The Longest Date: Life as a Wife
Cindy Chupack, 2014
Viking Press
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780670025534
Summary
An award-winning writer for Sex and the City and Modern Family takes a hilarious, heartbreaking look at marriage
Cindy Chupack has spent much of her adult life writing about dating and relationships for several hit TV series and as a sex columnist for O, The Oprah Magazine. At the age of thirty-nine, she finally found The One—and a wealth of new material.
Marriage, Cindy discovered, was more of an adventure than she ever imagined, and in this collection of essays she deftly examines the comedy and cringe-worthy aspects of matrimony. Soulful yet self-deprecating, The Longest Date recounts her first marriage (he was gay) and the meeting of Husband No. 2, Ian.
After the courtship and ceremony, both Cindy and Ian realized that happily ever after takes some practice, and near constant negotiation over everyday matters like cooking, sex, holidays, monogamy, and houseguests. The Longest Date takes a serious turn when it comes to infertility.
The Longest Date is the perfect companion for anyone navigating a serious relationship, be it newlyweds or couples moving in that direction. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—April 29, 1970
• Where—Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA
• Education—B.A., Northwestern University
• Awards—Golden Globe Awards (3); Emmy Awards (2)
• Currently—Los Angeles, California
Cindy Chupack is a screenwriter who has won three Golden Globes and two Emmys for her work as a writer/executive producer of HBO’s Sex and the City and writer/co-executive producer of ABC’s Modern Family.
Several episodes she penned—"Little Bo Bleep" (Modern Family) and "Evolution," "Attack of the 5'10" Woman," "Just Say Yes," "Plus One is the Loneliest Number," "I Love a Charade," and "Splat!" (Sex and the City—were individually nominated for Writer's Guild and/or Emmy awards. Chupack also worked on Everybody Loves Raymond as a writer/co-executive producer.
In May 2010, NBC announced it had commenced production of Love Bites, a television series created by Chupack for the NBC network.
Her first book, The Between Boyfriends Book, was published in 2003, and her second, a comic memoir about marriage, The Longest Date, in 2014. She has also written humorous essays for The New York Times, Real Simple, Harper's Bazaar, People, Allure, Slate, and Glamour.
Chupack is from Tulsa, Oklahoma. She received a journalism degree from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois..(From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Chupack chronicles the ups and downs of marriage in this amusing collection of short, real-life stories. The comedy writer leaves no stone unturned.... The pieces that touch on fertility issues deserve their own category: Chupack and her husband...detail this often painful subject with both sorrow and hope.
Publishers Weekly
Laugh-out-funny and surprisingly poignant.
Booklist
An award-winning TV writer and magazine sex columnist gives the scoop on the "honest, horrible, hysterical truth about the early years of marriage."... Rather, they are beginnings that, for all the pain and loss they may entail, offer the chance to "see higher highs than you ever imagined." A straight-talking, funny and poignant memoir.
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 Longest Ride
Nicholas Sparks, 2013
Grand Central Publishing
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781455520640
Summary
Ira Levinson is in trouble. At ninety-one years old, in poor health and alone in the world, he finds himself stranded on an isolated embankment after a car crash.
Suffering multiple injuries, he struggles to retain consciousness until a blurry image materializes and comes into focus beside him: his beloved wife Ruth, who passed away nine years ago. Urging him to hang on, she forces him to remain alert by recounting the stories of their lifetime together—how they met, the precious paintings they collected together, the dark days of WWII and its effect on them and their families.
Ira knows that Ruth can't possibly be in the car with him, but he clings to her words and his memories, reliving the sorrows and everyday joys that defined their marriage.
A few miles away, at a local bull-riding event, a Wake Forest College senior's life is about to change. Recovering from a recent break-up, Sophia Danko meets a young cowboy named Luke, who bears little resemblance to the privileged frat boys she has encountered at school.
Through Luke, Sophia is introduced to a world in which the stakes of survival and success, ruin and reward—even life and death—loom large in everyday life. As she and Luke fall in love, Sophia finds herself imagining a future far removed from her plans—a future that Luke has the power to rewrite...if the secret he's keeping doesn't destroy it first.
Ira and Ruth. Sophia and Luke. Two couples who have little in common, and who are separated by years and experience. Yet their lives will converge with unexpected poignancy, reminding us all that even the most difficult decisions can yield extraordinary journeys: beyond despair, beyond death, to the farthest reaches of the human heart. (From the publisher.)
