiguities of post-colonialism and the blinding desire for a "better life," when one person's wealth means another's poverty.
Publishers Weekly
The theme of loss is explored in this novel through the lives of three characters: a retired judge who went to Cambridge and is now living in Kalimpong, a remote town isolated on the edge of the Himalayas; his orphaned teenage granddaughter, Sai, who lives with him; and her math tutor, Gyan, who soon becomes involved with revolutionaries. Another character, Biju, whose story is told as if he lives in a parallel universe, is an illegal immigrant in New York City, going from one job to another, trying to find a place for himself. The judge has lost his place in India, where once he identified with the British rather than his own people. Sai has lost her parents, her young love, and hasn't yet found herself. Biju is searching for his place in a new world that seems to have no niche for him. Although this story is set in the 1980s, the issues of immigration and resentment of the West by those living in the East are relevant to the post-9/11 world. Despite its serious themes and message that multiculturalism may not be the answer to the world's or any individual's personal woes, Desai's descriptions and her humor make this intensely dense novel of national and personal identity fascinating. (Winner of the 2006 Man Booker Prize.)
KLIATT
Discussion Questions
1. The Inheritance of Loss is preceded by a poem by Jorge Luis Borges. Given what you know of Borges, why do you think Kiran Desai chose his work as an epigraph? Who are “the ambitious...the loftily covetous multitude”? Why are they “worthy of tomorrow”? Who is “I”?
2. The first evening that Sai was at Cho Oyu, “she had a fearful feeling of having entered a space so big it reached both backward and forward” (p. 34). Discuss this observation. Could this be a description of the novel itself?
3. Discuss the terms globalization and colonialism. What does it mean to introduce an element of the West into a country that is not of the West, a person from a poor nation into a wealthy one? What are examples of this in the novel? Discuss them in political and economic terms. How are Noni and Lola stand-ins for the middle class the world over? See page 242.
4. Why did the judge lead such a solitary life in England? The judge returned to India a changed man. “He envied the English. He loathed Indians. He worked at being English with the passion of hatred and for what he would become, he would be despised by absolutely everyone, English and Indians, both” (p. 119). Discuss the effect that the prejudice and rejection he experienced in England had on the judge for the rest of his life.
5. Bose was the judge’s only friend in England. “A look of recognition had passed between them at first sight, but also the assurance that they wouldn’t reveal one another’s secrets, not even to each other” (p. 118). Compare and contrast the two men. Who was the optimist? How did Bose help the judge when they were in England? When they met again, thirty-three years later, Bose had changed. How? Why did he want to see the judge again?
6. Nimi attended a political rally unknowingly. Who took her to the rally? Explain why the judge was enraged at this. After independence, he found himself on the wrong side of history. What was happening politically in India at this time? What was the Congress Party?
7. The judge’s marriage to Nimi was destined to fail. Did the judge ever have any tender feelings for his wife? Why and how did her family pay for him to go to school in England? What finally happened to Nimi? What did the judge choose to believe about it? And finally, did the judge have regrets that he abandoned his family “for the sake of false ideals” (p. 308)?
8. Discuss the judge’s feelings for Sai, who was “perhaps the only miracle fate had thrown his way” (p. 210). The cook treated Sai like a daughter. Discuss their relationship.
9. Discuss the role that Mutt played in the judge’s life.
10. Sai’s parents left her at St. Augustine’s Convent, and she never saw them again. Why were they in the Soviet Union? How does their journey to and years in another country parallel the stories of Biju and the judge? How do India’s allegiances to other countries prompt this kind of immigration?
11. Describe Noni, who was Sai’s first tutor. What advice did Noni give Sai? Why? See page 69.
12. Compare Gyan’s and Sai’s homes. Gyan’s home is “modernity proffered in its meanest form, brand-new one day, in ruin the next” (p. 256) and Sai’s home had been a grand adventure for a Scotsman, but is now infested with spiders and termites, and the walls sail out from the humidity (p. 7). How do their homes illustrate the differences between them?
13. Compare Gyan and the judge. Both were the chosen sons of the family; much was sacrificed for their success and much expected of them. They are both lonely and feel that they don’t fit in anywhere. If they are so similar, why don’t they get along? Do you think they would raise their sons the way they had been raised?
14. How is it that the judge’s father realized that the class system in India would prevent his son from realizing his potential, but that colonialism offered a chink in that wall? Why does the judge not work in his own province once he returns to India? What are the different types of immigration that take place in the novel? There is Biju, Saeed Saeed, the judge, Sai’s mother and father, Father Booty and Uncle Potty, the Tibetan monks, the workers in the New York restaurants, and all the people in the Calcutta airport when Biju arrives back home (chapter 48). What does all this immigration mean?
15. Was Gyan a strong person? How did he become involved with a “procession coming panting up Mintri Road led by young men holding their kukris aloft and shouting, ‘Jai Gorkha’ ” (p. 156)? Gyan was not totally convinced at the rally. Later at Ex-Army Thapa’s Canteen “fired by alcohol” (p. 160), what decision did Gyan reach? Explain his reasons. What did Gyan think about his father?
16. The next day Gyan went to Cho Oyu. What had changed? He returned to the canteen after leaving Cho Oyu. Discuss his reasons for betraying Sai. “ ‘You hate me,’ said Sai, as if she read his thoughts, ‘for big reasons, that have nothing to do with me’ ” (p. 260). Discuss why Gyan rejected Sai.
17. Discuss the unrest, betrayals, and eventual violence that separate Gyan and Sai. How are their troubles, and those of the cook, the judge, Father Booty, and Lola and Noni, related to problems of statehood and old hatreds that will not die? Does Noni’s statement, “ ‘Very unskilled at drawing borders, those bloody Brits,’ ” (p. 129) fully explain the troubles?
18. Biju’s time in New York City is not what he had expected. How do the earlier immigrants treat him? How do the class differences in India translate into class differences in the United States, where there were supposed to be none? Saeed Saeed is a success in America: “He relished the whole game, the way the country flexed his wits and rewarded him; he charmed it, cajoled it, cheated it, felt great tenderness and loyalty toward it.... It was an old-fashioned romance” (p. 79). Why is he so successful, and Biju is not?
19. Most of the examples of Americans and other tourists in India are extremely unflattering (pp. 197, 201, 237, 264). Most of the Indians in America are also not impressive, such as the students to whom Biju delivers food (pp. 48–51) and the businesspeople who order steak in the restaurant in the financial district (p. 135). How do they judge themselves? How does Biju judge them?
20. How did the cook get his job with the judge? Did the cook accept his position in society? Did he fulfill his responsibilities despite the judge’s treatment? Why did the cook embellish the stories he told about the judge?
21. Why did the cook want his son, Biju, to go to America? Discuss Biju’s experiences there. How did he feel about the possibility that he might never see his father again? Why did Biju return to India? Describe how he felt when he stepped out of the airport.
22. Did Sai mature or change over the months of both personal and political turmoil? “The simplicity of what she had been taught wouldn’t hold. Never again could she think there was but one narrative and that narrative belonged only to herself” (p. 323). Explain what she means by this statement. Will Sai leave Cho Oyu?
23. The cook is not referred to by name until the next to last page of the novel. Why?
24. Which of the characters achieved, in Gyan’s words, “a life of meaning and pride” (p. 260)?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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INK
Glenn Benest, Dale Pitman, 2015
Larry Czeronka Publishing
315 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780692336182
Summary
His studio has become his refuge and his prison—a place of boundless imagination and lonely isolation. Brian Archer, creator of a series of successful graphic novels about a vengeful supernatural being called “The Highwayman,” has become a recluse after the adoration of a female fan turned to rage and violence.
But all that changes when he meets a renowned and beautiful illustrator, A.J. Hart, who carries emotional scars of her own. Their work together is fueled by the unrequited passion they share and a mysterious bottle of black ink that arrives one day at Brian’s doorstep.
The impossibly dark liquid has mystical properties, making their characters appear so real they eventually come to life, reigning terror on those who mean them harm and if not stopped—threatens to unleash an apocalypse on all mankind. Brian must break free of his self-imposed exile and solve the mystery that allowed these terrible creatures into the world.
Author Bio
• Birth—September 1, 1950
• Where—Garden City, Kansas, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard University; M.F.A., University of California, Los Angeles
• Currently—lives in Glendale, California
Glenn Benest lives in Glendale, California, along with his adorable puppy, Milton, so named after the renowned English poet. He’s an award-winning screenwriter and producer with seven produced feature and television movie credits. He has been a professional writer his entire career.
Like the protagonist in our novel, I was a late bloomer when it came to reading, but when I got the hang of it, I spent many hours in the library, devouring everything I could get my hands on: Batman, westerns, sports books even pulp magazines. I also started writing poetry when I was in high school, then transitioned to the theatre at Harvard, where I realized I had to go for my dream. I quickly moved to Los Angeles where I got my master of fine arts degree at U.C.L.A., but soon realized I couldn’t make a living writing stage plays.
Glenn began to write screenplays and by the age of thirty wrote two films for acclaimed horror director Wes Craven.
I think I’ve written in every genre imaginable, including romance, thrillers, mystery, comedy, and drama. Writing fiction has been my latest endeavor, although INK combines two genres that have always fascinated me—paranormal romance and horror.
Glenn and his writing partner Dale Pitman met in one of Mr. Benest’s screenwriting workshops and quickly discovered they shared a passion for comic books and the supernatural.
This is their first novel. (From the author.)
Visit the authors' website....and the book's Goodreads page.
Book Reviews
Masterful! A scare-fest that is thrilling, macabre and spine-chilling!
Jenn Ann - The Book Tales
My brain is in total fangirl mode right now. I love, love, LOOOOVE this book!
Ash D. - Fear Street Zombies
Reading this book is as fun as going to the movies! The writing is so vivid! Highly recommended for pretty much everyone!
JP Bloch - Social Misfit Times
Discussion Questions
1. What is the curse of The Highwayman? How was he created?
2. Why did Brian, the author of The Highwayman, create this particular creature?
3. How is a graphic novel different from a normal novel?
4. What is the connection between Brian, hero, and A.J., the heroine?
5. What were the conditions that laid the groundwork for the attempted murder of the female fan?
6. Is an author responsible for his works of creation and how they affect others?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)
INK
Glenn Benest, Dale Pitman, 2015
Larry Czeronka Publishing
315 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780692336182
Summary
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Author Bio
• Birth—
• Where—
• Education—
• Awards—
• Currently—
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Book Reviews
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Publishers Weekly
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Library Journal
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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.)
Inland
Tea Obreht, 2019
Random House
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812992861
Summary
The bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife returns with a stunning tale of perseverance—an epic journey across an unforgettable landscape of magic and myth.
In the lawless, drought-ridden lands of the Arizona Territory in 1893, two extraordinary lives collide.
Nora is an unflinching frontierswoman awaiting the return of the men in her life—her husband, who has gone in search of water for the parched household, and her elder sons, who have vanished after an explosive argument. Nora is biding her time with her youngest son, who is convinced that a mysterious beast is stalking the land around their home.
Lurie is a former outlaw and a man haunted by ghosts. He sees lost souls who want something from him, and he finds reprieve from their longing in an unexpected relationship that inspires a momentous expedition across the West.
The way in which Nora’s and Lurie’s stories intertwine is the surprise and suspense of this brilliant novel.
Mythical, lyrical, and sweeping in scope, Inland is grounded in true but little-known history.
It showcases all of Téa Obreht’s talents as a writer, as she subverts and reimagines the myths of the American West, making them entirely—and unforgettably—her own. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September 20, 1985
• Where—Belgrade, Yugoslavia
• Raised—Cyprus; Egypt; Georgia, & California, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Southern California; M.A., Cornell University
• Currently—lives in Ithica, New York
Tea Obreht was born in 1985 in the former Yugoslavia, and spent her childhood in Cyprus and Egypt before eventually immigrating to the United States in 1997.
Her writing has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Zoetrope: All-Story, The New York Times, and The Guardian, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading. The Tiger’s Wife (2011), is her first novel.
She has been named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty and included in the National Book Foundation’s list of 5 Under 35. Tea Obreht lives in Ithaca, New York.
Among many influences, Obreht has mentioned in press interviews the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Yugoslav Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andric, Raymond Chandler, Ernest Hemingway, Isak Dinesen, and the children's writer Roald Dahl. (From the publisher and Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
[S]entimental and meandering…. Let me pause to say: Obreht has real gifts as a storyteller… [but] all the drama feels fake, as if someone is backstage shaking a thunder sheet…. More common are observations and dialogue that are as softly didactic as refrigerator magnet slogans…. I realize I am being terribly hard on Obreht’s novel, but… [t]he many readers who will enjoy Inland and put it on best-seller lists can send an old curse in my direction.
Dwight Garner - New York Times
[T]he landscape of the West itself is a character, thrillingly rendered throughout…. Obreht's simple but rich prose captures and luxuriates in the West's beauty and sudden menace.… Obreht also has a poetic touch for writing intricate and precise character descriptions…. In Obreht's hands, this is an era that overflows with what the dead want, and with wants that lead to death.
Chanelle Benz - New York Times Book Review
[Inland] unfolds like a dream… a smoky borderland between…reality and fantasy, the living and the dead, textbook history and fairy tales. Ms. Obreht has the extraordinary ability to… [create] a fully immersive imaginary world governed by its own logic…. The bedtime-story elements can become twee and caricatured…. And the novel feels sanitized… [yet] when you’re under its spell the objections seem beside the point…. Inland is a place of killers, camels, families and phantoms. Reading it, you may feel as Lurie does: "I had somehow wanted my way into a marvel that had never before befallen this world."
Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal
It’s a voyage of hilarious and harrowing adventures, told in the irresistible voice of a restless, superstitious man determined to live right but tormented by his past. At times, it feels as though Obreht has managed to track down Huck Finn years after he lit out for the Territory and found him riding a camel.… The unsettling haze between fact and fantasy in Inland is not just a literary effect of Obreht’s gorgeous prose: it’s an uncanny representation of the indeterminate nature of life in this place of brutal geography.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Inland is a classic story, told in a classic way—and yet it feels wholly and unmistakably new.… At once a new Western myth and a far realer story than many we have previously received—and that’s even with all the ghosts.
NPR
Tea Obreht’s M.O. is clear: She’s determined to unsettle our most familiar, cliche-soaked genres.… Inland can feel like Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian turned inside out: contemplative rather than rollicking, ghostly rather than blood-soaked.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
With Inland, Obreht makes a renewed case for the sustained, international appeal of the American West, based on a set of myths that have been continually shaped and refracted through outside lenses.
New Yorker
Obreht is the kind of writer who can forever change the way you think about a thing, just through her powers of description…. Inland is an ambitious and beautiful work about many things: immigration, the afterlife, responsibility, guilt, marriage, parenthood, revenge, all the roads and waterways that led to America. Miraculously, it’s also a page-turner and a mystery, as well as a love letter to a camel… splendid.
Oprah Magazine
What Obreht pulls off here is pure poetry. It doesn’t feel written so much as extracted from the mind in its purest, clearest, truest form.
Entertainment Weekly
(Starred review) [A] mesmerizing historical novel spun from two primary narrative threads.… Obreht paints a colorful portrait of the Western landscape, populated by a rogue’s gallery of memorable characters… . [She] knocks it out of the park in her second novel.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) At 37, Nora Lark feels she's become a hard woman from the impossible challenges over the last 20 years…. [P]arallel to Nora's story is one of the Balkans-born outlaw Lurie Mattie…. How he ends up in Nora's yard roped to a camel is a most unusual, absorbing tale. —Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Grand Junction, CO
Library Journal
(Starred review) [E]xtraordinarily intricate worldview, psychological and social acuity, descriptive artistry, and shrewd, witty, and zestful storytelling…. As her protagonists’ lives converge, Obreht inventively and scathingly dramatizes the delirium of the West—its myths, hardships, greed, racism, sexism, and violence.
Booklist
(Starred review) A frontier tale dazzles with camels and wolves and two characters who never quite meet.… Meanwhile, there are head lice, marvelous, dueling newspaper editorials, and a mute granny with her part to play. The final, luminous chapter is six pages that will take your breath away.
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.)
Summary | Author | Book Reviews | Discussion Questions
The Inn at Lake Devine
Elinor Lipman, 1999
Knopf Doubleday
pp. 272
ISBN-13: 9780375704857
In Brief
It's 1962 and all across America barriers are collapsing. But when Natalie Marx's mother inquires about summer accommodations in Vermont, she gets the following reply: "The Inn at Lake Devine is a family-owned resort, which has been in continuous operation since 1922. Our guests who feel most comfortable here, and return year after year, are Gentiles." For twelve-year-old Natalie, who has a stubborn sense of justice, the words are not a rebuff but an infuriating, irresistible challenge.
In this beguiling novel, Elinor Lipman charts her heroine's fixation with a small bastion of genteel anti-Semitism, a fixation that will have wildly unexpected consequences on her romantic life. As Natalie tries to enter the world that has excluded her—and succeeds through the sheerest of accidents—The Inn at Lake Devine becomes a delightful and provocative romantic comedy full of sparkling social mischief. (From the publisher.)
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About the Author
• Birth—October 16, 1950
• Where—Lowell, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—A.B. Simmons College
• Awards—New England Books Award For Fiction
• Currently—lives in North Hampton, Massachusetts, and New York, New York
Elinor Lipman is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist, known for her humor and societal observations. In his review of her 2019 novel, Good Riddance, Sam Sacks of the Wall Street Journal wrote that Lipman "has long been one of our wittiest chroniclers of modern-day romance."
The author was born and raised in Lowell, Massachusetts. She graduated from Simmons College in Boston where she studied journalism. While at Simon, Lipman began her writing career, working as a college intern with the Lowell Sun. Throughout the rest of the 1970s, she wrote press releases for WGBH, Boston's public radio station.
Writing
Lipman turned to writing fiction in 1979; her first short story, "Catering," was published in Yankee Magazine. In 1987 she published a volume of stories, Into Love and Out Again, and in 1990 she came out with her first novel, Then She Found Me. Her second novel, The Inn at Lake Devine, appeared in 1998, earning Lipman the 2001 New England Book Award three years later.
Lipman's first novel, Then She Found Me, was adapted into a 2008 feature film—directed by and starring Helen Hunt, along with Bette Midler, Colin Firth, and Matthew Broderick.
In addition to her fiction, Lipman released a 2012 book of rhyming political tweets, Tweet Land of Liberty: Irreverent Rhymes from the Political Circus. Two other books—a 10th novel, The View from Penthouse B, and a collection of essays, I Can't Complain: (all too) Personal Essays—were both published in 2013. The latter deals in part with the death of her husband at age 60. A knitting devotee, Lipman's poem, "I Bought This Pattern Book Last Spring," was included in the 2013 anthology Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting.
Lipman was the Elizabeth Drew Professor of Creative Writing at Smith College from 2011-12, and she continues to write the column, "I Might Complain," for Parade.com. Smith spends her time between North Hampton, Massachusetts, and New York City.
Works
1988 - Into Love and Out Again: Stories
1990 - Then She Found Me
1992 - The Way Men Act
1995 - Isabel's Bed
1998 - The Inn at Lake Devine
1999 - The Ladies' Man
2001 - The Dearly Departed
2003 - The Pursuit of Alice Thrift
2006 - My Latest Grievance
2009 - The Family Man
2012 - Tweet Land of Liberty: Irreverent Rhymes from the Political Circus
2013 - I Can't Complain: (All Too) Personal Essays
2013 - The View From Penthouse B
2017 - On Turpentine Lane
2019 - Good Riddance
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/27/2019.)
Critics Say . . .
Lipman waltzes fearlessly through a minefield of loaded subjects—AntiSemitism, intermarriage, ethnic cuisine and Anne Frank—in this witty romantic comedy.
New York Times
A punchy little comedy of manners.... Think Jane Austen in the Catskills.
Chicago Tribune
A funny, knowing novel about how love really does conquer all.... Thanks to Lipman's deft touch, the novel...rivals her own best work for its understanding of the way smart, opinionated people stumble toward happiness.
Glamour
A story of Jews and Gentiles, this very funny novel begins with a segregated inn in Vermont and ends with all the characters getting their comeuppance. In its skewering of assimilation and cultural diversity, it is reminiscent of Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land, only here Lipman uses Christians, not Chinese, to tweak social consciousness. Natalie Marx is shocked when, in response to an inquiry, her mother receives a note from the proprietor of the Inn at Lake Devine baldly stating that the guests who feel most comfortable there are Gentiles. Natalie inveigles an invitation from a friend to go to the inn and thereby sets off a lifelong fascination with breaking the rules. Both entertaining and thought-provoking, this delightful new work is highly recommended for all fiction collections. —Molly Abramovitz, Silver Spring, MD
Library Journal
Natalie Marx is the Jewish narrator of this good-humored tale of lovers of different faiths, who find happiness and even manage to be accepted by their initially not-so-happy parents. Natalie's family, who live in Massachusetts, summered each year in the 1960s either at the beach or on the lakes; one summer, in response to an inquiry her mother addressed to the Inn at Lake Devine in Vermont, a letter came from the proprietor, Ingrid Berry, saying that their guests were all Gentiles. Young Natalie was both angry and intrigued. She finessed a summer in her teens at the Inn by befriending WASP Robin Fife, whom she met at a summer camp, and then found both the Fife family and the Inn bland and boring. Now in 1970s Boston, Natalie, training to be a chef after college, runs into Robin, who asks her to come to her wedding at the Inn: She's marrying Nelson Berry, Ingrid's eldest son. Natalie goes, and cooks up a storm as the families grieve after Robin is killed on her way to Vermont, then falls for Kris, the younger Berry son. Neither the Marxes nor the Berrys are pleased. But their biases are nicely balanced when Linette Feldman, whose family owns a kosher hotel in the Catskills, falls for Nelson Berry, and her parents have also to be brought round. Love wins out, of course, thanks to perseverance and good sense. An upbeat and amusing romp through what is usually a minefield, by a writer who deftly makes her points but never preaches.
Kirkus Reviews
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Book Club Discussion Questions
1. What fascinates Natalie most about the offensive note from Mrs. Berry is its "marriage of good manners and anti-Semitism" [p. 4]. Does Natalie show, later in the novel, what truly having "good manners" might mean?
2. What does Natalie mean when she mentions the "Gentile ambitions" [p. 65] that led her into a friendship with Robin Fife?
3. Although Eddie and Audrey Marx are both Jewish, they were originally drawn together because of their differences. For the spritelike Audrey, "there was something...about Eddie's jumbo presence, something like a bodyguard's or a football player's, that was normally off limits to a Jewish girl" [p. 19]. They were forced to marry when Audrey became pregnant at nineteen. Given the circumstances of their own history together, are Natalie's parents hypocritical in trying to stop Natalie from seeing Kris Berry?
4. Natalie says that her sister, Pamela, in marrying a Catholic (in a Catholic mass, no less), "used up our family's mixed-marriage chit, even our liberal-dating chit. It was up to me to bring home the perfect Jewish son-in-law" [p. 144]. Are Jewish parents more insistent than others about keeping their children from marrying outside their faith? If so, why?
5. The Inn at Lake Devine might be called a "revenge comedy." At the end the Berrys lose the Inn, and both of their sons take up with Jewish women. Is this a fitting comic closure for Ingrid Berry? What about the feckless but kind Mr. Berry, who loses his business because of carelessness in mushroom hunting? Should he have been more active in preventing his wife's exclusion of Jews from the hotel?
6. What are the social and class markers that Lipman uses to create a sense of realism at the Halseeyon and at the Inn at Lake Devine? How well do Kris and Nelson Berry respond to their weekend immersion in Jewish culture when they visit the Halseeyon with Natalie?
7. What role does food play in this novel? How do the significance and style of dining differ among social groups at Lake Devine and at the Halseeyon? Does food have more meaning for the Jews in the Catskills than it does for the WASPs in New England? What does the desire to be a chef reveal about Natalie's character?
8. At camp, Natalie first befriends Robin Fife in the hope of being invited by her family to the Inn at Lake Devine, but she is bored by the dull-witted Robin who, she notes, "couldn't take, make, or get a joke of any kind" [p. 41]. Her relationship with Robin at fourteen could be seen as mere opportunism; how does this change when they meet again ten years later?
9. Why do you suppose Elinor Lipman has chosen to leave out any details of Natalie's college years, including her experience of dating and sex?
10. The novel of the Jewish person coming of age in modern America—the most famous examples are Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint and Mordecai Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz—is usually told from a young man's perspective. How does the shift to a female narrator in The Inn at Lake Devine challenge and transform this tradition?
11. Do some of the characters come across as more true to life than others? Which of the three families—Marx, Fife, or Berry—seems most realistically depicted? Does the role of surprise in the novel feel realistic? Does the unexpected always work? Does it add or detract from your enjoyment of the story?
12. This novel is based upon the reality of intermarriage and assimilation in American life, issues that are especially painful among the more observant Jewish communities. Lipman expertly draws the difference between the habits of Natalie's Reform family and those of her Orthodox friend Linette Feldman. Is it easier to feel good about the pairing of Natalie and Kris than that of Linette and Nelson? Do you feel that love rightly triumphs over religion in this novel?
13. One reviewer of this novel wrote, "Prejudice, in all its many disguises, is an unusually worthy but often ponderous subject; its very weightiness...often threatens to sink otherwise well-written and well-meaning tales."1 What aspects of Lipman's style allow her to avoid this pitfall?
14. What do you find most satisfying about the way that Lipman brings her plot to closure?
15. In a recent interview Elinor Lipman said, "I like novels that are funny, quirky, intelligent, and humane." How well, for you, does The Inn at Lake Devine fit this description?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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The Inn at Rose Harbor
Debbie Macomber, 2012
Random House
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345528926
Summary
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber comes a heartwarming new series based in the Pacific Northwest town of Cedar Cove, where a charming cast of characters finds love, forgiveness, and renewal behind the doors of the cozy Rose Harbor Inn.
Jo Marie Rose first arrives in Cedar Cove seeking a sense of peace and a fresh start. Coping with the death of her husband, she purchases a local bed-and-breakfast—the newly christened Rose Harbor Inn—ready to begin her life anew. Yet the inn holds more surprises than Jo Marie can imagine.
Her first guest is Joshua Weaver, who has come home to care for his ailing stepfather. The two have never seen eye to eye, and Joshua has little hope that they can reconcile their differences. But a long-lost acquaintance from Joshua’s high school days proves to him that forgiveness is never out of reach and love can bloom even where it’s least expected.
The other guest is Abby Kincaid, who has returned to Cedar Cove to attend her brother’s wedding. Back for the first time in twenty years, she almost wishes she hadn’t come, the picturesque town harboring painful memories from her past. And while Abby reconnects with family and old friends, she realizes she can only move on if she truly allows herself to let go.
A touching novel of life’s grand possibilities and the heart’s ability to heal, The Inn at Rose Harbor is a welcome introduction to an unforgettable set of friends. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October 22, 1948
• Where—Yakima, Washington, USA
• Education—high school
• Awards—Quill Award; RITA and Distinguished Lifetime Achievement (Romance Writers of America)
• Currently—Port Orchard, Washington
Debbie Macomber is a best-selling American author of over 150 romance novels and contemporary women's fiction. Over 170 million copies of her books are in print throughout the world, and four have become made-for-TV-movies. Macomber was the inaugural winner of the fan-voted Quill Award for romance in 2005 and has been awarded both a Romance Writers of America RITA and a lifetime achievement award by the Romance Writers of America.
Beginning writer
Although Debbie Macomber is dyslexic and has only a high school education, she was determined to be a writer. A stay-at-home mother raising four small children, Macomber nonetheless found the time to sit in her kitchen in front of a rented typewriter and work on developing her first few manuscripts. For five years she continued to write despite many rejections from publishers, finally turning to freelance magazine work to help her family make ends meet.
With money that she saved from her freelance articles, Macomber attended a romance writer's conference, where one of her manuscripts was selected to be publicly critiqued by an editor from Harlequin Enterprises Ltd. The editor tore apart her novel and recommended that she throw it away. Undaunted, Macomber scraped together $10 to mail the same novel, Heartsong, to Harlequin's rival, Silhouette Books. Silhouette bought the book, which became the first romance novel to be reviewed by Publishers Weekly.
Career
Although Heartsong was the first of her manuscripts to sell, Starlight was the first of her novels to be published. It became #128 of the Silhouette Special Edition category romance line (now owned by Harlequin). Macomber continued to write category romances for Silhouette, and later Harlequin. In 1988, Harlequin asked Macomber to write a series of interconnected stories, which became known as the Navy series. Before long, she was selling "huge" numbers of books, usually 150,000 copies of each of her novels, and she was releasing two or three titles per year. By 1994, Harlequin launched the Mira Books imprint to help their category romance authors transition to the single title market, and Macomber began releasing single-title novels. Her first hardcover was released in 2001.
In 2002, Macomber realized that she was having more difficulty identifying with a 25-year-old heroine, and that she wanted to write books focusing more on women and their friendships. Thursdays at Eight was her first departure from the traditional romance novel and into contemporary women's fiction.
Since 1986, in most years Macomber has released a Christmas-themed book or novella. For several years, these novels were part of the Angel series, following the antics of angels Shirley, Goodness, and Mercy. Macomber, who loves Christmas, says that she writes Christmas books as well because "Every woman I know has a picture of the perfect Christmas in her mind, the same way we do romance. Reality rarely lives up to our expectations, so the best we can do is delve into a fantasy."
In general, Macomber's novels focus on delivering the message of the story and do not include detailed descriptive passages. Her heroines tend to be optimists, and the "stories are resolved in a manner that leaves the reader with a feeling of hope and happy expectation." Many of the novels take place in small, rural town, with her Cedar Cove series loosely based on her own hometown. Because of her Christian beliefs, Macomber does not include overly explicit sexual details in her books, although they do contain some sensuality.
Over 170 million copies of her books are in print throughout the world. This Matter of Marriage, became a made-for-tv movie in 1998. In 2009, Hallmark Channel broadcast "Debbie Macomber's Mrs. Miracle," their top-watched movie of the year. The next year Hallmark Channel aired "Call Me Mrs. Miracle," based on Debbie's novel of the same name, and it was the channel's highest rated movie of 2010. In 2011 Hallmark premiered "Trading Christmas," based on Debbie's novel When Christmas Comes (2004).
Debbie also now writes inspirational non-fiction. Her second cookbook, Debbie Macomber's Christmas Cookbook, and her second children's book, The Yippy, Yappy Yorkie in the Green Doggy Sweater (written with Mary Lou Carney), were released in 2012. There is also a Debbie Macomber line of knitting pattern books from Leisure Arts and she owns her own yarn store, A Good Yarn, in Port Orchard, Washington.
Now writing for Random House, Debbie published two Ballantine hardcovers in 2012, The Inn at Rose Harbor and Angels at the Table (November). The same year also saw the publication of two inspirational non-fiction hardcovers, One Perfect Word (Howard Books) and Patterns of Grace (Guideposts April). Starting Now, the ninth in her Blossom Street series, was issued in 2013.
Recognition
Macomber is a three-time winner of the B. Dalton Award, and the inaugural winner of the fan-voted Quill Award for romance (2005, for 44 Cranberry Point). She has been awarded the Romantic Times Magazine Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award and has won a Romance Writers of America RITA Award, the romance novelist's equivalent of an Academy Award, for The Christmas Basket. Her novels have regularly appeared on the Waldenbooks and USAToday bestseller lists and have also earned spots on the New York Times Bestseller List. On September 6, 2007 she made Harlequin Enterprises history, by pulling off the rarest of triple plays—having her new novel, 74 Seaside Avenue, appear at the #1 position for paperback fiction on the New York Times, USAToday and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists. These three highly respected bestseller lists are considered the bellwethers for a book's performance in the United States.
She threw out the first pitch in Seattle Mariners games at Safeco Field in 2007 and 2012. The Romance Writers of America presented Debbie with their prestigious 2010 Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award.
Personal
Macomber has mentored young people, is the international spokesperson for World Vision’s Knit for Kids and serves on the Guideposts National Advisory Cabinet. She was appointed an ambassador for the Big Brothers Big Sisters of America national office in 1997.
Debbie and her husband, Wayne, raised four children and have numerous grandchildren. They live in Port Orchard, Washington and winter in Florida. When not writing, she enjoys knitting, traveling with Wayne and putting on Grandma Camps for her grandchildren, for whom she has built a four-star tree house behind her home in Port Orchard. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 3/11/2015.)
Book Reviews
Each unique character in this tale is suffering from one type of disaster or sadness that finds healing at the seaside inn in Cedar Cove. I found this to be a typical Debbie Macomber story filled to the brim with nostalgia and magical warmth and love. She has a wonderful way of leaving the reader with a stronger faith and belief in miracles by the end of the book. This is a most difficult book to put down until the very last page has been turned and left you with complete contentment. I truly loved this book in her new series of the town of Cedar Cove.
Fresh Fiction
The prolific Macomber introduces a spin-off of sorts from her popular Cedar Cove series, still set in that fictional small town but centered on Jo Marie Rose, a youngish widow who buys and operates the bed and breakfast of the title. This clever premise allows Macomber to craft stories around the B&B’s guests...while using Jo Marie and her ongoing recovery from the death of her husband Paul in Afghanistan as the series’ anchor.... With her characteristic optimism, Macomber provides fresh starts for both. — Patty Wetli
Booklist
Debbie Macomber has written a charming, cathartic romance full of tasteful passion and good sense. Reading it is a lot like enjoying comfort food, as you know the book will end well and leave you feeling pleasant and content. The tone is warm and serene, and the characters are likable yet realistic. A quick, light read, The Inn at Rose Harbor is a wonderful novel that will keep the reader’s undivided attention.
Bookreporter
Slow-paced, emotionally charged romance; the first in a planned series by best-selling genre novelist Macomber. Rose Harbor is...beautiful, a touch staid, full of folk who look and act the part of locals.... There, Jo Marie Rose has just moved to open a B&B. She had found romance...well, in her late 30s,...only to suffer the death of her husband in far-off Afghanistan.... Macomber's players are grief-ridden in different degrees and ways, and the saving grace of this book, full of explication and asides...is that the author recognizes that life is tough and that people need room to deal with that.... There's also plenty of narrative room for the promised sequel for those who can't wait to find out what happens to Mary Smith, Kent Shivers and the rest.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Debbie chose a bed-and-breakfast in the fictional Pacific Northwest town of Cedar Cove, Washington, as the backdrop for The Inn at Rose Harbor. How do you think the choice of a bed-and-breakfast versus a hotel or motel impacts the story? How is the depiction of Jo Marie’s bed-and-breakfast different or similar to your travel experiences?
2. In The Inn at Rose Harbor, the bed-and-breakfast turns out to be a place where its innkeeper and her guests heal from different kinds of heartache. Have you ever had a similar experience, where a trip or a stay in a certain place turned out to be so much more than you thought it would be, more than just a vacation or a respite from work and the stress of everyday living? If so, share the miracle of this trip and how it impacted your life, as the stay at the Rose Harbor Inn forever changed the lives of Jo Marie’s first two guests.
3. Cedar Cove quickly embraces Jo Marie Rose as one of its own. What qualities does Jo Marie possess that enable people to warm to her so openly? Do you think her ease in settling into the community of Cedar Cove had more to do with her personality or with the nature of the town—or both?
4. One of the recurrent themes in The Inn at Rose Harbor is second chances—that it’s never too late to start over, to adopt a fresh outlook on life. Which character struggling to overcome the past do you relate to the most and why?
5. As the story begins Richard is a difficult, unsympathetic character. Do you feel that he changes by the end of the book, and if so, how? Did his journey make you feel any different about someone in your life?
6. Jo Marie decides to have a rose garden planted at The Inn at Rose Harbor. What significance does this rose garden have for Jo Marie?
7. The one thing Josh hopes to retrieve from his stepfather when he returns to Cedar Cove is his late mother’s Bible. What memento or heirloom from a family member do you treasure and why?
8. Abby’s chance encounter with an old high school friend, who welcomes her back to Cedar Cove with honest enthusiasm, is the spark that gradually enables Abby to reconnect with those she loves and to begin to forgive herself. She also seeks forgiveness once again from Angela’s parents. Discuss the challenges and differences between forgiving yourself and forgiving others. Do you think one is more important than the other?
9. How does Jo Marie grow from the beginning of the story until the end? How have her guests, and her budding relationship with Mark, enriched her life and opened her to life’s possibilities?
(From the author's website.)
The Innocent
David Baldacci, 2012
Grand Central Publishing
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781455519002
Summary
America has enemies—ruthless people that the police, the FBI, even the military can't stop. That's when the U.S. government calls on Will Robie, a stone cold hitman who never questions orders and always nails his target.
But Will Robie may have just made the first—and last—mistake of his career.
The Innocent It begins with a hit gone wrong. Robie is dispatched to eliminate a target unusually close to home in Washington, D.C. But something about this mission doesn't seem right to Robie, and he does the unthinkable. He refuses to kill. Now, Robie becomes a target himself and must escape from his own people.
Fleeing the scene, Robie crosses paths with a wayward teenage girl, a fourteen-year-old runaway from a foster home. But she isn't an ordinary runaway-her parents were murdered, and her own life is in danger. Against all of his professional habits, Robie rescues her and finds he can't walk away. He needs to help her.
Even worse, the more Robie learns about the girl, the more he's convinced she is at the center of a vast cover-up, one that may explain her parents' deaths and stretch to unimaginable levels of power.
Now, Robie may have to step out of the shadows in order to save this girl's life...and perhaps his own. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1960
• Where—Richmond, Virginia, USA
• Education—B.A., Virginia Commonwealth University; J.D.,
University of Virginia
• Currently—Northern Virginia
David Baldacci's authoritative legal thrillers operate on the irresistible notion that a sinister undercurrent threads through the country's most powerful institutions.
While his stories hinge on the complex machinations behind the presidency, the FBI, the Supreme Court and other spheres of influence, Baldacci (a former Washington, D.C.-based attorney) finds his way into a mystery through the eyes of the innocents. Semi-innocents, at least: small players who often don't realize they're players at all end up hunting down answers, and their hunt becomes the reader's.
According to Baldacci, reading John Irving's The World According to Garp convinced him that he wanted to be a novelist. Absolute Power—in which a thief finds himself accidentally connected to a murder involving the president and the ensuing coverup—was hardly Irvingesque; but it did begin Baldacci's friendly relationship with the bestseller lists, which has continued over his writing career.
Baldacci's style is brief and plot-driven, but he's not afraid to linger on macabre and vivid details, such as a rosary clenched in a plane crash victim's hand, or hard-learned lessons from a sniper's life (pack your food so you can find it at night, by touch). These small but memorable—indeed, almost cinematic—details give his books another layer that distinguishes them from the average potboiler.
Although the author has occasionally departed from his usual fare (examples include the tenderhearted coming-of-age tale Wish You Well and the holiday-themed adventure The Christmas Train), it is high-octane thrillers that are his true stock in trade. Whether it's a taut stand-alone or a new installment in his "Camel Club" series, readers know when they crack the spine of a new Baldacci book, they're in for an action-packed page-turner.
Extras
• Baldacci was a trial lawyer and a corporate lawyer for nine years in Washington, D.C.
• He worked his way through college as a Pinkerton security guard and by washing and detailing 18-wheel trucks.
• Baldacci writes under his own name except when published in Italy, where he uses a pseudonym because it is the homeland of his ancestors. (From Barnes and Noble.)
Book Reviews
[A] spectacular entry into the hardcore action-adventure world...a tour de force of storytelling power and grace. Baldacci at his best, which is as good as it gets.
Providence Sunday Journal
This is another great novel by a brilliant writer. Baldacci catches you from the very first page and grabs your attention until the last word. Read it.
Lincoln Journal Star
Another action tale of espionage and betrayal from a master storyteller. Baldacci brings his unusual, distinctive skill in character development to portray people who seem very real, with a degree of unpredictability that advances this very clever plot.
Free-Lance Star (Fredericksburg, VA)
The Innocent is....all-American, all-heart... a maze of bread-crumb clues keeping you riveted to the page as each precious minute ticks toward its deadly ultimatum ....His talent for weaving so many disparate and delicate strands into a perilous web of deception is masterful, resulting in a remarkable, intellectually satiating experience.
Everyday eBook
This book is a definite one-day, 'edge-of-your-chair' read, with an ending that is a complete surprise. One of the best Baldacci's since Absolute Power, this is one that will have all suspense readers enthralled.
Suspense Magazine
"The Innocent is Baldacci at his absolute best...Baldacci provides the reader a non-stop pulse pounding ride that will keep you on the edge of your seat into the wee hours of the morning...Five Stars.
Examiner.com (San Francisco)
David Baldacci is still at the top of his game.... He is a meticulous writer who blasts his plot into a million pieces yet is able to pull it back together before the final page is turned. [He] continutes to impress.
Huffington Post
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 Innocent:
1. Talk about the moral justification for assassination.
His employer decided who among the living and breathing would qualify as a target. And then they turned to men like Robie to end the living and breathing part. It made the world better, was the justification.
What do you think of "sanctioned assassinations?" Can there ever be, as the last sentence of the above quote says, a "justification" for political killing? Are assassinations sometimes necessary for public safety?
2. What do you think of Will Robie? How would you describe him as a character? Is he presented as one-dimensional—or does the author give him an psychological and emotional inner life? Does he have a moral compass?
3. Do you think our government ever employs hit men like Robie?
4. What makes Robie refuse to kill the target of his newest assignment? What makes him suspicious?
5. What do you think about Julie Getty? Does she represent the stereotypical foster child? Why does Robie decide to ally himself with her? When did he (and you, as the reader) begin to suspect that she was at the heart of the mission he was assigned to?
6. The plot consists of two climactic episodes: one when the villain is unmasked, and the second, well...we won't spoil that one. Did you find the climaxes satisfying? One more so than the other? Are the endings believable? Were you surprised...not surprised...gratified? Are all the loose ends tied up, so that all the mystifying events that take place earlier in the novel are revealed and resolved?
7. The thriller genre is characterized by a fast-paced plot, unexpected twists and turns, danger and suspense. Does The Innocent live up to its reputation as a thriller? Top-notch...or so-so?
8. If you're read other books by David Baldacci, how does this compare?
9. Do expect—hope—that The Innocent will be the first in a new Will Robie series?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Innocent
Scott Turow, 2010
Grand Central Publishing
406 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780446562423
Summary
The sequel to the genre-defining, landmark bestseller Presumed Innocent, Turow continues the story of Rusty Sabich and Tommy Molto who are, once again, twenty years later, pitted against each other in a riveting psychological match after the mysterious death of Rusty's wife. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—April 12, 1949
• Where—Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., Amherst; M.A. Stanford University; J.D.,
Harvard University
• Awards—Silver Dagger of British Crime Writers
• Currently—lives in Chicago, Illinois
Scott F. Turow is an American author and practicing lawyer, who has written eight fiction and two nonfiction books. His works have been translated into over 20 languages and have sold over 25 million copies. Movies have been based on several of his books.
Turow was born in Chicago, attended New Trier High School, and graduated from Amherst College in 1970. He received an Edith Mirrielees Fellowship to the Stanford University Creative Writing Center, where he attended from 1970 to 1972. In 1971, he married Annette Weisberg, a painter.
Scott Turow became a Jones Lecturer at Stanford until 1975, when he entered Harvard Law School. In 1977, Turow wrote One L, a book about his first year at law school.
After earning his Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree in 1978, Turow became an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Chicago, serving in that position until 1986. There he prosecuted several high-profile corruption cases, including the tax fraud case of state Attorney General William Scott. Turow also was lead counsel in Operation Greylord, the federal prosecution of Illinois judicial corruption cases.
