Lark and Termite
Jayne Anne Phillips, 2009
Knopf Doubleday
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375701931
Summary
A rich, wonderfully alive novel from one of our most admired and best-loved writers, her first book in nine years. Lark and Termite is set during the 1950s in West Virginia and Korea. It is a story of the power of loss and love, the echoing ramifications of war, family secrets, dreams and ghosts, and the unseen, almost magical bonds that unite and sustain us.
At its center, two children: Lark, on the verge of adulthood, and her brother, Termite, a child unable to walk and talk but filled with radiance. Around them, their mother, Lola, a haunting but absent presence; their aunt Nonie, a matronly, vibrant woman in her fifties, who raises them; and Termite’s father, Corporal Robert Leavitt, who finds himself caught up in the chaotic early months of the Korean War.
Told with deep feeling, the novel invites us to enter into the hearts and thoughts of the leading characters, even into Termite’s intricate, shuttered consciousness. We are with Leavitt, trapped by friendly fire alongside the Korean children he tries to rescue. We see Lark’s dreams for Termite and her own future, and how, with the aid of a childhood love and a spectral social worker, she makes them happen. We learn of Lola’s love for her soldier husband and her children, and unravel the mystery of her relationship with Nonie. We discover the lasting connections between past and future on the night the town experiences an overwhelming flood, and we follow Lark and Termite as their lives are changed forever. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July, 1952
• Education—N/A
• Awards—Guggenheim Fellowship; two National Endowment
for the Arts Fellowships; Bunting Fellowship; Howard
Foundation Fellowship; Academy Award in Literature
from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
• Currently—Professor of English and Director of the MFA
Program at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New
Jersey
Jayne Anne Phillips was born and raised in West Virginia. Her first book of stories, Black Tickets, published in 1979 when she was 26, won the prestigious Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, awarded by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Featured in Newsweek, Black Tickets was pronounced "stories unlike any in our literature...a crooked beauty" by Raymond Carver and established Phillips as an writer "in love with the American language." She was praised by Nadine Gordimer as "the best short story writer since Eudora Welty" and Black Tickets has since become a classic of the short story genre.
Machine Dreams, Phillips' first novel, published in 1984, elegantly and astutely observes one American family from the turn of the century through the Vietnam War. A New York Times best seller, Machine Dreams was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and chosen by the New York Times Book Review as one of twelve "Best Books of the Year."
Her next book of stories, Fast Lanes, (1987), praised in the LA times as "stories that hover on the edge of poetry," is being re-issued by Vintage in April and includes three previously uncollected stories.
Shelter, her 1994 novel, a haunting, suspenseful evocation of childhood rite-of-passage, was awarded an Academy Award in Literature by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and chosen one of the "Best Books of the Year" by Publishers Weekly.
Her novel, MotherKind, published in 2000, examines timeless questions of birth and death.
Jayne Anne Phillips' works have been translated and published in twelve foreign languages. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and a Bunting Fellowship from the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College.
Her work has appeared most recently in Harper's, Granta, Doubletake, and the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. She has taught at Harvard University, Williams College, and Boston University, and is currently Professor of English and Director of a new MFA Program at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey. (From the author's website and Wikipedia)
Book Reviews
Jayne Anne Phillips's intricate, deeply felt new novel reverberates with echoes of Faulkner, Woolf, Kerouac, McCullers and Michael Herr's war reporting, and yet it fuses all these wildly disparate influences into something incandescent and utterly original.... Ms. Phillips knows her characters so intimately and tackles their stories with such ferocity that the novel does not devolve into soap opera but instead ascends into the higher, more rarified altitudes of fable.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
Jayne Anne Phillips renders what is realistically impossible with such authority that the reader never questions its truth. This is the alchemy of great fiction: the fantastic dream that's created in Lark and Termite is one the reader enters without ever looking back.
Kathryn Harrision - New York Times Book Review
On the surface, nothing about the West Virginia family in Lark and Termite seems especially noteworthy, except perhaps the consistency of their misfortune, but the author reveals their tangled secrets in such a profound and intimate way that these ordinary, wounded people become both tragic and magnificent.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Luminous and haunting and singular...feels as if it has been taken straight from the griddle and is still too hot to touch. And because it deals with—families and war—the novel’s rare immediacy is really quite spectacular.
Julia Keller - Chicago Tribune
This poetic novel alternates between the last hours of Robert Leavitt, a corporal in the U.S. Army, pinned down in a tunnel in South Korea, in 1950, and the story of his disabled son, Termite, who, nine years later, is living with his half sister, Lark, and their aunt in West Virginia. Lark knows little of her mother and even less of her father, and pours herself into nurturing Termite, whose stunted body and lack of language has Social Services perpetually threatening to take him away. The appearance of a sympathetic social worker marks the beginning of a great fracture in their lives, which culminates in a flood that reveals the past and makes way for a new future. Phillips gives each scene an evocative, often lyrical description, but the mystical elements of the story and the improbable ending undermine an otherwise moving exploration of familial love.
The New Yorker
From Phillips (Motherkind; Shelter) comes a long-awaited and wonderful coming-of-age tale of grief and survival. The story straddles a parallel six-day period in July, one in 1959-during which 17-year-old Lark; her brother, Termite, who can't talk; and their aunt and caretaker, Nonie, are struggling to balance hope and despair in smalltown West Virginia—and nine years earlier, when Termite's father, Robert Leavitt, serves a tour in Korea. Lark, living with her aunt without knowing who her father is or why her mother gave her up, was nine years old when baby Termite landed on their doorstep. Nonie works long hours at a local restaurant to support the hodgepodge family, leaving Lark to take over mothering duties, but as Lark finishes secretarial school and realizes how limited the options are for her and Termite, forces of nature and odd individuals shed light on mysteries of the past and lend a hand in steering the next course of action. Through Robert and Nonie's stories and by exposing the innermost thoughts of each character, Phillips creates a wrenching portrait of devotion while keeping the suspense at a palpitating level.
Publishers Weekly
In her latest novel, Phillips (Machine Dreams; Motherkind) works with favorite themes in a tale of secrets, family bonds, and the power of love related through multiple perspectives and set during the 1950s. Central to the narrative are a remarkable pair of siblings orphaned by the Korean War. Born the day his soldier father perished in the notorious No Gun Ri massacre, the young boy called Termite possesses unusual perception unnoticed by most observers because of his severe disabilities. His prospects in tiny Winfield, WV, seem dismal, but teenage sister Lark, who adores her little brother, won't give up. She schemes to gain a happy mutual future even while she is pursued romantically by a much older man, threatened with Termite's removal by the state, and endangered by approaching floodwaters. These suspenseful plot elements (including more than a hint of the supernatural) are supported by sensitively rendered characters and finely drawn Appalachian and Asian locales that create a poignant story with broad reader appeal. Recommended for most fiction collections.
Starr E. Smith - Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. Have you read any of Jayne Anne Phillips's other books? If so, in what ways is Lark and Termite similar to her earlier work, and how is it different?
2. Reread the quotations in the epigraph. Now that you've read the novel, what does each one mean to you?
3. On page 6, Leavitt thinks, "The war makes ghosts of them all." In what ways does this prove true? Which ghosts are literal, and which metaphorical?
4. Who is the strongest person in the novel? The weakest?
5. Mothers, and substitute mothers, play a substantial role in the novel. What do you think Jayne Anne Phillips is trying to say about motherhood?
6. Compare and contrast the sibling relationships in the novel: Lark and Termite, Nonie and Lola, and the nameless Korean pair.
7. Discuss the sense of sound as it relates to each of the main characters. In what ways does sound function differently for Termite than for Nonie or Lark? What about Leavitt and Lola? What does the sense of sound say about the importance of language?
8. Two different tunnels are the settings for major developments in the novel. What do they signify?
9. On page 27, Lola says of Lark, "I gave her a bird's name. Maybe she'll grow up safe and fly away." And on page 37 Lark discusses Termite’s nickname: "I think he's in himself like a termite's in a wall." What other names in the novel carry metaphorical weight?
10. Why does Charlie take care of Lola? What about Onslow?
11. "Termite can only tell the truth," Lark says on page 94. Who else tells the truth? Who lies? What are the ramifications?
12. What role does Solly play? What about his father, Nick?
13. Throughout thenovel, we revisit events from different perspectives. How do the multiple takes change your understanding of what's happening?
14. On page 158, Lark says, "It's almost as though Stamble and Termite are related versions of something, but Stamble walks around in the world and Termite doesn't." Who is Robert Stamble? Why does Lark see him?
15. Where do you think Termite's new wheelchair really came from?
16. Discuss the flood. How is each character's life affected?
17. Reread and discuss the final Termite passages, on pages 276-277. What is revealed there?
18. Does the novel have a happy ending?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
LaRose
Louise Erdrich, 2016
HarperCollins
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062277022
Summary
Winner, 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award
In this literary masterwork, Louise Erdrich wields her breathtaking narrative magic in an emotionally haunting contemporary tale of a tragic accident, a demand for justice, and a profound act of atonement with ancient roots in Native American culture.
North Dakota, late summer, 1999. Landreaux Iron stalks a deer along the edge of the property bordering his own. He shoots with easy confidence—but when the buck springs away, Landreaux realizes he’s hit something else, a blur he saw as he squeezed the trigger.
When he staggers closer, he realizes he has killed his neighbor’s five-year-old son, Dusty Ravich.
The youngest child of his friend and neighbor, Peter Ravich, Dusty was best friends with Landreaux’s five-year-old son, LaRose. The two families have always been close, sharing food, clothing, and rides into town; their children played together despite going to different schools; and Landreaux’s wife, Emmaline, is half sister to Dusty’s mother, Nola.
Horrified at what he’s done, the recovered alcoholic turns to an Ojibwe tribe tradition—the sweat lodge—for guidance, and finds a way forward. Following an ancient means of retribution, he and Emmaline will give LaRose to the grieving Peter and Nola. “Our son will be your son now,” they tell them.
LaRose is quickly absorbed into his new family. Plagued by thoughts of suicide, Nola dotes on him, keeping her darkness at bay. His fierce, rebellious new “sister,” Maggie, welcomes him as a coconspirator who can ease her volatile mother’s terrifying moods.
Gradually he’s allowed shared visits with his birth family, whose sorrow mirrors the Raviches’ own. As the years pass, LaRose becomes the linchpin linking the Irons and the Raviches, and eventually their mutual pain begins to heal.
But when a vengeful man with a long-standing grudge against Landreaux begins raising trouble, hurling accusations of a cover-up the day Dusty died, he threatens the tenuous peace that has kept these two fragile families whole.
Inspiring and affecting, LaRose is a powerful exploration of loss, justice, and the reparation of the human heart, and an unforgettable, dazzling tour de force from one of America’s most distinguished literary masters. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 7, 1954
• Where—Little Falls, Minnesota, USA
• Education—A.B., Dartmouth College; M.A., Johns Hopkins
• Awards—National Book Award; National Book Critics Circle Awards (2); Nelson Algren Prize
• Currently—lives in Minnesota
Karen Louise Erdrich is an author of some 20 novels, as well as poetry, short stories, and children's books. She has some Native American ancestry and is widely acclaimed as one of the most significant writers of the second wave of what critic Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance.
In 1984, Erdrich won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her debut novel, Love Medicine. In 2009, her novel The Plague of Doves was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, and three years later, in 2012, she won the National Book Award for Round House.
Erdrich is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The eldest of seven children, Erdrich was born to Ralph and Rita Erdrich in Little Falls, Minnesota. Her father was German-American while her mother was French and Anishinaabe (Ojibwa). Her grandfather Patrick Gourneau served as a tribal chairman for the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. Erdrich grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota where her parents taught at the Bureau of Indian Affairs school.
She attended Dartmouth College in 1972-1976, earning an AB degree and meeting her future husband, the Modoc anthropologist and writer Michael Dorris. He was then director of the college’s Native American Studies program. Subsequently, Erdrich worked in a wide variety of jobs, including as a lifeguard, waitress, poetry teacher at prisons, and construction flag signaler. She also became an editor for The Circle, a newspaper produced by and for the urban Native population in Boston. Erdrich graduated with a Master of Arts degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University in 1979.
In the period 1978-1982, Erdrich published many poems and short stories. It was also during this period that she began collaborating with Dorris, initially working through the mail while Dorris was working in New Zealand. The relationship progressed, and the two were married in 1981. During this time, Erdrich assembled the material that would eventually be published as the poetry collection Jacklight.
In 1982, Erdrich's story "The World’s Greatest Fisherman" was awarded the $5,000 Nelson Algren Prize for short fiction. This convinced Erdrich and Dorris, who continued to work collaboratively, that they should embark on writing a novel.
Early Novels
In 1984, Erdrich published the novel Love Medicine. Made up of a disjointed but interconnected series of short narratives, each told from the perspective of a different character, and moving backwards and forward in time through every decade between the 1930s and the present day, the book told the stories of several families living near each other on a North Dakota Ojibwe reservation.
The innovative techniques of the book, which owed a great deal to the works of William Faulkner but have little precedent in Native-authored fiction, allowed Erdrich to build up a picture of a community in a way entirely suited to the reservation setting. She received immediate praise from author/critics such as N. Scott Momaday and Gerald Vizenor, and the book was awarded the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award. It has never subsequently been out of print.
Erdrich followed Love Medicine with The Beet Queen, which continued her technique of using multiple narrators, but surprised many critics by expanding the fictional reservation universe of Love Medicine to include the nearby town of Argus, North Dakota. Native characters are very much kept in the background in this novel, while Erdrich concentrates on the German-American community. The action of the novel takes place mostly before World War II.
The Beet Queen was subject to a bitter attack from Native novelist Leslie Marmon Silko, who accused Erdrich of being more concerned with postmodern technique than with the political struggles of Native peoples.
Erdrich and Dorris’ collaborations continued through the 1980s and into the 1990s, always occupying the same fictional universe.
Tracks goes back to the early 20th century at the formation of the reservation and introduces the trickster figure of Nanapush, who owes a clear debt to Nanabozho. Erdrich’s novel most rooted in Anishinaabe culture (at least until Four Souls), it shows early clashes between traditional ways and the Roman Catholic Church.
The Bingo Palace updates but does not resolve various conflicts from Love Medicine: set in the 1980s, it shows the effects both good and bad of a casino and a factory being set up among the reservation community. Finally, Tales of Burning Love finishes the story of Sister Leopolda, a recurring character from all the former books, and introduces a new set of white people to the reservation universe.
Erdrich and Dorris wrote The Crown of Columbus, the only novel to which both writers put their names, and A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, credited to Dorris. Both of these were set away from the Argus reservation.
Domestic Life
The couple had six children, three of them adopted. Dorris had adopted the children when he was single. After their marriage, Erdrich also adopted them, and the couple had three daughters together. Some of the children had difficulties.
In 1989 Dorris published The Broken Cord, a book about fetal alcohol syndrome, from which their adopted son Reynold Abel suffered. Dorris had found it was a widespread and until then relatively undiagnosed problem among Native American children because of mothers' alcohol issues. In 1991, Reynold Abel was hit by a car and killed at age 23.
In 1995 their son Jeffrey Sava accused them both of child abuse. Dorris and Erdrich unsuccessfully pursued an extortion case against him. Shortly afterward, Dorris and Erdrich separated and began divorce proceedings. Erdrich claimed that Dorris had been depressed since the second year of their marriage.
On April 11, 1997, Michael Dorris committed suicide in Concord, New Hampshire.
Later Writings
Erdrich’s first novel after divorce, The Antelope Wife, was the first to be set outside the continuity of the previous books. She has subsequently returned to the reservation and nearby towns, and has produced five novels since 1998 dealing with events in that fictional area. Among these are The Master Butchers Singing Club, a macabre mystery which again draws on Erdrich's Native American and German-American heritage, and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. Both have geographic and character connections with The Beet Queen.
Together with several of her previous works, these have drawn comparisons with William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha novels. The successive novels have created multiple narratives in the same fictional area and combined the tapestry of local history with current themes and modern consciousness.
In The Plague of Doves, Erdrich has continued the multi-ethnic dimension of her writing, weaving together the layered relationships among residents of farms, towns and reservations; their shared histories, secrets, relationships and antipathies; and the complexities for later generations of re-imagining their ancestors' overlapping pasts. The novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2009.
Erdrich's 2010 book, Shadow Tag, was a departure for her, as she focuses on a failed marriage.
Erdrich is an enrolled member of the Anishinaabe nation (also known as Ojibwa and Chippewa). Erdrich also has German, French and American ancestry. One sister, Heidi, publishes under the name Heid E. Erdrich; she is a poet who also resides in Minnesota. Another sister, Lise Erdrich, has written children's books and collections of fiction and essays. For the past few years, the three Erdrich sisters have hosted annual writers workshops on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in North Dakota.
The award-winning photographer Ronald W. Erdrich is one of their cousins. He lives and works in Abilene, Texas. He was named "Star Photojournalist of the Year" in 2004 by the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors association. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
The name LaRose is inscribed many times across the cover of this fine novel by Louise Erdrich. And we do meet a boy named LaRose shortly after the book begins. He is but five years old. He is an Ojibwa boy who walks between two worlds, just beginning to sense the spirit world. There have been other LaRoses in his family and their stories are deftly woven into this novel.
Keddy Ann Outlaw - LitLovers
Incandescent…Erdrich has always been fascinated by the relationship between revenge and justice, but…. LaRose comes down firmly on the side of forgiveness. Can a person do the worst possible thing and still be loved? Erdrich’s answer is a resounding yes.
Mary Gordon - New York Times Book Review
[Erdrich] is, like Faulkner, one of the great American regionalists, bearing the dark knowledge of her place, as he did his. She is by now among the very best of American writers.
Philip Roth - New York Times
I’m one of those Erdrich enthusiasts who nonetheless balks at her penchant for embellishing stories with traditional Indian sorcery. In this case, LaRose is the fourth to bear his name, all of whom were women healers able to fly and defy other laws of physics.... [Still, over the years, Erdrich] has presented us with a splendid panorama of Native-American life unprecedented in our literary history, forever changing Americans’ sense of who they are and what they have been.
Dan Cryer - Newsday
Remarkable…As the novel draws to a conclusion, the suspense is ratcheted up, but never at the expense of Erdrich’s reflective power or meditative lyricism…One of Erdrich’s finest achievements.
Boston Globe
A masterly tale of grief and love…Erdrich never missteps…The recurring miracle of Erdrich’s fiction is that nothing feels miraculous in her novels. She gently insists that there are abiding spirits in this land and alternative ways of living and forgiving that have somehow survived the West’s best efforts to snuff them out.
Washington Post
[Erdrich] has laid out one of the most arresting visions of America in one of its most neglected corners, a tableaux on par with Faulkner, a place both perilous and haunted, cursed and blessed.
Chicago Tribune
[A] sad, wise, funny novel, in which [Erdrich] takes the native storytelling tradition that informs her work and remakes it for the modern world, stitching its tattered remnants into a vibrant living fabric.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
The rewards of LaRose lie in the quick unraveling and the slow reconstruction of these lives to a moment when animosities resolve, like shards of glass in a kaleidoscope, into clarity and understanding...Told with constraint and conviction.
Los Angeles Times
You’re going to want to take your time with this book, so lavish in its generational scope, its fierce torrent of wrongs and its luxurious heart. Anyway, you may have no choice, as you fall under the spell of a master… Like Toni Morrison, like Tolstoy, like Steinbeck, Erdrich writes her characters with a helpless love and witnesses them with a supreme absence of judgment…[a] beautiful novel.
San Francisco Chronicle
Erdrich suffuses the book with her particular sort of magic—an ability to treat each character with singular care, weaving their separate journeys flawlessly.... All the while, she adds new depth to timeless concepts of revenge, culture, and family.
Entertainment Weekly
(Starred review.) Erdrich spins a powerful, resonant story with masterly finesse...explor[ing] the quest for justice and the thirst for retribution.... Erdrich introduces [a] mystical element seamlessly...[and those] magical aspects are lightened by scenes of everyday life.... [A] memorable and satisfying ending.
Publishers Weekly
Set in 1999 North Dakota, this new work concludes a trilogy begun with the Anisfield-Wolf Award winner The Plague of Doves and the National Book Award winner The Round House.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) The radiance of this many-faceted novel is generated by Erdrich’s tenderness for her characters…magnificent…a brilliantly imagined and constructed saga of empathy, elegy, spirituality, resilience, wit, wonder, and hope that will stand as a defining master work of American literature for generations to come.
Booklist
(Starred review.) After accidentally shooting his friend and neighbor's young son, a man on a Native American reservation subscribes to "an old form of justice" by giving his own son, LaRose, to the parents of his victim.... [A] meditative, profoundly humane story... this novel is...about the emotions men need, but rarely get, from one another.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What are the intended effects of Emmaline and Landreaux’s traditional act of giving LaRose to the Raviches? In what ways does it achieve these or not? What are the costs?
2. What is the nature of the two marriages at the center of the novel, the Irons and the Raviches? How are they similar or different?
3. Consider the first LaRose. What were her particular strengths? What was essential to her ability to survive the neglect and abuse from her mother Mink, Mackinnon, and the mission school?
4. In what ways does Wolfred help and balance LaRose before and throughout their marriage?
5. What common qualities does each LaRose possess?
6. When Nola accepts LaRose from the Irons, she’s not sure if she does so for the profound beauty of the gesture or because it will so deeply punish them. Is she obligated to respond in any particular way to such a gesture?
7. Revenge is sought by various characters throughout the novel: Maggie’s defense of LaRose, LaRose’s fighting the Fearsome Four, Romeo’s longstanding behavior toward Landreaux. What is revenge? What is it intended to accomplish? In what ways does it help or harm? Is it, as Romeo believes, a form of justice?
8. Mrs. Peace, the fourth LaRose and Emmaline’s mother, abstains from any romantic relationships after her “cruel, self-loving, and clever” husband, Billy Peace, dies, saying that, “he had taught her what she needed to know about men.” What does she mean? Where in the novel is a man able to show kindness or selflessness?
9. Consider the girls in both families: The “Iron Maidens,” Snow and Josette, and Maggie Ravich. What is each like? What are their particular strengths? What do they provide for each other?
10. How does each person in the novel respond to such profound grief and loss? Which response seems the healthiest?
11. What’s the relationship between suffering and anger in the novel? What is the value of anger? What’s the healthiest response to it?
12. What does Father Travis provide all involved with the loss of Dusty? What are his own struggles? How do they affect his ability to help his community?
13. What’s the nature of technology as it’s presented in Peter Ravich’s concern about Y2K and Snow and Josette’s obsession with “robot/cyborg” movies?
14. How do the Irons work to balance a connection with their traditional wisdom and rituals with a rapidly changing modern world?
15. At one point Randall explains that the medicine his people did in the past was not magic, but “beyond ordinary understanding now.” What does he mean? Why is it important to not see such healing as magic?
16. Consider the image of cake as it appears throughout the novel. What are its various connotations? How is this complicated by Nola’s obsessive making of cakes or Peter’s concern about the eating of sugar?
17. How does Nola’s deep, suicidal depression affect the members of her family? What aids in her healing?
18. Mrs. Peace, thinking about Frank Baum’s genocidal policy and all the cultural loss and destruction it caused, says the resulting loneliness “sets deep in a person,” and takes four generations to heal. Why might it take this long? What is it about the fourth LaRose that suggests the nature of such healing?
19. To what extent is some kind of disconnection necessary to survive such cultural and personal tragedy? What are the various ways characters disconnect throughout the novel? Where are key moments of reconnection?
20. To what extent is Romeo’s vengeful and self-destructive behavior understandable given his past? In addition to his physical injury, what were important moments of harm or loss? What helps explain his improvement over time?
21. When Landreaux suggests escaping from the boarding school, Romeo sees in his eyes an “opacity of spirit.” What does this mean? Where else do people struggle with such a thing in the novel?
22. Romeo considers the strong painkillers he takes as “the only mercy in this world.” How do other characters use drugs or alcohol? When is it necessary or valuable, when is it unhealthy?
23. Romeo, revealing his often hidden or overlooked intelligence, tries to explain to Hollis about “intergenerational trauma.” What is this? What is necessary for it to be healed?
24. In the kitchen with his mother and sisters, LaRose says “what we used for TV in the olden times was stories.” What is the importance of storytelling in a family or culture? How has modern TV and media changed the nature and content of stories? What are the effects of this?
25. Throwing their dandelion forks into the woods, LaRose says to Maggie, “Let’s stop being grown-ups.” In what ways have the children in each family demonstrated maturity and understanding to compensate for the adults? What might explain such strength and insight in young people?
26. At Hollis’ graduation party, many of the people “spoke in both languages” as they enjoyed cake. In addition to language, what are the best ways to stay connected to valuable traditions?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Las Hechizadas
Anne Garcia, 2013
Synchronicity Publishing
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781891554384
Summary
Las Hechizadas is a novel set in a fictitious Latin American village where Mother Nature and her chosen women work together to care for the community. When Juan Romero, a young photographer living in Arizona, decides to visit his Abuela in Aguas Puras he doesn't realize the magical healing powers that exist in the high mountain valley.
His journey to reconnect with his family's past transforms his life and the lives of generations to follow. He becomes involved in a battle to save the valley from a multinational mining company and the struggle threatens to destroy the village as well as "Las Hechizadas," or the healing women, and their way of life.
Twenty years later his sister, Silvia, makes her way from the U.S. to again discover the secrets of her family's past, but in contrast to her brother, what she learns finally sets the universe straight and the women of the valley are once again in balance. The book is based off of the author's own experiences living and traveling in Latin America. She has woven stories told to and lived by her into this magical novel that connects us all to the power of the extraordinary women of the valley of Aguas Puras.
The novel is separated into Book I & Book II, intertwining the different time periods in which the siblings and their friends, families and lovers struggle to solve the problems of a society in which money and power rule over health, wellness and balance. It also has a spattering of Spanish, using codeswitching to communicate the biculturalness of the characters. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 8, 1972
• Raised—the State of Colorado, USA
• Education—M.A., University of Colorado
• Currently—lives in Colorado
Anne García is a writer and a teacher. Her writing career ranges from working as a magazine journalist to writing education professional development books to exploring children's books and fiction. Her day job finds her teaching others in a bilingual elementary school. She lives in the mountains in Colorado with her family.
She has recently started a blog on writing, teaching and a little bit about motherhood—seeing as once a mother it's hard to escape the wonderful stories that children provide. (From the author.)
Visit the author's blog.
Follow Anne on Facebook.
Book Reviews
Great read and great experience. Las Hechizadas was a wonderful read. The entire story was very engaging and beautifully written. There were so many aspects of it that felt like a Gabriel Garcia Marquez story. I loved the re-telling of the family history and its importance. I loved how tradition played such an important role in the plot of this story. Fantastic and interesting read. If you like anything by Isabel Allende, you will like this book.
booknerd (booknerdloleotodo) - Amazon Customer Review
Magical story! Las Hechizadas brought me into the story after the first chapter. I couldn’t stop reading and was fascinated by the characters and the town of Aguas Puras, wishing it exists.… Anne Garcia awakens the reader’s senses with her beautiful description of the colors, textures, sounds, and smells of Aguas Puras. The way Anne Garcia narrates the story has a magical realistic style that reminded me of Garcia Marquez, and Isabel Allende’s books. Thank you Anne Garcia for this beautiful story.
Rosa Medina - Amazon Customer Review
Intrigue in the Andes. Anne Garcia's debut novel is pure intrigue, Latin-style. The story follows a young idealist coming of age, whose sensitivity and actions invite heavy repercussions that will reverberate through the ages. It's a real page turner, and a lovely portrait of Latin America from a very insider point of view.
Carolyn McCarthy - Amazon Customer Review
This book was an enchanting read, one I wished would have went on and on! And it's not a short book, not by any means. I really enjoyed this journey, it was a beautiful book and a true literature masterpiece! I loved it all, the characters, the plot, and the setting. I think this a book that everyone should read at least once, it's a definite keeper in my kindle library.
Cryptic Reads
Discussion Questions
1. How does the structure of the book help or hinder the development of the plot?
2. As the female characters become to show their strengths and weaknesses, how did you feel about their significance in the story?
3. Do you think it is important that small communities be allowed to be autonomous? Compare the situation in Aguas Puras with your own community. Are there any situations in which your community has had to fight for autonomy?
4. What do you think about Juan Romero's political understandings and do you think they would have changed over time? Are people like him actually able to make a difference in today's world?
5. Did you like the book? Why/why not?
6. If you could ask the author anything what would you ask her?
7. What would you change about the plot or structure of the book if you could?
8. Which character or characters did you like best and why?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)
top of page (summary)
The Last Ballad
Wiley Cash, 2017
William Morrow
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062313119
Summary
Twelve times a week, twenty-eight-year-old Ella May Wiggins makes the two-mile trek to and from her job on the night shift at American Mill No. 2 in Bessemer City, North Carolina.
The insular community considers the mill’s owners — the newly arrived Goldberg brothers — white but not American and expects them to pay Ella May and other workers less because they toil alongside African Americans like Violet, Ella May’s best friend.
While the dirty, hazardous job at the mill earns Ella May a paltry nine dollars for seventy-two hours of work each week, it’s the only opportunity she has. Her no-good husband, John, has run off again, and she must keep her four young children alive with whatever work she can find.
When the union leaflets begin circulating, Ella May has a taste of hope, a yearning for the better life the organizers promise. But the mill owners, backed by other nefarious forces, claim the union is nothing but a front for the Bolshevik menace sweeping across Europe.
To maintain their control, the owners will use every means in their power, including bloodshed, to prevent workers from banding together. On the night of the county’s biggest rally, Ella May, weighing the costs of her choice, makes up her mind to join the movement—a decision that will have lasting consequences for her children, her friends, her town—indeed all that she loves.
Seventy-five years later, Ella May’s daughter Lilly, now an elderly woman, tells her nephew about his grandmother and the events that transformed their family. Illuminating the most painful corners of their history, she reveals, for the first time, the tragedy that befell Ella May after that fateful union meeting in 1929.
Intertwining myriad voices, Wiley Cash brings to life the heartbreak and bravery of the now forgotten struggle of the labor movement in early twentieth-century America — and pays tribute to the thousands of heroic women and men who risked their lives to win basic rights for all workers. Lyrical, heartbreaking, and haunting, this eloquent novel confirms Wiley Cash’s place among our nation’s finest writers. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1977-78
• Where—Gastonia, North Carolina, USA
• Education—B.A., M.A., University of North Carolina;
Ph.D., University of Louisiana
• Currently—lives in Wilmington, North Carolina
Wiley Cash is from western North Carolina, a region that figures prominently in his fiction. A Land More Than Home, his first novel was published in 2012, followed by This Dark Road to Mercy in 2014, and The Last Ballad in 2017.
Wiley holds a B.A. in Literature from the University of North Carolina-Asheville, an M.A. in English from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette (where he studied under author Ernest Gaines).
He has received grants and fellowships from the Asheville Area Arts Council, the Thomas Wolfe Society, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. His stories have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Roanoke Review and Carolina Quarterly, and his essays on Southern literature have appeared in American Literary Realism, South Carolina Review, and other publications.
Wiley lives with his wife and two daughters in Wilmington, North Carolina. He serves as the writer-in-residence at the University of North Carolina-Asheville and teaches in the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA. (Adapted from previous and current bios on the author's website. Retrieved 10/4/2017.)
Book Reviews
In the retelling of the Loray Mill strike and the courageous role of Ella May Wiggins, Cash vividly blends the archival with the imaginative. As the historian Perry Anderson has noted, good historical fiction has the ability “to waken us to history, in a time when any real sense of it has gone dead.” … Cash, with care and steadiness, has pulled from the wreckage of the past a lost moment of Southern progressivism. Perhaps fiction can help us bear the burden of Southern history, which is pressing down hard on us today.
Amy Rowland - New York Times Book Review
With his vibrant imagination, vigorous research, and his architectural skill in structuring this novel, Wiley Cash has lifted the events of the past into the present and immortalized a time that holds valuable lessons for our country today.
Charlotte Observer
Cash transports readers into the world of real-life ballad singer Ella May Wiggins, a central figure in workers’ battle for unionization in North Carolina textile mills.… [S]uspenseful, moving… [it] will resonate with readers of John Steinbeck or Ron Rash.
Publishers Weekly
Cash…writes with earnestness and great sympathy but reveals the outcome early, taking the bite out of the story's climax. Verdict: Admirers of Ron Rash's Serena and its Appalachian setting will find much to like here. —Michael Pucci, South Orange P.L., NJ
Library Journal
Wiley Cash’s third novel is a sweeping, old-fashioned saga with an inspirational but ill-fated heroine at its center… Ella May is such a rich, sympathetic character.… Powerful and moving, exploring complex historical issues that are still with us today.
BookPage
Although it is initially a bit difficult to keep so many points of view straight, it is satisfying to see them all connect.… Cash highlights the struggles of often forgotten heroes…. A heartbreaking and beautifully written look at the real people involved in the labor movement.
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 Last Ballad … then take off on your own:
1. Talk about the quality, or more like the lack of quality, of Ella May Wiggins's life and her daily struggles to support herself and children. What are the particular challenges she faced?
2. Describe the abusive working conditions in the Loray Mill, which eventually led to the workers' strike in 1929.
3. Many, if not all, of the strike leaders were communists. How did its leadership's affiliation affect the national media and general public support?
4. Even though it ultimately failed, what role did the strike play in galvanizing the national labor movement?
5. The workers were captivated and empowered by Wiggins's songs. Later, the failed strike inspired other songwriters of the era, such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Why does music hold such power over us?
6. Consider Wiggins's rise to union leadership. Her actions were incredibly risky; do you think those risks were unfair to her four children? Would any of us today have had her courage?
7. Why do you think Cash decided to use the voices of Wiggins's daughter, the mill-owner's wife, a black Pullman porter, and the old man who pulls the "dope wagon" to tell the story? What does each bring to the telling that gives it a unique perspective?
8. Today's labor movement has shrunk in both numbers and power. Use Cash's book as a starting point to discuss the pros and cons of organized labor in the U.S. — it's history, its demise, and whether or not it is needed today.
9. Does story resonate in today's world, given the growth of populism and concern over income disparity?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Last Bus to Wisdom
Ivan Doig, 2015
Penguin
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594632020
Summary
The final novel from a great American storyteller.
Donal Cameron is being raised by his grandmother, the cook at the legendary Double W ranch in Ivan Doig’s beloved Two Medicine Country of the Montana Rockies, a landscape that gives full rein to an eleven-year-old’s imagination.
But when Gram has to have surgery for “female trouble” in the summer of 1951, all she can think to do is to ship Donal off to her sister in faraway Manitowoc, Wisconsin. There Donal is in for a rude surprise: Aunt Kate–bossy, opinionated, argumentative, and tyrannical—is nothing like her sister. She henpecks her good-natured husband, Herman the German, and Donal can’t seem to get on her good side either.
After one contretemps too many, Kate packs him back to the authorities in Montana on the next Greyhound. But as it turns out, Donal isn’t traveling solo: Herman the German has decided to fly the coop with him. In the immortal American tradition, the pair light out for the territory together, meeting a classic Doigian ensemble of characters and having rollicking misadventures along the way.
Charming, wise, and slyly funny, Last Bus to Wisdom is a last sweet gift from a writer whose books have bestowed untold pleasure on countless readers. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 27, 1939
• Where—White Sulphur Springs, Montana, USA
• Death—April 9, 2015
• Where—Seattle, Washington
• Education—B.A., M.A., Northwestern University; Ph.D., University of Washington
Ivan Doig was born in Montana to a family of home-steaders and ranch hands. After the death of his mother Berneta, on his sixth birthday, he was raised by his father Charles "Charlie" Doig and his grandmother Elizabeth "Bessie" Ringer. After several stints on ranches, they moved to Dupuyer, Pondera County, Montana in the north to herd sheep close to the Rocky Mountain front.
After his graduation from Valier high school, Doig attended Northwestern University, where he received a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in journalism. He later earned a Ph.D. in American history at the University of Washington, writing his dissertation about John J. McGilvra (1827-1903). He now lives with his wife Carol Doig, nee Muller, a university professor of English, in Seattle, Washington.
Before he became a novelist, Doig wrote for newspapers and magazines as a free-lancer and worked for the United States Forest Service. He has also published two memoirs—This House of Sky (1979) and Heart Earth (1993).
Much of his fiction (more than 10 novels) is set in the Montana country of his youth. His major theme is family life in the past, mixing personal memory and regional history. As the western landscape and people play an important role in his fiction, he has been hailed as the new dean of western literature, a worthy successor to Wallace Stegner. (From Wikipedia.)
Extras
His own words:
• Taking apart a career in such summary sentences always seems to me like dissecting a frog—some of the life inevitably goes out of it—and so I think the more pertinent Ivan Doig for you, Reader, is the red-headed only child, son of ranch hand Charlie Doig and ranch cook Berneta Ringer Doig (who died of her lifelong asthma on my sixth birthday), who in his junior year of high school (Valier, Montana; my class of 1957 had 21 members) made up his mind to be a writer of some kind.
• No one is likely to confuse my writing style with that of Charlotte Bronte, but when that impassioned parson’s daughter lifted her pen from Jane Eyre and bequeathed us the most intriguing of plot summaries—"Reader, I married him"—she also was subliminally saying what any novelist ... must croon to those of you with your eyes on our pages: "Reader, my story is flirting with you; please love it back."
• One last word about the setting of my work, the American West. I don’t think of myself as a "Western" writer. To me, language—the substance on the page, that poetry under the prose—is the ultimate "region," the true home, for a writer. Specific geographies, but galaxies of imaginative expression —we’ve seen them both exist in William Faulkner’s postage stamp-size Yoknapatawpha County, and in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s nowhere village of Macondo, dreaming in its hundred years of solitude. If I have any creed that I wish you as readers, necessary accomplices in this flirtatious ceremony of writing and reading, will take with you from my pages, it’d be this belief of mine that writers of caliber can ground their work in specific land and lingo and yet be writing of that larger country: life. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
[O]ne of Doig's best novels, an enchanting 1950s road-trip tale that swaps Kerouac's Sal Paradise for a plucky 11-year-old named Donal Cameron…Doig has always written with a keen ear for Western vernacular, but in Last Bus to Wisdom he kicks subtlety to the curb and adopts the sort of exaggerated patter that the Coen brothers put to use in O Brother, Where Art Thou?…In less experienced hands this might come off as a cheap trick, but Doig handles the device with the loving care of a literary curator, inviting his readers to take pleasure in the language…There's a full-circle feel to the book. Donal's early circumstances—Montana ranch, grandmother's care—match those of the author's own, and it's warming to think that in his final months Doig shared the writing hours with one of his greatest characters: a version of his younger self wound up and set spinning on the long zigzag adventure called life in the American West.
Bruce Barcot - New York Times Book Review
The pleasures of reading Doig’s final novel (he died in April 2015) are bittersweet.... Though this book lacks the deeper resonance of Doig’s previous novels, such as Dancing at the Rascal Fair and his classic nonfiction memoir, This House of Sky, it’s nonetheless a heartwarming, memorable story.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Doig's superb storytelling does not disappoint. The dialog is snappy, funny, and true to the charming characters. With the author's passing in April, this is the last journey into familiar Doig territory we've come to admire. —Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Palisade, CO
Library Journal
(Starred review.) An utterly charming, goodhearted romp...this posthumous publication will be greeted enthusiastically as a fitting tribute to a memorable body of work.
Booklist
Two long-distance bus trips give an 11-year-old new horizons and run a lively gamut through mid-20th-century American life.... A marvelous picaresque showing off the late Doig's ready empathy for all kinds of people and his perennial gift for spinning a great yarn. He will be missed.
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 Last Child
John Hart, 2010
St. Martin's Press
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312642365
Summary
John Hart’s New York Times bestselling debut, The King of Lies, announced the arrival of a major talent. With Down River, he surpassed his earlier success, transcending the barrier between thriller and literature and winning the 2008 Edgar Award for best novel. Now, with The Last Child, he achieves his most significant work to date, an intricate, powerful story of loss, hope, and courage in the face of evil.
Thirteen year-old Johnny Merrimon had the perfect life: a warm home and loving parents; a twin sister, Alyssa, with whom he shared an irreplaceable bond. He knew nothing of loss, until the day Alyssa vanished from the side of a lonely street. Now, a year later, Johnny finds himself isolated and alone, failed by the people he’d been taught since birth to trust. No one else believes that Alyssa is still alive, but Johnny is certain that she is—confident in a way that he can never fully explain.
Determined to find his sister, Johnny risks everything to explore the dark side of his hometown. It is a desperate, terrifying search, but Johnny is not as alone as he might think. Detective Clyde Hunt has never stopped looking for Alyssa either, and he has a soft spot for Johnny. He watches over the boy and tries to keep him safe, but when Johnny uncovers a dangerous lead and vows to follow it, Hunt has no choice but to intervene.
Then a second child goes missing . . .
Undeterred by Hunt’s threats or his mother’s pleas, Johnny enlists the help of his last friend, and together they plunge into the wild, to a forgotten place with a history of violence that goes back more than a hundred years.There, they meet a giant of a man, an escaped convict on his own tragic quest. What they learn from him will shatter every notion Johnny had about the fate of his sister; it will lead them to another far place, to a truth that will test both boys to the limit.
Traveling the wilderness between innocence and hard wisdom, between hopelessness and faith, The Last Child leaves all categories behind and establishes John Hart as a writer of unique power. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1965
• Where—Durham, North Carolina, USA
• Education—B.A., Davidson College; MAcc, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill;
J.D., University of New Hampshire
• Awards—Edgar Awards (2), Best Novel; Barry Award; Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award
• Currently—lives in Charlottesville, Virginia
John Hart is an American author of five mystery-thriller novels that have achieved both popular and critical acclaim—and that have garnered him several major awards.
Hart was born and raised in North Carolina; his father was a surgeon and his mother a French teacher. Spending a year in France and learning the language, he decided to major in French at Davidson College (north of Charlotte, North Carolina). After college, Hart tried his hand at writing and completed his first novel, though it remains unpublished. He went on to earn his Master's in Accounting at the University of North Carolina, headed to Juneau, Alaska, for a spell with his two sisters, and eventually returned to school for his law degree at the University of New Hampshire. He wrote a second novel while there, but that, too, went unpublished.
Hart returned to Salisbury, North Carolina, where he practiced law for three years—until he was assigned a case involving the defense of a child murderer. Deciding the law wasn't for him, he left the law practice and returned to his first love, writing. He spent just shy of a year buried in the local library writing what would become his first published work, The King of Lies.
Initially rejected by publishers, he and his wife Katie, also a North Carolinian, moved to Greensboro where Hart worked as a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch. That was when he decided to revisit and revise The King of Lies and send it out again. This time it was scooped up by the second publisher who saw it. It was published by St. Martin's Press in 2006 and became an immediate bestseller.
Four more books followed, most recently the 2016 Redemption Road. His books have accrued awards, including two back-to-back Edgar Allan Poe Awards for Best Novel, in 2008 and 2010—he is the only writer to have done so. (He won for Down River and The Last Child). Over two million of his books are in print.
He and Katie now live with their children in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he writes full time.
Novels
2006 - The King of Lies
2007 - Down River (Edgar Allan Poe Award)
2009 - The Last Child (Edgar Allan Poe Award, Ian Flemming Silver Dagger, Barry Award)
2011 - Iron House
2016 - Redemption Road.
(Visit the author's website.)