About the Author
• 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 nearly 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 clearly knows how to tug at heartstrings and so he proves again with this tale of two love stories ... The fortunes of both romances are described with a noticeably old-fashioned tenderness which prizes love and devotion.... [Sparks] has a canny knack of tapping into what makes us human, and before you know it, you are rooting for Ira and engrossed in his life story Irish Independent A fiercely romantic and touching tale, with the added bonus of a sexy cowboy. When it comes to tales about love, Nicholas Sparks is one of the undisputed kings Heat Will suck you in and leave you a sobbing mess.
Star Magazine
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 Longest Road
A.S. Thompson, 2012
Bradley Publishings
365 pp.
ISBN-13: 1938076168
Summary
Join Steve, Collin, Alex, Billy and Mike. A group of cousins surviving through the aftermath of a pandemic infection of unknown origin. Once contracted, the disease is irreversibly fatal, but its victims don't stay dead for long. Eventually the dead return to life, but all elements of humanity are replaced by ravenous cannibalistic tendencies.
After fleeing their homes in up-state New York, the cousins take to the safety of the road, where they travel west-bound to the rumored "safe-zone" of California. Every day is a fight to stay alive; whether scavenging for essentials or engaging in nerve-racking battles with the relentless undead. Every stop they make is filled with surprises, twists and turns as their lives are now a roller-coaster being driven by hope and shadowed by despair.
Feel their heartache. Experience their triumphs. Follow them as they journey across the wasteland that was once the United States. Ride alongside this family as they search for safety on The Longest Road. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Growing up in southern California, A.S. Thompson has always loved entertainment. So, after receiving his bachelor’s in communications, he decided to follow that love and has since gone on to explore the diversity of the entertainment industry. He has spent countless hours in music studios and worked on set and behind the scenes at TV and film production companies, searching for the right career. But when it’s time to relax, you can find him at a music venue checking out a his favorite bands, at the movies seeing a new release or at home catching up on his DVR.
A.S. has always been a creative individual. He plays multiple instruments, has written and recorded dozens of songs and performed live on stage in front of hundreds of screaming fans (well maybe not hundreds). Whenever possible, he enjoys writing and filming movies and helping friends out with their projects. He’s also the type of guy who’s always looking for something new; the next big adventure. Whether it’s learning a new skill like karate, pursuing a new hobby like becoming a pilot, or, if he could, spend his life traveling the world.
In a screen writing class in college he discovered a new passion-writing. When it comes to writing music, books or film, he is always looking for originality, that new sound or idea that is going to set himself apart. His first book, The Longest Road, was created out of his love for the horror genre. To him, there’s nothing like the suspense and thrill of reading a horror novel or watching a scary movie.... The heart pounding, the spine tingling, and that part in the back of your head that wonders what will happen next. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
(No mainstream press reviews have been posted online for this book. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
Discussion Questions
1. Were the main characters’ actions/relationships/decisions believable?
2. What did you think about the author’s language and writing style?
3. Was the author fairly descriptive?
4. How was the plot? What was unique about it? Was it a stimulating, page-turner?
5. What are some of the major themes of the book? In your opinion, did the author effectively develop these?
6. Describe the setting(s) and tone of the book.
7. How do you feel about the ending?
8. What else struck you about the book? What did you like/not like about the story?
9. Would you recommend this book? Why/why not?
(Questions provided by author.)
Look Again
Lisa Scottoline, 2009
St. Martin's Press
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312380731
Summary
When reporter Ellen Gleeson gets a “Have You Seen This Child?” flyer in the mail, she almost throws it away.
But something about it makes her look again, and her heart stops—the child in the photo is identical to her adopted son, Will. Her every instinct tells her to deny the similarity between the boys, because she knows her adoption was lawful.
But she’s a journalist and won’t be able to stop thinking about the photo until she figures out the truth. And she can’t shake the question: if Will rightfully belongs to someone else, should she keep him or give him up? She investigates, uncovering clues no one was meant to discover, and when she digs too deep, she risks losing her own life—and that of the son she loves. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 1, 1955
• Where—Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., J.D., University of Pennsylvania
• Awards—Edgar Award
• Currently—lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Lisa Scottoline is the New York Times bestselling author and Edgar award-winning author of some two dozen novels and several nonfiction books. She also writes a weekly column with her daughter Francesca Serritella for the Philadelphia Inquirer titled "Chick Wit" which is a witty and fun take on life from a woman's perspective.