Writing
After leaving the U.S. Attorney's office, Turow became a novelist, writing legal thrillers such as The Burden of Proof, Presumed Innocent, Pleading Guilty, and Personal Injuries, which Time magazine named as the Best Fiction Novel of 1999. All four became bestsellers, and Turow won multiple literary awards, most notably the Silver Dagger Award of the British Crime Writers.
Many of the characters appear in multiple books, and all of his novels take place in Kindle County. (The state is unspecified, but the county contains a tri-city conglomerate on the Mississippi between Chicago and New Orleans. —Burden of Proof p. 52.) In 1990, Turow was featured on the June 11 cover of Time, which described him as the "Bard of the Litigious Age." In 1995, Canadian author Derek Lundy published a biography of Turow, entitled Scott Turow: Meeting the Enemy (ECW Press, 1995). Also, in the 1990s a British publisher bracketed Turow’s work with that of Margaret Atwood and John Irving, republishing it in the series Bloomsbury Modern Library.
Turow is the president of the Authors Guild. He was also President from 1997 to 1998 and has served on its board.
From 1997 to 1998 Turow was a member of the U.S. Senate Nominations Commission for the Northern District of Illinois, which recommends federal judicial appointments.
Current legal work
Turow is a partner of the Chicago law firm of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal. He works pro bono in most of his cases, including a 1995 case where he won the release of Alejandro Hernandez, who had spent 11 years on death row for a murder he did not commit. He was also appointed to the commission considering the reform of the Illinois death penalty by former Governor George Ryan and is currently a member of the Illinois State Police Merit Board. He and his wife Annette divorced in late 2008 with three grown children. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
[Turow's] intimate understanding of his characters and his authoritative knowledge of the legal world inject the narrative with emotional fuel, creating suspense that has less to do with the actual twists and turns of the plot than with our interest in what will happen to these people and how they will behave under pressure…Rusty's second trial—which takes up the better half of this novel—proves to be just as suspenseful and gripping as his first.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
In Innocent, [Turow's] exploring the many ways in which, time after time, we fail to under stand ourselves, in which we miss or misinterpret the evidence that could tell us who we are. "If we are always a mystery to ourselves," Anna asks at the end of Sabich's latest ordeal, "then what is the chance of fully understanding anybody else?" That's a novelist's question as much as it is a lawyer's…Innocent is a meticulously constructed and superbly paced mystery…a lovely novel, gripping and darkly self-reflective.
Terrence Rafferty - New York Times Book Review
There are enough surprises...to keep the reader's attention fixed—Turow has always been very good at that—but as usual in his fiction there's more than skillful legal drama. Turow is a serious man who has thought long and carefully about the law. He understands that in the end it is not really much better than any other mechanism at uncovering absolute truth; that the courtroom is a roll of the dice…that life itself is a crapshoot…All of which makes for an intelligent, thoughtful novel: a grownup book for grownup readers.
Jonathan Yardley - Washington Post
Mesmerizing prose and intricate plotting lift Turow's superlative legal thriller, his best novel since his bestselling debut, Presumed Innocent, to which this is a sequel. In 2008, 22 years after the events of the earlier book, former lawyer Rusty Sabich, now a Kindle County, Ill., chief appellate judge, is again suspected of murdering a woman close to him. His wife, Barbara, has died in her bed of what appear to be natural causes, yet Rusty comes under scrutiny from his old nemesis, acting prosecuting attorney Tommy Molto, who unsuccessfully prosecuted him for killing his mistress decades earlier. Tommy's chief deputy, Jim Brand, is suspicious because Rusty chose to keep Barbara's death a secret, even from their son, Nat, for almost an entire day, which could have allowed traces of poison to disappear. Rusty's candidacy for a higher court in an imminent election; his recent clandestine affair with his attractive law clerk, Anna Vostic; and a breach of judicial ethics complicate matters further. Once again, Turow displays an uncanny ability for making the passions and contradictions of his main characters accessible and understandable.
Publishers Weekly
It took Turow more than 20 years to bring us the sequel to his best-selling first novel, Presumed Innocent, and it was worth the wait. Now 60 and long after being acquitted of murdering his mistress, Rusty Sabich has become chief judge of the Kindle County, IL, appellate court and is running for the state supreme court. When his wife dies in her sleep, Sabich waits 24 hours before calling his son or anyone else, setting off suspicions of foul play with his old nemesis, acting prosecutor Tommy Molto. The coroner determines she died of natural causes, but Molto and his chief deputy, Brand, quietly start building a case, convinced Sabich is trying to get away with murder again. Verdict: This is a beautifully written book with finely drawn characters and an intricate plot seamlessly weaving a troubled family story with a murder. Drawing the reader in and not letting go until the last page, Turow's legal thriller is a most worthy successor to Presumed Innocent and perhaps the author's finest work to date. —Stacy Alesi, Palm Beach Cty. Lib. Syst., Boca Raton, FL
Library Journal
Though at least one other lawyer turned author has subsequently achieved greater commercial success, Turow remains the master of the form, at least partly because he's more fascinated by the mysteries of the human heart than he is by the intricacies of the law. Here, suspense and discovery sustain the narrative momentum until the final pages, but character trumps plot in Innocent. The ironic title underscores the huge gap between innocence as a moral state of grace and "not guilty" as a courtroom verdict. Once again, Turow's novel pits Rusty Sabich against Tommy Molto, former colleagues turned adversaries, with the former now chief judge of the appellate court and the latter as prosecuting attorney. Sabich remains more complicated and morally compromised, while Molto is much more certain of right and wrong. Exonerated in a murder trial 20 years ago, but his innocence never completely established, Sabich finds himself once again under suspicion after the sudden death of his mentally unstable, heavily medicated wife. As in the first novel, Sabich suffers the guilt of infidelity, but does this make him guilty of the murder Molto becomes convinced the judge has committed? Complicating the issue are the judge's only son, more of a legal scholar than his father though with some of his mother's emotional instability, and the whirlwind romance between the junior Sabich and the former clerk for the senior Sabich. To reveal more would undermine the reader's own pleasure of discovery, but the judge, whether guilty or not, might prefer prison to the revelation of crucial secrets. "How do we ever know what's in someone else's heart or mind?" the novel asks. "If we are always a mystery to ourselves, then what is the chance of fully understanding anybody else?" The various perspectives—with some characters knowing more than the reader does, while the reader knows more than others—contribute to an exquisite tension that drives the narrative. Where the title of the first novel may have presumed innocence, the sequel knows that we're all guilty of something.
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 Innocent:
1. What is the significance of the book's title, ostensibly the legal term for someone found "not guilty"? In what way is it ironic, suggesting a philosophical, moral question?
2. Author Scott Turow uses an unusual structure for this novel, moving back and forth between time frames and viewpoints. Why might he have used this technique rather than a straightforward narrative? Did the novel's structure enhance or detract from your enjoyment?
3. Have you read Presumed Innocent, the "prequel" to this novel? If so, how do the two compare? Is it important to have read the previous book? Why or why not?
4. Follow-up to Question 3: If you haven't read Presumed Innocent, was it hard to come up to speed on this novel? Having finished Innocent—and looking back—would it have made a difference if you had read the first book? If so...in what way? Will you read PI now? Why or why not?
5. How would you describe Rusty Sabitch? What kind of a man is he? Has he learned from his past mistakes?
6. What is Rusty's wife Barbara like? Why have the two stayed married all these years?
7. Author Turow seems as interested in penetrating the mysteries of marriage and the human heart as he is the ins-and-outs of the legal system. What issues does he raise about how two people operate within a marriage? What do we come to learn about Barbara and Rusty's marriage? Do you see parallels to your own relationships?
8. What about Anna Vostic? First of all, will older men ever find age-appropriate women? Or is the answer to that "In your dreams, sweetheart"?
9. Back to Anna: what kind of person is she...and why does she end up in an affair with Rusty's son? Talk about those complications.
10. What about Nat? Is he a sympathetic character or not? Good boyfriend material...good son material?
11. What drives the prosecutorial team—Tommy Molto and Jim Brand? Why is Brand so eager to convict Rusty Sabitch? What evidence does the prosecution have against Rusty? Is it particularly strong?
12. Much of the book is a courtroom drama. Did you enjoy the pyrotechnics between prosecutors and defense attorneys?
13. How does Rusty's secret drive, or shape, his own defense?
14. Does this book deliver? Were you surprised by the various plot twists? Going back over the book, can you pick out where Turow purposely withholds information—then reveals it—to keep readers wondering?
15. What insights does this book offer—or issues does it raise—regarding the country's (or a state's) legal system ?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Innocents
Francesca Segal, 2012
Voice
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781401341893
Summary
A smart and slyly funny tale of love, temptation, confusion, and commitment; a triumphant and beautifully executed recasting of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence.
Newly engaged and unthinkingly self-satisfied, twenty-eight-year-old Adam Newman is the prize catch of Temple Fortune, a small, tight-knit Jewish suburb of London. He has been dating Rachel Gilbert since they were both sixteen and now, to the relief and happiness of the entire Gilbert family, they are finally to marry.
To Adam, Rachel embodies the highest values of Temple Fortune; she is innocent, conventional, and entirely secure in her community—a place in which everyone still knows the whereabouts of their nursery school classmates. Marrying Rachel will cement Adam's role in a warm, inclusive family he loves.
But as the vast machinery of the wedding gathers momentum, Adam feels the first faint touches of claustrophobia, and when Rachel's younger cousin Ellie Schneider moves home from New York, she unsettles Adam more than he'd care to admit.
Ellie—beautiful, vulnerable, and fiercely independent—offers a liberation that he hadn't known existed: a freedom from the loving interference and frustrating parochialism of North West London. Adam finds himself questioning everything, suddenly torn between security and exhilaration, tradition and independence. What might he be missing by staying close to home? (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1980
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—Oxford University
• Awards—Costa First Novel Award (more below)
• Currently—lives in London, England
Francesca Segal is a British writer and author of two well regarded novels, The Innocents (2012) and The Awkward Age (2017). She is one of two daughters of Erich Segal, most widely known as the author of Love Story, the bestseller novel turned blockbuster movie staring Ali McGraw and Ryan O'Neal.
Born in London, Francesca was brought up between the UK and America, where her father taught Greek and Latin at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton Universities. She returned to England to take her degree at St Hugh’s College, Oxford.
Since then, Segal has worked as a journalist and author. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Guardian, and Vogue (both UK and US), among others. She has been a features writer at Tatler, and for three years wrote the Debut Fiction column in The Observer.
Awards
For her first novel, The Innocents, Segal received the Costa First Novel Award, the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, the Sami Rohr Prize, and a Betty Trask Award. She was also long-listed for the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize). Segal lives in London. (Adapted from the publisher and Wikipedia. Retrieved on 5/25/2017.)
Book Reviews
[A] delightful first novel... wise, witty and observant.
London Times
Segal writes with an understated elegance.
Observer (UK)
"With understated wit, empathy and a cinematic eye of detail, Segal brings alive a host of characters so robust that you can easily imagine them onscreen... A winning debut novel.
People
A crafty homage... [Segal] writes with engaging warmth.
Entertainment Weekly
Segal’s debut novel is an example of how one can be influenced by great writers who’ve come before yet not be trapped by them. Nice, reliable Adam is engaged to Rachel, the perfect Jewish girl, in a closely knit North West London Jewish community. But Rachel’s free-spirited cousin Ellie, back from a scandalous time in the U.S., makes him feel not so nice and not so reliable. He falls for Ellie, but the machinations of both his fiancée and his community create obstacles to his desires. Inspired by The Age of Innocence, Segal’s book is warmer, funnier, and paints a more dynamic and human portrait of a functional community that is a wonderful juxtaposition to Wharton’s cold social strata in Gilded Age New York. Adam is just as much of a coward as Newland Archer, more in love with the idea of rebellion than actually capable of committing the act. Rachel echoes May Welland’s passive aggressiveness, yet goes after what she wants with more courage when faced with tough choices. Ellie is far more self-aware and less of a victim than Ellen Olenska, which makes her more interesting and sympathetic. The real hero of the book is Lawrence, Adam’s father-in-law, a man who deeply loves his family, appreciates the community, utilizes his “quiet faith,” and is profoundly grateful for his life. The book is full of delightful moments, such as Lawrence’s comment, “Any Jewish holiday can be described the same way. They tried to kill us. They failed. Let’s eat.” Segal took the theme of a well-known novel and made it her own. Lively and entertaining.
Publishers Weekly
Are communities cocoons sheltering us from the rigors of the world, or are they wet blankets stifling creativity and experimentation? That's the quandary facing Adam Newman, a product of the close-knit Jewish community centered around Temple Fortune, London NW11, an enclave that takes care of its own from cradle to grave...and beyond. For 12 years, he has been engaged to Rachel Gilbert and has been a member of her father's legal firm. When cousin Ellie Schneider appears on the scene, trailing clouds of marijuana and rumors of online pornography, Adam is torn between what seems like an unending succession of lovingly detailed family meals (guaranteed to make you reach for the nearest poppy seed coffee cake) and what Ellie might have to offer. If the story sounds familiar, that's because it is. In the year that marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Edith Wharton, this imitation of The Age of Innocence is the sincerest form of flattery. The unexpressed moral might be plus ça change. Verdict: Readers who enjoy fast-paced, gently satirical literary novels, fans of Allegra Goodman, and book group participants will find a Shabbat dinner's worth of noshing in this accomplished debut novel by the daughter of author Erich Segal.—Bob Lunn, formerly with Kansas City P.L., MO
Library Journal
Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence gets a reboot in this novel set in a present-day London Jewish enclave.... Segal isn't the ornate stylist Wharton is, but she writes elegantly and thoughtfully about Adam's growing sense of entrapment, and she excels at showing how a family's admirable supportiveness can suddenly feel like smothering.... Overall this is a well-tuned portrait of a couple whose connection proves to be much more tenuous than expected, and of religious rituals that prove more meaningful than they seem. Segal thoughtfully ties in family Holocaust lore and high-holiday gatherings to show that those long-standing bonds are tough to break. Even if the plot and themes are second-hand, this is an emotionally and intellectually astute debut.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Segal’s debut novel is a re-telling of the classic novel The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. For those of you who have read the book or seen the movie adaptation of The Age of Innocence, discuss the specific ways in which The Innocents parallels Wharton’s novel, and then consider the important ways in which it departs from her novel. Does knowledge of this parallel add to your understanding of Segal’s novel, or does it complicate it?
2. Apart from Adam’s initial physical attraction to Ellie, what in the beginning of the novel foreshadowed that Adam and Rachel were not, perhaps, as ideally suited to one another as he’d thought for the past 12 years?
3. How did the back-story about Jackie’s death help you to sympathize with Ellie? What aspects of her personality seem most likely a result of her mother’s early death and her father’s subsequent emotional distance?
4. Discuss Ziva’s relationship with Ellie and consider how the two women are similar in terms of being survivors. How much do you think this accounted for their mutual affection for one another? Could any of the others—Jaffa, Rachel, Adam—have truly understood Ziva? Why or why not?
5. Compare Ellie’s character with that of Rachel’s, and discuss Adam’s inability to commit wholly to just one of them for most of the novel. Between the two women, whom did you prefer? With whom did you sympathize the most? Do you think Adam made the right choice, in the end?
6. Also, compare and contrast the novel’s “Evan Goodman” financial scandal with recent events in the financial sector of our own culture—such as the Bernie Madoff scandal. Discuss how the ordeal operates as a catalyst and as a complication of the plot within the novel. Do you think it can also work as a symbol with any of Segal’s themes in the book? Why or why not?
7. How well does Segal portray the social, psychological, religious, and emotional lives of the Jewish community in North London? Do you feel that she conveys a reasonable and realistic portrait of this large and diverse group of people? What were her greatest strengths in her depiction, as well as her weaknesses?
8. Similarly, how did characters like Ziva Schneider help you to understand the Israeli immigrant experience? In particular, what did the novel help to show about the Jewish survivors of World War II, and their difficulties with nationality and assimilation into post-World War II European society?
9. Is Rachel’s character a passive one? Would you call her passive aggressive? Why or why not? By the end of the novel, in what significant ways has her character changed?
10. Discuss how Segal incorporates the subject of death into her novel – would you call her handling of the subject matter sensitive? Objective? Realistic? Consider the many moments in the novel where death is encountered or referenced and discuss Segal’s success when it comes to writing about the end of life and its impact on those who remain.
11. Similarly, discuss Segal’s choice of setting for this adaptation of Wharton’s novel. In what important ways does the Jewish community of North London in the early 2000’s parallel late 19th century New York? Discuss the key characteristics that these communities share, and then discuss their important differences.
12. Discuss the significance of Segal’s title to the characters in her book. Not only does the title recall Wharton’s novel, but it reflects a characteristic of the group of people she’s writing about, as well as specific characters. Discuss the ways in which The Innocents is both a sincere title and an ironic one.
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Innocents and Others
Dana Spiotta, 2016
Scribner
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781501122729
Summary
A novel about aspiration, film, work, and love.
Dana Spiotta’s new novel is about two women, best friends, who grow up in LA in the '80s and become filmmakers.
Meadow and Carrie have everything in common—except their views on sex, power, movie-making, and morality. Their lives collide with Jelly, a loner whose most intimate experience is on the phone.
Jelly is older, erotic, and mysterious. She cold calls powerful men and seduces them not through sex but through listening. She invites them to reveal themselves, and they do.
Spiotta is “a wonderfully gifted writer with an uncanny feel for the absurdities and sadnesses of contemporary life, and an unerring ear for how people talk and try to cope today” (The New York Times). Innocents and Others is her greatest novel—wise, artful, and beautiful. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 16, 1966
• Where—state of New Jersey, USA
• Raised—Los Angeles, California
• Education—Evergreen State College
• Awards—finalist, National Book Awards and National Book Critics Circle Award
• Currently—lives in Syracuse, New York
Dana Spiotta is the author of several novels: Innocents and Others (2016); Stone Arabia (2011), a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; Eat the Document (2006), a National Book Award finalist; and Lightning Field (2001), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
Spiotta was born in New Jersey, moving to and from various suburbs until her family settled in Los Angeles when she was 13. The city, especially its film industry, impressed itself on her and later became the setting, even the subject, of her novels.
She attended Columbia University for two years but dropped out during the chaotic period of her parents' divorce. To support herself, she headed to Seattle, Oregon, eventually enrolling at Evergreen State College where she studied labor history and creative writing.
On a whim almost, she and a friend cold-called a number in New York City—a number they found on the back of Quarterly, the literary journal. When its editor, the famed writer-editor Gordon Lish, happened to pick up the phone, the girls ended up being offered jobs as managing editors, and the two headed to New York. It was while working at Quarterly that Spiotta met Don DeLillo, who became both mentor and friend. (Years later, Spiotta was referred to as "DeLillo with a vagina," meant, it's utterer said, as a compliment.)
Her second novel Eat the Document (2006)—published while working at an upstate restaurant (which she and her then-husband owned)—brought her to the attention of writers and critics. She was offered a teaching position in the M.F.A. program at Syracuse University, where she remains today. Her colleagues include such notables as George Saunders and Mary Karr (who called her "whip smart and tirelessly generous").
Spiotta has been a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. She lives in Syracuse with her daughter and her second husband. (Adapted from Wikipedia and New York Times. Retrieved 3/10/2016.)
Book Reviews
Ambitious.... Innocents and Others aims not only to use its characters’ experiences to open a window on American life in the late 20th century, but also to examine how technology has atomized contemporary life and the ways art mediates our relationships with friends and strangers. ...[S]harp, kinetic.... Ms. Spiotta writes about film with great knowledge and insight.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
Such is the subtlety of Spiotta’s prose, and the diversity of its presentation (the book includes biographical essays, video transcripts, diary entries, online chats), that the reader can never be sure which, if any, meaning is intended as primary. Are we meant to discern a deconstructive critique, or merely a mockery of chick lit, in Spiotta’s portrayal of two smart female artists trying to honor their pasts while inventing their futures, all without judging each other to death? Or are we reading a philosophical novel, one that enacts the immemorial debate between art as entertainment (Carrie’s filmography) and art for art’s sake (Meadow’s)?
Joshua Cohen - New York Times Book Review
A brilliant split-screen view of women working within and without the world of Hollywood…. [I]lluminating….. Among chapters of conventional narration, Spiotta presents the transcript of an eight-hour interview...lists, descriptions of editing sessions, a filmography, online essays. Whatever the novel needs, it confidently shifts to embrace…its moral dimensions feel vast. Once Spiotta has her disparate storylines in motion, they resonate with each other in ways you can’t stop thinking about…. Spiotta explores the remarkable species of sisterhood that survives jealousy and disappointment and even years of neglect....nothing can blot out their shared history, their abiding devotion, the great wonder that is a true friend.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Enigmatic… fascinating… the need to connect, the desire for intimacy and friendship, and the quest for meaning in our lives are at the heart of this complex and compelling book… Spiotta is asking big, interesting, questions here. Without consciousness, without an inward operator, what are we connecting to? To art? To nature? To something divine?.... It is worth mentioning that in the structure of the novel, Spiotta is playing with time and narrative, jumping freely between story lines, to create a unique vibe that buzzes in your subconscious…. These dual (or triple) parallel threads intersect only briefly but with consequences that deliver a surprising wallop of emotion…. It's difficult not to descend into hyperbole talking about Spiotta's work. She writes with a breezy precision and genuine wit that put her on a short list of brilliant North American novelists who deserve a much wider audience…. And it's rare to find a novel that is so much fun and, at the same time, seeks emotional truth with such intellectual rigor; it adds up to an original and strangely moving book.
Mark Haskell Smith - Los Angeles Times
Haunting…[Meadow’s] story serves as the intellectual fulcrum of this intimate, unsettling novel, but Jelly provides its emotional heart.
Claudia Rowe - Seattle Times
A female critic may have been impolitic in calling Spiotta "DeLillo with a vagina"; more to the point, she’s DeLillo with a heart (or a stronger one, at least). Innocents and Others is both lean and capacious. Revolving around a documentary filmmaker, her rocky friendship with a more commercial director, and one of her subjects—a sympathetic con artist who catfishes powerful men over the phone—Innocents and Others uses both traditional narration and ‘found’ documents to build a sort of mixed-media meditation on alienation, friendship, technology, and the senses of hearing and sight.
Boris Kachka - New York Magazine
A thrillingly complex and emotionally astute novel about fame, power, and alienation steeped in a dark eroticism and a particularly American kind of loneliness.
Elissa Schappell - Vanity Fair
The visionary liberty and daring with which Dana Spiotta has crafted her brilliant new novel Innocents and Others is both inspirational and infectious. At its heart is a cinematic tale of friendship, obsession, morality, and creativity between best-friend filmmakers Carrie Wexler and Meadow Mori….over time, Meadow’s ‘penchant for failures, [her] soft spot for them’ and Carrie’s commercial success will test their bond to the max…original and seductive…with Innocents and Others, [Spiotta] delivers a tale about female friendship, the limits of love and work, and costs of claiming your right to celebrate your triumphs and own your mistakes.
Lisa Shea - Elle
Impossible to put down.
Steph Optiz - Marie Claire
Dana Spiotta’s whip-smart Innocents and Others maps the unexpected confluence of two rising feminist filmmakers and a movie buff who, posing as a film student, seduces Hollywood men over the phone, simply by listening to them.
Marnie Hanel - W
Brilliant…masterful…Recalling a younger, warmer DeLillo, Spiotta reminds us that the cinema is where America fears and desires have long been projected, the small-town theater an abandoned temple of shared dreams. At the same time, she nails a devastating irony: The more reachable we are, the more screens infiltrate our lives, the less there is that genuinely connects us.
Megan O’Grady - Vogue
Eschewing linear storytelling in favor of chapters interspersed with scene and interview transcripts and paragraphs of film theory, Spiotta delivers a patchwork portrait of two women on the verge of two very different nervous breakdowns. True to form, the effect is like watching raw footage before it’s been edited—sometimes moving, often disjointed, always thought provoking.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [E]nsnaring, sly, and fiercely intelligent.... A novel for readers thrilled by Jennifer Egan, Siri Hustvedt, Rachel Kushner, and Claire Messud, Spiotta’s deeply inquiring tale is about looking and listening, freedom and obligation, our dire hunger for illusion, and our profound need for friendship. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
(Starred review.) The complex relationship among three women and the film world drives this tale of technology and its discontents.... [Spiotta] finds something miraculous in how technology can reveal us to ourselves.... A superb, spiky exploration of artistic motivation.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add the publisher's questions if and when they're available. In the meantime use these LitLovers talking points to kick off a discussion for Innocents and Others...then take off on your own:
1. "This is a love story," reads the opening line of Innocents and Others. How does that line apply to the novel as a whole? What is meant by the term "love"? Does it refer to intimacy or friendship or obsession...or something else?
2. The book opens with Meadow, one of the main characters, lying about an affair with Orson Welles. Why does Meadow fabricate the relationship? And why might Dana Spiotta have chosen to open her novel with a lie?
3. Talk about Meadow Mori and Carrie Wexler. How are they different from one another? Consider their childhood backgrounds, as well as the choices they made in their personal and professional lives.
4. Follow-up to Question 3: Discuss the long-term friendship at the heart of the novel. How do Carrie's and Meadow's career paths strain their relationhip? What continues to bind them together?
5. Consider Meadow's reaction when she sees Carrie's new film—the "funniest film of the summer." After seeing it, Meadow wonders, "What was wrong with her? Why was she like this, so ungenerous?" Is Meadow normally "ungenerous"? She also wonders, "Why couldn't she be better?" Have you ever had similar concerns about how you react to friends' successes (or failures...schadenfreud, anyone)? Is resentment or jealousy part of human nature?
6. One of the concerns of the novel has to do with artistic integrity. Whose career path is more authentic...and whose is less? Is Carrie a sellout because her films appeal to popular audiences? Or in an industry—and a society—that rewards escapism, is Carrie's choice inevitable, even blameless? Has Meadow remained true to her goals? Or is she following her own egotistical drive for acclaim among the art house crowd?
7. Is Meadow's film "Inward Operator" a betrayal of Jelly, or even a betrayal of her own standards?
8. Talk about the hollowness at the heart of the lives of the three women in this novel: Carrie, Meadow, and Jelly. Why are their lives not more fulfilling?
9. What about Jelly, who finds intimacy through her "pure calls"? Jelly says, "I was always happy to reach an inward operator." What is an "inward operator"—and who else might be searching for one in this novel?
10. Meadow believes that people reveal themselves in front of a camera whether they intend to or not. Do you believe cameras have a revelatory quality to them? Can we come to know others, even ourselves, through the lens of a camera? If so, how does that happen? When you see yourself on video, or hear your voice on tape, have you ever been surprised at how you look and sound?
11. Dana Spiotta avoids straight forward, linear story telling; instead, she intersperses her narrative with interviews, scene transcripts, webpages, film theory dissertations, and more. What affect does this have on your reading of the book? Why might the author have chosen this interruptive mode?
12. This book is concerned about the impact of art on human consciousness. What is art's purpose or intent? Is it to entertain? Is it to enable us to see what we often overlook—about the world, about ourselves? What are your thoughts on how art affects us? When we view art (an image, say, on film or otherwise), what are we connecting with—art itself, nature, ourselves, or something transcendant and divine ?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Inside the O'Briens
Lisa Genova, 2015
Gallery Books
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781476717791
Summary
A powerful and transcendent new novel about a family struggling with the impact of Huntington’s disease.
Joe O’Brien is a forty-four-year-old police officer from the Irish Catholic neighborhood of Charlestown, Massachusetts. A devoted husband, proud father of four children in their twenties, and respected officer, Joe begins experiencing bouts of disorganized thinking, uncharacteristic temper outbursts, and strange, involuntary movements.
He initially attributes these episodes to the stress of his job, but as these symptoms worsen, he agrees to see a neurologist and is handed a diagnosis that will change his and his family’s lives forever: Huntington’s Disease.
Huntington’s is a lethal neurodegenerative disease with no treatment and no cure. Each of Joe’s four children has a 50 percent chance of inheriting their father’s disease, and a simple blood test can reveal their genetic fate. While watching her potential future in her father’s escalating symptoms, twenty-one-year-old daughter Katie struggles with the questions this test imposes on her young adult life. Does she want to know? What if she’s gene positive? Can she live with the constant anxiety of not knowing?
As Joe’s symptoms worsen and he’s eventually stripped of his badge and more, Joe struggles to maintain hope and a sense of purpose, while Katie and her siblings must find the courage to either live a life "at risk" or learn their fate.
Praised for writing that “explores the resilience of the human spirit” (San Francisco Chronicle), Lisa Genova has once again delivered a novel as powerful and unforgettable as the human insights at its core. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—November 22, 1970
• Where—N/A
• Education—B.S. Bates College; Ph.D, Harvard University
• Currently—lives on Cape Cod, Massachusetts
Lisa Genova is an American neuroscientist and author of fiction. She graduated valedictorian, summa cum laude from Bates College with a BS degree in biopsychology and received her Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard University in 1998.
Genova did research at Massachusetts General Hospital East, Yale Medical School, McLean Hospital, and the National Institutes of Health. She also taught neuroanatomy at Harvard Medical School fall 1996.
Genova married and gave birth to a daughter in 2000. Four years later she and her husband divorced, and Genova began writing full-time. To hear Genova tell it:
When I was 33, I got divorced. I’d been a stay-at-home mom for four years, and I planned to go back to work as a health-care industry strategy consultant. But then I asked myself a question that changed the course of my life: If I could do anything I wanted, what would I do? My answer, which was both exciting and terrifying—write a novel about a woman with Alzheimer’s (Cape Cod Magazine.).
In 2007 she self-published her first novel, Still Alice, which went on to became a major best seller and award winning film. Since then, Genova has written three other fictional works about characters dealing with neurological disorders.
Still Alice
Genova's debut novel follows a woman suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Alice Howland, a 50-year-old woman, is a cognitive psychology professor at Harvard and a world-renowned linguistics expert. She is married to an equally successful husband, and they have three grown children. The disease takes hold swiftly, changing Alice’s relationship with her family and the world.
Self-published, Genova sold copies of the book out of the trunk of her car. The book was later acquired by Simon & Schuster and published in 2009. It appeared on the New York Times best seller list for more than 40 weeks, was sold in 30 countries, and translated into more than 20 languages.
The book was adapted for the stage by Christine Mary Dunford and performed by Chicago's Lookingglass Theatre Company in 2013.
A 2014 film adaptation starred Julianne Moore as the lead and co-starred Alec Baldwin, Kristen Stewart, and Kate Bosworth. Moore won an Oscar for Best Actress.
Other books
♦ Left Neglected (2011)
Genova's second novel tells the story of a woman who suffers from left neglect (also called hemispatial or unilateral neglect), caused by a traumatic brain injury. As she struggles to recover, she learns that she must embrace a simpler life. She begins to heal when she attends to elements left neglected in herself, her family, and the world around her.
♦ Love Anthony (2012)
Offering a unique perspective in fiction, this third novel presents the extraordinary voice of Anthony, a nonverbal boy with autism. Anthony reveals a neurologically plausible peek inside the mind of autism, why he hates pronouns, why he loves swinging and the number three, how he experiences routine, joy, and love. And it is the voice of this voiceless boy that guides two women in this powerfully unforgettable story to discover the universal truths that connect us all.
♦ Inside the O'Briens (2015)
In her fourth novel, Genova follows Joe O'Brien, a middle-aged Boston policeman diagnosed with Huntington's. There is no cure, and the disease is progressive and lethal. The story revolves around the fallout on Joe's family, including his daughter who is at risk for carrying the genes.
TV and film
Since her first novel was published, Genova has become a professional speaker about Alzheimer's disease. She has been a guest on the Today Show, Dr. Oz, CNN, PBS News Hour, and the Diane Rehm Show. She appeared in the documentary film To Not Fade Away. It is a follow-up to the Emmy Award-winning film, Not Fade Away (2009), about Marie Vitale, a woman who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease at the age of 45. (Adapated from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/6/2015.)
Book Reviews
This novel of siblings rocked by their father's Huntington's disease is a total tearjerker, but ultimately it's a tribute to family love.
Glamour
An intimate, heartbreaking look at life with Huntington's disease.
Marie Claire
(Starred review.) [The] tale of a Boston police officer who learns that he has Huntington's disease.... This is a gut-wrenching and memorable read, most similar to Genova's Still Alice in its detailed portrayal of the disintegration and rebuilding of a family in the face of a horrible illness. —Mariel Pachucki, Maple Valley, WA
Library Journal
Best-selling neuroscientist-turned-novelist Genova, author of several popular stories based on the experience of suffering debilitating diseases...now tackles the impact of Huntington's disease on one blue-collar Boston family.... Genova's intention once again is acceptance, and the wrung-out reader bids farewell to the family at a relatively calm and united moment. This journey to a place of mindfulness, while inevitably affecting, often reads like fictionalized campaign literature for a worthy cause.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
2. In the beginning of the novel, Joe is horrified to recognize his mother, Ruth, in his reflection. Why do you think that is such a painful realization? How do his feelings about Ruth change? Discuss the complex ties we all have with our parents.
3. Joe is fiercely proud of his job as a police officer, but admits that he sometimes feels constrained by the uniform and the trappings that come with assuming that identity. How do you think that internal conflict ripples through his children and their professional choices? Who do you think is most like him? Who is most different?
4. Katie is compelled to leave, yet still feels tethered. Discuss the role that family and tradition play in the novel. When is tradition helpful, and when does it hold us back?
5. In the ways they can see, through external physical traits and personality, Katie and JJ come from their dad. Does this mean they also have his Huntington’s? Discuss the interplay of nature versus nurture in the narrative. How does each sibling define themselves in both relation and opposition to their family?
6. Even in their darkest moments, the O’Brien family finds reasons to be grateful. Name some of them. Do these reasons change over the course of the story? How? Do you specifically relate to any?
7. As a cop, it is essential that Joe make split-second decisions in high-stress environments. He takes pleasure in it. But later into his diagnosis, as his body goes to war with his mind, we see him starting to think in the long-term. Discuss the dichotomy of instinctual versus analytical thinking in the novel. When do they contradict each other? When do they complement each other?
8. Joe is a born storyteller but Rosie is "intensely private" about her family, especially when it comes to difficult topics. How do they compromise these two opposing impulses throughout the narrative?
9. Ultimately, Joe becomes an unreliable narrator. He can’t predict his moods or even his movements. How does he use the reflections of people and his surrounding environment to monitor himself? Who do you think he depends on most, and why?
10. Discuss what Catholicism means to the O’Brien family, specifically the theme of purgatory as it attends to the implications of the Huntington’s genetic test. Do you think religion informs their decision-making? How?
11. Joe is well versed in both the immediate and reverberating effects of trauma, having served in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon terrorist attack. He is aware that every day on the job might be his last. How is that specific dread different from the terrible anticipation of a Huntington’s diagnosis? How is it similar? Do you think Joe can still find honor in death from his disease? If so, how?
12. The O’Brien and extended Charlestown community is incredibly tight-knit. But when does that closeness cross the line into exclusivity? Discuss Katie’s relationship with Felix. Why do you think she hesitates to introduce him to her family? How does their reaction surprise her?
13. In chapter 31, Katie guides her dad through a yoga routine and tells him to "be the thermostat, not the temperature." What do you think she means? And how does it influence Joe’s decision to change his mantra from "stay in the fight" to “stay in the pose”?
14. In the novel, we learn one HD symptom is "chorea"—jerky, involuntary movements—and is derived from the Greek word for dance. Discuss the role of movement throughout the story, in both its liberating and debilitating forms. Why do you think Meghan decides to leave the Boston Ballet to work with a more experimental dance company in London?
15. In chapter 34, Katie frets about the effect a HD diagnosis would have on Felix’s future. Discuss the feeling of accountability that often comes with living with a terminal illness. At what point do we all have to relinquish the illusion of having control over someone else’s life?
16. Discuss Joe’s realization that his mother, Ruth, communicated gratitude and love to her children when she was in end-stage HD. How does that trickle down through him and onto Katie? Do you think Katie moves to Portland? Would you?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Instructions for a Heatwave
Maggie O'Farrell, 2013
Knopf Doubleday
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345804716
Summary
Sophisticated, intelligent, impossible to put down, Maggie O’Farrell’s beguiling novels blend richly textured psychological drama with page-turning suspense.
Instructions for a Heatwave finds Maggie O'Farrell at the top of her game, with a novel about a family crisis set during the legendary British heatwave of 1976.
- Gretta Riordan wakes on a stultifying July morning to find that her husband of forty years has gone to get the paper and vanished, cleaning out his bank account along the way.
- Gretta’s three grown children converge on their parents’ home for the first time in years: Michael Francis, a history teacher whose marriage is failing.
- Monica, with two stepdaughters who despise her and a blighted past that has driven away the younger sister she once adored.
- Aoife, the youngest, now living in Manhattan, a smart, immensely resourceful young woman who has arranged her entire life to conceal a devastating secret.
O’Farrell writes with exceptional grace and sensitivity about marriage, about the mysteries that inhere within families, and the fault lines over which we build our lives—the secrets we hide from the people who know and love us best.
In a novel that stretches from the heart of London to New York City’s Upper West Side to a remote village on the coast of Ireland, O’Farrell paints a bracing portrait of a family falling apart and coming together with hard-won, life-changing truths about who they really are. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1972
• Where—Coleraine, Northern Ireland, UK
• Raised—Wales and Scotland, UK
• Education—Cambridge University
• Awards—Costa Award; Betty Trask Award; Somerset Maugham Award
• Currently—lives in London, England
Maggie O'Farrell is a British author of contemporary fiction, who was once featured in Waterstones' 25 Authors for the Future. It is possible to identify several common themes in her novels—the relationship between sisters is one, another is loss and the psychological impact of those losses on the lives of her characters.
The Vanishing Act Esme Lennox was published in 2007. In 2010 O'Farrell won the Costa novel award for The Hand That First Held Mine. Her 2013 novel, Instructions for a Heatwave, also received wide acclaim.
Maggie was born in Ireland and grew up in Wales and Scotland. At the age of eight she missed a year of school due to a viral infection, an event that is echoed in The Distance Between Us. Maggie worked as a journalist, both in Hong Kong and as the Deputy Literary Editor of The Independent on Sunday. She has also taught creative writing.
She is married to the novelist William Sutcliffe, whom she met at Cambridge. They live in Hampstead Heath, London, with their two children. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
[O'Farrell] has made her mark by combining the elements of good old-fashioned drama—love affairs in the shadows, the reappearance of long-lost relatives, hidden wives—with a modern lightness of touch in language and a deft freedom in moving her narratives forward through juxtaposition rather than linear plotting. For the reader, this can feel like having one’s cake and eating it too. O’Farrell’s novels appeal to a broad audience, but they’re also smart and provocative. Over and over, they try to work out who people really are, how ordinary lives can conceal extraordinary stories.
Stacey D'Erasmo - New York Times Book Review
Riveting.... Finely drawn... Once again, O’Farrell demonstrates her mastery at depicting strained relationships, skewed family loyalties, and the just reachable light at the end of the tunnel.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Acutely observed…revelatory, redemptive, and moving…There is a deliciousness to this novel, a warmth and readability that render it unputdownable and will surely make it a hit. O’Farrell has done it again.
Joanna Briscoe - Guardian (UK)
An accomplished and addictive story told with real humanity, warmth, and infectious love for the characters. Highly recommended,
Viv Groskop - Observer (UK)
A literary event…evocative, articulate, and joyously readable…O’Farrell’s talent for drawing intriguing but relatable characters is eclipsed only by a rare gift for description that is almost photographic in its imagery…An author at the top of her game.
Charlotte Heathcote - Sunday Express (UK)
Humorous, humane, and perceptive…O’Farrell depicts relationships with piercing acuity in haunting, intense prose…a deliciously insightful writer…Her sharp but humane eye dissects every form of human interaction.
Leyla Sanai - Independent on Sunday (UK)
Elegant, lyrical, and subtle…O’Farell’s a compassionate writer, showing us every member of the family from a variety of viewpoints, ensuring that we understand and feel for every one of them even as they drive each other mad…The Riordans will stay in your mind long after you finish reading this book. They’re funny, infuriating, and impossible not to love. They feel like family.
Anna Carey - Irish Times (UK)
Thoroughly absorbing and beautifully written…A novel about what we say and what other people hear; about families; what we don’t tell each other and what we do; the compromises and accommodations we make and what happens when we build our lives around half-truths.
Victoria Moore - Daily Mail (UK)
A ripping yarn…A brilliant domestic drama that teeters on the edge of being a thriller; it’ll hook you in at the start and keep you dangling.
Katie Law - Evening Standard (UK)
O’Farrell is adept at creating pace out of the intricacies of family relations. She keeps the gas up on the Bunsen burner throughout...I felt that I gobbled this book.
Vicky Allan - Herald (UK)
A rich, barbed interplay among siblings, who gibe, snap, and snipe as they go through their father's things, slowly teasing out one another's long-buried secrets—and a few of Gretta’s and Robert’s, too.
Entertainment Weekly
When Gretta Riordan's husband, Robert, disappears during the 1976 London heatwave, her three grown children return home for the first time in years.... [T]he siblings and their mother are forced to confront old resentments which bubble to the surface. O'Farrell skillfully navigates between past and present.... An absorbing read from start to finish, through O'Farrell's vibrant prose, each character comes alive as more is revealed and the novel unfolds.
Publishers Weekly
During an infamous heat wave in 1976 London, Robert Riordan fails to return after heading out to buy a newspaper, and wife Gretta calls in her grown children for help. Multi-award-winning O'Farrell should be a household name here.
Library Journal
A beautiful portrait of family life. The story really blossoms in the second half . . . where the family’s secrets and private feuds come raging forth so that the true healing can begin.
Booklist
An Irish family saga, replete with secrets, rivalries, and misbehavior becomes a compelling and entertaining story in Maggie O’Farrell’s hands.... O’Farrell takes readers on journeys interior and exterior—recounted in flawless prose that will have you reading while strap-hanging, standing in line, or waiting at a stop light.
Shelf Awareness
A sometimes-brooding but always sympathetic novel, by prize-winning British writer O'Farrell, of a family's struggles to overlook the many reasons why they should avoid each other's glances and phone calls.... [N]o one's quite normal, which is exactly as it is with every family on Earth.... O'Farrell paints a knowing, affectionate, sometimes exasperated portrait of these beleaguered people, who are bound by love, if a sometimes-wary love, but torn apart by misunderstanding, just like all the rest of us. A skillfully written novel of manners, with quiet domestic drama spiced with fine comic moments. The payoff is priceless, too.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The weather referenced in the novel’s title refers to the setting but also takes on symbolic or metaphorical significance. O’Farrell writes that “strange weather brings out strange behavior.... [People] start behaving...not so much out of character but deep within it” (p. 103). What does she mean by this? Where do we see examples of this among the characters? How does the heat enhance or mirror the psychological drama of the story?
2. Consider the various examples of siblings in the story. What are their relationships like? Are there many similarities among their relationships? Are the siblings very alike as characters? What problems or tensions are evident among them, and what causes this?
3. In the opening scenes of the book, O’Farrell creates a sense of the routine and the mundane through a description of Gretta’s and Robert’s daily habits. It creates a sense of domesticity, but how does this sense of the routine also heighten the feeling of alarm over Robert’s disappearance and affect our reaction to the revelations at the story’s end?