Book Reviews
The young boy at the story's center is a magnificent creation, Huck Finn channeled through Lord of the Flies, and as a detective in his own right he proves as driven and passionate as any mystery fan could hope for.... Hart is still far too young for The Last Child to be called a crowning achievement, but the novel's ambition, emotional breadth and maturity make it an early masterpiece in a career that continues to promise great things.
Art Taylor - Washington Post
The missing-child story has been done so often that it takes something extraordinary to make it rise above the commonplace. And that is what John Hart has accomplished in his third novel, The Last Child. In the end, this is a novel about blood—the blood of life and death, the blood of kin, the blood of the past. And Hart has again brought forth a mystery/thriller that surpasses the humdrum and rises to serious literature.
Richmond Times Dispatch
The Last Child is a beautifully written, gripping story that will have you staying up late, torn between a desire to know what happens and a reluctance to get to the book's end and break the spell. But don't worry: The characters will stay vividly alive in your imagination long after you've raced through the pages.
Winston-Salem Journal
Hart...is brilliant in the art of misdirection...but his attention to language and tempo, his descriptions of settings and people, and his development of characters and their personal relationships all add a wonderful richness to his work. It is a richness that should make The Last Child a pleasure for any reader.
Raleigh News & Observer
A year after 12-year-old Alyssa Merrimon disappeared on her way home from the library in an unnamed rural North Carolina town, her twin brother, Johnny, continues to search the town, street by street, even visiting the homes of known sex offenders, in this chilling novel from Edgar-winner Hart (Down River). Det. Clyde Hunt, the lead cop on Alyssa's case, keeps a watchful eye on Johnny and his mother, who has deteriorated since Alyssa's abduction and her husband's departure soon afterward. When a second girl is snatched, Johnny is even more determined to find his sister, convinced that the perpetrator is the same person who took Alyssa. But what he unearths is more sinister than anyone imagined, sending shock waves through the community and putting Johnny's own life in danger. Despite a tendency to dip into melodrama, Hart spins an impressively layered tale of broken families and secrets that can kill.
Publishers Weekly
When 12-year-old Alyssa Merrimon disappeared a year ago, her family fell apart. Her twin brother, Johnny, became obsessed with trying to find her, their father took off, not to be heard from again, and their mother sank into a world of drugs and booze, helped along by an abusive, wealthy boyfriend. Det. Clive Hunt is also obsessed, both with finding Alyssa and with her mother, and his preoccupation costs him his marriage and jeopardizes his job. But this is Johnny's story and his quest to find the sister he lost. Taking his mother's car while she's passed out and occasionally taking along his best friend, Jack, Johnny spies and keeps meticulous records on the townsfolk of small Raven County, NC. The world is a dark place when seen through his eyes, and Johnny is an unforgettable character in this finely drawn yet disturbing thriller. With his best novel yet, the Edgar Award-winning Hart (Down River) firmly cements his place alongside the greats of the genre. Highly recommended for all public libraries.
Library Journal
In his third novel, Edgar-winner Hart confronts murder, depravity, betrayal and the like, while still finding room for tenderness. Young Johnny Merrimon carries a detailed map of his Raven County, N.C., home and rides his bike in strict accordance with it, knocking on certain doors, bypassing others, but always watching. One year ago, his twin sister was kidnapped. By now, of course, conventional wisdom presumes her dead, but Johnny won't let go. Neither will Detective Clyde Hunt, who's paying a severe price for what some call an obsession. His wife has left him; his relationship with his teenaged son is getting less than the attention it requires; and even his career has been jeopardized. His boss, the chief of police, has begun to wonder aloud if Hunt has let the Merrimon case become unduly personal. Hunt denies this, claiming it's the terrible, tragic case alone that absorbs him. But the fact is that he likes Johnny enormously. He's drawn to the boy's grit and tenacity. As for Johnny's beautiful, grief-stricken mother, Hunt acknowledges to himself that he'd best tread carefully there. Then another little girl is kidnapped, and when murder follows murder, with more murder in the wings, it's as if Pandora's Box has sprung open. Appealingly character-driven, particularly by 13-year-old Johnny, who's full of likeable traces of Huck Finn.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What is the meaning of the title? Who is “The Last Child”?
2. The novel is not just about Johnny’s search for Alyssa. It’s also about his quest for power. Where does Johnny look for power and does he ever truly find it? If so, where?
3. In the beginning of the novel we find Katherine in a state of utter collapse. Is her condition understandable, given the circumstances? If not, does she redeem herself?
4. Why does Detective Hunt care so much for Katherine and Johnny? Why does he love her so deeply and what does he see in the boy that he finds so remarkable? How do those feelings contrast with the way he sees his own son? His own life?
5. Revisit the opening of Chapter Fourteen: Johnny’s ritual with the fire. We find out that Johnny has had a severe crisis of faith since Alyssa disappeared, and for what he was about to do, he "needed older gods." What draws Johnny to "older gods"? What kind of power do they have that the God of his childhood does not?
6. By the end of the novel, Johnny comes to believe that Freemantle was, indeed, set in motion as an instrument of God. If this the case, by what means did God put Freemantle in motion? And given the debt that Freemantle owes to Johnny’s family, was the price too high, or was it fair? Is life, indeed, a circle?
7. We see two preachers in Johnny’s life, one described as, “fingernails buffed and fat face shining,” and one described as "a blade of a priest in white, flashing robes." How do these figures reflect the changing nature of Johnny’s faith? At the end of the novel, does he believe in the same God he believed in before Alyssa disappeared or does he still believe in other sources of power?
8. Freemantle believes that crows have the power to collect the souls of the dead. This is why he fears them. If the crows are not after the soul of Freemantle’s daughter, as Freemantle originally believes, why then are they following him? Do the crows have another goal in mind? Is the goal accomplished?
9. Explore the different father-son relationships in the story. How does each relationship evolve throughout the course of the novel? What are the similarities and differences between each father-son relationship? How do the fathers’ actions effect those of their sons?
10. Many people blame themselves for things that have happened in the past—Johnny, Hunt, Katherine, Jack, Levi Freemantle, and others. How does guilt motivate each of them to act? Where does the real guilt lie in the story?
11. The novel opens on a view of the North Carolina back country. What role does the setting have in the story? Do you think Johnny’s story have the same impact if it took place in a different state, or in a different country?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Last Days of Night
Graham Moore, 2016
Random House
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812988901
Summary
A thrilling novel based on actual events, about the nature of genius, the cost of ambition, and the battle to electrify America—from the Oscar-winning screenwriter of The Imitation Game and bestselling author of The Sherlockian.
New York, 1888. Gas lamps still flicker in the city streets, but the miracle of electric light is in its infancy. The person who controls the means to turn night into day will make history—and a vast fortune.
A young untested lawyer named Paul Cravath, fresh out of Columbia Law School, takes a case that seems impossible to win. Paul’s client, George Westinghouse, has been sued by Thomas Edison over a billion-dollar question: Who invented the light bulb and holds the right to power the country?
The case affords Paul entry to the heady world of high society—the glittering parties in Gramercy Park mansions, and the more insidious dealings done behind closed doors. The task facing him is beyond daunting. Edison is a wily, dangerous opponent with vast resources at his disposal—private spies, newspapers in his pocket, and the backing of J. P. Morgan himself. Yet this unknown lawyer shares with his famous adversary a compulsion to win at all costs. How will he do it?
In obsessive pursuit of victory, Paul crosses paths with Nikola Tesla, an eccentric, brilliant inventor who may hold the key to defeating Edison, and with Agnes Huntington, a beautiful opera singer who proves to be a flawless performer on stage and off.
As Paul takes greater and greater risks, he’ll find that everyone in his path is playing their own game, and no one is quite who they seem. (From the publisher.)
Watch for the 2017 film adaptation with Eddie Redmayne.
Author Bio
• Birth—October 18, 1981
• Where—Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., Columbia University
• Awards—Academy Award-Best Adapted Screenplay
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California
Graham Moore is an American screenwriter and author known for his 2010 novel The Sherlockian, as well as his screenplay for the historical film The Imitation Game. (Alan Turing had been Moore's childhood hero since he was 14.)
A second book, The Last Days of Night, was published in 2016. Set in 1888 New York City, the novel focuses on the heated rivalry between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse during the advent of electricity and is told through the eyes of Westinghouse’s attorney, Paul Cravath. Moore himself wrote the screenplay for the film.
Background
Moore was born in Chicago, Illinois, and raised on the city's north side—"the son of two lawyers who divorced and then married two other lawyers." His mother was formerly the City of Chicago's chief lawyer and First Lady Michelle Obama's chief of staff.
While he was learning to read, Moore developed a love of mystery stories; he later came to believe he'd have a career in music. Nonetheless, he received his B.A. in religious history from Columbia University.
At Columbia, unsure about a writing career, Moore took the advice of a professor to dedicate five years to any profession he pursued, "because it takes that long to get halfway decent at anything." After graduating in 2003, Moore stayed in New York, playing in a number of rock bands, creating a music studio in the basement of a heavy metal art gallery on Rivington Street, working as a sound engineer, and collecting sound equipment.
It was during those years he began to write. For several years, he wrote scripts by day and did studio work by night. He woke up in his New York apartment, dressed in a coat and tie, and sat down to write. "I told myself writing was my job and I was getting dressed for work—which was like telling myself, dress for the job you want."
Eventually, Moore moved to Hollywood, California, where one of his earliest jobs was on the writing staff of the television series 10 Things I Hate About You. In 2010 he published his first book,The Sherlockian, which made it to the New York Times bestseller list for three weeks.
His adapted screenplay for the 2014 film The Imitation Game, based on Andrew Hodges' biography, Alan Turing: The Enigma, earned Moore numerous nominations, including the 2014 Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay, and ultimately won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 87th Academy Awards (held in 2015).
Moore lives in Los Angeles, California. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/25/2016.)
Book Reviews
How America got the electric light bulb—a battle between intellectual giants—is the subject of Graham Moore’s fine new novel. Drawing on historical sources, Moore has created characters of equal parts charm and villainy—complicated men who grapple with opposite poles of their nature: all-out ambition versus belief in the greater good. A triangle of brilliant men is at the heart of this tale. Thomas Edison, the great man himself, is perhaps not the hero we’ve always thought…
P.J. Adler - LitLovers
A fascinating portrait of American inventoion...Moore crafts a compelling narrative out of [Paul] Cravath’s cunning legal maneuvers and [Nikola] Tesla’s world-changing tinkering, while a story line on opera singer Agnes Huntington has the mysterious glamour of The Great Gatsby.... Moore weaves a complex web..... He conjures Gilded Age New York City so vividly, it feels like only yesterday.
Entertainment Weekly
[T]hrilling.... While the plot starts off slowly, the tempo picks up as events within the court begin to unfold. Moore’s extensive research is apparent, and readers are likely to walk away from the book feeling as informed as they are entertained.
Publishers Weekly
The great tech innovators of...the 1890s posture, plot, and even plan murder in this business book–turned–costume drama.... The real-life events of the War of the Currents are exciting enough without embroidery. Still, readers who care more about atmosphere than accuracy will enjoy this breezy melodrama.
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 Last Days of Night…then take off on your own:
1. Talk about the role of the lightbulb, that small pear-shaped device, in changing the face of civilization. Can you imagine life without it?
2. What do you think about the two great giants of American science and manufacturing: Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse? Are you surprised at the manner in which Moore portrays Edison, an American icon? How do the two men differ?
3. Can you explain the legal suit that Edison initiated against Westinghouse? In what way did Westinghouse's bulb differ from Edison's?
4. Does Graham Moore do a credible job in breaking down the science of electricity, especially the differences between AC and DC current?
5. How did Nikola Tesla revolutionize AC current? Do you think it possible/probable in real life that Edison might have made an attempt on Tesla's life? Or did Graham add that plot point to build fictional suspense?
6. How was Nikola Tesla different from the two rivals at the heart of this story? In what way was his "genius" different from that of Edison or Westinghouse? What drove Tesla, as opposed to the other two men?
7. Talk about the role of J.P. Morgan and his insistence that the two men settle their differences. Was his "coup" of Edison's General Electric fair?
8. In the end, is it possible to actually say who invented the light bulb? What role did each of the three men—Edison, Tesla, and Westinghouse—play in its development? Consider this passage from the book:
For Edison who loved the audience it was the performance. Westinghouse was different as he loved the products themselves and he made them better than anyone else. Westinghouse did not want to sell the most but wanted to make the best. Tesla, the third leg, only cared for the ideas themselves. Once he had an idea, he was done, he knew he had solved the problem and moved on.
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Last Dickens
Matthew Pearl, 2009
Random House
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812978025
Summary
In his most enthralling novel yet, the critically acclaimed author Matthew Pearl reopens one of literary history’s greatest mysteries. The Last Dickens is a tale filled with the dazzling twists and turns, the unerring period details, and the meticulous research that thrilled readers of the bestsellers The Dante Club and The Poe Shadow.
Boston, 1870. When news of Charles Dickens’s untimely death reaches the office of his struggling American publisher, Fields & Osgood, partner James Osgood sends his trusted clerk Daniel Sand to await the arrival of Dickens’s unfinished novel. But when Daniel’s body is discovered by the docks and the manuscript is nowhere to be found, Osgood must embark on a transatlantic quest to unearth the novel that he hopes will save his venerable business and reveal Daniel’s killer.
Danger and intrigue abound on the journey to England, for which Osgood has chosen Rebecca Sand, Daniel’s older sister, to assist him. As they attempt to uncover Dickens’s final mystery, Osgood and Rebecca find themselves racing the clock through a dangerous web of literary lions and drug dealers, sadistic thugs and blue bloods, and competing members of Dickens’s inner circle. They soon realize that understanding Dickens’s lost ending is a matter of life and death, and the hidden key to stopping a murderous mastermind. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October 2, 1976
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A. Harvard University; Yale Law School
• Currently—lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Matthew Pearl is the New York Times bestselling author of The Last Dickens, The Dante Club, and The Poe Shadow, and is the editor of the Modern Library editions of Dante’s Inferno (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue: The Dupin Tales. The Dante Club has been published in more than thirty languages and forty countries around the world.
Pearl is a graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School and has taught literature at Harvard and at Emerson College. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (From the publisher.)
More
Matthew Pearl's novels achieve the seemingly unachievable. They manage to be both informative and entertaining, utilizing historically accurate details about some very famous literary figures to fashion fictional thrillers that rival the works of Pearl's idols. While Pearl's work is indeed ambitious, he has the credentials to tackle such challenging projects that place immortals like Dante Alighieri, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Edgar Alan Poe in the middle of mysteries of his own creation.
In 1997, Pearl graduated from Harvard University summa cum laude in English and American literature. He went on to teach literature and creative writing at both Harvard and Emerson College. Pearl's impressive background in literature and research provided him with the necessary tools for making history come alive in a most unique way. He is also bolstered by a genuine fascination with the theme of literary stardom. "I am very interested by literary celebrity, and both Dante and Poe experienced it in some degree," Pearl explained to litkicks.com. "Or, in Poe's case, he aimed for literary celebrity and never quite achieved it.... Longfellow was more genuinely a celebrity. People would stop him in the streets, particularly in his later years. Imagine that today, a poet stopped in the streets! It was also common for writers like Longfellow to have their autographs cut out of letters and sold, or even their signatures forged and sold."
Writing
Pearl published The Dante Club, his debut novel in 2003. The novel concerns a small group of Harvard professors and poets (including Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes) who must track down a killer before he derails their efforts to complete the first American translation of The Divine Comedy. The novel became an international sensation. Pearl's attention to historical facts, his imagination, his vivid descriptions and fine characterizations awed critics and delighted readers. Esquire magazine chose The Dante Club as its "Big Important Book of the Month." Since its 2003 publication, it has become an international bestseller, translated into 30 languages.
Pearl followed The Dante Club with another cagey combination of historical fact and mysterious fiction. The Poe Shadow takes place during the aftermath of the death of Edgar Alan Poe. In a labyrinthine plot that would surely have made the master of the macabre proud, an attorney named Quentin Hobson Clark seeks to uncover the exact details that lead up to the peculiar death of his favorite writer. The Poe Shadow was another major feat from Matthew Pearl. If anything, it is even richer and more intriguing than its predecessor. Poe's status as a great purveyor of mystery and the mystery which Pearl conjures within his plot makes for a most provocative mixture. Critics from all corners of the globe agreed. From Entertainment Weekly to The Spectator to The Independent, The Globe and Mail, Booklist, Bookpage, and countless others, The Poe Shadow is being hailed as another major achievement for Matthew Pearl. The novel has also become yet another international bestseller.
So, is Matthew Pearl heading for the kind of literary celebrity that so fascinates him? Well, Details magazine named the writer as one of its "Next Big Things," and Dan "The Da Vinci Code" Brown called him "the new shining star of literary fiction." Who knows? Maybe one day an aspiring young writer may see fit to place Matthew Pearl in the center of some fictional puzzler.
Extras
• Pearl was placed on the 2003 edition of Boston Magazine's annual "Hot List."
• His fascination with Edgar Alan Poe does not end with Poe's presence in The Poe Shadow. Pearl also edited a 2006 collection of Poe's C. Auguste Dupin mysteries titled Murders in the Rue Morgue: The Dupin Tales. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Pearl’s plot is ambitious and satisfying, involving a murder and a missing manuscript, the opium trade, the emerging publishing business in New York and Boston, and the predicament of single, divorced women in America in the 19th century. Fans of Dickens will appreciate Pearl’s literary allusions and his thoroughly researched characterizations.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Bestseller Pearl (The Poe Shadow) delivers a period thriller that has the misfortune to fall short of the high standard set by Dan Simmons's Drood (Reviews, Nov. 24), which also centers on Charles Dickens's final, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. After the author dies in 1870, a series of suspicious deaths leads Dickens's U.S. publisher, James Osgood, to suspect they may be connected with the solution to the novel's puzzle. Accompanied by attractive bookkeeper Rebecca Sand, the sister of one of the victims, Osgood travels from Boston to England to seek clues to Drood's missing conclusion. The action shifts to India, where Charles's son Francis is a superintendent of the Bengal Mounted Police, and back in time, to the novelist's last American tour in 1867. Some awkward prose distracts ("There were several other grim faces at dinner that, like some imperceptible force, spread a dark cloud over the levity"), while the ending may strike some readers as a cop-out.
Publishers Weekly
Pearl's third historical novel (after The Dante Club and The Poe Shadow) explores the circumstances surrounding Charles Dickens's unfinished last work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Boston publisher James Osgood eagerly awaits the final installments of Drood after hearing of Dickens's sudden death. Unfortunately, Osgood's trusted messenger, Daniel, is killed before he can deliver the manuscript to the publishing house, and the manuscript disappears. Could Osgood's publishing rivals have stolen it, or is there an even deeper mystery going on? Accompanied by Daniel's sister, Osgood travels to England to search for clues about how Dickens planned on finishing Drood, unaware his enemies are close at hand. Pearl enriches his story through extended flashbacks, the inclusion of actual historical figures, including Osgood himself, and an in-depth knowledge of Dickens's career and literary works. Strongly recommended for all public libraries.
Laurel Bliss - Library Journal
Pearl’s latest literary historical mystery aligns perfectly with his two previous works, the widely applauded Dante Club (2002) and the equally esteemed Poe Shadow (2006); like its predecessors, the novel is a brilliant, exciting thriller exactingly set in past times and involving mysterious aspects of the lives of famous writers.... [The reader] will be well rewarded. —Brad Hooper
Booklist
A rousing yarn of opium, book pirating, murder most foul, man-on-man biting and other shenanigans-and that's just for starters. Charles Dickens is dead, and, inexplicably, people are beginning to die because of that fact-not because they've got no reason to live absent new tales from a beloved author, but because said author's last work-in-progress contains evidence of real-life mayhem that its perpetrators, it would seem, do not wish to see publicized. So runs the premise that Pearl, who specializes in literary mysteries, offers. The story unfolds on the docks of Boston, to which an office boy has run to retrieve the next installment of Dickens's Mystery of Edwin Drood, fresh off the boat from London. Said boy expires, unpleasantly, while a stranger of most peculiar manner is seen skulking in the vicinity, conspicuous by his "decidedly English accent" and "brown-parchment complexion," suggestive of India and imperial milieus beyond. Dickens's American publisher-better put, the only publisher in America who is paying the author royalties rather than stealing his work-sets out to solve the crime and retrieve the manuscript, with the clerk's resourceful sister on hand to help on a journey across oceans and continents. Meanwhile, our stranger is up to more nasty business, slashing throats, sawing bones and giving people the willies. It's clear that Pearl is having a fine time of it all, firing off a few inside jokes at the publishing business along the way: No matter that Dickens is dead with only six chapters done, says his London editor a trifle ungrammatically, for "Every reader who picks up the book, finding it unfinished, can spend their time guessing whatthe ending should be. And they'll tell their friends to buy a copy and do the same, so it can be argued."A pleasing whodunit that resolves nicely, bookending Dan Simmons's novel Drood (2009) as an imaginative exercise in what might be called alternative literary history.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. In the novel, there is a stalker who shadows Charles Dickens's reading tour around in America, based on actual incidents that happened to Dickens. Think of some modern examples of celebrity stalking and discuss the unique characteristics of this type of obsession in and out of this novel.
2. James Osgood must find more about The Mystery of Edwin Drood to try to save his struggling publishing firm. Do you believe Osgood has additional motivations, whether personal or professional, for his quest?
3. The character of Rebecca Sand is a young working woman in Boston in the latter half of the nineteenth century. What are some of the interesting and surprising challenges facing her in that situation that struck you? Do you think she is properly appreciated by Osgood and the firm?
4. Dickens's death in 1870 and the incomplete status of his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, is at the heart of this novel's story. For those who have read Drood before, how did your knowledge of that novel influence your reading of The Last Dickens? For those who haven't read Drood, what did you learn about that final Dickens novel, and would you go out and read Drood now? Consider choosing Drood for your reading group or class and debate how it was to end or even “write” new endings.
5. The Last Dickens refers to the last novel Charles Dickens wrote. Does the title have any other meaning or significance to you? If Fields, Osgood & Co. were publishing Matthew's novel, and called you into their offices at 124 Tremont Street demanding a title change, what might you suggest?
6. There is much consternation and excitement over The Mystery of Edwin Drood's incomplete status among the characters in this novel, propelling various actions. Other books by famous authors that were never finished include The Aeneid by Virgil, The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Buccaneers by Edith Wharton, A Movable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, Septimus Felton by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Lesley Castle by Jane Austen. Some of these have undergone attempts to be “completed” by other writers or family members, as some of the characters in The Last Dickens wish to do with Drood. Should unfinished books like Drood have new endings written, or be left as fragments?
7. The novel's depiction of Charles Dickens is based closely on history. What are some of the facts of Dickens's life that most interested you that you may not have known before?
8. The novel depicts a dramatically different period in the publishing world. What were some of the things that surprised you to see how books and publishing operated in the nineteenth century?
9. In our age of increasingly digital media, how relevant are books and publishing today? Discuss whether there will—and should—be a time where physical books no longer exist. What would be the implications of this?
(Questions from author's website.)
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The Last Empress
Anchee Min, 2007
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780547053707
Summary
The last decades of the nineteenth century were a violent period in China's history marked by humiliating foreign incursions and domestic rebellion, ultimately ending in the demise of the Ch'ing dynasty. The only constant during this tumultuous time was the power wielded by one person, the resilient, ever-resourceful Tzu Hsi, Lady Yehonala — or Empress Orchid, as readers came to know her in Anchee Min's critically acclaimed novel covering the first part of her life.
The Last Empress is the story of Orchid's dramatic transition from a strong-willed, instinctive young woman to a wise and politically savvy leader who ruled China for more than four decades. Moving from the intimacy of the concubine quarters into the spotlight of the world stage, Orchid must face not only the perilous condition of her empire but also a series of devastating personal losses, as first her son and then her adopted son succumb to early death. Yearning only to step aside, and yet growing constantly into her role, only she — allied with the progressives, but loyal to the conservative Manchu clan of her dynasty — can hold the nation's rival factions together.
Anchee Min offers a powerful revisionist portrait based on extensive research of one of the most important figures in Chinese history. Viciously maligned by the western press of the time as the "Dragon Lady," a manipulative, blood-thirsty woman who held onto power at all costs, the woman Min gives us is a compelling, very human leader who assumed power reluctantly, and who sacrificed all she had to protect those she loved and an empire that was doomed to die. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 14, 1957
• Where—Shanghai, China
• Where—N/A
• Currently—lives in San Francisco, California, USA
Anchee Min is a Chinese-born painter, photographer, musician, and author. Born in Shanghai in 1957, at seventeen she was sent to a labor collective, where a talent scout for Madame Mao's Shanghai Film Studio recruited her to work as a movie actress.
She came to the United States in 1984 with the help of actress Joan Chen. Her memoir, Red Azalea, was named one of the New York Times Notable Books of 1994 and was an inter-national bestseller, with rights sold in twenty countries. Her novels Becoming Madame Mao and Empress Orchid were published to critical acclaim and were national bestsellers. Her two other novels, Katherine and Wild Ginger, were published to wonderful reviews and impressive foreign sales. Min is married to author Lloyd Lofthouse. (From the publisher and Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
For every generation's dream of China there seems to be a corresponding dream of Tzu Hsi. She was a dragon lady for late-19th-century Westerners who considered that image useful for their colonial aspirations. Today's Tzu Hsi, as Min's revisionist pair of novels imagines her, suits a contemporary Western audience as the vision of an empress who very nearly had it all: vulnerability and strength, motherhood and power, earthiness and dignity, compassion and ambition.
Donna Rifkind - Washington Post
Min's Empress Orchid tracked the concubine Orchid's path to becoming Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi; this revisionist look at her long years behind her son Tung Chih's throne (1863–1908) won't disappoint Orchid's fans. Recounted through Tzu Hsi's first-person, the early chapters encompass her trials as a young "widow," as co-regent with the late emperor's wife and as a mother. An engaging domestic drama gives way to pedestrian political history; Tzu Hsi lectures like a popular historian on palace intrigue, military coups, the Boxer Rebellion and conflicts with Russia, France and Japan. Though tears flow, there is little passion (save Tzu Hsi's erotic but chaste longing for Yung Lu, commander of the emperor's troops). Min's empress adopts a notably modern psychologizing tone ("How much was Guang-hsu affected when he was wrenched from the family nest?"), earthy language ("You are the most wretched fucking demon I know!") and notes of historical prescience (including what "future critics" will say). Min attacks the popular conception of Tzu Hsi as a corrupt, ruthless, power-hungry assassin, but the results read less like a novel than a didactic memoir.
Publishers Weekly
In this sequel to her historical novel Empress Orchid (2004), Min tells the story of late-19th-century China's crumbling empire, from the point of view of the country's much-vilified final empress. Two years after the death of Orchid's husband, she and his "first wife," Nuharoo, are sharing the upbringing of the new Emperor, Orchid's seven-year-old son Tung Chih, and acting as ruling co-regents until he grows up. Orchid is overseeing a nation heavily in debt and slowly losing control of its provinces to western nations and Japan. Orchid is selflessly devoted to governing China. She does not allow herself a relationship with the one man she genuinely loves, focusing instead on preparing Tung Chih for his responsibilities with a single-mindedness that undermines the typical mother-son relationship. When Tung Chih, who hates his duties, dies in his 20s of a venereal disease, Orchid adopts her sister's three-year-old son Guang-hsu and makes him emperor. Although Orchid loves Guang-hsu, her sense of political responsibility again overrides maternal feelings. The sensitive, sweet little boy grows into an indecisive, insecure ruler. Although recognizing the mistakes Guang-hsu and his advisors are making, Orchid often goes along in order to keep his sense of authority intact. By the time of the Boxer Rebellion, she has lost control over her ministers, even while she is being vilified in the Western press as the "Dragon Lady." She wants reform and feels camaraderie with Robert Hart, who keeps China financially afloat for decades. But most of all, she wants to keep China unified, a goal that proves impossible. The great swatches of historical detail will enlighten readers who generally view history from a Western perspective, but with Orchid so busy explaining herself, the human story of a woman who denies her instincts never quite emerges.
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)
The Last Enchantments
Charles Finch, 2014
St. Martin's Press
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250018717
Summary
The Last Enchantments is a powerfully moving and lyrically written novel. A young American embarks on a year at Oxford and has an impassioned affair that will change his life forever.
After graduating from Yale, William Baker, scion of an old line patrician family, goes to work in presidential politics. But when the campaign into which he's poured his heart ends in disappointment, he decides to leave New York behind, along with the devoted, ambitious, and well-connected woman he’s been in love with for the last four years.
Will expects nothing more than a year off before resuming the comfortable life he's always known, but he's soon caught up in a whirlwind of unexpected friendships and romantic entanglements that threaten his safe plans. As he explores the heady social world of Oxford, he becomes fast friends with Tom, his snobbish but affable flat mate; Anil, an Indian economist with a deep love for gangster rap; Anneliese, a German historian obsessed with photography; and Timmo, whose chief ambition is to become a reality television star. What he's least prepared for is Sophie, a witty, beautiful and enigmatic woman who makes him question everything he knows about himself.
For readers who made a classic of Richard Yates's A Good School, Charles Finch's The Last Enchantments is a sweeping novel about love and loss that redefines what it means to grow up as an American in the twenty-first century. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1980
• Raised—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale University; M.A. Oxford University
• Currently—lives in Chicago, Illinois
Charles Finch is an American author of mystery novels set in Victorian era England. He was born in New York City and graduated from Yale University where he majored in English and History. He also holds a master's degree in Renaissance English Literature from the University of Oxford. He is the grandson of American artist and writer Anne Truitt. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.
His first published novel in 2007, A Beautiful Blue Death, introduced gentleman sleuth Charles Lenox. The book was named one of Library Journal’s Best Books and was nominated for the Agatha Award for best new mystery of 2007. The September Society, Finch's second historical mystery featuring the Charles Lenox character, was published in 2008. The Fleet Street Murders came out in 2009 and was nominated for the Nero Award. A Stranger in Mayfair, the fourth Lenox mystery, was released in 2010. A Burial at Sea, A Death in the Small Hours, and An Old Betrayal were released in 2011, 2012, and 2013, respectively.
Finch's first contemporary novel, The Last Enchantments, was published in 2014. He has written for the New York Times and regularly reviews books for the Chicago Tribune and USA Today. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/17/2014.)
Book Reviews
The Last Enchantments is a discover-thy-own-true-self story written by Charles Finch, a Chicago-based author and Printers Row Journal contributor well known for moody mysteries. It succeeds on some levels. It baffles on many more. It is at times wonderfully written and at times not wonderful at all. I harbor affection for the book it might have been.
Beth Kephart - Chicago Tribune
[A] privileged young man stretching his way through the unavoidable emotional growing pains of, well, growing up—is at turns charming and annoying.... Finch is an able narrator, and The Last Enchantments moves quickly. Bank on a focused, four-hour session to sweep through it. You'll have a nice time, but much like college, you won't necessarily want to go back.
Tucker Shaw - Denver Post
Will Baker, formerly a staffer on the failed John Kerry campaign, decides to salve his wounded ego by spending a year at...Oxford.... The strength of Finch’s novel is its vivid portrayal of Oxford University in all its history, along with the school’s ancient and quirky traditions, and colorful student body and faculty. Sadly, readers may find this deft scene-setting wasted on a protagonist as vacuous and aimless as Will.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Young man studies abroad, falls in love with his new surroundings, and meets a beautiful woman: that sounds like the gist of every campus story ever told, but Finch's charming effort distinguishes itself with its personal touch.... Finch's first contemporary novel...often reads less like fiction than as memoir, and will be enjoyed by readers of both —Michael Pucci, South Orange P.L., NJ
Library Journal
[A] lyrical ode to youth, idealism and love in a contemporary novel about a young man's year of graduate studies at Oxford University.... Finch brings each character to life with striking effectiveness as they struggle with issues of class, the political climate, academics and their futures. A portrait of university life that's contemplative and nostalgic.
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 Last Flight
Julie Clark, 2020
Source Books
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781728215723
Summary
Two women. Two flights. One last chance to disappear.
Claire Cook has a perfect life. Married to the scion of a political dynasty, with a Manhattan townhouse and a staff of ten, her surroundings are elegant, her days flawlessly choreographed, and her future auspicious.
But behind closed doors, nothing is quite as it seems.
That perfect husband has a temper that burns as bright as his promising political career, and he's not above using his staff to track Claire's every move, making sure she's living up to his impossible standards.
But what he doesn't know is that Claire has worked for months on a plan to vanish.
A chance meeting in an airport bar brings her together with a woman whose circumstances seem equally dire. Together they make a last-minute decision to switch tickets—Claire taking Eva's flight to Oakland, and Eva traveling to Puerto Rico as Claire.
They believe the swap will give each of them the head start they need to begin again somewhere far away.
But when the flight to Puerto Rico goes down, Claire realizes it's no longer a head start but a new life. Cut off, out of options, with the news of her death about to explode in the media, Claire will assume Eva's identity, and along with it, the secrets Eva fought so hard to keep hidden.
For fans of Lisa Jewell and Liv Constantine, The Last Flight is the story of two women—both alone, both scared—and one agonizing decision that will change the trajectory of both of their lives. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Santa Monica, California, USA
• Education—B.A., University of the Pacific
• Currently—Santa Monica, California
Born and raised in Santa Monica, California, Julie Clark grew up reading books on the beach while everyone else surfed. After attending college at University of the Pacific, she returned home to Santa Monica to teach. She now lives there with her two young sons and a golden doodle with poor impulse control.
Her debut novel, The Ones We Choose, was published in 2018, and has been optioned for television by Lionsgate. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[T]horoughly absorbing—not only because of its tantalizing plot and deft pacing, but also because of its unexpected poignancy and its satisfying, if bittersweet, resolution. The characters get under your skin.
Sarah Lyall - New York Times Book Review
(Starred review) [Ou]tstanding thriller… [and a] pulse-pounding tale of suspense. Clark is definitely a writer to watch.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) Clark is an exceptional writer…. Highly recommended for fans of thrillers, mysteries, and crime fiction.
Library Journal
(Starred review) Two women risk everything to leave their troubled lives behind.… Readers will surely find themselves hopelessly invested in Claire's and Eva’s ultimate fates. A tense and engaging womancentric thriller
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.)
The Last Flight of Poxl West
Daniel Torday, 2015
St. Martin's Press
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250081605
Summary
Poxl West fled the Nazis' onslaught in Czechoslovakia. He escaped their clutches again in Holland. He pulled Londoners from the Blitz's rubble. He wooed intoxicating, unconventional beauties. He rained fire on Germany from his RAF bomber.
Poxl West is the epitome of manhood and something of an idol to his teenage nephew, Eli Goldstein, who reveres him as a brave, singular, Jewish war hero. Poxl fills Eli's head with electric accounts of his derring-do, adventures and romances, as he collects the best episodes from his storied life into a memoir.
He publishes that memoir, Skylock, to great acclaim, and its success takes him on the road, and out of Eli's life. With his uncle gone, Eli throws himself into reading his opus and becomes fixated on all things Poxl.
But as he delves deeper into Poxl's history, Eli begins to see that the life of the fearless superman he's adored has been much darker than he let on, and filled with unimaginable loss from which he may have not recovered. As the truth about Poxl emerges, it forces Eli to face irreconcilable facts about the war he's romanticized and the vision of the man he's held so dear.
Daniel Torday's debut novel, The Last Flight of Poxl West, beautifully weaves together the two unforgettable voices of Eli Goldstein and Poxl West, exploring what it really means to be a hero, and to be a family, in the long shadow of war. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—near Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Kenyon College; M.F.A., Syracuse University
• Currently—lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Daniel Torday is the Director of Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College. An author and former editor at Esquire magazine, Torday currently serves as an editor at The Kenyon Review. His short stories and essays have appeared in Esquire, Glimmer Train, Harper Perennial's Fifty-Two Stories, Harvard Review, The New York Times and The Kenyon Review. Torday's novella, The Sensualist, won the 2012 National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction. (From the publisher.)
An introduction to an interview with Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air:
Torday pulled from his own family's experiences to write about the war [in The Last Flight of Poxl West]—his father was born in Hungary two years after World War II ended. He says, "My grandfather falsified papers to make himself appear to not be Jewish anymore and that was how they were able to live out the war in Hungary."
Seven years after the war, Torday's grandparents moved to a Hungarian community on Long Island, N.Y.—but they still kept their secrets.
My grandmother died in the early '90s without ever once admitting that she was Jewish, to me or to anybody else," Torday says. "My grandfather, actually, after her funeral, admitted to the rest of the family that he was Jewish and then wanted to tell those stories for the next decade of his life." —March 17,2015
Book Reviews
The Last Flight provides both a touching, old-fashioned drama about war and love…and a more modern framing tale that makes us rethink the impulses behind storytelling, and the toll that self-dramatization can take not only on practitioners but also on those who believe and cherish their fictions…. It's Mr. Torday's ability to shift gears between sweeping historical vistas and more intimate family dramas, and between old-school theatrics and more contemporary meditations on the nature of storytelling that announces his emergence as a writer deserving of attention.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
[An] expertly crafted first novel…. There doesn't seem to be a germane subject for which the author hasn't done his homework, from the leather trade to the cockpit controls of military aircraft to the kabbalah…. And all of this is rendered in Torday's unobtrusively lyrical prose, superb Rothian sentences that glide over the page as smoothly as a Spitfire across a cloudless sky…. The Last Flight of Poxl West…[is] an utterly accomplished novel…. Daniel Torday is a writer…with real talent and heart.
Teddy Wayne - New York Times Book Review
OMFG! What a book! Eli Goldstein has the retrospective candor of Roth's Zuckerman and the sensitivity of a Harold Brodkey narrator, and Poxl West is an unforgettable creation. Plus, things happen in this book, big things like the world wars. A delight!
Gary Shteyngart
The Last Flight of Poxl West manages to be about WWII, the Holocaust, the place of novels and memoirs in the lives of their readers, and what the book's narrator makes of all this.
Terry Gross - NPR's Fresh Air
The last sentence of The Last Flight of Poxl West is one of the great conclusions.... The best 149 words published this year.
Chris Jones - Esquire Magazine
Torday’s descriptive and powerful prose stands as the book’s highlight. The book-within-a-book memoir is a page-turner.... [His nephew] Elijah’s chapters culminate with him looking at his uncle through more mature eyes...culminating with a tender ending to Elijah’s narrative.
Publishers Weekly
Torday...is a polished writer who creates an unforgettable character for whom the term flight describes his whole life.... This portrait of a Holocaust survivor's experiences is innovative, and its page-turning plot will keep readers on the edge until the very end. —Andrea Kempf, formerly with Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, KS
Library Journal
(Starred review.) While Torday is more likely to be compared to Philip Roth or Michael Chabon than Gillian Flynn, his debut novel has two big things in common with Gone Girl—it's a story told in two voices, and it's almost impossible to discuss without revealing spoilers. A richly layered, beautifully told and somehow lovable story about war, revenge and loss.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. After Poxl's book is published his relationship with Eli becomes distant. He blames his busy schedule, but do you think there were other reasons why Poxl pulled away from Eli? Do you think Eli comes to understand and accept Poxl's withdrawal?
2. What do you think is the biggest lesson Eli learns from his experience with his Uncle Poxl's memoir in the immediate aftermath? How does that understanding change after years of reflection?
3. What roles does art play in Poxl's life, specifically his admiration for Egon Schiele and William Shakespeare? How do you think Poxl's love of the arts shapes Eli's perception of him?
4. How does Poxl's knowledge of his mother's infidelities affect his view of her? How does it affect his views of his father? Do his judgments change after he begins to suspect their fates? How does he feel about the actions he's taken toward them?
5. Do you think Poxl's parents' relationship affected his own relationships with women? How?
6. Who do you think was Poxl's great love? What role did Francoise serve in his life? Glynnis? Victoria? How does each intimate relationship affect subsequent relationships in this life?
7. Eli says of himself that he was not drawn to learning about his Jewish heritage as a boy. What about Poxl's stories captures his interest? Was Poxl's wartime experience as a Jewish refugee who fights militarily against the Nazi invasion different than other Jewish experiences you've read before? How?
8. How did you feel about the ending? Would you call it happy?
9. Can a memoir ever be considered strictly nonfiction? Or does autobiographical recollection always possess a level of fiction,regardless of the factual foundation?
10. This novel alternates between two coming-of-age narratives: Eli's reflections and Poxl's memoir, inviting comparisons between both their experiences of adolescence? How are they similar? How do they differ? Do you like novels composed of two different stories or perspectives?
11. Half of the novel takes place in 1940s Europe, and the other half in Boston in the 1980s and '90s. Was there a time period or section that you preferred? Why?
12. How does Skylock, as a book-within-a-book, affect your reading? What is your experience of returning to the Eli sections after long periods in Poxl's head?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State
Nadia Murad, 2017
Crown/Archetype
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781524760434
Summary
In this intimate memoir of survival, a former captive of the Islamic State tells her harrowing and ultimately inspiring story.
Nadia Murad was born and raised in Kocho, a small village of farmers and shepherds in northern Iraq. A member of the Yazidi community, she and her brothers and sisters lived a quiet life. Nadia had dreams of becoming a history teacher or opening her own beauty salon.
On August 15th, 2014, when Nadia was just twenty-one years old, this life ended.
Islamic State militants massacred the people of her village, executing men who refused to convert to Islam and women too old to become sex slaves. Six of Nadia’s brothers were killed, and her mother soon after, their bodies swept into mass graves.
Nadia was taken to Mosul and forced, along with thousands of other Yazidi girls, into the ISIS slave trade.
Nadia would be held captive by several militants and repeatedly raped and beaten.
Finally, she managed a narrow escape through the streets of Mosul, finding shelter in the home of a Sunni Muslim family whose eldest son risked his life to smuggle her to safety.
Today, Nadia's story—as a witness to the Islamic State's brutality, a survivor of rape, a refugee, a Yazidi—has forced the world to pay attention to the ongoing genocide in Iraq. It is a call to action, a testament to the human will to survive, and a love letter to a lost country, a fragile community, and a family torn apart by war. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—
• Where—
• Education—
• Awards—
• Currently—
Nadia Murad Basee Taha is a Yazidi human rights activist from Iraq, Nobel Peace Prize nominee, and the first Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking of the United Nations (UNODC). She was kidnapped and held by the Islamic State in August 2014. On 1 June 2017, she returned to her home village of Kocho after three years.
Background
Murad was born in the village of Kocho in Sinjar, Iraq. Her family, of the Yazidi ethno-religious minority, were farmers. At the age of 19, Murad was a student living in the village of Kocho in Sinjar, northern Iraq when Islamic State fighters rounded up the Yazidi community in the village killing 600 people, including six of Nadia's brothers and stepbrothers. The younger women, including Murad, were taken into slavery — more than 6,700.
She was held as a slave in the city of Mosul, beaten, burned with cigarettes, and raped when trying to escape. Nadia was able to escape after her captor left the house unlocked. She was taken in by a neighbouring family who were able to smuggle her out of the Islamic State controlled area, allowing her to make her way to a refugee camp in Duhok, northern Iraq.
In February 2015, she gave her first testimony to reporters of the Belgian daily La Libre Belgique while she was staying in the Rwanga camp, living in a container. In 2015, she was one of 1.000 women and children to benefit from a refugee programme of the Government of Baden-Württemberg, Germany, which became her new home.