These stories, along with many other never-before-published stories, have been collected in four books including their most recent, Have a Nice Guilt Trip, and the earlier, Meet Me at Emotional Baggage Claim, Best Friends, Occasional Enemies, Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog, which has been optioned for TV, and My Nest Isn't Empty, It Just Has More Closet Space.
Lisa reviews popular fiction and non-fiction, and her reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post and Philadelphia Inquirer. Lisa has served as President of Mystery Writers of America and has taught a course she developed, "Justice and Fiction" at The University of Pennsylvania Law School, her alma mater.
Lisa is a regular and much sought after speaker at library and corporate events. Lisa has over 30 million copies of her books in print and is published in over 35 countries. She lives in the Philadelphia area with an array of disobedient pets, and she wouldn't have it any other way.
Lisa's books have landed on all the major bestseller lists including the New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Publisher's Weekly, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, and Look Again was named "One of the Best Novels of the Year" by the Washington Post, and one of the best books in the world as part of World Book Night 2013.
Lisa's novels are known for their emotionality and their warm and down-to-earth characters, which resonate with readers and reviewers long after they have finished the books. When writing about Lisa’s Rosato & Associates series, Janet Maslin of the New York Times applauds Lisa's books as "punchy, wisecracking thrillers" whose "characters are earthy, fun and self-deprecating" and distinguishes her as having "one of the best-branded franchise styles in current crime writing."
Recognition
Lisa's contributions through her writing has been recognized by organizations throughout the country. She is the recipient of the Edgar Award, the Mystery Writer's of America most prestigious honor, the Fun, Fearless, Fiction Award by Cosmopolitan Magazine, and named a PW Innovator by Publisher's Weekly.
Lisa was honored with AudioFile's Earphones Award and named Voice of the Year for her recording of her non-fiction book, Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog. The follow up collection, My Nest Isn't Empty, It Just Has More Closet Space has garnered both Lisa and her daughter, Francesca, an Earphones Award as well. In addition, she has been honored with a Distinguished Author Award from Scranton University, and a "Paving the Way" award from the University of Pennsylvania, Women in Business.
Personal
Lisa's accomplishments all pale in comparison to what she considers her greatest achievement, raising, as a single mom, her beautiful (a completely unbiased opinion) daughter, an honors graduate of Harvard, author, and columnist, who is currently working on her first novel.
Lisa believes in writing what you know, and she puts so much of herself into her books. What you may or may not learn about Lisa from her books is that...
♦ she is an incredibly generous person
♦ an engaging and entertaining speaker
♦ a die-hard Eagles fan
♦ a good cook.
♦ She loves the color pink, her Ipod has everything from U2 to Sinatra to 50 Cent, she is proud to be an American, and nothing makes her happier than spending time with her daughter.
Dogs
Lisa is also a softie when it comes to her furry family. Nothing can turn Lisa from a professional, career-minded author, to a mushy, sweet-talking, ball-throwing woman like her beloved dogs. Although she has owned and loves various dog breeds, including her amazing goldens, she has gone crazy for her collection of King Charles Spaniels.
Lisa first fell in love with the breed when Francesca added her Blehneim Cavalier, Pip, to the mix. This prompted Lisa to get her own, and she started with the adorable, if not anatomically correct (Lisa wrote a "Chick Wit" column about this), Little Tony, her first male dog. Little Tony is a black and tan Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.
But Lisa couldn't stop at just one and soon added her little Peach, a Blehneim King Charles Cavalier. Lisa is now beyond thrilled to be raising Peach’s puppies, Daniel Boone and Kit Carson, and for daily puppy pictures, be sure to follow Lisa on Facebook or Twitter. Herding together the entire pack is Lisa’s spunky spit-fire of a Corgi named Ruby. The solitude of writing isn't very quiet with her furry family, but she wouldn't have it any other way.
Cats
Not to be outshined by their canine counterparts, Lisa's cats, Vivi and Mimi, are the princesses of the house, and have no problem keeping the rest of the brood in line. Vivi is a grey and white beauty and is more aloof than her cuddly, black and white partner, Mimi.
When Lisa’s friend and neighbor passed, Lisa adopted his beloved cat, Spunky, a content and beautiful ball of fur.
Chickens
Lisa loves the coziness of her farmhouse, and no farm is complete without chickens. Lisa has recently added a chicken coop and has populated it with chicks of different types, and is overjoyed with each and every colorful egg they produce. Watching over Lisa's chicks are her horses, which gladly welcomed the chicks and all the new excitement they bring. (Author bio adapted from the author's website.)