4. When we are introduced to Michael Francis, we find him thinking that “[h]e is, for a moment, exactly the person he is meant to be..... There is no difference...between the way the world might see him and the person he privately knows himself to be” (p. 13). What does the author mean by this? Where do we find discrepancies in the book between who a character really is and who others see the character to be? What causes this dissonance?
5. Examine the various representations of family and family structures in the book. Are they very similar? What does this tell us about marriage and family? About the characters? Most of the characters are, or have been, married. What were their reasons for marrying? How is marriage represented in the story? Are these unions mostly successful? What makes them successful or not?
6. Why is Michael Francis so upset by his wife’s haircut and enrollment in history classes?
7. Pregnancy and birth are recurring subjects in the book; the loss that can be associated with them is also explored. Evaluate the scenes that portray pregnancy and birth: Gretta’s births, Monica’s loss, Michael Francis’s children, and Aoife’s pregnancy. What message does the novel seem to present about birth?
8. Whose fault is it that Monica’s secret was found out? How did Monica respond to the secret being revealed to her husband? What is your reaction?
9. The characters reflect throughout the book on various events from their childhoods. What were some of the more memorable events, or events that had the greatest impact on them? What do these revelations seem to indicate about the impact of the past and its relationship to the present?
10. Consider the various conflicts in the novel. There is the problem of Robert’s disappearance, but other conflicts also begin to surface. Are these conflicts resolved? If so, how? How does the larger conflict unite or divide the characters? How does each character respond to conflict?
11. Evaluate the structure of the book. How does it accommodate point of view? Does any single standpoint dominate the story? How does this affect our response to the characters and our interpretation of the story? How would our understanding of the story have been different if it was told in only one point of view?
12. Evaluate the style of the book. Is O’Farrell’s language simple or difficult or complex? What about the sentence structures? How does her style of writing work to create a sense of portraiture, albeit with words?
13. Analyze O’Farrell’s use of flashbacks as a literary device. The characters are constantly recalling moments and events from the past. This allows us to know the unknowable. What insight does it give us into the characters? What does we learn about subjects such as memory, history, and truth?
14. Gretta tries to “keep Ireland alive” (p. 6) through trips to Ireland, Mass and communion, her cooking, and other customs. How do her children respond to her efforts? How does the book create a portrait of the complexities of tradition versus modernity? The characters are all living in different places–different countries, even. What might this say about contemporary living and the modern family?
15. Consider the sense of time in the book. The story takes place over only a few days, yet we get a sense of the entire history of each character from childhood to the present day. How does O’Farrell accomplish this?
16. Evaluate disappearance and estrangement as themes of the novel. While Mr. Riordan’s disappearance takes center stage, instances of disappearance and escape are not limited to his character. What other examples do we find in the novel? What causes these disappearances? What causes the divisions between the characters that grow into estrangement? How could this be helped?
17. What secrets do the characters keep from one another? Is one more surprising than another? If so, why? How do the characters react to the revelation of one another’s secrets?
18. Is Aoife’s disability identified? Why or why not? How does her disability affect how other characters perceive her? How does it affect her life? Does anyone try to help? How does it influence readers’ perception of her character?
19. What does the novel tell us about tragedy and the ways in which we face tragedies? Does each character respond in the same way? Does the way that the characters deal with tragedy change throughout the story?
20. How does this novel compare to O’Farrell’s other works? What are some of the recurring themes? Is their treatment similar? Are there recurring character types or plotlines?
(Questions by the publisher.)
The Interestings
Meg Wolitzer, 2013
Penguin Group USA
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594632341
Summary
From bestselling author Meg Wolitzer a dazzling, panoramic novel about what becomes of early talent, and the roles that art, money, and even envy can play in close friendships.
The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable. Decades later the bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. In The Interestings, Wolitzer follows these characters from the height of youth through middle age, as their talents, fortunes, and degrees of satisfaction diverge.
The kind of creativity that is rewarded at age fifteen is not always enough to propel someone through life at age thirty; not everyone can sustain, in adulthood, what seemed so special in adolescence. Jules Jacobson, an aspiring comic actress, eventually resigns herself to a more practical occupation and lifestyle. Her friend Jonah, a gifted musician, stops playing the guitar and becomes an engineer. But Ethan and Ash, Jules’s now-married best friends, become shockingly successful—true to their initial artistic dreams, with the wealth and access that allow those dreams to keep expanding. The friendships endure and even prosper, but also underscore the differences in their fates, in what their talents have become and the shapes their lives have taken.
Wide in scope, ambitious, and populated by complex characters who come together and apart in a changing New York City, The Interestings explores the meaning of talent; the nature of envy; the roles of class, art, money, and power; and how all of it can shift and tilt precipitously over the course of a friendship and a life (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 28. 1959
• Where—Brooklyn, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Brown University
• Awards—National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1994; Best
American Short Stories, 1999; Pushcart Prize; 1998
• Currently—New York, New York
Meg Wolitzer grew up around books. Her mother, Hilma Wolitzer, published two novels while Meg was still in school, and weekly trips to the library were a ritual the entire family looked forward to. Not surprisingly, Meg served as editor for her junior high and high school literary magazines.
She graduated from Brown University in 1981. One year later, she published her debut novel, Sleepwalking, the story of three college girls bonded by an unhealthy fascination with suicidal women poets. It marked the beginning of a successful writing career that shows no sign of slacking.
Over the years, Wolitzer has proven herself a deft chronicler of intense, unconventional relationships, especially among women. She has explored with wit and sensitivity the dynamics of fractured families (This Is Your Life, The Position); the devastating effects of death (Surrender, Dorothy), the challenges of friendship (Friends for Life), and the prospective minefield of gender, identity, and dashed expectations (Hidden Pictures, The Wife, The Ten-Year Nap, The Interestings).
In addition to her bestselling novels, Wolitzer has written a number of screenplays. Her short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize, and she has also taught writing at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and at Skidmore College.
Extras
From a Barnes & Noble interview:
• First of all, I am obsessed with playing Scrabble. It relaxes me between fits of writing, and I play online, in a bizarro world of anonymous, competitive players. It's my version of smoking or drinking—a guilty pleasure. The thing is, I love words, anagrams, wordplay, cryptic crossword puzzles, and anything to do with the language.
• I also love children's books, and feel a great deal of nostalgia for some of them from my own childhood (Harriet the Spy and The Phantom Tollbooth among others) as well as from my children's current lives. I have an idea for a kids' book that I might do someday, though right now my writing schedule is full up.
• Humor is very important to me in life and work. I take pleasure from laughing at movies, and crying at books, and sometimes vice versa. I also have recently learned that I like performing. I think that writers shouldn't get up at a reading and give a dull, chant-like reading from their book. They should perform; they should do what they need to do to keep readers really listening. I've lately had the opportunity to do some performing on public radio, as well as singing with a singer I admire, Suzzy Roche, formerly of the Roches, a great group that started in 1979. Being onstage provides a dose of gratification that most writers never get to experience.
• But mostly, writing a powerful novel—whether funny or serious, or of course both—is my primary goal. When I hear that readers have been affected by something I've written, it's a relief. I finally have come to no longer fear that I'm going to have to go to law school someday....
• When asked what book most influenced her career as a writer, here is her response:
Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell—this is the perfect modern novel. Short, concise, moving, and about a character you come to care about, despite her limitations. It reminds me of life. It takes place over a span of time, and it's hilarious, tragic, and always stirring.
Book Reviews
[The Interestings] soars, primarily because Wolitzer insists on taking our teenage selves seriously and, rather than coldly satirizing them, comes at them with warm humor and adult wisdom.
Elle
You’ll want to be friends with these characters long after you put down the book.
Marie Claire
[A] big, juicy novel.... Wolitzer’s finger is unerringly on the pulse of our social culture.
Readers Digest
In the “nefarious, thoroughly repulsive” summer of 1974, 15-year-old Julie Jacobson, “an outsider and possibly even a freak” from the suburbs, gets a scholarship to an arts camp and falls in with a group of kids—the aptly self-named “Interestings.” Talented, attractive, and from New York City, to Julie they are “like royalty and French movie stars.” There Julie, renamed Jules, finds her place, and Wolitzer her story: the gap between promise and genuine talent, the bonds and strains of long friendships, and the journey from youth to middle age, with all its compromises, secrets, lies, and disparities.... While Wolitzer is adept at switching between past and present, and showing the different fears that dog Jules at different ages, the problem is that the Interestings are never quite as interesting as this 464-page look at them requires them to be.
Publishers Weekly
Wolitzer's latest novel follows a group of creative types from the beginning of their friendship as teenagers through middle age. Hipsters before their time, they dub themselves The Interestings, in an effort at pretentious irony.... Verdict: The novel skips back and forth, revealing information about each member of the group and covering their triumphs and tragedies over the course of the years. Ultimately, the work hits its own ironic note: Julie's successful and creative friends are far more normal than she'd ever realized. This is certain to attract readers of literary and smart women's fiction. —Mara Dabrishus, Ursuline Coll. Lib., Pepper Pike, OH
Library Journal
Wolitzer follows a group of friends from adolescence at an artsy summer camp in 1974 through adulthood and into late-middle age as their lives alternately intersect, diverge and reconnect. Middle-class suburban Julie becomes Jules when a group of more sophisticated kids from Manhattan include her in their clique at Camp Spirit-in-the-Woods in upstate New York.... After this first idyllic summer, the novel cuts to 2009 when Jules, now living a modest middle-class life as a therapist married to a medical technician....tries not to envy her friend's success. Secrets are kept for decades among the six "Interestings"; resentments are nursed; loyalties are tested with mixed results. Ambitious and involving, capturing the zeitgeist of the liberal intelligentsia of the era.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Think about how talent is presented in the book. In your opinion, is it something you are born with or something you work hard to achieve? What is Meg Wolitzer saying about early talent? How is it important to future success? What roles do money and class play in fostering talent? Think about Jules and Ash. How does money influence the trajectories of their lives?
2. Jealousy is referred to in the book as being “I want what you have,” whereas envy is “I want what you have, but I also want to take it away so you can’t have it.” Who is jealous in this book? Who is envious? Can jealousy become envy? How is envy tied up in issues like talent and money?
3. Single parents, lost parents, and absent parents play a role in this novel. In what ways do the families the characters were born into shape their futures? Ash and Goodman are the only characters to come from an intact nuclear family that is able to provide for all their needs. Do you think this is necessarily a good thing for Goodman? What about Ash?
4. Despite the well–quoted sentiment that “you can’t go home again,” Jules tries to return to the place that felt like her spiritual, emotional, and artistic home. Are there circumstances in life in which you can go home again successfully? Is Jules foolish to give up her current life for something much more uncertain? What positive changes does the experience bring?
5. Despite how much she wants to, Jules cannot make herself fall in love with Ethan. Do you wish she were able to? Do you think Jules wishes she could? What about Ethan?
6. Ethan is one of the most noble characters in the book, and yet he has trouble reconciling his son’s condition and lies to Ash to avoid going to Mo’s evaluation. How does Ethan’s ambivalence about Mo change the way you feel about him? How do you feel about Jules’s complicity in his deception?
7. The shift from the seventies to the eighties to the current moment is an important one depicted in the book. What do you think Meg Wolitzer is trying to say about art and how art is sold? How does the commoditization of art change the role of the artist? Was the art of the seventies as pure as it seemed to the creators? The Wunderlichs remain true to an even earlier version of what art should be. What are the positives of that vision? What are its limits?
8. What role does geography play in the book? Think about the different spaces and homes represented: Manhattan, Underhill, Spirit–in–the–Woods. What do they say about the people who live in them? Think about Jules’s own feelings about her mother’s home in Underhill compared with the Wolfs’ home in Manhattan. What do those two spaces mean to her?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Interpretation of Murder
Jed Rubenfeld, 2006
Macmillan Picador
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312427054
Summary
National Bestseller The Interpretation of Murder opens on a hot summer night in 1909 as Sigmund Freud disembarks in New York from a steamship. With Freud is his rival Carl Jung; waiting for him on the docks is a young physician named Stratham Younger, one of Freud's most devoted American supporters. So begins this story of what will be the great genius's first—and last—journey to America.
The morning after his arrival, a beautiful young woman is found dead in an apartment in one of the city's grand new skyscrapers, The Balmoral. The next day brings a similar crime in a townhouse on Gramercy Park. Only this time the young heiress, Nora Acton, escapes with her life—but with no memory of the attack. Asked to consult on the case, Dr. Younger calls on Freud to guide him through the girl's analysis. Their investigation, and the pursuit of the culprit, lead throughout New York, from the luxurious ballrooms of the Waldorf-Astoria, to the skyscrapers rising on seemingly every street corner, to the bottom of the East River, where laborers are digging through the silt to build the foundation of the Manhattan Bridge.
Drawing on Freud's case histories, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and the historical details of a city on the brink of modernity, The Interpretation of Murder introduces a brilliant new storyteller who, in the words of the New York Times, "will be no ordinary pop cultural sensation. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1959
• Where—Washington, D.C., USA
• Education—B.A., J.D., Harvard University
• Currently—lives in New Haven, Connecticut
Jed Rubenfeld, (born 1959 in Washington, D.C.), is the Robert R. Slaughter Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He is an expert on constitutional law, privacy, and the First Amendment. He joined the Yale Law School faculty in 1990 and was appointed to a full professorship in 1994. Rubenfeld has also taught as a visiting professor at both the Stanford Law School and the Duke University School of Law. He is also the author of two novels and a nonfiction work, co-authored with his wife, Amy Chu.
Education
Rubenfeld was a summa cum laude graduate of Princeton University (A.B., 1980) and a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School (J.D., 1986). He also studied theater in the Drama Division of the Juilliard School between 1980-1982. Rubenfeld clerked for Judge Joseph T. Sneed on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in 1986-1987.
After his clerkship, he worked as an associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz and as an assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York.
Books
2001 - Freedom and Time: A Theory of Constitutional Self-Government
2005 - Revolution by Judiciary: The Structure of American Constitutional Law
2006 - The Interpretation of Murder, a novel
2010 - The Death Instinct, a novel
2014 - The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of
Cultural Groups in America (with Amy Chua)
Personal
Rubenfeld is Jewish. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut and is married to Yale Law School professor Amy Chua, author of several nonfiction works, the most well-known of which is her 2011 memoir on parenting, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011). They have two daughters. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/18/2014.)
Book Reviews
As The Interpretation of Murder races past ravished damsels, sinister aristocrats, architectural marvels (the building of the Manhattan Bridge), hysterical symptoms, a Hamlet-Freud nexus and downright criminal wordplay ("there are more things in heaven and earth, Herr Professor, than are dreamt in your psychology"; "sometimes a catarrh, I’m afraid, is only a catarrh"), it cobbles together its own brand of excitement. That excitement is as palpable as it is peculiar. In a book that pays too much homage to contemporary suspense templates, there are still deep reserves of insight, data, wit and anecdote upon which the author ingeniously draws.
Janet Maslin - The New York Times
Turning a psychological thriller with a cast that includes Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and several important American politicians and millionaires from a rich textual experience to a gripping and exciting audio event requires a reader with many skills. Heyborne knows how to use just his voice to bring a variety of nationalities and social classes to life. He can catch the inherent smartness of a working-class detective in a phrase, and can as quickly mark a pioneering medical examiner as a dangerous crank. But where he really succeeds is in the three very different psychoanalysts who move Rubenfeld's story of murder and psychosis down its distinctive road. Heyborne's Freud is an all-too-human man of obvious charm and originality; Freud's disciple Jung is cold, calculating and obviously envious; and fictional narrator Dr. Stratham Younger is a bright and admiring early Freudian who is also somewhat skeptical about some of the Viennese master's theories. This goes a long way in easing listeners through some of Rubenfeld's longer monologues about life and architecture in New York in 1909-passages that readers had the option of skimming without missing any vital nuances.
Publishers Weekly
This is a gloriously intelligent exploration of what might have happened to Sigmund Freud during his only visit to America. The tortured body of a young society woman is found in a posh New York apartment in the summer of 1909. A day later, beautiful Nora Acton is found with similar marks, only she has managed to survive the brutal attack. Freud, en route with Carl Jung to a speaking engagement in Boston, finds himself drawn into the investigation. He asks an American colleague to psychoanalyze Nora, who has repressed all memory of the attack. Meanwhile, a determined if inexperienced police detective follows another trail. Can Freud and his fellow psychoanalysts find the killer before he strikes again? Filled with period detail, this historical thriller challenges the reader to reason out the mystery. Rubenfeld (law, Yale Univ.; Revolution by Judiciary: The Structure of American Constitutional Law) shows great talent for psychological suspense and uses shifting viewpoints to build tension. Fans of Caleb Carr will adore this work. Given the publicity planned, it is highly recommended for all fiction collections. —Laurel Bliss, Princeton Univ. Lib., NJ
Library Journal
Sigmund Freud and friends play Sherlock Holmes in an Alienist-style historical murder mystery. Human monsters stalk the teeming streets of early-20th-century New York City in Rubenfeld's ambitious debut. A sadist is assaulting rich society girls with whips and blades. Is the villain unscrupulous, wealthy entrepreneur George Banwell, who is mean to his horses and denies his gorgeous wife sexual intercourse because pregnancy would ruin her figure? Is it mysterious William Leon of Chinatown, in whose room one of the corpses is found? Or could Harry Thaw, notorious murderer of Stanford White, be slipping out from Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane? Freud, making his only visit to America, to lecture at Clark University, is in New York with a group of colleagues. Among them is one who seems crazy enough to be another murder suspect: Carl Jung. Carl has violent mood swings, carries a pocket revolver, lies about his ancestors and believes that he can hear supernatural voices. Freud's cohorts also include Dr. Stratham Younger, an American psychoanalyst given the job of analyzing lovely 17-year-old Nora Acton, who has survived an attack by the sex maniac but can't remember anything about it. Into this already-teeming stew, the author tosses a group of powerful grandees scheming to ruin Freud's visit and reputation, political corruption, the plight of the working poor, the coming psychological revolution, Oedipus, Hamlet and much more. Rubenfeld tends to slice and splice his chapters in cinematic fashion; Younger's first-person narration repeatedly jars with the remainder of the book's third-person perspective, often spoiling the buildup of tension. Other weaknesses include the author's failure to establish exactly who the central character is. Eventually, relying heavily on bait-and-switch, the story reaches its conclusion, giving Freud the last, prophetic word. Meaty and provocative, though also grandiose and calculated.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Discss the use of the title, The Interpretation of Murder.
2. The author’s portrayal of women is noteworthy: Is Nora still a victim when she is empowered by a sympathetic listener? What are Clara’s motives for the events in the novel? How is Betty the maid, Susie Merrill, and Greta depicted? Do these characters reflect the turn-of-the-century society, or do they represent a more timeless portrayal of women?
3. Dr. Stratham Younger, a thirty-three-year-old Harvard graduate who teaches at Clark University and who is the narrator of the book, insisted at age seventeen that all great art and scientific discoveries were made at or near the turn of a century (Michelangelo’s David- 1501; Cervantes’s Don Quixote-1604; Beethoven’s symphonies-1800; Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams-1900, etc.) Discuss this phenomenon.
4. Is Younger the right man for the job of trying to unravel the attempted murder of Nora? Discuss psychoanalysis versus interrogation.
5. Consider the role of class conflict in the book: Jung’s feelings of shame over his obvious wealth; Jung versus Freud; Acton versus Banwell; Chong versus Leon; Malley and Betty, etc.
6. What role does psychological transference and sexual attraction play in the book?
7. Younger asks, “How can human beings be loved if we carry within such repugnant desires?” Freud thinks that Nora wants to sodomize her father. Is this ultimately true?
8. Discuss the author’s mix of fact and fiction. How has this device been used in previous New York novels, such as The Alienist, Ragtime, Dreamland: A Novel, Paradise Alley, etc.
9. Younger is obsessed with solving the riddle of Hamlet in the book. Discuss his analysis of “to be or not to be” in terms of Freudian/Oedipal theories. What does Younger finally decide? Is this the correct interpretation?
10. Younger says, “Some people feel a need to bring about the very thing that will most torment them.” How does this describe the characters in the book?
11. When he boards the ship back to Europe, Freud says that “America is a mistake.... A gigantic mistake.” What does he mean?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Interpreter of Maladies
Jhumpa Lahiri, 1999
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
208 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780395927205
Summary
Winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Hemingway Award
Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. In "A Temporary Matter," published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant. She is an important and powerful new voice. (From the publisher.)
More
Maladies both accurately diagnosed and misinterpreted, matters both temporary and life changing, relationships in flux and unshakeable, unexpected blessings and sudden calamities, and the powers of survival—these are among the themes of Jhumpa Lahiri's extraordinary, Pulitzer Prize-winning debut collection of stories. Traveling from India to New England and back again, Lahiri charts the emotional voyages of characters seeking love beyond the barriers of nations, cultures, religions, and generations. Imbued with the sensual details of both Indian and American cultures, they also speak with universal eloquence and compassion to everyone who has ever felt like an outsider. Like the interpreter of the title story—which was selected for both the O. Henry Award and The Best American Short Stories—Lahiri translates between the ancient traditions of her ancestors and the sometimes baffling prospects of the New World. Including three stories first published in The New Yorker, Interpreter of Maladies introduces, in the words of Frederick Busch, "a writer with a steady, penetrating gaze. Lahiri honors the vastness and variousness of the world." Amy Tan concurs: "Lahiri is one of the finest short story writers I’ve read." (Also from the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 11, 1967
• Where—London, England, UK
• Raised—Kingston, Rhode Island, USA
• Education—B.A., Barnard College; 2 M.A's., M.F.A., and
Ph.D., Boston University
• Awards—Pulitizer Prize (see more below)
• Currently—lives in Rome, Italy
Jhumpa Lahiri is an Indian American author. Lahiri's debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and her first novel, The Namesake (2003), was adapted into the popular film of the same name.She was born Nilanjana Sudeshna but goes by her nickname Jhumpa. Lahiri is a member of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, appointed by U.S. President Barack Obama.
Biography
Lahiri was born in London, the daughter of Indian immigrants from the state of West Bengal. Her family moved to the United States when she was two; Lahiri considers herself an American, having said, "I wasn't born here, but I might as well have been." Lahiri grew up in Kingston, Rhode Island, where her father Amar Lahiri works as a librarian at the University of Rhode Island; he is the basis for the protagonist in "The Third and Final Continent," the closing story from Interpreter of Maladies. Lahiri's mother wanted her children to grow up knowing their Bengali heritage, and her family often visited relatives in Calcutta (now Kolkata).
When she began kindergarten in Kingston, Rhode Island, Lahiri's teacher decided to call her by her pet name, Jhumpa, because it was easier to pronounce than her "proper names". Lahiri recalled, "I always felt so embarrassed by my name.... You feel like you're causing someone pain just by being who you are." Lahiri's ambivalence over her identity was the inspiration for the ambivalence of Gogol, the protagonist of her novel The Namesake, over his unusual name. Lahiri graduated from South Kingstown High School and received her B.A. in English literature from Barnard College in 1989.
Lahiri then received multiple degrees from Boston University: an M.A. in English, M.F.A. in Creative Writing, M.A. in Comparative Literature, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. She took a fellowship at Provincetown's Fine Arts Work Center, which lasted for the next two years (1997–1998). Lahiri has taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design.
In 2001, Lahiri married Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, a journalist who was then Deputy Editor and now Senior Editor of Time Latin America. The couple lives in Rome, Italy with their two children.
Literary career
Lahiri's early short stories faced rejection from publishers "for years." Her debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, was finally released in 1999. The stories address sensitive dilemmas in the lives of Indians or Indian immigrants, with themes such as marital difficulties, miscarriages, and the disconnection between first and second generation United States immigrants. Lahiri later wrote,
When I first started writing I was not conscious that my subject was the Indian-American experience. What drew me to my craft was the desire to force the two worlds I occupied to mingle on the page as I was not brave enough, or mature enough, to allow in life.
The collection was praised by American critics, but received mixed reviews in India, where reviewers were alternately enthusiastic and upset Lahiri had "not paint[ed] Indians in a more positive light." However, according to Md. Ziaul Haque, a poet, columnist, scholar, researcher and a faculty member at Sylhet International University, Bangladesh,
But, it is really painful for any writer living far away in a new state, leaving his/her own homeland behind; the motherland, the environment, people, culture etc. constantly echo in the writer’s (and of course anybody else’s) mind. So, the manner of trying to imagine and describe about the motherland and its people deserves esteem. I think that we should coin a new term, i.e. “distant-author” and add it to Lahiri’s name since she, being a part of another country, has taken the help of "imagination" and depicted her India the way she has wanted to; the writer must have every possible right to paint the world the way he/she thinks appropriate.
Interpreter of Maladies sold 600,000 copies and received the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (only the seventh time a story collection had won the award).
In 2003, Lahiri published The Namesake, her first novel. The story spans over thirty years in the life of the Ganguli family. The Calcutta-born parents emigrated as young adults to the United States, where their children, Gogol and Sonia, grow up experiencing the constant generational and cultural gap with their parents. A film adaptation of The Namesake was released in 2007, directed by Mira Nair and starring Kal Penn as Gogol and Bollywood stars Tabu and Irrfan Khan as his parents. Lahiri herself made a cameo as "Aunt Jhumpa".
Lahiri's second collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, was released in 2008. Upon its publication, Unaccustomed Earth achieved the rare distinction of debuting at number 1 on the New York Times best seller list. The Times Book Review editor, Dwight Garner, wrote, "It’s hard to remember the last genuinely serious, well-written work of fiction — particularly a book of stories — that leapt straight to No. 1; it’s a powerful demonstration of Lahiri’s newfound commercial clout."
Her fourth book and second movel, The Lowland, was published in 2013, again to wide acclaim. The story of two Indian born brothers who take different paths in life, it was placed on the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize.
Lahiri has also had a distinguished relationship with The New Yorker magazine in which she has published a number of her short stories, mostly fiction, and a few non-fiction including "The Long Way Home; Cooking Lessons," a story about the importance of food in Lahiri's relationship with her mother.
Since 2005, Lahiri has been a Vice President of the PEN American Center, an organization designed to promote friendship and intellectual cooperation among writers. In 2010, she was appointed a member of the Committee on the Arts and Humanities, along with five others.
Literary focus
Lahiri's writing is characterized by her "plain" language and her characters, often Indian immigrants to America who must navigate between the cultural values of their homeland and their adopted home. Lahiri's fiction is autobiographical and frequently draws upon her own experiences as well as those of her parents, friends, acquaintances, and others in the Bengali communities with which she is familiar. Lahiri examines her characters' struggles, anxieties, and biases to chronicle the nuances and details of immigrant psychology and behavior.
Unaccustomed Earth departs from this earlier original ethos as Lahiri's characters embark on new stages of development. These stories scrutinize the fate of the second and third generations. As succeeding generations become increasingly assimilated into American culture and are comfortable in constructing perspectives outside of their country of origin, Lahiri's fiction shifts to the needs of the individual. She shows how later generations depart from the constraints of their immigrant parents, who are often devoted to their community and their responsibility to other immigrants.
Television
Lahiri worked on the third season of the HBO television program In Treatment. That season featured a character named Sunil, a widower who moves to the United States from Bangladesh and struggles with grief and with culture shock. Although she is credited as a writer on these episodes, her role was more as a consultant on how a Bengali man might perceive Brooklyn.
Awards
• 1993 – TransAtlantic Award from the Henfield Foundation
• 1999 – O. Henry Award for short story "Interpreter of Maladies"
• 1999 – PEN/Hemingway Award (Best Fiction Debut of the Year) for "Interpreter of Maladies"
• 1999 – "Interpreter of Maladies" selected as one of Best American Short Stories
• 2000 – Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
• 2000 – "The Third and Final Continent" selected as one of Best American Short Stories
• 2000 – The New Yorker's Best Debut of the Year for "Interpreter of Maladies"
• 2000 – Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her debut "Interpreter of Maladies"
• 2002 – Guggenheim Fellowship
• 2002 – "Nobody's Business" selected as one of Best American Short Stories
• 2008 – Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award for "Unaccustomed Earth"
• 2009 – Asian American Literary Award for "Unaccustomed Earth"
(Author bio from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/12/13.)
Book Reviews
[Lahiri] announces herself as a wonderfully distinctive new voice.... [She] chronicles her characters' lives with both objectivity and compassion while charting the emotional temperature of their lives with tactile precision. She is a writer of uncommon elegance and poise...a precocious debut.
Michiko Kakutani - The New York Times
Her subject is not love's failure...but the opportunity that an artful spouse (like an artful writer) can make of failure.... She breathes unpredictable life into the page, and the reader finishes each story reseduced, wishing he could spend a whole novel with its characters. There is nothing accidental about her success; her plots are as elegantly constructed as a fine proof in mathematics.
Caleb Crain - The New York Times Book Review
Dazzling writing, an easy-to-carry paperback format and a budget-respecting price tag of $12: Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies possesses these three qualities, making it my book of choice this summer every time someone asks for a recommendation.... Simply put, Lahiri displays a remarkable maturity and ability to imagine other lives....[E]ach story offers something special. Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies will reward readers.
USA Today
Lahiri's language is uncluttered; she's sparing with metaphor, and the riches accumulate unobtrusively.
Laura Shapiro - Newsweek
There is not one false note here, not one misstep or hestiation.... [E]ach of these nine stories has the capacity to amaze us.... "In Lahiri's sympathetic tales, the pang of disappointment turns into a sudden hunger to know more.... Lahiri's achievement is something like Twinkle's. She breathes unpredictable life into the page, and the reader finishes each story reseduced, wishing he could spend a whole novel with its characters. There is nothing accidental about her success; her plots are as elegantly constructed as a fine proof in mathematics. To use the word Sanjeev eventually applies to Twinkle, Lahiri is 'wow.'"
Book Magazine
India is an inescapable presence in this strong first collection's nine polished and resonant tales, most of which have appeared in The New Yorker and other publications. Lahiri, who was born in London and grew up in Rhode Island, offers stories that stress the complex mechanics of adjustment to new circumstances, relationships, and cultures. Sometimes they're narrated by outside observers like the flatmates of an "excited" (presumably epileptic) young woman "cured" by "relations" with men (in "The Treatment of Bibi Haldar"); the preadolescent American schoolboy cared for at "Mrs. Sen's," where the eponymous immigrant is tortured by the pressure of adapting to American ways; or, most compellingly, the Indian-American girl emotionally touched and subtly matured by the kindness her parents show to a Pakistani friend who fears for the safety of his family back home amid civil war ("When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine"). Richly detailed portrayals of young marriages dominate tales like that of an Indian emigrant's oddly fulfilling relationship with his landlady, a bellicose centenarian ("The Third and Final Continent"); "This Blessed House," in which the wedge afflicting a young couple is widened when they discover "Christian paraphernalia" left behind by their home's former owners; and "A Temporary Matter," which delicately traces how a pair of academics, continually mourning their stillborn baby, find in "an exchange of confessions" a renewal of their intimacy. Lahiri is equally skilled with more sophisticated plots, as in her title story's seriocomic disclosure of a middle-aged tour guide's self-delusive romance, or in the complexity of "Sexy," about a young American woman who's fascinated not only by her married Bengali lover but by all other things Indian—including the manner in which she is and isn't deflected from her passion by an afternoon with an Indian boy victimized by his own father's infidelity. Moving and authoritative pictures of culture shock and displaced identity.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What kinds of marriage are presented in the stories? One reviewer has written that Lahiri's "subject is not love's failure,...but the opportunity that an artful spouse (like an artful writer) can make of failure..." Do you agree or disagree with that assessment?
2. Lahiri has said, "As a storyteller, I'm aware that there are limitations in communication." What importance in the stories do miscommunication and unexpressed feelings have?
3. In "When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine," what does the ten-year-old Lilia learn about the differences between life in suburban America and life in less stable parts of the world? What does she learn about the personal consequences of those differences?
4. For Mrs. Sen, "Everything is there" (that is, in India). What instances are there in these stories of exile, estrangement, displacement, and marginality—both emotional, and cultural?
5. What characterizes the sense of community in both the stories set in India and stories set in the U.S.? What maintains that sense, and what disrupts it?
6. Another reviewer has written, "Food in these stories is a talisman, a reassuring bit of the homeland to cling to." How do food and meal preparation maintain links to the characters’ homelands? What other talismans—items of clothing, for example—act as "reassuring bits of the homeland"?
7. The narrator of "The Third and Final Continent" ends his account with the statement, "Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept." In what ways are Lahiri's characters bewildered?
8. What are the roles and significance of routine and ritual in the stories? What are the rewards and drawbacks of maintaining long-established routines and ritual?
9. In "Interpreter of Maladies," Mr. Kapasi finds it hard to believe of Mr. and Mrs. Das that "they were regularly responsible for anything other than themselves." What instances of selfishness or self-centeredness do you find in these stories?
10. In "Interpreter of Maladies," visitors to Konarak find the Chandrabhaga River dried up, and they can no longer enter the Temple of the Sun, "for it had filled with rubble long ago..." What other instances and images does Lahiri present of the collapse, deterioration, or passing of once-important cultural or spiritual values?
11. What does Mrs. Sen mean when, looking at the traffic that makes "her English falter," she says to Eliot, "Everyone, this people, too much in their world"? What circumstances of life in both America and India account for people being "too much in their world"?
12. Rather than leave his weekly rent on the piano, the narrator of "The Third and Final Continent" hands it to Mrs. Croft. What similar small acts of kindness, courtesy, concern, or compassion make a difference in people's lives?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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The Intersect
Brad Graber, 2016
Dark Victory Press
460 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780997604207
Summary
Set against Arizona’s political and cultural vortex at the start of 2010, The Intersect explores the issues of the day by weaving together the lives of disparate characters striving to survive in a world where the strongest link, and most lasting connection, is made among strangers.
When Dave and Charlie relocate from the Bay Area to Phoenix, tensions ratchet up in their relationship as Charlie insists on buying a house on the grounds of the Arizona Biltmore as Dave contemplates leaving his job.
Daisy, a spry septuagenarian, shows up at their front door after a long convalescence, unaware that her greedy, Michigan relatives, Jack and Enid, have already sold her home. Charlie assumes the older woman is Dave’s distant aunt and happily ushers her into a guest room.
Meanwhile, across town, Anna, a gifted psychic who channels the dead, is concerned about her neighborhood. She hires a handyman to install motion-detectors, unaware that Ernie has entered the United States illegally from Mexico as a child.
When Henry, a homeless gay teen, attempts to rob Anna, Ernie intervenes and a melee ensues. The police mistakenly arrest Ernie, leading to his deportation. And so begins The Intersect as relationships unravel, secrets are revealed, love blossoms, and injustice leads to a thrilling climax. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., State University of New York-Buffalo; M.H.A., Washington University
• Currently—lives in Phoenix, Arizona
Brad Graber was born and raised in New York City. He obtained a B.A. in Biology from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and an M.H.A. from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.
As a healthcare executive, Brad has held a number of management positions over the years. He’s lived in Highland Park, a suburb of Chicago; West Bloomfield, a suburb of Detroit; and Mill Valley, a suburb of San Francisco. Brad currently resides in Phoenix on the grounds of the Arizona Biltmore with his long-term spouse and their dog Charlie.
Brad is formerly a Fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives and Certified Medical Executive through Medical Group Management Association. He no longer works in healthcare though he does continue to actively volunteer with local non-profit organizations.
He is currently working with Duet, transporting seniors to their medical appointments. He also takes a blind senior grocery shopping every two weeks. The Intersect is Brad’s debut novel.
Visit the author's website.
Book Reviews
For additional reviews, see Amazon Customer reviews.
Beautifully told by Brad Graber...I found myself thinking that I was one of the characters and interacting with those around me. It was really only when I closed the book that I really realized that I had only been reading.
Reviews by Amos Lassen
Discussion Questions
1. Why do you think the author named the novel The Intersect?
2. Were you surprised by the turn in Charlie and Dave’s relationship? What clues did the author provide along the way? What challenges do you think couples face as they go through a major life change? Do you think these stresses are experienced differently by gay and straight couples?
3. How did Charlie and Dave’s personality traits contribute to their relationship issues? Did you find it enlightening to have a glimpse into a gay relationship? Was there anything about that relationship which surprised you?
4. When Daisy breaks a hip, she finds herself struggling, afraid of becoming a permanent resident of a long-term care facility. What key factors make Daisy most vulnerable? How have her choices led to her present circumstances? How does she overcome these choices? Are there seniors living in your community who might be at-risk for experiences similar to Daisy’s? Are you aware of the support services that reach out to isolated seniors?
5. Jack and Enid are new to Arizona. How are the tensions in their marriage manifested in their relationship? Are these tensions the same for Charlie and Dave? What is the difference between these two couples and how they approach life together?
6. Jack struggles to see clearly what is happening to Daisy. How does this parallel his struggles? How do his experiences with Enid, Daisy, and Bonnie move his character along an arc of growth? Is Jack a victim or merely ignorant?
7. Bonnie has a pattern of failed relationships. What characteristics does she possess that explain her inability to connect? Do you think she’s like many women in their late-thirties who are career-driven and remain unmarried or in unattached relationships? What will it take to get Bonnie to make a commitment to a relationship?
8. Anna opens her heart to Henry, yet later in the novel, remains in Mexico with Ernie. Do you think she’s abandoned Henry? How can you explain this conflict in her character? Why does she remain unaware of Henry’s challenges?
9. There are clues throughout the novel about Ernie and his background. Did you catch them? Did you feel empathy for Ernie? Were you surprised by the final twist? What do you think the author is saying about undocumented immigrants who are raised in the United States?
10. The author shares the backstory on many of the characters in the novel. Whose backstory did you find the most compelling—Enid’s, Ernie’s, Daisy’s, or Jack’s childhood? How did their childhoods contribute to each character’s experience as an adult?
11. Henry struggles with his identity. Have you known a family that has trouble accepting their gay child? What about Henry’s struggle keeps him from sharing with Anna? What is it about Henry that makes him particularly vulnerable?
12. At the end of the novel, Charlie and Dave’s dynamic changes. Do you think it takes a trauma before we shift how we think about the direction of our own life?
13. Which character most closely touched your heart? Which character reminded you of someone in your own life? Which character would you have liked to learn more about?
14. The novel is set in Phoenix. What was your impression of Arizona before reading the book? Has that impression changed? Has the book made you want to visit Phoenix?
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Into the Beautiful North
Luis Alberto Urrea, 2009
Little, Brown & Co.
338 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316025263
Summary
Nineteen-year-old Nayeli works at a taco shop in her Mexican village and dreams about her father, who journeyed to the US to find work. Recently, it has dawned on her that he isn't the only man who has left town.
In fact, there are almost no men in the village—they've all gone north. While watching The Magnificent Seven, Nayeli decides to go north herself and recruit seven men—her own "Siete Magníficos"—to repopulate her hometown and protect it from the bandidos who plan on taking it over.
Filled with unforgettable characters and prose as radiant as the Sinaloan sun, Into the Beautiful North is the story of an irresistible young woman's quest to find herself on both sides of the fence. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1955
• Where—Tiujana, Mexico
• Education—B.A., University of California, San Diego;
University of Colorado, Boulder (graduate work)
• Awards—American Book Award, Christopher Award, Lannan
Literary Award, Pulitizer Prize (nonfiction); Latino Literature
Hall of Fame
• Currently—lives in Naperville, Illinois, USA
Luis Alberto Urrea, 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for nonfiction and member of the Latino Literature Hall of Fame, is a prolific and acclaimed writer who uses his dual-culture life experiences to explore greater themes of love, loss and triumph.
Born in Tijuana, Mexico to a Mexican father and an American mother, Urrea has published extensively in all the major genres and is currently published by Little, Brown and Company.
The critically acclaimed author of 11 books, Urrea is an award-winning poet and essayist. The Devil's Highway, his 2004 non-fiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, won the 2004 Lannan Literary Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Pacific Rim Kiriyama Prize. A national best-seller, The Devil's Highway was also named a best book of the year by the Los Angeles Times, the Miami Herald, the Chicago Tribune, the Kansas City Star and many other publications.
Urrea's first book, Across the Wire, was named a New York Times Notable Book and won the Christopher Award. Urrea also won a 1999 American Book Award for his memoir, Nobody's Son: Notes from an American Life and in 2000, he was voted into the Latino Literature Hall of Fame following the publication of Vatos. His book of short stories, Six Kinds of Sky, was named the 2002 small-press Book of the Year in fiction by the editors of ForeWord magazine. He has also won a Western States Book Award in poetry for The Fever of Being and was in The 1996 Best American Poetry collection.
Urrea's 2005 book, The Hummingbird's Daughter, is the culmination of 20 years of research and writing. The historical novel tells the story of Teresa Urrea, sometimes known as The Saint of Cabora and the Mexican Joan of Arc.
Urrea attended the University of California at San Diego, earning an undergraduate degree in writing, and did his graduate studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
Extras
• After serving as a relief worker in Tijuana and a film extra and columnist-editor-cartoonist for several publications, Urrea moved to Boston where he taught expository writing and fiction workshops at Harvard. He has also taught at Massachusetts Bay Community College and the University of Colorado and he was the writer in residence at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette.
• Urrea's other titles include By the Lake of Sleeping Children, In Search of Snow, Ghost Sickness and Wandering Time. His writing has won an American Book Award, a Western States Book Award, a Colorado Center for the Book Award and a Christopher Award. The Devil's Highway has been optioned for a film by CDI Producciones.
Urrea lives with his family in Naperville, IL, where he is a professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Deliciously composed.... [Urrea writes] in a sweet but serious style.... You find it in the dialogue...[and] in the description of the countryside.... The plot gathers as much strength as the prose.
Alan Cheuse - Chicago Tribune
Awash in a subtle kind of satire.... As a funny and poignant impossible journey,...Into the Beautiful North is a refreshing antidote to all the negativity currently surrounding Mexico.
Roberto Ontiveros - Dallas Morning News
A wonderful comic satire.... Urrea uses a breathtaking Mexican magical realism to construct a shimmering portrait of the United States.
Denver Post
"[A] wondrous yarn in the hands of a terrific storyteller.... Urrea's meticulous detail makes the story come to life.... Not to trivialize, but these characters cry out for a sequel—maybe a telenovela?—They are too good for just a single outing.
Valerie Ryan - Seattle Times
Nayeli, the Taqueria worker of Urrea's fine new novel (after The Hummingbird's Daughter), is a young woman in the poor but tight-knit coastal Mexican town of Tres Camarones who spends her days serving tacos and helping her feisty aunt Irma get elected as the town's first female mayor. Abandoned by her father who headed north for work years before, Nayeli is hit with the realization that her hometown is all but abandoned by men, leaving it at the mercy of drug gangsters. So Nayeli hatches an elaborate scheme inspired by The Magnificent Seven: with three friends, she heads north to find seven Mexican men and smuggle them back into Mexico to protect the town. What she discovers along the way, of course, surprises her. Urrea's poetic sensibility and journalistic eye for detail in painting the Mexican landscape and sociological complexities create vivid, memorable scenes. Though the Spanglish can be tough for the uninitiated to detangle, the colorful characters, strong narrative and humor carry this surprisingly uplifting and very human story.
Publishers Weekly
"Perhaps it is time for a new kind of femininity," declares Nayeli, the 19-year-old heroine of this engaging postglobalization immigration story from the author of The Hummingbird's Daughter. Nayeli's small village in the Sinaloa region of Mexico has been drained of its adult males, including her father, by the promise of El Norte, and taken over by some shadowy gangsters. Inspired by a screening of The Magnificent Seven at the local cinema, Nayeli decides to journey north herself, not to seek her fortune in "Los Yunaites" but to bring back some of the men who have abandoned their families and their country, thereby saving her beloved town. It would be hard to go wrong with such a premise, and Urrea rises to the occasion with a surprising, inventive, and very funny novel populated by an array of quirky characters. His fast-paced, accessible style has the crossover appeal of a John Steinbeck or Cormac McCarthy, while the politically charged undercurrent of the novel pulses with a compassionate vision of the future. Highly recommended.