Career
In December, 2015, Murad briefed the United Nations Security Council on the issue of human trafficking and conflict — it the first time the Council was ever briefed on human trafficking. As part of her role as an ambassador, Murad will participate in global and local advocacy initiatives to bring awareness of human trafficking and refugees. Murad reaches out to refugee and survivor communities, listening to testimonies of victims of trafficking and genocide.
As of September 2016, Attorney Amal Clooney spoke before the UN Office on Drugs and Crime to discuss the decision that she had made in June 2016 to represent Murad as a client in legal action against ISIL commanders. Clooney characterized the genocide, rape, and trafficking by ISIL as a "bureaucracy of evil on an industrial scale", describing it as a slave market existing both online, on Facebook and in the Mideast that is still active today.[10] Murad has received serious threats to her safety as a result of her work.
In September 2016, Murad announced Nadia's Initiative at an event hosted by Tina Brown in New York City. The initiative will provide advocacy and assistance to victims of genocide.
In 2017, Murad met Pope Francis and Archbishop Gallagher in the Vatican City. During the meeting she "asked for helping Yazidis who are still in ISIS captivity, acknowledged the Vatican support for minorities, discussed the scope for an autonomous region for minorities in Iraq, highlighted the current situation and challenges facing religious minorities in Iraq and Syria particularly the victims and internally displaced people as well as immigrants."
Her memoir, The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State, was published in 2017.(From Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/18/2018 .)
Book Reviews
The Last Girl is difficult to process. It is a call to action, but as it places Murad’s tragedy in the larger narrative of Iraqi history and American intervention, it leaves the reader with urgent, incendiary questions: What have we done, and what can we do?
Anna Della Subin - New York Times Book Review
Murad gives us a window on the atrocities that destroyed her family and nearly wiped out her vulnerable community. This is a courageous memoir that serves as an important step toward holding to account those who committed horrific crimes.
Washington Post
This devastating memoir unflinchingly recounts Murad’s experiences and questions the complicity of witnesses who acquiesced in the suffering of others.
The New Yorker
Her book is sobering—and an inspiration.
People
This is likely the most inspiring feminist memoir out this year.
Bustle
Nadia Murad's courageous account is horrific and essential reading. . . . Anyone who wants to understand the so-called Islamic State should read The Last Girl.
Economist (Uk)
Surpassingly valuable.… With her new book, The Last Girl, Nadia Murad has assumed the stature of an Elie Wiesel for her people.… As much as it is an account of the Yazidi genocide, the book is also a loving ode to a way of life that has now been all but obliterated.
Jewish Journal
A harrowing and brave book, a testament to human resilience.
Progressive
(Starred review.) Human rights activist Murad recounts her captivity in Iraq as a sabiya, or sex slave, held by ISIS in this brilliant and intense memoir.… This book is a clear-eyed account of ISIS’s cruelty and the devastation caused by the war in Iraq.
Publishers Weekly
In 2014, ISIS swept through Iraq, bringing death and destruction to the Yazidis people, a Kurdish religious minority.… [A] rare glimpse into the rich culture of the Yazidi. Her memoir is powerful and heart-breaking and will inspire the world to action. —Heidi Uphoff, Sandia National Laboratories, NM
Library Journal
[R]aw, terrifying.… With vivid detail and genuine, heartbreaking emotion, the author lays bare not only her unimaginable tragedy, but also the tragedies of an entire people…. A devastating yet ultimately inspiring memoir that doubles as an urgent call to action.
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 Last Girl … then take off on our own:
1. Discuss the ancient Yazidi religion with its creation myths, visions of afterlife, and its various customs. How did Nadia Murad's faith help sustain her during her ordeal?
2. Talk about the treatment of the Yazidi people throughout history, including the many occurrences of genocide. Why have Yazidis been the object of persecution? In fact, why has religious sectarianism— throughout history—been so virulent and led to such violence?
3. How did the Yazidi's lives improve with the initial 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. How did it worsen after the dismantling of the Baathist institutions?
4. ONce she escapee, Murad was required by the Kurd officials to testify, and despite assurances of privacy, the tape was made public. "I was quickly learning," she observed, "that my story, which I still thought of as a personal tragedy, could be someone else’s political tool." What were the Kurd officials hoping to achieve by airing the tape, and in what way did it endanger Nasser and his family?
5. What tricky issues did/does Murad face in publishing such an incendiary, if not sensational, book?
6. Follow-up to Question 5: Murad's story is almost too much to bear. Yet she was only one among thousands of women who suffered at the hands of ISIS. How important is it for us to read The Last Girl? Do you feel hopeless after reading it—or does it give you hope that her story has come to light?
7. Murad expresses fury and bafflement at the way families carried on with their normal lives under ISIS while all around them Yazidi women were subjected to horrific treatment. Where else have we heard similar reports of apathy in the face of atrocity? Is it human nature? Is it fear? Why are we so prone to ignore the horrors that take place under our noses?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Last Good Paradise
Tatjana Soli, 2015
St. Martin's Press
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250043962
Summary
From Tatjana Soli, the bestselling author of The Lotus Eaters and The Forgetting Tree, comes a black comedy set on an island resort, where guests attempting to flee their troubles realize they can’t escape who they are.
On a small, unnamed coral atoll in the South Pacific, a group of troubled dreamers must face the possibility that the hopes they’ve labored after so single-mindedly might not lead them to the happiness they feel they were promised.
—Ann and Richard, an aspiring, Los Angeles power couple, are already sensing the cracks in their version of the American dream when their life unexpectedly implodes, leading them to brashly run away from home to a Robinson Crusoe idyll.
—Dex Cooper, lead singer of the rock band, Prospero, is facing his own slide from greatness, experimenting with artistic asceticism while accompanied by his sexy, young, and increasingly entrepreneurial muse, Wende.
—Loren, the French owner of the resort sauvage, has made his own Gauguin-like retreat from the world years before, only to find that the modern world has become impossible to disconnect from.
—Titi, descendent of Tahitian royalty, worker, and eventual inheritor of the resort, must fashion a vision of the island’s future that includes its indigenous people, while her partner, Cooked, is torn between anarchy and lust.
By turns funny and tragic, The Last Good Paradise explores our modern, complex and often, self-contradictory discontents, crafting an exhilarating and darkly satirical story about our need to connect in an increasingly networked but isolating world. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Salzburg, Austria
• Education—B.A., Stanford University; M.F.A., Warren Wilson College
• Awards—James Tait Black Prize; Dana Award
• Currently—lives in Orange County, California, USA
Tatjana Soli is an American novelist and short story writer. Her first novel, The Lotus Eaters, won the 2010 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Dana Award, her second novel, The Forgetting Tree, was published in 2012, and The Last Good Paradise came out in 2015.
Soli graduated from Stanford University (Palo Alto, California) and the Warren Wilson College (Asheville, North Carolina) with an MFA. She received scholarships to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is married and lives in Orange County, California.
Her work has appeared in Zyzzyva, Boulevard, Five Chapters, The Normal School, The Sun, StoryQuarterly, Confrontation, Gulf Coast, Other Voices, Inkwell Journal, Nimrod, Third Coast, Carolina Quarterly, Sonora Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Washington Square Review, and Web del Sol. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 3/11/2015.)
Book Reviews
[E]ach character reveal[s] hidden dimensions as the plot progresses. Perhaps Soli tries to do a bit too much here...[with] multiple plot threads.... Still, the novel has smart things to say about the frailty of human relationships [and] the importance of responsibility to others.... —Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. Ann and Richard experience strain in their relationship at the start of the novel, resulting from stress at work and a lack of intimacy. Do you think all couples face the same struggles to some degree? Of the two, do you think either carries more of the blame for their marital issues?
2. Dex retreats to the island in an attempt to escape his overwhelming depression and hoping to find inspiration for his next album. Do you think fame is the reason for Dex’s unhappiness, or do you think he brought it upon himself? If he had never become famous, do you think he would have treated he women in his life better?
3. Cooked and Titi, set to inherit the retreat, are strongly opposed to tourists at the start of the novel. Do you sympathize with their views of the tourists? Do you think tourism is more harmful or helpful in remote areas?
4. How do you feel about the choice Loren makes at the end of the novel? Are you able to understand why he made that decision? Do you think it was a fitting ending for his story?
5. The local islanders in the novel are wage slaves, forced to live in impoverished conditions rampant with disease, and to cater to wealthy tourists and French settlers in order to survive. What do you think about the inequalities and social injustices that less-developed civilizations are forced to endure? Whose responsibility is it to help them?
6. Loren and Ann draw shapes in the sand at two pivotal moments in the novel. What do you believe is the importance of these shapes? Did you find Ann’s drawing fitting for the occasion? What do you think it said about her personal transformation?
7. The island that Ann and Richard run away to is totally unplugged. Do you think society is too tuned into technology? Does technology really bring people together? How do you feel about the webcam in the novel?
8. All of the guests at the resort are there in an attempt to flee from issues at home. Do you think it is possible to run away from one’s problems, or do you think the only way to solve a problem is to face it? Have you ever wanted to run away to a desert island?
9. There are several cases of infidelity in this novel. Do you think the affairs in this novel should have been forgiven? How did the infidelities affect your views of the relationships in the novel? Would you forgive a partner under similar circumstances?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Last Goodbye
Caroline Finnerty, 2014
Poolbeg Press
360 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781842236185
Summary
Sometimes the decisions we make can last a lifetime . . . and sometimes we cannot shake off the shackles of decisions made by others in the past.
Kate Flynn has spent her whole life running away. She reckons the best decision she ever made was to leave Ireland the day after she finished school. Having seldom returned since, she would be perfectly happy if she never had to go back there. She is happy in London where she runs a successful photography gallery with her best friend Nat, though their relationship is going through a rocky patch since Nat began an affair with a married man.
When Kate becomes pregnant and her partner Ben persuades her to make the trip home, she is forced to confront everything she left behind and memories of Eva, the mother she feels betrayed her. Kate finds it impossible to forgive Eva who chose to refuse cancer treatment while pregnant and died, leaving a young family motherless.
Do some wounds go too deep to ever heal? Must Eva's Choice forever deny Kate real happiness?
The Last Goodbye is a powerful story of love and loss, forgiveness and new beginnings—a heart-wrenching and emotional page-turner for mothers and daughters everywhere. (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
Wonderfully drawn and intensely moving.
Irish Independent
Any author who can have her readers rooting for a heroine as headstrong, stubborn and bloody-minded as Finnerty’s deserves credit; with The Last Goodbye she merits praise indeed.
Independent Living
Discussion Questions
1. Eva is faced with a deeply difficult dilemma. Do you think that Eva’s decision was selfless? Do you think she considered the needs of her three older children adequately?
2. Do you believe that the tendency to put a child’s needs before our own, is a trait unique to mothers?
3. Kate still carries a lot of anger towards her mother but do you think Kate is more similar to her mother than she would like to admit? What characteristics do they share?
4. What are your feelings about Nat’s relationship with Will?
5. Do you agree with Kate’s assertion that there are lots of "ones" out there for us or would you agree with Nat’s more romantic view that you can love a lot of people but that there is an ultimate one out there for all of us?
6. Do you think Will made the right decision to choose his marriage and his family’s well being over a future with Nat?
7. Ben has a difficult and problematic relationship with his father. How damaging do you think the weight of a parent’s expectations can be on a child?
8. What did you think of Aoife’s relationship with her grandmother Josephine?
9. What did you think of Noel’s relationship with Aoife? Do you think that he should have raised her with her brothers or was he right to let her stay with Josephine as happens in the story?
10. What were your feelings towards Kate at the start of the novel? Did they change towards the end?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)
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The Last Letter from Your Lover
Jojo Moyes, 2011
Penguin Group USA
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780670022809
Summary
A sophisticated, page-turning double love story spanning forty years—an unforgettable Brief Encounter for our times.
It is 1960. When Jennifer Stirling wakes up in the hospital, she can remember nothing-not the tragic car accident that put her there, not her husband, not even who she is. She feels like a stranger in her own life until she stumbles upon an impassioned letter, signed simply "B", asking her to leave her husband.
Years later, in 2003, a journalist named Ellie discovers the same enigmatic letter in a forgotten file in her newspaper's archives. She becomes obsessed by the story and hopeful that it can resurrect her faltering career. Perhaps if these lovers had a happy ending she will find one to her own complicated love life, too. Ellie's search will rewrite history and help her see the truth about her own modern romance.
A spellbinding, intoxicating love story with a knockout ending, The Last Letter from Your Lover will appeal to the readers who have made One Day and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society bestsellers. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1969
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—B.A., London University
• Awards—Romantic Novel of the year (twice)
• Currently—lives in Essex, England
Jojo Moyes is a British journalist and the author of 10 novels published from 2002 to the present. She studied at Royal Holloway, University of London and Bedford New College, London University.
In 1992 she won a bursary financed by The Independent newspaper to attend the postgraduate newspaper journalism course at City University, London. She subsequently worked for The Independent for the next 10 years (except for one year, when she worked in Hong Kong for the Sunday Morning Post) in various roles, becoming Assistant News Editor in 1988. In 2002 she became the newspaper's Arts and Media Correspondent.
Moyes became a full-time novelist in 2002, when her first book Sheltering Rain was published. She is most well known for her later novels, The Last Letter From Your Lover (2010), Me Before You (2012), and The Girl You Left Behind ( 2013), all of which were received with wide critical accalim.
She is one of only a few authors to have won the Romantic Novelists' Association's Romantic Novel of the Year Award twice—in 2004 for Foreign Fruit and in 2011 for The Last Letter From Your Lover. She continues to write articles for The Daily Telegraph.
Moyes lives on a farm in Saffron Walden, Essex with her husband, journalist Charles Arthur, and their three children. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Elegiac yet emotionally ablaze, what could have been merely another love story is instead a graceful examination of grand events. In 1960s England, 27-year-old Jennifer Stirling awakens in the hospital after a terrible accident, suffering acute memory loss. As the past makes its too-slow return, Jennifer employs the skillful deception of an actress in order to cope, but soon realizes that she doesn't love her husband, a man of great wealth from mining operations in the Congo. Stumbling across a haunting love letter sent to her by a man identified only as "B," Jennifer tries to reconcile what is clearly a great passion with the crippling social mores of her day and class. As she examines her heart and mind, the story skips from London to the French Riviera and the Congo in the midst of an anticolonial war. In 2003, English journalist Ellie Haworth stumbles across one of B's letters to Jennifer while researching a story, dragging her into ancient passions and sparking her to examine her own heart. With poetic prose and affecting characters, Moyes's (Night Music) genuinely captivating tale resonates deeply in today's fast-paced, less gracious world.
Publishers Weekly
Jennifer Stirling, recovering from a car crash that almost killed her, suffers from amnesia. Nothing feels familiar, her friends seem like strangers, and as she begins to suspect that her marriage is a sham, she discovers a mysterious letter from a lover whose identity she can't remember. She knows him only as "B." What follows is an engrossing saga of love found then lost, crossed paths, and missed opportunities. This romantic tale bounces between the present and the past, examining the depths of love and the decisions made while in its throes. Although portions of the plot are somewhat predictable (the loyal secretary secretly in love with her boss) and the premise a tad unlikely, none of this matters because the reader will be drawn in by the characters, the time period (the early 1960s), and the multilayered story. Verdict: British journalist/novelist Moyes's (Horsedancer) latest book is the perfect read for those who enjoy a more serious romance as well as a British turn of phrase ("darling, be a dear and fetch me another drink"). Reminiscent of Janice Y.K. Lee's The Piano Teacher (but with more likable characters) or Jamie Ford's The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, it will appeal to fans of those titles. —Julie K. Pierce, Ft. Myers-Lee Cty. P.L., FL
Library Journal
A prize-winning, cross-generational love story of missed connections and delayed gratification hits a seam of pure romantic gold. Star-crossed is an understatement for the ill-fated love between trophy wife Jennifer Stirling and hard-drinking journalist Anthony O'Hare in British writer Moyes' cleverly constructed, cliffhanger-strewn tale of heartache in two strikingly different eras. Jennifer and Anthony meet in the South of France in that strait-laced time just before the 1960s blew social conventions apart. Jennifer, married to a powerful businessman whose fortunes derive from asbestos, is a Grace Kelly look-alike, beautiful and seemingly blessed with a perfect life. But as the story opens with her attempts to reconstruct her existence after post–traffic-accident amnesia it becomes apparent that her marriage has a cold heart compared to recently experienced passion. Held back by convention and fear, she hesitates to grasp her first chance at happiness. Later, other and larger impediments stand between the two lovers whose commitment finds expression in letters which come to light again 40 years later in the library of a relocated newspaper. Journalist Ellie Haworth, involved with a married man, is moved by the words and starts to piece the story together, in the process coming to a different understanding of what love really means. A nicely judged sense of period and the author's full-blooded commitment lend heartfelt emotion to simple characters in a tour de force of its kind.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What similarities are there between Ellie and Jennifer? How do their experiences reflect their respective eras? Of the two women, with whom do you empathize or identify the most?
2. Have you ever written or received a love letter? Have you ever sent a romantic e-mail or text? Do you think electronic communication has changed the nature of expression? How does the emotional weight of a love letter compare with that of spoken words?
3. Does Laurence love Jennifer? Imagine yourself in his position. What were his motives in lying to Jennifer about O'Hare's death?
4. How did your opinion of O'Hare develop over the course of the novel? Is he a traditional romantic hero?
5. If Jennifer and O'Hare had run away together, what would their lives have been like?
6. Jennifer's friends and her mother are reluctant to tell her much about her life before the accident, urging her to focus on the future. Why? Do you believe they knew about her affair?
7. Why does Yvonne react the way she does to Jennifer's decision to leave Laurence?
8. Think of Jennifer's many roles as mother, daughter, wife, lover, and friend. Is it possible to fill all those roles at once? Should any one role be a priority and, if so, which one? With this in mind, did Jennifer make the right choice in pursuing O'Hare?
9. Examine the female friendships in the novel, particularly the interactions between Ellie and her girlfriends. Had you been friends with Ellie, what advice would you have given her about John? What would you say to John?
10. Rory argues that being in love doesn't excuse someone from being responsible for their actions, that "everyone makes a choice" to do either the right or the wrong thing (p. 332). Ellie disagrees, believing that people can be swept away by emotion. What do you think?
11. Did you find the ending satisfactory? What happens next for Jennifer and Ellie?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Last Man in Tower
Aravind Adiga, 2011
Knopf Doubleday
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307594099
Summary
Searing. Explosive. Lyrical. Compassionate. Here is the astonishing new novel by the Man Booker Prize–winning author of The White Tiger, a book that took rage and anger at injustice and turned it into a thrilling murder story. Now, with the same fearlessness and insight, Aravind Adiga broadens his canvas to give us a riveting story of money and power, luxury and deprivation, set in the booming city of Mumbai.
At the heart of this novel are two equally compelling men, poised for a showdown. Real estate developer Dharmen Shah rose from nothing to create an empire and hopes to seal his legacy with a building named the Shanghai, which promises to be one of the city’s most elite addresses. Larger-than-life Shah is a dangerous man to refuse. But he meets his match in a retired schoolteacher called Masterji. Shah offers Masterji and his neighbors—the residents of Vishram Society’s Tower A, a once respectable, now crumbling apartment building on whose site Shah’s luxury high-rise would be built—a generous buyout. They can’t believe their good fortune. Except, that is, for Masterji, who refuses to abandon the building he has long called home. As the demolition deadline looms, desires mount; neighbors become enemies, and acquaintances turn into conspirators who risk losing their humanity to score their payday.
Here is a richly told, suspense-fueled story of ordinary people pushed to their limits in a place that knows none: the new India as only Aravind Adiga could explore—and expose—it. Vivid, visceral, told with both humor and poignancy, Last Man in Tower is his most stunning work yet. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October 23, 1974
• Where—Madras (now Chennai), India
• Education—B.A., Columbia University (US); Oxford
University (UK)
• Awards—Man Booker Prize, 2008
• Currently—lives in Mumbai, India
Aravind Adiga is a journalist and author, who holds dual Indian and Australian citizenship. His debut novel, The White Tiger, won the 2008 Man Booker Prize. In 2011 he published Last Man in Tower.
Aravind Adiga was born in Madras (now Chennaii) in 1974 to K. Madhava and Usha Adiga, Kannadiga parents hailing from Mangalore, Karnataka. He grew up in Mangalore and studied at Canara High School, then at St. Aloysius High School, where he completed his Secondary School Leaving Certificate (SSLC) in 1990. He secured first rank in the state in SSLC. After emigrating to Sydney, Australia, with his family, he studied at James Ruse Agricultural High School. He studied English literature at Columbia College, Columbia University in New York, where he studied with Simon Schama and graduated as salutatorian in 1997. He also studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, where one of his tutors was Hermione Lee.
Adiga began his journalistic career as a financial journalist, interning at the Financial Times. With pieces published in the Financial Times, Money and the Wall Street Journal, he covered the stock market and investment, interviewing, among others, Donald Trump. His review of previous Booker Prize winner Peter Carey's book, Oscar and Lucinda, appeared in The Second Circle, an online literary review. He was subsequently hired by Time, where he remained a South Asia correspondent for three years before going freelance. During his freelance period, he wrote The White Tiger. He currently lives in Mumbai, India.
Aravind Adiga's debut novel, The White Tiger, won the 2008 Booker Prize. He is the fourth Indian-born author to win the prize, after Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai (V. S. Naipaul is of Indian ancestry, but is not India-born). The five other authors on the shortlist included one other Indian writer (Amitav Ghosh) and another first-time writer (Steve Toltz). The novel studies the contrast between India's rise as a modern global economy and the lead character, Balram, who comes from crushing rural poverty.
At a time when India is going through great changes and, with China, is likely to inherit the world from the West, it is important that writers like me try to highlight the brutal injustices of society (Indian). That's what I'm trying to do—it's not an attack on the country, it's about the greater process of self-examination.
He explained that the criticism by writers like Flaubert, Balzac and Dickens of the 19th century helped England and France become better societies. Shortly after winning the prize it was claimed that Adiga had sacked the agent who helped him to victory—and to reach a deal with Atlantic Books at the 2007 London Book Fair. However, it later emerged that these stories were factually incorrect: Adiga had fired his agent almost a year before, in November 2007. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Funny, provocative and decadent: Aravind Adiga's Last Man in Tower is the kind of novel that's so richly insightful about business and character that it's hard to know where to begin singing its praises…Vain, shrewd and stubborn, [Masterji] is one of the most delightfully contradictory characters to appear in recent fiction.
Marcela Valdes - Washington Post
When Mr. Adiga's energetic first novel, The White Tiger, won the 2008 Booker Prize, the judges praised the Indian-born author for undertaking ‘the extraordinarily difficult task of gaining and holding the reader's sympathy for a thoroughgoing villain.’ Last Man in Tower is set in a crumbling apartment building in Mumbai, which a real-estate developer wants to clear out and transform into a luxury high-rise. Many of the residents happily agree to take the handsome payoff and leave; others dig in their heels, spurning the developer's bribes and threats. Adiga populates his fiction with characters from all parts of India's contemporary social spectrum, and the intensity of his anger at aspects of modern India is modulated by his impish wit.
Cynthia Crossen - The Wall Street Journal
Aravind Adiga, winner of the Man Booker Prize for The White Tiger, brings readers another look at an India at once simple and complex, as old as time and brand new.... Adiga has written the story of a New India; one rife with greed and opportunism, underpinned by the daily struggle of millions in the lower classes. This funny and poignant story is multidimensional, layered with many engaging stories and characters, with Masterji as the hero. He is neither Gandhi nor Christ but an unmistakable, irresistible symbol of integrity and quiet perseverance.
Valerie Ryan - Seattle Times
It sounds far too clinical to say that Aravind Adiga writes about the human condition. He does, but, like any good novelist, Adiga’s story lingers because it nestles in the heart and the head. In Last Man in Tower, his new novel about the perils of gentrification in a Mumbai neighborhood, the plot turns on a developer’s generous offer to convince apartment residents to leave their building so that he can build a luxury tower in its place. The book mines the tricky terrain of the bittersweet and black humor, always teasing out just enough goodness to allow readers a glimmer of hope for humanity. Adiga won the Booker for his debut, The White Tiger, and his new novel shows no signs of a sophomore slump. Last Man in Tower glides along with a sprawling cast of characters, including the teeming city of Mumbai itself.... With wit and observation, Adiga gives readers a well-rounded portrait of Mumbai in all of its teeming, bleating, inefficient glory. In one delightful aside, Adiga notes the transition beyond middle age with a zinger of a question: "What would he do with his remaining time—the cigarette stub of years left to a man already in his 60s?" ... Adiga never settles for the grand epiphany or the tidy conclusion. In a line worthy of John Irving, Adiga writes: "A man’s past keeps growing, even when his future has come to a full stop."
Erik Spanberg - Christian Science Monitor
First-rate. If you loved the movie Slumdog Millionaire, you will inhale the novel Last Man in Tower. Adiga’s second novel is even better than the superb White Tiger. You simply do not realize how anemic most contemporary fiction is until you read Adiga's muscular prose. His plots don't unwind, they surge. [Last Man] tells the story of a small apartment building and its owner occupants, a collection of middle-class Indians—Hindu, Muslim, Catholic. There is love, dislike, bickering, resentment. Most of all, there are genuine human connections. Trouble begins when a real estate mogul decides to build a luxury high-rise where the building currently stands, offer[ing] residents 250 times what their dinky little apartments are worth. The result is chaos.... life-long friends turn on each other. Money—even the possibility of it—changes everything. What makes [Last Man in Tower] so superb is the way Adiga balances the micro plot—will Masterji agree to sell?—with the macro: How Mumbai is changing in profound, often disturbing ways. Most of all, Last Man in Tower asks the eternal questions: What is right, what is wrong, what do we owe each other, what do we owe ourselves? Just brilliant.
Deirdre Donahue - USA Today
When Mumbai was still Bombay, the apartment building became the new village, inhabitants growing up and old together, intertwined in one another's rhythms and needs. Tower A of the Vishram Society is one such building—both a character and the setting in this highly allegorical yet riveting novel, Adiga's first since winning the Man Booker Prize for The White Tiger. Here, Hindus, Christians, Muslims and Communists have lived together for decades, finding recent common ground in their suspicions about the new "modern" single girl in 3B. But when a developer offers each resident an astronomical sum to move out so that he might build a luxury condo, greed threatens to destroy the community. But one holdout, the teacher Mr. Masterji, is determined that knowledge and principle will protect him. Though occasionally overwritten ("The hypodermic needle of the outside world had bent at his epidermis and never penetrated"), Adiga is a master of pacing. The momentum builds as Masterji's neighbors become consumed by money, allowing Adiga to show his characters grappling with circumstances, and enduring difficult changes of heart. Adiga takes a harsh look at Mumbai's new wealth, but his characters are more than archetypes. Though the allure of capitalism has won them over, the inhabitants of Tower A are at the mercy of the rich as much as their neighbor, the teacher, is at the mercy of them.
Publishers Weekly
Adiga, author of the highly acclaimed White Tiger, returns with this morality tale about events at a respectable, solidly middle-class building in Mumbai. The veneer of respectability and hard-earned bonhomie falls away after the residents—Hindu, Christian, and Muslim—are offered a windfall by an unscrupulous real estate developer who wants them to move. It is a credit to the author that the reader manages to keep straight the large cast of unforgettable and all-too-believable characters.... In the end, there are no heroes in this viper’s nest of competing desires and petty jealousies, as the residents’ uglier natures are gradually revealed in the face of their greed and disappointment. The swarming oceanfront metropolis of Mumbai, in various stages of development and decay, functions as a character in its own right. You won’t be able to look away as the novel hurtles toward its inevitable train wreck of a conclusion in this stunner from Adiga. —Lauren Gilbert
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. What are some of the major themes of the novel? How does Adiga set them forth even in the first pages through his description of Vishram Society? What do you think the banyan tree symbolizes?
2. The novel begins, “If you are inquiring about Vishram Society, you will be told right away that it is pucca—absolutely, unimpeachably pucca.” What does the word pucca mean? Why is this fact about Vishram important to the story?
3. How does Adiga use humor as social commentary?
4. On page 7, there is a quote adapted from the Bhagavad Gita: “I was never born and I will never die; I do not hurt and cannot be hurt; I am invincible, immortal, indestructible.” Which characters in the novel seem to feel this way?
5. Why is Masterji so respected at the beginning of the novel? How would he be treated in the United States?
6. According to Masterji, his wife’s favorite saying was “ ‘Man is like a goat tied to a pole.’ Meaning, all of us have some free will but not too much” (page 41). Does this prove true for him?
7. There are dozens of scenes that revolve around food. What do the characters’ eating habits tell us about them?
8. Is Dharmen Shah a villain? What are his intentions? Who else might be considered a villain in the story?
9. Discuss Masterji’s friendship with Mr. and Mrs. Pinto. Does envy come into play? How does the offer change their relationship?
10. What is the symbolism behind Mr. Kothari’s flamingos? What are some of the other characters’ influential memories?
11. There are several instances of betrayal in the novel. Whose struck you as most shocking?
12. The offer brings out many different emotions and reactions from the residents of Vishram. In general, how is the reaction of the women different from that of the men in the building?
13. Several of the characters have children, Masterji included. How does their role as parents influence their decision-making? How does parenting in the novel’s modern-day India compare to parenting in the United States?
14. After reading the sign his neighbors have posted criticizing him, Masterji thinks, “A man is what his neighbours say he is” (page 196). Is this true in the novel? How does that notion affect Masterji? Do you think the neighbors’ opinions were entirely new or had just lain dormant until he refused the offer?
15. What role does class play in the story? How does the neighbors’ treatment of Mary and Ram Khare reflect their attitudes in general?
16. Why do you think Mr. Pinto changes his mind about accepting the offer? Is it only about the money or are there other reasons as well?
17. When Shah hears the news about Masterji, he says, “ ‘I thought it would be a push down the stairs, or a beating at night. That’s all…I forgot we were dealing with good people’” (pages 358–359). What does he mean?
18. Why does Ajwani refuse to sign?
19. The last line of the novel is, “Nothing can stop a living thing that wants to be free.” What is this referring to?
20. Why doesn’t Masterji just agree to sell? What would you have done?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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The Last Mrs. Parrish
Liv Constantine, 2017
HarperCollins
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062667571
Summary
The mesmerizing debut about a coolly manipulative woman and a wealthy "golden couple," from a stunning new voice in psychological suspense.
Some women get everything. Some women get everything they deserve.
Amber Patterson is fed up. She’s tired of being a nobody: a plain, invisible woman who blends into the background. She deserves more — a life of money and power like the one blond-haired, blue-eyed goddess Daphne Parrish takes for granted.
To everyone in the exclusive town of Bishops Harbor, Connecticut, Daphne — a socialite and philanthropist — and her real-estate mogul husband, Jackson, are a couple straight out of a fairy tale.
Amber’s envy could eat her alive … if she didn't have a plan. Amber uses Daphne’s compassion and caring to insinuate herself into the family’s life — the first step in a meticulous scheme to undermine her. Before long, Amber is Daphne’s closest confidante, traveling to Europe with the Parrishes and their lovely young daughters, and growing closer to Jackson. But a skeleton from her past may undermine everything that Amber has worked towards, and if it is discovered, her well-laid plan may fall to pieces.
With shocking turns and dark secrets that will keep you guessing until the very end, The Last Mrs. Parrish is a fresh, juicy, and utterly addictive thriller from a diabolically imaginative talent. (From the publisher.)
Author Bios
Lynne Constantine
• Birth—ca. 1961
• Where—Baltimore, Maryland, USA
• Education—M.A., Johns Hopkins University
• Currently—Milford, Connecticut
Valerie Constantine
• Birth—ca. 1947
• Where—Baltimore, Maryland, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Maryland
• Currently—Annapolis, Maryland and England
Liv Constantine is the pen-name of two sisters, Lynne and Valerie, who published The Last Mrs. Parrish in 2017. Born into a Greek-American family, the two have collaborated previously — on Circle Dance (2004, Rev., 2012), a novel about two sisters from a Greek American family, who, while embracing their American identity, are determined to hold on to their family's proud Greek traditions. Lynne went on to write short stories, as well as a second novel, The Veritas Deception (2016), a suspense mystery.
Thanks to technology — Skype and email — the sisters are able to live three states away from one another yet still manage to write as one to plot their novels. They attribute the dark storyline found in The Last Mrs. Parish to the hours they spent listening to their Greek grandmother spin her wonderful tales. (Adopted from the authors' joint and individual websites).
Visit Lynne's website.
Visit Valerie's website.
Book Reviews
[This] utterly irresistible novel is about a young woman named Amber Patterson, newly arrived in an ultra-rich town on Long Island Sound. The Last Mrs. Parrish pivots on an enormous and satisfying twist …the pages keep flying, flying, flying by.
USA Today
Fabulous.… I read this book in a flash, devouring every twisty delicious detail.
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
This terrific, noir-steeped tale written by sisters that go by Liv Constantine actually owes more to Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley than it does to the likes of Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train.… The twists, turns and mechanizations are a devilishly delicious delight. Kind of like the brilliant television show Breaking Bad, where it’s hard to distinguish Dr. Frankenstein from the monster he created.
Providence Journal
(Starred review.) The reader watches with shock and delight as Amber cold-bloodedly manipulates Daphne and Jackson.… To say any more would spoil all the twists …[and] a surprising and entirely satisfying ending.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Readers will learn that things are not always as they seem, as they anxiously await the next bombshell.… [A] captivating … deliciously duplicitous psychological thriller. —Mary Todd Chesnut, Northern Kentucky Univ. Lib., Highland Heights
Library Journal
The twists keep coming in this psychological roller coaster.… [T]his is a satisfying thriller that offers a window into the darker side of glamorous lives and powerful men.
Booklist
(Starred review.) Constantine's debut novel is the work of two sisters in collaboration, and these ladies definitely know the formula. A Gone Girl-esque confection with villainy and melodrama galore.
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 Last Mrs. Parrish … then take off on your own:
1. Start perhaps by talking about the disparity in life-styles — wealthy vs. "just-getting-by — that sets Amber off on her con job. How great are the differences in the women's lives? Amber is jealous, belieing that Daphne takes the ease and luxuries of her life for granted. Is she correct, at least in the first half of the book? Have you ever envied someone for their wealth? Of if you're wealthy, have you ever been on the receiving end of others' envy?
2. Talk about Amber's inner monologues, the ones she has, for instance, while talking to Daphne about the death of Julie. What more do the internal conversations reveal about Amber?
3. Is Daphne naive, or is Amber that convincing in her lies?
4. At what point do you begin to suspect that Amber has more to hide than the desire to break her way into the Parrish marriage? What do we learn about her past?
5. At what point, in the first half of the book, do cracks in the perfect Parrish marriage begin to evidence themselves?
6. Jackson has piercing blue eyes. Why do all fictional male hunks have dazzling orbs? Can you think of one, just one, who doesn't?
7. The book changes point of view in the second half. Were you surprised by Daphne? In what ways had you misjudged her?
8. The plot's twists and turns: did you see them coming, or were you taken by surprise? What about the ending: satisfying?
9. Inevitable comparisons are being made to Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train. How does this one stack up?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Last Night at the Lobster
Stewart O'Nan, 2007
Penguin Group USA
160 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143114420
Summary
Perched in the far corner of a run-down New England mall, the Red Lobster hasn't been making its numbers and headquarters has pulled the plug. But manager Manny DeLeon still needs to navigate a tricky last shift. With four shopping days left until Christmas, Manny must convince his near-mutinous staff to hunker down and serve the final onslaught of hungry retirees, lunatics, and holiday office parties. All the while, he's wondering how to handle the waitress he's still in love with, his pregnant girlfriend at home, and where to find the present that will make everything better. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 4, 1961
• Raised—Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.S., Boston University; M.F.A., Cornell University
• Awards—Drue Heinz Literature Prize; Pirate's Alley Faulkner Prize
• Currently—lives in Avon, Connecticut
Stewart O'Nan is an American novelist, born in 1961 to John Lee O'Nan and Mary Ann O'Nan, (nee Smith). He and his brother were raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
He earned his B.S. at Boston University in 1983. While in Boston, O'Nan became a fan of the Red Sox. On October 27, 1984, he married Trudy Anne Southwick, his high school sweetheart. They moved to Long Island, New York, and he went to work for Grumman Aerospace Corporation in Bethpage, New York, as a test engineer from 1984 to 1988.
Encouraged by his wife to pursue a career in writing, they moved to Ithaca, New York, and O'Nan returned to college and graduated with his M.F.A. from Cornell University in 1992. His family and he then moved to Edmond, Oklahoma, and he taught at the University of Central Oklahoma and the University of New Mexico.
O'Nan's first book, and only collection of short stories, In the Walled City, was awarded the 1993 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. The same year, he was able to find a publisher for his second book, and first novel, Snow Angels—based on the story "Finding Amy" from his In the Walled City collection—when the manuscript earned him the first Pirate's Alley Faulkner Prize for the Novel, awarded by the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society of New Orleans. In 2007 Snow Angels was adapted for a film of the same title, directed by David Gordon Green, who also wrote the screenplay, and starring Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale.
In 1995, his family and he moved to Avon, Connecticut. He was a writer-in-residence and taught creative writing at Trinity College in nearby Hartford until 1997. The research he did for his novel The Names of the Dead led to the creation of a class that studied Vietnam War memoirs as a form of literature, which he also initially taught. In 1996, Granta named him one of America's Best Young Novelists.
In a 2002 article, "Finding Time to Write," O'Nan wrote:
Very simple things like keeping the manuscript with you at all times. Always keep it with you. That way you can always go back to it. Doesn't have to be the whole manuscript. Another way to do this is to bring only the very last sentence that you worked on--where you left off, basically. Bring it with you on a sheet of paper or index card. Keep it on your person so that if you're running around the building where you're working, you take that five seconds to pull it out and look at it and say, "Okay, oh, maybe I'll do this with it. Maybe I'll do something else with it. Maybe I'll fix it there.
In the spring of 2005 O'Nan spoke at the Lucy Robbins Welles Library in Newington, Connecticut, as the featured author in its One Book, 4 Towns program. When asked about Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season, the book he co-authored with Stephen King, O'Nan replied, "Who would have thought that writing a book about the Red Sox would be the luckiest thing I ever did in my life."
In 2008, Lonely Road Books sold out its pre-orders for O'Nan's latest writing, a screenplay simply titled Poe. It is a dramatic retelling of the life of Edgar Allan Poe. The screenplay was released as a limited edition of 200 copies and as a lettered edition of 26 copies. It features a foreword by Roger Corman and frontispieces by Jill Bauman.
Works
1993 - In the Walled City (Stories)
1987 - Transmission
1994 - Snow Angels
1996 - The Names of the Dead
1997 - The Speed Queen
1998 - A World Away
1999 - A Prayer for the Dying
2000 - The Circus Fire (Nonfiction)
2001 - Everyday People
2002 - Wish You Were Here
2003 - The Night Country
2004 - Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans... (Nonfiction w/ Stephen King)
2005 - The Good Wife
2007 - Last Night at the Lobster
2008 - Songs for the Missing
2008 - Poe (Screenplay)
2011 - Emily, Alone
2012 - A Face in the Crowd (Novella e-book w/ Stephen King)
2012 - The Odds
2015 - West of Sunset
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/16/2015.)
Book Reviews
O'Nan's empathy for his characters is one of his great gifts as a novelist, and it is an impressive achievement that Manny's misplaced affection for Red Lobster is not risible, but tragic. There is a powerful dignity to Manny's proud desire to do hard, productive work and contribute something of value to the people with whom he lives and toils. But O'Nan is also a bitter realist. So when the Lobster closes, Manny doesn't re-examine his relationship with Deena or ponder a new, more fulfilling career. He goes to work at Olive Garden.
Nathaniel Rich - New York Times
Set on the last day of business of a Connecticut Red Lobster, this touching novel by the author of Snow Angels and A Prayer for the Dying tells the story of Manny DeLeon, a conscientious, committed restaurant manager any national chain would want to keep. Instead, corporate has notified Manny that his — and Manny does think of the restaurant as his — New Britain, Conn., location is not meeting expectations and will close December 20. On top of that, he'll be assigned to a nearby Olive Garden and downgraded to assistant manager. It's a loss he tries to rationalize much as he does the loss of Jacquie, a waitress and the former not-so-secret lover he suspects means more to him than his girlfriend Deena, who is pregnant with his child. On this last night, Manny is committed to a dream of perfection, but no one and nothing seems to share his vision: a blizzard batters the area, customers are sparse, employees don't show up and Manny has a tough time finding a Christmas gift for Deena. Lunch gives way to dinner with hardly anyone stopping to eat, but Manny refuses to close early or give up hope. Small but not slight, the novel is a concise, poignant portrait of a man on the verge of losing himself.
Publishers Weekly
O'Nan's tenth novel (after The Good Wife) demonstrates once again why the author is known as the "bard of the working class." It's December 20, closing day for the New Britain, CT, Red Lobster restaurant, abandoned by headquarters owing to mediocre sales. Manager Manny De Leo had to let most of his employees go — only five can transfer with him to the Olive Garden — and is counting on the good will of a few to run the place. As he opens, we hear in intimate detail about routine tasks (changing the oil in the Frialator) and tacky decorations (the shellacked marlin on the wall). Manny will miss it; it's his shop, and he takes pride in it. He'll also miss Jacquie, the waitress with whom he had a brief, intense affair. As snow falls, Manny handles the regulars, Christmas parties, the mall crowd, and his small crew with aplomb, constantly aware of his losses. This slice-of-life novel is funny, poignant, and exquisitely rendered. Strongly recommended for all fiction collections.
Library Journal
A rueful mood piece from prolific, eclectic O'Nan (The Good Wife, 2005, etc.) about the closing of a chain restaurant. On a snowy morning just a few days before Christmas, general manager Manny DeLeon opens the Red Lobster in New Britain, Conn., for the last time. Corporate ownership is closing this branch near a dying mall, and though Manny is moving to the Olive Garden in Bristol (with a demotion to assistant manager), he can take only four people with him. Unsurprisingly, most of the understandably pissed-off, soon-to-be-unemployed workers don't bother to show for the last shift. O'Nan paints a vivid picture of the world of minimum-wage labor, where people have little incentive to be responsible or reliable. Manny is both, scrambling to keep the restaurant running smoothly in the middle of a blizzard, even though it's the last day and no one cares but him. Personally, he's less upright. He doesn't want to marry his pregnant girlfriend Deena and still carries a torch for Jacquie, a waitress who's refused to come to the Olive Garden because their affair is over. There's hardly any plot here, just the frantic rush to serve lunch — O'Nan's depiction of the complex organization of meal preparation and service is the best since Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential — and the long wait through a sparsely populated dinner to shut the place down forever. Customers from hell and surly staff interact in a dance of clashing personalities that would be a marvelous comedy of manners if the overall tone weren't so sad. In his mid-30s, Manny is plagued by regret over Jacquie and not terribly optimistic about his future. O'Nan hews to a neglected literary tradition by focusing his sympathetic attentionon people with few options. He offers no political message, merely the reminder that blue-collar lives are as charged with moral quandaries and professional difficulties as those of their better-dressed, more affluent fellow Americans. Very low-key, but haunting and quietly provocative.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Why does Manny choose to keep the restaurant open through the snowstorm? Would he have made the same decision if it hadn’t been the restaurant’s last day?
2. How well do you think Darden Restaurants handled closing this branch of the Red Lobster? Could they have made the transition easier for the employees?
3. When Jacquie shows up for work, she’s angry with him for his glib response, saying, “Why do you have to go and make a joke about it? I don’t know if you know this, but a lot of us only came in because of you.” Why can’t Manny see the loyalty he’s aroused in some of his staff?