Visit the author's website.
Follow Lisa on Facebook.
Book Reviews
Scottoline's writing hasn't acquired the paunch often found in thrillers by authors whose careers have reached the literary equivalent of middle age. Her plots are as lean and swift as a scull on the Schuylkill River in her native Philadelphia.
Janice Harayda - Washington Post
(Starred review.) Bestseller Scottoline (Lady Killer) scores another bull's-eye with this terrifying thriller about an adoptive parent's worst fear—the threat of an undisclosed illegality overturning an adoption. The age-progressed picture of an abducted Florida boy, Timothy Braverman, on a have you seen this child? flyer looks alarmingly like Philadelphia journalist Ellen Gleeson's three-year-old son, Will, whom she adopted after working on a feature about a pediatric cardiac care unit. Ellen, who jeopardizes her newspaper job by secretly researching the Braverman case, becomes suspicious when she discovers the lawyer who handled her adoption of Will has committed suicide. Meanwhile, Will's supposed birth mother, Amy Martin, dies of a heroin overdose, and Amy's old boyfriend turns out to look like the man who kidnapped Timothy. Scottoline expertly ratchets up the tension as the desperate Ellen flies to Miami to get DNA samples from Timothy's biological parents. More shocks await her back home.
Publishers Weekly
If you received news that threatened your family, would you ignore it or devote yourself to proving it false? Pennsylvania reporter Ellen Gleeson is living an ordinary life with her son and cat until she receives a "Have You Seen This Child?" flyer in the mail. The boy photographed in the flyer bears a striking resemblance to her three-year-old adopted son, Will, and becomes an object of obsession for Ellen, shaking the very foundations of her family and propelling her into an investigation. Is Will really Timothy Braverman, missing since infancy? Ellen finds herself anticipating the worst as her quest for the truth progresses. In typical Scottoline (Daddy's Girl) fashion, a strong female fights for what she believes in, despite more than her share of obstacles. Scottoline's best novel to date will have faithful fans and new readers singing her praises. Highly recommended to all public libraries
Library Journal
In a departure from her wildly popular Rosato & Associates series, Scottoline still sticks to what she knows in this taut stand-alone: female drama, family ties, legal intrigue, and fast-paced action. A sure-fire winner. —Mary Frances Wilkens
Booklist
Legal and illegal shenanigans take a back seat to mother love and its vicissitudes in Scottoline's barn-burning crossover novel about every adoptive mother's worst nightmare. Even though the escalating homicide count in Philadelphia includes more and more children and economic clouds portend layoffs at her newspaper, features reporter Ellen Gleeson has her own private store of sunshine: her three-year-old son Will, whom she fell in love with two years ago when a story about pediatric care brought her to his hospital bedside. Because Will had a heart defect and his mother couldn't care for him, she was willing to sign him over to a single mother, a decision Ellen has blessed every day of her life—until the day she sees a circular asking, "HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CHILD?" with the photograph of a boy whose resemblance to Will is uncanny. Timothy Braverman, abducted from his wealthy Florida parents, Carol and Bill, in a carjacking that went horribly wrong, hasn't been seen since. Despite her dread of confirming her fear that Will is Tim, Ellen can't help neglecting her job (with predictably dire professional results) to gather more information about him, partly because of her reporter's nose for a story, but mostly because she wants what's best for her son, no matter the cost. The trail leads her to a garage full of adoption folders, some unwelcome revelations about Will's birth mother and a tense game of hide-and-seek with the Bravermans as she realizes what a hornet's nest her questions have stirred up, and how determined someone is to make sure this is one story she doesn't break. Though the blood-and-thunder climax arrives a mite early, there's one final twist in reserve. Fans will spot the last twist a mile away, but it doesn't matter. For once Scottoline subordinates the criminal plot to the human-interest story that rides sidesaddle in all her thrillers, and the result is her best book yet.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Look Again really examines the notion of parenthood. What do you think makes someone a parent? Do you think the bond a child has with a non-biological parent can be as strong as one they would have with a biological parent? Why?
2. Lisa's favorite quote is one from Eleanor Roosevelt, "A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until she's in hot water." How does Ellen prove that she is a strong woman? Does Ellen remind you of anyone you know? Could you relate to Ellen, and did you like her? Why or why not?
3. As a journalist, Ellen has a heightened need to find the truth. In this circumstance, was this a good thing, or a bad thing? What would you have done in Ellen's place? Would you have looked for the truth, even if it meant losing your son? What do you think were Ellen's motivations?