Forest Turner - Library Journal
Three Mexican senoritas cross the border with a gay escort in this good-humored road novel from Urrea (The Hummingbird's Daughter, 2005, etc.). The coastal town of Tres Camarones has gone from sleepy to desolate since its men went north to "Los Yunaites," looking for work. Luckily there are two strong women in town. Middle-aged Irma, a no-nonsense former bowling champion, is running for mayor. Her niece Nayeli, a dark-skinned beauty one year out of high school, is her campaign manager. Nayeli misses her father, one of the migrants, and treasures his one postcard, from Kankakee, Ill. After Irma is elected, Nayeli turns her attention to the crime wave she sees coming-though all we've been shown are two out-of-luck drug dealers. Inspired by a screening of The Magnificent Seven at the Cine Pedro Infante, she decides to head north and bring back Mexican cops or soldiers to help her deal with the bandidos. Joining Nayeli in her quest are Yolo and Vampi, her "homegirls," and Tacho, gay owner of La Mano Ca'da Taquer'a and Internet cafe. The premise is weak, and Urrea keeps everything cartoon simple so he can get his show on the road. The town takes up a collection and gives the girls a big send-off. In Tijuana, Nayeli fights off some bad guys before being befriended by At-miko, ersatz warrior and authentic trash-picker, who insists on joining their mission. Using tunnels, they cross the border successfully on their second attempt. (This is well-covered ground for Urrea: See his nonfiction border trilogy, beginning with Across the Wire, 1992.) In a silly bit of farce, Tacho is arrested as a suspected al-Qaeda member. Meanwhile, the ladies spend time in San Diego. Their recruiting goes well. Yolo and Vampi find boyfriends. Nayeli, still single, goes back on the road with the liberated Tacho. They are heading for Illinois, her father's putative home, but the momentum has been lost and the ending is a fizzle. Minor work from a writer who has done much better.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Into the Beautiful North tells the exceptional story of a small group’s successful mission to save their village in its bleakest hour. What are some of the other themes that Luis Alberto Urrea unpacks along the way?
2. Language and dialect play an integral role in the novel’s style. Spanish words and phonetic spellings are laced throughout, and Spanglish and slang are used on both sides of the border. What does Urrea achieve by mixing language in this way? What does it say about the ability of language to bridge—or not to bridge—cultural gaps?
3. Into the Beautiful North is divided into two parts—Sur and Norte. References to American pop culture abound in the first half as Nayeli and her friends speak of life across the border with unwavering certainty. Where do their ideas of America come from? How does the reality of their time in the U.S. compare to their initial ideas of it? Are they surprised or disappointed?
4. Nayeli tells García-García, “Perhaps it is time for a new kind of femininity?” What does she mean? Given the homage to The Magnificent Seven and Seven Samurai in the novel, how has Urrea played with gender stereotypes?
5. Into the Beautiful North examines physical and psychological borders. Urrea repeatedly shows that while the physical borders can be crossed, some that are culturally defined appear unbridgeable. What are those culturally defined differences, and do you think it’s possible to eradicate such invisible borders?
6. After traveling thousands of miles in search of her father, Nayeli is unable to confront him. In your opinion, does she make the right decision to heed his words at this time—“all things must pass”—or should she have approached him?
7. What do you make of the overwhelming turnout produced by Aunt Irma’s interviews? Why do so many men want to return to Mexico, and does this strike you as ironic?
8. Nayeli and her friends are inspired by the movie The Magnificent Seven, a remake of the Japanese film Seven Samurai. Both films climax with the showdown between good guys and bad guys, but Urrea ends his novel before such a clash. Why do you think he did so?
9. Were you surprised to find the Mexican characters so knowledgeable about American pop culture? If you were surprised, did it change how you think about Mexico?
10. Where did your family emigrate from? Did you recognize any parallels between your family stories and this one?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Into the Free
Julie Cantrell, 2012
David C. Cook
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780781404242
Summary
Just a girl. The only one strong enough to break the cycle.
In Depression-era Mississippi, Millie Reynolds longs to escape the madness that marks her world. With an abusive father and a "nothing mama," she struggles to find a place where she really belongs.
For answers, Millie turns to the Gypsies who caravan through town each spring. The travelers lead Millie to a key that unlocks generations of shocking family secrets. When tragedy strikes, the mysterious contents of the box give Millie the tools she needs to break her family's longstanding cycle of madness and abuse.
Through it all, Millie experiences the thrill of first love while fighting to trust the God she believes has abandoned her. With the power of forgiveness, can Millie finally make her way into the free?
Saturated in Southern ambiance and written in the vein of other Southern literary bestsellers like The Help by Kathryn Stockett and Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin, Julie Cantrell has created in Into the Free—now a New York Times Best Seller—a story that will sweep you away long after the novel ends. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1973
• Where—Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA
• Education—N/A
• Awards—Christie Award for First Novel
• Currently—Oxford, Mississippi
Julie Cantrell was the editor-in-chief of the Southern Literary Review and has worked as a freelance writer for ten years, including a three-year stint as the activities editor for Mothers of Preschoolers, Intl. (MOPS). After publishing two picture books to help young children overcome nightmares and separation anxiety, she penned her first novel, Into the Free.
Julie is a certified speech-language pathologist and an active advocate for literacy in Oxford, Mississippi, where she and her family operate Valley House Farm. (From the publishers.)
Book Reviews
A beautiful and literary coming-of-age romance that is as close to perfect as I've seen in quite some time.
Serena Chase - USA TODAY
A young girl growing into adolescence confronts family abuse and a dark past in this lyrical debut novel.... A visceral and gripping journey of a young woman’s revelations about God and self, this novel will surely excite any reader who appreciates a compelling story about personal struggle and spiritual resilience
Publishers Weekly
Cantrell’s words paint vivid pictures that bring Millie’s harrowing story to life. Riveting you to your chair, this story is a reminder that sometimes faith—real faith—is slowly built during the darkest moments of your life.
Romance Times Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. How do the Reverend Paul Applewhite (Millie’s grandfather) and Jack Reynolds (Millie’s father) compare? Are they more alike or different from one another? What characteristics of these two men attract so many admirers (church members and rodeo fans)? Are you more drawn to those who live on the edge of madness, the more eccentric, creative, or wild personalities? Or do more stable personalities demand your attention? Think of famous people in today’s society. What is it that makes them so magnetic? What kind of people do you most admire?
2. Throughout her life, Millie is trying to figure out whether or not she really believes in God. Her mother seems to rely on her faith to keep her anchored, singing hymns, praying, telling Bible stories, and quoting Scripture, yet she never takes Millie to church. Millie feels closest to God when she’s in nature, and she speaks of the gypsy gathering as "holy." How does Millie’s questioning make you consider your own faith? When do you feel closest to God? What do you like or dislike about organized religion and traditions? Have you ever been judged, criticized, ostracized, or punished because of your faith? Have you ever visited a country (or do you live in a country) where religious worship is prohibited? What is the effect?
3. When Millie falls from the tree, she believes that a man catches her and saves her life. She sees this man many times, often when she feels most alone. Do you believe loved ones can watch over us after death? Do you believe in angels? Why do you think Millie’s guardian angel came in the form of Sloth rather than as one of her parents? What role did Sloth play in her life?
4. When Millie is just seventeen years old, she faces a choice of loving Bump or River. Do you think she makes the right choice? Do you think women have more options now than Millie did as a disadvantaged orphan girl in the 1940s? Even with more options, do women still tend to determine their life course based on their husband’s job and priorities? How does your religious affiliation affect the way you see yourself as a woman? Do you agree or disagree with your church’s view of women?
5. Throughout the book, Millie struggles to come to terms with traditional labels of "good" and "bad." Bill Miller is described as a good man, even describing himself with those words as he begins to rape Millie. As a rodeo veterinarian, Bump might be looked down upon by the likes of the upper-class Millers. And Millie was surprised to find River a well-read, well-groomed adventurer, rather than the illiterate, dirty stereotype she thought he’d be. What does Millie learn about the way people are perceived and the truth about who they really are? Do you portray your true self to the public, or do you strive to maintain a perfect image, like the Miller family? What stereotypes or class issues do you struggle to overcome, either in the way you perceive others or in the way you are perceived? How many people know the real you?
6. How do you feel about the way Millie handled the situation in the steeple? Have you ever been a victim of sexual, verbal, or physical abuse? How have you learned to take a more active role in your own life in order to prevent further victimization? What would you do differently if you could go back to that moment again? Have you been able to forgive the person(s) who harmed you, and how has that ability or inability to forgive affected you? Likewise, have you ever been the one to inflict harm on another person? If so, take time to evaluate the causes and effects of such events. What can you do to break that cycle?
7. Even though Millie felt so alone most of her life, her life has been filled with lots of people who loved her: Sloth, Miss Harper, Mama. She also develops a special bond with Diana’s housekeeper, Mabel, and Diana’s daughter, Camille. What do you think about the relationship she builds with each of them? Do you think she’ll continue to develop those relationships after she leaves Iti Taloa? What people have helped shape your life? Do you believe people are put into our lives for a reason? What efforts do you make to nourish your friendships?
8. Millie has a complicated relationship with her mother and father, yet she loves them both. What do you value most about your parents or your children? What would you like to improve about your relationship? What steps can you take to build a healthier relationship with them? Likewise, Millie’s relationship with her grandparents is beyond strained. How do you see your role as a grandparent or grandchild?
9. Millie leaves town without confronting Bill Miller. She chooses not to let him control one more minute of her life. She tries to leave that history behind her and start her new life with Bump, claiming, "It is finished." Do you think it’s possible to leave such traumatic events buried deep without ever coming to terms with them? Do you think the events that took place in the steeple will come back to haunt Millie, or is such a clean escape possible? Do you think she should tell Bump about the rape? Do you have secrets that you have kept from those you love? Have you ever wondered what would happen if you told the truth?
10. In the end, Millie reaches a comfortable place with her faith. She comes to believe that a loving God had been there all along, watching over her, allowing her to make her own choices. Do you believe everything is in God’s hands, and that all you need to do is pray (as Millie’s mother does)? Or do you believe God gives you options, and that it’s up to you to correct the negative things that happen to you, all while making your faith the central part of your life?
(Questions from author's website.)
Into the Night Sky
Caroline Finnerty, 2014
Poolbeg Press
326 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781781999929
Summary
Conor Fahy, owner of a struggling bookshop, is finding it hard to cope in the aftermath of his partner Leni’s tragic death. His friend Ella Wilde tries to be supportive but is herself in a fragile mental state—she has just been axed from her job as a TV presenter, having been caught shoplifting.
Then eight-year-old Jack White walks into Conor’s bookshop and settles down on the floor to read. Jack likes Ben 10, Giant Jawbreakers and Ronaldo. He likes his dad (when he doesn’t shout) but he doesn’t like the bad bugs that are eating up his ma inside her tummy.
Conor listens to the talkative boy but finds it hard to piece together what is really happening in his life. He is particularly mystified by Jack’s intense resentment of a woman called Rachel Traynor, not realising that she is a social worker assigned to Jack’s case and that Jack’s fate hangs in the balance.
They must each learn the healing power of love, and the need to let the past go and turn to the future. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—November 6, 1980
• Where—Kildare, Ireland
• Education—N/A
• Currently—Kildare, Ireland
Caroline Finnerty is an Irish author and freelance writer living on the banks of the Grand Canal in the County Kildare countryside with her husband, their three young children and their dog. She is the author of In a Moment, The Last Goodbye, and Into the Night Sky. She also compiled the charity anthology If I Was a Child Again in aid of Barnardos.
Caroline has written articles for The Irish Daily Mail, The Star, Woman’s Way Magazine, as well as several parenting magazines. (From the author.)
Visit the author's website.
Follow Caroline on Facebook.
Book Reviews
Impossible to put down.
Irish Independent
Discussion Questions
1. Did you feel empathy for Ella’s situation initially? What about afterwards?
2. There is strong use of imagery of the sea in Ella’s story, specifically her Martello Tower home situated on the rocks in Dublin Bay. Do you think that was intentional and does it add to the story?
3. Conor and Ella have been friends for a long time and share a close bond, do you think friendships between men and women can ever be truly platonic?
4. Rachel and Marcus have a seemingly perfect relationship except for the fact that he doesn’t want to have any more children. He is adamant that it is unfair to bring a child into the world when he doesn’t want it. Do you agree with this belief or do you think he should have relented so he could hold onto Rachel?
5. What did you think of John-Paul’s relationship with his son?
6. Do you agree with John-Paul’s solicitor when he argues in court that society has a natural bias towards women as mother figures?
7. Ella and her sister Andrea have very different attitudes to their mother’s desertion of their family as children. Why do you think this is?
8. Do you agree with Ella’s assertion that "every action has an equal and opposite reaction," i.e. that we must suffer the consequences of our actions?
9. Rachel mentions that you wouldn’t do her job if you didn’t have hope that people can change. How important is it to have this attitude in our everyday lives?
10. Who saves whom in this novel?
11. Which character do you think grew the most over the course of the story and why?
12. What do you think the future holds for Jack?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)
Into the Water
Paula Hawkins, 2017
Penguin Publishing
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780735211209
Summary
Paula Hawkin's addictive new novel of psychological suspense.
A single mother turns up dead at the bottom of the river that runs through town. Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate.
They are not the first women lost to these dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history, dredging up secrets long submerged.
Left behind is a lonely fifteen-year-old girl. Parentless and friendless, she now finds herself in the care of her mother's sister, a fearful stranger who has been dragged back to the place she deliberately ran from—a place to which she vowed she'd never return.
With the same propulsive writing and acute understanding of human instincts that captivated millions of readers around the world in her explosive debut thriller, The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins delivers an urgent, twisting, deeply satisfying read that hinges on the deceptiveness of emotion and memory, as well as the devastating ways that the past can reach a long arm into the present.
Beware a calm surface—you never know what lies beneath. (From the publisher.)
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
It’s a set-up that is redolent with possibility. But that promising start fails to deliver, and the main reason is structural. The story of Into the Water is carried by 11 narrative voices. To differentiate 11 separate voices within a single story is a fiendishly difficult thing. And these characters are so similar in tone and register – even when some are in first person and others in third – that they are almost impossible to tell apart, which ends up being both monotonous and confusing.
Val McDermid - Guardian (UK)
Hawkins is back with a second thriller, Into the Water. Many of the elements that helped propel The Girl on the Train are present here…[but] something’s amiss in this second novel: It’s stagnant rather than suspenseful.… The revelations about her sister’s life and death produce but a ripple in Jules’s day-to-day life.… [A] dull disappointment.
Maureen Corrigan - Washington Post
Hawkins is at the forefront of a group of female authors—think Gillian Flynn and Megan Abbott—who have reinvigorated the literary suspense novel by tapping a rich vein of psychological menace and social unease.… [T]here’s a certain solace to a dark escape, in the promise of submerged truths coming to light.
Vogue
Addicting… this novel has a little something for anyone looking for their next binge-read.
Marie Claire
Hawkins keeps you guessing until the final page.
Real Simple
Paula Hawkins is back with a brand-new thriller about a string of mysterious deaths. You’ll burn through this one!
People Style Watch
Beckford history is dripping with women who’ve thrown themselves—or been pushed?—off the cliffs into the Drowning Pool, and everyone…knows more than they’re letting on. Hawkins may be juggling a few too many story lines for comfort, but the payoff packs a satisfying punch.
Publishers Weekly
Hawkins guides readers through a muddled labyrinth of twists and turns, secrets and lies, and misdirections that will ultimately reveal the sordid details of three deaths before its surprising conclusion.… [For] fans of twisty thrillers. —Mary Todd Chesnut, Northern Kentucky Univ. Lib., Highland Heights
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Hawkins returns to the rotating-narration style of her breakout debut, giving voice to an even broader cast this time.
Booklist
[E]ven after you've managed to untangle all the willfully misleading information, half-baked subplots, and myriad characters, you're going to have a tough time keeping it straight.… Let's call it sophomore slump and hope for better things.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Family relationships, particularly the bond between sisters, feature heavily in Into the Water. How do you think Lena is affected by Nel and Jules’s estrangement? How does it influence her friendship with Katie?
2. Jules and Nel’s estrangement hinges on a misremembering of an event in their past. Are there any childhood or teenage memories you have that are no longer as clear when you look back now? How has this novel made you view your past, and the way it reflects upon your present?
3. Within the novel there are several inappropriate relationships — for example, Katie and Mark; Sean and Nel; Helen and Patrick. How does the depiction of the relationships between these characters affect your interpretation of their behavior and actions?
4. "Beckford is not a suicide spot. Beckford is a place to get rid of troublesome women." Discuss the gender dynamic in Into the Water. How much power does each of the women in the novel hold? What are the different types of power they hold?
5. Into the Water contains several different voices and perspectives. How did this structure affect your reading of the novel?
6. How do the epigraphs relate to the novel? Does one speak to you more than another? If so, why?
7. The structure of the novel means that we get tremendous insight into our suspects throughout. Who did you originally think was responsible for Nel’s death? Did your opinion change as the plot developed?
8. Was there a particular character you identified with? Was there a particular moment you found moving, surprising, or terrifying?
9. Many of the characters in the novel are grieving — some from more recent, raw losses and others from historic ones. How sympathetic were you to these characters? Was there a character you felt more sympathy for than another? Does their grief excuse their behavior?
10. Nickie Sage represents the legacy of witches that haunts the novel. Do you believe she sees things others cannot? Do you agree with the way she behaves?
(Questions from the author's website.)
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The Invasion of the Tearling (Tearling Trilogy, 2)
Erika Johansen, 2015
HarperCollins
544 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062290410
Summary
In this riveting sequel to the national bestseller The Queen of the Tearling, the evil kingdom of Mortmesne invades the Tearling, with dire consequences for Kelsea and her realm.
With each passing day, Kelsea Glynn is growing into her new responsibilities as Queen of the Tearling.
By stopping the shipments of slaves to the neighboring kingdom of Mortmesne, she crossed the Red Queen, a brutal ruler whose power derives from dark magic, who is sending her fearsome army into the Tearling to take what is hers. And nothing can stop the invasion.
But as the Mort army draws ever closer, Kelsea develops a mysterious connection to a time before the Crossing, and she finds herself relying on a strange and possibly dangerous ally: a woman named Lily, fighting for her life in a world where being female can feel like a crime. The fate of the Tearling—and that of Kelsea’s own soul—may rest with Lily and her story, but Kelsea may not have enough time to find out.
In this dazzling sequel, Erika Johansen brings back favorite characters, including the Mace and the Red Queen, and introduces unforgettable new players, adding exciting layers to her multidimensional tale of magic, mystery, and a fierce young heroine. (From the publisher.)
The Queen of the Tearling (2014) is the first book of the series. This is the second, and The Fate of the Tearling is the third.
Author Bio
Erika Johansen grew up in the San Francisco Bay area. She went to Swarthmore College, earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and eventually became an attorney, but she never stopped writing. (From the publishers.)
Read Erika's Buzzfeed article: Why We Need "Ugly" Heroines
Book Reviews
The Invasion of the Tearling glides over the sophomore slump, carrying the series upward with it.... The new Tearling characters are fascinating, and Johansen introduces them so smoothly, we care for them almost the instant we learn their names.
Entertainment Weekly
Get caught up with Kelsea, a heroine so badass, Emma Watson’s already signed up to play her.
Cosmopolitan
All hail Queen Kelsea! In the series’ second action-packed book, the teen saves her throne from a power-hungry neighbor.
Us Weekly
Genre-bending.... So good.... Gripping.
Buzzfeed
A dazzling and gripping followup.... Expertly combining modern and medieval themes, Johansen ratchets up suspense as she weaves a magical story that crosses time...one of the most original and well-written series in recent memory.
USA Today.com
Readers—Watson included —can’t seem to put down the novels, in large part because of the Queen of the Tearling herself: spunky, complex, tough-as-nails Kelsea Glynn.
Bustle
This sequel to The Queen of the Tearling continues Kelsea's story and provides the history that created Tea.... Verdict: Teens need to have read the first volume in order to understand and appreciate this sequel; both books should be at hand for fantasy fans. —Connie Williams, Petaluma High School, CA
School Library Journal
Gritty, gruesome, and enthrallingly magical fantasy.
Booklist
[T]he end gets all liony, witchy, and wardroby...requiring more than a little disbelief-suspension. Still, the writing is smart and...a touch above a lot of sword-and-sorcery stuff—but still very much bound up in the conventions of that genre. Overall, a satisfying close to a long but worthy yarn.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. We first encounter the Queen of the Tearling when she visits the Keep’s jail to confront several new prisoners. She is described not as "delicate," or "pretty," but "tough," with hair "short like a man’s." What does this add to our understanding of her? What role does appearance play in authority?
2. Consider Ewen, the Keep’s Jailor. Despite his intellectual "slowness," what admirable and valuable qualities does he possess? What of his constant attempt and admitted failure "to paint the things he saw"?
3. Queen Kelsea "had been born angry," but saw her destructive anger as "pure," and "the closest she would ever get to the girl she really was deep down." What might it mean for anger to be "pure"? When does it serve her well or not? In what ways can anger be valuable?
4. What is introduced to the novel with Kelsea’s dreamlike connection to Lily Mayhew and her experience in the time of the pre-Crossing? What’s the effect on the novel of shifting between the two eras and storylines?
5. What qualities do Kelsea and Lily share? In what significant ways are they different? Is this the result of personality or profoundly different times and circumstances?
6. Despite various differences, like the scale and scope of technology, how are the social situations of the pre-Crossing America and that of the Tear similar?
7. What are the attitudes toward and use of books in each society? Why are books and literacy so important to both Kelsea and Lily?
8. How did Lily, an intelligent and independent person, become married to an abusive and dangerous man like Greg? In what ways is this similar to or different from other abused women like Andalie?
9. How does the painful memory of Maddy influence and help Lily?
10. An important theme in the novel is the struggle to balance thoughts of the past and future and how they both affect the present. What’s the relationship between these three conceptions of time? How are they similar or different? What’s a healthy balance of concern for each?
11. Kelsea’s struggle with her own "plain" appearance—hating herself when seen reflected in a mirror—continues but is complicated by her gradual transformation into a beautiful woman. What are the origins of her concern with her looks? Why might personal beauty matter to someone with such significant power and responsibility?
12. Consider Andalie and her personal history. What more does her experience reveal about the complex social issues of equality for women, violence against them, autonomy of their own bodies and ability, and even the importance of personal strength? How does her story affect Kelsea? What do Andalie’s daughters, Aisa and Glee, each bring to the novel?
13. Andalie powerfully defines "the crux of evil" as those without empathy, "who feel entitled to whatever they want, whatever they can grab." What are the origins of such entitlement? In what ways is it the result of "upbringing," as Kelsea says? How does a system based on inherited royalty avoid encouraging such entitlement? How might such feelings of entitlement be "eradicated"?
14. How does Kelsea’s developing physical desire—to the point of almost being seduced by the handsome but evil "dark thing"—complicate her responsibilities as Queen? To what extent are these feelings natural or related to her self-critical thoughts about her "unremarkable" appearance? In what ways is her relationship with close guard and "paramour" Pen Alcott healthy or not?
15. Of what significance, literally and symbolically, is it that Kelsea must forgive and free "the dark thing" in her attempt to defeat the Red Queen? Why is the information she gets so powerful?
16. Despite their differences, Kelsea and the Red Queen both use their powers to harm themselves. Why is this? What relationship does each have to pain? What does self-harm suggest about the complex issues women face regarding beauty, autonomy and their own bodies?
17. Considering the history of the human species, the ebb and flow of enlightenment and goodness, Kelsea wonders if "the most defining characteristic of the species might be lapse." In what ways might this be true? Why is it so difficult to evolve toward the good despite increased knowledge?
18. The Better World Lily enters is still threatened by people potentially bringing "their own nightmares of the past." What does this mean? How do people’s personal experiences affect the building of a healthy society?
19. Tear explains to Lily that the Better World will be "doomed to fail" unless people can "put the community’s needs before [their] own." What are these community needs? What would it take to control or sacrifice one’s personal desires? What forces might be strong enough to enable it?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Invention of Exile
Vanessa Manko, 2012
Penguin Group (USA)
304pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594205880
Summary
Austin Voronkov is many things. He is an engineer, an inventor, an immigrant from Russia to Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1913, where he gets a job at a rifle factory. At the house where he rents a room, he falls in love with a woman named Julia, who becomes his wife and the mother to his two children.
When Austin is wrongly accused of attending anarchist gatherings his limited grasp of English condemns him to his fate as a deportee; retreating with his family to his home in Russia, they become embroiled in the civil war and must flee once again, to Mexico.
While Julia and the children are eventually able to return to the United States, Austin becomes indefinitely stranded in Mexico City because of the black mark on his record. He keeps a daily correspondence with Julia as they each exchange their hopes and fears for the future and as they struggle to remain a family across a distance of two countries.
Austin becomes convinced that his engineering designs will be awarded patents, thereby paving the way for the government to approve his return and award his long sought-after American citizenship. At the same time he becomes convinced that an FBI agent working for the House Committee for Un-American Activities is monitoring his every move, with the intent of blocking any possible return to the United States.
Austin’s and Julia’s struggles build to crisis and heartrending resolution in this dazzling, sweeping debut. The novel is based in part on Vanessa Manko’s family history and a trove of hidden letters that serve as a kind of inheritance—letters from a grandfather she never knew.
Manko uses this history as a jumping-off point for the novel, which deals with themes of exile and invention and explores how loss reshapes and transforms lives. It is a profoundly moving story of family, history, and the meaning of home. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Brookfield, Connecticut, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Connecticut; M.A., New York University
M.F.A, Hunter College
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City, New York
Vanessa earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Hunter College where she was the recipient of a Hertog Fellowship. Prior to writing, Vanessa trained in ballet at the North Carolina School of the Arts and danced professionally before returning to school to earn her B.A. in English from the University of Connecticut.
She went on to receive her M.A. from New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study where she focused on dance history and performance studies. Vanessa has taught writing at NYU and SUNY Purchase and she is the former Dance Editor of The Brooklyn Rail. An excerpt of The Invention of Exile, her first novel, was published in Granta 114, Exit Strategies in 2012. Originally from Brookfield, CT, Vanessa now lives in Brooklyn, New York. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
An achingly painful and all too relevant meditation on what can happen to identity when human beings are crammed inside an unforgiving container of politics, bureaucracy, and fear...Manko’s own prose is… rich and convincing…[A] wonderful first novel.
Elizabeth Graver - Boston Globe
The summer’s surest candidate for lit-hit crossover.
New York Magazine
Manko’s debut thrums with longing.
Vanity Fair
An incident from her own family history inspired Manko’s fine fiction debut, in which Austin Voronkov, a Russian engineer and inventor, emigrates to the U.S. in 1913 and finds...[himself] falsely accused of being an anarchist.... The beating heart of Manko’s story is Austin’s determination to be reunited with his family.
Publishers Weekly
Trust Penguin Press to offer historically informed fiction. Early 1900s Russian immigrant Austin Voronkov is a happily married father of two in Bridgeport, CT. But after tripping over his English while responding to accusations [of anarchy,] the family must flee [their U.S.] home.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) A man separated from his family for years reckons with his isolation in Manko's debut, a superb study of statelessness.... She deeply explores...the impact of years of lacking a country.... A top-notch debut, at once sober and lively and provocative.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What are your definitions of home and family? What are Austin’s? How do your definitions align or differ?
2. What was your reaction to the interrogation scenes in Connecticut (pp. 20–37)? Do you think there was anything Austin could have done to sway the inquisitor’s mind?
3. How is the lighthouse symbolic in Austin’s and Julia’s lives? What about Julia’s flooded garden?
4. Austin is very hopeful, to the point of obsession, that his inventions will aid him in reuniting with his family. How does the theme of invention work in his life and in the novel?
5. What is Anarose’s role?
6. The storyline and perspective shift and jump over time and place. How does this structure inform the story?
7. Austin muses, “Paper is stronger than one thinks. Papers, documents don’t define a man, but they lived in a mire of them. . . . His days revolved around papers. But no amount of paper means a country” (p. 116). What do you think about this passage? How do papers control how Austin conducts his life?
8. How does Austin’s story fit into the trope of the United States as a “melting pot” for immigrants? How did it influence your thoughts on the immigrant experience?
9. Austin is paranoid that an FBI agent, Jack, has him under surveillance. Do you think the agent is real, or is he a figment born of fear and distrust? What purpose does Jack serve?
10. Correspondence is a vital undercurrent in Austin’s life. How do the many letters and notes we read bring him closer to—and push him further apart from—his loved ones? How do you correspond with people close to you?
11. How does Austin’s conception and understanding of being American and returning to the United States change throughout the novel? What was your reaction to his thoughts in the final pages?
12. What does the title, The Invention of Exile, mean to you? In what ways was Austin in exile?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Invention of Wings
Sue Monk Kidd, 2014
Viking Press
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143121701
Summary
Writing at the height of her narrative and imaginative gifts, Sue Monk Kidd presents a masterpiece of hope, daring, the quest for freedom, and the desire to have a voice in the world—and it is now the newest Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 selection.
Hetty “Handful” Grimke, an urban slave in early nineteenth century Charleston, yearns for life beyond the suffocating walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimke household. The Grimke’s daughter, Sarah, has known from an early age she is meant to do something large in the world, but she is hemmed in by the limits imposed on women.
Kidd’s sweeping novel is set in motion on Sarah’s eleventh birthday, when she is given ownership of ten year old Handful, who is to be her handmaid. We follow their remarkable journeys over the next thirty five years, as both strive for a life of their own, dramatically shaping each other’s destinies and forming a complex relationship marked by guilt, defiance, estrangement and the uneasy ways of love.
As the stories build to a riveting climax, Handful will endure loss and sorrow, finding courage and a sense of self in the process. Sarah will experience crushed hopes, betrayal, unrequited love, and ostracism before leaving Charleston to find her place alongside her fearless younger sister, Angelina, as one of the early pioneers in the abolition and women’s rights movements.
Inspired by the historical figure of Sarah Grimke, Kidd goes beyond the record to flesh out the rich interior lives of all of her characters, both real and invented, including Handful’s cunning mother, Charlotte, who courts danger in her search for something better.
This exquisitely written novel is a triumph of storytelling that looks with unswerving eyes at a devastating wound in American history, through women whose struggles for liberation, empowerment, and expression will leave no reader unmoved. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 12, 1948
• Where—Sylvester, Georgia, USA
• Education—B.S., Texas Christian University
• Awards—Poets and Writers Award; Katherine Anne Porter
Award
• Currently—lives near Charleston, South Carolina
Sue Monk Kidd's first novel, The Secret Life of Bees, spent more than one hundred weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, has sold more than four million copies, and was chosen as the 2004 Book Sense Paperback Book of the Year and Good Morning America's "Read This!" Book Club pick. She is also the author of several acclaimed memoirs and the recipient of numerous awards, including a Poets & Writers award. She lives near Charleston, South Carolina.
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Sue Monk Kidd first made her mark on the literary circuit with a pair of highly acclaimed, well-loved memoirs detailing her personal spiritual development. However, it was a work of fiction, The Secret Life of Bees, that truly solidified her place among contemporary writers. Although Kidd is no longer writing memoirs, her fiction is still playing an important role in her on-going journey of spiritual self-discovery.
Despite the fact that Kidd's first published books were nonfiction works, her infatuation with writing grew out of old-fashioned, Southern-yarn spinning. As a little girl in the little town of Sylvester, Georgia, Kidd thrilled to listen to her father tell stories about "mules who went through cafeteria lines and a petulant boy named Chewing Gum Bum," as she says on her web site. Inspired by her dad's tall tales, Kidd began keeping a journal that chronicled her everyday experiences.
Such self-scrutiny surely gave her the tools she needed to pen such keenly insightful memoirs as When the Hearts Waits and The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, both tracking her development as both a Christian and a woman. "I think when you have an impulse to write memoir you are having an opportunity to create meaning of your life," she told Barnes & Noble.com, "to articulate your experience; to understand it in deeper ways... And after a while, it does free you from yourself, of having to write about yourself, which it eventually did for me."
Once Kidd had worked the need to write about herself out of her system, she decided to get back to the kind of storytelling that inspired her to become a writer in the first place. Her debut novel The Secret Life of Bees showed just how powerfully the gift of storytelling charges through Kidd's veins. The novel has sold more than 4.5 million copies, been published in over twenty languages, and spent over two years on the New York Times bestseller list.
Even as Kidd has shifted her focus from autobiography to fiction, she still uses her writing as a means of self-discovery. This is especially evident in her latest novel The Mermaid Chair, which tells the story of a woman named Jessie who lives a rather ordinary life with her husband Hugh until she meets a man about to take his final vows at a Benedictine monastery. Her budding infatuation with Brother Thomas leads Jessie to take stock of her life and resolve an increasingly intense personal tug-of-war between marital fidelity and desire.
Kidd feels that through telling Jessie's story, she is also continuing her own journey of self-discovery, which she began when writing her first books. "I think there is some part of that journey towards one's self that I did experience. I told that particular story in my book The Dance of the Dissident Daughter and it is the story of a woman's very-fierce longing for herself. The character in The Mermaid Chair Jessie has this need to come home to herself in a much deeper way," Kidd said, "to define herself, and I certainly know that longing."
Kidd lives beside a salt marsh near Charleston, South Carolina, with her husband, Sandy, a marriage and individual counselor in private practice. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
A remarkable novel that heightened my sense of what it meant to be a woman - slave or free. . .will resonate with anyone who has ever struggled to find her power and her voice. . .Sue Monk Kidd has written a conversation changer. It is impossible to read this book and not come away thinking differently about our status as women and about all the unsung heroines who played a role in getting us to where we are.
O, The Oprah Magazine
A searing historical novel. . .these two women’s relationship with each other grows more complex while the culture shape-shifts around them. Their bold individual requests for independence are explored by Kidd in exquisitely nuanced language that makes this book a page turner in the most resonant and satisfying of ways.
More
Kidd...is no stranger to strong female characters. Here, her inspiration is the real Sarah Grimke, daughter of an elite Charleston family, who fought for abolition and women’s rights. Handful, Kidd’s creation, is Sarah’s childhood handmaid.... Bolstered by female mentors, Kidd’s heroines finally act on Sarah’s blunt realization: “We can do little for the slave as long as we’re under the feet of men.”
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Women played a large role in the fledgling abolitionist movement preceding the Civil War by several decades but were shushed by their male compatriots if they pointed out their own subservient status.... Monk's compelling work of historical fiction stands out...because of its layers of imaginative details.... [A] richly imagined narrative...of two women who became sisters under the skin. —Laurie Cavanaugh, Holmes P.L., Halifax, MA
Library Journal
(Starred review.) [A] moving portrait of two women inextricably linked by the horrors of slavery..... While their pain and struggle cannot be equated, both women strive to be set free—Sarah from the bonds of patriarchy and Southern bigotry, and Handful from the inhuman bonds of slavery. Kidd is a master storyteller...with smooth and graceful prose. —Kerri Price
(Starred review.) Kidd hits her stride and avoids sentimental revisionism with this historical novel about the relationship between a slave and the daughter of slave owners in antebellum Charleston...Kidd’s portrait of white slave-owning southerners is all the more harrowing for showing them as morally complicated while she gives Handful the dignity of being not simply a victim, but a strong, imperfect woman.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The title The Invention of Wings was one of the first inspirations that came to Sue Monk Kidd as she began the novel. Why is the title an apt one for Kidd's novel? What are some of the ways that the author uses the imagery and symbolism of birds, wings, and flight?
2. What were the qualities in Handful that you most admired? As you read the novel, could you imagine yourself in her situation? How did Handful continue her relentless pursuit of self and freedom in the face of such a brutal system?
3. After laying aside her aspirations to become a lawyer, Sarah remarks that the Graveyard of Failed Hopes is "an all-female establishment." What makes her say so? What was your experience of reading Kidd's portrayal of women's lives in the nineteenth century?
4. In what ways does Sarah struggle against the dictates of her family, society, and religion? Can you relate to her need to break away from the life she had in order to create a new and unknown life? What sort of risk and courage does this call for?
5. The story of The Invention of Wings includes a number of physical objects that have a special significance for the characters: Sarah's fleur-de-lis button, Charlotte's story quilt, the rabbit-head cane that Handful receives from Goodis, and the spirit tree. Choose one or more of these objects and discuss their significance in the novel.
6. Were you aware of the role that Sarah and Angelina Grimke played in abolition and women's rights? Have women's achievements in history been lost or overlooked? What do you think it takes to be a reformer today?
7. How would you describe Sarah and Angelina's unusual bond? Do you think either one of them could have accomplished what they did on their own? Have you known women who experienced this sort of relationship as sisters?
8. Some of the staunchest enemies of slavery believed the time had not yet come for women's rights and pressured Sarah and Angelina to desist from the cause, fearing it would split the cause of abolition. How do you think the sisters should have responded to their demand? At the end of the novel, Sarah asks, "Was it ever right to sacrifice one's truth for expedience?"
9. What are some of the examples of Handful's wit and sense of irony, and how do they help her cope with the burdens of slavery?
10. Contrast Handful's relationship with her mother with the relationship between Sarah and the elder Mary Grimke. How are the two younger women formed-and malformed-by their mothers?
11. Kidd portrays an array of male characters in the novel: Sarah's father; Sarah's brother, Thomas; Theodore Weld; Denmark Vesey; Goodis Grimke, Israel Morris, Burke Williams. Some of them are men of their time, some are ahead of their time. Which of these male characters did you find most compelling? What positive and negative roles did they play in Sarah and Handful's evolvement?
12. How has your understanding of slavery been changed by reading The Invention of Wings? What did you learn about it that you didn't know before?
13. Sarah believed she could not have a vocation and marriage, both. Do you think she made the right decision in turning down Israel's proposal? How does her situation compare with Angelina's marriage to Theodore? In what ways are women today still asking the question of whether they can have it all?
14. How does the spirit tree function in Handful's life? What do you think of the rituals and meanings surrounding it?
15. Had you heard of the Denmark Vesey slave plot before reading this novel? Were you aware of the extent that slaves resisted? Why do you think the myth of the happy, compliant slave endured? What were some of the more inventive or cunning ways that Charlotte, Handful, and other characters rebelled and subverted the system?
16. The Invention of Wings takes the reader back to the roots of racism in America. How has slavery left its mark on American life? To what extent has the wound been healed? Do you think slavery has been a taboo topic in American life?
17. Are there ways in which Kidd's novel can help us see our own lives differently? How is this story relevant for us today?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Invincible Summer
Alice Adams, 2016
Little, Brown and Company
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316391177
Summary
Four friends. Twenty years. One unexpected journey.
Inseparable throughout college, Eva, Benedict, Sylvie, and Lucien graduate in 1997, into an exhilarating world on the brink of a new millennium.
Hopelessly in love with playboy Lucien and eager to shrug off the socialist politics of her upbringing, Eva breaks away to work for a big bank. Benedict, a budding scientist who's pined for Eva for years, stays on to complete his PhD in physics, devoting his life to chasing particles as elusive as the object of his affection. Siblings Sylvie and Lucien, never much inclined toward mortgages or monogamy, pursue more bohemian existences-she as an aspiring artist and he as a club promoter and professional partyer.
But as their twenties give way to their thirties, the group struggles to navigate their thwarted dreams. Scattered across Europe and no longer convinced they are truly the masters of their fates, the once close-knit friends find themselves filled with longing for their youth—and for one another.
Broken hearts and broken careers draw the foursome together again, but in ways they never could have imagined.
A dazzling depiction of the highs and lows of adulthood, Invincible Summer is a story about finding the courage to carry on in the wake of disappointment, and a powerful testament to love and friendship as the constants in an ever-changing world. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Alice Adams is half Australian but has lived in England for most of her life—growing up in a house without a TV and as a result becoming a voracious reader. Career-wise, she's done everything from waitressing to investment banking, and in addition to a BA in philosophy, she has a multitude of geeky math, finance, and computer qualifications.
She lives in North London but escapes into the wilderness as often as possible. Invincible Summer is her first novel and she's hard at work on a second. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
There's a long list of reasons that Alice Adams's debut novel, Invincible Summer, shouldn't work. But it clicks anyhow. Ms. Adams has managed to combine…a familiar plot…and pigeonhole-ready characters and spin their story into a heart tugger with seemingly honest appeal. This amazing feat doesn't rival those of the Large Hadron Collider, which plays a cameo role in Invincible Summer. But it's close…. Ms. Adams [has a] gift for making her characters so changeable, so vulnerable, so universally familiar. They all make terrible decisions…and the book's main satisfaction comes from watching them adapt and cope.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
A crackerjack storyteller who deeply inhabits her characters—deploying pitch-perfect dialogue to poignant and hilarious effect—Adams uses the conventions of the form to examine larger ideas about class and commerce, art and science, friendship and family at the time of the most recent fin de siècle.... Ultimately, though, this is a novel that strives to define a generation...and it falters when Adams overreaches, struggling to establish her characters as representatives of their era, shaped by the historical events of their day.... [T]his charming novel derives its power less from its author’s reductive attempts at answers and more from her restless questioning.
Joanna Rakoff - New York Times Book Review
[A] moving...bittersweet and compassionate novel.... Like your favorite Austen novel, Invincible Summer reconciles the cultural reality of an era with the personal lives of its characters. But Eva is not as reflective as, say, Elizabeth Bennet.
Sophie McManus - Washington Post
Perfect for the beach, but it's got some substance as well.... Think of this as The Big Chill for millennials.
Deborah Dundas - Toronto Star
Easy yet not insubstantial, this debut is a sweet toast to enduring friendship.
Meredith Turits - Elle
Adulthood has never been so endearing.
Steph Opitz - Marie Claire
Adams movingly depicts the tough steps we take into adulthood.
Good Housekeeping
Adams does an incredible job [of] conveying life's ups and downs with both humor and compassion, [and] shows herself to be especially skilled at crafting charming, empathetic (albeit troubled) characters you can't help but cheer on.
Sadie L. Trombetta - Bustle
[A] fun and memorable debut.... Adams’s characters have many ups and downs, disappointments and adjustments, but they are believable due to her understated exposition of the characters’ psychologies. The reader will stick with the book...because the characters are such good company.
Publishers Weekly
Adams'...characters are nearly impossible not to root for, and she captures their often troubled dynamics with tremendous empathy and charming wit. And while the novel wraps up just a touch too neatly...there is something pleasantly satisfying about its profound sense of hope. Breezy with substance...absorbing.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. "Is it impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him?" or so said George Bernard Shaw, and it's certainly true that it's difficult to write about the UK without at the very least a nod to class. To what degree do you think the friends' lives and aspirations are shaped by their social class?
2. The novel aims to give a nuanced portrayal of the London's financial world and the characters in it; do you feel it succeeds in providing a good portrayal of the workings of finance and the motivations of the people working in the field? Did you come away more of less sympathetic to bankers than when you started the book?
3. We follow Eva, Benedict, Sylvie, and Lucien across 20 years and through some of the most formative experiences of their lives, including job lay-offs, divorce, prison, and raising a disable child. Do the characters respond to these challenges in a convincing and interesting way?