4. When the mother of the sick toddler demands the phone number of Manny’s boss, he gives it to her even though his staff doesn’t understand — or approve. Have you ever had to do something that you felt was the right thing to do even if the people around you did not? Discuss how that made you feel.
5. Manny seems to have a soft spot for Coach Kashynski. Is it just sentimentality, or is there a deeper reason?
6. After buying the earrings for Deena, he thinks, “Sometimes it’s not the thought that counts, just the present.” Do you agree or disagree?
7. Despite the likelihood that no one will ever use the bathrooms again — the building will likely even be demolished —Manny cleans them up after the busload of sick passengers departs. What does his decision say about him?
8. Do you think that Jacquie and Manny’s relationship was doomed to failure, or do you think he could have done something differently? Do you think Manny and Deena will stay together? Why or why not?
9. Manny couldn’t bring himself to steal the marlin even though he defied company policy in giving away the lighthouse glasses. What, in his mind, is the difference between the two transgressions?
10. What does it say about the way businesses operate today when a man as hardworking and conscientious as Manny is treated as if he were negligible?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Last Night in Twisted River
John Irving, 2009
Random House
592 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345479730
Summary
In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable’s girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, forced to run from Coos County—to Boston, to southern Vermont, to Toronto—pursued by the implacable constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends them.
In a story spanning five decades, Last Night in Twisted River—John Irving’s twelfth novel—depicts the recent half-century in the United States as “a living replica of Coos County, where lethal hatreds were generally permitted to run their course.” From the novel’s taut opening sentence—“The young Canadian, who could not have been more than fifteen, had hesitated too long”—to its elegiac final chapter, Last Night in Twisted River is written with the historical authenticity and emotional authority of The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany. It is also as violent and disturbing a story as John Irving’s breakthrough bestseller, The World According to Garp.
What further distinguishes Last Night in Twisted River is the author’s unmistakable voice—the inimitable voice of an accomplished storyteller. Near the end of this moving novel, John Irving writes: “We don’t always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly—as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth—the same sudden way we lose people,who once seemed they would always be part of our lives.” (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 2, 1942
• Where—Exeter, New Hampshire, USA
• Education—B.A., University of New Hampshire; M.F.A., Iowa Writers' Workshop
• Awards—American Book Award (Garp); Academy Award; Best Screenplay (Cider House)
• Currently—lives in Vermont
John Irving is an American novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter.
Irving achieved critical and popular acclaim in 1978 after the international success of The World According to Garp in 1978. A number of of his novels, such as The Cider House Rules (1985), A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), and A Widow for One Year (1998), have been bestsellers. He won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1999 for his script The Cider House Rules.
Early years and career
Irving was born John Wallace Blunt, Jr. in Exeter, New Hampshire, the son of Helen Frances (nee Winslow) and John Wallace Blunt, Sr., a writer and executive recruiter. The couple parted during pregnancy, and Irving grew as the stepson of a Phillips Exeter Academy faculty member, Colin Franklin Newell Irving (as well as the nephew of another faculty member, H. Hamilton "Hammy" Bissell). Irving attended Phillips Exeter and participated in school wrestling program, both as a student athlete and as assistant coach. Wrestling features prominently in his books, stories, and life.
Irving's biological father, a World War II pilot, was shot down over Burma in 1943, although he survived. Irving learned of his father's heroism only in 1981 and incorporated the incident into The Cider House Rules. He never met has father, however, even though on occasion Blunt attended his son's wrestling competitions.
Irving's published his first novel, Setting Free the Bears (1968) when he was only 26. The book was reasonably well reviewed but failed to gain a large readership. In the late 1960s, he studied with Kurt Vonnegut at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. His second and third novels, The Water-Method Man (1972) and The 158-Pound Marriage (1974), were similarly received. In 1975, Irving accepted a position as assistant professor of English at Mount Holyoke College.
World According to Garp
Frustrated at the lack of promotion his novels were receiving from Random House, his first publisher, Irving moved to Dutton. Dutton made a strong commitment to his new novel—The World According to Garp (1978), and the book became an international bestseller and cultural phenomenon. It was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 1979 but won the award the following year when the paperback edition was issued.
The film version of Garp came out in 1982 with Robin Williams in the title role and Glenn Close as his mother; it garnered several Academy Award nominations, including nominations for Close and John Lithgow. Irving makes a brief cameo in the film as an official in one of Garp's high school wrestling matches.
After Garp
Garp transformed Irving from an obscure, academic literary writer to a household name, and his subsequent books were bestsellers. The next was The Hotel New Hampshire (1981), which sold well despite mixed reviews from critics. It, too, was adapted to film, starring Jodie Foster, Rob Lowe, and Beau Bridges. Irving also received the 1981 O. Henry Award for "Interior Space," a short story published in Fiction magazine in 1980.
In 1985, Irving published The Cider House Rules. An epic set in a Maine orphanage, the novel's central topic is abortion. Many drew parallels between the novel and Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist (1838). It took Irving nearly 10 years to develop the screenplay for Cider House, and the film—starring Michael Caine, Tobey Maguire, and Charlize Theron—was released in 1998. It was nominated for several Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and earned Irving an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
In 1989, four years after publishing Cider House, Irving came out with A Prayer for Owen Meany, also set in a New England boarding school (and Toronto). The novel was influenced by Gunter Grass's 1959 The Tin Drum, and contains allusions to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and works of Dickens. Owen Meany was Irving's best selling book since Garp and, today, remains on many high school reading lists.
That book, too, was later adapted to film: the 1998 Simon Birch. Irving insisted that the title and character names be changed because the screenplay was "markedly different" from the novel. He is on record, however, as having enjoyed the film.
Other works
In addition to his novels, he has also published nonfiction: The Imaginary Girlfriend (1995), a short memoir focusing on writing and wrestling; Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (1996), a collection of his writings, which includes a brief memoir and short stories; and My Movie Business (1999), an account of the protracted process of bringing The Cider House Rules to the big screen,
In 2004 he published a children's picture book, A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound, illustrated by Tatjana Hauptmann. It had originally been included in his 1998 novel A Widow for One Year.
Life
Since the publication of Garp, which made him independently wealthy, Irving has been able to concentrate solely on fiction writing as a vocation, sporadically accepting short-term teaching positions —including one at his alma mater, the Iowa Writers' Workshop—and serving as an assistant coach on his sons' high school wrestling teams. (Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in 1992 as an "Outstanding American.")
Irving's four most highly regarded novels—The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and the 1998 A Widow for One Year—have been published in Modern Library editions. In 2004, a portion of A Widow for One Year was adapted into The Door in the Floor, starring Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger.
On June 28, 2005, the New York Times published an article revealing that Until I Find You (2005) contains two elements about his personal life that he had never before discussed publicly: his sexual abuse at age 11 by an older woman, and the recent entrance in his life of his biological father's family.
Works
1968 - Setting Free the Bears
1972 - The Water-Method Man
1974 - The 158-Pound Marriage
1978 - The World According to Garp
1981 - The Hotel New Hampshire
1985 - The Cider House Rules
1989 - A Prayer for Owen Meany
1994 - A Son of the Circus
1995 - The Imaginary Girlfriend (non-fiction)
1996 - Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (collection)
1998 - A Widow for One Year
1999 - My Movie Business (non-fiction)
1999 - The Cider House Rules: A Screenplay
2001 - The Fourth Hand
2004 - A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound (Children's book)
2005 - Until I Find You
2009 - Last Night in Twisted River
2012 - In One Person
2015- Avenue of Mysteries
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/12/2015.)
Book Reviews
Last Night in Twisted River showcases all of John Irving’s biggest liabilities as a writer: a tricked-up, gimmicky plot; cartoony characters; absurd contrivances; cheesy sentimentality; and a thoroughly preposterous ending. And yet, at the same time, it evolves into a deeply felt and often moving story—a story that with some diligent editing might have ranked right up there with The World According to Garp (1978) and A Widow for One Year (1998) as one of Mr. Irving’s more powerful works.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
There’s plenty of evidence of Irving’s agility as a writer in Last Night in Twisted River. He is adept at following an accident through its intricate consequences. His evocations of sounds and smells and tactile sensations, especially those provoked by Dominic’s expert cooking, are tantalizing. And some of the comic moments are among the most memorable that Irving has written, including the scene when a naked female skydiver, one of the novel’s many voluptuaries, makes an unfortunate landing smack in the middle of a pigpen. Given Irving’s skill, it’s especially frustrating to see him working so hard to spell out the import of the fiction.... In his bid to make something “serious,” Irving has risked distracting readers from what otherwise could be a moving, cohesive story.
Joanna Scott - New York Times Book Review
Everything that makes John Irving such a wonderful writer is on display in the opening section of his 12th novel, Last Night in Twisted River. And everything that makes him such a maddening one is evident in the 450 rambling pages that follow.... Ironically, the novel only soars when we read the parts that Danny has supposedly written...a haunting chapter in the middle about a pig roast interrupted by a naked sky diver, and another one later on about Danny's son. These parts are full of captivating characters, well-polished prose and heartbreak-ing insights into the joys and terrors of parenthood. But...[fictional author] Danny Baciagalupo's marvelous novel is smothered inside John Irving's dull one. If only somebody could have helped it get out and breathe.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Irving returns with a scattershot novel, the overriding themes, locations and sensibilities of which will probably neither surprise longtime fans nor win over the uninitiated. Dominic “Cookie” Baciagalupo and his son, Danny, work the kitchen of a New Hampshire logging camp overlooking the Twisted River, whose currents claimed both Danny's mother and, as the novel opens, mysterious newcomer Angel Pope. Following an Irvingesque appearance of bears, Cookie and Danny's “world of accidents” expands, precipitating a series of adventures both literary and culinary. The ensuing 50-year slog follows the Baciagalupos from a Boston Italian restaurant to an Iowa City Chinese joint and finally a Toronto French cafe, while dovetailing clumsily with Danny's career as the distinctly Irving-like writer Danny Angel. The story's vicariousness is exacerbated by frequent changes of scene, self-conscious injections of how writers must “detach themselves” and a cast of invariably flat characters. With conflict this meandering and characters this limp, reflexive gestures come off like nostalgia and are bound to leave readers wishing Irving had detached himself even more.
Publishers Weekly
Irving's new doorstopper addresses a strong theme-the role accident plays in even the most carefully planned and managed lives-but doesn't always stick to the subject. His logjam of a narrative focuses on the life and times of Danny Baciagalupo, who navigates the roiling waters of growing up alongside his widowed father Dominic, a crippled logging-camp cook employed by a company that plies its dangerous trade along the zigzag Twisted River, north of New Hampshire's Androscoggin River in Robert Frost's old neighborhood of Coos County. The story begins swiftly and compellingly in 1954, when a river accident claims the life of teenaged Canadian sawmill worker Angel Pope, whom none of his co-workers really know. Irving's characters live in a "world of accidents" whose by-products include Dominic's maiming and the death of his young wife in a mishap similar to Angel's. All is nicely done throughout the novel's assured and precisely detailed early pages. But trouble looms and symbols clash when Danny mistakenly thinks a constable's lady friend is a bear, and admirers of The Cider House Rules (1985) and A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989) will anticipate that Large Meanings prowl these dark woods. The narrative flattens out as we follow the Baciagalupos south to Boston, thence to Iowa (where we're treated to a lengthy account of Danny's studies, surely not unlike Irving's own, at the Iowa Writers' Workshop), and an enormity of specifics and generalizations about Danny's career as bestselling author "Danny Angel." The tale spans 50 years, and Danny's/Irving's penchant for commentary on the psyche, obligations and disappointments of the writer's life makes those years feel like centuries. Will entertain the faithful and annoy readers who think this author has already written the same novel too many times.
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 Last Night in Twisted River.
1. Like a number of Irving's novels, this one is concerned with a father and son. What is the relationship between Danny and his father Dominic? And how would you describe both of the characters?
2. One of the central ideas of this book is the precarious—even random—nature of life. How does Irving explore that theme throughout the novel? What are some of the inexplicable coincidences and accidents? Did the bizarre occurrences enrich the story for you..or irritate you?
3. Irving can be an ingeniously funny writer. Point out some of the many humorous parts in Twister River.
4. Why does Danny become an author? What does he try to accomplish with his writing? Talk about the ways this book reflects on the art of fiction. Consider these two quotations from the book:
Fiction is "both autobiographical and not autobiographical at the same time."
"All writers must know how to distance themselves, to detach themselves from this and that emotional moment."
How might these remarks apply to Danny...or to John Irving himself?
5. As father and son move from New Hampshire to Boston to Iowa, Vermont and Toronto, the book takes us back and forth in time—often out of sequence. Were you able to patch together a chronological timeline? Think about why Irving might be playing with time sequence—what affect does it have on the plot...or theme...?
6. Ketchum is Dominic's best friend: "Everything about Ketchum was hardened and sharp-edged, like a whittled-down stick—and, as Danny had observed, 'wicked tough.' " What do you think of Ketchum?
7. Do you find Constable Carl's chase believable or not? If you've seen Les Miserables, can you see a comparison between Carl and Inspector Javert?
8. Have you read other Irving novels? If so, how does this one stack up against the others? Are there similarities?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off with attribution. Thanks.)
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The Last of the Moon Girls
Barbara Davis, 2020
Amazon Publishing
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781542006491
Summary
A novel of secrets, memory, family, and forgiveness by the bestselling author of When Never Comes.
Lizzy Moon never wanted Moon Girl Farm. Eight years ago, she left the land that nine generations of gifted healers had tended, determined to distance herself from the whispers about her family’s strange legacy.
But when her beloved grandmother Althea dies, Lizzy must return and face the tragedy still hanging over the farm’s withered lavender fields: the unsolved murders of two young girls, and the cruel accusations that followed Althea to her grave.
Lizzy wants nothing more than to sell the farm and return to her life in New York, until she discovers a journal Althea left for her—a Book of Remembrances meant to help Lizzy embrace her own special gifts.
When she reconnects with Andrew Greyson, one of the few in town who believed in Althea’s innocence, she resolves to clear her grandmother’s name.
But to do so, she’ll have to decide if she can accept her legacy and whether to follow in the footsteps of all the Moon women who came before her. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Barbara Davis spent more than a decade as an executive in the jewelry business before leaving the corporate world to pursue her lifelong passion for writing. She is the author of When Never Comes, Summer at Hideaway Key, The Wishing Tide, The Secrets She Carried, and Love, Alice. Her most recent novel, The Last of the Moon Girls, came out in 2020 and reached #5 on Amazon's bestseller list.
A Jersey girl raised in the south, Barbara now lives in Rochester, New Hampshire, with her husband, Tom, and their beloved ginger cat, Simon. She’s currently working on her next book. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Fans of Tana French, Alena Dillon, and Hannah Mary McKinnon will adore Davis’ multilayered tale of intrigue, romance, and long-held biases set straight.
Booklist
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 LAST OF THE MOON GIRLS … then take off on your own:
1. How would you describe Lizzy and her New York life when we first meet her?
2. Why is Lizzy so determined not to follow in the footsteps of her grandmother as a Moon woman? What in her past has turned her against accepting her role in the legacy?
3. How are the Moon women viewed by the residents of Salem Creek (a nice allusion, btw)? What has the historical relationship been, going all the way back to 1786 when Sabine Moon originally purchased the property for Moon Girl Farm?
4. What insights does Lizzy gain by reading the Books of Remembrance? What was some of the sage advice she found in the books? Do you have some favorites? Did you write any of the adages down—any in particular that resonate with you? What do you make of these three, for example:
- We all of us have a story—one we tell knowingly or not with our hours and our days.
- There are an infinite number of paths in this life. Some are well traveled, others must be forged. But none should be walked with a guilty or bitter heart.
- Bitterness is a subtle poison. It lulls with its righteous indignation and its false sense of power, then turns on you and burns your heart to ash. But forgiveness is balm to the wounded heart. And love. We must never forget love.
5. What do you make of Rhyanna? How does Lizzy feel about her return? Rhyanna tells Lizzy, "I came back to learn how to be your Mother." What does she mean, how does she intend to do so, and is she ultimately successful?
6. Andrew? Some reviewers say they find him adorable; others … not so much. A number of readers feel the romance detracts from the mystery and from the overall narrative of Lizzy's growth. Still others find it enriches the story.
7. What about the mystery of the Gilmore twins? Were you surprised by the ending … or see it coming?
8. What do you see for Lizzy in the future? Are you pleased with the way the novel ended?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Last One Home
Debbie Macomber, 2015
Random House
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780553391886
Summary
An inspiring new stand-alone novel about the enduring bond between sisters, the power of forgiveness, and a second chance at love.
Growing up, Cassie Carter and her sisters, Karen and Nichole, were incredibly close—until one fateful event drove them apart. After high school, Cassie ran away from home to marry the wrong man, throwing away a college scholarship and breaking her parents’ hearts.
To make matters worse, Cassie had always been their father’s favorite—a sentiment that weighed heavily on her sisters and made Cassie’s actions even harder to bear.
Now thirty-one, Cassie is back in Washington, living in Seattle with her daughter and hoping to leave her past behind. After ending a difficult marriage, Cassie is back on her own two feet, the pieces of her life slowly but surely coming together.
Despite the strides Cassie’s made, she hasn’t been able to make peace with her sisters. Karen, the oldest, is a busy wife and mother, balancing her career with raising her two children. And Nichole, the youngest, is a stay-at-home mom whose husband indulges her every whim.
Then one day, Cassie receives a letter from Karen, offering what Cassie thinks may be a chance to reconcile. And as Cassie opens herself up to new possibilities—making amends with her sisters, finding love once more—she realizes the power of compassion, and the promise of a fresh start.
A wonderful novel of perseverance and trust, and an exciting journey through life’s challenges and joys, Last One Home is Debbie Macomber at the height of her talents. (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
Meet the Palmer sisters: rock-steady eldest Karen, who followed up perfect grades with a perfect spouse and children; wild middle sister Cassie, who got pregnant right out of high school; and free-spirited Nicole, the baby of the family. They're hardly speaking, but their mother's untimely death brings them together.
Library Journal
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.)
Last Orders
Graham Swift, 1996
Knopf Doubleday
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679766629
Summary
Winner, 1996 Booker Prize and James Tait Black Memorial Prize
Last Orders is the story of four men once close to London butcher Jack Dodds, who meet to carry out his last wish: to have his ashes scattered into the sea. The men, whose lives revolve around work, family, the racetrack and their favourite pub, must make their way down to a seaside town to complete the task.
Through conversation and memory they trace the paths they have followed by choice and by accident; through the Second World War and its aftermath, through the dramas of family life, and their relationships with each other.
In their brilliantly realized, richly nuanced voices, Swift has created a narrative language that perfectly expresses not only the comforts of old habits and friendships, but also the complexity and courage of ordinary lives. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 4, 1949
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—Dulwich College; Cambridge; University of York
• Awards—Booker Prize; James Tait Black Memorial Prize
• Currently—lives in London, England
Graham Colin Swift is a well-known British author and fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL). He was born in London, England and educated at Dulwich College, London, Queens' College, Cambridge, and later the University of York. He was a friend of poet Ted Hughes.
Some of his works have been made into films, including Last Orders, which starred Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins and Waterland which starred Jeremy Irons.
Last Orders was a joint winner of the 1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and a mildly controversial winner of the Booker Prize in 1996, owing to the superficial similarities in plot to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.
Waterland was set in The Fens; it is a novel of landscape, history and family, and is often cited as one of the outstanding post-war British novels and has been a set text on the English Literature syllabus in British schools.
Works
1980 - The Sweet-Shop Owner
1982 - Shuttlecock (Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize)
1983 - Waterland
1988 - Out of This World
1992 - Ever After
1996 - Last Orders (Booker Prize)
2003 - The Light of Day
2007 - Tomorrow
2009 - Making an Elephant: Writing from Within
2012 - Wish you Were Here
2016 - Mothering Sunday
(Author bio from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
On a bleak spring day, four men meet in their favorite pub in a working-class London neighborhood. They are about to begin a pilgrimage to scatter the ashes of a fifth man, Jack Dodds, friend since WWII of three of them, adoptive father to the fourth. By the time they reach the seaside town where Jack's "last orders" have sent them, the tangled relationship among the men, their wives and their children has obliquely been revealed. Swift's lean, suspenseful and ultimately quite moving narrative is propelled by vernacular dialogue and elliptical internal monologues. Through the men's richly differentiated voices, the reader gradually understands the bonds of friendship, loyalty and love, and the undercurrents of greed, adulterous betrayal, parental guilt, anger and resentment that run through their intertwined lives. Each of them, it turns out, has a guilty secret, and the ironies compound as the quiet dramas of their lives are revealed. Amy, Jack's widow, does not accompany the men; she chooses instead to visit her and Jack's profoundly handicapped daughter in an institution, as she has done twice a week for 50 years. Swift plumbs the existentialist questions of identity and the meaning of existence while remaining true to the vocabulary, social circumstances and point of view of his proletarian characters. Written with impeccable honesty and paced with unflagging momentum, the novel ends with a scene of transcendent understanding.
Publishers Weekly
In Swift's latest work, following Ever After, a group of men bound together by their experiences in World War II and their efforts to scrape by afterward join to take the ashes of friend Jack to Margate and toss them in the sea. In flashbacks, the intertwining stories of the men's lives are neatly unfolded, told staccato fashion in the intimate, slangy patois of working-class Britain. We learn that Jack and Amy's daughter was born defective, that they adopted Vince as a baby when his parents were killed by a German bomb, that Vince has twisted and resisted the family tie, and that the family struggled to better itself to no avail. This and more is told at times rather too elliptically, but the story is affecting. Big tragedies can make a grand show, but it is the little tragedies we can all relate to that break our hearts. Recommended for literary collections. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self-conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling sea waves that will draw up feelings, perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The title of the novel is a play on the "last orders" taken by a bartender in the pub [p. 6], and, of course, the "last orders" given by Jack concerning the disposal of his ashes. Why does Swift choose to make this link between the end of a night in the pub and the end of a life?
2. Last Orders has an unusual narrative structure: in each section characters speak for themselves, recounting past and present actions. There is no omniscient narrator, no stand-in for the author, no one who knows more than any one character. What effect does this narrative structure have upon your experience as a reader? What happens to your expectation of the traditional "exposition"—being filled in, at the outset of a novel, on setting, character, and what has happened before? How do you, as the reader, gather and sort through information given by each of the speakers?
3. In addition to the characters who are engaged in the novel's main action, there are three other narrators: Jack's widow Amy, Vince's wife Mandy, and Jack himself. What does the addition of these three contribute to the building up of the story? Are they necessary, and if so, why?
4. Given that the narrative point of view is shifting and necessarily subjective, how does Graham Swift give Ray a different status from the other narrators? Do you find as a result that you feel closer to, or more sympathetic with, Ray's experience than any of the others?
5. What is the relationship between what the characters do for a living and the alternative careers they wished for, but did not take up? How is "what might have been" an issue in the lives of each of the characters in the novel, including the women?
6. The carrying on of the family business is important to Jack Dodds: he has followed in the path of his father, but his adopted son, Vince, refuses to join him in "Dodds & Son, Family Butchers." Why is it so vital to Jack that Vince join him, and why is it so vital to Vince that he resist? What other causes are there for the difficulties between Jack and Vince?
7. Jack, Lenny, Ray, and Vince each has a single daughter. Jack's daughter, June, has been institutionalized from a very early age and he has never visited her; Ray's daughter lives in Australia and he hasn't heard from her in years; Lenny's daughter, Sally, is now a prostitute married to a jailbird; Vince has pimped his daughter to a rich Arab businessman. Why have these men failed so miserably in their relationships with their daughters? Do you suppose that they might have managed relationships with sons better?
8. The friendship between Jack and Ray was forged in North Africa in World War II. Lenny, too, served in the war and still thinks of himself as "Gunner Tate." Vic served in the navy, and the trip to Margate includes a stop at the Naval Monument at Chatham. How has the memory of the war shaped how these men think of themselves? Is their shared experience of war partly the reason for their friendship? Does having lived through the war create a barrier between them and their children's generation?
9. If Vince and Lenny are the most unhappy characters in the novel, why do you think they've become this way? How is their unhappiness translated into anger and violence? What is the effect of the fight between them-comic? ludicrous? a relief? Does it change anything?
10. How has Vic's profession shaped his personality? How does Vic differ from the other characters?
11. We can think of the place names at the head of certain sections as a dotted line on a map of England: they mark the progress of the friends as they make their way to Margate. The fact that they stop at Canterbury Cathedral reminds us that in his Canterbury Tales Chaucer, too, chose to have his pilgrims tell stories and talk about themselves as they made their way along the road to Canterbury. In what ways is the journey in Last Orders like a pilgrimage? What sort of knowledge or illumination results from this trip?
12. In the opening scene of the novel, Ray compares the Coach pub to a church, with the bottles ranged like organ pipes above the bar. Later, the characters find themselves in Canterbury Cathedral. What, if any, are the connections in this novel between the pub and the cathedral? What moods andor revelations does each place nurture or inspire? How does the novel make us meditate upon the relationship between the mundane and the spiritual?
13. Why does Graham Swift locate Jack's butcher shop directly across the street from Vic's funeral home, so that the two shops mirror each other? How do images of meat, bodies, and ashes create a web of meaning in the novel?
14. Jack is present, corporeally speaking, in the jar of ashes as his friends take him down to the seaside. How does Jack's presence elicit comedy in the novel? Tenderness? How does the handling of the jar tell us about the power of friendship?
15. Why does Vince, against the wishes of the others, scatter some of the ashes over the hill at Wick's Farm? Why does this place have a particular meaning for him, so that this becomes a necessary and fitting action?
16. Consider Graham Swift's handling of time in this novel. In approximately what year is the novel's "present" action taking place? How much time has passed since the affair between Ray and Amy? What are some other instances in which specific remembered events work to build up the reader's sense of time passing in the lives of these characters? By the end of the novel, would you be able to situate roughly all of its events on a time line?
17. Swift's challenging narrative structure illuminates the problem of partial knowledge: as readers, we discover only gradually, and in bits and pieces, information we need in order to understand the characters and their histories. We have no more insight than the characters themselves, and come to the same dawning realizations that they do, at the same time. At times this effect is the result of crucial information being held back. Which characters conceal important information from others, and why? How is this issue of partial knowledge—and the keeping of secrets and the telling of lies--important to the overall plan and meaning of the novel?
18. How successful are the marriages and love relationships in this novel? What are the limits to understanding between men and women? Is love a redemptive force here, or merely a painful misunderstanding, a botched effort? Do we wish to believe that Amy and Ray will take up their love affair again, now that Jack is gone and Amy has decided to stop visiting June?
19. Ray's friends depend upon his luck-or skill-in betting on horses when they need ready cash, usually because of major crises in their lives. How large a role does random fortune play at these moments? What does it mean to be "lucky" in this novel?
20. In a novel in which each character speaks without the intervention of a narrator, the issue of individualized voices becomes crucial. How do you come to distinguish the characters' voices? How successful is Swift in differentiating between voices? How important is the role of British slang in creating the illusion of reality in this novel?
21. Consider the first epigraph (from the seventeenth-century writer Sir Thomas Browne) that Swift has chosen for his novel: "But man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave..." Do you read this epigraph ironically or seriously? What does your choice indicate about your response to the overall effect of the range of detail and meaning in this novel, from the tawdry to the profound?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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The Last Original Wife
Dorothea Benton Frank, 2013
HarperCollins
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062132468
Summary
Experience the sultry Southern atmosphere of Atlanta and the magic of the Carolina Lowcountry in this funny and poignant tale of one audacious woman’s quest to find the love she deserves, from New York Times bestselling author Dorothea Benton Frank.
Leslie Anne Greene Carter is The Last Original Wife among her husband Wesley’s wildly successful Atlanta social set. His cronies have all traded in the mothers of their children they promised to love and cherish—’til death did them part—for tanned and toned young Barbie brides.
If losing the social life and close friends she adored wasn’t painful enough, a series of setbacks shake Les’s world and push her to the edge. She’s had enough of playing the good wife to a husband who thinks he’s doing her a favor by keeping her around. She’s not going to waste another minute on people she doesn’t care to know.
Now, she’s going to take some time for herself—in the familiar comforts and stunning beauty of Charleston, her beloved hometown. In her brother’s stately historic home, she’s going to reclaim the carefree girl who spent lazy summers sharing steamy kisses with her first love on Sullivans Island. Along Charleston’s live oak- and palmetto-lined cobblestone streets, under the Lowcountry’s dazzling blue sky, Les will indulge herself with icy cocktails, warm laughter, divine temptation and bittersweet memories. Daring to listen to her inner voice, she will realize what she wants...and find the life of which she’s always dreamed.
Told in the alternating voices of Les and Wes, The Last Original Wife is classic Dorothea Benton Frank: an intoxicating tale of family, friendship, self-discovery, and love, that is as salty as a Lowcountry breeze and as invigorating as a dip in Carolina waters on a sizzling summer day. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1951
• Where—Sullivan's Island, North Carolina, USA
• Education—Fashion Institute of America
• Currently—lives in New Jersey and on Sullivan Island
An author who has helped to put the South Carolina Lowcountry on the literary map, Dorothea Benton Frank hasn't always lived near the ocean, but the Sullivan's Island native has a powerful sense of connection to her birthplace. Even after marrying a New Yorker and settling in New Jersey, she returned to South Carolina regularly for visits, until her mother died and she and her siblings had to sell their family home. "It was very upsetting," she told the Raleigh News & Observer. "Suddenly, I couldn't come back and walk into my mother's house. I was grieving."
After her mother's death, writing down her memories of home was a private, therapeutic act for Frank. But as her stack of computer printouts grew, she began to try to shape them into a novel. Eventually a friend introduced her to the novelist Fern Michaels, who helped her polish her manuscript and find an agent for it.
Published in 2000, Frank's first "Lowcountry tale," Sullivan's Island made it to the New York Times bestseller list. Its quirky characters and tangled family relationships drew comparisons to the works of fellow southerners Anne Rivers Siddons and Pat Conroy (both of whom have provided blurbs for Frank's books). But while Conroy's novels are heavily angst-ridden, Frank sweetens her dysfunctional family tea with humor and a gabby, just-between-us-girls tone. To her way of thinking, there's a gap between serious literary fiction and standard beach-blanket fare that needs to be filled.
"I don't always want to read serious fiction," Frank explained to The Sun News of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. "But when I read fiction that's not serious, I don't want to read brain candy. Entertain me, for God's sake." Since her debut, she has faithfully followed her own advice, entertaining thousands of readers with books Pat Conroy calls "hilarious and wise" and characters Booklist describes as "sassy and smart,."
These days, Frank has a house of her own on Sullivan's Island, where she spends part of each year. "The first thing I do when I get there is take a walk on the beach," she admits. Evidently, this transplanted Lowcountry gal is staying in touch with her soul.
Extras
From a Barnes & Noble interview:
• Before she started writing, Frank worked as a fashion buyer in New York City. She is also a nationally recognized volunteer fundraiser for the arts and education, and an advocate of literacy programs and women's issues.
• Her definition of a great beach read—"a fabulous story that sucks me in like a black hole and when it's over, it jettisons my bones across the galaxy with a hair on fire mission to convince everyone I know that they must read that book or they will die."
• When asked about her favorite books, here is what she said:
After working your way through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor, of course, you have to read Gone with the Wind a billion times, then [tackle these authors].
The Water is Wide by Pat Conroy; To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee; The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood; A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley; The Red Tent by Anita Diamant; Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler; Brunelleschi's Dome by Ross King; Making Waves and The Sunday Wife by Cassandra King; Islands by Anne Rivers Siddons; Rich in Love, Fireman's Fair, Dreams of Sleep, and Nowhere Else on Earth (all three) by Josephine Humphrey. (Author bio and interview from Barnes and Noble.)
Book Reviews
The last original wife of the title is Leslie Anne Greene, the lone remaining first spouse in her husband's circle of friends. It only takes a relatively minor accident to snap her to the realization that what had seemed like a singular mark of distinction had become over the span of years a hollow symbol. To retrieve and replenish her life, she retreats to the pristine sands of South Caroline's shores. There she finds more than she ever imagined. A classic summer vacation read from the inimitable Dorothea Benton Frank
Barnes & Noble Editors
Discussion Questions
1. Describe Leslie and Wesley. Who are they as people? Do they see each other for who they truly are? Do they like each other as people?
2. Why does Leslie call herself "the last original wife?" Is she proud of this designation? Does it propel her to continue her situation? What impact does her friends' divorces have on her own life and outlook?
3. Leslie tells the psychiatrist, Dr. Katz, "Wes's friends were married to girls who are young enough to be their daughters. I didn't want to spend every holiday and weekend for the rest of my life with a bunch of Barbies.... These insipid young women would never be my friends. Moreover, I didn't want them to be my friends." Even though she doesn't have much in common with these younger women, should Leslie have tried to give them a chance? Is being friendly with a new, younger wife a sign of disloyalty?
4. Leslie and Wes have two adult children. Talk about their relationship with their kids. What kind of parents are they? Did they raise their daughter and son well?
5. One of the most important people in Leslie's life is her brother, Harlan. Why did she allow herself to be separated from him for so long? What does Harlan bring to her life that is lacking in Atlanta?
6. What happens to Les emotionally when she heads to Charleston to see Harlan? Why is Charleston important to her?
7. While she's in Charleston, Leslie learns a great deal about Josephine Pinckney. How does Miss Pinckney inspire Leslie?
8. Being in Charleston, Les is reunited with her first love, Jonathan. Compare him with Wes. What does Jonathan provide Les that Wes does not? Do you think she and Jonathan will live happily ever after?
9. Wes and his friends are all in late middle age. Do you think that younger generations of men will be different? How does Wes see himself and his friends? Have their financial achievements given them a false sense of security about their lives? What do you think will happen to Wes?
10. If you've read other books by Dorothea Benton Frank, how does The Last Original Wife compare with them?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Last Painting of Sara de Vos
Dominic Smith, 2016
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374106683
Summary
A rare 17th-century painting links three lives, on three continents, over three centuries in the last painting of Sara de Vos, an Exhililarating new novel from Dominic Smith.
Amsterdam, 1631:
Sara de Vos becomes the first woman to be admitted as a master painter to the city’s Guild of St. Luke.
Though women do not paint landscapes (they are generally restricted to indoor subjects), a wintry outdoor scene haunts Sara: She cannot shake the image of a young girl from a nearby village, standing alone beside a silver birch at dusk, staring out at a group of skaters on the frozen river below. Defying the expectations of her time, she decides to paint it.
New York City, 1957:
The only known surviving work of Sara de Vos, At the Edge of a Wood, hangs in the bedroom of a wealthy Manhattan lawyer, Marty de Groot, a descendant of the original owner. It is a beautiful but comfortless landscape.
The lawyer’s marriage is prominent but comfortless, too. When a struggling art history grad student, Ellie Shipley, agrees to forge the painting for a dubious art dealer, she finds herself entangled with its owner in ways no one could predict.
Sydney, 2000:
Now a celebrated art historian and curator, Ellie Shipley is mounting an exhibition in her field of specialization: female painters of the Dutch Golden Age.
When it becomes apparent that both the original At the Edge of a Wood and her forgery are en route to her museum, the life she has carefully constructed threatens to unravel entirely and irrevocably. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Sydney, Australia
• Education—M.F.A., University of Texas-Austin
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Austin, Texas, USA
Dominic Smith grew up in Sydney, Australia and now lives in Austin, Texas. He holds an MFA in writing from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. His short fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including Atlantic Monthly.
Recognition
Dominic has been the recipient of the Dobie Paisano Fellowship, the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Prize, the Gulf Coast Fiction Prize, and a new works grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts.
Novels
His 2006 debut novel The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre was selected for the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Program. It also received the Steven Turner Prize for First Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters.
Dominic's second novel, The Beautiful Miscellaneous, came out in 2007 and was a Booklist Editors' Choice. It has been optioned for a film by Southpaw Entertainment.
His third novel—Bright and Distant Shores—was published in 2011. It was named by Kirkus Reviews as one of the Best Books of 2011 and chosen by the American Library Association for its annual reading list. In Australia, it was shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year and the Vance Palmer Prize, two of Australia's foremost literary awards.
The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, his fourth novel, was published in 2016 to excellent reviews.
Dominic serves on the fiction faculty in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers in Asheville, North Carolina. He has taught recently at the University of Texas at Austin, Southern Methodist University, and Rice University. (Adapted from the author's website.)
Book Reviews
The genius of Smith’s book is not just the caper plot but also the interweaving of three alternating timelines and locations to tell a wider, suspenseful story of one painting’s rippling impact on three people over multiple centuries and locations.
Ian Shapira - Washigton Post
[L]ustrous.... The Last Painting braids Ellie's story together with the life of the titular Sara, a fictionalized amalgam of the few Dutch women painters...[through] skillful plotting and effortless prose.... Though the characters' realizations about their motives are at times belabored, the shifting perspectives of The Last Painting keep epiphanies from feeling too neat. Both melancholy and defiant, Smith's novel leaves us with the sense that the truths we make are no less valuable for being inexact. As Sara points out, "Surely, this is the way of all art.
Anna Clark - Chicago Tribune
The Last Painting of Sara de Vos is a deeply researched, beautifully written, intellectually absorbing novel that also has the qualities of a page-turner...a tremendous story of art, deception, love, ambition and the place of women in the world, and in history. From the opening pages you know you are in the hands of a writer at the top of his game.
Stephen Romei - Australian
Smith’s novel centers on two women who live hundreds of years apart yet are inextricably linked.... [T]he technical process...enrich this nove.... Smith’s paintings, like his settings, come alive through detail:...two women from different times and places both able to capture on canvas simultaneous beauty and sadness.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Highly evocative of time and place, this stunning novel explores a triumvirate of fate, choice, and consequence and is worthy of comparison to Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring and Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch . . . Just as a painter may utilize thousands of fine brushstrokes, Smith slowly creates a masterly, multilayered story that will dazzle readers of fine historical fiction.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) [W]onderfully engaging.... Rich in historical detail, the novel explores the immense challenges faced by women in the arts (past and present), provides a glimpse into the seedy underbelly of the art world across the centuries, and illustrates the transformative power and influence of great art. An outstanding achievement, filled with flawed and fascinating characters. —Kerri Price
Booklist
Smith’s latest novel is a rich and detailed story that connects a 17th-century Dutch painting to its 20th-century American owner and the lonely but fervent art student who makes the life-changing decision to forge it. This is a beautiful, patient, and timeless book, one that builds upon centuries and shows how the smallest choices—like the chosen mix for yellow paint—can be the definitive markings of an entire life.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What does At the Edge of a Wood mean to Sara, Marty, and Ellie? How did your reactions to the painting shift throughout the novel?
2. How does the memory of Kathrijn influence Sara’s art? What are Sara’s perceptions of mortality and the natural world?
3. What does the novel reveal about the distinctions between artists and art historians, and between collectors and dealers? Is art forgery a form of art?
4. What empowers Ellie and Sara despite the chauvinism they face when they launch their respective careers?
5. Would you want the Rent-a-Beats at your party? In their disdain for capitalism, do they do a good job of exposing the plight of someone like Sara?
6. As you read about the great lengths taken to transport the painting from the museum in Leiden, what came to mind about the value of a fake? What value should Ellie’s painstakingly created painting possess? How does the muddy nature of falsehood and illusion shape her relationship with Marty?
7. As you observed the stark difference between the Guild of St. Luke in the Netherlands and the modern auction scene in Manhattan, what did you discover about the economics of the art world? Has the patronage system that provided Sara with a benefactor (through Barent’s creditor, Cornelis Groen) disappeared?
8. If you had been in Ellie’s situation, would you have accepted Gabriel’s invitation to “restore” At the Edge of a Wood?
9. Discuss the three marriages portrayed in the book: Sara and Barent, Sara and Tomas, Marty and Rachel. When does love flourish in the novel? What causes it to fade?
10. What is Marty seeking on his sojourn to Sydney? What realizations emerge when he and Ellie are reunited? What misconceptions are laid to rest?
11. Beyond additional paintings, what is Ellie seeking when she makes the pilgrimage to Edith Zeller’s bed-and-breakfast?
12. Consider the author’s decision to make the Dutch Golden Age his backdrop. What particular qualities permeate the novel as a result of that choice.
13. Does At the Edge of a Wood convey any messages that endure across the centuries? What would Sara think if she could have known the fate of her work?
14. How does The Last Painting of Sara de Vos enhance the portraits of humanity presented in other novels by Dominic Smith that you have enjoyed?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
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The Last Queen
C.W. Gortner, 2006
Random House
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345501851
Summary
One of history's most enigmatic women tells the haunting, passionate story of her tumultuous life. Juana of Castile is just thirteen when she witnesses the fall of Moorish Granada and uniting of the fractured kingdoms of Spain under her warrior parents, Isabel and Fernando.
Intelligent and beautiful, proud of her heritage, Juana rebels against her fate when she is chosen as a bride for the Hapsburg heir—until she arrives in Flanders and comes face-to-face with the prince known as Philip the Fair, a man who will bring her the greatest of passions, and the darkest despair. One by one, tragedy decimates Juana's family in Spain.
Suddenly, she finds herself heiress to Castile—a realm on the verge of chaos, prey to avaracious nobles and scheming lords bent on thwarting her rule. Juana vows to win her throne, until the betrayal of those she loves plunges her into a ruthless battle of wills—a struggle of corruption, perfidy, and heart-shattering deceit that could cost her the crown, her freedom, and her very life.
From the somber majesty of Renaissance Spain to the glittering courts of Flanders, France and Tudor England, Juana of Castile reveals her life and secrets in this captivating historical novel of romance, grandeur, power and treachery by the acclaimed author of The Secret Lion. (From the publisher.
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—southern Spain
• Education—M.F.A., (university unknown)
• Currently—lives in northern California, USA
Half-Spanish by birth, C.W. Gortner was raised in southern Spain, where he developed a lifelong fascination with history. After holding various jobs in the fashion industry, he earned a MFA in Writing with an emphasis in Renaissance Studies. He has taught university seminars on the 16th century and women in history, as well as workshops on writing, historical research, and marketing.
Acclaimed for his insight into his characters, he travels extensively to research his books. He has slept in a medieval Spanish castle, danced in a Tudor great hall, and explored library archives all over Europe.
His debut historical novel The Last Queen gained international praise and has been sold in ten countries to date. His new novel, The Confessions of Catherine de Medici, his second, was published in 2010. He is currently at work on The Princess Isabella, his third historical novel, and The Tudor Secret, the first book in his new Tudor suspense series, The Elizabeth I Spymaster Chronicles.
C.W. lives with his partner in northern California. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
The 1492 conquest of Granada makes for high adventure and royal intrigue in this second sparkling historical from Gortner (The Secret Lion). Spanish Princess Juana, 13, watches as her parents, King Fernando and Queen Isabel, unite Spain, vanquish Moors and marry their children off to foreign kingdoms for favorable alliances: Princess Catalina becomes first wife to Henry VIII; Princess Juana, who narrates, is shipped off to marry Philip of Flanders, heir to the Hapsburg Empire. Although Juana balks at leaving Spain for the north and a husband she has never met, their instant chemistry soon turns to love. Years and children later, Juana unexpectedly becomes next in line to the Spanish crown and must carefully navigate every step of the journey from Flanders to Spain, fearful of alienating husband or parents or both. Emotional and political tensions soar as Juana's loyalties are tested to their limits. Disturbing royal secrets and court manipulations wickedly twist this enthralling story, brilliantly told.