4. The idea of "letting go" a child helped shape the whole premise of the book for Lisa, which led her to thinking about who really "owns" a child. Who do you think "owns" a child, and what exactly does that mean? If children actually "own" themselves, what then is the role of parents, and what are the limitations on parenthood?
5. If the child you raised and loved with all your heart actually belonged to someone else, and you were the only one who knew, would you give the child up? How do you think those around you would react? Who in your life would agree with your decision, and who would have done the opposite?
6. How would you describe Ellen's relationship with her father and how do you think it changed over the course of the book? Ellen considered her mother her go to parent. Do you think everyone has a go to parent, and what defines them as such?
7. What effect do you think all the drama in Will's life will have on him in the future? Do you think things ultimately worked out to his benefit or detriment and why?
8. How do you feel about single parents adopting children? What kind of, if any, additional requirements do you think should be put on single parents before they can adopt? How do you feel about open adoption? Is it better or worse for children? Is it better or worse for the adoptive parents? The biological parents? At what age do you think a child should be told they are adopted?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Look at Me
Jennifer Egan, 2001
Knopf Doubleday
415 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385721356
Summary
2002, Finalist, National Book Award
At the start of this edgy and ambitiously multilayered novel, a fashion model named Charlotte Swenson emerges from a car accident in her Illinois hometown with her face so badly shattered that it takes eighty titanium screws to reassemble it. She returns to New York still beautiful but oddly unrecognizable, a virtual stranger in the world she once effortlessly occupied.
With the surreal authority of a David Lynch, Jennifer Egan threads Charlotte’s narrative with those of other casualties of our infatuation with the image. There’s a deceptively plain teenaged girl embarking on a dangerous secret life, an alcoholic private eye, and an enigmatic stranger who changes names and accents as he prepares an apocalyptic blow against American society.
As these narratives inexorably converge, Look at Me becomes a coolly mesmerizing intellectual thriller of identity and imposture. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September 7, 1962
• Where—Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Raised—San Francisco, California
• Education—University of Pennsylvania; Cambridge
University (UK)
• Awards—Pulitizer Prize; National Book Critics Circle Award
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York, New York
Jennifer Egan is an American novelist and short story writer who lives in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, New York City. She is perhaps best known for her 2010 novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won both the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.
Background/early career
Egan was born in Chicago, Illinois, but grew up in San Francisco, California. She majored in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania and, as an undergrad, dated Steve Jobs, who installed a Macintosh computer in her bedroom. After graduating from Penn, Egan spent two years at St John's College at Cambridge University, supported by a Thouron Award.
In addition to her several novels (see below), Egan has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper's, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Ploughshares, among other periodicals. Her journalism appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine. She also published a short-story collection in 1993.
A Visit from the Goon Squad
Egan has been hesitant to classify her most noted work, A Visit from the Goon Squad, as either a novel or a short story collection, saying,
I wanted to avoid centrality. I wanted polyphony. I wanted a lateral feeling, not a forward feeling. My ground rules were: every piece has to be very different, from a different point of view. I actually tried to break that rule later; if you make a rule then you also should break it!
The book features genre-bending content such as a chapter entirely formatted as a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. Of her inspiration and approach to the work, she said,
I don’t experience time as linear. I experience it in layers that seem to coexist.… One thing that facilitates that kind of time travel is music, which is why I think music ended up being such an important part of the book. Also, I was reading Proust. He tries, very successfully in some ways, to capture the sense of time passing, the quality of consciousness, and the ways to get around linearity, which is the weird scourge of writing prose.
Bibliography (partial)
Novels
1995 - The Invisible Circus
2001 - Look at Me
2006 - The Keep
2010 - A Visit from the Goon Squad
2017 - Manhattan Beach
Short fiction
1993 - Emerald City (short story collection; released in US in 1996)
2012 - "Black Box" (short story, released on The New Yorker's Twitter account)
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/3/2017.)
Book Reviews
In Propelled by plot, peppered with insights, enlivened by quirkily astute characterizations, and displaying an impressive prescience about our newly altered world, Look at Me is more nuanced than it first appears. Ultimately, it takes us beyond what we see and hints at truths we have only just begun to understand.