4. One of the central themes in the novel is finding the hope and courage to carry on despite life's disappointments and tragedies. Although the characters do not find simple solutions to their problems,do you feel the overall message is redemptive? If so, in what way? If not, why not?
5. What is the significance of the book's title? It comes from a line by Albert Camus: "In the depths of winter, I finally learned that there lay within me an invincible summer." What does Camus mean? And how does the line relate to Alice Adams's book?
6. Invincible Summer takes place over two decades in a number of historical events, including 9/11, the credit crunch, and the discovery of the Higgs boson. How much did you feel the characters were masters of their own fates, and how much were they buffeted by forces of economics and history far greater than themselves?
7. Do you feel satisfied with the way the book ends? Would you have preferred a different ending? If so, what might that ending look like?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Invisible Bridge
Julie Orringer, 2010
Knopf Doubleday
784 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400034376
Summary
A grand love story set against the backdrop of Budapest and Paris, an epic tale of three brothers whose lives are ravaged by war, and the chronicle of one family’s struggle against the forces that threaten to annihilate it.
Paris, 1937.
Andras Levi, a Hungarian-Jewish architecture student, arrives from Budapest with a scholarship, a single suitcase, and a mysterious letter he has promised to deliver to C. Morgenstern on the rue de Sevigne.
As he falls into a complicated relationship with the letter’s recipient, he becomes privy to a secret history that will alter the course of his own life.
Meanwhile, as his elder brother takes up medical studies in Modena and their younger brother leaves school for the stage, Europe’s unfolding tragedy sends each of their lives into terrifying uncertainty. At the end of Andras’s second summer in Paris, all of Europe erupts in a cataclysm of war.
Orringer takes us from the small Hungarian town of Konyar to the grand opera houses of Budapest and Paris, from the lonely chill of Andras’s room on the rue des Ecoles to the deep and enduring connection he discovers on the rue de Sevigne, from the despair of Carpathian winter to an unimaginable life in forced labor camps and beyond.
The Invisible Bridge is the story of a love tested by disaster, of brothers whose bonds cannot be broken, of a family shattered and remade in history’s darkest hour, and of the dangerous power of art in a time of war.
Expertly crafted, magnificently written, emotionally haunting, and impossible to put down, The Invisible Bridge resoundingly confirms Julie Orringer’s place as one of today’s most vital and commanding young literary talents. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 12, 1973
• Where—Miami, Florida, USA
• Education—B.A., Cornell University; M.F.A., University of Iowa; Stegner Fellowship, Stanford University
• Awards—Ploughshares Cohen Award; Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for Fiction
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City, New York
Julie Orringer is a short story writer and author of two higly acclaimed works of historical fiction. Both were bestsellers. The Invisible Bridge was published in 2010, and The Flight Portfolio in 2019.
Orringer is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Cornell University, and was a Stegner Fellow in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University. Her stories have appeared in the Paris Review, Yale Review, Ploughshares, Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Zoetrope: All-Story. She lives in Brooklyn, New York City. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[T]he horrors of war never become Ms. Orringer's primary subject. She devotes far more attention to conveying the intricacies of Jewish life and describing the ways in which they were cherished and preserved. This is a book in which one family's cooking rituals can take on an almost totemic importance.... Andras's most enduring wish…is to create a kind of family memorial. And Ms. Orringer, writing with both granddaughterly reverence and commanding authority, has done it for him.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
We all know what happened in the Holocaust, even if few among us can ever understand it, and the close of the novel demonstrates the refreshing trust Orringer has in her audience. The Invisible Bridge provides another literary glimpse of the day-to-day horrors of that time, and also reminds us of the potential contributors to the postwar world—the architects and painters, the professionals and tradesmen—who were lost from Mitteleuropa…The strength of The Invisible Bridge lies in Orringer's ability to make us care so deeply about the people of her all-too-real fictional world. For the time it takes to read this fine novel, and for a long time afterward, it becomes our world too.
Andrew Ervin - New York Times Book Review
Orringer uses the symbolism of invisible bridges in many inventive ways, re-engineering traditional dimensions of time and space, calibrating the immensity of world-war deaths against the specifics of one family's life, and building emotional connections between parents and children, husbands and wives, the preserved and the obliterated…She maintains a fine balance between the novel's intimate moments…and its panoramic set-pieces. Even those monumental scenes manage to display a tactful humility: This is a story, they keep reminding us, and it's not bringing anybody back. With its moving acknowledgment of the gap between what's been lost and what can be imagined, this remarkably accomplished first novel is itself, in the continuing stream of Holocaust literature, an invisible bridge.
Donna Rifkind - Washington Post
Orringer's stunning first novel far exceeds the expectations generated by her much-lauded debut collection, How to Breath Underwater. In this WWII saga, Orringer illuminates the life of Andras Levi, a Hungarian Jew of meager means whose world is upended by a scholarship to the Ecole Speciale d'Architecture in Paris. There, he makes an unlikely Hasz), a woman nine years his senior whose past links her to a wealthy Hungarian family familiar to Andras. Against the backdrop of grueling school assignments, exhausting work at a theater, budding romance, and the developing kinship between Andras and his fellow Jewish students, Orringer ingeniously depicts the insidious reach of the growing tide of anti-Semitism that eventually lands him back in Hungary. Once there, Orringer sheds light on how Hungary treated its Jewish citizens—first, sending them into hard labor, though not without a modicum of common decency—but as the country's alliance with Germany strengthens, the situation for Jews becomes increasingly dire. Throughout the hardships and injustices, Andras's love for Claire acts as a beacon through the unimaginable devastation and the dark hours of hunger, thirst, and deprivation. Orringer's triumphant novel is as much a lucid reminder of a time not so far away as it is a luminous story about the redemptive power of love.
Publishers Weekly
In September 1937, Andras Levi leaves Budapest for Paris, where he will study at the Ecole Speciale on a scholarship. Before he leaves, he encounters Elza Hasz, who asks him to carry a letter to Paris addressed to C. Morgenstern. Andras posts the letter and begins his studies, getting help from a Hungarian professor, a desperately needed job from a theater director he met on the train, and an introduction to some friends from an actress at the theater. The daughter is sullen and disinterested, but the mother turns out to be Claire Morgenstern, recipient of the mysterious letter, and it is with Claire that Andras launches a tumultuous affair. Soon, a painful secret about Claire's past emerges—and then war comes to sweep everything aside. Verdict: With historic detail, a complex cast of characters, and much coincidental crossing, this book has a big, sagalike feel. Unfortunately, it also has a paint-by-the-numbers feel, as if the author were working too hard to get through every point of the story she's envisioned. The result is some plain writing, not the luminous moments we remember from her story collection, How To Breathe Underwater. Nevertheless, this should appeal to those who like big reads with historic significance. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal
A long, richly detailed debut novel from prizewinning short-story writer Orringer (How to Breathe Underwater, 2003), unfolding from a little-explored area of the Holocaust. The brothers Andras and Tibor Levi, Hungarian Jews, are models of aspiration. As the narrative opens, Andras is bound for Paris to study architecture, Tibor for Italy to study medicine. The year is 1937, far enough along in the proceedings that neither should be surprised to learn that bad things are about to happen; yet both are so resolutely set on their paths that, it seems, the outside world does not always figure. Andras is helped along by a few fellow Jews at the Parisian academy, as well as a seemingly sympathetic artist who inspires him to contemplate, at 22, converting to "become a Christian, and not just a Christian-a Roman Catholic, the Christians who'd imagined houses of God like Notre-Dame, like the Saint-Chapelle, like the Matyas Templom or the Basilica of Szent Istvan in Budapest." This will not be the first time Andras gives free play to lofty-mindedness, but the mood gives way to earthlier concerns when he meets a woman who has an engagingly complex past-and whose story will travel alongside Andras's through the labor-camp system and, eventually, the Nazi death machine. Tibor's story is a quieter version of Andras's; indeed, the reader sometimes wonders whether Orringer has forgotten about him, though only for a time. The author works large themes of family, loyalty and faith across a huge sweep of geography and history. Her settings are the smart avenues of world capitals, snowy dirt tracks on the road to Stalingrad, even the woods of upstate New York. Her story develops without sentimentality or mawkishness, though it is full of grand emotions. Though the events of the time, especially in Hungary, are now the stuff of history books and increasingly fewer firsthand memories, Orringer writes without anachronism, and convincingly. Written with the big-picture view of Doctor Zhivago or Winds of War.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What does the opening chapter establish about the cultural and social milieu of prewar Budapest? What do Andras’s reactions to Hasz household reveal about the status of Jews within the larger society? How do the differences between the Hasz and Levi families affect their assumptions and behavior during the war? Which scenes and characters most clearly demonstrate the tensions within the Jewish community?
2. Why do Andras and his friends at the Ecole Speciale tolerate the undercurrent of anti-Semitism at the school even after the verbal attack on Eli Polaner (pp. 39–40) and the spate of vandalism against Jewish students (p. 94)? To what extent are their reactions shaped by their nationalities, political beliefs, or personal histories? Why does Andras agree to infiltrate the meeting of Le Grand Occident (pp. 97–102)? Is his belief that “[the police] wouldn’t deport me... Not for serving the ideals of France” (p. 102), as well as the reactions of Professor Vago and Andras’s father to the German invasion of Czechoslovakia (p. 266) naïve, or do they represent widespread opinions and assumptions?
3. Andras and Klara’s love blossoms against the background of uncertainties and fear. Is Klara’s initial lack of openness about her background justified by her situation? Why does she eventually begin an affair with Andras? Are they equally responsible for the arguments, break-ups, and reconciliations that characterize their courtship? Do Klara’s revelations (pp. 214–34) change your opinion of her and the way she has behaved?
4. Despite the grim circumstances, Andras and Mendel produce satirical newspapers in the labor camps. What do the excerpts from "The Snow Goose" (p. 331), The Biting Fly (pp. 360–61), and The Crooked Rail (p. 437) show about the strategies that helped laborers preserve their humanity and their sanity? What other survival techniques do Andras and his fellow laborers develop?
5. In Budapest, the Levi and Hasz families sustain themselves with small pleasures, daily tasks at home and, in the case of the men, working at the few jobs still available to Jews (pp. 352–55, pp. 366–77, pp. 405–10). Are they driven by practical or emotional needs, or both? Does the attempt to maintain ordinary life represent hope and courage, or a tragic failure to recognize the ever-encroaching danger? What impact do the deprivations and degradations imposed by the Germans have on the relationship between the families? Which characters are the least able or willing to accept the threats to their homeland and their culture?
6. What details in the descriptions of Banhida (pp. 356–63, pp. 392–99), Turka (pp. 486–503), and the transport trains (pp. 558–66) most chillingly capture the cruelty perpetrated by the Nazis? In addition to physical abuse and deprivation, what are the psychological effects of the camps’ rules and the laws imposed on civilian populations?
7. General Marton in Banhida (pp. 399–402), Captain Erdo, and the famous General Vilmos Nagy in Turka all display kindness and compassion. Miklós Klein engages in the tremendously dangerous work of arranging emigrations for fellow Jews (pp. 422–23). What motivates each of them to act as they do? What political ideals and moral principles lie at the heart Nagy’s stirring speech to the officers-in-training (pp. 506–7)? (Because of his refusal to support official anti-Semitic policies, Nagy was eventually forced to resign from the Hungarian army; in 1965, he was the first Hungarian named as a Righteous Among the Nations by the Yad Vashem Institute.)
8. Why does Klara refuse to leave Budapest and go to Palestine (p. 510)? Is her decision the result of her own set of circumstances, or does it reflect the attitudes of other Jews in Hungary and other countries under Nazi control?
9. “He could no sooner cease being Jewish than he could cease being a brother to his brothers, a son to his father and mother” (p. 46). Discuss the value and importance of Jewish beliefs and traditions to Andras and other Jews, considering such passages as Andras’s feelings in the above quotation and his thoughts on the High Holidays (pp. 201–3); the weddings of Ben Yakov and Ilana (pp. 255–56) and of Andras and Klara (p. 317); the family seder in wartime Budapest (pp. 352–55); and the prayers and small rituals conducted in work camps.
10. The narrative tracks the political and military upheavals engulfing Europe as they occur. What do these intermittent reports demonstrate about the failure of both governments and ordinary people to grasp the true objectives of the Nazi regime? How does the author create and sustain a sense of suspense and portending disaster, even for readers familiar with the ultimate course of the war?
11. Throughout the book there are descriptions of Andras’s studies, including information about his lessons and the models he creates and detailed observations of architectural masterpieces in Paris. What perspective does the argument between Pingsson and Le Corbusier offer on the role of the architect in society (pp. 273–74)? Whose point of view do you share? What aspects of architecture as a discipline make it particularly appropriate to the themes explored in the novel? What is the relevance of Andras’s work as a set designer within this context?
12. Andras’s encounters with Mrs. Hász (p. 6) and with Zoltan Novak (pp. 19–20) are the first of many coincidences that determine the future paths of various characters. What other events in the novel are the result of chance or luck? How do the twists and turns of fortune help to create a sense of the extraordinary time in which the novel is set?
13. Does choice also play a significant role in the characters’ lives? What do their decisions (for example, Klara’s voluntary return to Budapest; Gyorgy’s payments to the Hungarian authorities; and even Joszef’s attack on Andras and Mendel (p. 492)) demonstrate about the importance of retaining a sense of independence and control in the midst of chaos?
14. The Holocaust and other murderous confrontations between ethnic groups can challenge the belief in God. “(Andras) believed in God, yes, the God of his fathers, the one to whom he’d prayed...but that God, the One, was not One who intervened in the way the needed someone to intervene just then. He had designed the cosmos and thrown its doors open to man, and man had moved in.... The world was their place now” (p. 432). What is your reaction to Andras’s point of view? Have you read or heard explanations of why terrible events come to pass that more closely reflect your personal beliefs?
15. What did you know about Hungary’s role in World War II before reading The Invisible Bridge? Did the book present information about the United States and its Allies that surprised you? Did it affect your views on Zionism and the Jewish emigration to Palestine? Did it deepen your understanding of the causes and the course of the war? What does the epilogue convey about the postwar period and the links among past, present, and future?
16. “In the end, what astonished him the most was not the vastness of it all—that was impossible to take in, the hundreds of thousands dead from Hungary alone, and the millions from all over Europe—but the excruciating smallness, the pinpoint of which every life was balanced” (p. 558). Does The Invisible Bridge succeed in capturing both the “vastness of it all” and the “excruciating smallness” of war and its impact on individual lives?
17. Why has Orringer chosen “Any Case” by the Nobel Prize–winning Polish poet Wislawa Szymborkska as the coda to her novel? What does it express about individuals caught in the flow of history and the forces that determine their fates?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko
Scott Stambach, 2016
St. Martin's Press
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250081865
Summary
The Fault In Our Stars meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Seventeen-year-old Ivan Isaenko is a life-long resident of the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children in Belarus.
For the most part, every day is exactly the same for Ivan, which is why he turns everything into a game, manipulating people and events around him for his own amusement.
Until Polina arrives.
She steals his books. She challenges his routine. The nurses like her.
She is exquisite. Soon, he cannot help being drawn to her and the two forge a romance that is tenuous and beautiful and everything they never dared dream of. Before, he survived by being utterly detached from things and people.
Now, Ivan wants something more: Ivan wants Polina to live. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Rochester, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., B.S., State University of New York-Buffalo; M.S., University of
California-San Diego
• Currently—lives in San Diego, California
Scott Stambach is an American author and physics professor. His first novel, The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko, was published in 2016 and referred to as an "auspicious, gut-wrenching, wonderful debut" by Kirkus Reviews.
Stambach lives in San Diego where he teaches physics and astronomy at Grossmont and Mesa colleges. He also collaborates with Science for Monks, a group of educators and monastics working to establish science programs in Tibetan Monasteries throughout India. He has written about his experiences working with monks of Sera Jey monastery and has published short fiction in several literary journals including Ecclectica, Stirring, and Convergence. (Adapted from the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Scott Stambach’s wonderful debut prods us to question everything—reality, religion, morality, even the value of life itself—and he does it through the voice of 17- year-old Ivan Isaenko. If you’re trapped in a mutated body, but you also happen to be a prodigy—well-versed in Russian literature, say, and astrophysics—how could you not question the very things the rest of us accept as settled wisdom? READ MORE.
Molly Lundquist - LitLovers
[I]mpressive, well-structured debut.... Stambach’s surprising, empathetic novel takes on heavy themes of illness, suffering, religion, patience, and purpose, with a balanced mix of humor and heart.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [S]easoned with humor, wit, and astute observation.... What's more, despite the presence of a corrupt health care bureaucracy, the story highlights the ways random acts of kindness can illuminate individual lives and make the seemingly unbearable tolerable, if not wholly acceptable. An auspicious, gut-wrenching, wonderful debut.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko...then take off on your own:
1. In a confrontation with Nurse Natalya, Ivan says he would rather be mentally "deficient" than mentally cogent living at Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children. Natalya responds that "self-awareness is what makes life worth living." What do you think?
2. Why does Ivan work so hard to learn how to change Max's diaper? Why is the two-year-old so important to him that he takes Polina to see him?
3. What is the state of Ivan's faith? He says he once believed "there was a set amount of bad to be distributed to all people." What made him question, even change, his belief in the fairness of the world? Another time he asks Natalya, "Should I be angry with God?" Natasha says, "God didn't do this to you, Ivan." What would you say to Ivan to answer his doubts?
4. Talk about Nurse Natalya, Ivan says she is the closest person to a mother he has ever had. Why is her kindness so rare? Consider the myriad duties of nurses at the Mazyr Hospital. Does that kind of overloaded schedule sap one's ability to sympathize? Might there be other reasons (of course, the author never develops any of the personalities, but we're allowed to conjecture on our own).
5. The unfairness of Dr. Ridick's ability to cure the "heart-hole" children is a conflicting emotion for Ivan. Talk about his feelings toward them. He paraphrases Nabokov: "the world needs happy endings no matter how unethical." (See quote below.) Why does Ivan draw upon that quotation? How, in his mind, does it apply to the ethics of curing the heart-hole children?
6. What are the Interlopers, and why is Ivan wary of them?
7. Ivan considers Polina an Interloper, at first. Talk about Ivan's initial reactions to her: he hates—and fears—her the very moment he lays eyes on her. Why? He lists his reasons for despising her, one of which is that "she obliterated the edges of my world." What does he mean by that phrase? More to the point: what do the particular reasons for his hatred—to say nothing of the list itself—reveal about Ivan?
8. (Follow-up to Question 7): A few pages later, after he discovers Polina reading Gogol, Ivan says of her:
[S]he was someone who could see my reality and reflect it back to me. She was someone who could make me feel I was not just a ghost haunting the hallways.
What does Ivan mean, and why is it so disturbing to him?
9. The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko has numerous moments of humor, sometimes to the point of hilarity. Consider the episodes with his therapists, particularly with Dr. Moisey Sokolov who he treats as the patient. What other comments, conversations, or observations of Ivan's do you find funny?
10. One of the most poignant chapters of the book concerns Ivan's mother, or the mother he envisions. Talk about his ideal and what it reveals about Ivan's state.
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The actual quote is from Nabokov's 1953 novel Pnin: "Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically."
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison, 1952
Knopf Doubleday
581 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679732761
Summary
Winner, 1953 National Book Award
Invisible Man is a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952. A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century.
The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood", and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.
The book is a passionate and witty tour de force of style, strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Joyce, and Dostoevsky. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1914
• Where—Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA
• Died—April 16, 1994
• Where—New York, New York
• Education—Tuskegee Institute
• Awards—National Book Award
Ralph Ellison was born in 1914 in Oklahoma City, the son of Lewis Ellison, a construction worker, and his wife, Ida, a domestic. He was introduced to literature by his mother, who used to bring him books she borrowed from the homes she cleaned. A further exposure was provided by the ironies of segregation: in the 1920s, Oklahoma City had no black library, and books from the library's main branch were shelved haphazardly in a pool hall, where the young Ralph might find a volume of fairy tales alongside one of Freud—with no well-meaning librarian telling him what a child ought or ought not to be reading.
Ellison attended Alabama's Tuskegee Institute on a music scholarship, but in 1936 he moved to New York City, where he began writing short stories while supporting himself as a free-lance photographer and audio engineer. After serving in the Merchant Marine during World War II, he spent seven years writing Invisible Man, working out of an office located at the back of a jewelry store on Fifth Avenue. The book was published in 1952 and was awarded the National Book Award. It has been translated into seventeen languages.
The manuscript of Ellison's second novel was destroyed by a fire in 1967. He spent the remaining years of his life painstakingly reconstructing it, while publishing two volumes of nonfiction, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986). He taught and lectured widely, was appointed to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, served on the National Council on the Arts and Humanities and the Carnegie Commission on public television, and was a trustee of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Ralph Ellison died of cancer on April 16, 1994, at his home in New York City. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
With this book the author maps a course from the underground world into the light. Invisible Man belongs on the shelf with the classical efforts man has made to chart the river Lethe from its mouth to its source (New York Times Books of the Century).
Wright Morris - New York Times (April, 1952)
Unquestionably, Ellison's book is a work of extraordinary intensity—powerfully imagined and written with a savage, wryly humorous gusto.
Atlantic Monthly
[O]ne of the lasting masterpieces of American literature. It chronicles the existential journey of an unnamed black man attempting to discover his identity and role in a hostile and confusing world that refuses to acknowledge his existence. Within the story of the protagonist's quest for definition, Ellison offers a vivid and unforgiving examination of the shortcomings of the self-serving black bourgeoisie, clumsy white philanthropists, dehumanizing American industry, and unrealistic revolutionary movements.... [A]n essential book,
Sacred Fire
Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel tells truths about the nature of bigotry and its effect on the minds of victims and perpetrators (Grade 11 and up).
School Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. What makes Ellison's narrator invisible? What is the relationship between his invisibility and other people's blindness—both involuntary and willful? Is the protagonist's invisibility due solely to his skin color? Is it only the novel's white characters who refuse to see him?
2. One drawback of invisibility is that "you ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world" [p. 4]. How does the narrator try to prove that he exists? Does this sentence provide a clue to the behavior of other characters in the book?
3. What are the narrator's dreams and goals? How are these variously fulfilled or thwarted in the course of the book?
4. Is the reader meant to identify with the narrator? To sympathize with him? How do you think Ellison himself sees his protagonist?
5. What is the significance of the grandfather's deathbed speech [p.16]? Whom or what has he betrayed? What other characters in this book resort to the same strategy of smiling betrayal?
6. Throughout the novel the narrator gives speeches, or tries to give them, to audiences both black and white, at venues that range from a whites-only "smoker" to the funeral of a black street vendor murdered by the police. What role does oratory—and, more broadly, the spoken word—play in Invisible Man?
7. The "battle royal" sequence portrays black men fighting each other for the entertainment of whites. Does Ellison ever portray similar combats between blacks and whites? To what end?
8. Throughout the book the narrator encounters a number of white benefactors, including a millionaire college trustee, an amiable playboy, and the professional agitator Brother Jack. What does the outcome of these relationships suggest about the possibility of friendship or cooperation between the races?
9. What black men does the protagonist choose as mentors or role models? Do they prove to be any more trustworthy than his white "benefactors"? What about those figures whose authority and advice the narrator rejects—for example, the vet in The Golden Day and the separatist Ras the Exhorter? What characters in Invisible Man, if any, represent sources of moral authority and stability?
10. What cultural tendencies or phenomena does Ellison hold up for satire in this novel? For example, what were the real-life models for the Founder, the Brotherhood, and Ras the Exhorter? How does the author convey the failures and shortcomings of these people and movements?
11. Why might Tod Clifton have left the Brotherhood to peddle demeaning dancing Sambo dolls? What does the narrator mean when he says: "It was as though he [Clifton] had chosen...to fall outside of history"? How would you describe Ellison's vision of history and the role that African-Americans play within it?
12. Invisible Man may be said to exemplify the paranoid style of American literature. How does Ellison establish an atmosphere of paranoia in his novel, as though the reader, along with the narrator, "had waded out into a shallow pool only to have the bottom drop out and the water close over my head" [p.432]? Why is this style particularly appropriate to Ellison's subject matter?
13. Where in Invisible Man does Ellison—who was trained as a musician—use language to musical effect? (For example, compare the description of the college campus on pages 34-7 to Trueblood's confession on 51-68, to the chapel scene on 110-135, and Tod Clifton's funeral on 450-461.) What different sorts of language does Ellison employ in these and other passages? How does the "music" of these sections—their rhythm, assonance, and alliteration—heighten their meaning or play against it?
14. More than sixty years after it was first published, Invisible Man is still one of the most widely read and widely taught books in the African-American literary canon. Why do you think this is so? How true is this novel to the lives of black Americans in the 1990s?
15. In spite of its vast success (or perhaps because of it), Ellison's novel—and the author himself—were fiercely criticized in some circles for being insufficiently "Afrocentric." Do you think this is true? Do you think Ellison made artistic compromises in order to make Invisible Man accessible to white readers?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Invisible Ones
Stef Penney, 2012
Penguin Group USA
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780399157714
Summary
Small-time private investigator Ray Lovell veers between paralysis and delirium in a hospital bed. But before the accident that landed him there, he'd been hired to find Rose Janko, the wife of a charismatic son of a traveling Gypsy family, who went missing seven years earlier.
Half Romany himself, Ray is well aware that he's been chosen more for his blood than his investigative skills. Still, he's surprised by the intense hostility he encounters from the Jankos, who haven't had an easy past. Touched by tragedy, they're either cursed or hiding a terrible secret-whose discovery Ray can't help suspecting is connected to Rose's disappearance. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1969
• Where—Edinburg, Scotland, UK
• Education—Bristol University
• Awards—Costa (Whitbread) Award
• Currently—lives in London, England
Stef Penney was born and grew up in Edinburgh. After earning a degree in philosophy and theology from Bristol University, she turned to filmmaking, studying film and TV at Bournemouth College of Art. On graduation she was selected for the Carlton Television New Writers Scheme. She is a screenwriter. Her debut novel, The Tenderness of Wolves, won the 2006 Costa Award. She published The Invisible Ones in 2012. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
The mystery element of the story is adroitly handled, as clues and subtle inconsistencies in the Janko story are dropped in. Yet its destination is a total surprise, and if that is because it stretches the bounds of credibility, Penney is confident enough to let her characters say exactly that. The Invisible Ones is a book about love, deception, growing up, belonging, being an outsider and about how all our presents are haunted by our pasts. Its author is a supreme story-teller on top form.
London Times
Penney is a good storyteller. She unfurls various mysterious plot possibilities and unearths the insecurities that lurk in families and relationships. She imagines the Romany world carefully, avoiding cliche or judgement or anything too negative ... there are moments of transcendence here, moments where Penney's writing really excels.
Sunday Times (UK)
[A] haunting tale...this is a beautifully crafted novel with skilful characterisation and a plot which twists and turns.... [T]his story of loss, deceit and family tragedy lingers long after you've finished the book,
Daily Express (UK)
Penney's portrayal of the gypsy way of life is sympathetic. Seemingly bizarre customs are given a context; strong love is set against deadening control.... Ivo's return trip to Lourdes with JJ, Christo and their grandmother is a marvellously atmospheric piece of writing.
Financial Times
In her mesmerizing sophomore outing, Penney wraps a riddle in a mystery inside an enigma that intrigues from the very first page. As the tale—set in the ’80s—begins, private eye Ray Lovell wakes up in an English hospital with little memory and partial paralysis. While he recovers, other problems present. Lovell Price Investigations is broke and most of its cases involve adultery, about which Ray says: “These sorts of cases... can depress you if you let them.” Then Ray, who is half-Gypsy himself, is offered a job by a fellow Gypsy, Leon Wood, who wants Ray to find his daughter, Rose, who he hasn’t seen or spoken to in seven years, ever since she married Ivo Janko, another Gypsy (or traveler, as the British often call them). Why Leon wants to find Rose after so much time begins the mystery. He tells Ray it’s because her mother has died and she should know, but Leon suspects foul play even though Rose’s husband claims she ran off with a “gorjio” right after having a child, but Leon suspects foul play. Given his Gypsy heritage, Ray is able to insert himself into the itinerant lifestyle of that world—exactly the reason why Leon has hired him. But even with his knowledge of the traveling life, Ray is surprised by the stonewalling and half-truths he encounters while trying to learn the Janko family’s secrets. The narrative slides seamlessly between Ray’s point of view and that of J.J., Ivo’s cousin’s son, giving the reader a balanced perspective—and serving up two truly shocking twists at the story’s end. Fast-paced, with characters who will live in full color inside the reader’s head, Penney delivers an impressive follow-up to her debut bestseller, The Tenderness of Wolves.
Publishers Weekly
Penney's Costa Award-winning debut, The Tenderness of Wolves, offers edge-of-civilization suspense in Canada's Northern Territory in the 1860s. Set in 1980s England, her new novel might seem like a departure, but it's not; here Penney probes the edge-of-civilization otherness of England's Romany (or Gypsies) while presenting a mystery rooted in the stranglehold of family. As the novel opens, Det. Ray Lovell gets a visit from Leon Wood, a Gypsy whose daughter, Rose, went missing years ago after marrying into the Janko family. Since Lovell has Gypsy roots, he's the only investigator Wood trusts. Trying to breach the silence surrounding Rose's disappearance, Lovell goes up against the entire Janko clan, including patriarch Tener; Tener's son Ivo, husband to Rose and father to Christo, who's languishing from an inherited disease that has killed off much of the family; Sandra, Ivo's cousin and the mother of JJ; and JJ himself, who's 14, smart, and the family's bridge to the outer world. Told alternately from Lovell's and JJ's perspectives, the story ends with a bone-rattling surprise that conveys how much the Jankos have endured. Verdict: Another stunner from Penney; highly recommended. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal
Perhaps one of the first novels involving a half-Gypsy as a detective. Penney uses the missing-person plot rather than the whodunit to provide a thread for her narrative. One day Romany Leon Wood shows up at Ray Lovell's failing detective agency to hire him to find his missing daughter, Rose. Lovell has some immediate concerns about the case, primarily because Rose has been missing for seven years. Leon has a Gypsy's reluctance to go to the police about the case but trusts Lovell because he's half Romany—his father was born in a field in Kent while his mother was gorjio, or non-Romany. The novel starts with Lovell in a hospital, partially paralyzed and vaguely remembering a recent sexual encounter, though he's unsure whether this was memory or hallucination. As he gets well, he takes us back to his initial steps in tracing Rose's disappearance. Besides Lovell, Penney uses JJ Janko, a Romany teenager, as her other narrator. JJ is concerned about Ivo, his uncle, but especially about Ivo's son Christo, who's suffering from a rare and seemingly incurable disease, one that Ivo himself had had as a child and "miraculously" recovered from. (Ivo had made a pilgrimage to Lourdes, where they also take Christo in a desperate attempt to cure him.) Fortunately, Lovell has a pediatrician friend who's able to give insight into the nature of Christo's illness and how it's genetically transmitted from generation to generation...and it turns out that it's impossible for Ivo to be Christo's father. Penney gives her plot plenty of twists and saves the best for the end, with a truly unforeseen and unpredictable conclusion.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The author chose to tell this story with two narrators, each of whom offers a different view into Romany culture. Would the story have been stronger or weaker with just one narrator? Do the narrators’ positions affect your perspective on the culture?
2. Why do you think the author chose JJ to illustrate Romany culture? How would the story have been influenced by a different narrator—Tene or Sandra, for example? What effect does JJ’s voice have on the story?
3. JJ reflects on a disastrous study date with a classmate at the end of chapter 16, saying that he and Stella are “like trains on tracks that run more or less parallel but will never meet. I can’t go on her tracks, and she can’t go on mine.” In what ways is Romany culture different from the outside world? In what ways is it the same?
4. Romany face a significant amount of prejudice and stereotyping. What are some examples in the novel? What impact does this have on the characters? How are Romany themselves prejudiced against outsiders? How does Ray Lovell walk the line between his two cultures?
5. Ray Lovell’s viewpoint moves between his past and his present. How does solving the mystery "alongside" him enhance your reading experience?
6. “Pure blood” is a significant concern through this novel. How does pure blood shape the “one of us” mentality? How has the desire for pure blood affected the Janko family? Are there other cultures or instances in history where “pure blood” has been a valuable trait?
7. The Jankos visit the healing bathhouses at Lourdes in an attempt to cure Christo’s mysterious disease, through prayer and holy water. JJ says that his family is not religious, though we learn that their culture is rich in folklore. How does their belief in the healing power of Lourdes align with their folkloric traditions? Are there ways in which it conflicts?
8. Luck is a prevalent theme in the novel. Are the Jankos lucky or unlucky? Explain with specific instances that the Jankos attribute to luck.
9. The Invisible Ones is set in the 1980s. Why do you think the author chose this time period? In what ways does it affect your reading experience?
10. Sandra and Lulu have very different reactions to Ray’s revelation about Ivo. Sandra is arguably much closer to Ivo, but she responds much more calmly to the news. Were you surprised by this? Why do you think the two reacted so differently?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Use a numeral "one" not upper-case "I" ...
Not to worry ... it's an easy mistake.
IRAN (The de'Conte Series, 6)
Nicholas Borelli, 2016
CreateSpace
314 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781523678792
Summary
Niccolo Cervantes de'Conti is an international attorney with global clientele based in New York's prestigious Rockefeller Center.
He represents clients in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia who do business with Iranian companies. The United States government would like an "introduction" to some of his clients’ Iranian counter-parties to effect covert foreign policy.
The U.S. spies know that Iran has cheated on the nuclear arms deal and has a stash of weapons grade uranium and plutonium hidden deep underground in the Iranian desert. Nick de'Conti will join a CIA-led team to effect U.S. covert operations.
Author Bio
• Birth—1951
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.M.E., Pratt Institute; M.B.A., Fordham University
• Currently—Wilton, Connecticut
Nicholas Borelli, a New England based author, has and continues to write the de'Conti series.
The novels currently include Let No Man Be My Albatross, A Convoluted Defense, The Machiavelli Imperative, FATA! The Act of the Vengeance, At Last Reconciled and IRAN. Mr. Borelli is writing two more novels: Dahij and A Special Prosecution.
These works feature the protagonist Niccolo Cervantes de'Conti. Mr. Borelli has conceived and developed a central character based on his knowledge of and first-hand experience with the gritty New York inner city of his youth. Nick de'Conti is an ethnic mixture of Basque and Southern Italian. He has a penchant for independent thought and action, and a passion with which he approaches everything in his life. He is a prominent lawyer, an aristocrat. The arc of his life is developed from the depths of his childhood poverty in East Harlem in the cruel, inner city streets of New York City to his unimagined success—albeit troubled, conflicted and, at times, ethically bereft.
These novels are edgy, raw, graphic and thought-provoking.
Although de'Conti is a former New York City prosecutor and United States Attorney, his hard life as a child in the inner city of East Harlem sometimes causes him to mete out as much street justice as he does the legal kind. He abhors the abuse of women, his own college-age daughter having been murdered at the hands of male predators. He will revert to instincts he developed as an inner city kid, even though he lives in a Fifth-Avenue penthouse on a high floor across from New York's Central Park. (From the author.)
Visit borellibooks.com.
Follow Nicholas on Instagram.
Book Reviews
In Borelli’s latest thriller, a New York lawyer gets caught up in a U.S. operation to neutralize weapons-grade material hidden in Iran.... It’s riveting stuff, though the finale includes a jarring personnel shift. Not the most likable protagonist but watching him confront danger may garner interest in his previous tales.
Kirkus Reviews
[A] page turner.... Didn't want to put it down!
Mary L., Amazon Customer Review
[R]ead this book. It's so plausibly realistic you cannot put it down.
Kindle User, Amazon Customer Review
[F]illed with intrigue.... Fast-paced enjoyable read.
Marsha N, Amazon Customer Review
Discussion Questions
1. The author obviously has technical knowledge of nuclear physics. Does the protagonist’s scientific proposals to President Obama seem plausible?
2. What do you think of Nick de’Conti’s relationship with Laleh Sassani?
3. Nick de’Conti has multiple woman in his life, including his wife Katherine Sheffield and Gabriella Desjardins, his African American beauty. Who do you think he will ultimately settle down with?
4. Nick de’Conti always reverts too his old, childhood friend in Harlem, Victor Armstrong, aka The Pig. Why do you think he relies on him so much?
5. How does this book’s premise compare to what is actually taking place between Iran and the United States on the nuclear front?
6. Do you think this world view given by the author is possible?
7. Do you like President Obama’s demeanor better in real life or the novel?
8. Do Nick de’Conti and President Obama have a good relationship?
9. What do you think of the book’s cover?
10. Would this novel make for a good feature film?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)
Irma Voth
Miriam Toews, 2011
HarperCollins
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062070180
Summary
That rare coming-of-age story able to blend the dark with the uplifting, Irma Voth follows a young Mennonite woman, vulnerable yet wise beyond her years, who carries a terrible family secret with her on a remarkable journey to survival and redemption.
Nineteen-year-old Irma lives in a rural Mennonite community in Mexico. She has already been cast out of her family for marrying a young Mexican ne'er-do-well she barely knows, although she remains close to her rebellious younger sister and yearns for the lost intimacy with her mother. With a husband who proves elusive and often absent, a punishing father, and a faith in God damaged beyond repair, Irma appears trapped in an untenable and desperate situation. When a celebrated Mexican filmmaker and his crew arrive from Mexico City to make a movie about the insular community in which she was raised, Irma is immediately drawn to the outsiders and is soon hired as a translator on the set. But her father, intractable and domineering, is determined to destroy the film and get rid of the interlopers. His action sets Irma on an irrevocable path toward something that feels like freedom.
A novel of great humanity, written with dry wit, edgy humor, and emotional poignancy, Irma Voth is the powerful story of a young woman's quest to discover all that she may become in the unexpectedly rich and confounding world that lies beyond the stifling, observant community she knows. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1964
• Where—Steinbach, Manitoba, Canada
• Education—University of Manitoba; University
of Kings College
• Awards—Governor General's Award, Rogers
Writers Trust Fiction Prize, Writers’ Trust
Engel/Findley Award
• Currently—lives in Toronto, Canada
Miriam Toews (prounced "Tayvz") is a Canadian writer of Mennonite descent. She grew up in Steinbach, Manitoba and has lived in Montreal and London, before settling in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She moved to Toronto in 2009.
Toews studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of King's College in Halifax, and has also worked as a freelance newspaper and radio journalist. Her non-fiction book Swing Low: A Life was a memoir of her father, a victim of lifelong depression.
Her 2004 novel A Complicated Kindness was her breakthrough work, spending over a year on the Canadian bestseller lists and winning the Governor General's Award for English Fiction. The novel, about a teenage girl who longs to escape her small Dutch Mennonite town and hang out with Lou Reed in the slums of New York City, was also nominated for the Giller Prize and was the winning title in the 2006 edition of Canada Reads.
A series of letters she wrote in 2000 to the father of her son were published on the website www.openletters.net and were profiled on the radio show This American Life in an episode about missing parents.
In 2007 she made her screen debut in the Mexican film Luz silenciosa directed by Carlos Reygadas, which screened at the Cannes Film Festival. She was nominated for Best Actress at Mexico's Ariel Awards for her performance in the film.
The Flying Troutmans was published in 2008. The novel is about a 28-year-old woman from Manitoba who takes her 15-year-old nephew and 11-year-old niece on a road trip to California after their mentally ill mother has been hospitalized. That novel won the 2008 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. In 2010 she received the prestigious Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Award for her body of work. Her novel, Irma Voth, came out in 2011. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
[F]or all its slow-burn funniness and faith in the redeeming power of art, the novel is built on an awareness that Irma can never fully escape her family's history of pain, suffering and loss…[Toews] writes with an instinctive grasp of the adolescent point of view, in which concepts like personal freedom and self-determination have the highest emotional charge and adults are powerful but slightly irrelevant beings.
Melissa Russo - New York Times Book Review
Miriam Toews has a remarkably light touch. She combines a playfully sardonic humour with crushing pathos.
Times Literary Supplement (UK)
In this compelling and beautiful novel, Toews’s quirky and authentic voice shows increasing range and maturity. She is well on her way to fulfilling her promise as an important and serious writer.
Montreal Gazette
A strong and skillful novel…a parable of redemption, a powerful theme…that leaves the reader with a comforting glow of hope.
Annie Proulx - Financial Times
A witty and thoughtful coming-of-age story…a novel about parenthood and sisterhood, and about redefining those relationships as people grow…it succeeds tremendously.
Washington Independent Review of Books
Toews…combines an intimate coming-of-age tale with picaresque and extremely effective prose.
Publishers Weekly
A literary novel marked by charm, wit and an original approach to language.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Who is Irma Voth? What is she like when the novel opens? Is she the same person by the book’s end? What changes about her—and what does not?
2. What are your impressions of her family? What is her role among the Voths? What are the dynamics like between Irma, her parents, and her siblings? Do you like her parents? Can you understand their choices?
3. Irma has been raised in a strict Mennonite community. Is religion important to Irma? Does she believe in the same God her father does? How has it shaped her character?
4. How would you describe her marriage? Why did she marry Jorge—and why did he marry her? Was it love?
5. Early in the story, Irma poses a question to herself. “How do I behave in this world without following the directions of my father, my husband, or God?” How would you answer Irma? How might she answer this question herself by the novel’s end?
6. What does the film crew’s arrival hold for Irma and her family? How does meeting Diego, Marijke, Wilson affect the young woman?
7. Diego talks to Irma about rebellion, and asks her a question. “Do you feel that we can rebel against our oppressors without losing our love, our tolerance, and our ability to forgive?” What would your response to Diego be? What are they all rebelling against?
8. Why does Diego suggest Irma keep a diary of her experiences on the shoot? What does she write about? What wisdom does her writing offer her and how does that wisdom affect her choices?
9. Marijke introduces Irma to Epicurus’s “four-part cure”—Don’t fear God. Don’t worry about death. What is good is easy to get, and what is terrible is easy to endure.” Is this a good philosophy to live by? Does it illuminate Irma’s struggle? How do events in her lrma’s life address all four tenets? Use examples from the story to illustrate your points.
10. What draws Irma to Wilson? She asks him to ponder a question. “if you knew this was your last day on earth what kind of story would you write?” By the end, Irma has her own answer. Explain her ultimate response, and how she came to it. What would your answer be?
11. What adjectives would you use to describe Irma? What about Aggie? Irma calls her baby sister Ximena, “honest.” Why? Can a baby be honest? Is Irma honest? What about Aggie and the rest of the people in Irma’s life?
12. When they arrive in Mexico City, Aggie discovers a Diego Rivera mural. How does the mural affect Aggie? What about Irma? How does Rivera’s message reflect the girls’ experience?
13. What role does art play in Irma’s life? Her father says, “Art is a lie.” Why? Wilson tells her that art, “comes from the same desire to live.” Later, in Mexico City, Hubertus joyfully tells Irma, “When life is a shit storm your best umbrella is art.” Analyze each of these men’s viewpoints. What do their opinions tell us about their characters? What does Irma think about art? How would she define it? Is art necessary for life—even if it is a lie? Does it shelter us from life’s vicissitudes? How? What would life be like without art?
14. A jacaranda tree saved Natalie from despair and suicide. What, in your opinion, saved Irma?
15. Was Irma right to feel guilty about what happened in Canada? Could she have known the outcome of her actions? How did her knowledge of the truth and her role transform her relationship with her father? Does Irma’s revelation influence your opinion of her?