Publishers Weekly
Discussion Questions
1. This novel is told from the point of view of a woman. Do you think the male author does a convincing job of immersing the reader in Juana’s thoughts and emotions?
2. The Last Queen is set mainly in sixteenth-century Spain. What did you learn about life in Spain during this time? How does the Spanish court differ from other courts you may have read about?
3. When Juana is told she must marry Philip, she begs to be released of her duty. How did you react to her mother, Queen Isabel, deciding to marry her off against her will? What do you think about Isabel’s notions of duty?
4. Princesses did not often get to choose whom they would marry, nor were they allowed to leave or divorce their spouses. How does this affect Juana in her struggles?
5. When Juana discovers her mother is dying, she realizes she cannot evade her destiny. Why do you think she decides to return to Flanders to fight for Castile? What are your impressions of her conflicts with her inheritance?
6. The differences in societal power between men and women in the sixteenth century are a principal theme in this novel. How do they compare to gender relations today?
7. Juana makes a terrible choice to free herself from Philip. Do you think her act was justified? How do you imagine you might have acted in her place?
8. History has dubbed Juana the Mad Queen. Do you believe she was mad? What are your impressions of her as a person and as a monarch?
9. Fernando of Aragon is an enigmatic personage in this novel. How do you feel about him and his actions?
10. Which of the characters in this novel were your favorites? Which did you dislike the most? Do you think the characters were portrayed as true to their time?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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The Last Romantics
Tara Conklin, 2019
HarperCollins
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062358202
Summary
Tara Conklin, the New York Times bestselling author of The House Girl, explores the lives of four siblings in this ambitious and absorbing novel in the vein of Commonwealth and The Interestings.
"The greatest works of poetry, what makes each of us a poet, are the stories we tell about ourselves. We create them out of family and blood and friends and love and hate and what we’ve read and watched and witnessed. Longing and regret, illness, broken bones, broken hearts, achievements, money won and lost, palm readings and visions. We tell these stories until we believe them."
When the renowned poet Fiona Skinner is asked about the inspiration behind her iconic work, "The Love Poem," she tells her audience a story about her family and a betrayal that reverberates through time.
It begins in a big yellow house with a funeral, an iron poker, and a brief variation forever known as the Pause: a free and feral summer in a middle-class Connecticut town.
Caught between the predictable life they once led and an uncertain future that stretches before them, the Skinner siblings—fierce Renee, sensitive Caroline, golden boy Joe and watchful Fiona—emerge from the Pause staunchly loyal and deeply connected.
Two decades later, the siblings find themselves once again confronted with a family crisis that tests the strength of these bonds and forces them to question the life choices they’ve made and ask what, exactly, they will do for love.
A sweeping yet intimate epic about one American family, The Last Romantics is an unforgettable exploration of the ties that bind us together, the responsibilities we embrace and the duties we resent, and how we can lose—and sometimes rescue—the ones we love.
A novel that pierces the heart and lingers in the mind, it is also a beautiful meditation on the power of stories—how they navigate us through difficult times, help us understand the past, and point the way toward our future. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—St. Croix, US Virgin Islands
• Raised—Stockbridge, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale University; M.A.L.D., Tufts Univesity; J.D., New York University
• Currently—lives in Seattle, Oregon
Tara Conklin was born on St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands and raised in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. She is a graduate of Yale University and received her Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy (MALD) from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, as well as a law degree from New York University School of Law.
Conklin's first novel, The House Girl, published in 2013, was a New York Times bestseller. The Last Romantics, her second, was released in 2019.
A joint US-UK citizen, Tara now lives with her family in Seattle. (Adapted from the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[A]ccomplished…. Conklin’s plot avoids the predictable and adds a new mystery each time an old one is solved, resulting in a clever novel.
Publishers Weekly
[A] full-bodied drama…. The unusual narrative format… is similar to that of Atonement, Ian McEwan's masterpiece, and is equally successful as deployed here. An intimate, soul-searing examination of a modern family and the ties that bind, for better or worse.
Shelf Awareness
Beautifully written.… Despite spanning almost a century, The Last Romantics never feels rushed. Conklin places readers in the center of the Skinner family,… allowing waves of emotion to slowly uncurl. Perfectly paced, affecting fiction.
Booklist
Conklin’s narrator describes the lingering consequences of the traumatic childhood she shared with her three siblings.…. Basically a lukewarm… family melodrama despite the intermittent, never adequately integrated references to a future wracked by climate change.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Why does Conklin choose to frame the story from 2077? Did you think that was effective?
2. Which of the four Skinner siblings do you like the most?
3. How do the effects of The Pause ripple through each of the four siblings' lives? If the Pause had not happened, what do you think might have been different for each of the siblings?
4. Noni came out of her paralyzing depression a staunch second-wave feminist. In what ways does her brand of feminism help her children, and in what ways does it let them down? How does Noni’s feminism compare to Fiona’s feminism, and to the feminism we are seeing today? What strides have we made as feminists and where do we still need to go?
5. Joe and Fiona’s last conversation was an argument about Fiona’s blog, The Last Romantic. Whose side do you take in that argument? Why?
6. Caroline and Fiona try to find Luna in several different ways. Why is it so important for them to find her? Did you think the PI was a good idea? The psychic? What did each sister need from the search for Luna, and did she get it? Why didn’t Renee want to find Luna? Which sister did you sympathize with the most? The least?
7. After Joe’s death, the Skinner sisters break apart for a long time. What brings them back together? How much of family relationships are we able to control? Do you think sometimes it is necessary for families to separate for a time?
8. Do you agree with Fiona’s decision to keep Rory’s existence from her siblings?
9. Caroline ends her long marriage to Nathan, but they remain friends to the end of their lives. Renee leaves Jonathan in order to have a baby, but allows him to return when the baby is born. Fiona has two great loves: Will and Henry. What is Conklin saying about the nature of marriage? Why do you think the Skinner sisters find and forge meaningful partnerships, but Joe does not?
10. At the end of her life, Noni tells Renee that, though her children have forgiven her for the Pause, she has never forgiven herself. Consider the ideas of betrayal and forgiveness. Who in this novel is a betrayer? Who is forgiven? Do you think forgiveness is necessary for rebuilding a relationship after betrayal?
11. At the beginning of the novel, Fiona says, "This is a story about the failures of love." At the end she says, "I was wrong to tell you that this is a story about the failures of love. No, it is about real love, true love." Which do you think is correct? Is there room for both?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Last Runaway
Tracy Chevalier, 2013
Penguin Group USA
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525952992
Summary
In New York Times bestselling author Tracy Chevalier’s newest historical saga, she introduces Honor Bright, a modest English Quaker who moves to Ohio in 1850, only to find herself alienated and alone in a strange land. Sick from the moment she leaves England, and fleeing personal disappointment, she is forced by family tragedy to rely on strangers in a harsh, unfamiliar landscape.
Nineteenth-century America is practical, precarious, and unsentimental, and scarred by the continuing injustice of slavery. In her new home Honor discovers that principles count for little, even within a religious community meant to be committed to human equality.
However, drawn into the clandestine activities of the Underground Railroad, a network helping runaway slaves escape to freedom, Honor befriends two surprising women who embody the remarkable power of defiance. Eventually she must decide if she too can act on what she believes in, whatever the personal costs.
A powerful journey brimming with color and drama, The Last Runaway is Tracy Chevalier’s vivid engagement with an iconic part of American history. (From the publisher.)
About the Author
• Birth—October 19, 1962
• Where—Washington, D.C., USA
• Education—B.A., Oberlin College (USA); M.A., University of
East Anglia (UK)
• Currently—lives in London, UK
Raised in Washington D.C., Tracy Chevalier moved to England in 1984 after graduating from Oberlin College in Ohio. Initially intending to attend one semester abroad, she studied for a semester and never returned. After working as a literary editor for several years, Chevalier chose to pursue her own writing career and in 1994, she graduated with a degree in creative writing at the University of East Anglia.
The Virgin Blue (her first novel), was chosen by W. H. Smith for its Fresh Talent promotion in 1997. She lives in London with her husband and son and hopes to see all of Vermeer's thirty-five known paintings in her lifetime (thus far, she's seen twenty-eight of them). Tracy Chevalier first gained attention by imagining the answer to one of art history's small but intriguing questions: Who is the subject of Johannes Vermeer's painting "Girl with a Pearl Earring"?
It was a bold move on Chevalier's part to build a story around the somewhat mysterious 17th-century Dutch painter and his unassuming but luminous subject; but the author's purist approach helped set the tone. In an interview with her college's alumni magazine, she commented:
I decided early on that I wanted [Girl] to be a simple story, simply told, and to imitate with words what Vermeer was doing with paint. That may sound unbelievably pretentious, but I didn't mean it as "I can do Vermeer in words." I wanted to write it in a way that Vermeer would have painted: very simple lines, simple compositions, not a lot of clutter, and not a lot of superfluous characters.
Chevalier achieved her objective expertly, helped by the fact that she employed the famous Girl as narrator of the story. Sixteen-year-old Griet becomes a maid in Vermeer's tumultuous household, developing an apprentice relationship with the painter while drawing attention from other men and jealousy from women. Praise for the novel poured in: "Chevalier's exploration into the soul of this complex but naïve young woman is moving, and her depiction of 17th-century Delft is marvelously evocative," wrote the New York Times Book Review. The Wall Street Journal called it "vibrant and sumptuous."
Girl with a Pearl Earring was not Chevalier's first exploration of the past. In The Virgin Blue, her U.K.-published first novel (U.S. edition, 2003), her modern-day character Ella Turner goes back to 16th-century France in order to revisit her family history. As a result, she finds parallels between herself and a troubled ancestor — a woman whose fate had been unknown until Ella discovers it.
With 2001's Falling Angels, Chevalier—a former reference book editor who began her fiction career by enrolling in the graduate writing program at University of East Anglia — continued to tell stories of women in the past. But she has been open about the fact that compared to writing Girl with a Pearl Earring, the "nightmare" creating of her third novel was difficult and fraught with complications, even tears. The pressure of her previous success, coupled with a first draft that wasn't working out, made Chevalier want to abandon the effort altogether. Then, reading Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible led Chevalier to change her approach. "[Kingsolver] did such a fantastic job using different voices and I thought, with Falling Angels, I've told it in the wrong way," Chevalier told Bookpage magazine. "I wanted it to have lots of perspective."
With that, Chevalier began a rewrite of her tale about two families in the first decade of 20th-century London. With more than ten narrators (some more prominent than others), Falling Angels has perspective in spades and lots to maintain interest over its relatively brief span: a marriage in trouble, a girlhood friendship born at Highgate Cemetery, a woman's introduction to the suffragette movement. A spirited, fast-paced story, Falling Angels again earned critical praise. "This moving, bittersweet book flaunts Chevalier's gift for creating complex characters and an engaging plot," Book magazine concluded.
Chevalier continues to pursue her fascination with art and history in her fourth novel, on which she is currently at work. According to Oberlin Alumni Magazine, she is basing the book on the "Lady and the Unicorn" medieval tapestries that hang in Paris's Cluny Museum.
Extras
From a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview:
• Chevalier's interest in Vermeer extends beyond a fascination with one painting. "I have always loved Vermeer's paintings," Chevalier writes on her Web site. "One of my life goals is to view all thirty-five of them in the flesh. I've seen all but one — ‘Young Girl Reading a Letter' — which hangs in Dresden. There is so much mystery in each painting, in the women he depicts, so many stories suggested but not told. I wanted to tell one of them."
• Chevalier moved from the States to London in 1984. "I intended to stay six months," she writes. "I'm still here." She lives near Highgate Cemetery with her husband and son.
• The film version of Girl with a Pearl Earring was released 2003 with Scarlett Johansson in the role of Griet and Colin Firth playing Vermeer.
• When asked what book most influenced her life as a writer, here is her response:
It's impossible to list just one! I would say more generally— books that I read when I was a girl, that showed me how different worlds can be brought to life for a reader. My aunt likes to quote that when I was young I once said I was never alone when I had a book to read. (I don't remember saying that, but my aunt isn't prone to lying.) Those companions would be books like the Laura Ingalls Wilder series; Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery; A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle; The Egypt Game by Zylpha Keatley Snyder; "The Dark Is Rising" series by Susan Cooper; The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken plus subsequent books in that series; and of course The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien.
• Other favorite books include: Pride and Prejudice (Austen), The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner), Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger), Alias Grace (Atwood), and Song of Solomon (Morrison). (Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Chevalier’s (Girl with a Pearl Earring) haunting seventh novel delves into the difference between a theory of belief and its practice. When young Quaker Honor Bright’s fiance breaks off the relationship to marry outside the faith, Honor goes to America in 1850 with her sister, Grace. Grace is engaged to marry Adam Cox, a young man from their hometown who followed his brother to Faithwell, Ohio. Unfortunately, Grace dies en route, and Honor arrives in Ohio to find Adam sharing a house with Abigail, his sister-in-law, made a widow by the death of Adam’s brother. Honor moves into the house, but feels tense and unwelcome. In Belle Mills, a milliner who appreciates Honor’s sewing skills, Honor finds a friend and ally. Honor also draws the attention of Belle’s brother, Donovan, a slave hunter, and Jack Haymaker, a local farmer, a man “like a pulled muscle that Honor sensed every time she moved.” They marry and Honor, drawn by her sympathies into helping the Underground Railroad, is forced to choose between living her beliefs and merely speaking them. The birth of her own child raises the stakes, and she takes a unique stand in her untenable situation. Honor’s aching loneliness, overwhelming kindness, and stubborn convictions are beautifully rendered, as are the complexities of all the supporting characters and the vastness of the harsh landscape. Honor’s quiet determination provides a stark contrast to the roiling emotions of the slave issue, the abolitionist fight, and the often personal consequences. Chevalier’s thought-provoking, lyrical novel doesn’t allow any of her characters an easy way out.
Publishers Weekly
For the first time ever, the American-born, London-based Chevalier is using America as a backdrop. Leaving home after suffering a disappointment, English Quaker Honor Bright ends up in 1850 Ohio, where she finds folks—even Quakers—pragmatically unprincipled and becomes involved in the Underground Railroad.
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. "We're all from somewhere else. That's how Ohio is." —Belle Mills
Through Honor's own journey, the existence of the Underground Railroad and the runaways themselves, there is a constant sense of movement in this novel, suggesting home is not a permanent place and can be made and remade. Is Belle right that this is particular to Ohio or do you think this is a characteristic of America in general?
2. Silence in this novel seems to play different roles: communal religious silence at Meeting, individual reflection to which Honor attributes her own fine sewing, and there is also the Quaker community's more unsettling silence towards slavery.
Discuss the importance of its different roles in the novel. Does the Quaker community believe its own survival is dependent on staying quiet about slavery?
3. What are Honor's true feelings towards Donovan, and how do they change? Do you think her relationship with Donovan reveals aspects of her character that we don't see in her relationships with others?
4. When Belle Mills comes to visit Honor while she is sick at the Haymakers' farm, seeing her is, for Honor, like "discovering a sweet plum among a bowl full of unripe fruit." How important are the relationships Honor has with Belle Mills and Mrs. Reed? Is it significant that her strongest female relationships in Ohio lie outside the Quaker community? Would you say that female relationships would have been even more critical to survival in the 19th century than they are today?
5. Why do you think Honor feels she cannot go back to England? Do you think the horror of the journey plays a greater part than the heartbreak she ran away from?
6. When Honor comes across the applique patterns that are so common to quilting in Ohio, she finds them "cheerful" but "unsophisticated" when set against the accuracy and complexity of the patchwork quilts she is used to back home. Can this comparison have significance when considering the differences between England and the US at that time?
7. "As she peered into the dim woods, a raccoon scurried away, its humped back swaying back and forth...Grace would have loved to see a raccoon, Honor thought."
Honor spends much ofthe book learning how to cope with loss - of her intended husband, her sister, her homeland. Many of the other characters have their own losses to contend with. What does Honor learn from Belle, from Mrs. Reed, from Jack about dealing with loss?
8. How did The Last Runaway make you feel after reading it? Is this a hopeful story, both in the context of Honor's path and the path that America takes?
(Questions from author's website.)
The Last Song
Nicholas Sparks, 2009
Grand Central Publishing
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780446570961
Summary
Seventeen year old Veronica "Ronnie" Miller's life was turned upside-down when her parents divorced and her father moved from New York City to Wilmington, North Carolina.
hree years later, she remains angry and alientated from her parents, especially her father...until her mother decides it would be in everyone's best interest if she spent the summer in Wilmington with him. Ronnie's father, a former concert pianist and teacher, is living a quiet life in the beach town, immersed in creating a work of art that will become the centerpiece of a local church.
The tale that unfolds is an unforgettable story of love on many levels—first love, love between parents and children—that demonstrates, as only a Nicholas Sparks novel can, the many ways that love can break our hearts...and heal them. (From the publisher.)
The film 2010 film version starts Miley Cyrus.
Author Bio
• Birth—December 31. 1965
• Where—Omaha, Nebraska, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Notre Dame
• Currently—lives in New Bern, North Carolina
Nicholas Charles Sparks is an American novelist, screenwriter and producer. He has published some 20 novels, plus one non-fiction. Ten have been adapted to films, including Message in a Bottle, A Walk to Remember, The Notebook, Nights in Rodanthe, Dear John, The Last Song, The Lucky One, and most recently The Longest Ride.
Background
Sparks was born to Patrick Michael Sparks, a professor of business, and Jill Emma Marie Sparks (nee Thoene), a homemaker and an optometrist's assistant. He was the middle of three children, with an older brother and a younger sister, "Dana", who died at the age of 33 from a brain tumor. Sparks said that she is the inspiration for the main character in his novel A Walk to Remember.
His father was pursuing graduate studies at University of Minnesota and University of Southern California, and the family moved a great deal, so by the time Sparks was eight, he had lived in Watertown, Minnesota, Inglewood, California, Playa del Rey, California, and Grand Island, Nebraska, which was his mother's hometown during his parents' one year separation.
In 1974 his father became a professor of business at California State University, Sacramento teaching behavioral theory and management. His family settled in Fair Oaks, California, and remained there through Nicholas's high school days. He graduated in 1984 as valedictorian from Bella Vista High School, then enrolled at the University of Notre Dame under a full track and field scholarship. In his freshman year, his team set a record for the 4 x 800 relay.
Sparks majored in business finance and graduated from Notre Dame with honors in 1988. He also met his future wife that year, Cathy Cote from New Hampshire, while they were both on spring break. They married in 1989 and moved to New Bern, North Carolina.
Writing career
While still in school in 1985, Sparks penned his first (never published) novel, The Passing, while home for the summer between freshman and sophomore years at Notre Dame. He wrote another novel in 1989, also unpublished, The Royal Murders.
After college, Sparks sought work with publishers or to attend law school, but was rejected in both attempts. He then spent the next three years trying other careers, including real estate appraisal, waiting tables, selling dental products by phone and starting his own manufacturing business.
In 1990, Sparks co-wrote with Billy Mills Wokini: A Lakota Journey to Happiness and Self-Understanding. The book was published by Random House sold 50,000 copies in its first year.
In 1992, Sparks began selling pharmaceuticals and in 1993 was transferred to Washington, DC. It was there that he wrote another novel in his spare time, The Notebook. Two years later, he was discovered by literary agent Theresa Park, who picked The Notebook out of her agency's slush pile, liked it, and offered to represent him. In October 1995, Park secured a $1 million advance for The Notebook from Time Warner Book Group. The novel was published in 1996 and made the New York Times best-seller list in its first week of release.
With the success of his first novel, he and Cathy moved to New Bern, NC. After his first publishing success, he began writing his string of international bestsellers.
Personal life and philanthropy
Sparks continues to reside in North Carolina with his wife Cathy, their three sons, and twin daughters. A Roman Catholic since birth, he and his wife are raising their children in the Catholic faith.
In 2008, Entertainment Weekly reported that Sparks and his wife had donated "close to $10 million" to start a private Christian college-prep school, The Epiphany School of Global Studies, which emphasizes travel and lifelong learning.
Sparks also donated $900,000 for a new all-weather tartan track to New Bern High School. He also donates his time to help coach the New Bern High School track team and a local club track team as a volunteer head coach.
In addition to track, he funds scholarships, internships and annual fellowship to the Creative Writing Program (MFA) at the University of Notre Dame. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Nicholas Sparks' blockbuster novels are like hot buttered Orville Redenbacher for the soul: highly consumable [and] comforting.... Fans of The Notebook, Message in a Bottle, etc., will gobble [The Last Song] up with glee, right through the tear-duct-milking finale.
Entertainment Weekly
Discussion Questions
1. Ronnie is a difficult teenager who is prone to acting out and is alienated from both her parents at the start of the novel. Were you rebellious as a teenager? How was this manifested? On the other side, have you ever had to deal with a rebellious teenager? Did Ronnie’s behavior touch a nerve?
2. What do you think about the very different approaches to parenting taken by Ronnie’s mother and father? Do you think Ronnie’s mother is too intrusive or can you understand her relationship with Ronnie? Do you think Ronnie’s father is too absent, or can you understand why the relationship is the way it is?
3. Early in the novel we learn that Ronnie was a piano prodigy who performed at Carnegie Hall when she was thirteen. However, when we meet Ronnie she hasn’t played in many years and she’s sworn to never play the piano again. Why does Ronnie feel this way? Who do you think Ronnie hurts more by not playing the piano, herself or her father?
4. Reflecting back on his life, Steve wonders: “Was it still possible for someone like him to experience the presence of God?” Why does Steve ask himself this? What role do religion and belief play in this novel? How would you characterize Steve’s religious faith?
5. Why does Will fall for Ronnie? Can you understand the attraction from both Ronnie’s and Will’s point of view?
6. What do you make of Blaze? How would you characterize her relationship with Marcus? Have you ever been in a relationship that was not particularly healthy? Did you stay in the relationship? If so, why?
7. Ronnie and Will fall in love very quickly over the course of the summer. Have you ever had a summer romance that became something more than a fling?
8. This novel is, in large part, about loyalty and trust. Which characters exhibit the most trustworthiness and which exhibit the least? How does a betrayal of trust affect various relationships within the novel?
9. In the middle of the novel, Will asks Ronnie how far she would go to protect a friend. Why does Will ask Ronnie this? How far would you go to protect a friend?
10. How are Jonah and Ronnie affected by their parents’ divorce? What effect does divorce have on children, in your experience?
11. Both Will and Ronnie come from families that have certain expectations of them. How do these familial expectations shape them and in what ways do they reject these expectations?
12. Why does Ronnie get angry at Will toward the end of the novel? Do you think her anger is justified?
13. What do you think of the choices Steve and Kim make as parents? Do you think they were right in keeping certain things secret from their children?
14. Ronnie makes an important choice at the end of the novel. Would you have made the same choice if you were in her position?
15. In what ways does Ronnie change over the course of the novel? In what ways does she stay the same? (Questions issued by publisher.)
The Last Story of Mina Lee
Nancy Jooyoun Kim, 2020
Park Row Books
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780778310174
Summary
A profoundly moving and unconventional mother-daughter saga, The Last Story of Mina Lee illustrates the devastating realities of being an immigrant in America.
Margot Lee’s mother, Mina, isn’t returning her calls. It’s a mystery to twenty-six-year-old Margot, until she visits her childhood apartment in Koreatown, LA, and finds that her mother has suspiciously died.
The discovery sends Margot digging through the past, unraveling the tenuous invisible strings that held together her single mother’s life as a Korean War orphan and an undocumented immigrant, only to realize how little she truly knew about her mother.
Interwoven with Margot’s present-day search is Mina’s story of her first year in Los Angeles as she navigates the promises and perils of the American myth of reinvention. While she’s barely earning a living by stocking shelves at a Korean grocery store, the last thing Mina ever expects is to fall in love.
But that love story sets in motion a series of events that have consequences for years to come, leading up to the truth of what happened the night of her death.
Told through the intimate lens of a mother and daughter who have struggled all their lives to understand each other, The Last Story of Mina Lee is a powerful and exquisitely woven debut novel that explores identity, family, secrets, and what it truly means to belong. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Los Angeles, California
• Education—B.A., University of California, Los Angeles; M.A., University of Washington
• Currently—lives in the San Francisco Bay Area
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Nancy Jooyoun Kim is a graduate of UCLA and the University of Washington, Seattle. Her debut novel, The Last Story of Mina Lee, was released in 2020.
Her essays and short fiction have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, NPR/PRI’s Selected Shorts, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, The Offing, and elsewhere. (From the publisher .)
Book Reviews
The novel’s interior moments — in which mother and daughter think tragically past each other—work best.… Had the author kept the narrative this close, The Last Story of Mina Lee would have been a stronger book, its tangled subplots (Korean flashbacks, organized-crime figures) more of a counterbalance to the characters’ yearnings. Unfortunately, Kim succumbs to a common failing of first novels, telling too much.
Los Angeles Times
Mina’s immigration story poignantly mingles optimism with the heartbreak of exploitation. The more contemporary portions of the narrative, however, lack both emotional pull and narrative conviction.… As a personal immigration narrative Kim’s novel largely succeeds, but as a mystery novel or a mother-daughter drama it fails to connect.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) Haunting and heartbreaking, troubled threads between a mother and daughter blend together in a delicate and rich weave… With both sadness and beauty, [Kim] describes grief, regret, loss, and the feeling of being left behind. Fans of Amy Tan and Kristin Hannah will love Kim's brilliant debut.
Booklist
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:
1. How would you describe Mina and Margot, the two characters at the heart of this novel? What about their relationship—why it is so difficult? Why do mother and daughter find it so hard to understand one another?
2.The police have ruled Mina's death accidental. Why does Margot doubt their conclusion? What, in her mind, makes it suspicious?
3. As Margot begins her investigation into her mother's death, whom does she come to suspect? What about you?
4. The Last Story of Mina Lee is about the perils and hardships of immigration. Why did Mina leave South Korea, and what were her hopes for a life in the United States? In what way did those dreams fall short?
5. Do you believe that Mina's story typical of most, or at least many, newly arrived immigrants? Does the novel offer you insights into the rationale, dreams, and hardships of those who leave their countries and families behind to come to America?
6. Talk about Margot's own journey as she explores her mother's life. How it change her? What does she come to understand about who her mother was—and, just as important, who she herself is?
7. What do you see for Margot in the coming years? Do you believe she will see her grandmother?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Last Summer (of You and Me)
Ann Brashares, 2007
Penguin Group USA
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594483080
Summary
In The Last Summer (of You & Me), Ann Brashares explores the exhilaration and anguish of leaving adolescence. Telling the story of three lifelong friend—Alice, her sister Riley, and their neighbor Paul—who struggle to maintain their purity against the world's many compromises and betrayals, the novel captures both the innocent yearnings of childhood and the more complex desires of adulthood. As the former inevitably yields to the latter, the relationship between the three friends realigns in a complex dance of passion, guilt, and love, opening up new possibilities while closing off others forever.
As the story opens, it has been three long years since Alice last saw Paul at their summer home on Fire Island. While her sister Riley has always maintained contact with Paul during the off-seasons, Alice's relationship with him has been defined by their silences between summers. As she awaits his arrival on the afternoon ferry, Alice tries to deny that her feelings for Paul have grown beyond friendship. She knows that they are not reciprocated, and even if they were, to change the nature of their relationship would constitute a kind of betrayal of the bond they share with her sister.
Paul has avoided returning to Fire Island these past years because he fears what will happen when he does. Although he fights it with all his will, the truth is that he is in love with Alice and probably always has been. And then there is Riley, the kindred spirit of his childhood who somehow remains frozen in time both physically and emotionally. As much as Paul wishes he could join her in her state of perpetual childhood, the demands and longings of the adult world are pulling him in the opposite direction.
At first, the three of them fall right back into their old patterns — Paul and Riley forging off on adventures, Alice always left a few steps behind. But soon the attraction between Alice and Paul breaks to the surface, and they embark on an intense love affair tinged with guilt over the friend and sister they have left behind. That guilt is seemingly made manifest when Riley is suddenly struck with a life-threatening illness.
Dreading the attention and pity her condition is sure to elicit, Riley begs Alice not to tell Paul what has happened, and in so doing drives a wedge between the burgeoning couple. As Alice and Paul nurse regrets and resentments over the long, cold winter, Riley's health continues to deteriorate. Trying desperately to hang onto the lost bliss of their childhood, Alice, Paul, and Riley instead must face their futures. The road to that future is both heartbreaking and deeply moving, offering the promise of new life even in the face of immense loss. (From the publisher.
Author Bio
• Birth—July 30, 1967
• Where—Alexandria, Virginia, USA
• Reared—in Chevy Chase, Maryland
• Education—Barnard College
• Currently—lives in New York, New York
Ann Brashares is an American writer of young adult fiction, best known as the author of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series.
She was born in Alexandria, Virginia, and grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland. She attended elementary and high school at the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C. After studying philosophy at Barnard College, she worked as an editor for 17th Street Productions. 17th Street was acquired by Alloy Entertainment, and following the acquisition she worked briefly for Alloy.
After leaving Alloy she wrote The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, which became an international best seller. It was followed with three more titles in the "Pants" series, the last of which, Forever in Blue, was released in January 2007. The first book in the series was made into a film in 2005, and a second film based on the other three titles in the series was released in August 2008.
Brashares' first adult novel, The Last Summer (of You and Me) was released in 2007. The first companion book to the Sisterhood series, 3 Willows: The Sisterhood Grows was published in 2009, and the second companion book, Sisterhood Everlasting was published in 2011.
A second novel for adults, My Name is Memory was published in 2010 and has been optioned for film. Her next book, a young-adult time-travel novel, The Here and Now, was published in 2014. She lives in New York with her artist husband, Jacob Collins. They have four children.
Although Brashares writes primarily fiction, she has contributed two 80-page biographies to the nonfiction book series Techies—Linus Torvalds, Software Rebel and Steve Jobs Thinks Different, both issued in 2001. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/27/2014.)
Book Reviews
Despite its serious themes The Last Summer (of You and Me) is full of optimism and too neatly resolved. But it's steeped in the familiar longings for lost time that readers seeking the carefree pleasures of a summer will enjoy.
Kim Edwards - Washington Post
The Last Summer is as much a treatise on loyalty and letting go of childish ways as it is on a summer of love.
USA Today
Vivid elegy for youth...Brashares is wise as well as sentimental. She sagely remembers just how it feels to be young, lost, and in love. The Last Summer (of You and Me) is a weeper: If you don't grow misty there's something a bit shifty about the state of your heart.
Miami Herald
When summertime neighbors Alice and Paul realize their feelings for go deeper than friendshipm they're afraid to share the news of their clandestine affair with Riley, Alice's sister and Paul's best friend. But then a darker, more tragic secret threatens to come between them. The page-turning pace of Ann Brashares's The Last Summer (of You & Me) makes it a perfect beach read.
Redbook
[A] treacly tale about the tribulations a trio of longtime friends encounter.... Brashares's YA roots are on display: the girls and Paul act like high school kids...and anything below the surface is left untouched. It's a beach read, for sure, but a mediocre one.
Publishers Weekly
A novel about sisters, friendship, irrevocable loss, blossoming love, old betrayals and secrets.... Brashares writes with a spare hand about the evolving ties between Paul and the sisters.... But the characters, although likeable, never really come alive, and neither does the novel. Slow-moving, deliberately paced coming-of-age tale oddly lacking in passion, though a built-in readership will undoubtedly want to read it anyway.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Early on, we learn of the different beaches associated with each character: a Riley beach "was when little grains of sand whipped like glass against your skin and the surf was ragged and punishing"; a Paul beach has "low-tide crunchy sand, a sharp drop-off to the water, and a close army of rough, green waves"; and an Alice beach "was truly rare, and it involved tide pools." Discuss these three characters in relation to the beaches named after them. Are the names appropriate or ironic?
2. The school psychologist whom Riley is taken to in the fifth grade explains that the mind "has an immune system of its own." When dealing with distress, "it surrounds the offending element like a germ and stops its spread." Discuss the thematic significance of this passage. How does the "immune system" of each character's mind influence their actions throughout the novel?
3. Riley's sexuality is a subject of speculation for many characters in the novel. At one point, Paul guiltily considers the question: "Was Riley gay? Was she sexual at all? Was she lonely?" What answers does the novel offer? Are these questions even relevant to understanding who Riley is? Or are they, as Paul thinks, a subject for "smaller minds"?
4. Consider the author's choice of chapter titles. Some relate directly to subject of the chapter ("Waiting"), others introduce ideas not explicitly explored until later chapters ("You'll Turn Out Ordinary if You're Not Careful"), while still others echo ideas from previous chapters ("Cryogenics"). What, in your opinion, is the purpose of these titles? What do they reveal about the author's overall narrative approach?
5. Riley says that she missed the call for a potential heart transplant because she was swimming. Do you believe this? Is there some part of Riley—conscious or unconscious—that is seeking death?
6. As a child, Riley wonders what would happen if the dolphins in the aquarium at Coney Island could talk to the dolphins swimming in the ocean. "What would a free dolphin say to a captive one? How could one possibly understand the circumstances of the other?" How does this passage relate to the larger themes of the novel? Discuss the symbolic role of the Coney Island dolphins.
7. The phrase "consider yourself forgiven" is employed three times in the story: by Alice, as part of her ultimatum to Paul at the beginning of their romance; by Ethan, after Paul apologizes for brushing him off outside NYU; and by Paul, when Ethan expresses regret for his relationship with Paul's mother. Discuss the subtext of each occurrence of this phrase, and how it relates the development of the main characters.
8. Ultimately, Alice, Paul, and Riley fear growing up because of the example set by the adults in their world—especially their parents. How does each character deal with this fear through the course of the story? How does it influence their actions?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Last Summer of the Camperdowns
Elizabeth Kelly, 2013
Liveright Publishing
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780871403407
Summary
The Last Summer of the Camperdowns introduces Riddle James Camperdown, the twelve-year-old daughter of the idealistic Camp and his manicured, razor-sharp wife, Greer.
It’s 1972, and Riddle’s father is running for office from the family compound in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Between Camp’s desire to toughen her up and Greer’s demand for glamour, Riddle has her hands full juggling her eccentric parents.
When Riddle accidentally witnesses a crime close to home, her confusion and fear keep her silent. As the summer unfolds, the consequences of her silence multiply. Another mysterious and powerful family, the Devlins, slowly emerges as the keepers of astonishing secrets that could shatter the Camperdowns.
As an old love triangle, bitter war wounds, and the struggle for status spiral out of control, Riddle can only watch, hoping for the courage to reveal the truth. The Last Summer of the Camperdowns is poised to become the summer’s uproarious and dramatic must-read. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Elizabeth Kelly is the best-selling author of the novel Apologize, Apologize! (2009) and The Last Summer of the Camperdowns (2013). She is an award-winning journalist and lives in Merrickville, Ontario, Canada, with her husband, five dogs, and three cats. (From .)
Book Reviews
The plot unfolds like the Cape Cod season itself… beginning lazily, languidly, before heating up and morphing into a fast-paced thriller.
Abbe Wright - O Magazine
These vibrant personalities jump off the page individually, and the collective dynamic is as lifelike and scintillating as beautifully cast actors in an artfully directed play… the scenes and dialogue unravel organically, and razor-sharp witticisms tumble out effortlessly.
Redbook
Kelly’s raucous, deliciously creepy novel about the dysfunction of the über wealthy begins in 1972 as the hoity-toity Camperdown clan prepare for another summer.... The novel threatens to veer too predictably into Great Gatsby territory (long-buried secrets bubbling to the surface...but is saved by precocious Riddle’s dry-witted narration of events, at least until she witnesses a heinous murder and clams up.... [I]n a climax that’s a touch too hurried...no one, not even the creepy killer, escapes unscathed.
Publishers Weekly
The author of Apologize! Apologize! (2009) returns with another witty take on a dysfunctional family… Kelly is a very entertaining writer with a digressive style and a way with metaphor …readers will find much to like in this colorful story peopled with larger-than-life personalities.
Booklist
A 13-year-old girl finds that keeping secrets can have mortal consequences.... Kelly's new novel is just as scathingly witty as her best-selling debut [Apologize! Apologize!] but better plotted and even more emotionally harrowing, as narrator Riddle Camperdown looks back two decades to the disastrous summer of 1972.... Kelly skillfully builds almost unbearable tension, slipping in plenty of dark laughs en route to a wrenching climax that leaves in its wake some painfully unresolved questions—just like life. More fine work from a writer with a rare gift for blending wit and rue.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The novel is set in Cape Cod during the summer of 1972. How does the physical setting and time period affect the story? How would the plot differ if the story was set in a different location at a different historical moment?
2. On numerous occasions throughout the novel, Riddle is compared to Greer. Are Riddle and Greer really as different as they appear? What qualities do they share?
3. As Michael reappears in the life of the Camperdowns, the relationship between Camp and Greer alters. Why does Michael change their dynamic, and what else could be at work between Camp and Greer?
4. How does Greer’s experience as an actress influence her daily behavior? Although Greer is the only actress by profession, what other characters are guilty of performing their lives? What initiates their needs to play out specific roles?
5. Describe Riddle’s relationship with Gula. How do you interpret Gula’s fictitious stories that continue to unfold? Can you relate to Riddle’s complicated emotions of perversion and seduction toward Gula?
6. Why do you think nineteen-year-old Harry has such an attachment to twelve-year-old Riddle? What is at the heart of their friendship? Do you think Harry will ever speak to Riddle again?
7. What explains Gula’s fascination with Riddle? Why do you think Gula gave Riddle the present at the end of the book?
8. Riddle’s reaction to finding Charlie’s body is noteworthy: “I felt such shame, such guilt, even as I was ashamed to feel shame, disgusted by my feelings of guilt.” Why do you think Riddle felt this way? What do her emotions reveal about her character?
9. In Charlie’s book of condolences, Camp writes, “I will see you in the morning.” What do you think this means?
Compare Michael and Camp; which man do you find more trustworthy? Whose account of the war do you believe? Who do you think Greer loved more?
10. One theme of the book is the power of secrets, and the end of the book capitalizes on the secret Riddle has kept throughout regarding Charlie’s death. Do you think this is the most consequential secret of the book? What other secrets cause grave consequences?
11. How does the first chapter, set in the present, frame the rest of the novel that is set in the past? When the novel returns to the present in the epilogue, how have your feelings for Riddle changed from the beginning of the book?
The book is narrated from Riddle’s point of view. How does her perspective influence the story? Do you trust her as a narrator? Why or why not?
12. Why do you think Riddle kept what she saw in the yellow barn a secret for so long? How was Gula able to manipulate Riddle to stay silent? What drove Riddle to finally reveal the truth?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Last Time I Saw You
Elizabeth Berg, 2010
Random House
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400068647
Summary
To each of the men and women in The Last Time I Saw You, their 40th high school reunion means something different—a last opportunity to say something long left unsaid, an escape from the bleaker realities of everyday life, a means to save a marriage on the rocks, or an opportunity to bond with a slightly estranged daughter, if only over what her mother should wear.
As the onetime classmates meet up over the course of a weekend, they discover things that will irrevocably affect the rest of their lives. For newly divorced Dorothy Shauman, the reunion brings with it the possibility of finally attracting the attention of the class heartthrob, Pete Decker. For the ever self-reliant, ever left-out Mary Alice Mayhew, it’s a chance to reexamine a painful past. For Lester Heseenpfeffer, a veterinarian and widower, it is the hope of talking shop with a fellow vet—or at least that’s what he tells himself. For Candy Armstrong, the class beauty, it’s the hope of finding friendship before it is too late.
As Dorothy, Mary Alice, Lester, Candy, and the other classmates converge for the reunion dinner, four decades melt away, desires and personalities from their youth reemerge, and new discoveries are made. For so much has happened to them all. And so much can still happen.
In this beautiful novel, Elizabeth Berg deftly weaves together stories of roads taken and not taken, choices made and opportunities missed, and the possibilities of second chances. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 2, 1948
• Where—St. Paul, Minnesota, USA
• Education—A.A.S, St. Mary’s College
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Chicago, Illinois
Before she became a writer, Elizabeth Berg spent 10 years as a nurse. It's a field, as she says on her website, that helped her to become a writer:
Taking care of patients taught me a lot about human nature, about hope and fear and love and loss and regret and triumph and especially about relationships—all things that I tend to focus on in my work.
Her sensitivity to humanity is what Berg's writing is noted for. As Publishers Weekly wrote in reviewing The Dream Lover, her 2015 portrayal of George Sand, "Berg offers vivid, sensual detail and a sensitive portrayal of the yearning and vulnerability" behind her main character.
Background
Berg was born in St. Paul Minneapolis. When her father re-enlisted in the Army, she and her family were moved from base to base—in one single year, she went to three different schools. Her peripatetic childhood makes it hard for Berg to answer the usually simple question, "where did you grow up?"
Berg recalls that she loved to write at a young age. She was only nine when she submitted her first poem to American Girl magazine; sadly, it was rejected. It was another 25 years before she submitted anything again—to Parents Magazine—and that time she won.
In addition to nursing, Berg worked as a waitress, another field she claims is "good training for a writer." She also sang in a rock band.
Writing
Berg ended up writing for magazines for 10 years before she finally turned to novels. Since her 1993 debut with Durable Goods, her books have sold in large numbers and been translated into 27 languages. She writes nearly a book a year, a number of which have received awards and honors.
Recognition
Two of Berg's books, Durable Goods and Joy School, were listed as "Best Books of the Year" by the American Library Association. Open House became an Oprah Book Club Selection.
She won the New England Booksellers Award for her body of work, and Boston Public Library made her a "literary light." She has also been honored by the Chicago Public Library. An article on a cooking school in Italy, for National Geographic Traveler magazine, won an award from the North American Travel Journalists Association.
Personal
Now divorced, Berg was married for over twenty years and has two daughters and three grandchildren. She lives with her dogs and a cat in Chicago. (Author bio adapted from the author's website.)
Book Reviews
A high school reunion and all of its attendant dramas is the backdrop of Berg's rose-tinted latest (after Home Safe). For Dorothy Shauman, her 40th reunion is the chance to finally hook up with her high school crush. She prepares weeks in advance for the big night, strange as that may seem, preening in front of the mirror. As Berg surveys the gamut of emotions felt by Dorothy and some of her classmates, she zeroes in on an array of stereotypes—the hot girls, the jocks, the in crowd, the out crowd—and considers what makes each one tick, offering the vanilla revelation that the person on the inside doesn't always match the person on the outside. It's cleanly plotted, ably written, and sure to appeal to boomers staring down the barrel of their own 40th reunions.