Amy Reiter - Salon
Equipped with an arresting premise, Egan's hip and haunting second novel (after The Invisible Circus) gets off to a promising start. Thirty-five-year-old Charlotte, a thoroughly unpleasant Manhattan-based model who escaped the middle-class nothingness of her upbringing in Rockford, Ill., then spent her adult life getting by on appearances, literally loses her face in a catastrophic car accident back in Rockford. As Charlotte's rebuilt face heals and she goes unrecognized at the restaurants and nightclubs that were her old haunts, she must grapple with the lives and losses she has tried to outrun a fractured childhood friendship, the fiance she betrayed and "Z," a suspicious man from an unidentified Middle Eastern country. Anthony Halliday, an attractive, tormented private investigator, interrupts Charlotte's isolation. Hired by a pair of nightclub owners to track down Z because he absconded with a pile of their money, Halliday carries the scent of romance, but he also kicks off a chain of introductions that bizarrely lands Charlotte in the "mirrored room" of great fame. She is reconnected with her past at the same time that she becomes part of a brave new Internet world, where identity itself is a consumable commodity. Oddly, this narrative alternates with that of her old friend Ellen's daughter (also named Charlotte), whose life in Rockford centers around two older men. Though expertly constructed and seductively knowing, Egan's tale is marred by the overblown trendiness at its core. Charlotte (the model, who progresses from horrid to just bearable by the end) and the others come to the same realization: a world ruled by the consumerist values bred by mass production and mass informationis "a world constructed from the "outside in." The Buddha said it better.
Publishers Weekly
Charlotte, a successful thirtyish model, miraculously survives a horrific car crash near Rockford, IL, her despised hometown. However, reconstructive facial surgery alters her appearance irrevocably. Within the fashion world, where one's look is one's self, she has become literally unrecognizable. Seeking a new image, Charlotte stumbles into a tantalizing Internet experiment that may both save and damn her. Back in Rockford, another Charlotte, this one a plain, unhappy teenager, wonders who she really is. Her search for self drives her to extremes; she maintains a tortuous sexual liaison with a mysterious high school math teacher and takes on an eerie scholar-disciple role opposite her unbalanced Uncle Moose, who is obsessed by his unorthodox theories about the Industrial Revolution. The intersections of these and the novel's other intriguing characters raise tantalizing questions about identity and reality in contemporary American culture. Egan continues to fulfill the literary promise she showed in her previous fiction, The Invisible Circus and Emerald City. Recommended for most collections.
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. “I was not Rockford—I was its opposite, whatever that might be, ” Charlotte declares. In Charlotte’s mind, what does Rockford represent? How is her chosen path a reaction to her place of birth? Is her return to Rockford at the end of the book merely circumstantial, or does it represent a symbolic shift in her perception of her hometown?
2. Charlotte describes her notion of the shadow self as, “that caricature that clings to each of us, revealing itself in odd moments when we laugh or fall still, staring brazenly from certain bad photographs.” Why does this concept interest Charlotte, and what does that reveal about her character? What do you imagine Charlotte’s shadow self looks like? Does it change after her accident?
3. Many of the characters in Look at Me undergo major transformations—whether during the course of the novel or before it begins. In what specific ways do the characters change, and how do these changes affect their lives? Which transformations do you find most surprising? How is the idea of transformation linked to the novel’s larger thematic concerns about identity and self?
4. Discuss Z/Michael West. For what is he searching, and what does he find? How does his personal journey mirror Charlotte Swenson’s?
5. While recuperating from her accident and subsequent surgery, Charlotte allows none of her friends or acquaintances to see her. Once people see you in a weakened state, she claims, they’ll never forget, “and long after you’ve regained your vitality, after you yourself have forgotten these exhibits of your weakness, they’ll look at you and stillsee them.” How does this statement reflect Charlotte’s worldview at the beginning of the book? Is she right? Is her perspective borne out over the course of the novel, or does it evolve?
6. Misperceptions and misunderstandings play a crucial role in the plot of Look at Me; characters often reach for something they believe they see in one another, only to find that they were mistaken, or even purposely deceived. Identify some of these misunderstandings and talk about their significance to the novel as a whole.
7. Charlotte says, “information was not a thing—it was colorless, odorless, shapeless, and therefore indestructible. There was no way to retrieve or void it, no way to halt its proliferation.” Compare this statement to Moose’s idea that “now the world’s blindness came from too much sight, appearances disjoined from anything real, afloat upon nothing, in the service of nothing, cut off from every source of blood and life.” What is the connection between these two statements? Do they present differing views of the world or simply different interpretations of the same problem? In the end, does Look at Me seem to sanction them or call them into question?