16. At its heart, Irma Voth is the story of young woman discovering herself and finding meaning in her life. It touches on many themes—defiance, freedom, independence, beauty, sacrifice, guilt, family, art, God, forgiveness, love. Choose one or two and trace them through the course of the story, using examples from Irma’s life and those around her.
17. Towards the end of the novel, Irma sees Diego’s film. How does she feel watching it? Can she ever forgive herself for all that has passed? Do you think she will ever be reconciled with the family she left behind?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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The Irresistible Henry House
Lisa Grunwald, 2010
Random House
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400063000
Summary
It is the middle of the twentieth century, and in a home economics program at a prominent university, real babies are being used to teach mothering skills to young women. For a young man raised in these unlikely circumstances, finding real love and learning to trust will prove to be the work of a lifetime. In this captivating novel, bestselling author Lisa Grunwald gives us the sweeping tale of an irresistible hero and the many women who love him.
From his earliest days as a “practice baby” through his adult adventures in 1960s New York City, Disney’s Burbank studios, and the delirious world of the Beatles’ London, Henry remains handsome, charming, universally adored—and never entirely accessible to the many women he conquers but can never entirely trust.
Filled with unforgettable characters, settings, and action, The Irresistible Henry House portrays the cultural tumult of the mid-twentieth century even as it explores the inner tumult of a young man trying to transcend a damaged childhood. For it is not until Henry House comes face-to-face with the real truths of his past that he finds a chance for real love. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1959
• Where—N/A
• Education—N/A
• Currently—lives in New York City
Lisa Grunwald is the author of the novels Whatever Makes You Happy, New Year’s Eve, The Theory of Everything, and Summer. Along with her husband, journalist Stephen J. Adler, she edited the bestselling anthologies Women’s Letters and Letters of the Century. Grunwald is a former contributing editor to Life and a former features editor of Esquire. She and Adler live in New York City with their two children. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Epic and thoroughly engrossing.... House sweeps along with such page-turning vitality that [Henry's] story is indeed irresistible. Grade: A
Leah Greenblat - Entertainment Weekly
A smart, enjoyable read that will leave you with a pleasing thought: Even for guys who just aren't that into anyone, there's hope.
Kim Hubbard - People
Imaginatively picaresque and often gut-wrenching.
Alex Kuczynski - O Magazine
Like T.S. Garp, Forrest Gump or Benjamin Button, Henry House , the hero of Grunwald’s imaginative take on a little known aspect of American academic life, has an unusual upbringing. In 1946, orphaned baby Henry is brought to all-girl’s Wilton College as part of its home economics program to give young women hands-on instruction in child-rearing (such programs really existed). Henry ends up staying on at the practice house and growing up under the care of its outwardly stern but inwardly loving program director, Martha Gaines. As a protest against his unusual situation, Henry refuses to speak and is packed off to a special school in Connecticut, where his talents as an artist and future lover of women bloom. After he drops out of school, Henry finds work as an animator, working on Mary Poppins, then on the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. With cameos by Dr. Benjamin Spock, Walt Disney and John Lennon, and locations ranging from a peaceful college campus to swinging 1960s London, Grunwald nails the era just as she ingeniously uses Henry and the women in his life to illuminate the heady rush of sexual freedom (and confusion) that signified mid-century life.
Publishers Weekly
For several decades beginning in the 1920s, some college home economic departments had practice houses, complete with practice babies for students to learn scientific principles of child and home care. The babies were orphans who spent a year tended by students before being adopted. Grunwald explores what life might have been like for one such baby. Henry House, the tenth Wilton College practice baby, earns his title of irresistible by learning early how to please eight different mothers. He's a master at keeping women engaged while never showing a preference. He learns how to imitate but not to create, a skill that helps him become a competent cartoon illustrator but not a true cartoonist. Not until he comes close to losing the one friend who knows him best does he begin to break the patterns learned as a baby. Verdict: This welcome variation of coming-of-age tales shares with Grunwald's previous novels (Whatever Makes You Happy; Summer) a compelling web of characters and emotions that will please will please the author's fans and readers interested in novels with emotional depth. —Jan Blodgett, Davidson Coll. Lib. NC
Library Journal
Grunwald has created a wonderfully well-written story about a charming, lovable man who must learn to trust and love the women in his life. —Carolyn Kubisz
Booklist
A "practice baby" grows up to be the most indifferent guy, in this multilayered new novel from Grunwald. As the baby boom begins in 1946, fictional Wilton College in Pennsylvania works hard to prepare young women for that all important MRS. degree. It even provides a home economics "practice house," where coeds can hone their mother craft by caring for an infant on loan from the local orphanage. Each foundling is surnamed House by decree of Wilton's middle-aged, widowed and childless doyenne of domestic science, Martha Gaines. Three-month-old Henry, the current rental baby, is diapered, bathed and bottle-fed by alternating shifts of college students under Martha's hypercritical supervision. Though she's firmly wedded to the parenting wisdom of that era (e.g., babies must be trained, not indulged), Martha finds long-dormant maternal yearnings awakened by winsome Henry. Through guile and well-placed blackmail she adopts him, and he remains at Wilton under the care of successive practice mothers. Manipulating multiple moms teaches Henry to view women as interchangeable pushovers. Female demands-especially Martha's-repel him. A talented artist, Henry finds a haven with his beatnik art teachers in boarding school, until the birth of their child displaces him. His birth mother Betty, now a Manhattan career girl, offers temporary asylum from Martha, then unceremoniously abandons him. He finds work in Hollywood as a Disney animator, painting penguins for Mary Poppins (another story about a mother substitute). Then he moves on to London at the height of the Swinging Sixties to help animate the Beatles' Yellow Submarine. Henry is both irresistible and impervious to women other than his childhood friend Mary Jane, adept at the approach-avoidance game that is his Achilles' heel. Then, one day Henry meets his narcissistic match in another former practice baby. The near-omniscient narration perfectly suits this story, which often reads like a rueful but wry case study of nurture as nightmare.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Trust is a recurring theme in Lisa Grunwald’s novel. Which characters are most deeply affected by its presence or absence? What makes us trust another person, and what happens if that trust is betrayed? Can a relationship recover after trust has been broken?
2. For Martha Gaines, “there was no future for her without Henry. There was only her tiny world, bordered by practice walls and practice floors.” (p. 113) Why does Martha become so attached to Henry, and how would you describe their relationship?
3. Is it possible to love a person too much? Have you ever felt smothered by love? Is there a secret to building a relationship where both people feel equally loved?
4. According to Martha, “a child was something to manage, not to be managed by.” (p. 44). Do you agree with her ideas on raising children? Describe and compare the different child-rearing approaches that are explored in this story. Are they all outdated now, or do any of them still hold weight?
5. How does Henry’s early experience—being tended by a number of devoted practice mothers—affect his personality as he grows up? What is the downside to his unusual upbringing? What are the benefits?
6. As a child, Henry covers the walls of his closet with his own drawings, so that the closet becomes “a place of deep colors, vast distances, and great possibilities.” (p. 141) How is Henry’s life shaped by his artistic gifts? In what ways do these gifts fall short? How are these shortcomings reflected in his relationships with women?
7. “Henry’s silence gave him a refuge, an excuse not to participate, but it was also a weapon for keeping Martha at bay.” (p. 145) What brings on Henry’s silent period and what pulls him out of it? Why is silence such a powerful weapon? What other psychological weapons do we use against those closest to us?
8. Why is Henry drawn to Charles and Karen at the Humphrey School, and why is the couple’s home so important to him? How does their marriage compare with other romantic relationships depicted in The Irresistible Henry House?
9. At Martha’s funeral service, what does Henry discover as he describes her accomplishments? Do you think his epiphany is a momentary vision or a permanent change of heart? Is there anything truly redeeming about Martha?
10. What makes Henry choose Peace Jacobs, after so many girls and women have pursued him in vain?
11. Discuss the lifelong relationship between Henry and Mary Jane. How does Henry’s blinding of Mary Jane affect their friendship? What makes their connection to each other unique?
12. What does Grunwald’s portrayal of the lives and career options of women like Martha, Betty, and Ethel say about the opportunities for women in the mid-twentieth century? How much has changed since then?
13. As the author depicts Henry’s journey from practice baby to grown man, vivid historical details are revealed. When you look back at the various locations and decades that are depicted in The Irresistible Henry House, which scenes strike you as the most memorable, and why?
14. Over the course of the novel, Henry uses, betrays, and lies to nearly all the women who trust him. Do you consider Henry a likeable character despite this? To what extent can we blame his behavior on his upbringing? Is there a point at which we must take responsibility for our own actions?
15. Henry never meets his father or discovers his identity. Discuss the effects of this absence on Henry’s relationships with other men. What characters act as father figures for Henry?
16. Near the end of the book, Henry expresses gratitude toward Betty for choosing to go through with her pregnancy and giving him life. Beyond this initial gift, has Betty given anything to Henry as a mother? Has Henry inherited any of her characteristics?
17. Henry longs to find lasting love and a home of his own, but he finds himself chronically incapable of trust. Do you think there is hope for Henry? Can we ever truly transcend the effects of our upbringing?
18. What do you think will happen after the novel ends? Will Henry get to live in the home that he and Haley are drawing?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)
Mindy Kaling, 2011
Crown/Archetype
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307886279
Summary
Mindy Kaling has lived many lives: the obedient child of immigrant professionals, a timid chubster afraid of her own bike, a Ben Affleck–impersonating Off-Broadway performer and playwright, and, finally, a comedy writer and actress prone to starting fights with her friends and coworkers with the sentence “Can I just say one last thing about this, and then I swear I’ll shut up about it?”
Perhaps you want to know what Mindy thinks makes a great best friend (someone who will fill your prescription in the middle of the night)
. . . or what makes a great guy (one who is aware of all elderly people in any room at any time and acts accordingly)
. . . or what is the perfect amount of fame (so famous you can never get convicted of murder in a court of law)
. . . or how to maintain a trim figure (you will not find that information in these pages).
If so, you’ve come to the right book . . . mostly!
In Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, Mindy invites readers on a tour of her life and her unscientific observations on romance, friendship, and Hollywood, with several conveniently placed stopping points for you to run errands and make phone calls.
Mindy Kaling really is just a Girl Next Door—not so much literally anywhere in the continental United States, but definitely if you live in India or Sri Lanka. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 24, 1979
• Where—Cambridge, Massachesetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Darthmouth College
• Awards—Emmy
• Currently—lives in West Hollywood, California
Vera Mindy Chokalingam, known professionally as Mindy Kaling, is an American actress, comedian, and writer. She is the creator and star of the Fox and Hulu sitcom The Mindy Project, and also serves as executive producer and writer for the show. She is also known for her work on the NBC sitcom The Office, where she portrayed the character Kelly Kapoor and served as executive producer, writer and director.
Her memoir Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concers) was published in 2011. Her second book, Why Not Me? was released in 2015. Both became top sellers.
Early life
Kaling was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to a Tamil father, Avu Chokalingam, an architect, and a Bengali mother, Dr. Swati Chokalingam (nee Roysircar), an obstetrician/gynecologist.
Both of Kaling's parents are Hindus from India, who met while working at the same hospital in Nigeria. Kaling's mother was working as an OBGYN, and her father was overseeing the building of a wing of the hospital. The family emigrated in 1979, the same year Kaling was born. Kaling's mother died of pancreatic cancer in 2012. Kaling has an older brother, anti-affirmative action activist Vijay Jojo Chokalingam.
Kaling graduated from Buckingham Browne & Nichols, a private school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1997. The following year, she entered Dartmouth College where she graduated with a B.A. in Playwriting.
While at Dartmouth, she was a member of the improvisational comedy troupe, The Dog Day Players, and the a cappella singers, The Rockapellas. She was creator of the comic strip Badly Drawn Girl in The Dartmouth (the college's daily newspaper), and a writer for the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern (the college's humor magazine). She was a Classics major for much of college, studying Latin, which she had not studied since 7th grade.
Career
While a 19-year-old sophomore at Dartmouth, Kaling was an intern on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. She described herself as a terrible intern, "less of a 'make copies' intern and more of a 'stalk Conan' intern."
After college, Kaling moved to Brooklyn and took what she said was one of her "worst job" experiences"—a production assistant for three months on the Crossing Over With John Edward psychic show. At the same time, Kaling did stand-up in New York City.
In August 2002, Kaling and Brenda Withers, a college friend, wrote an off=Broadway play called Matt & Ben, Kaling played Ben Afflect to Brenda Withers' Matt Damon. The play was named one of Time magazine's "Top Ten Theatrical Events of The Year" and was "a surprise hit" at the 2002 New York International Fringe Festival. The play reimagined how Damon and Affleck came to write the movie Good Will Hunting.
Kaling also wrote a popular blog called "Things I’ve Bought That I Love," which reemerged on her website on September 29, 2011. The blog was written under the name Mindy Ephron, "a name Kaling chose because she was amused by the idea of her 20-something Indian-American self as a long-lost Ephron sister."
The Office
When working in 2004 to adapt The Office from its BBC progenitor, producer Greg Daniels hired Kaling as a writer-performer after reading a spec script she wrote. Daniels called Kaling "very original," saying that "if anything feels phony or lazy or passé, she’ll pounce on it."
Kaling joined the The Office, as the only woman on a staff of eight. She was only 24. She took on the role of character Kelly Kapoor, debuting in "Diversity Day"—the series’ second episode. Since then she wrote at least 22 episodes, including "Niagara," for which she was co-nominated for an Emmy with Greg Daniels. Kaling both wrote and directed the webisode "Subtle Sexuality" in 2009.
In a 2007 interview with The A.V. Club, she stated that her character Kelly is "an exaggerated version of what I think the upper-level writers believe my personality is." After the "Diwali" episode, Kaling appeared with Daniels on NPR's Fresh Air.
Kaling's contract was set to expire at the end of Season 7. But in September, 2011, she signed a new contract to stay for Season 8; she was promoted to full Executive Producer status. Her Universal Television contract included a development deal for a new show (eventually titled The Mindy Project), in which she appears as an actor and contributes as a writer.
The Mindy Project
In 2012, Kaling pitched a single-camera comedy to Fox called The Mindy Project, which she wrote and produced. Fox began airing the series in 2012. Although canceled by Fox in May 2015, the series was later picked up by Hulu for a 26 episode fourth season.
Additional TV and film
Kaling's TV appearances include a 2005 episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, playing Richard Lewis's assistant. She is featured on the CD Comedy Death-Ray and guest-wrote parts of an episode of Saturday Night Live in April 2006.
After her film debut in The 40-Year-Old Virgin with Steve Carell, Kaling appeared as a waitress in the film Unaccompanied Minors. In 2007 she held a small part in License to Wed starring fellow The Office actors John Krasinski, Angela Kinsey, and Brian Baumgartner.
She was also in the 2009 film Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian as a Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum tour guide and voiced Taffyta Muttonfudge in Disney's animated comedy film, Wreck-It Ralph. In 2011 she played the role of Shira, a doctor who is a roommate and colleague of the main character Emma (played by Natalie Portman) in No Strings Attached. Kaling also made an appearance as Vanetha in The Five-Year Engagement (2012). She also did voiced the role Disgust in the 2015 Pixar animated film, Inside Out.
Personal life
Kaling has said she has never been called Vera, her first name,[15] but has been referred to as Mindy since her mother was pregnant with her while her parents were living in Nigeria. They were already planning to move to the United States and wanted, Kaling said, a "cute American name" for their daughter, and liked the name Mindy from the TV show Mork & Mindy. The name Vera is, according to Kaling, the name of the "incarnation of a Hindu goddess."[15]
When Kaling started doing stand-up, the emcees could never pronounce her last name, Chokalingam, so they made fun of it. Eventually she changed it to Kaling. She stopped doing stand-up because it required a lot more time than she had. She toured solo as well as with Craig Robinson before he was on The Office.
Kaling has said that she never saw a family like hers on TV, which gave her a dual perspective she uses in her writing.[2] The "everyone against me mentality" is what she thinks she learned as a child of immigrants.[2] She loves reading books by Jhumpa Lahiri, even naming her Mindy Lahiri character after her.[29]
Kaling considers herself Hindu. She lives in West Hollywood, California. (From .)
Book Reviews
[A] breezy, intermittently amusing and somewhat unfocused first essay collection....The problem is that Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? doesn’t provide enough strong evidence of this awesomeness. A mix of childhood memoir, inside-Hollywood confessional and commentary on important cultural matters...the book takes unnecessary detours that sometimes do it a disservice.... What she says is entertaining and makes you want to be her BFF, but some of the details will fade as quickly as those tannins leave the tongue
Washington Post
The fashion opinions of Kelly Kapoor mixed with a Miss Manners-esque advice column.
EW.com
If you love Kelly and think the three minutes or so allotted her on episodes of The Office are too few, you can take home Mindy.
The New Yorker
[H]ilarious and relatable—just like Kaling’s classic Tweets.
Ladies Home Journal
(Audio version.) Kaling charts the course of her varied life, while offering often hilarious, sometimes poignant tips and words of wisdom mined from her childhood and adult life.... Kaling’s fresh humor, one-liners, and analogies...make this audio worth listening to a second time and sharing with friends.
Publishers Weekly
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 start a discussion for Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?:
1. Mindy Kaling knows, and admits in the book's introduction, that the book will be (has been) compared to Tina Fey's Bossy Pants. Is she correct? Have you read Fey's book...and if so, what do you think? Perhaps, more to the point, why the comparisons to begin with? What do the two women have in common?
2. Discuss Kaling's background—her childhood, family, and education—and how it shaped her success in the entertainment field, as a writer, a comic, and an actress.
3. Talk about speciic moments in Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? that you found especially relatable to your own life: her embarrassments and disappointments, her triumphs, or her observations about contemporary culture.
4. Do you find the book humorous? Which parts are particularly funny to you...and why? Do any parts of the book make you sad or angry (the People magazine photo shoot with only size 0 clothing)?
5. Do you come away liking Mindy Kaling more after having read her book...or less?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Island Beneath the Sea
Isabel Allende, 2010
HarperCollins
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061988240
Summary
Born a slave on the island of Saint-Domingue, Zarite—known as Tete—is the daughter of an African mother she never knew and one of the white sailors who brought her into bondage. Though her childhood is one of brutality and fear, Tete finds solace in the traditional rhythms of African drums and in the voodoo loas she discovers through her fellow slaves.
When twenty-year-old Toulouse Valmorain arrives on the island in 1770, it’s with powdered wigs in his baggage and dreams of financial success in his mind. But running his father’s plantation, Saint Lazare, is neither glamorous nor easy. It will be eight years before he brings home a bride—but marriage, too, proves more difficult than he imagined. And Valmorain remains dependent on the services of his teenaged slave.
Spanning four decades, Island Beneath the Sea is the moving story of the intertwined lives of Tete and Valmorain, and of one woman’s determination to find love amid loss, to offer humanity though her own has been battered, and to forge her own identity in the cruellest of circumstances. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 2, 1942
• Where—Lima, Peru
• Education—private schools in Bolivia and Lebanon
• Awards—Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, 1998; Sara Lee
Foundation Award, 1998; WILLA Literary Award, 2000
• Currently—lives in San Rafael, California, USA
Isabel Allende is a Chilean writer whose works sometimes contain aspects of the "magic realist" tradition. Author of more than 20 books—essay collections, memoirs, and novels, she is perhaps best known for her novels The House of the Spirits (1982), Daughter of Fortune (1999), and Ines of My Soul (2006). She has been called "the world's most widely read Spanish-language author." All told her novels have been translated from Spanish into over 30 languages and have sold more than 55 million copies.
Her novels are often based upon her personal experience and pay homage to the lives of women, while weaving together elements of myth and realism. She has lectured and toured many American colleges to teach literature. Fluent in English as a second language, Allende was granted American citizenship in 2003, having lived in California with her American husband since 1989.
Early background
Allende was born Isabel Allende Llona in Lima, Peru, the daughter of Francisca Llona Barros and Tomas Allende, who was at the time the Chilean ambassador to Peru. Her father was a first cousin of Salvador Allende, President of Chile from 1970 to 1973, making Salvador her first cousin once removed (not her uncle as he is sometimes referred to).
In 1945, after her father had disappeared, Isabel's mother relocated with her three children to Santiago, Chile, where they lived until 1953. Allende's mother married diplomat Ramon Huidobro, and from 1953-1958 the family moved often, including to Bolivia and Beirut. In Bolivia, Allende attended a North American private school; in Beirut, she attended an English private school. The family returned to Chile in 1958, where Allende was briefly home-schooled. In her youth, she read widely, particularly the works of William Shakespeare.
From 1959 to 1965, while living in Chile, Allende finished her secondary studies. She married Miguel Frias in 1962; the couple's daughter Paula was born in 1963 and their son Nicholas in 1966. During that time Allende worked with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Santiago, Chile, then in Brussels, Belgium, and elsewhere in Europe.
Returning to Chile in 1996, Allende translated romance novels (including those of Barbara Cartland) from English to Spanish but was fired for making unauthorized changes to the dialogue in order to make the heriones sound more intelligent. She also altered the Cinderella endings, letting the heroines find more independence.
In 1967 Allende joined the editorial staff for Paula magazine and in 1969 the children's magazine Mampato, where she later became editor. She published two children's stories, Grandmother Panchita and Lauchas y Lauchones, as well as a collection of articles, Civilice a Su Troglodita.
She also worked in Chilean television from 1970-1974. As a journalist, she interviewed famed Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Neruda told Allende that she had too much imagination to be a journalist and that she should become a novelist. He also advised her to compile her satirical columns in book form—which she did and which became her first published book. In 1973, Allende's play El Embajador played in Santiago, a few months before she was forced to flee the country due to the coup.
The military coup in September 1973 brought Augusto Pinochet to power and changed everything for Allende. Her mother and diplotmat stepfather narrowly escaped assassination, and she herself began receiving death threats. In 1973 Allende fled to Venezuela.
Life after Chile
Allende remained in exile in Venezuela for 13 years, working as a columnist for El Nacional, a major newspaper. On a 1988 visit to California, she met her second husband, attorney Willie Gordon, with whom she now lives in San Rafael, California. Her son Nicolas and his children live nearby.
In 1992 Allende's daughter Paula died at the age of 28, the result of an error in medication while hospitalized for porphyria (a rarely fatal metabolic disease). To honor her daughter, Allenda started the Isabel Allende Foundation in 1996. The foundation is "dedicated to supporting programs that promote and preserve the fundamental rights of women and children to be empowered and protected."
In 1994, Allende was awarded the Gabriela Mistral Order of Merit—the first woman to receive this honor.
She was granted U.S. citizenship in 2003 and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004. She was one of the eight flag bearers at the Opening Ceremony of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy.
In 2008 Allende received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from San Francisco State University for her "distinguished contributions as a literary artist and humanitarian." In 2010 she received Chile's National Literature Prize.
Writing
In 1981, during her exile, Allende received a phone call that her 99-year-old grandfather was near death. She sat down to write him a letter wishing to "keep him alive, at least in spirit." Her letter evolved into The House of the Spirits—the intent of which was to exorcise the ghosts of the Pinochet dictatorship. Although rejected by numerous Latin American publishers, the novel was finally published in Spain, running more than two dozen editions in Spanish and a score of translations. It was an immense success.
Allende has since become known for her vivid storytelling. As a writer, she holds to a methodical literary routine, working Monday through Saturday, 9:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M. "I always start on 8 January,"Allende once said, a tradition that began with the letter to her dying grandfather.
Her 1995 book Paula recalls Allende's own childhood in Santiago, Chile, and the following years she spent in exile. It is written as an anguished letter to her daughter. The memoir is as much a celebration of Allende's turbulent life as it is the chronicle of Paula's death.
Her 2008 memoir The Sum of Our Days centers on her recent life with her immediate family—her son, second husband, and grandchildren. The Island Beneath the Sea, set in New Orleans, was published in 2010. Maya's Notebook, a novel alternating between Berkeley, California, and Chiloe, an island in Chile, was published in 2011 (2013 in the U.S.). Three movies have been based on her novels—Aphrodite, Eva Luna, and Gift for a Sweetheart. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/23/2013.)
Book Reviews
Allende brings women to the forefront of the story of the rebellion.... Ultimately, however, Allende has traded innovative language and technique for a fundamentally straightforward historical pageant. There is plenty of melodrama and coincidence in Island Beneath the Sea, but not much magic.
Gaiutra Bahadur - New York Times Book Review
Exuberant passions, strong heroines and intricate plots...a world as enchanted—and enchanting—as it is brutal and unjust.... A page-turning drama.
San Francisco Chronicle
A remarkable feat of prescience…Island Beneath the Sea is rich in drama, setting, themes, characters, dialogue and symbolism…. An intriguing and wonderfully woven story.
San Antonio Express-News
Epic scope and sweep…[Allende’s] characters, linked by blood, love triangles and even incest, have a depth and complexity that…imbues the proceedings with a lushness bordering on magic realism.
Associated Press
[With] gorgeous place descriptions, a keen eye for history and a predilection for high drama…. There are few more charming storytellers in the world than Isabel Allende.
National Public Radio.org
Of the many pitfalls lurking for the historical novel, the most dangerous is history itself. The best writers either warp it for selfish purposes (Gore Vidal), dig for the untold, interior history (Toni Morrison), or both (Jeannette Winterson). Allende, four years after Ines of My Soul, returns with another historical novel, one that soaks up so much past life that there is nowhere left to go but where countless have been. Opening in Saint Domingue a few years before the Haitian revolution would tear it apart, the story has at its center Zarite, a mulatto whose extraordinary life takes her from that blood-soaked island to dangerous and freewheeling New Orleans; from rural slave life to urban Creole life and a different kind of cruelty and adventure. Yet even in the new city, Zarite can't quite free herself from the island, and the people alive and dead that have followed her. Zarite's passages are striking. More than merely lyrical, they map around rhythms and spirits, making her as much conduit as storyteller. One wishes there was more of her because, unlike Allende, Zarite is under no mission to show us how much she knows. Every instance, a brush with a faith healer, for example, is an opportunity for Allende to showcase what she has learned about voodoo, medicine, European and Caribbean history, Napoleon, the Jamaican slave Boukman, and the legendary Mackandal, a runaway slave and master of black magic who has appeared in several novels including Alejo Carpentier's Kingdom of This World. The effect of such display of research is a novel that is as inert as a history textbook, much like, oddly enough John Updike's Terrorist, a novel that revealed an author who studied a voluminous amount of facts without learning a single truth. Slavery as a subject in fiction is still a high-wire act, but one expects more from Allende. Too often she forgoes the restraint and empathy essential for such a topic and plunges into a heavy breathing prose reminiscent of the Falconhurst novels of the 1970s, but without the guilty pleasure of sexual taboo. Sex, overwritten and undercooked, is where opulent hips slithered like a knowing snake until she impaled herself upon his rock-hard member with a deep sigh of joy. Even the references to African spirituality seem skin-deep and perfunctory, revealing yet another writer too entranced by the myth of black cultural primitivism to see the brainpower behind it. With Ines of My Soul one had the sense that the author was trying to structure a story around facts, dates, incidents, and real people. Here it is the reverse, resulting in a book one second-guesses at every turn. Of course there will be a forbidden love. Betrayal. Incest. Heartbreak. Insanity. Violence. And in the end the island in the novel's title remains legend. Fittingly so, because to reach the Island Beneath the Sea, one would have had to dive deep. Allende barely skims the surface.
Publishers Weekly
Zarieté, known as Tete, is born a slave in Haiti, then called Saint-Domingue, in 1700. She is bought by Toulouse Valmorain, a young Frenchman whose ideals quickly disappear in the brutality of life on a sugar plantation. Tete tenderly cares for Valmorain's son and, since she is her master's property, bears two of the master's children herself. She helps Valmorain and the children escape just as the bloody violence of the slave revolt reaches the plantation. They set sail for New Orleans, a raucous city where Tete finds more family drama and, finally, love and freedom. Verdict: Confining Allende's trademark magic realism to the otherworldly solace Tete finds in the island's voodoo, this timely and absorbing novel is another winning Allende story filled with adventure, vivid characters, and richly detailed descriptions of life in the Caribbean at that time. Sure to be popular with Allende's many fans. —Leslie Patterson, Brown Univ. Lib., Providence
Library Journal
In a many-faceted plot, Allende animates irresistible characters authentic in their emotional turmoil and pragmatic adaptability.... Allende is grace incarnate in her evocations of the spiritual energy that still sustains the beleaguered people of Haiti and New Orleans. Demand will be high for this transporting, remarkably topical novel of men and women of courage risking all for liberty. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
Given recent events, the timing couldn't be better for this historical fiction from Allende, which follows a slave/concubine from Haiti during the slave uprisings to New Orleans in time for the Louisiana Purchase. In 1770, Toulouse Valmorain arrives in Haiti from France to take over his dying father's plantation. He buys the child Zarite to be his new Spanish wife Eugenia's maidservant and has her trained by the mulatto courtesan Violette Boisier, whose charisma could carry a book on its own. Barely into puberty, Zarite is raped by Valmorain, who gives the resulting son to Violette and her French army officer husband to raise as their own. Eugenia bears Valmorain one legitimate heir before she descends into madness. Zarite, who is devoted to pathetic Eugenia until her early death, lovingly raises baby Maurice and runs the household with great competence. She also submits to sexual relations with Valmorain whenever he wants. When Zarite's daughter is born, Valmorain assumes the child Rosette is his and allows her to remain in the household as Maurice's playmate. Actually Rosette's father is Gambo, a slave who has joined the rebels and become a lieutenant to the legendary Toussaint Louverture. When the rebels destroy Valmorain's plantation, Gambo and Zarite help him escape. In return Valmorain promises to free Zarite, who stays with him, she thinks temporarily, for the children's sake. Valmorain relocates to Louisiana, where Eugenia's brother has purchased him land. His new wife, jealous and vindictive Hortense, makes life unbearable for both Zarite and Maurice, who is sent to school in Boston. While Valmorain, less a villain than a man of his time, finally grants Zarite the freedom he's promised, more tragedies await strong-willed Rosette and sensitive, idealistic Maurice, whose love crosses more than racial boundaries. Still Zarite, along with the reader, finds solace in the cast of secondary characters, who also journey from Haiti to New Orleans. A rich gumbo of melodrama, romance and violence.
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 Island Beneath the Sea:
1. The story of this novel is steeped in historical events, yet it centers around the fictional slave girl, Zarite. How would you describe her? Zarete, for instance, demonstrates an indomitable strength of character yet at the same time submits passivly to Valmorain at his asking.
2. Tete describes her "island beneath the sea" as a paradise where "rhythm is born...it shakes the earth, it cuts through me like a lightning bolt and rises toward the sky...." What does Tete mean? What is the thematic significance of her island to this novel?
3. How would you describe Toulouise Valmorain. Is he a monstrous villain...or is he a more complicated individual, forced to subvert his ideals to the pressures of plantation life?
4. Aside from master/slave, what are the complications in the relationship between Valmorain and Tete? In what ways are the two dependent upon one another?
5. What insights into the conditions of slavery does this book provide?
6. Some readers/reviewers have criticized this novel as melodramatic (excessive prose style, stereotypical characters (all good or all evil), sex-drenched scenes, disaster-prone plot). Others see the the work as an exciting, complex portrait of history and characters. Where do you stand?
7. Talk about the role of Voodoo in this work. What is the loa...and who is Erzulie, a name that becomes a refrain throughout the book? What does she represent? Voodo continues to exists today—how you account for its power and endurance? Also, talk about how the two faiths, Voodoo and Christianity, occasionally mingle in this book.
8. How does Allende depict the life and culture of the wealthy French who control the island of Saint-Dominque before the rebellion?
9. How well does Allende combine historical events with her fictional narrative? Some believe her overlaying of history onto the story is clumsy; others say the history is beautifully interwoven. What is your opinionl...and can you point to examples that support your views?
10. Talk about New Orleans section of the novel. How different is life there from Saint Dominique?
11. This book is particularly rich in secondary characters— Violette, Etienne Rilais, Gambo, Tante Rose, Permentier. Which ones do you find most interesting...or sympathetic?
12. Does this book end on a note of hope...or despair? In what way is the second generation a window on the future?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Island of a Thousand Mirrors
Nayomi Munaweera, 2012 (2014, U.S.)
St. Martin's Press
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250051875
Summary
A family epic set against the backdrop of the Sri Lankan civil war comes to poignant and powerful life in this lyrical and riveting debut novel by Nayomi Munaweera.
Before violence tore apart the tapestry of Sri Lanka and turned its pristine beaches red, there were two families; two young women, ripe for love with hopes for the future; and a chance encounter that leads to the terrible heritage they must reckon with for years to come.
One tragic moment that defines the fate of these women and their families will haunt their choices for decades to come. In the end, love and longing promise only an uneasy peace.
A sweeping saga with the intimacy of a memoir that brings to mind epic fiction like The Kite Runner and The God of Small Things, Nayomi Munaweera's Island of a Thousand Mirrors strikes mercilessly at the heart of war.
It offers an unparalleled portrait of a beautiful land during its most difficult moments. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1973
• Where—Colombo, Sri Lanka
• Raised—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Education—B.A., University of California (UCAL), Irving; M.A., UCAL, Riverside
• Awards—Commonwealth Book Prize (Asian Region)
• Currently—lives in the San Francisco Bay area
Nayomi Munaweera is a Sri Lankan American writer and author of two novels. Her 2012 debut Island of a Thousand Mirrors won Commonwealth Book Prize for the Asian Region in 2013 and was shortlisted for a number of other awards. In 2016 she released her second novel What Lies Between Us.
Nayomi Munaweera was born in Sri Lanka, but her family left to escape the ravages of the civil war. They went first to Nigeria then eventually settled in Los Angeles, California, where Munaweera spent her teenage years. She holds Bachelor's degree in Literature from the University of California, Irvine, and a Master's degree in South Asian Literature from the University of California, Riverside.
Novels
Island of a Thousand Mirrors, Munaweera's debut novel, was published in South Asia in 2012 and in the U.S. in 2014. It tells the story of the conflict between two main ethnic groups in Sri Lanka from the perspective of two girls who witness the horror of the civil war. The war officially began in 1983 and continued until 2009.
What Lies Between Us is the story of a young Sri Lankan teenager who outwardly has taken up the mantel of American adolescence. Underneath, however, she struggles to reconcile her life in the U.S. with her traumatic past. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 3/52016.)
Book Reviews
The uneasy relationship between "liberation movements" and those they seek to liberate is convincingly captured, as are the constant negotiations civilians have to make to survive in a war zone…. The beating heart of Island of a Thousand Mirrors is not so much its human characters but Sri Lanka itself and the vivid, occasionally incandescent, language used to describe this teardrop in the Indian Ocean.
Nadifa Mohamed - New York Times Book Review
The paradisiacal landscapes of Sri Lanka are as astonishing as the barbarity of its revolution, and Munaweera evokes the power of both in a lyrical debut novel.... The book leaves the reader with two lingering smells that perfectly capture the conflict that nearly destroyed Munaweera’s home country: gasoline and jasmine.
Publishers Weekly
Munaweera's storytelling and lyrical writing easily pull readers into the world of her characters (all strongly drawn, especially the females), and the book as a whole is an eye-opening look at lives and cultures intersecting during a turbulent and disturbing historical period of civil unrest. —Shirley Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA
Library Journal
The Sri Lankan civil war's traumatic effect on the island nation's people—and one family in particular—is the subject of this verdantly atmospheric first novel.... Munaweera's depiction of war-torn Sri Lanka, though harrowing, seems rushed and journalistic, more reported than experienced.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. In this book, Munaweera takes on the point of views of both a Sinhala woman and a Tamil woman. Why do you think she made this decision? What does it mean to try and express both points of view when the subject is a civil war? Do you think she was more successful in painting one or the other of these women? Which one and why do you think so?
2. Did your reading of the Prologue change after you finished reading the book? How?
3. This is a book partly about the process of immigration. Do you think Munaweera successfully captured the pleasures and pains of immigration? Did she successfully express the divided nature of the immigrant? Did she do so in ways that reminded you of other authors or was the experience of reading this book quite different?
4. This novel has been compared to The God of Small Things, Anil’s Ghost, and The Kite Runner. If you’ve read these books, do you think these are fair comparisons? Why or why not? Are there other authors/books Munaweera’s style reminds you of?
5. Visaka and Ravan’s love is thwarted but their children go on to fall in love. What dose Munaweera seem to be saying about destiny, the acts/sins of parents, the nature of love?
6. The big white house on the seaside in Colombo figures prominently in this book. It is where Visaka grows up, where Yasodhara is brought after she is born and where the Upstairs-Downstairs wars take place. What does this house seem to represent in the book?
7. The riots in 1983 are described as a pivot point in the history of Sri Lanka and in the plot of the book. Were these scenes similar to painful moments in other parts of the world? Saraswathie grows up with aspirations of becoming a teacher. Do you think what happens to her subsequently is plausible? Do you think Munaweera properly describes the process by which a normal girl might become a suicide bomber?
9. The scene of Saraswathie’s rape is extremely traumatic and Munaweera has admitted that it was quite difficult for her to write. Do you think the scene was necessary in the book or should literature stay away from depicting the most painful events in a character’s life? Why do you think Munaweera chose to include this scene?
10. Would you describe this book as a feminist work? If so, why?
11. Munaweera has admitted that this is a book obsessed with food. Did you find this to be true? Did the book make you interested in finding out more about Sri Lankan cuisine?
12. What does the ending message of the book seem to be?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Island of Lost Girls
Jennifer McMahon, 2008
HarperCollins
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061445880
Summary
One summer day, at a gas station in a small Vermont town, six-year-old Ernestine Florucci is abducted by a person wearing a rabbit suit while her mother is buying lottery tickets. Twenty-three year old Rhonda Farr is the only witness, and she does nothing as she watches the scene unfold—little Ernie goes with the rabbit so casually, confidently getting into the rabbit’s Volkswagen bug, smiling while the rabbit carefully fastens her seatbelt.
The police are skeptical of Rhonda’s story and Ernie’s mother blames her outright. The kidnapping forces Rhonda to face another disappearance, that of her best friend from childhood—Lizzy Shale, whose brother, Peter just so happens to be a prime suspect in Ernie’s abduction.
Unraveling the present mystery plunges Rhonda headlong down the rabbit hole of her past. She must struggle to makes sense of the loss of the two girls, and to ask herself if the Peter she grew up with—and has secretly loved all her life—could have a much darker side. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1968
• Where—suburban, Connecticut, USA
• Education—B.A., Goddard College; M.F.A., Vermont College
• Currently—Montpelier, Vermont
In her words
I was born in 1968 and grew up in my grandmother’s house in suburban Connecticut, where I was convinced a ghost named Virgil lived in the attic. I wrote my first short story in third grade.
I graduated with a BA from Goddard College in 1991 and then studied poetry for a year in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College. A poem turned into a story, which turned into a novel, and I decided to take some time to think about whether I wanted to write poetry or fiction.
After bouncing around the country, I wound up back in Vermont, living in a cabin with no electricity, running water, or phone with my partner, Drea, while we built our own house. Over the years, I have been a house painter, farm worker, paste-up artist, Easter Bunny, pizza delivery person, homeless shelter staff member, and counselor for adults and kids with mental illness—I quit my last real job in 2000 to work on writing full time.
In 2004, I gave birth to our daughter, Zella. These days, we're living in an old Victorian in Montpelier, Vermont. Some neighbors think it looks like the Addams family house, which brings me immense pleasure. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
[H]aunting.... [R]ecent college grad Rhonda Farr witnesses a child abduction in front of a convenience store.... McMahon expertly shifts between pivotal events in the past and present-day action, building tension to a resolution both poignant and shattering. (May)
Publishers Weekly
As in her assured debut novel, Promise Not to Tell, McMahon offers a moving if bittersweet portrait of childhood.... [R]eaders will be hooked on both the mystery element and the coming-of-age aspects of this atmospheric novel.
Booklist
[W]ell-crafted-if formulaic. As Rhonda Farr...witnesses the unthinkable: Someone dressed in a rabbit suit snatches a small child from a car and drives away.... Rhonda and Warren become a team, linking up to scout for clues and eventually beginning a romantic relationship. But the hunt also forces her to confront....a trove of intricate family secrets.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. When the rabbit kidnaps Ernie, Rhonda finds herself unable to act because she's so completely caught off guard by what she sees. Have you ever been so surprised (or overcome with any emotion) you were paralyzed?
2. Island of Lost Girls moves back and forth through time, essentially following two interweaving storylines. Do you think this was an effective structure? How did it affect your reading of the book?
3. Rhonda has two love interests: Peter and Warren. How are they different? In what ways are they similar? And how does the Peter of Rhonda's youth compare to the man he is as an adult?
4. What are your observations about the different roles that fantasy, imagination, and make-believe play in the lives of both the children and adults? Do any of the characters really live in the here and now? Are these forms of escapism helpful or harmful?
5. Justine seems passive and removed, but later, Rhonda comes to believe that Justine didn't just see what was going on, but may have had a hand in hiding evidence to protect the children. Do you see her as weak or strong? A victim or a protector?
6. Daniel and Clem had been friends since boyhood. How did this affect Clem's vision of Daniel? Did it give him blind spots? And how does Rhonda's childhood friendship with Peter influence her judgment about his possible involvement in Ernie's kidnapping?
7. Ella Starkee says, "Sometimes, what a person needs most is to be forgiven." What did you think of how themes of forgiveness are played out in Island of Lost Girls? Are there unforgivable acts?
8. Some of the townspeople blame Trudy Florucci for Ernie's abduction, for being a"bad mother." Trudy blames Rhonda, and Rhonda blames herself. Ultimately, is there any one person at fault for what happens to Ernie? Why do you think people are so eager to find someone to take the blame?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Island of Sea Women
Lisa See, 2019
Scribner
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781501154850
Summary
A new novel about female friendship and family secrets on a small Korean island.
Mi-ja and Young-sook, two girls living on the Korean island of Jeju, are best friends that come from very different backgrounds.
When they are old enough, they begin working in the sea with their village’s all-female diving collective, led by Young-sook’s mother. As the girls take up their positions as baby divers, they know they are beginning a life of excitement and responsibility but also danger.
Despite their love for each other, Mi-ja and Young-sook’s differences are impossible to ignore.
The Island of Sea Women is an epoch set over many decades, beginning during a period of Japanese colonialism in the 1930s and 1940s, followed by World War II, the Korean War and its aftermath, through the era of cell phones and wet suits for the women divers.
Throughout this time, the residents of Jeju find themselves caught between warring empires. Mi-ja is the daughter of a Japanese collaborator, and she will forever be marked by this association. Young-sook was born into a long line of haenyeo and will inherit her mother’s position leading the divers in their village.
Little do the two friends know that after surviving hundreds of dives and developing the closest of bonds, forces outside their control will push their friendship to the breaking point.
This beautiful, thoughtful novel illuminates a world turned upside down, one where the women are in charge, engaging in dangerous physical work, and the men take care of the children.
A classic Lisa See story—one of women’s friendships and the larger forces that shape them—The Island of Sea Women introduces readers to the fierce and unforgettable female divers of Jeju Island and the dramatic history that shaped their lives. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 18, 1955
• Where—Paris, France
• Education—B.A., Loyola Marymount University
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California
Lisa See is an American writer and novelist. Her Chinese-American family (See has one Chinese great-grandparent) has had a great impact on her life and work. Her books include On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family (1995) and the novels Flower Net (1997), The Interior (1999), Dragon Bones (2003), Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005), Peony in Love (2007), Shanghai Girls (2009), which made it to the 2010 New York Times bestseller list, and China Dolls (2014).