Publishers Weekly
Luckily, the zestfully wise Berg is the perfect teacher for such tender lessons of the heart, and her sublimely authentic and winsome characters are apt students. Book groups are clamoring for upbeat yet significant works that are entertaining as well as enlightening; Berg’s latest novel satisfies and succeeds on both counts. —Carol Haggas
Booklist
A 40th high-school reunion reawakens old insecurities and crushes among former geeks, jocks, wallflowers and beauty queens. In the small Ohio town of Clear Springs, the high-school class of 1960-something is about to relapse into old roles. Three of the alums still live in Clear Springs. Lester, science nerd, is now a veterinarian. Mary Alice, a four-eyed ugly duckling who never married, is caring for her 92-year-old neighbor Einer. Divorcee Dorothy, who hovered on the fringes of popularity, is crash-dieting in hopes of seducing quarterback Pete Decker, who, she hears, is separated from his wife and high-school sweetheart Nora. Blonde lead cheerleader Candy has just been diagnosed with a terminal disease, and she intends to fly to the reunion accompanied by her bulldog in lieu of husband Coop, whose micromanagement she finds exhausting. Pam, the unpopular girl still tasked, thanklessly, with organizing events, has planned the ultimate buzz-kill for the reunion dinner-dance. While trying to dump his mistress and win back Nora, Pete suffers a heart attack. He escapes from the hospital to attend the reunion dressed in ill-fitting golf togs purchased at the airport. Nora flaunts her new boyfriend, while Mary Alice is escorted by Einer, who vows to protect her from classmates who used to haze her. When Dorothy arrives flanked by girlfriends who made up her small clique, she's dismayed to see Pete schmoozing Mary Alice. Einer shares his own high-school memories—then, they called the cool crowd "superlatives." Candy seeks out Lester as her dinner mate, much to Mary Alice's dismay: She had high hopes after lunch with Lester. Candy invites Lester to her hotel room, to examine the suspicious lumps she's just discovered on her bulldog's abdomen. More cynical than her usual Anne Tyler-lite approach, Berg's depiction of her characters' mid-life follies and ongoing struggles with the specter of aging is at times hilarious, at times sad, but this time she steers clear of the maudlin to go for the jugular.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Last Time I Saw You:
1. Berg offers portraits of high school "types"—the jock, the cheerleader, the popular kids, the nerds and outsiders. Are her depictions accurate?
2. Which character do you most identify with? Which ones do you find most sympathetic? Which least sympathetic?
3. What do the individual characters want—or hope to achieve —from the reunion? Why are some hesitant to attend?
4. In what ways have the various characters changed over the past 40 years—especially Lester and Mary Alice? Have any other characters truly changed? What have they learned? How have expectations been dashed...or met?
5. One character observes: "Here they are, these people, all these years later just...what? Trying.... Just trying." What does he mean..."just trying" to do what?
6. High school comprises a very short time of our lives; in retrospect, most of us recognize how shallow, cruel, even meaningless, the social heirarchy was. Nonetheless, the memories—the hurts and triumphs—resonate even after 40 years. Why is that? Why are those few short years so potent for so many?
7. If you're "of an age"... or have graduated even just 10 years ago...does Berg's novel ring true to you? Have you attended any of your high school reunions?
8. Does the ending of Berg's novel satisfy you? Are you pleased with how it all turned out?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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The Last Time I Was Me
Cathy Lamb, 2008
Kensington Publishing
404 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780758214638
Summary
I wrapped up my grandmother's tea cup collection and my mother's china, then grabbed a violin I'd hidden way back in my closet that made me cry, a gold necklace with a dolphin that my father gave me two weeks before he died of a heart attack when I was twelve and, at midnight, with that moon as bright as the blazes, I left Chicago.
When Jeanne Stewart stops at The Opera Man's Cafe in Weltana, Oregon, to eat pancakes for the first time in twelve years, she has no idea she's also about to order up a whole new future. It's been barely a week since she succumbed to a spectacularly public nervous breakdown in front of hundreds of the nation's most important advertising and PR people. Jeanne certainly had her reasons—her mother's recent death, the discovery that her boyfriend had been sleeping with a dozen other women, and the assault charges that resulted when Jeanne retaliated in a creative way against him, involving condoms and peanut oil.
Now, en route to her brother's house in Portland, Jeanne impulsively decides to spend some time in picturesque Weltana. Staying at a B&B run by the eccentric, endearing Rosvita, she meets a circle of quirky new friends at her court-ordered Anger Management classes. Like Jeanne, all of them are trying to become better, braver versions of themselves. Yet the most surprising discoveries are still to come—a good man who steadily makes his way into her heart and a dilapidated house that with love and care might be transformed into something wholly her own, just like the new life she is slowly building, piece by piece.
As heartfelt as it is hilarious, The Last Time I Was Me is a warm, wise novel about breaking down, opening up, and finally letting go of everything we thought we should be, in order to claim the life that has been waiting all along. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Newport Beach, California, USA
• Raised—state of Oregon
• Education—B.A., University of Oregon
• Currently—lives in Portland, Oregon
In her words:
I was born in Newport Beach, California and spent my first ten years playing outside like a wild vagabond.
As a child, I mastered the art of skateboarding, catching butterflies in bottles, and riding my bike with no hands. When I was ten, my parents moved me, my two sisters, a brother, and two poorly behaved dogs to Oregon before I could fulfill my lifelong dream of becoming a surfer bum.
I then embarked on my notable academic career where I earned good grades now and then, spent a great deal of time daydreaming, ran wild with a number of friends, and landed on the newspaper staff in high school. When I saw my byline above an article about people making out in the hallways of the high school, I knew I had found my true calling.
After two years of partying at the University of Oregon, I settled down for the next three years and earned my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education, and became a fourth grade teacher. I became a teacher because I wanted to become a writer. It was difficult for me to become proper and conservative but I threw out my red cowboy boots and persevered. I had no choice. I had to eat and health insurance is expensive. I loved teaching, but I also loved the nights and summers where I could write and try to build a career filled with creativity and my strange imagination.
I met my husband on a blind date. A mutual friend who was an undercover vice cop busting drug dealers set us up. My husband jokes he was being arrested at the time. That is not true. Do not believe him. His sense of humor is treacherous. It was love at third sight. We’ve now been married a long time.
Teaching children about the Oregon Trail and multiplication facts amused me until I became so gigantically pregnant with twins I looked like a small cow and could barely walk. With a three year old at home, I decided it was time to make a graceful exit and waddle on out. I left school one day and never went back. I later landed in the hospital for over six weeks with pre term labor, but that is another (rather dull) story. I like to think my students missed me.
When I was no longer smothered in diapers and pacifiers, I took a turn onto the hazardous road of freelance writing and wrote over 200 articles on homes, home décor, people and fashion for a local newspaper. As I am not fashionable and can hardly stand to shop, it was an eye opener to find that some women actually do obsess about what to wear. I also learned it would probably be more relaxing to slam a hammer against one’s forehead than engage in a large and costly home remodeling project. I also tried to write romance books, which ended ingloriously for years.
I suffer from, "I Would Rather Play Than Work Disease" which prevents me from getting much work done unless I have a threatening deadline, which is often. I like to hang with family and friends, walk, eat chocolate, travel, go to Starbucks, and I am slightly obsessive, okay very obsessive, about the types of books I read. I also like to be left alone a lot so I can hear all the bizarre and troubled characters in my head talk to each other and then transfer that oddness to paper. The characters usually don’t start to talk until 10:00 at night, however, so I am often up ‘til 2:00 in the morning with them. That is my excuse for being cranky. Really, I was just born a little cranky.
I adore my children and husband, except when he refuses to take his dirty shoes off and walks on the carpet. I will ski because my kids insist, but I secretly don’t like it at all. Too cold and I fall all the time.
I am currently working on my next novel and I’m not sleeping much. (From the author's website.)
Follow Cathy on Facebook.
Book Reviews
Lamb is an awesome storyteller and moves seamlessly from the past to the present.
RT Book Reviews
IF YOU COULD SEE WHAT I SEE: Lamb’s story is earnest, heartwarming and, at times, heartbreaking.
RT Book Reviews
THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF MY LIFE: The blending of three or more generations and the secrets they harbor keeps this story moving briskly, culminating in a satisfying ending that makes us believe that despite heartache and angst, there can be such a thing as happily ever after.
New York Journal of Books
SUCH A PRETTY FACE: Stevie’s a winning heroine
Publishers Weekly
HENRY’S SISTERS
An Indie Next List Notable Book.
A story of strength and reconciliation and change.
Sunday Oregonian
If you loved Terms of Endearment, the Ya Ya Sisterhood, and Steel Magnolias, you will love Henry’s Sisters. Cathy Lamb just keeps getting better and better.
Three Tomatoes Book Club
THE LAST TIME I WAS ME: Charming.
Publishers Weekly
JULIA’S CHOCOLATES: Julia's Chocolates is wise, tender, and very funny. In Julia Bennett, Cathy Lamb has created a deeply wonderful character, brave and true. I loved this beguiling novel about love, friendship and the enchantment of really good chocolate.
Luanne Rice, New York Times bestselling author
Discussion Questions
1. Jeanne Stewart says, "To assume that a woman, any woman, is completely innocent is to be completely naïve." Is she right?
2. What was your first impression of Jeanne? Do you like her? Is she a feminist or a traditionalist at heart, or both?
3. Jeanne says that most women have secrets, "Pretty big ones, if I do say so myself." What secrets did people have in this book? Is it true that most women have secrets? Do you have secrets? Do people tell you their secrets?
4. What character did you most relate to in anger management class? What personal growth, if any, did you see in Bradon, Becky, Soman, Jeanne, and Emmaline? Was there a session that you would have liked to take part in? Do you need anger management?
5. Soman says he has, "sluggin’ problems." he also dresses like a woman to relax, gets in bar fights, and falls in love with Becky, an ex addict. Where do you see Soman in five years? Ten? Will he and Becky still be together?
6. Bradon King says...
Every year more black kids drop out of school. Every year no one cares. I think the schools are glad to see 'em go. But then what happens to them? They’re teenagers, Jeanne. Kids. And their future is, at that moment, zero. Why doesn’t anyone care? Because the kids are black? You can damn well bet that if a bunch of rich, white sixteen year old girls all started dropping out of school and selling drugs on the corner that people would be screaming their heads off and demanding change. And change would happen.
Is that true? How would you describe Braden?
7. Is Jeanne a heavy drinker or is she an alcoholic?
8. Jeanne becomes very close to the Lopez family and is, herself, one quarter Hispanic. She clearly sympathizes with their plight and the plight of the migrant workers. What does this tell you about her personally?
9. Did the migrant devil deserve his punishment?
10. Jeanne said, "All women, feminist or not, have a right to take action against condoms that are worn by cheating men." Do you believe this? What does the peanut oil and condom incident tell you about Jeanne? Why do men cheat? Why do women cheat?
11. Jeanne assaulted her ex boyfriend with a condom and peanut oil knowing he had a slight allergy to peanut oil. She helped to bury the body of a man whom she thought her friend had shot. She actively participated in a bar fight. She committed perjury at her trial when she said she only put in two drops of peanut oil per condom. Is she a criminal?
12. If Jeanne came to dinner at your house, what five pieces of advice would she give you about your life?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)
The Last Town on Earth
Thomas Mullen, 2006
Random House
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812975925
Summary
Set against the backdrop of one of the most virulent epidemics that America ever experienced—the 1918 flu epidemic—Thomas Mullen’s powerful, sweeping first novel is a tale of morality in a time of upheaval.
Deep in the mist-shrouded forests of the Pacific Northwest is a small mill town called Commonwealth, conceived as a haven for workers weary of exploitation. For Philip Worthy, the adopted son of the town’s founder, it is a haven in another sense—as the first place in his life he’s had a loving family to call his own.
And yet, the ideals that define this outpost are being threatened from all sides. A world war is raging, and with the fear of spies rampant, the loyalty of all Americans is coming under scrutiny. Meanwhile, another shadow has fallen across the region in the form of a deadly illness striking down vast swaths of surrounding communities.
When Commonwealth votes to quarantine itself against contagion, guards are posted at the single road leading in and out of town, and Philip Worthy is among them. He will be unlucky enough to be on duty when a cold, hungry, tired—and apparently ill—soldier presents himself at the town’s doorstep begging for sanctuary. The encounter that ensues, and the shots that are fired, will have deafening reverberations throughout Commonwealth, escalating until every human value—love, patriotism, community, family, friendship—not to mention the town’s very survival, is imperiled.
Inspired by a little-known historical footnote regarding towns that quarantined themselves during the 1918 epidemic, The Last Town on Earth is a remarkably moving and accomplished debut. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Rhode Island, USA
• Education—B.A., Oberlin College
• Awards—James Fenimore Cooper Prize, Best Historical
Fiction
• Currently—lives in Atlanta, Georgia
Thomas Mullen is the author of The Last Town on Earth, which was named Best Debut Novel of 2006 by USA Today, was a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year, and was awarded the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for excellence in historical fiction.
His second novel, The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers, will be published in early 2010 by Random House. Since the publication of The Last Town on Earth, he has given lectures/readings to universities and community libraries (some of which have chosen The Last Town on Earth for "One Book/One Community" or "Freshman Reads" projects), literary festivals, and the Chicago Humanities Festival.
Mullen was born and raised in Rhode Island and graduated from Oberlin College. He has lived in Boston; in Chapel Hill, NC; in Washington, DC; and he now makes his home in Atlanta with his wife and son.
When not reading or writing, his greatest interests are music, film, travel, and hiking. The best books he read in 2008 were Lush Life by Richard Price, Citizen Vince by Jess Walter, Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris, Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner, and The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Quietly, ominously, these details create a larger background we may recognize — a deeply unpopular war, a subservient press, a secretive vigilante-like group called the American Protective League, sponsored by the Department of Justice, which monitors the draft and suppresses dissent. As always, noncombatant politicians wage a comical war against language (substituting, say, "liberty cabbage" for "sauerkraut.").
Max Byrd - New York Time
A novel about the Spanish flu would be hard put to avoid grimness, of course, what with all the dying that will have to go on if it's going to be true to the historical event. But grim can be gripping. As does nearly every would-be serious novel hoping for a breakthrough these days, Mullen's book has most of the requisite elements: psychological suspense, villains, victims, a conflicted hero or two, secrets and a mystery. In short, it's a grabber.
Zofia Smardz - Washington Post
It is the autumn of 1918 and a world war and an influenza epidemic rage outside the isolated utopian logging community of Commonwealth, Wash. In an eerily familiar climate of fear, rumor and patriotic hysteria, the town enacts a strict quarantine, posting guards at the only road into town. A weary soldier approaches the gate on foot and refuses to stop. Shots ring out, setting into motion a sequence of events that will bring the town face-to-face with some of the 20th-century's worst horrors. Mullen's ambitious debut is set against a plausibly sketched background, including events such the Everett Massacre (between vigilantes and the IWW), the political repression that accompanied the U.S. entry into WWI and the rise of the Wobblies. But what Mullen supplies in terms of historical context, he lacks in storytelling; though the novel is set in 1918, it was written in a post 9/11 world where fear of bird flu regularly makes headlines, and the allegory is heavy-handed (the protagonist townie, after all, is named Philip Worthy). The grim fascination of the narrative, however, will keep readers turning the pages.
Publishers Weekly
Set in 1918, with World War I raging in Europe and a deadly flu epidemic spreading to and through America, this is the story of a town that decides to take its fate into its own hands. The committee members of the Washington town of Commonwealth decide to set up an armed outpost to prevent those infected with influenza from getting in. Young guards Graham, a mill worker, and Philip, the 16-year-old adopted son of the mill owner, reluctantly murder a soldier from a local fort who tries to force his way in. A few days later, a second soldier attempts to gain entry. Philip, alone this time, can't shoot the man, and the youth and soldier end up quarantined together. Yet despite the town's precautions, the plague arrives and wreaks graphically depicted havoc. Debut novelist Mullen patiently unfolds the plot, using historical facts as a springboard. His long and absorbing novel is a timely and sobering look back at a nation during a deadly war involving a human enemy far away, a disease at home, fear, and political and cultural forces. Recommended for all collections. —Jim Coan, SUNY Coll. at Oneonta, NY
Library Journal
Set in 1918 against the backdrop of World War I and the influenza epidemic, this ambitious debut novel draws several vivid parallels with current times.... Although the novel is too long and, in places, too detailed, its foreboding atmosphere and grim story line exert considerable pull. —Joanne Wilkinson
Booklist
A progressive community buckles under a double whammy: the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic and the hatreds stirred by American participation in WWI. Deep in the evergreens north of Seattle, a company town revolves around its timber mill. Owner Charles Worthy founded Commonwealth in 1916, and two years later, the town is thriving. The workers own their homes and set the rules, dispensing with police. After nearby Timber Falls is hit by the flu, a majority of Commonwealth's residents decide to quarantine the town. Armed volunteers guard the one access road. Worthy's adopted son, 16-year-old Philip, is on guard duty with Graham, an older man he regards as a big brother, when a disheveled soldier emerges from the woods and ignores orders to stop. Graham shoots him dead. Some days later, Philip is the lone sentry when a second soldier appears. After a skirmish, Philip and the soldier are detained by another guard, also deemed a possible carrier. Meanwhile, Commonwealth has its first flu death: a Canadian who snuck into Timber Falls for some liquor. The sickness travels with astonishing speed; fear and suspicion infect the town along with the epidemic. As supplies dwindle, the store and community gardens are plundered. Mullen has a good premise for a disaster story, but a fatal weakness for melodrama. Graham kills the imprisoned soldier, believing him to be the original carrier. Philip, back home but now stricken himself, rises from his sickbed to confront Graham; then a delegation of lawmen and goons from Timber Falls forces its way into town to arrest draft-dodgers, including the sick and contagious. Mullen's debut gets mileage out of the gruesome epidemic and contains some interesting historical nuggets, but it fails to mesh its grim subject matter with convincing individual narratives.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. In what ways does Thomas Mullen use foreshadowing throughout the novel?
2. The Commonwealth quarantine is rife with moral ramifications. What are its consequences? Was Charles’ decision reasonable? What would you have done in his place?
3. The gauze mask has a ubiquitous presence throughout the story. What is its symbolic significance?
4. The flu often causes its victims to experience delusions. What other examples of delusion, literal or figurative, can you find throughout the novel?
5. Rebecca, Elsie, Tamara and other women in the novel have important influences on their male loved ones. What do these women have in common? In what ways do they exert their influence?
6. What is Frank’s significance? Why does Philip grow so attached to him?
7. Does the relationship between Frank and the C.O. resonate with Philip and Graham’s relationship? If so, how?
8. Were you surprised by Philip’s recovery? Why do you think Mullen allows him (and the rest of the Worthy family) to survive?
9. How has Philip developed by the end of the novel? Has his character progressed or regressed? Having been “stripped of so many things that he thought had defined who he was” (page 387), how, then, should we view his prior experiences?
10. Philip initially calls Graham a murderer for shooting the first soldier, but ultimately ends up shooting Bartrum to save Graham’s life. Is there a difference between their acts? Where does Philip and Graham’s relationship stand by the end of the novel?
11. A prominent motif throughout the novel is that of starting over after experiencing loss. Bearing this in mind, is your interpretation of the ending optimistic or pessimistic?
12. Would you have responded to the crisis more like Philip or like Graham?
13. Do you think Philip and Graham’s behavior differed in part because of their situations? Does that make their decisions about the soldier more or less sympathetic/understandable?
(Copyright 2007 by the Random House Publishing Group. Permission for use granted by Random House Inc.)
The Last Train to Key West
Chanel Cleeton, 2020
Penguin Publishing
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780451490889
Summary
In 1935 three women are forever changed when one of the most powerful hurricanes in history barrels toward the Florida Keys.
For the tourists traveling on Henry Flagler’s legendary Overseas Railroad, Labor Day weekend is an opportunity to forget the economic depression gripping the nation.
But one person’s paradise can be another’s prison, and Key West-native Helen Berner yearns to escape.
After the Cuban Revolution of 1933 leaves Mirta Perez’s family in a precarious position, she agrees to an arranged marriage with a notorious American. Following her wedding in Havana, Mirta arrives in the Keys on her honeymoon.
While she can’t deny the growing attraction to her new husband, his illicit business interests may threaten not only her relationship, but her life.
Elizabeth Preston's trip to Key West is a chance to save her once-wealthy family from their troubles after the Wall Street crash. Her quest takes her to the camps occupied by veterans of the Great War and pairs her with an unlikely ally on a treacherous hunt of his own.
Over the course of the holiday weekend, the women’s paths cross unexpectedly, and the danger swirling around them is matched only by the terrifying force of the deadly storm threatening the Keys. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Chanel Cleeton is bestselling author of When We Left Cuba (2019), the Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick Next Year in Havana.(2019), and The Last Train to Key West (2020).
Originally from Florida, she grew up on stories of her family's exodus from Cuba following the events of the Cuban Revolution. Her passion for politics and history continued during her years spent studying in England where she earned a bachelor's degree in international relations from Richmond, the American International University in London, and a master's degree in global politics from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Chanel also received her Juris Doctor from the University of South Carolina School of Law. She loves to travel and has lived in the Caribbean, Europe, and Asia. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Edge-of-your-seat storytelling is Cleeton's hallmark….The Last Train to Key West blends danger, intimacy, history, and suspense in a taut, romantic story I didn't want to end.
NPR
The author neatly ties up the trio of plotlines, revealing the slender—and very convenient—threads connecting the women. Cleeton finds the right balance of historical detail and suspense, making this a riveting curl-up-on-the-couch affair.
Publishers Weekly
[E]ach of the three story lines is well done on its own, and the historical events are riveting. Cleeton's strength is in exploring the lives of women longing to push back against restrictive social expectations. —Mara Bandy Fass, Champaign P.L., IL
Library Journal
Cleeton’s depiction of the catastrophic hurricane is both gripping and terrifying, and she skillfully balances each woman’s internal growth with the various romantic subplots. Fans of Cleeton’s previous books… will devour this exciting, romantic tale.
Booklist
The story, the characters, the setting and the situation all lead to a thrilling climax.… We see the beauty of the Keys, the worst side of nature, and the fortitude of women who must stand up for themselves.
BookReporter
Discussion Questions
1. At the beginning of the novel, Helen says, "People are what circumstances make them.' Do you agree with her statement? Why or why not? Are there places in the book where this sentiment seems to be true? How do the characters demonstrate this?
2. The hurricane hits Key West in 1935, during the Great Depression. What effect does the Depression have on the characters, on the setting? How do larger world events shape characters’ lives in the book?
3. What parallels do you see between the effects the hurricane has on the characters and that of fighting in the Great War?
4. How is the treatment of the veterans of the Great War similar to the problems faced by society during the Great Depression? Were you surprised to hear about the veterans’ lives after they came home from the war and some of the challenges they faced?
5. Helen and John have both experienced trauma. How does it shape them? What similarities do you see between their experiences and the way they cope with them? What differences?
6. Mirta and Elizabeth both come from wealthy families that have fallen on hard times. What similarities do you see in their personalities? What differences? How do those similarities and differences influence the choices they make throughout the novel?
7. The Last Train to Key West alternates between Helen’s, Mirta’s, and Elizabeth’s perspectives. Which character did you identify with most? How do they grow and change throughout the novel?
8. Elizabeth tells Sam that the Depression has been particularly hard on women. What examples do you see throughout the book where women’s lives are influenced by society’s expectations for them? How do they react to these expectations?
9. During the Depression, marriage rates dropped significantly. At the same time, marriage plays an important role in the characters’ lives. How do the heroines’ views on marriage change throughout the novel? Do the women find power in their relationships?
10. Mirta and Anthony’s marriage changes throughout the novel. What shifts do you see in their relationship? What roles do they take on and how do they evolve in those roles?
11. All of the main characters are searching for something at the start of the novel. Do you they ultimately find what they were looking for? How does the journey change them? What were they really searching for to begin with?
12. The characters’ lives are largely shaped by the hurricane and its aftermath. Have you ever experienced a natural disaster? How did the experience influence you?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Last Tudor
Philippa Gregory, 2017
Touchstone
528 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781476758763
Summary
Philippa Gregory's latest novel features one of the most famous girls in history, Lady Jane Grey, and her two sisters, each of whom dared to defy her queen.
Jane Grey was queen of England for nine days. Her father and his allies crowned her instead of the dead king’s half sister Mary Tudor, who quickly mustered an army, claimed her throne, and locked Jane in the Tower of London.
When Jane refused to betray her Protestant faith, Mary sent her to the executioner’s block, where Jane transformed her father’s greedy power grab into tragic martyrdom.
"Learn you to die," was the advice Jane wrote to her younger sister Katherine, who has no intention of dying. She intends to enjoy her beauty and her youth and fall in love.
But she is heir to the insecure and infertile Queen Mary and then to her half sister, Queen Elizabeth, who will never allow Katherine to marry and produce a Tudor son. When Katherine’s pregnancy betrays her secret marriage, she faces imprisonment in the Tower, only yards from her sister’s scaffold.
"Farewell, my sister," writes Katherine to the youngest Grey sister, Mary. A beautiful dwarf, disregarded by the court, Mary keeps family secrets, especially her own, while avoiding Elizabeth’s suspicious glare.
After seeing her sisters defy their queens, Mary is acutely aware of her own danger but determined to command her own life. What will happen when the last Tudor defies her ruthless and unforgiving Queen Elizabeth? (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 9, 1954
• Where—Nairobi, Kenya
• Raised—Bristol, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Sussex University; Ph.D., Edinburgh University
• Currently—lives in the North York Moors, Yorkshire, England
Philippa Gregory is a British historical novelist, writing since 1987. The best known of her works is The Other Boleyn Girl (2001), which in 2002 won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award from the Romantic Novelists' Association.
Early life and academic career
Philippa Gregory was in Nairobi, Kenya, the second daughter of Elaine (Wedd) and Arthur Percy Gregory, a radio operator and navigator for East African Airways. When she was two years old, her family moved to Bristol, England.
She was a "rebel" at Colston's Girls' School where she obtained a B grade in English and two E grades in History and Geography at A-level. She then went to journalism college in Cardiff and spent a year as an apprentice with the Portsmouth News before she managed to gain a place on an English literature degree course at the University of Sussex, where she switched to a history course.
She worked in BBC radio for two years before attending the University of Edinburgh, where she earned her doctorate in 18th-century literature. Gregory has taught at the University of Durham, University of Teesside, and the Open University, and was made a Fellow of Kingston University in 1994.
Private life
Gregory wrote her first novel Wideacre while completing a PhD in 18th-century literature and living in a cottage on the Pennine Way with first husband Peter Chislett, editor of the Hartlepool Mail, and their baby daughter, Victoria. They divorced before the book was published.
Following the success of Wideacre and the publication of The Favoured Child, she moved south to near Midhurst, West Sussex, where the Wideacre trilogy was set. Here she married her second husband Paul Carter, with whom she has a son. She divorced for a second time and married Anthony Mason, whom she had first met during her time in Hartlepool.
Gregory now lives on a 100-acre (0.40 km2) farm in the North York Moors national park, with her husband, children and stepchildren (six in all). Her interests include riding, walking, skiing, and gardening.
Writing
She has written novels set in several different historical periods, though primarily the Tudor period and the 16th century. Reading a number of novels set in the 17th century led her to write the bestselling Lacey trilogy — Wideacre, which is a story about the love of land and incest, The Favoured Child and Meridon. This was followed by The Wise Woman. A Respectable Trade, a novel of the slave trade in England, set in 18th-century Bristol, was adapted by Gregory for a four-part drama series for BBC television. Gregory's script was nominated for a BAFTA, won an award from the Committee for Racial Equality, and the film was shown worldwide.
Two novels about a gardening family are set during the English Civil War: Earthly Joys and Virgin Earth. She has also written contemporary fiction—Perfectly Correct; Mrs Hartley And The Growth Centre; The Little House; and Zelda's Cut. She has also written for children.
Some of her novels have won awards and have been adapted into television dramas. The most successful of her novels has been The Other Boleyn Girl, published in 2002 and adapted for BBC television in 2003 with Natascha McElhone, Jodhi May and Jared Harris. In the year of its publication, The Other Boleyn Girl also won the Romantic Novel of the Year and has subsequently spawned sequels—The Queen's Fool, The Virgin's Lover, The Constant Princess, The Boleyn Inheritance, and The Other Queen. Miramax bought the film rights to The Other Boleyn Girl and produced a film of the same name starring Scarlett Johansson as Mary Boleyn and co-starring Natalie Portman as Anne Boleyn, Eric Bana as Henry Tudor, Juno Temple as Jane Parker, and Kristin Scott Thomas as Elizabeth Boleyn. It was filmed in England and generally released in 2008.
Gregory has also published a series of books about the Plantagenets, the ruling houses that preceded the Tudors, and the Wars of the Roses. Her first book The White Queen (2009), centres on the life of Elizabeth Woodville the wife of Edward IV. The Red Queen (2010) is about Margaret Beaufort the mother of Henry VII and grandmother to Henry VIII. The Lady of the Rivers (2011) is the life of Jacquetta of Luxembourg, mother of Elizabeth Woodville, first married to John of Lancaster, 1st Duke of Bedford, younger brother of Henry the Fifth. The Kingmaker's Daughter (2012) is the story of Anne Neville, the daughter of the Earl of Warwick, the wife of Richard III. The next book, The White Princess (2013), centres on the life of Elizabeth of York, wife of Henry VII and the mother of Henry VIII.
Controversy
In her novel The Other Boleyn Girl, her portrayal of Henry VIII's second wife Anne Boleyn drew criticism. The novel depicts Anne as cold and ruthless, as well as heavily implying that the accusations that she committed adultery and incest with her brother were true, despite it being widely accepted that she was innocent of the charges. Novelist Robin Maxwell refused on principle to write a blurb for this book, describing its characterisation of Anne as "vicious, unsupportable." Historian David Starkey, appearing alongside Gregory in a documentary about Anne Boleyn, described her work as "good Mills and Boon" (a publisher of romance novels), adding that: "We really should stop taking historical novelists seriously as historians. The idea that they have authority is ludicrous." Susan Bordo criticized Gregory's claims to historical accuracy as "self-deceptive and self-promoting chutzpah", and notes that it is not so much the many inaccuracies in her work as "Gregory’s insistence on her meticulous adherence to history that most aggravates the scholars."
Media
Gregory is a frequent contributor to magazines and newspapers, with short stories, features and reviews. She is also a frequent broadcaster and a regular contestant on Round Britain Quiz for BBC Radio 4 and the Tudor expert for Channel 4's Time Team. She won the 29 December 2008 edition of Celebrity Mastermind on BBC1, taking Elizabeth Woodville as her specialist subject.
Charity work
Gregory also runs a small charity building wells in school gardens in The Gambia. Gardens for The Gambia was established in 1993 when Gregory was in The Gambia, researching for her book A Respectable Trade.
Since then the charity has dug almost 200 low technology, low budget and therefore easily maintained wells, which are on-stream and providing water to irrigate school and community gardens to provide meals for the poorest children and harvest a cash crop to buy school equipment, seeds and tools.
In addition to wells, the charity has piloted a successful bee-keeping scheme, funded feeding programmes and educational workshops in batik and pottery and is working with larger donors to install mechanical boreholes in some remote areas of the country where the water table is not accessible by digging alone. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/22/2013.)
Book Reviews
Gregory's deep knowledge of the period shows…the story of how proximity to power brought tragedy to the three young women is worth telling again. This is a compelling and convincing interpretation.
Times (UK)
Immaculate research, pacy narratives, and a stubborn insistence that history is not only about men.… [A] powerful reminder of how precarious the lives of Tudor women could be.
Daily Mail (UK)
Master of historical fiction Philippa Gregory returns this summer with another installment in her titillating The Plantagenet and Tudor Novels collection. In The Last Tudor, readers get to know Lady Jane Grey — England's queen for only nine days, but their martyr for all of history — and her two sisters, Katherine and Mary, all of whom buck expectations and defy orders in order to shape their own destinies during the Tudor dynasty rule. Poised to be another outstanding addition to the best-selling saga, this late-summer release is worth waiting for.
Bustle
True to her style, Philippa Gregory weaves a story that draws readers in and tugs at the heart, featuring characters who defy everyone’s expectations.… She delivers every emotion so subtly that you’ll be crying even before the intensity of the scene hits you. Gregory is at her best.
Bookreporter
(Starred review.) Gregory’s first-person perspective on late Tudor England’s turbulent history will delight existing and future fans.
Library Journal
Expect high demand for another outstanding entry in Gregory’s ongoing and best-selling Tudor saga.
Booklist
Gregory’s multivolume chronicle of the Tudor dynasty, with its emphasis on the women, now turns to the ill-fated scholar and Protestant reformer Jane Grey and her two sisters, Katherine and Mary, grandnieces of Henry VIII.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What role do faith and religion play during the time period represented in The Last Tudor? What is the relationship between religion and politics, and how does this relationship affect the cultural climate of England? Is the country mostly united in their faith or divided? What impact does this have on the royals of England?
2. What is "the true religion" according to Lady Jane Grey? Why does Jane believe that she and her family do not need to earn their place in heaven as others do? Does her faith ultimately serve her well? Discuss.
3. Consider the title of the book. Who are the members of the Tudor family? Which character or characters does the title of the book refer to?
4. Evaluate the roles and the treatment of women as represented in the novel. How are marriage and childbirth depicted? Is the education of women perceived as positive or negative? Would you say that the women of the novel are depicted as powerful or helpless? Do they garner much loyalty from the men in their lives? Discuss.
5. Katherine believes that "if you are a Tudor you don’t really have parents." What does she mean? What does her statement reveal about family dynamics and the relationship between parent and child during this time?
6. Why does Elizabeth punish Katherine and Mary for their marriages? Why does she refuse to show the same mercy for the Grey sisters that she shows for some others? Do you believe that her actions are justified or were you surprised by her lack of mercy to her relatives?
7. What does Mary Grey believe is Elizabeth’s greatest fear? What does Mary say that she has come to believe is the greatest sin and what does this reveal about Elizabeth? Do you agree that this "sin" is Elizabeth’s greatest flaw? How does this same "sin" or characteristic affect the others in the novel?
8. How does each Grey sister respond to her incarceration? What is the outcome for each? What does Mary wear at the conclusion of the novel and what does she believe this clothing represents? Is her choice to do this surprising? Why or why not?
9. What advice does Jane leave for her sisters after she receives the news of her impending execution? Do Katherine and Mary follow her advice? How does each interpret their sister’s final words?
10. Consider the theme of loyalty. Which of the characters is loyal and to whom? What seems to be at the root of their allegiance? Conversely, who betrays another person and why? Does the novel ultimately suggest to what or whom one should be most loyal? Explain.
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Last Tycoon (aka The Love of the Last Tycoon)
F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1941
Scribner
192 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780020199854
Summary
The Last Tycoon (aka The Love of the Last Tycoon), edited by the preeminent Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli, is a restoration of the author's phrases, words, and images that were excised from the 1940 edition, giving new luster to an unfinished literary masterpiece.
It is the story of the young Hollywood mogul Monroe Stahr, who was inspired by the life of boy-genius Irving Thalberg, and is an exposé of the studio system in its heyday. (From the publisher.)
See the 2016 series with John Bomer and Kelsey Grammer. Listen to our Movies Meet Book Club Podcast as Hollister and O'Toole discuss the movie and book.
Author Bio
• Birth—September 24, 1896
• Where—St. Paul, Minnesota, USA
• Died—December 21, 1940
• Where—Hollywood, California
• Education—Princeton University
F. Scott Fitzgerald was named for his famous relative, Francis Scott Key, though he was always referred to as "Scott." Minnesota born and Princeton educated, Fitzgerald published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920 to critical and popular acclaim.
That same year, He married Zelda Sayre, the queen of Montgomery, Alabama youth society, and the two lived a boisterous, decadent life in New York City. (See LitCourse 5 with Fitzgerald's story "Babylon Revisited" for an idea of their life.) To better afford their extravagant lifestyle, the couple moved to France, where Fitzgerald befriended Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, becoming part of the legendary group of expatriate writers and artists, which Stein labeled the "Lost Generation." In Paris he wrote his finest novel, The Great Gatsby (1925).
Zelda was eventually hospitalized in 1930 for the first of many breakdowns, and Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood (William Faulkner was there, too), where his heavy drinking ended his screen writing career. In 1934 he published Tender Is the Night. He died there of a heart attack six years later at the age of 44.
More
The 1920s proved the most influential decade of Fitzgerald's development. The Great Gatsby, Scott's masterpiece, was published in 1925. Hemingway greatly admired The Great Gatsby and wrote in his A Moveable Feast "If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one" (153). Hemingway expressed his deep admiration for Fitzgerald, and Fitzgerald's flawed, doomed character, when he prefaced his chapters concerning Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast with:
His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless. (129)
Much of what Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast helped to create the myth of Fitzgerald's eventual demise and Zelda's hand in that demise. Though much of Hemingway's text is factually correct, it is always tinged with his disappointment with Fitzgerald.
Fitzgerald began working on his fourth novel during the late 1920s but was sidetracked by financial difficulties that necessitated his writing commercial short stories, and by the schizophrenia that struck Zelda in 1930. Her emotional health remained fragile for the rest of her life. In 1932, she was hospitalized in Baltimore, Maryland.
Scott rented an estate in the Baltimore suburb of Towson and began work on Tender Is the Night, the story of the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychiatrist who falls in love with and marries one of his patients. Some critics have seen the book as a thinly-veiled autobiographical novel recounting Fitzgerald's problems with his wife, the corrosive effects of wealth and a decadent lifestyle, his own egoism and self-confidence, and his continuing alcoholism. Indeed, Fitzgerald was extremely protective of his material (their life together). When Zelda published her own version of their lives in Europe, Save Me the Waltz, Fitzgerald was angry and succeeded in getting her doctors to keep her from writing any more.
Tender was finally published in 1934, and critics who had waited nine years for the follow up to The Great Gatsby had mixed opinions about it. The novel did not sell well upon publication, but the book's reputation has since risen significantly.
Although he reportedly found movie work degrading, Fitzgerald was once again in dire financial straits and spent the second half of the 1930s in Hollywood, working on commercial short stories, scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (including some unfilmed work on Gone with the Wind), and his fifth and final novel, posthumously published as The Last Tycoon (based on the life of film executive Irving Thalberg). Scott and Zelda became estranged; she continued living in mental institutions on the east coast, while he lived with his lover Sheilah Graham, a well-known gossip columnist, in Hollywood.
Fitzgerald had been an alcoholic since his college days, and became notorious during the 1920s for his extraordinarily heavy drinking, leaving him in poor health by the late 1930s. According to Zelda's biographer, Nancy Milford, Scott claimed that he had contracted tuberculosis. Fitzgerald suffered two heart attacks in late 1940, and on December 21, while awaiting a visit from his doctor, Fitzgerald collapsed in Sheilah Graham's apartment and died. He was 44. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Of all our novelists, Fitzgerald was by reason of his temperament and his gifts the best fitted to explore and reveal the inner world of the movies and of the men who make them. The subject needs a romantic realist, which Fitzgerald was; it requires a lively sense of the fantastic, which he had; it demands the kind of intuitive perceptions which were his in abundance.... Monroe Stahr, the movie big shot about whom the story is centered, is Fitzgerald's most fully conceived character.... Fitzgerald has created a memorable figure in Stahr, Hollywood's "last tycoon"; he had marvelously conveyed the atmosphere in which a mammoth American industry is conducted; he would have ended, we can see, by bringing it clearly into focus as a world of its own within the larger pattern of American life as a whole.
J. Donald Adams - New York Times (11-9-1941)
Literary detective Bruccoli has produced a remarkable feat of scholarship in this welcome critical edition of the novel Fitzgerald began during his final year (1940) while working in Hollywood as a screenwriter. Generally considered a roman a clef, the story charts the power struggle of self-made, overworked producer Monroe Stahr (modeled on MGM producer Irving Thalberg) with rival executive Pat Brady (a stand-in for MGM head Louis B. Mayer). It is also the story of Stahr's love affair with Kathleen Moore and is (partly at least) narrated by Cecelia, Brady's cynical daughter who is hopelessly in love with Stahr. After Fitzgerald's death in December, his conflicting drafts for the novel were reworked by Edmund Wilson, who spliced episodes, moved around scenes and altered words and punctuation. Bruccoli, Fitzgerald biographer and editor of Cambridge's critical edition of The Great Gatsby, has restored Fitzgerald's original version and has also restored the narrative's ostensible working title, one that implies that Hollywood is the last American frontier where immigrants and their progeny remake themselves. Equally significant are other entries in this volume: Bruccoli's informative introduction; letters by Fitzgerald, Wilson and Maxwell Perkins; facsimiles of Fitzgerald's notes and drafts; and textual commentary, including helpful explanations of the novel's numerous topical references.
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 get a discussion started for The Last Tycoon:
1. How would you describe Monroe Stahr as a film producer? Is he someone to admire? Do you consider him ruthless, corrupt, a bully, fair minded, obsessed with power, concerned about those who work for him?
2. At one point we are told that, early on, Stahr had to learn, as if he were learning a lesson, "tolerance, kindness, forbearance, and even affection." Can you learn those qualities...or are they innate? We learn politeness, for instance, but do we "learn" kindness or tolerance?
3. What do you think of Kathleen Moore? Why is she so mysterious? Why does she hide her engagement from Stahr?
4. Why, when Stahr can have his pick of Hollywood beauties, is he irrevocably drawn to Moore? What is the attraction, and why is it so powerful? Is it mutual...or is Stahr more besotted that she? Does he truly love her...or is he infatuated with her as a replica of Minna Davis? What about his illness? If it seems unfair for Moore to hide her impending marriage, is it fair for him to hide his illness?
5. What do you think of Stahr's behavior (his performance?) in Chapter 4, as he watches the daily rushes with his directors and cameramen? Are you impressed by the breadth of technical knowledge or his aesthetic insight? Or are you disturbed by the way he uses (or abuses) his power over those who work for him? Is he a compulsive micro-manager? Does it matter that his judgment is "always—almost always—right"?
6. What do you think of Hollywood...it this book...and in it's present day incarnation? Have you come away after reading Tycoon understanding a little more about movie making, all that goes into the production process—"months of buying, planning, writing and rewriting, casting, constructing, lighting, rehearsing and shooting"? Was there anything that surprised you...or jumped out at you?
7. Fitzgerald finds ways to satirize Hollywood, especially through his well known wit—there's the director, who when fired knew "that he could not have a third wife just now as he had planned." What other humor do you find in the book?
8. Follow-up to Question 7: Besides his use of humor, how else...or at what else... does Fitzgerald take aim in Hollywood? What about the faded star at the table during the charity ball in Chapter 5? Can you discern Fitzgerald's attitude toward Hollywood? Does he portray Hollywood as corrupt, cruel, shallow, funny?
9. Consider Stahr's statement toward the end of Chapter 5 when he talks with Boxley. Stahr tells the frustrated writer that "we have to take people's own favorite folklore and dress it up and give it back to them." Is he saying that the wider public is what cheapens Hollywood's artistic vision—that Hollywood creates what public taste demands? Or his he talking about making peoples' dreams come to life?
10. Talk about Cecilia Brady as a narrator—and as a character. How would you describe her narrative voice? Why would Fitzgerald have used her point of view—what does she bring to the story? What about the sections she does not narrate directly. How does she know about what happened? Did you find this back and forth confusing...or unconvincing? What happens to her by the end, based on Fitzgerald's notes.
11. Reinmund, one of the filming supervisors, is described as once "a man of some character, [but] he was daily forced...into devious ways of acting and thinking. He was a bad man now." Of what other character might the same be said? Is it inevitable that any of us would be corrupted by a corrupt system, in any profession?
12. Find out what you can about Fitzgerald's time in Hollywood as a writer. Could he have been referring to himself in the numerous comments about screenplay writers—those who "can't write," who are blocked...or find themselves double-teamed behind their backs? Is he, perhaps, Boxley?
13. What is Stahr so disturbed by the black fisherman he and Kathleen meet on the shoreline? Why does he care what the man thinks of films?
14. In Fitgerald's notes we learn that Stahr will be betrayed by his colleagues, especially by his former mentor, Brady? Why were the men determined to bring him down?