8. Despite his apparent instability, there is a peculiar beauty in Moose’s striving for vision and in his efforts to communicate that vision to the young Charlotte. For what is he looking? Define, if you can, his odd emotional and spiritual response to industrial and historical events. When Moose experiences his vision once again at the end of the novel, what exactly do you think he sees?
9. Discuss Charlotte’s relationship with Irene Maitlock. What is it about Irene that draws Charlotte to her? Do you see any connection between this relationship and Charlotte’s friendship with Ellen Metcalf? How does Charlotte and Irene’s relationship change over the course of the book?
10. All of the characters in Egan’s novel deal differently with the concept of memory: Michael West allows himself just one memory a day, Charlotte shuns her memories, and Moose exists in a world saturated by memories of his own life, along with imagined recollections of an earlier historical time. What connection does the novel suggest between personal memory and cultural memory? How do you suppose the young Charlotte might feel about her memories twenty years down the road?
11. Look at Me begins by recounting Charlotte Swenson and Ellen Metcalf’s girlhood sexual misadventures. At the end of the novel, Charlotte and Ellen meet again, in very different circumstances. Talk about both women’s experiences in the interim, and about the significance of their last meeting. Did it satisfy you?
12. At the end of the novel, Charlotte demurs, “As for myself, I’d rather not say very much.” Indeed, the novel seems intentionally to leave us without a clear sense of what the future holds for its characters. Why do you think Egan has chosen to end her book so ambiguously? What sorts of lives will the Charlottes, Ellen Metcalf/Hauser, Z, Moose, Ricky, and Irene Maitlock go on to live?
13. Do you feel that Look at Me, with its depiction of how behind-the-scenes events contribute in the making of public images, will have any impact on the way you perceive celebrities?
14. Do you consider Look at Me—in particular, its brutal portrayal of the modeling world—a futuristic novel? Or can it be read it as a fairly accurate look at our present, evolving world? Might there be some way of escaping some of the disturbing scenes Egan describes?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Look for Me (Detective D.D. Warren, 9)
Lisa Gardner, 2018
Penguin Publising
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781524742058
Summary
In Lisa Gardner's latest twisty thrill ride, Detective D.D. Warren and Find Her's Flora Dane return in a race against the clock to either save a young girl's life … or bring her to justice.
The home of a family of five is now a crime scene: four of them savagely murdered, one—a sixteen-year-old girl—missing.
Was she lucky to have escaped? Or is her absence evidence of something sinister?
Detective D.D. Warren is on the case—but so is survivor-turned-avenger Flora Dane. Seeking different types of justice, they must make sense of the clues left behind by a young woman who, whether as victim or suspect, is silently pleading, look for me. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• AKA—Alicia Scott
• Birth—ca. 1971-72
• Where—Hillsboro, Oregon, USA
• Education—University of Pennsylvania
• Awards—Best Hardcove (Int'l. Thriller Writers); France's Grand Prix des lectrices
de Elle, prix du policie; Daphne du Maurier Award (Romances Writers of America)
• Currently—lives in New Hampshire
Lisa Gardner is an American author of fiction. She is the author of 30 some novels, including thriller-suspense works such as The Killing Hour, The Next Accident, Catch Me, and most recently Find Her. She also has written romance novels using the pseudonym Alicia Scott. With over 22 million books in print, Lisa is published in 30 countries. Four of her novels have been adapted as TV movies.
Her work as a research analyst for a consulting firm spurred her interest in police procedure, cutting edge forensics and twisted plots—a fascination she parlayed into more than 16 bestselling suspense novels.
Raised in Hillsboro, Oregon, she graduated from the city's Glencoe High School. As of 2007, Gardner lives in New Hampshire. (Author bio adapted from Wikipedia and the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Family, friendships and foster relationships are explored in this emotional, page-turning thriller.
USA Today
Gardner has a talent when it comes to exploring uncomfortable topics and the various psychological aspects that accompany them while evoking truly emotional responses.… Though the material Gardner writes about might sometimes be dark, she knows how to shine a light and generate optimism when all looks lost.
Associated Press
Gardner has tackled a tough subject with some complicated protagonists…Fans will find the result satisfying as ever.
Florida Times Union
In Thriller Award–winner Gardner’s exciting ninth novel featuring Boston Sgt. Det. D.D. Warren…. Gardner shines a heartbreaking light on foster care abuse while steadily ratcheting up the tension to a genuinely surprising and emotional finale.
Publishers Weekly
The twists and turns in this gripping D.D. Warren adventure will keep readers turning the pages.