Flower Net, The Interior, and Dragon Bones make up the Red Princess mystery series. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and Peony in Love focus on the lives of Chinese women in the 19th and 17th centuries respectively. Shanghai Girls chronicles the lives of two sisters who come to Los Angeles in arranged marriages and face, among other things, the pressures put on Chinese-Americans during the anti-Communist mania of the 1950s. See published a sequel titled Dreams of Joy.
Writing under the pen name Monica Highland, See, her mother Carolyn See, and John Espey, published three novels: Lotus Land (1983), 110 Shanghai Road (1986), and Greetings from Southern California (1988).
Biography
Lisa See was born in Paris but has spent many years in Los Angeles, especially Los Angeles Chinatown. Her mother, Carolyn See, is also a writer and novelist. Her autobiography provides insight into her daughter's life. Lisa See graduated with a B.A. from Loyola Marymount University in 1979.
See was West Coast correspondent for Publishers Weekly (1983–1996); has written articles for Vogue, Self, and More; has written the libretto for the opera based on On Gold Mountain, and has helped develop the Family Discovery Gallery for the Autry Museum, which depicts 1930s Los Angeles from the perspective of her father as a seven-year-old boy. Her exhibition On Gold Mountain: A Chinese American Experience was featured in the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, and the Smithsonian. See is also a public speaker.
She has written for and led in many cultural events emphasizing the importance of Los Angeles and Chinatown. Among her awards and recognitions are the Organization of Chinese Americans Women's 2001 award as National Woman of the Year and the 2003 History Makers Award presented by the Chinese American Museum. See has served as a Los Angeles City Commissioner. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/21/2014.)
Book Reviews
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Publishers Weekly
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Library Journal
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Booklist
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Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The story begins with Young-sook as an old woman, gathering algae on the beach. What secrets or clues about the past and the present are revealed in the scenes that take place in 2008? Why do we only understand the beginning of the novel only after we have finished it?
2. When Young-sook and Mi-ja are fifteen, Young-sook’s mother says to them: "You are like sisters, and I expect you to take care of each other today and every day as those tied by blood would do" (p. 13). How are these words of warning? The friendship between Young-sook and Mi-ja is just one of many examples of powerful female relationships in the novel. Discuss the ways in which female relationships are depicted and the important role they play on Jeju.
3. On page 17, Young-sook’s mother recites a traditional haenyeo aphorism: Every woman who enters the sea carries a coffin on her back. But she also says that the sea is like a mother (p. 22). Then, on page 71, Grandmother says, "The ocean is better than your natal mother. The sea is forever." How do these contradictory ideas play out in the novel? What do they say about the dangerous work of the haenyeo?
4. In many ways, the novel is about blame, guilt, and forgiveness. In the first full chapter, Yu-ri has her encounter with the octopus. What effect does this incident have on various characters moving forward: Mother, Young-sook, Mi-ja, Do-saeng, Gu-ja, Gu-sun, and Jun-bu? Young-sook is also involved in the tragic death of her mother. To what extent is she responsible for these sad events? Is her sense of guilt justified?
5. Later, on page 314, Clara recites a proverb attributed to Buddha: To understand everything is to forgive. Considering the novel as a whole, do you think this is true? Young-sook’s mother must forgive herself for Yu-ri’s accident, Young-sook must forgive herself for her mother’s death, Gu-sun forgives Gu-ja for Wan-soon’s death. On a societal level, the people of Jeju also needed to find ways to forgive each other. While not everyone on Jeju has found forgiveness, how and why do you think those communities, neighbors, and families have been able to forgive? Do you think anything can be forgiven eventually? Should it? Does Young-sook take too long to forgive given what she witnessed?
6. Mi-ja carries the burden of being the daughter of a Japanese collaborator. Is there an inevitability to her destiny just as there’s an inevitability to Young-sook’s? Another way of considering this aspect of the story is, are we responsible for the sins of our fathers (or mothers)? Later in the novel, Young-sook will reflect on all the times Mi-ja showed she was the daughter of a collaborator. She also blames Yo-chan for being Mi-ja’s son, as well as the grandson of a Japanese collaborator. Was Young-sook being fair, or had her eyes and heart been too clouded?
7. The haenyeo are respected for having a matrifocal culture—a society focused on women. They work hard, have many responsibilities and freedoms, and earn money for their households, but how much independence and power within their families and their cultures do they really have? Are there examples from the story that illustrate the independence of women but also their subservience?
8. What is life like for men married to haenyeo? Compare Young-sook’s father, Mi-ja’s husband, and Young-sook’s husband.
9. On page 189, there is mention of haenyeo from a different village rowing by Young-sook’s collective to share gossip. How fast did information travel around the island and from the mainland? Was the five-day market a good source of gossip or were there other places that were better? On page 201, Jun-bu mentions his concern about believing information broadcast on the radio, "but can we trust anything we hear?" Were there specific instances when information from the radio was misleading or false? What affects how people hear and interpret the news?
10. Confucianism has traditionally played a lesser role on Jeju than elsewhere in Korea, while Shamanism is quite strong. What practical applications did Shamanism have for the haenyeo? Do the traditions and rituals help the haenyeo conquer the fears and anxieties they have about their dangerous work? Does it bring comfort during illness, death, and other tragedies? Does Young-sook ever question her beliefs, and why?
11. On page 39, Young-sook’s mother recites the aphorism If you plant red beans, then you will harvest red beans. Jun-bu repeats the phrase on page 199. How do these two characters interpret the saying? How does this saying play out for various characters?
12. At first it would seem that the visit of the scientists to the island is a digression. What important consequences does the visit have for Young-sook and the other haenyeo?
13. The aphorism "Deep roots remain tangled underground," is used to describe Young-sook’s and Mi-ja’s friendship, and it becomes especially true when it’s revealed that their children, Joon-lee and Yo-chan, are getting married. How else does this aphorism manifest itself on Jeju, especially in the context of the islanders’ suffering and shared trauma? Do you think it’s true that we cannot remove ourselves from the connections of our pasts?
14. On page 120, Young-sook’s mother-in-law, Do-Saeng, says, "There's modern, and then there's tradition." How does daily life on Jeju change between 1938 and 2008? Discuss architecture, the arrival of the scientists and the studies they conduct, the introduction of wet suits and television and other changes. How does Young-sook reconcile her traditional haenyeo way of life with the encroaching modern world? Do you think it’s possible to modernize without sacrificing important traditional values?
15. The characters have lived through Japanese colonialism, the Sino-Japanese War, World War II, the Korean War, the 4.3 Incident, and the Vietnam War. How do these larger historic events affect the characters and island life?
16. Mi-ja's rubbings are critical to the novel. How do they illustrate the friendship between Mi-ja and Young-sook? How do they help Young-sook in her process of healing?
(Questions issued by the publishers.)
It Ends With Us
Colleen Hoover, 2016
Atria Books
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781501110368
Summary
Sometimes it is the one who loves you who hurts you the most.
Lily hasn’t always had it easy, but that’s never stopped her from working hard for the life she wants. She’s come a long way from the small town in Maine where she grew up—she graduated from college, moved to Boston, and started her own business.
So when she feels a spark with a gorgeous neurosurgeon named Ryle Kincaid, everything in Lily’s life suddenly seems almost too good to be true.
Ryle is assertive, stubborn, maybe even a little arrogant. He’s also sensitive, brilliant, and has a total soft spot for Lily. And the way he looks in scrubs certainly doesn’t hurt.
Lily can’t get him out of her head. But Ryle’s complete aversion to relationships is disturbing. Even as Lily finds herself becoming the exception to his "no dating" rule, she can’t help but wonder what made him that way in the first place.
As questions about her new relationship overwhelm her, so do thoughts of Atlas Corrigan—her first love and a link to the past she left behind. He was her kindred spirit, her protector. When Atlas suddenly reappears, everything Lily has built with Ryle is threatened.
With this bold and deeply personal novel, Colleen Hoover delivers a heart-wrenching story that breaks exciting new ground for her as a writer. Combining a captivating romance with a cast of all-too-human characters, It Ends With Us is an unforgettable tale of love that comes at the ultimate price. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 11, 1979
• Where—Sulphur Springs, Texas, USA
• Raised—Saltillo, Texas
• Education—B.A., Texas A&M-Commerce
• Currently—lives in Sulphur Springs, Texas
Born in Sulphur Springs, Texas, Colleen Hoover grew up in Saltillo, Texas, and graduated from Texas A&M-Commerce with a degree in Social Work. After college, she took a number of social work and teaching jobs before becoming a bestselling novelist.
Hoover began writing her first novel, Slammed, in 2011 with no intentions of getting published. Inspired by a lyric—"decide what to be and go be it"—from an Avett Brothers song, "Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise" and ended up incorporating Avett Brothers lyrics throughout the story.
After a few months, her novel was reviewed and given 5 stars by book blogger, Maryse Black. From that point on, sales increased rapidly: both Slammed and its sequel, Point of Retreat, ended up making the New York Times Best Seller list.
Since then Colleen has written and published over a dozen books.
In addition to her writing, Colleen is the founder of The Bookworm Box, a book subscription service which donates 100% of its profit to charity. She also owns a specialty bookstore of the same name, Bookworm Box, located in Sulphur Springs, Texas.
The author married Heath Hoover in 2000. The two have three sons and a pig named Sailor. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/3/2017.)
Book Reviews
What a glorious and touching read, a forever keeper. The kind of book that gets handed down.
USA Today
[T]tackles tough subject matter with a deft and confident hand.
Huffington Post
(Starred review.) Fans of Hoover's emotional stories, conflicted characters and intense romances will gleefully devour her new novel.... It Ends with Us is a perfect example of the author's writing chops and her ability to weave together uplifting, romantic and somber plotlines. No matter your level of fandom, readers will love and respect protagonist Lily and learn something from her struggles.
Romance Times Book Reviews
Best-selling Hoover’s latest valiant and compelling...novel packs her trademark emotional punch... The power and pain of the relationship will stay with readers even as Hoover offers hope.
Booklist
(Starred review.) The relationships are portrayed with compassion and honesty, and the author's note at the end that explains Hoover's personal connection to the subject matter is a must-read. Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of the survivors.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for It Ends With Us...then take off on your own:
1. Lily Bloom gave an uncomplimentary eulogy for her abusive father. Was Lily right to give the kind of eulogy she did? What might you have done—what kind of eulogy might you have given had you been in Lily's shoes? Or...perhaps you have been in her shoes.
2. Why is Lily hesitant at first to become involved with Ryle? Is it his name: is it just too damn perfect to be true? Or is there something else that makes her hold back initially?
3. Talk about Atlas and Lily's young relationship. What drew them together? What happens when they reconnect in Boston?
4. Why does Lily agree to marry Ryle after having rediscovered Atlas...and especially after witnessing Ryle's displays of anger? Is her decision understandable? What would you have advised had she asked you?
5. No Spoiler here: In the end, does Lily make the right decision? What did you want to have happened? What would you have done? Or, again, if you have been in Lily's shoes (or know someone has), what choices did you make?
6. How did learning about Hoover's own familly history affect your reading of her novel?
7. What message have you taken away form this book? Does Hoover overly humanize Ryle, make him too attractive? Or does she give him voice and depth so that we come to understand him?
8. What does the title mean?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
It's Always the Husband
Michele Campbell, 2017
St. Martin's Press
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250081803
Summary
Kate, Aubrey, and Jenny first met as college roommates and soon became inseparable, despite being as different as three women can be.
Kate was beautiful, wild, wealthy, and damaged. Aubrey, on financial aid, came from a broken home, and wanted more than anything to distance herself from her past. And Jenny was a striver—brilliant, ambitious, and determined to succeed.
As an unlikely friendship formed, the three of them swore they would always be there for each other.
But twenty years later, one of them is standing at the edge of a bridge, and someone is urging her to jump.
How did it come to this?
Kate married the gorgeous party boy, Aubrey married up, and Jenny married the boy next door. But how can these three women love and hate each other? Can feelings this strong lead to murder? When one of them dies under mysterious circumstances, will everyone assume, as is often the case, that it’s always the husband?
A suspenseful, absorbing novel that examines the complexities of friendship, It’s Always the Husband will keep readers guessing right up to its shocking conclusion. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Aka—Michele Martinez
• Birth—ca. 1962-63
• Raised—state of Connecticut, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard University; J.D, Stanford University
• Currently—lives in the state of New Hampshire
Michele Campbell, an American author of police procedurals and, most recently, a crime thriller, was raised in Connecticut. Her father owned an aerospace manufacturing company and her mother was an office manager.
Campbell received her Bachelor's from Harvard and law degree from Stanford. She worked for three years at a New York City law firm before leaving the practice to join the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York. She spent eight years as a federal prosecutor, serving as deputy chief of the Narcotics Unit.
In the 2000's she wrote a series of police procedurals under the name Michele Martinez. The novels, which feature fictional prosecutor Melanie Vargas, include Notorious (2008); Cover Up (2007); Finishing School (2006); and Most Wanted (2005).
Around the same time, Campbell said her goodbyes to the big city law and moved with her husband and two children to New England where, in addition to writing, she teaches law at Vermont Law School.
Like the female characters in her 2017 thriller, It's Always the Husband, Campbell says she has had many close female friends, a few frenemies, and only one husband, who — to the best of her knowledge — has never tried to kill her. (From various online sources.)
Book Reviews
It's Always the Husband has great character development, allowing readers to really get inside the minds of the characters until the very end, where a shocking twist leaves readers stunned (A "top pick").
Romantic Times
Readers will be left in an adrenaline inducing "whodunit" game, until the completely unpredictable conclusion. This book is perfect for fans of Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies.
Redbook Magazine
[A] suspenseful if soapy debut from former federal prosecutor Campbell.… Demonstrating diabolical plotting chops and an ability to convincingly conjure settings, Campbell crafts a twisty page-turner that might have been even more powerful if so many of the principals didn’t prove rotten at the core.
Publishers Weekly
Twists, turns, and a puzzling mix of suspects …will keep readers turning the pages.
Booklist
[A] page-turner…. At times, the characters' self-involvement detracts from the suspense of the novel…. However, perhaps this is part of Campbell's larger point: complicity through silence contributes as much to each of the crimes as the acts of violence. Moody and dark in its portrayal of friendship and marriage.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What is it about the college setting that allows three girls as different as Kate, Jenny and Aubrey to bond? What attracts them to one another? What repels them? If nothing terrible had happened at the end of freshman year, do you think their friendship would have had a future, or would they have gone their separate ways?
2. Kate, Jenny and Aubrey come from very different backgrounds. How is each character shaped by her upbringing and family circumstances? Can the characters’ flaws be explained by their difficult childhoods or their complicated relationships with their parents – or is this just an excuse for bad behavior?
3. Kate is at the center of two love triangles that shape the book. She gets involved with Lucas despite knowing he was Jenny’s high school boyfriend, and she has an affair with Ethan, who is Aubrey’s husband. What forces compel Kate to behave so badly? Is she simply pursuing these men in order to take them away from her best friends, or do you believe her feelings for them? How does the sense of betrayal Jenny and Aubrey feel when Kate steals their men influence their actions toward her?
4. The story cuts back and forth in time between freshman year at Carlisle and the roommates’ reunion twenty years later. Over those two decades, how do the three main characters change? Do they grow up at all? Does marriage, motherhood or career make them wiser, or kinder? At the end of the book, which of the three do you believe is the happiest, or best adjusted?
5. When Kate meets Owen Rizzo in the bar during the thunderstorm, she tells him her name is Maggie Price. Why? What role does Maggie Price’s suicide play in Kate’s inner life over the years? Do you believe she feels guilt for it? Does she feel genuine guilt for what happened to Lucas at the bridge? Is Kate capable of true remorse?
6. Why does Griff love Kate so much? What did you think of his actions toward her throughout the course of their marriage, and at the very end? Throughout the second half of the book, did you believe he killed her? Does he seem remorseful, or not? What do you think his future holds?
7. The three roommates wind up in three very different marriages to three very different men. Were the problems in these marriages a reflection of the women’s innate character flaws? Were they inevitable? If you had to pick one of the three men to be married to — Griff, Ethan or Tim — which would you pick?
8. Which of the three roommates did you like best? Which would you most like to have as a friend? Which is most like you — are you a Kate, an Aubrey or a Jenny, or some combination of the three?
(Questions from the author's website.)
The Italian Teacher
Tom Rachman, 2018
Penguin Publishing
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780735222694
Summary
A masterful novel about the son of a great painter striving to create his own legacy, by the bestselling author of The Imperfectionists.
Conceived while his father, Bear, cavorted around Rome in the 1950s, Pinch learns quickly that Bear's genius trumps all.
After Bear abandons his family, Pinch strives to make himself worthy of his father's attention—first trying to be a painter himself; then resolving to write his father's biography; eventually settling, disillusioned, into a job as an Italian teacher in London.
But when Bear dies, Pinch hatches a scheme to secure his father's legacy—and make his own mark on the world.
With his signature humanity and humor, Tom Rachman examines a life lived in the shadow of greatness, cementing his place among his generation's most exciting literary voices. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1974
• Where—London, England, UK
• Raised—Vancouver, Canada
• Education—B.A., University of Toronto; M.A., Columbia University
• Currently—lives in London
Tom Rachman was born in London and raised in Vancouver, Canada. A graduate of the University of Toronto and the Columbia School of Journalism, he has been a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press, stationed in Rome. From 2006 to 2008, he worked as an editor at the International Herald Tribune in Paris. He lives in London.
The Imperfectionsists (2010) is his first novel; The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (2014) his second, followed by The Italian Teacher (2018). (Adapted from the publisher and Wikipedia. Retrieved 6/09/2014.)
Book Reviews
The reliably excellent Rachman this time offers a nuanced, fascinating portrait of a celebrated painter looking ahead to his legacy.
Entertainment Weekly
Pencils down, brushes up: Rachman goes beyond the base coat with THE ITALIAN TEACHER, a portrait of a son his large-scale father.
Vanity Fair
(Starred review) [An] artful page-turner…. Spanning the 1950s to the present, the novel… makes for a satisfying examination of authorship and authenticity, and… how crafting an identity independent of one’s parents can be a lifelong, worthwhile project.
Publishers Weekly
long with the skewering of art-world and academic pretensions, there is humor, humanity, and compassion in Rachman’s writing. For most fiction readers.
Library Journal
(Starred review) A momentous drama of a volatile relationship and the fundamental will to survive.
Booklist
[P]oignant …[with] an ironic conclusion that also shimmers with love and regret.… A sensitive look at complicated relationships that's especially notable for the fascinatingly conflicted protagonist.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for THE ITALIAN TEACHER … then take off on your own:
1. What was it like to grow up under the shadow of Bear Bavinsky? What was the damage imposed on his son, Pinch? How has Pinch emerge from his childhood and young adult years: what scars has he been nursing all these years? In other words, how would you describe Pinch? Do you find yourself sympathetic toward him … or perhaps a little frustrated by him?
2. What do you make of Bear—the father of 17 children who has sprinkled the world with his abandoned spouses and ashes of burned paintings? Of all the things he says and/or does to Pinch, which do you find the most egregious, the most damaging?
3. What role does Pinch's mother Natalie play in the family dynamics and throughout Pinch's life? What happens to her life as an artist? How would you describe Pinch's relationship with her?
4. Nattty tells Pinch at one point that "you need to be selfish as an artist—that's why it's so much harder for a woman." What do you make of her statement?
5. Follow-up to Question 4: in the end, who in the family proves to be the strongest?
6. Bear tells Pinch, "Nobody sees themselves." Cynical? Perceptive? What does he mean?
7. Of all of Bear's children, most of whom keep their distance from their father, Pinch is the one who works to maintain a relationship. Why? Over the years, how does the balance of power shift between father and son? Do you have sympathy for Bear at some point...at any point...or at no point?
8. Were you surprised, pleased, disappointed at the novel's ending? How has Pinch changed by the end … has he grown?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
J: A Novel
Howard Jacobson, 2014
Crown Publishing
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780553419559
Summary
Finalist, 2014 Man Booker
Man Booker Prize–winner Howard Jacobson’s brilliant and profound new novel, J, "invites comparison with George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World" (Sunday Times, London). Set in a world where collective memory has vanished and the past is a dangerous country, not to be talked about or visited, J is a boldly inventive love story, both tender and terrifying.
Kevern Cohen doesn’t know why his father always drew two fingers across his lips when he said a word starting with a J. It wasn’t then, and isn’t now, the time or place to be asking questions.
When the extravagantly beautiful Ailinn Solomons arrives in his village by a sea that laps no other shore, Kevern is instantly drawn to her. Although mistrustful by nature, the two become linked as if they were meant for each other. Together, they form a refuge from the commonplace brutality that is the legacy of a historic catastrophe shrouded in suspicion, denial, and apology, simply referred to as WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED.
To Esme Nussbaum, Ailinn’s guardian, Ailinn and Kevern are fragile shoots of hopefulness. As this unusual pair’s actions draw them into ever-increasing danger, Esme is determined to keep them together—whatever the cost.
In this stunning, evocative, and terribly heartbreaking work, where one couple’s love affair could have shattering consequences for the human race, Howard Jacobson gathers his prodigious gifts for the crowning achievement of a remarkable career. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 25, 1942
• Where—Manchester, England, UK
• Education—Cambridge University
• Awards—Man Booker Prize
• Currently—lives in London, England
Howard Jacobson is a British author and journalist, best known for his comic novels that often revolve around the dilemmas of British Jewish characters. Born in Manchester, Jacobson was brought up in Prestwich and was educated at Stand Grammar School in Whitefield, before going on to study English at Downing College, Cambridge under F. R. Leavis. He lectured for three years at the University of Sydney before returning to England to teach at Selwyn College, Cambridge. His later teaching posts included a stint at Wolverhampton Polytechnic in the 1970s.
Although Jacobson has described himself as "a Jewish Jane Austen" (in response to being described as "the English Phillip Roth"), he also states, "I'm not by any means conventionally Jewish. I don't go to shul. What I feel is that I have a Jewish mind, I have a Jewish intelligence. I feel linked to previous Jewish minds of the past. I don't know what kind of trouble this gets somebody into, a disputatious mind. What a Jew is has been made by the experience of 5,000 years, that's what shapes the Jewish sense of humour, that's what shaped Jewish pugnacity or tenaciousness." He maintains that "comedy is a very important part of what I do."
Writing
His time at Wolverhampton was to form the basis of his first novel, Coming from Behind, a campus comedy about a failing polytechnic that plans to merge facilities with a local football club. The episode of teaching in a football stadium in the novel is, according to Jacobson in a 1985 BBC interview, the only portion of the novel based on a true incident. He also wrote a travel book in 1987, titled In the Land of Oz, which was researched during his time as a visiting academic in Sydney.
His fiction, particularly in the novels he has published since 1998, is characterised chiefly by a discursive and humorous style. Recurring subjects in his work include male–female relations and the Jewish experience in Britain in the mid- to late-20th century. He has been compared to prominent Jewish-American novelists such as Philip Roth, in particular for his habit of creating doppelgängers of himself in his fiction. Jacobson has been called "the English Philip Roth", although he calls himself the "Jewish Jane Austen."
His 1999 novel The Mighty Walzer, about a teenage table tennis champion, won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic writing. It is set in the Manchester of the 1950s and Jacobson, himself a table tennis fan in his teenage years, admits that there is more than an element of autobiography in it. His 2002 novel Who's Sorry Now?—the central character of which is a Jewish luggage baron of South London—and his 2006 novel Kalooki Nights were longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Jacobson described Kalooki Nights as "the most Jewish novel that has ever been written by anybody, anywhere."
As well as writing fiction, he also contributes a weekly column for The Independent newspaper as an op-ed writer. In recent times, he has, on several occasions, attacked anti-Israel boycotts, and for this reason has been labelled a "liberal Zionist."
In October 2010 Jacobson won the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Finkler Question, which was the first comic novel to win the prize since Kingsley Amis's The Old Devils in 1986. The book, published by Bloomsbury, explores what it means to be Jewish today and is also about "love, loss and male friendship." Andrew Motion, the chair of the judges, said: "The Finkler Question is a marvellous book: very funny, of course, but also very clever, very sad and very subtle. It is all that it seems to be and much more than it seems to be. A completely worthy winner of this great prize." Jacobson—at the age of 68—was the oldest winner since William Golding in 1980.
Jacobson's 2014 dystopian novel, J, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Broadcasting
He has also worked as a broadcaster. Two recent television programmes include Channel 4's Howard Jacobson Takes on the Turner, in 2000, and The South Bank Show in 2002 featured an edition entitled "Why the Novel Matters." An earlier profile went out in the series in 1999 and a television documentary entitled "My Son the Novelist" preceded it as part of the Arena series in 1985. His two non-fiction books—Roots Schmoots: Journeys Among Jews (1993) and Seriously Funny: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime (1997—were turned into television series.
In 2010 Jacobson presented "Creation," the first part of the Channel 4 series The Bible: A History. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
A masterwork of imagination flavored with grief.
Jenni Laidman - Chicago Tribune
A fascinating cautionary tale about the paradoxical dangers of assimilation and tranquility.
Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal
Remarkable... Comparisons do not do full justice to Jacobson’s achievement in what may well come to be seen as the dystopian British novel of its times.
John Burnside - Guardian
J is a snarling, effervescent, and ambitious philosophical work of fiction that poses unsettling questions about our sense of history, and our self-satisfied orthodoxies. Jacobson’s triumph is to craft a novel that is poignant as well as troubling from the debris.
Independent (UK)
J is a dystopia that invites comparison with George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
Sunday Times (UK)
Mystifying, serious, and blackly funny... J shows that, for a writer working at the peak of his powers, with the themes of his imagined future very much part of our present, laughter in the dark is the only kind.
Independent on Sunday (UK)
Brilliant...J is a firework display of verbal invention, as entertaining as it is unsettling.
Jewish Chronicle
J is a remarkable achievement: an affecting, unsettling—and yes, darkly amusing—novel that offers a picture of the horror of a sanitized world whose dominant mode is elegiac, but where the possibility of elegy is everywhere collectively proscribed.
National (UK)
Contemporary literature is overloaded with millenarian visions of destroyed landscapes and societies in flames, but Jacobson has produced one that feels frighteningly new by turning the focus within: the ruins here are the ruins of language, imagination, love itself.
Telegraph (UK)
[J]’s success owes much to the fine texture of its dystopia... As a conspiracy yarn examining the manipulation of collective memory, J has legs, and it’s well worth its place on this year’s Man Booker longlist... Jacobson has crafted an immersive, complex experience with care and guile.
Observer (UK)
Jacobson...goes from strength to strength. This is a new departure: futuristic, dystopian, not, it seems, the world as we know it. But as we peer through the haze we see something take shape. It’s horrible. It’s monstrous. Read this for yourself and you’ll see what it is
Evening Standard (UK)
J is a rare combination of moral vision and subtle emotional intelligence...superb.
Lancet (UK)
A provocative dystopian fantasy to stack next to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, J has the kind of nightmarish twist which makes you want to turn back to page one immediately and read the whole thing again.
Sunday Express (UK)
Set in a quiet village after a global cataclysm.... Jacobson's fusion of village comedy and dystopian sci-fi is a tour de force.... The chilling sketch that finally coheres about the fate that has befallen humanity may make readers lament not having had a more straightforward approach.... [A] unique entry in the [dystopian] genre.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) J delivers a gut punch of a plot twist that rests somewhere between hope and devastation. This is a major novel, a rare work that makes readers think as much as feel.
Shelf Awareness
(Starred review.) Readers...will find plenty to think and talk about in Jacobson’s remarkable, disturbing book.
Booklist
(Starred review.) [A]n enigmatic tale of the near future....from angst-y comedy to dystopian darkness.... The laughs come fewer and farther between than in Jacobson's recent string of men-lost-in-middle-age yarns.... A pleasure, as reading Jacobson always is....
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.)
The Jane Austen Book Club
Karen Joy Fowler, 2004
Penguin Group USA
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780452286535
Summary
In California's central valley, five women and one man join to discuss Jane Austen's novels. Over the six months they get together, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable, and love happens. With her eye for the frailties of human behavior and her ear for the absurdities of social intercourse, Karen Joy Fowler has never been wittier nor her characters more appealing. The result is a delicious dissection of modern relationships. Dedicated Austenites will delight in unearthing the echoes of Austen that run through the novel, but most readers will simply enjoy the vision and voice that, despite two centuries of separation, unite two great writers of brilliant social comedy. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 07, 1950
• Where—Bloomington, Indiana, USA
• Education—B.A., The University of California, Berkeley;
M.A., The University of California, Davis, 1974
• Currently—lives in Davis, California
Karen Joy Fowler, A PEN/Faulkner and Dublin IMPAC nominee, is the author of Sarah Canary, The Sweetheart Season, Black Glass: Short Fictions, and Sister Noon.
More
A genre such as science fiction, with its deeply committed fans and otherworldly subject matter, tends to stand apart from the rest of the book world. So when one writer manages to push the boundaries and achieve success with both sci-fi and mainstream fiction readers, it's a feat that signals she's worth paying attention to.
In terms of subject matter, Karen Joy Fowler is all over the map. Her first novel, 1991's Sarah Canary, is the story of the enigmatic title character, set in the Washington Territory in 1873. A Chinese railway worker's attempt to escort Sarah back to the insane asylum he believes she came from turns into more than he bargained for. Fowler weaves race and women's rights into the story, and it could be another historical novel — except for a detail Fowler talks about in a 2004 interview. "I think for science fiction readers, it's pretty obvious that Sarah Canary is an alien," Fowler says. Yet other readers are dumbfounded by this news, seeing no sign of it. For her part, Fowler refuses to make a declaration either way.
Sarah Canary was followed in 1996 by The Sweetheart Season, a novel about a 1950s women's baseball league that earned comparisons to Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon works; and the 2001 novel Sister Noon, which Fowler called "a sort of secret history of San Francisco." For all three novels, critics lauded Fowler for her originality and compelling storytelling as she infused her books with elements of fantasy and well-researched history.
In 2004, Fowler released her first contemporary novel, The Jane Austen Book Club. It dealt with five women and one man reading six of Austen's novels over a six-month period, and earned still more praise for Fowler. The New York Times called the novel shrewd and funny; the Washington Post said, "It's...hard to explain quite why The Jane Austen Book Club is so wonderful. But that it is wonderful will soon be widely recognized, indeed, a truth universally acknowledged." Though Fowler clearly wrote the book with Austen fans in mind — she too loves the English author of classics such as Pride and Prejudice—knowledge of Austen's works is not a prerequisite for enjoyment.
Readers who want to learn more about Fowler's sci-fi side should also seek out her short story collections. Black Glass (1999) is not a strictly sci-fi affair, but it is probably the most readily available; her Web site offers a useful bibliography of stories she has published in various collections and sci-fi journals, including the Nebula Award-winning "What I Didn't See."
Fowler also continues to be involved with science fiction as a co-founder of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, designed to honor "science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender." The award has spawned two anthologies, which Fowler has taken part in editing.
Whether or not Fowler moves further in the direction of mainstream contemporary fiction, she clearly has the flexibility and skill as a writer to retain fans no matter what. Her "category" as a writer may be fluid, but it doesn't seem to make a difference to readers who discover her unique, absorbing stories and get wrapped up in them.
Extras
From a 2004 Barnes & Noble interview:
• The first thing I ever wanted to be was a dog breeder. Instead I've had a succession of eccentric pound rescues. My favorite was a Keeshond Shepherd mix, named Tamara Press after the Russian shot-putter. Tamara went through college with me, was there when I married, when I had children. She was like Nana in Peter Pan; we were a team. I'm too permissive to deal with spaniels or hounds, as it turns out. Not that I haven't had them, just that I lose the alpha advantage.
• I take yoga classes. I eat sushi. I walk the dog. I spend way too much time on email. Mostly I read. I have cats, too. But I can't talk about them. They don't like it.
• I'm not afraid of spiders or snakes, at least not the California varieties. But I can't watch scary movies. That is, I can watch them, but I can't sleep after, so mostly I don't. Unless I'm tricked. I mention no names. You know who you are.
• I loved the television show The Night Stalker when it was on. Also The Greatest American Hero. And I Spy. And recently Buffy the Vampire Slayer, except for the final year.
• I do the crossword puzzle in the Nation every week. I don't like other crossword puzzles, only that one. It takes me two days on average."
• When asked what novel most influenced her life as a writer, here is her answer:
The Once and Future King by T. H. White. I read this book first when I was about 12. I've reread it a dozen times since. I was very imprinted by the narrative voice—omniscient shading into limited and back out. I tend to use that voice myself.
It's a very digressive book—literature, tilting, hawking, archeology, cricket. It combines history with deliberate anachronisms. The emotional range is enormous, from silly to tragic to lyrical to analytical. Parts of it are carefully documented and painstakingly realistic. Parts of it are utter fantasy. You can tell that White had a great time writing it; it's showy, and rompish. I think this book persuaded me that a writer is allowed to do absolutely anything. And that it could be fun. (Bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
One man and five women, all great readers who are passionate about literature, get together to read Jane Austen's six works. We're invited to join in...in the club and also in members' lives.
A LitLovers LitPick (May '08)
The thoughts are more than literary discussion. They bring out the characters and emotions of the participants along with the tensions and sympathies that flit and filter among them. Ms. Fowler has the genial notion to see in the book club—that newish American cultural phenomenon—a society resembling nothing so much as one of those sets of country gentry among which Austen constructed a social comedy where irony stiffens sentiment, and pain is a cool afterthought.
Richard Eder - New York Times
In her portrait of a California reading group, Karen Joy Fowler turns a mirror on the gawking, voyeuristic presence that lurks in every story: the reader. What results is Fowler's shrewdest, funniest fiction yet, a novel about how we engage with a novel. You don't have to be a student of Jane Austen to enjoy it, either. At the end are plot synopses of all six Austen novels for the benefit of the forgetful, the uninitiated or the nostalgic.
Patricia T. O'Conner - New York Times Book Review
It's just as hard to explain quite why The Jane Austen Book Club is so wonderful. But that it is wonderful will soon be widely recognized, indeed, a truth universally acknowledged.
Michael Dirda - Washington Post
With its many section breaks and point-of-view shifts, Fowler's newest book (following Sister Noon) poses significant challenges for a single narrator. But stage actress Schraf overcomes these obstacles with ease, her voice taking on just a touch of haughtiness for the chapters told from the "we" perspective and then switching back to an unassuming tone for the third-person sections. It may take listeners a short while to grasp the story's structure, but once they do, they'll be hopelessly snared by this witty look at the lives and loves of six people, all members of Central Valley, California's "all-Jane-Austen-all-the-time book club." As the members discuss Austen's stance on marriage, social status and love, the narrative meanders, touching on defining moments in the characters' lives and then drifting back to describe their current dilemmas: single, middle-aged Jocelyn has never been in love; French teacher Prudie can't stop thinking about men other than her husband; chatty Bernadette has decided to "let herself go"; warm-hearted Sylvia still loves her soon-to-be-ex-husband; emotional Allegra has left her girlfriend; and sci-fi aficionado Grigg is infatuated with someone who may not share his affection. Through subtle alterations of tone and inflection, Schraf neatly conveys the emotions and idiosyncrasies of each character, from Prudie's impossibly pretentious French asides to Bernadette's airy, endless storytelling. Playful and intelligent, this audiobook embodies the best of both the written and aural worlds.
Publishers Weekly
Fowler's book, for all intents and purposes, is a character study of six people who meet regularly over several months to discuss six of Austen's works. Jocelyn, in her 50s and never married, is the originator of the club, a control freak who handpicked all the members; Sylvia, her good friend, is in a funk because her husband of 32 years has just left her for another woman; Sylvia's daughter, Allegra, is an attractive 30-year-old lesbian who recently broke up with her lover; Prudie is a twentysomething high school French teacher; the much-married Bernadette, 67, is now single; and Grigg, in his 40s, would love to get married. The group sits around drinking and making aimless, often pointless, conversation about Austen, and into these light, roundabout discussions Fowler intertwines some clever and funny stories. There is not much depth to the characters, the plots are weak, and little happens until the last chapter. Read by Kimberly Schraf, this atypical but deliberate novel is recommended for larger public libraries. —Carol Stern, Glen Cove P.L., NY
Library Journal
The estimable Fowler (Sister Noon, 2001, etc.) offers a real delight as she follows the lives of six members of a book club. Not a moment passes without its interest as we meet Jocelyn (who raises Rhodesian Ridgebacks); her best friend since girlhood, Sylvia (nee Sanchez); Sylvia's daughter Allegra, an artist who's now 30 and a lesbian; high-school French teacher, Prudie, 28 and flighty; the talkative Bernadette, turning 67 and the oldest; and the only man, Grigg Harris, unmarried, in his 40s, new to the neighborhood-and a science-fiction buff who's never read Jane Austen. Month by month, the group meets at one house or another to discuss the agreed-upon book, and all the while Fowler keeps things moving with a fine and inventive dexterity, lingering in the present at one moment, dipping way back into the adolescent years of Jocelyn and Sylvia at another (Sylvia marries Jocelyn's boyfriend; Jocelyn remains single), sometimes touching on the life of Austen herself, then popping back to escort us through Grigg's plain but fascinating history (he had three sisters, no brother), or to let us in on what makes Prudie flighty, how many husbands Bernadette had, or what happened when Allegra jumped from an airplane. Much of the charm lies in the book discussions themselves-never dry, ever revealing, always on the psychological mark-and much indeed also lies in the many perfect Austen-esque moments, situations, misunderstandings, recognitions, and reversals that make up the web and woof of the novel. We learn early that after 30 years of perfect marriage Sylvia's husband has left her. That event, in one way or another, will touch on everyone, and before the end there'll be a positively lovely re-sorting of relationships, places, and positions, all done in today's most perfect emulation of Jane that you could ever imagine. Bright, engaging, dexterous literary entertainment for everyone, though with many special treats and pleasures for Janeites.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The author opens the novel with a quote from Jane Austen, part of which reads, "Seldom, very seldom does complete truth belong to any human disclosure." Do you agree with this sentiment? Why do you think the author chooses to open the novel with this quote? How might this statement apply to each of the characters in the book?
2. When the group is first being formed, Bernadette suggests that it should consist exclusively of women: "The dynamic changes with men. They pontificate rather than communicate. They talk more than their share. ' (page 3). What do you think of her statement? How does Grigg affect the group’s dynamic? How would things have been different without him?
3. While the group is reading Sense and Sensibility and discussing Mrs. Dashwood, Sylvia mentions that "the problems of older women don’t interest most writers" (page 46) and is thrilled that Austen seems to care. Do you agree with this, that most writers aren’t interested in older women? What about society in general? How does Fowler approach older women? Later, Prudie says that "An older man can still fall in love. An older woman better not." (page 47) Do you agree? How does Fowler deal with this issue?
4. On page 228 Sylvia asks, "Why should unhappiness be so much more powerful than happiness?" How would you answer her? How does each character find her/his own happiness in the novel?
5. The book club meets from March through August. How does the group change over these six months? "I always like to know how a story ends," Bernadette says on page 199. How do you think this story ends (the "epilogue to the epilogue")? Does Bernadette have a happy marriage with Senor Obando? Do Allegra and Corinne stay together? How about Jocelyn and Grigg? Daniel and Sylvia?
6. At the end of the novel, Jocelyn reluctantly agrees to read some science fiction, including the work of Ursula Le Guin, and really likes it. What other authors do you think the group might like? Although they would have to change the name of their group, what author would you suggest for the Central Valley/River City all-Jane-Austen-all-the-time book club to read next? What do you suggest for your own group?
7. If you’re new to Jane Austen, are you now interested in reading her work? Based on what you’ve learned from Karen Jay Fowler, which novel would you go to first? If you are already a "dedicated Janeite," how has reading The Jane Austen Book Club made you feel about your favorite author? How would you describe your own "private Austen"? What novel would you recommend to first-time readers of Austen?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
top of page (summary)
The Jane Austen Society
Natalie Jenner, 2020
St. Martin's Press
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250248732
Summary
Just after the Second World War, in the small English village of Chawton, an unusual but like-minded group of people band together to attempt something remarkable.
One hundred and fifty years ago, Chawton was the final home of Jane Austen, one of England's finest novelists. Now it's home to a few distant relatives and their diminishing estate.
With the last bit of Austen's legacy threatened, a group of disparate individuals come together to preserve both Jane Austen's home and her legacy.
These people—a laborer, a young widow, the local doctor, and a movie star, among others—could not be more different and yet they are united in their love for the works and words of Austen.
As each of them endures their own quiet struggle with loss and trauma, some from the recent war, others from more distant tragedies, they rally together to create the Jane Austen Society.
A powerful and moving novel that explores the tragedies and triumphs of life, both large and small, and the universal humanity in us all, Natalie Jenner's The Jane Austen Society is destined to resonate with readers for years to come. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Natalie Jenner was born in England, raised in Canada, and graduated from the University of Toronto with consecutive degrees in English Literature and Law.
She worked for decades in the legal industry and also founded the independent bookstore Archetype Books in Oakville, Ontario, where she lives with her family and two rescue dogs. A lifelong devotee of all things Jane Austen, The Jane Austen Society is her first published novel. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[Delightful…. Jenner’s immersive character development is juxtaposed against her study of Austen’s characters, providing clever insight into how the trials of Austen’s life were revealed through her books.
Publishers Weekly
Readers who enjoy character-driven novels will want to read this book. Like Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows’s The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, it’s a must-purchase for libraries of all sizes.
Library Journal
(Starred review) Just like a story written by Austen herself, Jenner's first novel is brimming with charming moments, endearing characters, and nuanced relationships.… Readers won't need previous knowledge of Austen and her novels to enjoy this tale's slow revealing of secrets that build to a satisfying and dramatic ending.
Booklist
[Seven] lost souls, who have been misjudged by society and/or misjudge themselves, find healing…. [T]hanks to Jenner’s psychologically astute portrayals, the society founders… are very real and thoroughly sympathetic. Readers will root for these characters.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. There is a wide range of major characters in The Jane Austen Society. Which of the eight main characters was your favorite? Which of their personal stories did you find the most satisfying? Which one do you most identify with and why?
2. Jane Austen’s writing—and the characters’ love of her writing—is what brings them together. If you area fan of Jane Austen, what is your favorite book and why? If not, then which of her books are you now most interested in reading?
3. Several of the characters are living with—and, to differing extents, dealing with—the grief of losing a close loved one. Did you find yourself sympathizing with one of them more than the others? What about their story touched you the most?
4. Most of The Jane Austen Society takes place in the 1940s, right after World War II. Given that it was a very different time, with very different attitudes, what aspect revealed in the novel seemed the most familiar to your experience? What seemed the most changed since that time?
5. Mimi Harrison is in sharp contrast to the rest of the characters—she’s from the U.S., she’s a movie star, she has wealth far beyond the rest of the characters. Beyond their shared love of Jane Austen’s work, what traits do you think she has most in common with the rest of the characters? Which other character does she best complement?
6. Adam Berwick has to make an important decision—one that will not only affect the Society but his family as well. Do you think he made the right decision? Why?
7. What surprised you the most about the book? Were there any plot developments you did not expect?
8. There are many obvious and more subtle allusions to Austen’s own plots and characters throughout the book. If you’re familiar with Austen, which parallels did you particularly notice? Which ones most delighted you?
9. What expectations did you have of this book entitled The Jane Austen Society? What plot lines surprised you? Which ones developed in the way you expected?
10. What do you imagine happened to the Society and to the members after the end of the book?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Bronte, 1847
Vintage Classics
600 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307455192
Summary
Orphaned at an early age, Jane Eyre leads a lonely life until she finds work as a governess at Thornfield Hall, where she meets the mysterious Mr. Rochester and sees a ghostly woman who roams the halls by night.