15. How does Kathleen Moore explain to Stahr that she got married immediately after spending the day with him? Is her explanation convincing? Fitzgerald's notes tell us that Stahr picks up with her again after her marriage. Were you surprised?
16. Where do you think Fitzgerald's sympathies lie—with the kind of Hollywood system that Stahr created...or with its dissolution because of its inherent corruption? The speculation is that Monroe Stahr is based on Irving Thalberg. Do a little research on Thalberg, and see if you can identify the parallels between the real-life producer and Fitzgerald's fictional one.
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Last Year of the War
Susan Meissner, 2019
Penguin Publishing
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780451492159
Summary
A novel about a German American teenager whose life changes forever when her immigrant family is sent to an internment camp during World War II.
Elise Sontag is a typical Iowa fourteen-year-old in 1943—aware of the war but distanced from its reach. Then her father, a legal U.S. resident for nearly two decades, is suddenly arrested on suspicion of being a Nazi sympathizer.
The family is sent to an internment camp in Texas, where, behind the armed guards and barbed wire, Elise feels stripped of everything beloved and familiar, including her own identity.
The only thing that makes the camp bearable is meeting fellow internee Mariko Inoue, a Japanese-American teen from Los Angeles, whose friendship empowers Elise to believe the life she knew before the war will again be hers.
Together in the desert wilderness, Elise and Mariko hold tight the dream of being young American women with a future beyond the fences.
But when the Sontag family is exchanged for American prisoners behind enemy lines in Germany, Elise will face head-on the person the war desires to make of her. In that devastating crucible she must discover if she has the will to rise above prejudice and hatred and re-claim her own destiny, or disappear into the image others have cast upon her.
The Last Year of the War tells a little-known story of World War II with great resonance for our own times and challenges the very notion of who we are when who we’ve always been is called into question. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 9, 1961
• Where—San Diego, California, USA
• Education—Point Loma Nazarene University
• Currently—lives in San Diego, California
Susan Meissner is an American writer born and raised in San Diego, California. She began her literary career at the age of eight and since then has published more than a dozen novels (though that part came a bit later in her life).
Early years and career
Susan attended Point Loma Nazarene University, married a U.S. Air Force man, raised four children, and spent five years overseas and several more in Minnesota. Those were the years she put her novel-writing itch on hold. In 1995, however, she took a part-time reporting job at her county newspaper, became a columnist three years later, and eventually editor of a local weekly paper. One of the things she is most proud of that her paper was named the Best Weekly Paper in Minnesota in 2002.
That was the same year Susan's latent novel-writing itch resurfaced, and she began working on her first novel, Why the Sky is Blue. In a little more than a year, the book was written, published, and in the bookstores. She's been noveling ever since—with a string of 12 books under her name. Historical Fiction is one of her favorite genres.
Booklist placed A Fall of Marigolds on its "Top Ten" list of women's fiction for 2014. In 2008, Publishers Weekly named The Shape of Mercy as one of the year's 100 Best Novels.
Personal
Susan lives with her husband and four children in San Diego where her husband is a pastor and Air Force Reserves chaplain. She teaches in writing workshops. In addition to writing books, she enjoys spending time with her family, making and listening to music, reading, and traveling. (Based on the author's website.)
Book Reviews
[P]ropulsive…. Vivid historical detail and elegant prose bolster this rewarding story of profound friendship, family, fear, and the pain that arose for American-born children of immigrant parents.
Publishers Weekly
Highlighting a little-known story of World War II with heart-wrenching detail, this beautifully written novel will make you think about what it means to be American, as well as what—and who— determines our identity
BookBub
Readers may wish they could see more of Mariko’s experiences and hardships, but Elise’s story is still compelling and important. Meissner has created a quietly devastating story that shows how fear and hatred during World War II changed (and even ended) the lives of many innocent Americans.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The Last Year of the War is a work of historical fiction, but the internment camp at Crystal City was a real place where families just like Elise Sontag’s were detained and then repatriated in prisoner exchanges. How do you feel about what happened during World War II to German Americans like Elise’s family? Was such an action justifiable in a time of war? Why or why not?
2. What do you think it was like for Elise, going from milk shakes at the local diner in Davenport to living off bread crumbs to survive in Stuttgart after the war? What about her character do you think allowed her to cope with those changes?
3. Was Elise’s father right to volunteer for Crystal City, knowing that by doing so he and his family might possibly be repatriated?
4. Elise’s father said the only thing he could do to stand up against the Nazi regime was to make faulty fuses. Was he right? What would you have done?
5. Elise seemed changed by the experience in the alley with the two Frenchmen. How do you think it changed her, and why?
6. Elise, because of her German heritage, struggles in Chapter 22 to understand how the German military could have been so inhumanely cruel to the prisoners in the concentration camps. She says to the reader, “I was beginning to understand that it was a person’s choices that defined his or her identity and not the other way around.” Do you agree that our choices say more about who we are than anything else? How does a person’s nationality figure into his or her identity?
7. What does it mean to you to be a patriot? What do you think it meant to Elise? She tells the reader in Chapter 23, “The land of my childhood mattered to me, maybe because it was where my life began. I felt a part of that land somehow, just as Papa’s heart was tied to the land of his birth. It was the land he loved, not so much the people, because people can change. People can be good and people can be monsters.” Does the land of your childhood matter to you? Why or why not?
8. Has The Last Year of the War prompted you to consider the way in which you see people from other nations?
9. Was Ralph a good friend to Elise? Do you think he had his own reasons for marrying her? Did you like him as a person? Why or why not?
10. If you had been in Elise’s position, would you have married Ralph? Did she make a wise choice or a foolish one?
11. Why do you think Elise wanted to return to America and stay with Hugh’s family, even though they were difficult in some ways? Do you think she felt her own family was broken somehow by their experience? Do you think she needed to be needed?
12. What do you think were the reasons Mariko’s friendship had such an impact on Elise? Can you relate? Did you have a friend like this growing up? How are we shaped by our friendships when we’re young?
13. Do you think Elise would have ended up being a different person if she hadn’t met Mariko? If so, how?
14. Mariko says from her deathbed that because of her, she and Elise were lost to each other. She laments that had she made different choices, she and Elise could have stayed friends. Elise assures Mariko that they did remain friends. Did they? Of Mariko, Elise tells the reader, “She remained in my heart and I in hers, all these years.” What was Elise saying? Do you think it’s possible to retain a friendship when you are parted from that friend?
15. Elise describes her Alzheimer’s as a sticky-fingered houseguest named Agnes who is stealing from her. What is Agnes taking from Elise? How does this predicament tie into the rest of the story?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Late in the Day
Tessa Hadley, 2018
HarperCollins
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062476692
Summary
Alexandr and Christine and Zachary and Lydia have been friends since they first met in their twenties.
Thirty years later, Alex and Christine are spending a leisurely summer’s evening at home when they receive a call from a distraught Lydia: she is at the hospital. Zach is dead.
In the wake of this profound loss, the three friends find themselves unmoored; all agree that Zach, with his generous, grounded spirit, was the irreplaceable one they couldn’t afford to lose.
Inconsolable, Lydia moves in with Alex and Christine.
But instead of loss bringing them closer, the three of them find over the following months that it warps their relationships, as old entanglements and grievances rise from the past, and love and sorrow give way to anger and bitterness.
Late in the Day explores the complex webs at the center of our most intimate relationships, to expose how, beneath the seemingly dependable arrangements we make for our lives, lie infinite alternate configurations.
Ingeniously moving between past and present and through the intricacies of her characters’ thoughts and interactions, Tessa Hadley once again "crystallizes the atmosphere of ordinary life in prose somehow miraculous and natural"—Washington Post. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 28, 1956
• Where—Bristol, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Cambridge University
• Currently—lives in London, England
Tessa Hadley is a British author born and raised in Bristol, England. Her father was a teacher who loved jazz, and her mother, a homemaker who loved painting. Her family was not devoid of literary chops: Hadley's uncle is the noted London playwright Peter Nichols.
As a girl, Tessa read extensively. She studied literature at Cambridge, which she found a "chilly, funny, odd place. Nursing idealistic dreams of changing lives, she decided to become a teacher.
It was a complete disaster. I was 23. I went to a rough comprehensive. I was political: I wanted to bring light where there was darkness. All that rubbish. I was hopeless. The kids ran rings around me. I cried on my way to school every morning.
Her misfortunes as a teacher sapped Hadley of her confidence to become an author. Additionally, two other major life events took over: marriage and children. Having attempted a book early on, it took another 23 years, plus three children and three stepchildren, before publishing her first novel in 2002. That book, Accidents in the Home, was longlisted for The Guardian First Book Award.
In addition to six novels (see below) she has two volumes of short stories, both of which were New York Times Notable Books. Her stories appear regularly in The New Yorker.
Hadley lives in London.
Books
2002 - Accidents in the Home
2003 - Everything Will Be All Right
2007 - The Master Bedroom
2007 - Sunstroke: and Other Stories
2011 - The London Train
2012 - Married Love: and Other Stories
2013 - Clever Girl
2016 - The Past
2018 - Late in the Day
(Author bio adapted from interview in the Independent, 5/25/2013, and from the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[B]rilliant and upsetting.… In the hands of a lesser novelist, the intricate tangle of lives at the center of Late in the Day might feel like… sly narrative machinations. Because this is Tessa Hadley, it instead feels earned and real and, even in its smallest nuances, important.… Hadley is adept at fluid omniscience, at storytelling that skims through the years as easily as it weaves through various points of view.… I'm not the first to compare [her] to Virginia Woolf… and Late in the Day calls to mind, in particular, Woolf's The Waves in its circling around a magnetic central character…whose absence becomes the book's main character.… It's in part Hadley's unflinching dissection of moments and states of consciousness that makes the Woolf comparisons irresistible, but it's also her commitment to following digressions both mental and philosophical… rather than pushing away at plot.… It's to her great credit that Hadley manages to be old-fashioned and modernist and brilliantly postmodern all at once…unlocking age-old mysteries in ways both revelatory and inevitable. We've seen this before, and we've never seen this before, and it's spectacular.
Rebecca Makkai - New York Times Book Review
Gorgeous, utterly absorbing.… More than many of her contemporaries, the British writer Tessa Hadley understands that life is full of moments when the past presses up against the present, and when the present transforms the past. Her brilliant new novel, Late in the Day, explores both with equal urgency.
Boston Globe
[A] splendid, perceptive book.… Hadley has expertly examined the complications and intimacies of marriage and family in such novels as The Past, The Master Bedroom and Clever Girl. In Late in the Day she continues her persistent exploration of human frailty and resilience, moving easily between the present and the past to reveal the hard edges and silent compromises that shape all relationships.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Tessa Hadley is well-known for her inimitable portrayal of character and her latest effort, Late in the Day, is no disappointment.… A smart exploration of human nature, desire, and friendship.
Vanity Fair
The British novelist does what she does best: excavate the tensions and traumas that linger in the most seemingly normal families and relationships.
Huffington Post
[P]erceptive, finely wrought…. Hadley is a writer of the first order, and this novel gives her the opportunity to explore, with profound incisiveness and depth, the inevitable changes inherent to long-lasting marriages.
Publishers Weekly
In the fine tradition of women's fiction by authors such as Margaret Drabble, Penelope Lively, and Rachel Cusk exploring relationships among the cultured classes, Hadley's place is secure. —Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.
Library Journal
A four-person character study—here as always, Hadley is a master of interpersonal dynamics—the novel captures the complexity of loss. Their grief is not only for Zachary; it is for the lives they thought they knew. Restrained and tender.
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.)
Late Nights on Air
Elizabeth Hay, 2007
Counterpoint Press
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781582434803
Summary
Winner, 2007 Giller Prize
It’s 1975 when beautiful Dido Paris arrives at the radio station in Yellowknife, a frontier town in the Canadian north. She disarms hard-bitten broadcaster Harry Boyd and electrifies the station, setting into motion rivalries both professional and sexual.
As the drama at the station unfolds, a proposed gas pipeline threatens to rip open the land and inspires many people to find their voices for the first time.This is the moment before television conquers the north’s attention, when the fate of the Arctic hangs in the balance.
After the snow melts, members of the radio station take a long canoe trip into the Barrens, a mysterious landscape of lingering ice and infinite light that exposes them to all the dangers of the ever-changing air.
Spare, witty, and dynamically charged, this compelling tale embodies the power of a place and of the human voice to generate love and haunt the memory. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October 22, 1951
• Where—Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada
• Education—University of Toronto (no degree)
• Awards—Giller Prize; Marian Engle Award
• Currently—Ottawa, Canada
Elizabeth Grace Hay is a Canadian novelist and short story writer. Her novel A Student of Weather (2000) was a finalist for the Giller Prize and won the CAA MOSAID Technologies Award for Fiction and the TORGI Award. She has been a nominee for the Governor General's Award twice, for Small Change in 1997 and for Garbo Laughs in 2003, and won the Giller Prize for her 2007 novel Late Nights on Air.
In 2002, she received the Marian Engel Award, presented by the Writers' Trust of Canada to an established female writer for her body of work—including novels, short fiction, and creative non-fiction.
Born on October 22, 1951 in Owen Sound, Ontario, Hay is the daughter of a high school principal and a painter. She spent a year in England when she was fifteen, then returned to Canada to attend the University of Toronto.
In January, 1972, she quit the university before finishing and travelled out west by train. In 1974 she moved to Yellowknife, Northwest Territory. She worked for ten years as a CBC radio broadcaster in Yellowknife, Winnipeg and Toronto and then moved to Mexico, where she freelanced. In 1986 she moved to New York City, and then returned to Canada in 1992 with her family. She lives in Ottawa with her husband Mark. She has two children: a son, Ben, and a daughter, Sochi.
Writing
In an interview with the CBC in 2007, Hay commented on the relationship between her writing and her career in radio.
When I worked in Yellowknife, I was writing poetry and stories on the side and not getting very far. I felt kind of schizophrenic, like my radio work was one type of thing and my writing was another and there was a gap between. That became even more pronounced when I started working for CBC’s Sunday Morning, doing radio documentaries. I took me a while to realize that there didn’t need to be such a wide gap between those two forms of writing, and that they could cross-fertilize. Good radio writing is similar to any good writing. It’s direct and economical and intimate and full of detail. Also, it sets your visual imagination working. (Author bio from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
The plot of this novel is a faint signal, a series of short moments, sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, often flecked with intimations of tragedy. Hay's writing is so alluring and her lost souls so endearing that you'll lean in to catch the story's delicate developments as these characters shuffle along through quiet desperation and yearning…There's real sadness here, but real tenderness, too. Hay listens to these people—their surprising comedy and their fragile needs—with enough sensitivity to catch, as she puts it, "a single word balanced atop a mountain of feeling."
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Elizabeth Hay has created her own niche in Canadian fiction by fastening her intelligence on the real stuff—the bumps and glories in love, kinship, friendship.
Toronto Star
Hay exposes the beauty simmering in the heart of harsh settings with an evocative grace that brings to mind Annie Proulx.
Washington Post
Dazzling....A flawlessly crafted and timeless story, masterfully told.
Jury citation - Scotiabank Giller Prize
Exquisite….Hay creates enormous spaces with few words, and makes the reader party to the journey, listening, marvelling.
Globe and Mail
Invites comparison with work by Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood. Outside Canada, one thinks of A.S. Byatt or Annie Proulx.
Times Literary Supplement
Written by a master storyteller.
Winnipeg Free Press
Psychologically astute, richly rendered and deftly paced. It’s a pleasure from start to finish.
Toronto Star
After being fired from his latest television job, a disgraced Harry Boyd returns to his radio roots in the northern Canadian town of Yellowknife as the manager of a station no one listens to, and finds himself at the center of the station's unlikely social scene. New anchor Dido Paris, both renowned and mocked for her Dutch accent, fled an affair with her husband's father, only to be torn between Harry and another man. Wild child Gwen came to learn radio production, but under Harry's tutelage finds herself the guardian of the late-night shift. And lonely Eleanor wonders if it's time to move south just as she meets an unlikely suitor. While the station members wait for Yellowknife to get its first television station and the crew embarks on a life-changing canoe expedition, the city is divided over a proposal to build a pipeline that would cut across Native lands, bringing modernization and a flood of workers, equipment and money into sacred territory. Hay's crystalline prose, keen details and sharp dialogue sculpt the isolated, hardy residents of Yellowknife, who provide a convincing backdrop as the main cast tromps through the existential woods.
Publishers Weekly
Against the backdrop of a judicial inquiry into a proposed construction of a gas pipeline across the Arctic that would threaten the northern environment and the native way of life, this novel follows an engaging assortment of characters working in the Yellowknife CBC radio station in the mid-1970s Canadian North. Inspired by a radio drama about adventurer John Hornby, who traveled extensively through the Northwest Territory before starving, Gwen Symon arrives as a dewy-eyed newcomer with dreams of working behind the scenes in radio. Mentored by the talented but hard-drinking station manager, Gwen ends up working the late shift on air. She gradually comes into her own, just as radio makes way for television and the station crew begins to disband. Before they do, Gwen and friends set out on a journey to retrace Hornby's route. Equal parts Northern Exposure and Lost in the Barrens, this novel, already the winner of Canada's prestigious Giller Prize, compellingly captures one of the many small moments in which the Canadian North began to lose its essence. A strong choice for all libraries. —Barbara Love
Library Journal
Lost souls converge on a remote radio outpost in the Canadian subarctic, in Hay's meditative latest (Garbo Laughs, 2003, etc.). The town of Yellowknife, on the shores of Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories, is the bleak terrain on which Hay tests the mettle of her ensemble cast, denizens of the town's CBC affiliate. Announcer Harry is reeling from a disastrous foray into Toronto television. Receptionist Eleanor and reporter Dido fled ill-advised marriages-in beautiful, enigmatic Dido's case, a marriage aborted by an affair with her father-in-law. Ralph, the station's book reviewer, worships Eleanor from afar. Eddy, the engineer, has a vaguely unsavory background. Gwen has driven 3,000 miles to start her radio apprenticeship in the hinterlands. She finds on-air announcing torturous, whereas dulcet-voiced Dido is a natural. Dido is a guy magnet and smooth-talking Yank Eddy handily outstrips all rivals. When Eddy blackens her eye, Dido cohabits briefly with Harry, exploiting his neediness. Interwoven with the workplace drama is a larger controversy-Judge Berger has landed in Yellowknife, a stop on his nationwide tour to elicit citizen comment on whether to block construction of an Arctic gas pipeline across pristine Native lands and wildlife habitats. Eddy and Dido (future toasts of Los Angeles and New York) leave to pursue their exalted destinies, clearing the stage for the quieter but more absorbing lives of lesser mortals. Harry, Ralph, Eleanor and Gwen decide to retrace the route of doomed Arctic explorer John Hornby. For weeks during the summer, the foursome backpack and canoe across frigid lake country, encountering late-receding ice, unremitting daylight, mosquitoes and flies. Wildlife sightings are awe-inspiring (muskoxen, ptarmigans and a vast herd of caribou) and frightening (Gwen provokes a grizzly near Hornby's shack). Richly observed detail of the stunted yet flourishing plant life of the northern latitudes is representative of the outwardly modest but inwardly lush lives of the characters. The sheer ordinariness of existence in the most atypical of settings is Hay's preferred territory, which she mines with prodigious skill.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Harry Boyd, an admitted romantic, tries to make an impression on Dido Paris by setting her news script on fire while she is on the air. Fire is an ancient metaphor for passion, and Late Nights on Air could be described as an anthology of romantic love. Mrs. Dargabble’s first husband had urged her to "jump," and many of the characters do, with differing results — from the sexually charged union of Eddy and Dido to more gradual entanglements. Discuss the varieties of love present in this small, isolated community. Which ones strike you as the most successful?
2. One of Elizabeth Hay's great novelistic strengths is her sense of place and the ways she knits her characters into their settings. In her first novel, A Student of Weather, the places included Saskatchewan, New York City, and Ottawa; her second novel, Garbo Laughs, is set in Ottawa, most memorably during the ice storm of 1998. In Late Nights on Air, set in Yellowknife and the North, the sense of place and her characters' relationship to it is particularly intense. Sometimes readers talk about a novel's setting as if it were a character in itself. Do you think that is the case in Late Nights on Air? What descriptions of place, in Yellowknife or on the canoe trip into the Arctic wilderness, have stayed with you most? How does the sense of place work to underscore and echo the characters and their situations or to contrast with them?
3. In Late Nights on Air, fictional characters interact with a real, contemporary person, Judge Thomas Berger. Although they only interact with him minimally and formally, Berger and his commission are important components in the novel. Discuss Berger’s approach and personality, the ways in which it informs the Inquiry, and the place of the man and the Inquiry in Late Nights on Air.
4. Late Nights on Air begins with Harry falling in love with the sound of Dido's voice. In the novel, Gwen finds her radio voice — both in the sense of finding an attractive physical voice and in the sense of expressing her own personality. Voice and sound in general are natural preoccupations for people who work in radio, and the novel pays consistent attention to them, from Gwen's fascination with sound effects to the voices of the announcers (in English and Dogrib), and the many descriptions of natural sounds and music. Discuss some of the ways Elizabeth Hay uses voice to characterize her men and women, and to highlight her larger themes.
5. Elizabeth Hay says in her acknowledgements that the story of the adventurer John Hornby was always at the back of this book. A fascination with Hornby and Edgar Christian is one of the things Gwen and Harry have in common, and the explorers' cabin is the destination of the canoe trip that takes Harry and Gwen, Eleanor and Ralph into the wilderness, where their lives will change forever. Does Hornby’s story of a quixotic and doomed exploration connect with, and perhaps comment on, the story of the modern characters — and if so, in what ways?
6. One of the most sophisticated elements in an Elizabeth Hay novel is the fact that her flawed characters don’t find any conversion or easy resolution: Dido, for example, cannot bear criticism, and Harry, a veteran radio man, can’t separate his personal failure in television from the medium in general. Problems don’t get neatly wrapped up in Late Nights on Air, and the characters, though changed, in many ways end as imperfect as they began. Discuss some of the things that the characters have learned in the end — about each other and about themselves. Discuss some of the situations or personalities that never get "fixed," and the particular flavour this gives the book.
7. Harry's relationship with Dido is never really fulfilled, but Harry’s yearning remains largely undiminished. What do you think the author is saying about human beings in general?
8. Just before he died, Eleanor's father was reading her the French story of "la fille qui etait laide" — a girl so ugly that she hid herself in the forest where the fresh air, sun, and wind made her beautiful. The narrator tells us that, in the summer of 1975, a version of that story would unfold. The theme of this kind of transformation has been seen before in an Elizabeth Hay novel (A Student of Weather). Who is the transformed woman in Late Nights on Air — or should it be "women"? How does it happen?
9. Discuss Dido and her personality, and how she powerfully affects each of the characters — Harry, Gwen, Eleanor, Eddy. To what extent is she affected by her past? Where does her power really lie? Is she, in fact, as confident and strong as she seems?
10. There are frequent instances of foreshadowing in Late Nights on Air. The narrator writes, for example, about three unfortunate things that would happen to Harry in the coming winter, and in another place that "the events of the following summer would make these pictures of Ralph's almost unbearably moving." The reader is regularly pulled into the characters' futures, but without knowing the details. In what way does foreshadowing function in the novel? How does it affect your reading experience?
11. Eleanor, who is reading William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, has a religious awakening in the course of the book. Most of the other characters don’t share her connection with institutionalized religion, but there is a strong undercurrent of spirituality in the book, felt differently by different characters. Discuss the varieties of religious or spiritual experience you find in the book.
12. There is an elegiac tone in Late Nights on Air, and a sense that an older, more human way of life is disappearing, as radio gives way to television and as the traditional ways of the North are threatened by the pipeline and, more generally, by the South. Where are the shades of grey in the conflict between old ways and "progress"? Does the novel give you a sense of where the novelist stands on this?
13. John Hornby’s biographer, George Whalley, tells Gwen that both he and his subject approach life "'crabwise,' meaning sideways and backwards rather than head-on." Harry likes this idea of "a wandering route notable for its 'digressions and divagations'.... A route of the soul, perhaps." Does "crabwise," in the sense Hay is using the term, suggest something of the structure chosen for Late Nights on Air? In what way does this approach reflect the characters’ yearnings and the way they are able to express themselves? Is this true of human beings in general?
14. "Gwen found herself thinking about the vulnerable rivers and birds and plants and animals and old ways of life." She learns, for example, that an oil spill, in turning the ice black, ruins its reflective power so that it absorbs light and melts, thus changing the environment. At one of its deepest levels, this is a book about ecology, about the fragile interdependence of people, animals and their environment. Discuss the ways this plays out in Late Nights on Air.
15. In addition to its rewards, the canoe trip taken by Harry, Eleanor, Gwen, and Ralph has its share of ordeals, including Harry and Eleanor getting lost, Gwen’s encounter with a bear, and Ralph’s fate. Discuss the various ways in which the characters are de-stabilized and reoriented in the course of the trip, and how the trip impacts upon their lives later.
16. Dido is so different in her relationship with Harry than she is with Eddy. What is it about the two men — and what is it about Dido — that cause such different responses?
17. This is a book where couples are often frustrated and love is not reciprocated or is cut off too soon — Harry and Dido, Dido and Eddy (a relationship that endures but on unknown terms), Eleanor and Ralph. Perhaps unexpectedly, an unconventional couple comes together at the end of the book. Were you surprised? Are there hints throughout the book? Does it work for you?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Laughing Monsters
Denis Johnson, 2014
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374280598
Summary
A high-suspense tale of kaleidoscoping loyalties in the post-9/11 world that shows one of our great novelists at the top of his game.
Roland Nair calls himself Scandinavian but travels on a U.S. passport. After ten years' absence, he returns to Freetown, Sierra Leone, to reunite with his friend Michael Adriko. They once made a lot of money here during the country’s civil war, and, curious to see whether good luck will strike twice in the same place, Nair has allowed himself to be drawn back to a region he considers hopeless.
Adriko is an African who styles himself a soldier of fortune and who claims to have served, at various times, the Ghanaian army, the Kuwaiti Emiri Guard, and the American Green Berets. He’s probably broke now, but he remains, at thirty-six, as stirred by his own doubtful schemes as he was a decade ago.
Although Nair believes some kind of money-making plan lies at the back of it all, Adriko’s stated reason for inviting his friend to Freetown is for Nair to meet Adriko’s fiancée, a grad student from Colorado named Davidia. Together the three set out to visit Adriko’s clan in the Uganda-Congo borderland—but each of these travelers is keeping secrets from the others.
Their journey through a land abandoned by the future leads Nair, Adriko, and Davidia to meet themselves not in a new light, but rather in a new darkness. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1949
• Where—Munich, Germany (of American parents)
• Education—M.F.A., University of Iowa, USA
• Awards—National Book Award; Whiting Writer's Award; Paris Review's Aga Khan Prize
• Currently—lives in Arizona and Idaho, US
Denis Hale Johnson is an American author who is known for his short-story collection Jesus' Son (1992), his novel Tree of Smoke (2007), which won the National Book Award, his novella, Train Dreams (2011), and The Laughing Monsters (2014) He also writes plays, poetry and non-fiction.
Johnson was born in 1949 in Munich, West Germany. He holds an MFA degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he has also returned to teach. He received a Whiting Writer’s Award in 1986 and a Lannan Fellowship in Fiction in 1993.
Johnson first came to prominence after the publication of his short story collection Jesus' Son (1992), whose 1999 film adaptation was named one of the top ten films of the year by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Roger Ebert. Johnson has a cameo role in the film as a man who has been stabbed in the eye by his wife.
Johnson's plays have been produced in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Seattle. He is the Resident Playwright of Campo Santo, the resident theater company at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco.
In 2006-2007, Johnson held the Mitte Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas.
Johnson lives with his wife, Cindy Lee, in Arizona and Idaho. He has three children, two of whom he homeschooled; in October, 1997 he wrote an article for Salon.com in defense of homeschooling. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
[S]ingle catastrophe is what fuels the demands and mysteries of literature. The wreckage is what essential writers particularize, and Denis Johnson's interests have always been in wreckage, both individual and universal. If Train Dreams (a Pulitizer finalist) dealt with the dignified tragedy of a past American antonym, The Laughing Monsters addresses the vanishing present, a giddy trickle-down of global exploitation and hubris—the farcical exploits of cold dudes in a hard land.
Joy Williams - New York Times Book Review
[A] stunner: the story of Roland Nair, a rogue intelligence agent looking to make a big score in Sierra Leone amid the detritus and chaos of the post-war-on-terrorism world. Johnson's sentences are always brilliant, but it is in the interstices, the gray areas of the story, that he really excels.
David Ulin - Los Angeles Times
National Book Award winner Denis Johnson has brilliantly plumbed the mystical and the macabre in such works as Tree of Smoke and his instant classic Jesus’ Son. The Laughing Monsters delivers a more commercial, post-9/11 tale of intrigue, deception, romance, and misadventure set in West Africa without losing Johnson’s essentially poetic drive.... With each twist, Johnson deftly ups the stakes while adding to the cavalcade of entrepreneurs, assassins, seers, and smugglers that populate the book, tuning us in to the roiling political realities and cultural complexities of Africa today.... This visionary novel is always falling together, never apart. That’s Johnson.
Lisa Shea - Elle
Much of the novel follows the shifting military and political loyalties in a post-9/11 world, and there is plenty of subterfuge and secrecy, but Johnson’s at his best when describing the pervasive, threatening strangeness of Roland’s life in Africa.... [S]ome effective nods to Heart of Darkness all help to make the book’s setting its strongest character.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) In a work that's part spy novel and part buddy tale, Johnson aptly locates his portrayal of a shadowy world of complicated relationships and ever-shifting alliances in one of the more broken places on the planet. This is what you might get if you combined Casablanca's cynicism and sense of intrigue with a touch of Heart of Darkness post-9/11. —Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA
Library Journal
[A] taut, Conrad-by-way-of-Chandler tale about a spy who gets too close to the man he's shadowing in Africa.... As in any good double-agent story, Johnson obscures whose side Roland is really on, and Roland himself hardly knows the answer either.... Johnson expertly maintains the heart-of-darkness mood.... [A]n intriguing metaphor for [post-9/11 lawlessness].
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.)
Laura & Emma
Kate Greathead, 2018
Simon & Schuster
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781501156601
Summary
A tender, witty debut novel about a single mother raising her daughter among the upper crust of New York City society in the late twentieth century from a nine-time Moth StorySLAM champion.
Laura hails from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, born into old money, drifting aimlessly into her early thirties. One weekend in 1981 she meets Jefferson. The two sleep together. He vanishes. And Laura realizes she’s pregnant.
Enter: Emma.
Despite her progressive values, Laura raises Emma by herself in the same blue-blood world of private schools and summer homes she grew up in, buoyed by a host of indelible characters:
- her eccentric mother, who informs her society friends and Emma herself that she was fathered by a Swedish sperm donor;
- her brother, whose childhood stutter reappears in the presence of their forbidding father;
- an exceptionally kind male pediatrician;
- and her overbearing best friend, whose life has followed the Park Avenue script in every way except for childbearing.
Meanwhile, the apple falls far from the tree with Emma, who begins to question her environment in a way her mother never could.
Told in vignettes that mine the profound from the mundane, with meditations on everything from sex and death to insomnia and the catharsis of crying on the subway, a textured portrait emerges of a woman struggling to understand herself, her daughter, and the changing landscape of New York City in the '80s and '90s.
Laura & Emma is an acutely insightful exploration of class and family warfare from a new author whose offbeat sensibility, understated wit, and stylish prose celebrate the comedy and pathos that make us human. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Kate Greathead is a graduate of Wesleyan University and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Vanity Fair, and on NPR’s Moth Radio Hour. She was a subject in the American version of the British Up documentary series. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the writer Teddy Wayne. Laura & Emma is her first novel. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[A] sly, charming debut.… Laura and Emma’s struggles are real, and their saga makes for a beguiling, addictive read (Book of the Week).
People
For a privileged Manhattan daughter who finds herself unexpectedly pregnant, raising a child alone is pearl-clutchingly radical in Kate Greathead’s wryly observed, 1980s-set first novel.
Vogue
A deft exploration of conflict, both class and interfamilial, in 1980s blue-blood New York.
Marie Claire
Kate Greathead’s debut novel gamely takes on class conflict, single motherhood, and the discreet pretension of the 1980s Upper East Side through the story of Laura, a daughter of privilege who finds herself unexpectedly pregnant after a one-night stand.
New York Magazine
If the title of Kate Greathead’s debut evokes a Jane Austen novel, well, it’s fitting for an incisive comedy of manners about class divides and the burdens of being born privileged (Best Books So Far of 2018).
Esquire
Kate Greathead classes it up with her debut, Laura & Emma.
Vanity Fair
[W]armhearted.… The supporting characters … sparkle with idiosyncrasies.… Greathead is a talented writer of detail, particularly in her evocations of New York life.… This is a thoughtful novel of trying to find oneself despite an assigned place in the world.
Publishers Weekly
This novel makes a seemingly unlikable character sympathetic and interesting to the point that her story becomes unputdownable. Set against the backdrop of the 1980s to mid-1990s, this debut …will appeal to readers of character-driven women’s fiction.
Library Journal
Most impressive are the ways Greathead restrainedly shows her characters stretching at the seams of their own… restraint, and she paints their immense privilege with knowing nuance. Greathead’s smart and original …novel impresses and charms.
Booklist
Although having a child should by all rights open the windows of Laura's life, it doesn't. Her daughter, on the other hand, turns out to be a totally different sort of person.… This ultimately rather mysterious book …is like a person who speaks so softly that you end up paying very close attention.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. On pages 112 and 113, we get a glimpse of Laura’s dismissive attitude toward sex. How do you think that influences Emma’s burgeoning sexuality throughout the book?
2. Privilege and the awareness of it are a recurring theme in Laura & Emma. At several points, Laura tries to explain what privilege is to Emma (for example, page 100). Have you ever been in a situation where you’ve wanted to explain privilege to children? How does that situation change when they’re part of your family? Did your parents ever have a conversation like this with you?
3. Laura quietly questions her sexuality throughout the book. On page 111, the metaphor describing the mysterious, lurking fisherman taking off—"the wake of his boat unzipping the water like the back of a dress”"—seems to imply a level of desire on Laura’s part. How did you understand Laura’s need—or lack thereof—for intimacy throughout the novel?
4. On page 124, Laura realizes Dr. Brown is offering Emma something "that she hadn’t been offered as a child, and was hence unequipped to provide herself." What do you think Dr. Brown is offering, and does Laura ever discover how to give it to Emma?
5. In the episode Laura has with her brother Nicholas (pages 160–170), she appears jealous and lonely. However, Laura has led a very solitary life for the most part. Why is she suddenly so eager for her brother’s company at this juncture?
6. On pages 197 and 198, there is a brief flashback to one of Laura’s teachers appearing to sexually harass her. In the scene, Bibs is excited that Laura has been invited over to the older male teacher’s house, and "insisted she wear lipstick and carry a comb in her pocketbook." What does this say about Bibs as a mother? Why do you think she let Laura go into this situation? What effect do you think this encounter has on Laura’s impression of men and her feelings toward them? Finally, do you think views of sexual harassment have changed since the late eighties and early nineties?
7. After her death, Laura discovers that Bibs went to group therapy for her depression. On page 183, Laura is momentarily panicking that she has lost Emma, and thinks, "Without Emma there would be no point to anything." What does this say about Laura’s character? Why do you think the author included this?
8. Analyze the first paragraph on page 242 (beginning with "In first grade" and ending with "a shade lighter than what surrounded it"). This paragraph seems like an interruption in the narrative flow. Why do you think the author chose to put it there? How do you interpret it based on the passages before and after?
9. Laura is a very pensive character—constantly evaluating her surroundings and reflecting on them, even if she doesn’t often explore her own thoughts or emotions. On page 164, Emma has a longer reflective moment, similar to ones her mother has had throughout the book. In what ways do you think Emma is like Laura, and in what ways is she drastically different?
10. Woven among the scenes of Laura & Emma are hints of Laura’s possible homosexuality or bisexuality. However, it is never resolved or identified. Why do you think the author chose to do this?
11. The last significant relationship Laura has in the book is with her neighbor, Martin. Why do you think she connects with him (and he to her)?
12. What do you make of the ending? What do you think will happen to Laura? Why did the author choose to end on this note?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures
Emma Straub, 2012
Penguin Group USA
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594631825
Summary
The enchanting story of a midwestern girl who escapes a family tragedy and is remade as a movie star during Hollywood’s golden age.
In 1920, Elsa Emerson, the youngest and blondest of three sisters, is born in idyllic Door County, Wisconsin. Her family owns the Cherry County Playhouse, and more than anything, Elsa relishes appearing onstage, where she soaks up the approval of her father and the embrace of the audience.
But when tragedy strikes her family, her acting becomes more than a child¹s game of pretend.
While still in her teens, Elsa marries and flees to Los Angeles. There she is discovered by Irving Green, one of the most powerful executives in Hollywood, who refashions her as a serious, exotic brunette and renames her Laura Lamont. Irving becomes Laura’s great love; she becomes an Academy Award-winning actress—and a genuine movie star.
Laura experiences all the glamour and extravagance of the heady pinnacle of stardom in the studio-system era, but ultimately her story is a timeless one of a woman trying to balance career, family, and personal happiness, all while remaining true to herself.
Ambitious and richly imagined, Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures is as intimate—and as bigger-than-life—as the great films of the golden age of Hollywood. Written with warmth and verve, it confirms Emma Straub’s reputation as one of the most exciting new talents in fiction. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1979-80
• Raised—New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Oberlin College
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City
Emma Straub is an American author three novels and a short story collection. Raised on Manhattan's Upper West side, she now lives with her husband and two young sons in Brooklyn.
Emma comes by writing naturally: her father is Peter Straub, an award winning writer of horror fiction, a fact which makes even Emma admit to a belief in a writing gene. Here's what she told Michele Filgate of Book Slut:
I believe the writing gene is located just behind the gene for enjoying red wine and just in front of the gene for watching soap operas, both of which I also inherited from my father. What I do know for sure is that I watched my father write for a living my entire childhood, and I understood that it was a job like any other, that one had to do all day, every day. I think a lot of people have the fantasy that a writer sits around in coffee shops all day, waiting for the muse to appear.
So while genes may play a role, so does hard work and grit: determined to become a writer, she pushed on even after her first four books were turned down. As she told Alexandra Alter of the New York Times,
They all got rejected by every single person in publishing, in the world. It’s still true that I will go to a publishing party or event, and the first thing I will think of is, "I know who you are, you rejected novels 2 and 4."
It's nice to think that today Straub is having the last laugh.
Attending Oberlin College, Straub received her B.A. in 2002. She went on to earn her M.F.A. at the University of Wisconsin where she studied with author Lorrie Moore. Returning to New York, she worked for a number of years at the independent Book Court bookstore in Brooklyn.
Her novels include Modern Lovers (2016), The Vacationers (2014), and Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures (2012). Her story collection is titled Other People We Married (2011). Straub's fiction and nonfiction have been published in Vogue, New York Magazine, Tin House, New York Times, Good Housekeeping, and Paris Review Daily. She is also a contributing writer to Rookie. (LitLovers.)
Book Reviews
At once a delicious depiction of Hollywood’s golden age and a sweet, fulfilling story about one woman’s journey through fame, love, and loss.
Boston Globe
In her big-hearted first novel…Emma Straub follows…[an] actress's 50-year journey from summer stock extra to screen star to has-been. It's a witty examination of the psychic costs of reinvention in Hollywood's golden age…Straub…is terrific at capturing the gilded cocoon created by the Hollywood studios for its stars that was both seductive and insidious.
Caroline Preston - Washington Post
Straub vividly recaptures the glamour and meticulously contrived mythology of the studio-system era.
USA Today
Straub’s brisk pacing and emotionally complex characters keep the story fresh.... This bewitching novel is ultimately a celebration of those moments when we drop the act and play the hardest role of all: ourselves.
O, The Oprah Magazine
Straub makes masterful use of the golden age of Hollywood to tap contemporary questions about the price of celebrity and a working mother’s struggle to balance all that matters.
People
Dramatic, human and historical: like a classic Hollywood movie…Straub knows when to linger and when to be brief, and her portrayal of Elsa/Laura’s relationships is exquisite.... Peppered with stunningly crafted sentences and heart-twisting storytelling, the richness of this full life is portrayed with perceptive clarity.
BUST Magazine
In her debut novel (after her early-2012 story collection, Other People We Married), Straub weaves together snapshots of the long, large life of Elsa Emerson, the youngest daughter in a family of quintessentially blonde, corn-fed Midwestern sisters living in Door County, Wis. In the late 1920s, the family runs a summer playhouse, and Elsa’s first role, as a flower girl in Come Home, My Angel, coincides with a family tragedy. These two events shape her passion for acting and her desire to slip into a different character than that of the good, homespun girl she is. At 17, a few years before WWII, she moves to Los Angeles and finds Hollywood the perfect stage for her metamorphosis into Laura Lamont, a dark-haired, serious-eyed starlet who carries with her an air of mystery and gravity completely apart from her idyllic Midwestern upbringing. Written in a removed prose, Straub brings Elsa to life with the detached analysis of an actor examining a character, exemplifying Elsa’s own remote relationship to her identity. Through marriages, births, deaths, and career upheavals, Elsa and Laura coexist, sometimes uneasily—until Elsa learns to reconcile her two selves. An engaging epic of a life that captures the bittersweetness of growing up, leaving home, and finding it again.
Publishers Weekly
Discussion Questions
1. “Yes, I’m an actress,” Elsa said, except that the moment the words were out of her mouth, there on that spot on a street that existed only in the movies, she wasn’t Elsa Emerson anymore, at least not all of her. “I’m Laura Lamont” (p. 58). What does it mean for Elsa to become Laura Lamont? How does her new name change the way she feels about herself?
2. How is Elsa’s relationship with Gordon different from Laura’s relationship with Irving, and how does Elsa/Laura’s shifting identity affect her two marriages?
3. Laura Lamont becomes a movie star in the studio system era. How do Hollywood and the lives of its actors, producers, and directors change over the course of the novel?
4. How do Laura’s friendships contribute to her happiness?
5. How do sibling relationships function in the novel?
6. What sacrifices is Laura forced to make for success? Does her ambition affect her personal happiness?
7. How do you think the choices have changed for contemporary actresses in Hollywood? What might Laura’s life have been like if she moved to California now?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Laura Rider's Masterpiece
Jane Hamilton, 2009
Grand Central Publishing
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780446538947
Summary
Laura and Charlie Rider have been married for twelve years. They share their nursery business in rural Wisconsin, their love for their animals, and their zeal for storytelling. Although Charlie's enthusiasm in the bedroom has worn Laura out, although she no longer sleeps with him, they are happy enough going along in their routine.
Jenna Faroli is the host of a popular radio show, and in Laura's mind is "the single most famous person in the Town of Dover." When Jenna happens to cross Charlie's path one day, and they begin an e-mail correspondence, Laura cannot resist using Charlie to try out her new writing skills. Together, Laura and Charlie craft florid, strangely intimate messages that entice Jenna in an unexpected way. The "project" quickly spins out of control.
The lines between Laura's words and Charlie's feelings are blurred and complicated, Jenna is transformed in ways that deeply disturb her, and Laura is transformed in her mind's eye into an artist. The transformations are hilarious and poignant, and for Laura Rider, beyond her wildest expectations. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 13, 1957
• Reared—Oak Park, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., Carleton College
• Awards—Hemingway/PEN Award, 1988
• Currently—lives in Rochester, Wisconsin
Her first published works were short stories, "My Own Earth" and "Aunt Marj's Happy Ending", both published in Harper's Magazine in 1983. "Aunt Marj's Happy Ending" later appeared in The Best American Short Stories 1984.
Her first novel, The Book of Ruth, was published in 1988 and won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award, and the Wisconsin Library Association Banta Book Award in 1989. The Book of Ruth was an Oprah's Book Club selection in 1996, and it was the basis for a 2004 television film of the same title.
In 1994, she published A Map of the World, which was adapted for a film in 1999 and, the same year, was also an Oprah's Book Club selection. Her third novel, The Short History of a Prince, published in 1998, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998. This book was also shortlisted for the 1999 Orange Prize. In 2000, Hamilton was named a Notable Wisconsin Author by the Wisconsin Library Association.
All of her books are set, at least in part, in Wisconsin.
In an interview with the Journal Times in Racine, Wisconsin, in November 2006, Hamilton talked about her early inspiration for writing novels. As a student at Carleton College, she overheard a professor say she would write a novel one day. Hamilton had written only two short stories for the professor's class. Overhearing the conversation gave her confidence. "It had a lot more potency, the fact that I overheard it, rather than his telling me directly," she said. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Amateur writers, along with the whole universe of advice books, workshops and conventions, also come in for some sustained ribbing, as though Hamilton were venting the frustration of a thousand tedious bookstore readings and summer writing seminars. It's a comedy, yes, but a meta-comedy, a romance novel that's very self-consciously about the nature of romance novels and the romance of writing.... To the extent that this romantic intrigue is funny, it's also surprisingly sophisticated and frequently creepy. Hamilton's sharp eye for the private quirks of married life has always been a little unnerving, and now it seems odd that she didn't drop more wit into her previous novels.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Oprah-anointed Hamilton once again takes readers to the Midwest, this time lacing her narrative with winning humor. Laura Rider and her husband, Charlie, live in Hartley, Wis., where they own and run Prairie Wind Farm. After 12 years of marriage, Laura decides to stop sleeping with Charlie, and although lovemaking is his "one superb talent," she's convinced she's "used up her quota." Also, Laura has a secret fantasy: to be an author. After she meets local public radio host Jenna Faroli, Laura decides to write a romance and encourages a flirtation between Charlie and Jenna, an experiment that she thinks will help her write her book. Their flirtation quickly slides into an affair, with Laura's sly interference. Laura, at once jealous and pleased, benefits from the inevitable chain of events, while Jenna isn't so lucky. Though the plotting is a bit predictable, the female characters are sharply observed and delineated, and the humorous tone will be an appealing surprise to Hamilton's readers.
Publishers Weekly
Hamilton (When Madeline Was Young, 2006, etc.) reinvents the menage a trois via the Internet in her lively sixth novel. When stoically married Laura tires of her puppy-like husband Charlie's volcanic sexuality and swears off lovemaking, her energies are reawakened to look beyond the successful "farm nursery" they run together in rural Wisconsin. Laura's dream of writing innovative, grownup romance novels is realized in surprising ways after she meets Milwaukee Public Radio talk show host (and neighbor) Jenna Faroli. Laura engineers Jenna's friendship with chronically extroverted Charlie, then manipulates that friendship by first assisting, then appropriating her husband's e-mail correspondence with his new girl friend/girlfriend. The inevitable occurs, skeletons emerge from both women's marital and familial closets, and a plot cleverly linked to that of a favorite novel (Evelyn Waugh's elegiac Brideshead Revisited) gathers up Jenna and Charlie in its jaws. Laura pulls strings; risks wrecking lives she believes she's enriching; and finds bliss at a climactic writers' conference. This very unusual novel's ballsy premise and haywire momentum are juggled expertly by the accomplished Hamilton, who somehow circumvents legitimate objections (e.g., no reader will believe Laura would not have foreseen Jenna's and Charlie's reactions to being thus thrust together) and keeps us eagerly guessing what further craziness lies in pages ahead. The harrowing story of how her father died serves to explain the narrowness of Laura's vision; nonetheless, she's never fully credible as a mixture of unpretentious charm and emotionally stunted duplicity—it's as if Mary Pickford and Joan Crawford took turns playing the same person in the same movie. Charlie, however, is a wonderful character and an irresistible enigma: "Dreamer, yes; underdog, yes; artist, yes; bonkers, yes." Eccentric, intriguing, almost perversely readable and entertaining. Hamilton never disappoints.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Laura muses that “she could only be her ultimate self when she was alone.” She isn’t the only one who has a clear “real” self and a constructed self. In what ways do the characters create new personas? Are these personalities convincing? Are they necessary?
2. Does Laura have the talent to be a writer? Are there rules that writers must follow, as she believes? Is Jenna correct when she suggests that it’s impossible to write without a historical knowledge of what has come before you?
3. How does the fi rst interaction between Charlie and Jenna at the side of the road set the tone for their relationship? What changes and what remains the same once Laura is involved?
4. It is made clear during her interview with Jenna and again at the writers’ conference that Laura is not terribly knowledgeable about books and writing. Was she also naïve to involve her husband with another woman? What other characters display inexperience or ignorance?
5. Charlie and Laura are similar to Jenna and Frank in that both couples’ passion for one another has cooled after years of marriage. In what other ways are the couples similar? How are they different?
6. How has e-mail affected correspondence? How has it affected writing in general? What opinions would Charlie, Laura, and Jenna each have on the topic?
7. When Charlie thinks back to his childhood and his life with Laura, he recognizes that Prairie Wind Farm “had never been his goal, in part because he’d never had any particular goals.” If not his job, what else drives Charlie? What other examples are there of the gap between desire and reality?
8. Is a “conscious romance” possible? What kind of relationship would that be like?
9. Is it possible that Laura did, in fact, mean to paste Jenna’s e-mail, whether Laura realizes it consciously or not? Why would she have done it intentionally? Why is her reaction to the e-mail being sent out so different from Charlie’s and Jenna’s reactions?
10. Laura Rider starts a list of what women want. What would be on your list?
11. Who, in the end, has the upper hand in the Jenna Faroli Radio Show interview with Laura Rider? Or do neither or both have the upper hand?
12. Is any character responsible for Jenna and Charlie’s affair?
Who or what would be the cause according to Laura? Jenna? Charlie?
13. What is the attraction, either romantic or not, between Charlie, Laura, and Jenna? What does each of them provide to each of the others?
14. In this satire, are all the characters skewered equally?
15. What does Hamilton seem to be saying about the writing life? Are writers necessarily ruthless?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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The Laws of HarmonyJudith Ryan Hendricks, 2009
HarperCollins
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061687365
Summary
In 1989 Sunny Cooper escaped to Albuquerque. Fourteen years later she's still there, struggling to make a living, to shore up her floundering relationship, and to forget her childhood on the New Mexico commune, Armonía, where a freak accident killed her younger sister, Mari.
Just when the "normal" life Sunny craves appears to be within reach, another accident—the sudden death of her fiancé, Michael, and revelations that their relationship was not what it seemed—will turn her world upside down. Once again, Sunny escapes, this time to the Pacific Northwest town of Harmony on San Miguel Island.
When a surprising discovery sparks an emotional encounter for Sunny with her estranged mother, Gwen, she must re-examine the truth of her memories. Only by making peace with the past can Sunny finally step out of its shadow and into a new life. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Santa Clara Valley, California, USA
• Currently—lives in Sante Fe, New Mexico
A former journalist, copywriter, computer instructor, travel agent, waitress, and baker, Judith Ryan Hendricks is the author of several novels, including the bestseller Bread Alone, which first introduced readers to Wynter Morrison. (Adapted from the publisher.)
More
Her own words:
• I was born in Silicon Valley when it was known as the Santa Clara Valley, or, more poetically, the Valley of Heart’s Delight, because it was a lovely, bucolic place known for its orchards and sleepy small towns. Which means if you have any mathematical ability at all, you can figure out that I’m older than I act.
• I had a boringly happy childhood in a middle-class suburban family with my parents, who recently celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary, and my younger brother. My mother instilled in me a love of reading, and I branched out from there into writing, although it took me a while to get serious about it.
• The first thing I remember writing, when I was about 7 years old, was a story about a family whose Christmas tree went missing. That was followed by a few plays coauthored with my best friend, Lynn Davis, and performed in her garage to a captive audience of intimidated younger kids. The plays were mostly outer space/cowboy stories—don’t ask. In junior high it was gothic romance thrillers, and high school was given over to bad poetry about the varsity basketball team. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Satisfying psychological depth and original characters help move along Hendricks's clumsily plotted latest. Sunny Cooper still has problems with Gwen, her mother. Raised on a New Mexico commune, Sunny now lives in Albuquerque with her boyfriend, Michael, doing voice-over work. When Michael is killed in a mysterious accident, Sunny discovers he was not who she thought he was, and creditors and cops inundate her. Looking for solace, Sunny heads back to the commune, where she finds her mother to be the same maddening hippie chick she always was. Again, fed up and out of options, Sunny decides to sell everything and leave, this time for San Miguel Island off the coast of Washington, where, in a little town called Harmony, she tries to rebuild her life. But events from her past follow her to the island, and before long she's heading off-island for some closure. Hendricks's gentle humor and vivid depictions of island and communal life put a little sugar on the unfortunate and overbusy plot.
Publishers Weekly
Hendricks has an engaging narrative voice that will pull readers right into this story of a damaged woman who is more resilient than she realizes.
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. What does Sunny Cooper's flexible assortment of occupations—voice-over artist, personal errand runner, obsessive baker—suggest about her personality and her professional focus?
2. How do the suspicious circumstances surrounding Michael Graham's death and his behavior prior to his disappearance make him seem like a stranger to Sunny?
3. How do the detailed descriptions of food and cooking in The Laws of Harmony affect your reading experience? Which were most memorable to you and why?
4. Why does Betsy Chambliss conceal her betrayal from Sunny, and could there be any possible justification for her behavior?
5. How does the tragic death of her younger sister, Mari, factor into Sunny's feelings about growing up in the commune in Armonía?
6. Sunny can't wait to get away from Armonía, but after almost fourteen years on her own, the normality and stability she craves still elude her. Why is this? To what extent is the summer idyll with her grandparents in California responsible for her sense of living an unmoored life?
7. Why do you think the author chose to explore the strange coincidence of Sunny's having been raised in Armonía, and her having turned up in a town called Harmony? What does this convergence suggest, and to what extent do you think the names might be intended ironically?
8. How would you characterize Sunny's feelings about her mother, Gwen, returning to her life? To what extent is their relationship irretrievably fractured?
9. What does JT's reaction to the news of Sunny's pregnancy reveal about his character and their romantic potential as a couple?
10. What do you think the ending of the book suggests for Sunny, her future life in San Miguel, and her relationships with JT, Gwen, and the others on whom she has come to depend?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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The Lay of the Land (Frank Bascombe series, 3)
Richard Ford, 2006
Knopf Doubleday
486 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679776673
Summary
A sportswriter and a real estate agent, husband and father –Frank Bascombe has been many things to many people.
His uncertain youth behind him, we follow him through three days during the autumn of 2000, when his trade as a realtor on the Jersey Shore is thriving. But as a presidential election hangs in the balance, and a postnuclear-family Thanksgiving looms before him, Frank discovers that what he terms “the Permanent Period” is fraught with unforeseen perils.
An astonishing meditation on America today and filled with brilliant insights, The Lay of the Land is a magnificent achievement from one of the most celebrated chroniclers of our time. National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist and a New York Times Best Book of the Year. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 16, 1944
• Where—Jackson, Mississippi, USA
• Education—B.A., Michigan State University; M.F.A., University of California, Irvine
• Awards—PEN/Faulkner Award; Pulitzer Prize (more below)
• Currently—lives in Boothbay, Maine
Richard Ford is an American novelist and short story writer. His best-known works are the novels that form the Bascombe quartet: The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1995), The Lay of the Land (2006), and Let Me Be Frank with You (2014). He has also published several short story collections, the stories of which have been widely anthologized.
Early years
Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, the only son of Edna and Parker Carrol Ford. Parker was a traveling salesman for Faultless Starch, a Kansas City company. Of his mother, Ford has said, "Her ambition was to be, first, in love with my father and, second, to be a full-time mother." When Ford was eight years old, his father had a major heart attack, and thereafter Ford spent as much time with his grandfather, a former prizefighter and hotel owner in Little Rock, Arkansas, as he did with his parents in Mississippi. Ford's father died of a second heart attack in 1960.
Ford's grandfather had worked for the railroad. At the age of 19, before deciding to attend college, Ford began work on the Missouri Pacific train line as a locomotive engineer's assistant, learning the work on the job.
Ford received a B.A. from Michigan State University. Having enrolled to study hotel management, he switched to English. After graduating he taught junior high school in Flint, Michigan, and enlisted in the US Marines but was discharged after contracting hepatitis. At university he met Kristina Hensley, his future wife; the two married in 1968.
Despite mild dyslexia, Ford developed a serious interest in literature. He has stated in interviews that his dyslexia may, in fact, have helped him as a reader, as it forced him to approach books at a slow and thoughtful pace.
Ford briefly attended law school but dropped out and entered the creative writing program at the University of California, Irvine, to pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree, which he received in 1970. Ford chose this course simply because "they admitted me, he confessed in a profile in Ploughshares (7/8/2010):
They admitted me. I remember getting the application for Iowa, and thinking they'd never have let me in. I'm sure I was right about that, too. But, typical of me, I didn't know who was teaching at Irvine. I didn't know it was important to know such things. I wasn't the most curious of young men, even though I give myself credit for not letting that deter me.
As it turned out, Oakley Hall and E. L. Doctorow were teaching there, and Ford has been explicit about his debt to them. In 1971, he was selected for a three-year appointment in the University of Michigan Society of Fellows.
Early writing
Ford published his first novel, A Piece of My Heart, the story of two unlikely drifters whose paths cross on an island in the Mississippi River, in 1976; he followed it with The Ultimate Good Luck in 1981. In the interim he briefly taught at Williams College and Princeton. Despite good notices the books sold little, and Ford retired from fiction writing to become a writer for the New York magazine Inside Sports. Speaking for same the Ploughshares profile, he said:
I realized there was probably a wide gulf between what I could do and what would succeed with readers. I felt that I'd had a chance to write two novels, and neither of them had really created much stir, so maybe I should find real employment, and earn my keep.
In 1982, the magazine folded, and when Sports Illustrated did not hire Ford, he returned to fiction writing with The Sportswriter, a novel about a failed novelist turned sportswriter who undergoes an emotional crisis following the death of his son. The novel became Ford's "breakout book", named one of Time magazine's five best books of 1986 and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Ford followed the success immediately with Rock Springs (1987), a story collection mostly set in Montana that includes some of his most popular stories, adding to his reputation as one of the finest writers of his generation.
Dirty realism
Reviewers and literary critics associated the stories in Rock Springs with the aesthetic movement known as dirty realism. This term referred to a group of writers in the 1970s and 1980s that included Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff—two writers with whom Ford was closely acquainted—along with Ann Beattie, Frederick Barthelme, Larry Brown, and Jayne Anne Phillips, among others.
Those applying this label point to Carver's lower-middle-class subjects or the protagonists Ford portrays in Rock Springs. However, many of the characters in the "Frank Bascombe" books (The Sportswriter, Independence Day, The Lay of the Land, and Let Me Be Frank With You), notably the protagonist himself, enjoy degrees of material affluence and cultural capital not normally associated with the "dirty realist" style.
Mid-career and acclaim
Although his 1990 novel Wildlife, a story of a Montana golf pro turned firefighter, met with mixed reviews and middling sales, by the end of the 1980s Ford's reputation was solid. He was increasingly sought after as an editor and contributor to various projects. Ford edited the 1990 Best American Short Stories, the 1992 Granta Book of the American Short Story, and the 1998 Granta Book of the American Long Story, a designation he claimed in the introduction to prefer to the novella.
In 1995, Ford's career reached a high point with the release of Independence Day, a sequel to The Sportswriter, featuring the continued story of its protagonist, Frank Bascombe. Reviews were positive, and the novel became the first to win both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In the same year, Ford was chosen as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, for outstanding achievement in that genre. He ended this prodigiously creative and successful decade of the 1990s with a well-received story collection Women with Men published in 1997.
Later life and writings
Ford lived for many years on lower Bourbon Street in the French Quarter and then in the Garden District of New Orleans, Louisiana, where his wife Kristina was the executive director of the city planning commission. He now lives in East Boothbay, Maine.[12] In between these dwellings, Ford has lived in many other locations, usually in the U.S., though he's pursued an equally peripatetic teaching career.
He took up a teaching appointment at Bowdoin College in 2005, but remained in the post for only one semester. In 2008 Ford served as an Adjunct Professor at the Oscar Wilde Centre with the School of English at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, teaching on the Masters programme in creative writing. But at the end of 2010, Ford assumed the post of senior fiction professor at the University of Mississippi in the fall of 2011, replacing Barry Hannah, who died in March 2010.
Ford's intense creative pace (writing, teaching, editing, publishing) did not subside, either, as a new decade (and a new century) commenced. He published another story collection A Multitude of Sins (2002), followed by The Lay of the Land (2006), which continues (and, according to Ford's explicit statements made at this time, was to have ended) the Frank Bascombe series.
However, in April 2013, Ford read from a new Frank Bascombe story without revealing to the audience whether or not it was part of a longer work. But by 2014, it was confirmed that the story would indeed appear as part of a longer work to be published in November of that year. Titled Let Me Be Frank With You, it is a work consisting of four interconnected novellas (or "ong stories"), all narrated by Frank Bascombe.
Also, as he did in the preceding decade, Ford continued to assist with various editing projects. In 2007, he edited the New Granta Book of the American Short Story, followed by the Library of America's two-volume edition of the selected works of fellow Mississippi writer Eudora Welty. Ford's latest novel, Canada, was published in 2012. That same year, he became the Emmanuel Roman and Barrie Sardoff Professor of the Humanities and Professor of Writing at the Columbia University School of the Arts.
Critical opinion
Richard Ford's writings demonstrate "a meticulous concern for the nuances of language ... [and] the rhythms of phrases and sentences." Ford has described his sense of language as "a source of pleasure in itself—all of its corporeal qualities, its syncopations, moods, sounds, the way things look on the page."
This "devotion to language" is closely linked to what he calls "the fabric of affection that holds people close enough together to survive." Comparisons have been drawn between Ford's work and the writings of John Updike, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and Walker Percy.
Ford's works of fiction "dramatize the breakdown of such cultural institutions as marriage, family, and community." His...
marginalized protagonists often typify the rootlessness and nameless longing... pervasive in a highly mobile, present-oriented society in which individuals, having lost a sense of the past, relentlessly pursue their own elusive identities in the here and now.*
Ford "looks to art, rather than religion, to provide consolation and redemption in a chaotic time."
Awards and honors
2013 - Prix Femina Etranger for Canada
2013 - Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for Canada
2001 - PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in short fiction
1995 - PEN/Faulkner Award[9] for Independence Day
1995 - Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Independence Day
1995 - Rea Award for the Short Story for outstanding achievement in that genre. (Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/20/2014.)
*Huey Guagliardo, Perspectives on Richard Ford: Redeemed by Affection, University Press of Mississippi, 2000.
Book Reviews
The novel’s lovely last sentence evokes "our human scale upon the land," and that touch of grandiloquence is well earned. By now, we have gotten to know Frank Bascombe well enough to take his measure, and to appreciate that, like almost no one else in our recent literature, he’s life-size.
A. O. Scott - New York Times
[I]t's a testament to Ford's mastery that we never tire of Frank's company. Whether we're battling rush-hour traffic with him, joining him for a few highballs while his car is in the shop, accompanying him on a client visit or just listening in while he returns some phone calls, we always feel lucky to hang out with him and hear what he has to say. Frank Bascombe—a divorced, middle-aged New Jersey real-estate agent with health problems, kid problems, ex-wife problems and a deep, submerged grief that erupts volcanically from time to time—has become our unlikely Virgil, guiding us through the modern American purgatory of big-box stores along frontage roads, slowly decaying town squares and leafy, secret-harboring suburbs. He's there to remind us that glimmering meaning is hiding everywhere, even in the ugliest or most banal of places.
Jeff Turrentine - Washington Post
Ford once again shows why he deserves to be hailed as one of the great American fiction novelists of his generation.
Washington Post Book World
The Lay of the Land...is distinct not only for its singular style but also because of its generosity. Ford shows that life is never easy and never placid.... Yet we keep moving forward for that occasional moment of pure understanding.
Chicago Sun-Times
[A]s in many literary classics, the beauty of this novel is in its presentation—word choice and perfect phrases—and in Bascombe's unwaveringly honest and humorous narration. Ford... transform[s] his novel into a story told to us by an old friend. A fitting way to complete the Frank Bascombe legacy. —Stephen Morrow, Columbus, OH
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Frank Bascombe....[is] trying mightily to deal with present circumstances while dodging past regrets. But it's Thanksgiving week, "the time of year when things go wrong if they're going to." ... Ford crafts a mesmerizing narrative voice—one that gives us, with offhanded eloquence and a kind of grim mirth, "the lay of the land." —Joanne Wilkinson
Booklist
The third and most eventful novel in the Frank Bascombe series takes a whiplash turn from comedy (occasionally slapstick) toward tragedy.... Though not as consistently compelling as Independence Day (too many chickens coming home to roost), this reaffirms that Frank Bascombe is for Ford what Rabbit Angstrom is for Updike.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What do you make of the story that opens the novel: that of the community college teacher who, before being gunned down by one of her disgruntled students, was asked if she was ready to meet her maker and replied “Yes. Yes, I think I am” [p. 3]. Why is Frank so riveted by this question? How does he think he might answer in similar circumstances? What does he mean when he says that “It’s not a question . . . that suburban life regularly poses to us. Suburban life, in fact, pretty much does the opposite” [p. 4]? Is he right? How do the themes of death, self-accounting, and the terrifying randomness of the American berserker recur throughout The Lay of the Land?
2. What does Bascombe mean by the “Permanent Period?” When does he seem to have entered it, and what events threaten to evict him from it? How serious is he when he speaks of its pleasures? In the scheme of this novel, is permanence the same thing as happiness? As resignation?
3. The Lay of the Land is set during Thanksgiving, as The Sportswriter takes place at Easter and Independence Day over a July 4th weekend. How does the holiday figure in the novel? How does Frank feel about it, and how do the other characters appear to be celebrating it? Discuss the novel’s exploration of themes like gratitude, family, and abundance—as well as the ambiguous meaning of “pilgrim.”
4. What role does politics play in this novel, which occurs during the long, inconclusive hangover of the 2000
presidential election? How does Frank feel about the nation’s current state of affairs? How do the other characters feel, and to what extent are they characterized by their politics? How does the outcome (or non-outcome) of the vote mirror events in Frank’s personal life?
5. What has prompted Frank to become a Sponsor, a member of a group “whose goal is nothing more than to help people” [p. 12]? What sort of help does he have in mind, and how does that correspond to what is actually asked of him on his one Sponsorial visit? What does he get from his voluntarism, and how do the services he performs as a Sponsor compare to his kindnesses as a friend, business partner, father, or husband? How do they highlight his failings and deficiencies? What does the very existence of an organization like Sponsors suggest about
American—or at least New Jerseyan—society in the year 2000?
6. What is the significance of Frank’s career as a realtor? Which of his character traits does it bring into relief? How does it cause him to see the landscape and houses around him, and how does it cause other characters to see him? What does “home” mean to a realtor, who makes his living selling them? What might “home” mean to Frank’s partner Mike Mahoney (né Lobsang Dhargey), whose original one was in Tibet? Is home, as Frank can’t keep from going back to, though the air there’s grown less breathable, the future’s over, where they really don’t want you back, and where you once left on a breeze without a rearward glance” [p. 14]?
7. Mike Mahoney’s name, career-track, and politics suggest a core sample of the American bedrock, except that, as previously mentioned, he happens to be a Buddhist from Tibet. Has the American archetype become someone who was once somebody (or something) else? In what ways are Mike and Frank similar? Are Ford’s characters constantly becoming new people or simply building additions onto an original structure? And, if Mike represents a paradigm in this novel, what do you make of Ann’s statement, “We just have to be who we are” [p. 377]?
8. Frank is a cancer survivor, a category whose ambiguity may be surpassed only by the “suicide survivors” that so confuse Mike. How does Frank feel about his condition, and particularly about where it has chosen to turn up in his body?
9. What sort of father is Frank? Which of his surviving children does he favor and for what reasons? To what extent is he still haunted by the death of his first son? Why is he so unnerved when Clarissa, who only yesterday was a straightforward lesbian, brings home a male “friend”? What might account for Frank’s embarrassment and irritation toward his son Paul and Paul’s occasional fury at him? Is Paul right when he accuses his father of “hold[ing] everything . . . down” [p. 396]?
10. How does Frank relate to the women in his life? What sort of husband has he been? How does he react to Ann’s admission that she still loves him? How has he dealt with his desertion by Sally, and to what extent may he have been complicit in it? (What might it mean when your wife leaves you for a dead man?) What do you make of his Sponsorial call to Marguerite Purcell and of the fact that it transpires without either person alluding to their long-ago sexual fling?
11. For all his relationships, Bascombe seems to be a fundamentally solitary figure. Is this because Ford embeds us so deeply in his consciousness that we experience the essential aloneness that is the hallmark of all consciousness or because Frank really is solitary? What traits or circumstances might make him so?
12. As its title suggests, The Lay of the Land is very much a novel about place. How does Bascombe view his neck of New Jersey? How do his observations about strip malls, McMansions, road houses, and human tissue banks illuminate Bascombe’s character? How do they comment on the novel’s action? Does Bascombe loathe the uniformity and ugliness of this environment, or are his feelings about them more complex? Are the author’s? What is the significance of the fox that appears in one of the book’s final scenes?
13. E. M. Forster famously summed up the difference between story and plot as follows: “‘The King died, then the Queen died’ is the story. ‘The King died, then the Queen died of grief’ is the plot” [Aspects of the Novel, chapter 5]. What is it that makes the seemingly haphazard events in this novel cohere into a plot? What is the relation between that plot’s hinges (Frank’s cancer, Sally’s departure, Ann’s confession, Clarissa’s disappearance, and Paul’s arrival, not to mention the shattering denouement) and its seemingly incidental moments?
14. Frank is both the novel’s protagonist and its narrator. Every perception and event is filtered through his voice. How would you characterize Frank’s voice? In what ways does it combine the casual and the literary, the comic and the tragic?
15. Because The Lay of the Land deals with ordinary people engaged in ordinary life in an environment that most readers will find familiar, it is tempting to see it as a miniaturist novel. But its length, its eventfulness, and the sheer, exuberant density of its observations suggest that it is also a work of fictional maximalism like Bellow’s Herzog or Joyce’s Ulysses (to which it sometimes alludes). Discuss these approaches to fiction and the ways that Ford reconciles, or navigates, between them.
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Lazarus Child
Robert Mawson, 1998
Random House
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 978055358005
Summary
It takes just an instant for a family's life to be changed forever. Now seven-year-old Frankie Heywood lies in a coma. The experts are telling her parents there is no hope. Their son is slipping away emotionally. And the Heywoods—their marriage already strained to the breaking point—are desperate. They have one last chance.
Dr. Elizabeth Chase is a brilliant neurologist who has dedicated her life to coaxing children back from the darkness. Her work is unconventional, controversial—and some say illegal. But the Heywoods have put their trust in her. They are convinced their daughter is waiting just beyond their reach. And they believe Dr. Chase is the miracle worker who can throw Frankie the lifeline that will lead their child back to them. But not even miracles occur without a price. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Aka—Robert Radcliffe
• Born—1956
• London, England, UK
• Education—N/A
• Currently—lives in Suffolk, England
Robert Mawson has worked as a journalist and copywriter, and spent ten years in the aviation industry as a commercial pilot. Widely traveled, he divides much of his time between England and France. The Lazarus Child is his second novel. (From the publisher.)
More
Rob Mawson was born and educated in London. A journalist and advertising copywriter by trade, he also spent ten years in the aviation industry as a commercial pilot. He joined publishers Christopher Little in 1993 with his first novel A Ship Called Hope, published in 1995. Two years later he sold his house and PR business and fled to France to try writing full time.
The result was the international bestseller The Lazarus Child, published in over twenty languages and with a movie version in 2004, starring Angela Bassett and Andy Garcia. In 2002 he again achieved bestseller status with his 1943 drama Under An English Heaven which he wrote under the name Robert Radcliffe. This was followed up in 2003 by a second Radcliffe book, Upon Dark Waters. Rob and his wife Kate live in rural seclusion in Suffolk. (From Christopher Little Literary Agency.)
Book Reviews
It's rare to find a page-turner with this much impact on both the pulse and the heart.
People
A real Sleeping Beauty comes haltingly to life in this slick but topical New Age thriller, the second novel (but the first to be published here) by British writer Mawson. When Alison Heywood evicts her husband, Jack, from their Cambridge, England, home for sleeping with his secretary, 12-year-old Ben has to take over the chore of walking his seven-year-old sister, Frankie, to school. After ducking into a store, he emerges to see her and her playmate Isabelle struck by a van; the accident kills Isabelle and leaves Frankie in a coma. The Heywoods decide to send her to the Perlman Institute in Virginia, run by charismatic Dr. Lizzie Chase, who occasionally has success reviving comatose patients with such controversial methods as sexual stimulation, recreational drugs and heavy metal music. The metaphor of indulging kids rather than censoring them is laid on thick in this emotionally manipulative narrative. So are the digs at the self-righteous types (led by a senator whose son died at Perlman) who try to close down the Institute. Meanwhile, Frankie's family and Lizzie's clique of friends are exceptionally clever and compassionate in their fight to keep the Institute operating. Mawson hits all the bases by weaving in whatever hot issues come to hand: alternative medicine, the "right to die" and the problems of medical bureaucracy. Yet he dilutes the climax by setting it in a dim dreamscape where hypnotized Ben fights to return Frankie from "the other side." The contemporaneous, real-world abduction of Frankie and Ben from the authorities who have occupied the Institute provides a showcase for Mawson's considerable strengths: witty dialogue, savvy characters, surprise developments and rapid pacing. Naturally, by the time the little girl comes back to life, her mum and dad have patched things up, and this three-hanky resolution may well justify the novel's pre-publication interest.
Publishers Weekly
Seven-year-old Frankie Heywood lies comatose in a London hospital after being hit by a car. Her older brother, Ben, who witnessed the accident, blames himself and becomes emotionally distant. His detachment increases as Frankie's lingering condition and his parents' marital difficulties compound the family tension. Finally, the Heywoods turn for help to an American neurologist, Elizabeth Chase, whose pioneering efforts with young coma patients provide renewed hope for Frankie's recovery. Behind Dr. Chase's extreme dedication to her work, and adding to the drama, lies a childhood experience similar to Ben's from which she has never fully recovered. Risk and controversy surround Dr. Chase's experimental methods, and local protesters obtain a court injunction to close her clinic. Frankie's treatment is interrupted, counter-measures are taken, and suspense builds in the competing race for her welfare. However, a couple of gratuitously explicit sex scenes (which transform readers into voyeurs) and a few bizarre chapters depicting epic travels through consciousness do little to advance the story. Recommended for larger fiction collections. —Sheila M. Riley
Library Journal
This second novel (but first US publication) by former London advertising/PR man Mawson combines an endangered-child melodrama with a quirky collective-unconscious tale. Even before the accident, the Heywoods were not a happy family. Jack, president of a failing air-charter business in Cambridge, was recently kicked out of the house for having slept with his secretary. He's been sleeping on the couch at his office for a while now when an accident occurs that overshadows the puny irritations of marital strife: on her way to school, Jack and Alison's seven-year-old daughter, Frankie, is hit by a truck and sent into a deep coma. Her 12-year-old brother, Ben, who witnessed the accident, is so traumatized that his hair turns white and he becomes nearly catatonic. The medical establishment offers the Heywoods no hope of a cure for Frankie and little help for Ben, whose guilt prompts him to attempt suicide, so Alison turns in desperation to Dr. Elizabeth Chase, a genius neurologist who operates a highly experimental clinic for coma victims in Virginia. Chase, whose own brother died in a coma, is intrigued by Ben's apparent knowledge of what Frankie is experiencing while she is unconscious. His reports that she is fully active in a beautiful world we can't see tally with Chases suspicions that her coma patients communicate with each other in some sort of "joint plane of awareness." Welcoming the Heywoods to her clinic despite increasingly threatening attacks by fanatics, the Defense Department, and the local D.A., she urges Ben into her world of the collective unconscious to find and rescue his sister. In the end, Chase must join her young hero in this video-gamelike universe where archetypal characters offer vital provisions and "magic" tokens to help seekers. The risk is that the participant will not return; in fact, only two of three wanderers manage to reach consciousness again. Mawson's evocation of a shared "world beyond" is intriguing, but an ungainly structure and stock British characters may foil the publisher's high hopes for this commercial novel.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Lazarus Child
1. Young Ben feels responsible for his sister's accident. How is it possible—is it possible—to offer comfort in light of a tragic event of this magnitude? How well do you feel his parents help Frankie cope with the trauma?
2. This story pits traditional medicine against experimental methods. What are the benefits of one system versus the other? Would you have entrusted a loved one with someone like Dr. Chase? How fairly do you think Mawson presents the controversy and the characters who stand on either side of the issues?
3. Discuss Dr. Chase's motives, or particular interest, in helping the Heywood children. Do her treatment methods raise ethical or moral issues?
4. Do you believe that a world beyond consciousness exists? Might it be possible for coma patients to communicate with others on a "joint plane of awareness"? Or do you see this story as a fable...say, about a universe of unseen possibilities—or about the potential for deeper levels of connection between human beings?
5. Did the sexually explicit scenes make you uncomfortable? Are they included for sensational effect, or did you find them integral to the plot? Why do you think they are part of the story?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Leave Me
Gayle Forman, 2016
Algonquin Books
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781616206178
Summary
Every woman who has ever fantasized about driving past her exit on the highway instead of going home to make dinner, and every woman who has ever dreamed of boarding a train to a place where no one needs constant attention—meet Maribeth Klein.
A harried working mother who’s so busy taking care of her husband and twins, she doesn’t even realize she’s had a heart attack.
Surprised to discover that her recuperation seems to be an imposition on those who rely on her, Maribeth does the unthinkable: she packs a bag and leaves.
But, as is often the case, once we get where we’re going we see our lives from a different perspective. Far from the demands of family and career and with the help of liberating new friendships, Maribeth is able to own up to secrets she has been keeping from herself and those she loves.
With bighearted characters—husbands, wives, friends, and lovers—who stumble and trip, grow and forgive, Leave Me is about facing the fears we’re all running from.
Gayle Forman is a dazzling observer of human nature. She has written an irresistible novel that confronts the ambivalence of modern motherhood head on and asks, what happens when a grown woman runs away from home? (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 5, 1970
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Education—N/A
• Awards—British Fantasy Award
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City, New York
Gayle Forman is a journalist, as well as an award-winning and New York Times bestselling author whose many young adult novels include I Was Here, Just One Day, and If I Stay, which became a motion picture. She made her foray into adult literature with her 2016 novel, Leave Me. Forman lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters.
Forman began her career with Seventeen magazine, writing articles primarily focusing on young people and social concerns. Later she did freelance writing for Details Magazine, Jane Magazine, Glamour, The Nation, Elle and Cosmopolitan.
In 2002, she and her husband Nick traveled around the world, which allowed her to gather ideas and information. She drew on her travel experiences to publish her first book in 2005, a travelogue—You Can't Get There From Here: A Year On The Fringes Of A Shrinking World. Two years later, in 2007, Forman published her first young adult novel Sisters in Sanity, which she based on an article she had written for Seventeen.
All told, Forman has written seven novels for young adult, plus her 2016 novel for adults, Leave Me. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/14/2016.)
Book Reviews
Gayle Forman is known for her dreamy but hard-hitting young adult novels, including the best-selling If I Stay. With her first foray into grown-up fiction, Leave Me, she doesn’t shy away from the tough questions in this deep-diving and highly entertaining read. It’s hard not to relate to—and root for—Maribeth even as she does the unthinkable: abandons her children.
Family Circle
YA author Forman’s successful foray into adult fiction features...an über-organized mom who is juggling her stressful job, a self-involved husband, and a set of preschool twins.... With humor and pathos, Forman depicts Maribeth’s complicated situation and her thoroughly satisfying arc, leaving readers feeling as though they’ve really accompanied Maribeth on her journey.
Publishers Weekly
Forman is no stranger to complex and emotional stories, having written the best-selling YA novel If I Stay.... While it may leave fans of Forman's previous books wanting more, this novel is sure to be in demand and will especially interest adoptees and their families. —Stephanie Sendaula
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Popular teen author Forman’s adult debut examines just what it means to be a working mother—beholden to everyone, seemingly obligated to forget who you really are. Maribeth’s search for her birth mother and the way she settles into her new—albeit temporary—life away from home will strike a chord with readers, especially those who enjoy Jennifer Weiner and Meg Wolitzer.
Booklist
Award-winning teen author Forman's adult debut nails the frustrations of working motherhood, though the love complications conveniently disappear and the frayed ends of Maribeth's life are retied too easily. An appealing fairy tale for the exhausted and underappreciated.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use these LitLovers talking points for Leave Me...then take off on your own:
1. How did you feel, initially, about Maribeth's decision to pack up and leave her family, especially the twins. Are her actions credible, or believable, as a character? Did your opinion of her change as you read further into the novel?
2. Describe Maribeth's family constellation: the twins, her husband, and her mother. How do they contribute to Maribeth's decision to leave? If this were your family (ooh, maybe it is!) how would you react?
3. Do Maribeth's actions resonate with you? Are there times you harbor similar desires to escape the stress and demands of daily life—or simply feel that life is overwhelming? In other words, do you ever fantasize about doing what Maribeth does?
4. Discuss the supporting characters who enter Maribeth's new life: Sunita, Todd, Stephen, and Janice. What do you think of each of them and the role each plays in helping Maribeth heal?
5. Talk about Maribeth's journey back to wholeness. What does she come to realize?
6. Are you satisfied with the way the story ends? Would you e prefer a different ending?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Leave No Trace
Mindy Mejia, 2018
Atria/Emily Bestler Books
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781501177361
Summary
A riveting and suspenseful thriller about the mysterious disappearance of a boy and his stunning return ten years later.
There is a place in Minnesota with hundreds of miles of glacial lakes and untouched forests called the Boundary Waters. Ten years ago a man and his son trekked into this wilderness and never returned.
Search teams found their campsite ravaged by what looked like a bear. They were presumed dead until a decade later… the son appeared.
Discovered while ransacking an outfitter store, he is violent and uncommunicative and sent to a psychiatric facility.
Maya Stark, the assistant language therapist, is charged with making a connection with their high-profile patient. No matter how she tries, however, he refuses to answer questions about his father or the last ten years of his life.
But Maya, who was abandoned by her own mother, has secrets, too. And as she’s drawn closer to this enigmatic boy who is no longer a boy, she’ll risk everything to reunite him with his father who has disappeared from the known world. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1979
• Where—Minneapolis, Minnesota
• Education—B.A., University of Minnesota; M.F.A., Hamline University
• Currently—lives in the Twin Cities, Minnesota
Mindy Mejia is an American author, best known for her suspense novels, Everything You Want Me to Be (2017) and Leave No Trace (2018). She was born and raised in the Twin Cities, Minnesota. She loved to write even as a child: her mother gave her a journal when she was 11, and Mindy continued writing throughout high school for the speech team and school literary magazine. In college she took a few writing courses. As she said in an interview on the blog, The Suspense is Killing Me,
Half-finished novels and story fragments littered my life during the 90’s. I began much more than I ever seemed to finish.
Mejia earned her B.A. from the University of Minnesota and afterward headed to the corporate world, eventually becoming a financial manager in an electronics firm. She continued to write on her lunch breaks, and went back to school to get her MFA. Her award-winning thesis project became her first novel, The Dragon Keeper, which was published by Ashland Creek Press in 2012. Five years later Emily Bestler Books published her second novel, Everything You Wanted Me to Be.
Mejia's short stories have been published in rock, paper, scissors; Things Japanese: An Anthology of Short Stories; and THIS Literary Magazine. Her next novel, Leave No Trace, is due out in 2018 from Emily Bestler Books.
She now writes full time and lives in the Twin Cities with her husband and children. (Author bio courtesy of the author.)
Book Reviews
Ms. Mejia displays the enviable ability and assurance of such contemporaries as Megan Abbott and Laura Lippman in convincingly charting inter-generational passion and angst.
Wall Street Journal
Excellent.… A strong sense of place infuses Leave No Trace, especially the expansive Boundary Waters—a place of wild beauty.
Associated Press
This psychological thriller is a triumph.
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
Mindy Mejia's evocative and provocative mystery… makes for a sophisticated and wicked whodunit.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
In the spirit of The Lovely Bones and Everything I Never Told You.… [C]ompelling.
Marie Claire
Mindy Mejia's latest is riveting.
US Weekly
Although overly plotted, especially with what feel like forced symmetries between Maya’s and Lucas’s backstories, the novel is saved by its arresting characters…. Mejia remains a writer to watch.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) The author uses Lake Superior's violent storms and the Boundary Waters' forbidding wilderness to intensify the story's emotional impact and heighten its exploration into the unpredictability of half-buried secrets.
Booklist
(Starred review) Bathed in shades of melancholy, Maya's narration, woven in with Lucas and Josiah's heartbreaking story, is a testament to resiliency…. Keep tissues handy.… [T]thrilling… engaging… haunting… and utterly riveting.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Leave No Trace is set in present-day Minnesota, both in the wilderness of the Boundary Waters and its more urban landscapes. What details does Mejia use to create atmosphere and build the setting? How does place affect the action of the story?
2. What was your first impression of Maya? Did your feelings toward her change throughout the novel? What did you think of her when she confessed to killing Derek?
3. Family relationships are at the heart of Leave No Trace; compare and contrast the parent-child relationships in the novel. What themes does Mejia explore within these relationships?
4. The geography of the Boundary Waters is integral to Leave No Trace. Note the way Mejia balances the beauty and danger of this remote location in her descriptions. What passages do you find most emphasize the unique place?
5. The other "disappeared" people Mejia mentions in the story, such as Ho Van Thanh, Agafia Lykov, and Christopher Knight, are all real people. Pick one or two and research their stories. Which disappearance most intrigues you? What do you think captures the imagination about people living away from society?
6. What role does the Bannockburn shipwreck play in the novel? How does its story parallel the stories of characters in Leave No Trace?
7. At the end of the novel, Mejia writes, "There are some places, though, we can only go alone." Think about the spaces (physical, mental, emotional) that Mejia’s characters experience by themselves. Are there any common factors?
8. As you read along, what did you think happened to Josiah, Lucas, Heather, and Jane? How did it differ from what is revealed at the end of the novel?
9. Extreme circumstances and intertwined history aside, what do you think attracts Maya and Lucas to each other? What similar personality traits do you see in these two characters?
10. "I was the girl who didn’t need anyone and made sure things stayed that way.… My life was lonely, but there was something vital in the loneliness, an imperative that I keep the space around me empty and weightless," Maya thinks to herself after Lucas comes to her home and begins to break down her emotional barriers. How does Mejia draw the distinction between solitude and loneliness? Who in the novel would you deem lonely and who lives in solitude? How do their situations change during the course of the novel?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)