This is a story of passionate love, travail and final triumph. The relationship between the heroine and Mr. Rochester is only one episode, albeit the most important, in a detailed fictional autobiography in which the author transmuted her own experience into high art.
In this work the plucky heroine is outwardly of plain appearance, but possesses an indomitable spirit, a sharp wit and great courage. She is forced to battle against the exigencies of a cruel guardian, a harsh employer and a rigid social order which circumscribes her life and position. (From Simon & Schusters Collector's Series.)
Author Bio
• Birth—April 21, 1816
• Where—Thornton, Yorkshire, England
• Death—March 31, 1855
• Where—Haworth, West Yorkshire, England
• Education—Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge in
Lancashire; Miss Wooler's School at Roe Head; Pensionnat
Heger (Belgium, to study French and German)
Bronte was born on April 21, 1816, in Thornton, Yorkshire, in the north of England, the third child of the Reverend Patrick Bronte and Maria Branwell Bronte. In 1820 the family moved to neighboring Haworth, where Reverend Brontë was offered a lifetime curacy. The following year Mrs. Brontë died of cancer, and her sister, Elizabeth Branwell, moved in to help raise the six children.
The four eldest sisters—Charlotte, Emily, Maria, and Elizabeth—attended Cowan Bridge School, until Maria and Elizabeth contracted what was probably tuberculosis and died within months of each other, at which point Charlotte and Emily returned home. The four remaining siblings—Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne—played on the Yorkshire moors and dreamed up fanciful, fabled worlds, creating a constant stream of tales, such as the Young Men plays (1826) and Our Fellows (1827).
Reverend Bronte kept his children abreast of current events; among these were the 1829 parliamentary debates centering on the Catholic Question, in which the Duke of Wellington was a leading voice. Charlotte's awareness of politics filtered into her fictional creations, as in the siblings' saga The Islanders (1827), about an imaginary world peopled with the Brontë children's real-life heroes, in which Wellington plays a central role as Charlotte's chosen character.
Throughout her childhood, Charlotte had access to the circulating library at the nearby town of Keighley. She knew the Bible and read the works of Shakespeare, George Gordon, Lord Byron, and Sir Walter Scott, and she particularly admired William Wordsworth and Robert Southey. In 1831 and 1832, Charlotte attended Miss Wooler's school at Roe Head, and she returned there as a teacher from 1835 to 1838. After working for a couple of years as a governess, Charlotte, with her sister Emily, traveled to Brussels to study, with the goal of opening their own school, but this dream did not materialize once she returned to Haworth in 1844.
Midlife
In 1846 the sisters published their collected poems under the pen names Currer (Charlotte), Ellis (Emily), and Acton (Anne) Bell. That same year Charlotte finished her first novel, The Professor, but it was not accepted for publication.
However, she began work on Jane Eyre, which was published in 1847 and met with instant success. Though some critics saw impropriety in the core of the story—the relationship between a middle-aged man and the young, naive governess who works for him—most reviewers praised the novel, helping to ensure its popularity. One of Charlotte's literary heroes, William Makepeace Thackeray, wrote her a letter to express his enjoyment of the novel and to praise her writing style, as did the influential literary critic G. H. Lewes.
Following the deaths of Branwell and Emily Bronte in 1848 and Anne in 1849, Charlotte made trips to London, where she began to move in literary circles that included such luminaries as Thackeray, whom she met for the first time in 1849; his daughter described Bronte as "a tiny, delicate, serious, little lady." In 1850 she met the noted British writer Elizabeth Gaskell, with whom she formed a lasting friendship and who, at the request of Reverend Bronte, later became her biographer. Charlotte's novel Villette was published in 1853.
In 1854 Charlotte married Arthur Bell Nicholls, a curate at Haworth who worked with her father. Sadly, less than a year later, Bronte died during her first pregnancy. While her death certificate lists the cause of death as "phthisis" (tuberculosis), there is a school of thought that believes she may have died from excessive vomiting caused by morning sickness. At the time of her death, Charlotte Brontë was a celebrated author. The 1857 publication of her first novel, The Professor, and of Gaskell's biography of her life only heightened her renown. (Bio from Barnes and Noble Classic Edition.)
Book Reviews
(Older works have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
Possibly no book, other than Pride and Prejudice, has been as beloved by women as Jane Eyre, a Cinderella novel if ever there was one.... On its surface, Jane Eyre is a simple romance: a young girl, brought low by circumstance and maltreated by the very institutions that should have protected her (family and school), wins the love of a wealthy, accomplished man. At its core, however, Jane Eyre is much, much more. (Read more...)
LitLovers Book Reviews - April 2013
The detailed exploration of a strong female character's consciousness has made readers in recent decades consider Jane Eyre as an influential feminist text. The novel works both as the absorbing story of an individual woman's quest and as a narrative of the dilemmas that confront so many women. Its mythic quality is enhanced by the fact that at the time of its writing its author was, like her heroine, unmarried and unremarked, and considered unattractive. In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë created a fully imagined character defined by her strength of will. Though Jane is nothing more than an impoverished governess, she can retort to her haughty employer Rochester: "Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?—You think wrong!" (p. 284). Jane's willfulness scandalized many contemporary critics, who called her (and the novel) "coarse" and "unfeminine." Such criticisms were powerless against the novel's popularity, and Jane's indomitable voice continues to enthrall readers more than 150 years after the novel's original publication.
Penguin Classic Edition (excerpt)
Discussion Questions
(There are two sets of questions—from the Penguin [first set] and Random House editions)
1. Why does Bronte juxtapose Jane's musings about women's social restraints with the mysterious laugh that Jane attributes to Grace Poole (p. 125-26)?
2. Rochester tells Jane, "if you are cast in a different mould to the majority, it is no merit of yours; Nature did it" (p. 153-54). Are we intended to agree or disagree with this statement?
3. After Mason's visit to Thornfield, Jane asks herself, "What crime was this, that lived incarnate in this sequestered mansion, and could neither be expelled nor subdued by the owner?" (p. 237). What crime does Bertha represent? Why does Rochester keep her at Thornfield?
4. Does Rochester ever actually intend to marry Blanche Ingram? If so, when does he change his mind? If not, why does he go to such lengths to make Jane believe he does?
5. Rochester's disastrous marriage to Bertha was based on passion, while St. John refuses to marry Rosamund because of his passion for her. What is Brontë saying about the role passion should play in marriage?
6. What does St. John feel for Jane? Why does Jane end her story with his prayer?
7. Jane asserts her equality to Rochester (p. 284), and St. John (p. 452). What does Jane mean by equality, and why is it so important to her?
8. When Jane first appears at Moor House, Hannah assumes she is a prostitute, but St. John and his sisters do not. What distinguishes the characters who misjudge Jane from those who recognize her true nature?
9. When Jane hears Rochester's voice calling while he is miles away, she says the phenomenon "is the work of nature" (p. 467). What does she mean by this? What are we intended to conclude about the meaning of this experience?
10. Brontë populates the novel with many female characters roughly the same age as Jane—Georgiana and Eliza Reed, Helen Burns, Blanche Ingram, Mary and Diana Rivers, and Rosamund Oliver. How do comparisons with these characters shape the reader's understanding of Jane's character?
11. What is the balance of power between Jane and Rochester when they marry? Does this balance change from the beginning of the marriage to the time ten years later that Jane describes at the end of the novel (p. 500-501)?
12. In a romantic relationship, does one partner inevitably dominate the other?
13. Should an individual who holds a position of authority be granted the respect of others, regardless of his or her character?
(This set of questions issued by Penguin Classics Edition.)
_________________
More Questions
1. In Jane Eyre, nothing can better show a man's moral worth than the way in which he treats the women in his life. How is Rochester's character reflected in the way he treats Jane, Adele, Bertha Mason, and Miss Ingram, and in his reported treatment of Celine Varens? How is St. John's character reflected in the way he treats Jane, Miss Oliver, and Diana and Mary? Why does this serve as such a good gauge of a man's morality and worth? What other relationships serve similar functions in the novel?
2. Throughout the novel, questions of identity are raised. From her identity as an orphan and stranger in the hostile environment of Gateshead Hall to that of a ward of the church at Lowood; from her being a possible wife of Rochester, then of St. John, to being the cousin of Diana and Mary, Jane is constantly in transition. Trace these changes in identity and how they affect Jane's view of herself and the world around her. Describe the final discovery of her identity that becomes apparent in the last chapter of the novel and the events that made that discovery possible.
3. Throughout the novel, Charlotte Brontë uses biblical quotes and religious references. From the church-supported school she attended that was run by Mr. Brocklehurst to the offer of marriage she receives from St. John, she is surrounded by aspects of Christianity. How does this influence her throughout her development? How do her views of God and Christianity change from her days as a young girl to the end of the novel? How is religion depicted in the novel, positively or negatively?
4. Many readers of Jane Eyre feel that the story is composed of two distinct parts, different in tone and purpose. The first part (chapters 1-11) concerns her childhood at Gateshead and her life at Lowood; the second part is the remainder of the story. Is creating such a division justified? Is there a genuine difference of tone and purpose between the two sections as they have been described? Some critics and readers have suggested that the first part of Jane Eyre is more arresting because it is more directly autobiographical. Do you find this to be true?
5. Upon publication, great speculation arose concerning the identity of the author of Jane Eyre, known only by the pen name Currer Bell. Questions as to the sex of the author were raised, and many critics said that they believed it to be the work of a man. One critic of her time said, "A book more unfeminine, both in its excellence and defects, it would be hard to find in the annals of female authorship. Throughout there is masculine power, breadth and shrewdness, combined with masculine hardness, coarseness, and freedom of expression." Another critic of the day, Elizabeth Rigby, said that if it was the product of a female pen, then it was the writing of a woman "unsexed." Why was there such importance placed on the sex of the author and why was it questioned so readily? What does it mean that people believed it to be the product of a man rather than of a woman?
6. Scenes of madness and insanity are among the most important plot devices in Jane Eyre. From the vision Jane sees when locked in the bedroom at Gateshead to her hearing the "goblin laughter" she attributes to Grace Poole, to the insanity and wretchedness of Bertha Mason, madness is of central importance to the plot and direction of the story. Give examples of madness in the text, and show how they affect the reader's understanding of the character experiencing the madness and how these examples affect the reader's understanding of the characters witnessing it.
7. There is probably no single line in the whole of Jane Eyre that has, in itself, attracted as much critical attention as the first line of the last chapter: "Reader, I married him." Why is the phrasing of this line so important? How would the sense be different-for the sentence and for the novel as a whole-if the line read, "Reader, we were married"?
(This set of questions issued by Random House—cover image, top right.)
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Jane Steele
Lyndsay Faye, 2016
Penguin Publishing
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780399169496
Summary
A reimagining of Jane Eyre as a gutsy, heroic serial killer, from the author whose work the New York Times described as "riveting" and the Wall Street Journal called "thrilling."
Reader, I murdered him.
A sensitive orphan, Jane Steele suffers first at the hands of her spiteful aunt and predatory cousin, then at a grim school where she fights for her very life until escaping to London, leaving the corpses of her tormentors behind her.
After years of hiding from the law while penning macabre "last confessions" of the recently hanged, Jane thrills at discovering an advertisement. Her aunt has died and her childhood home has a new master: Mr. Charles Thornfield, who seeks a governess.
Burning to know whether she is in fact the rightful heir, Jane takes the position incognito, and learns that Highgate House is full of marvelously strange new residents—the fascinating but caustic Mr. Thornfield, an army doctor returned from the Sikh Wars, and the gracious Sikh butler Mr. Sardar Singh, whose history with Mr. Thornfield appears far deeper and darker than they pretend.
As Jane catches ominous glimpses of the pair’s violent history and falls in love with the gruffly tragic Mr. Thornfield, she faces a terrible dilemma: can she possess him—body, soul, and secrets—without revealing her own murderous past?
A satirical romance about identity, guilt, goodness, and the nature of lies, by a writer who Matthew Pearl calls "superstar-caliber" and whose previous works Gillian Flynn declared "spectacular," Jane Steele is a brilliant and deeply absorbing book inspired by Charlotte Bronte’s classic Jane Eyre. (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
Jane Steele, an orphan turned governess, is a "murderess five times over." Perhaps more unforgivable, her crimes are wonderfully entertaining.... How can a serial killer also be a heroine? The answer lies in [Charlotte Bronte's words in the second edition of Jane Eyre:]...Conventionality is not morality....” Jane Steele adopts these words as her moral compass, slaying seemingly respectable villains who actually commit heinous deeds.
Abigail Meisel - New York Times
An entertaining riff on Jane Eyre.... [S]heer mayhem meets Victorian propriety.
USA Today
Jane Eyre gets a dose of Dexter. In a story that's equal parts romance, thriller, and satire, the Bronte heroine is made over into a fighter with a shadowy past.
Cosmopolitan
Set in Victorian England, this intriguing tribute to Jane Eyre from Edgar-finalist Faye reimagines Charlotte Brontë’s heroine as a killer.... The arresting narrative voice is coupled with a plot that Wilkie Collins fans will relish.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Young Jane Steele's favorite book, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, mirrors her life both too little and too much....In an arresting tale of dark humor and sometimes gory imagination, Faye has produced a heroine worthy of the gothic literature canon but reminiscent of detective fiction. —Jennifer Funk, McKendree Univ. Lib., Lebanon, IL
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Faye’s skill at historical mystery was evident in her nineteenth-century New York trilogy, but this slyly satiric stand-alone takes her prowess to new levels. A must for Bronte devotees; wickedly entertaining for all.
Booklist
Each chapter begins with a short excerpt from Charlotte Bronte's work, and Jane's interpretation of the classic novel lifts her story out of standard romance and into conversations about identity, guilt, and truth.... A novel that explores great torment and small mercies.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. When Jane Steele sets out to write her confession, she says she is doing so because she is reading Jane Eyre, and the work inspires her to "imitative acts." Has a book ever directly inspired you to create something yourself? If so, was this when you were you a child or an adult?
2. From the beginning of the novel, Jane is threatened by men who pose a direct danger to her. If you are female, did you find this peril realistic or unrealistic? If you are male, did you think Jane’s vulnerability rang true, or did it seem like melodrama?
3. The sadistic-headmaster trope, here embodied by Vesalius Munt, was very popular in the Victorian era among social justice writers. At the time, children were expected to be silent, obedient, and hardworking. Children are treated very differently today. What do you think a Victorian childhood would have been like? How would it have affected you?
4. Jane is convinced from the day she kills her cousin that she is irredeemably evil. Do you agree with her that she "murdered" her cousin? Why or why not? Do you think Jane’s later murders would have occurred if she had never caused Edwin’s death?
5. When Jane discovers erotica, she is repulsed by Mr. Munt’s letters, but she greatly enjoys the book published by Clarke’s family in which consensual polyamorous relationships are explored. Do men and women experience the erotic differently? If so, in what ways?
6. Jane Steele and Clarke have a passionate friendship, one that eventually puts both their lives on the line. The theme of "best friends" is common in literature, for instance Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, and Aibileen and Minny in The Help. Which friendships in fiction do you most identify with?
7. In London, Jane makes her living writing last confessions of the recently hanged. Many people are fascinated by the macabre; are you? Why or why not? Why are darkness and death such popular subjects when they are actually unpleasant topics?
8. Jane Steele enters the mysterious Gothic mansion thinking herself the owner, while Jane Eyre arrives as a governess. How does the power dynamic change the sorts of actions each of these characters takes after arriving? What are the biggest contrasts between Jane Steele and the character she loves? What are the greatest similarities?
9. Highgate House is full of mysteries—men with a dark past, unexpected and sinister visitors, and a forbidden cellar not unlike the forbidden attic in Jane Eyre. What is it we love about Gothic mansions? Can a house itself have secrets? A major component of the plot is the contested claim to Highgate House. In what ways may the property be considered a character?
10. Charles Thornfield and Edward Fairfax Rochester are both Byronic men plagued by their pasts, and yet they react to trauma in very different ways. In Jane Eyre, which lover is the pursuer, and which the pursued? What about in Jane Steele?
11. Sardar Singh is disgusted by the tragedy that befell his empire, and at one point he asks Jane which is worse, a rapist or a pimp—meaning the East India Company or the Sikh royalty who betrayed their country. How would you answer his question? In what ways has Sardar turned his back on his culture, and in what ways does he still cherish it?
12. There are many types of love in this novel—among others, the romantic love Jane feels for Mr. Thornfield, the unrequited love Clarke feels for Jane, the platonic love the asexual Mr. Singh feels for Mr. Thornfield. What other varieties of love are evident, and how do they drive the characters' actions? Which are the most compelling to you personally? Do you think making choices that are morally wrong is excusable if it is done for the sake of a loved one? Why or why not?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Japanese Lover
Isabel Allende, 2015
Atria Books
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781501116995
Summary
An exquisitely crafted love story and multigenerational epic that sweeps from San Francisco in the present-day to Poland and the United States during the Second World War.
In 1939, as Poland falls under the shadow of the Nazis, young Alma Belasco’s parents send her away to live in safety with an aunt and uncle in their opulent mansion in San Francisco.
There, as the rest of the world goes to war, she encounters Ichimei Fukuda, the quiet and gentle son of the family’s Japanese gardener. Unnoticed by those around them, a tender love affair begins to blossom. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the two are cruelly pulled apart as Ichimei and his family—like thousands of other Japanese Americans—are declared enemies and forcibly relocated to internment camps run by the United States government.
Throughout their lifetimes, Alma and Ichimei reunite again and again, but theirs is a love that they are forever forced to hide from the world.
Decades later, Alma is nearing the end of her long and eventful life. Irina Bazili, a care worker struggling to come to terms with her own troubled past, meets the elderly woman and her grandson, Seth, at San Francisco’s charmingly eccentric Lark House nursing home. As Irina and Seth forge a friendship, they become intrigued by a series of mysterious gifts and letters sent to Alma, eventually learning about Ichimei and this extraordinary secret passion that has endured for nearly seventy years.
Sweeping through time and spanning generations and continents, The Japanese Lover explores questions of identity, abandonment, redemption, and the unknowable impact of fate on our lives.
Written with the same attention to historical detail and keen understanding of her characters that Isabel Allende has been known for since her landmark first novel The House of the Spirits, The Japanese Lover is a profoundly moving tribute to the constancy of the human heart in a world of unceasing change. (From the publisher .)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 2, 1942
• Where—Lima, Peru
• Education—private schools in Bolivia and Lebanon
• Awards—Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, 1998; Sara Lee Foundation Award, 1998; WILLA
Literary Award, 2000
• Currently—lives in San Rafael, California, USA
Isabel Allende is a Chilean writer whose works sometimes contain aspects of the "magic realist" tradition. Author of more than 20 books—essay collections, memoirs, and novels, she is perhaps best known for her novels The House of the Spirits (1982), Daughter of Fortune (1999), and Ines of My Soul (2006). She has been called "the world's most widely read Spanish-language author." All told her novels have been translated from Spanish into over 30 languages and have sold more than 55 million copies.
Her novels are often based upon her personal experience and pay homage to the lives of women, while weaving together elements of myth and realism. She has lectured and toured many American colleges to teach literature. Fluent in English as a second language, Allende was granted American citizenship in 2003, having lived in California with her American husband since 1989.
Early background
Allende was born Isabel Allende Llona in Lima, Peru, the daughter of Francisca Llona Barros and Tomas Allende, who was at the time the Chilean ambassador to Peru. Her father was a first cousin of Salvador Allende, President of Chile from 1970 to 1973, making Salvador her first cousin once removed (not her uncle as he is sometimes referred to).
In 1945, after her father had disappeared, Isabel's mother relocated with her three children to Santiago, Chile, where they lived until 1953. Allende's mother married diplomat Ramon Huidobro, and from 1953-1958 the family moved often, including to Bolivia and Beirut. In Bolivia, Allende attended a North American private school; in Beirut, she attended an English private school. The family returned to Chile in 1958, where Allende was briefly home-schooled. In her youth, she read widely, particularly the works of William Shakespeare.
From 1959 to 1965, while living in Chile, Allende finished her secondary studies. She married Miguel Frias in 1962; the couple's daughter Paula was born in 1963 and their son Nicholas in 1966. During that time Allende worked with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Santiago, Chile, then in Brussels, Belgium, and elsewhere in Europe.
Returning to Chile in 1996, Allende translated romance novels (including those of Barbara Cartland) from English to Spanish but was fired for making unauthorized changes to the dialogue in order to make the heriones sound more intelligent. She also altered the Cinderella endings, letting the heroines find more independence.
In 1967 Allende joined the editorial staff for Paula magazine and in 1969 the children's magazine Mampato, where she later became editor. She published two children's stories, Grandmother Panchita and Lauchas y Lauchones, as well as a collection of articles, Civilice a Su Troglodita.
She also worked in Chilean television from 1970-1974. As a journalist, she interviewed famed Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Neruda told Allende that she had too much imagination to be a journalist and that she should become a novelist. He also advised her to compile her satirical columns in book form—which she did and which became her first published book. In 1973, Allende's play El Embajador played in Santiago, a few months before she was forced to flee the country due to the coup.
The military coup in September 1973 brought Augusto Pinochet to power and changed everything for Allende. Her mother and diplotmat stepfather narrowly escaped assassination, and she herself began receiving death threats. In 1973 Allende fled to Venezuela.
Life after Chile
Allende remained in exile in Venezuela for 13 years, working as a columnist for El Nacional, a major newspaper. On a 1988 visit to California, she met her second husband, attorney Willie Gordon, with whom she now lives in San Rafael, California. Her son Nicolas and his children live nearby.
In 1992 Allende's daughter Paula died at the age of 28, the result of an error in medication while hospitalized for porphyria (a rarely fatal metabolic disease). To honor her daughter, Allenda started the Isabel Allende Foundation in 1996. The foundation is "dedicated to supporting programs that promote and preserve the fundamental rights of women and children to be empowered and protected."
In 1994, Allende was awarded the Gabriela Mistral Order of Merit—the first woman to receive this honor.
She was granted U.S. citizenship in 2003 and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004. She was one of the eight flag bearers at the Opening Ceremony of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy.
In 2008 Allende received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from San Francisco State University for her "distinguished contributions as a literary artist and humanitarian." In 2010 she received Chile's National Literature Prize.
Writing
In 1981, during her exile, Allende received a phone call that her 99-year-old grandfather was near death. She sat down to write him a letter wishing to "keep him alive, at least in spirit." Her letter evolved into The House of the Spirits—the intent of which was to exorcise the ghosts of the Pinochet dictatorship. Although rejected by numerous Latin American publishers, the novel was finally published in Spain, running more than two dozen editions in Spanish and a score of translations. It was an immense success.
Allende has since become known for her vivid storytelling. As a writer, she holds to a methodical literary routine, working Monday through Saturday, 9:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M. "I always start on 8 January,"Allende once said, a tradition that began with the letter to her dying grandfather.
Her 1995 book Paula recalls Allende's own childhood in Santiago, Chile, and the following years she spent in exile. It is written as an anguished letter to her daughter. The memoir is as much a celebration of Allende's turbulent life as it is the chronicle of Paula's death.
Her 2008 memoir The Sum of Our Days centers on her recent life with her immediate family—her son, second husband, and grandchildren. The Island Beneath the Sea, set in New Orleans, was published in 2010. Maya's Notebook, a novel alternating between Berkeley, California, and Chiloe, an island in Chile, was published in 2011 (2013 in the U.S.). Three movies have been based on her novels—Aphrodite, Eva Luna, and Gift for a Sweetheart. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/23/2013.)
Book Reviews
(Starred review.) [Allende's] sweeping tale focuses on two survivors of separation and loss.... Allende sweeps these women up in the turmoil of families torn apart by WWII and ravaged by racism, poverty, horrific sexual abuse—and old age, to which Allende pays eloquent attention. .... Befitting the unapologetically romantic soul...love is what endures.
Publishers Weekly
Alma Belasco...and Ichimei Fukuda, the Japanese gardener's son, fall in love but are wrenched apart when thousands of Japanese Americans are interned during the war. Through the decades, they keep their passion alive—and secret.
Library Journal
Themes of lasting passion, friendship, reflections in old age, and how people react to challenging circumstances all feature in Allende’s newest saga, which moves from modern San Francisco back to the traumatic WWII years. As always, her lively storytelling pulls readers into her characters’ lives immediately.
Booklist
[A] saga of a couple that keeps its affair secret for the better half of a century.... Vividly and pointedly evoking prejudices "unconventional" couples among the current-day elderly faced (and some are still battling), Allende, as always, gives progress and hopeful spirits their due.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. As Alma Belasco reflects on her long life and the decisions she made to leave Ichimei and marry Nathaniel, do you think she would have done anything differently if she had had the chance? Why or why not?
2. At the beginning of her time at Lark House, Irina observes, “In itself age doesn’t make anyone better or wiser, but only accentuates what they have always been.” (p. 13) Do you think this is true of Alma Belasco? Why or why not?
3. Alma and Samuel Mendel are just two of many people who were forced to flee Europe during World War II—leaving their homes and loved ones behind. How does this affect the rest of their lives? How does it impact their view of family?
4. Consider this passage as the Fukudas and other Japanese and Japanese-American families board the buses to the internment camp at Topaz:
“The families gave themselves up because there was no alternative and because by so doing they thought they were demonstrating their loyalty toward the United States and their repudiation of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. This was their contribution to the war effort.” (p. 88)
How does the experience at Topaz affect each of the Fukudas’ sense of patriotism and their experiences as Americans? How does this change for each character over the course of internment?
5. Compare and contrast how the Belascos, a very formal family, uphold tradition, versus how the Fukudas, a family of recent immigrants and nisei, respect tradition while embracing their new Americanism.
6. Alma and Ichimei both experience the tragedy and loss of WWII firsthand. How does it affect each of them as children? How does it contribute to their understanding of one another as adults later?
7. Ichimei Fukuda and Nathaniel Belasco are the two great loves of Alma’s life. How are they able to coexist in her heart?
8. What role does race play in the choices Alma makes about her relationship with Ichimei? How would their relationship have played out in a different time period? Compare this with the choices that Megumi makes in her relationship with the soldier Boyd Anderson.
9. How do the choices of each mother throughout the novel change the lives of their children? Consider Alma, Lillian, and Heideko.
10. In reconstructing her life story for Seth’s book, Alma had the opportunity to piece “together the fragments of her biography, spicing them with touches of fantasy, allowing herself some exaggeration and white lies” (p. 177). How does it affect Alma, nearing the end of her life, to be able to control the narrative of her own life? Why do you think she chooses to leave out the stories about Ichimei at first? Why does she eventually decide to tell Seth and Irina the full story?
11. Consider this statement which Ichimei writes in a letter to Alma: “Love and friendship do not age.” (p. 176) Is Ichimei right about this? Why or why not? Consider the way that their relationship changes throughout the novel.
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Summary | Author | Book Reviews | Discussion Questions
Jarrettsville
Cornelia Nixon, 2009
Counterpoint
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781582435121
In Brief
Based on a true story from the author’s family history, Jarrettsville begins in 1869, just after Martha Jane Cairnes has shot and killed her fiancé, Nicholas McComas, in front of his Union cavalry militia as they were celebrating the anniversary of the Confederate surrender at Appomattox.
To find out why she murdered him, the story steps back to 1865, six days after the surrender, when President Lincoln has just been killed by John Wilkes Booth. Booth belongs to the same Rebel militia as Martha’s hot-headed brother Richard, who has gone missing along with Booth. Martha is loyal to her brother but in love with Nicholas McComas, a local hero of the Union cause, and their affair is fraught with echoes of the bloody conflict just ended.
The story is set in Northern Maryland, six miles below the Mason-Dixon line, where brothers literally fought on opposing sides, and former slave-owners live next door to abolitionists and freed men. Such tension proves key to Martha’s motives in killing the man she loves, and why — astonishingly — she is soon acquitted by a jury of her peers, despite more than fifty eyewitnesses to the crime. (From the publisher.)
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About the Author
• Birth—N/A
• Where—N/A
• Education—B.A., University of California, Irvine;
M.A., San Francisco State University; Ph.D.
University of California-Berkeley
• Awards—Michael Shaara prize; First prize O. Henry
Award; O. Henry Award; Carl Sandburg Award;
National Endowment for the Arts; Pushcart Prize (twice);
Carnegie Fellowship to the Mary Ingraham Bunting
Institute. at Radcliff
• Currently—teaches in Oakland, California
Cornelia Nixon is an American novelist, short-story writer, and teacher. She is most well known for her literary works and critical writings. She has authored three novels, a book of literary criticim, and many stories, which have appeared in periodicals and earned top prizes.
Nixon attended the University of California, Irvine where she earned her B.A.. She received an M.F.A. from San Francisco State University and the Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
She served as a teacher at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana from 1981 to 2000. Then she joined the faculty at Mills College in Oakland, California, in 2000 and continues to teach there today.
Nixon's first book was Lawrence's Leadership Politics and the Turn Against Women a critical essay that examined what Nixon felt to be the negative portrayal of women in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love.
In 1991, Nixon authored Now You See It, a novel in stories. The book earned acclaim from several critics at prominent periodicals such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Mademoiselle.
Nixon's next literary work, Angels Go Naked, published in 2000, is a collection of interrelated short stories that together form a larger narrative. This work also received critical acclaim from periodicals such as the New York Times Book Review, Library Journal, Booklist, and the Washington Post. Jarrettsville, Nixon's most recent novel, came out in 2009. It was reviewed, in the New York Times, Washington Post, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, and San Francisco Magazine.
Nixon has also contributed to several periodicals such as the New England Review, Iowa Review and Ploughshares. (From Wikipedia.)
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Critics Say . . .
[Cynthai Nixon] ably conveys the dark atmosphere of Reconstruction, which, in a place like Jarrettsville, could be more brutal—and even, at times, more bloody—than the wartime period itself.... Yet Nixon fumbles repeatedly when it comes to the finer details of history that, woven together, form a credible fabric of the past. For anyone who knows a bit about American history, it’s irksome when—to pick out just a couple of examples—she talks about the supposed cotton plantations of antebellum Maryland or uses the 20th-century word “segregationist".... Such errors are all the more jarring because the book’s various chapters are written in what purport to be 19th-century voices.
Adam Goodheart - New York Times Book Review
On April 10, 1869, in Jarrettsville, Md., a young mother shoots her lover to death in the middle of the main street with 50 witnesses looking on in horror and then sits down with her victim's head in her lap, weeping uncontrollably, asking to be hanged before dark. How this remarkable scene came to pass and its equally remarkable aftermath make up Cornelia Nixon's fine and compelling new novel. Jarrettsville describes the tangled and ultimately tragic romance between Martha Jane Cairnes and Nick McComas. Their story is inextricable from the history of their small town, six miles below the Mason-Dixon line, and of the still unended agony of the Civil War.
Robert Goolrick - Washington Post
Post–Civil War tensions complicate the romance between an abolitionist's son and the spirited sister of a rebel sympathizer in Nixon's uneven latest (after Angels Go Naked). Four years after the war, in Jarrettsville, Md., Martha Cairnes kills her fiance, Nicholas McComas, and demands to be arrested and hanged. The narrative then moves backward to explain how the lovers came together: Martha falls for Nick even though he has a reputation as a scoundrel. Nick, meanwhile, thinks marriage is out of the question, especially after it's revealed that his father, killed under mysterious circumstances, has left behind a mountain of debt. Yet the two are soon engaged, and Martha's brother, who may have been involved in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, resents Nick's efforts to support three former Cairnes slaves, and a tangle of crossed loyalties wreak havoc on the engagement. Nixon tells the tale a la Shadow Country, with a chorus of narrators, but here the variety of voices and the disparate narrative elements—historical account, tragic romance, courtroom drama—renders unclear what kind of story the author is trying to tell, and the riveting beginning is sabotaged by the restrained conclusion.
Publishers Weekly
The tragic end of a love affair precipitates an epic court case in a small Maryland town riven by the Civil War. Martha Jane Cairnes shoots Nicholas McComas to death at a celebration of the fourth anniversary of the Confederate surrender at Appomattox. Nixon (Angels Go Naked, 2000, etc.) stitches together multiple narratives and points of view to describe the murder, then backtracks to explore the events that led Martha to kill. From the time they fall in love at the war's end, Nicholas and Martha are caught in its residual grudges. He comes from abolitionist ilk, while she boasts a proud Southern heritage. Various narrators economically relate their story in relay, seldom overlapping and rendering the community in lively, lifelike perspective. From the former slaves who act as nurses to the doctor who witnesses Nicholas' dying throes and his son's birth, the entire community is involved in the strangulation of an innocent love affair. Nicholas' sympathy for the newly freed slaves puts him afoul of Confederate thugs like Martha's brother Richard. Yet he is not immune from the racist mores of the day and is haunted by accusations, after she is seen regularly visiting a hurt freedman, that Martha has engaged in miscegenation. For many in Jarrettsville, codes of honor trump federally imposed law, and when Nicholas gets cold feet concerning the engagement, rumors of scandal run amok. His portions of the narrative painfully trace faltering will, self-doubt and moral decline. At Martha's murder trial, more than just one young woman stands accused. Thrilling and cathartic, this imaginative, well-crafted historical fiction meditates on morality and the complexity of motivation.
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)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Jarrettsville:
1. Why might Cornelia Nixon begin, rather than end, her novel with the shooting? What difference does it make in how you read the novel?
2. Does the author fully develop her characters? How would you describe both Martha Jane Cairnes and Nicholas McComas? Are the two well-suited to one another? What kind of character is Martha's brother Richard? Of the primary characters, which do you most admire? Least admire?
3. Was the romance between Martha and Nick doomed? Given the hostile environment and personalities and prjeudices of the those involved, was the tragedy inevitable? Could the shooting have been avoided?
4. The novel indicates that the Civil War, while officially over, had yet to end in places like Jarrettsville. Were you suprised by the level of animosity in the wake of the war?
5. Follow-up to Question 4: How did the Civil War affect the families and community of Jarrettsville. Talk about the ways in which it tore at the social fabric of the town.
6. How are African Americans treated in Jarrettsville? Are the freed slaves better off after the war than they were as slaves before the war?
7. Discuss the friendship between Martha and Tim—what is it's nature? How does that friendship get manipulated and corrupted? Should Martha have been more cautious? Should she, could she, have known the repercussions?
8. Did you detect the double-standard between men and women, especially with regards to Martha and Isie?
9. At what point did you come to understand why Martha shot Nick? Do you sympathasize with her? If so, how does an author go about building sympathy for a murderer? If you have no sympathy for Martha, why is that?
10. Nixon uses shifting perspectives in telling her story. Does her use of multiple voices as a narrative technique appeal to you? Why or why not? Was there a particular narrator you liked more than others? Any you disliked more than others?
11. How thoroughly does Cornelia Nixon establish the novel's 19th-century setting? Does she bring to life both the era and its people? If so, how does she accomplish this? If not, why not?
12. Does the ending hold up? Were you suprised...or let down by the way the novel ended?
13. Did you learn something new by reading this historical novel, perhaps something about the aftermath of the Civil War, the treatment of freed slaves, or the hostilities that continued after the war.
Jerusalem Maiden
Talia Carner, 2011
William Morrow
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062004376
Summary
Esther Kaminsky knows that her duty is to marry young and produce many sons to help hasten the Messiah’s arrival: that is what expected of young ultra-Orthodox women in Jerusalem at the end of the Ottoman Empire’s rule.
But when a teacher catches Esther's extraordinary doodling and gives her art lessons, Esther wonders if God has a special destiny for her: maybe she is meant to be an artist, not a mother; maybe she is meant to travel to Paris, not stay in Jerusalem. However, Esther sacrifices her own yearnings and devotes herself instead to following God’s path as an obedient “Jerusalem maiden.”
In the coming years, Esther struggles between comfort and repression in God’s decrees, trusting the rituals of faith while suppressing her desires—until a surprising opportunity forces itself into her pre-ordained path. As her beliefs clash with the passions she has staved off her entire life, Esther must confront the hard questions: What is faith? Is there such thing as destiny? And to whom must she be true, to God or to herself? (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Tel Aviv, Israel
• Education—B.A. ,Hebrew University (Jerusalem); M.A.,
State University of New York, Stony Brook
• Awards—Forward National Literature Award
• Currently—lives in Bridgehampton, Long Island and New
York City, NY
Before turning to fiction writing, Talia Carner worked for Redbook magazine and served as the publisher of Savvy Woman magazine. An adjunct professor of marketing at Long Island University and a marketing consultant to Fortune 500 companies, she was a volunteer counselor and lecturer for the Small Business Administration and a member of United States Information Agency missions to Russia, teaching women entrepreneurial skills.
Carner’s activities in women’s organizations led to her participation at the 1995 International Women’s Conference in Beijing, where she learned of the atrocities of The Dying Rooms—the Chinese orphanages where the documented death rate was 80%—and about the U.S.’s courts betrayal of molested children.
Helping African women to develop a campaign against clitoridectomy, she was exposed to the plight of women in societies that subjected millions of girls to this brutal mutilation. Her education about violence against women continued when she assisted Indian women in a campaign to end the burning of brides over dowry disputes. A sought-after keynote lecturer at renowned organizations, Carner speaks on both universal and culture-specific issues facing today’s women across the globe.
As Carner researched and wrote about the difficulties women face, she examined her own family’s ten-generation history in Jerusalem. Because her grandmother, with whom she had been close, had been blocked from developing her extraordinary artistic talent, Carner set out to explore the religious world in which obedient 12- to 14-year-olds were expected to hasten the Messiah’s arrival and save the world Jewry by procreating. Her novel Jerusalem Maiden (2011) depicts a woman’s struggle for self-expression against her society’s religious dictates.
In the early 1980s, while at Redbook magazine, Carner was the first to define the characteristics of female baby-boomers as having a later marriage-age and being more educated, career-oriented, and health- and civic-conscious than their older counterparts. While the publisher of Savvy Woman magazine—then one of only four females to head a major American magazine—she was the first to document the demographics of female business owners.
Launching her own marketing consulting firm to Fortune 500 companies, Carner commissioned independent research and challenged both public perceptions and the U.S. government’s definition of entrepreneurship, a debate that ultimately established the White House Oversight Committee and brought changes to the way the Office of Labor Statistics gathered and analyzed data about husband-wife business ownership.
In 1993, on Carner’s second U.S. Information Agency (USIA) mission to Russia, she was caught in the uprising of the parliament against then-president Boris Yeltsin. Her report to the USIA about her escape was the seed for her first (unpublished) novel and the start of her fiction-writing career.
Carner’s first published novel, Puppet Child, launched The Protective Parent Reform Act, a law now passed in several stares and under consideration in many others, and has become the platform of two State Senatorial candidates. Her second novel, China Doll, was the platform for her 2007 presentation at the U.N. about infanticide in China—the first in U.N. history.
In addition to published articles on issues of family court, infanticide in China, and women’s plights in developing societies, Carner’s award-winning personal essays have appeared in the New York Times, Chocolate for Women, Cup of Comfort and Chicken Soup anthologies, as well as The Best Jewish Writing 2003.
Her short stories have been published in literary magazines such as Midstream, Lynx Eye, River Sedge, Moxie, Lilith, Rosebud, Confrontation, North Atlantic Review, Litro, and Midwest Literary Magazine. An excerpt from Jersusalem Maiden is included in The Best New Writing 2011 as the “Editor’s Choice Award” and was nominated to the prestigious Pushcart Prize. The book-length novel Jerusalem Maiden won the Forward National Literature Award in the “historical fiction” category.
A 7th generation Sabra born in Tel Aviv, Israel, Ms. Carner served in the Israel Defense Force (IDF.) She received a B.A. degree from Hebrew University in Jerusalem in Psychology and Sociology and a Master's degree in Economics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Talia Carner is a board member of Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, (HBI) the Jewish women research center at Brandeis University. She is also an honorary board member of several anti-domestic violence and child abuse intervention organizations.
She and her husband, Ron Carner, (president of Maccabi USA) have four grown children. The couple lives in Bridgehampton, Long Island and in Manhattan, New York. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
A fascinating look at a little-known culture and time.... Tuck Jerusalem Maiden in your beach bag.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Talia Carner uses beautiful language, exquisite storytelling, and detailed research to transport the reader into the world of old Jerusalem.... This is a book to savor and discuss.
Jewish Book World
Engaging.... Carner renders Esther’s world with great authority and detail, revealing intimate familial rituals within the larger political and socioeconomic context.
Publishers Weekly
A welcome glimpse into a little-understood world.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. “The Greenwald girl” represents a concept of a young woman who followed her heart—and her non-Jewish lover—and brought a chain of disasters upon her family. Discuss Esther's action in light of this concept. Did she become “A Greenwald girl?”
2. Girls’ innocence and purity are sacred in the ultra-Orthodox world of Jerusalem Maiden. Even today, many women in religious societies—Jewish, Christian, Hindu or Islam—live in even worse oppressive enclaves both in the West and in the Middle East, Asia and Africa. What are the tools used to control them in various places? Do these women share responsibility for their own insulation? Can they change their fate? Should we interfere in their cultural or religious practices?
3. In Esther's ultra-Orthodox society, adherence to all Commandments and decrees is paramount. Discuss the difference with what you know of today’s Jewish Orthodox societies in the USA—their child-rearing practices, education and the status of women.
4. Esther does not desert her faith. She only rebels against the religious establishment. Have you experienced that gap?
5. What kind of medical practices were available at the time of the story? Discuss the role of the midwife as a medical practitioner.
6. Discuss the relationship between Esther and her mother during Esther's adolescence—and her view of that relationship as an adult. What were her mother’s expectations, and what were Esther's?
7. When Aba recites Woman of Valor from the Book of Proverbs, Esther finds the expectations unattainable. What expectations exist today that reflect an unfeasibility similar to that of the Woman of Valor?
8. Esther felt she never belonged in her world—neither in Me’ah She’arim, nor in Jaffa. Was there anything she should have done differently? Was it “her, or them,” as Nathan asks?
9. Twice in the novel Esther physically emerges from a dark place where she connected with her ancestors—at Rachel’s Tomb and at Hezekiah Tunnel. Discuss the physical and spiritual illumination. Have you had similar experiences?
10. Was Mlle. Thibaux an early feminist, or was she just a “back-street” mistress? Discuss her character and her life’s choices. Would she have been a different person had she been married?
11. Esther's marriage to Nathan was not a bad one. She was comfortable and safe. Yet she was willing to throw it all away. Discuss her character and her dissatisfaction with what would have been many women’s dream.
12. Esther’s relationship with guilt fluctuates as she ages, accompanying rebellion, acquiescence, indignation and impetuousness. Throughout her life, how do her desires produce guilt, and how does she reconcile it at each step?
13. Chaim Soutine is the one true-to-life character in this novel. Read about him and check out his art—and if possible travel the Philadelphia-based Barnes Collection.
14. Esther's sojourn in Paris is supposed to be a vacation. Discuss the point at which it turns to abandonment of her children. Also, is her settling in Paris a betrayal of the Holy Land?
15. Even in today’s open, free society, many women do not follow their hearts or their dreams to discover “The Primordial Light.” Why? Discuss what it takes for a woman to focus and to fully develop her talents.
16. Relationship between sisters can be complex. Discuss Esther and Hanna’s, starting in their childhood and how their different personalities and choices played a role.
17. In the end, Esther gives up the only two things she loves and which let her be who she is. Discuss her double sacrifice. What kind of a woman will she be in Jaffa and what life will she have back there?
(Questions issued by publisher.)