Library Journal
( Starred review.) Suspenseful and wholly believable, this ninth entry will win new fans for the series, especially among those who favor Karin Slaughter's gritty procedurals.
Booklist
Despite Gardner's considerable research into the foster-care system, her plot is a tired one populated with cardboard characters and twists any savvy reader will see coming a mile away.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers Book Club Resources. They can help with discussions for any book:
GENERIC QUESTIONS
Mystery / Crime / Suspense Thrillers
1. Talk about the characters, both good and bad. Describe their personalities and motivations. Are they fully developed and emotionally complex? Or are they flat, one-dimensional heroes and villains?
2. What do you know...and when do you know it? At what point in the book do you begin to piece together what happened?
3. Good crime writers embed hidden clues, slipping them in casually, almost in passing. Did you pick them out, or were you...clueless? Once you've finished the book, go back to locate the clues hidden in plain sight. How skillful was the author in burying them?
4. Good crime writers also tease us with red-herrings—false clues—to purposely lead us astray. Does the author try to throw you off track? If so, were you tripped up?
5. Talk about the twists & turns—those surprising plot developments that throw everything you think you've figured out into disarray.
a. Do they enhance the story, add complexity, and build suspense?
b. Are they plausible or implausible?
c. Do they feel forced and gratuitous—inserted merely to extend the story?
6. Does the author ratchet up the suspense? Did you find yourself anxious—quickly turning pages to learn what happened? A what point does the suspense start to build? Where does it climax...then perhaps start rising again?
7. A good ending is essential in any mystery or crime thriller: it should ease up on tension, answer questions, and tidy up loose ends. Does the ending accomplish those goals?
a. Is the conclusion probable or believable?
b. Is it organic, growing out of clues previously laid out by the author (see Question 3)?
c. Or does the ending come out of the blue, feeling forced or tacked-on?
d. Perhaps it's too predictable.
e. Can you envision a different or better ending?
8. Point to passages in the book—ideas, descriptions, or dialogue—that you found interesting or revealing, that somehow struck you. What, if anything, made you stop and think? Or maybe even laugh.
9. Overall, does the book satisfy? Does it live up to the standards of a good crime story or suspense thriller? Or does it somehow fall short?
10. Compare this book to other mystery, crime, or suspense thrillers that you've read. Consider other authors or other books in a the series by the same author.
(Mystery Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Look Homeward, Angel
Thomas Wolfe, 1929
Simon & Schuster
544 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780743297318
Summary
The classic first novel from one of America's greatest men of letters "I don't know yet what I am capable of doing," wrote Thomas Wolfe at the age of twenty-three, "but, by God, I have genius—I know it too well to blush behind it." Six years later, with the publication of Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe gave the world proof of his genius, and he would continue to do so throughout his tumultuous life.
Look Homeward, Angel tells the coming-of-age story of Eugene Gant, whose restlessness and yearning to experience life to the fullest take him from his rural home in North Carolina to Harvard. Through his rich, ornate prose and meticulous attention to detail, Wolfe evokes the peculiarities of small-town life and the pain and upheaval of leaving home. Heavily autobiographical, Look Homeward, Angel is Wolfe's most turbulent and passionate work, and a brilliant novel of lasting impact.
Thomas Wolfe's classic coming-of-age novel, first published in 1929, is a work of epic grandeur, evoking a time and place with extraordinary lyricism and precision. Set in Altamont, North Carolina, this semi-autobiographical novel tells the story of a restless young man who longs to escape his tumultuous family and his small town existence. (From the publisher.)
More
The novel follows the trajectory of Eugene Gant, a brilliant and restless young man whose wanderlust and passion shape his adolescent years in rural North Carolina. Wolfe said that Look Homeward, Angel is "a book made out of my life," and his largely autobiographical story about the quest for a greater intellectual life has resonated with and influenced generations of readers, including some of today's most important novelists. Rich with lyrical prose and vivid characterizations, this twentieth-century American classic will capture the hearts and imaginations of every reader. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October 3, 1900
• Where—Asheville, North Carolina, USA
• Died—September 15, 1938
• Where—Baltimore, Maryland
• Education—B.A., University of North Carolina; M.A.,
Harvard University
Thomas Clayton Wolfe was a major American novelist of the early 20th century. He wrote four lengthy novels, plus many short stories, dramatic works and novellas. He is known for mixing highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing. His books, written and published from the 1920s to the 1940s, reflect vividly on American culture and mores of the period, albeit filtered through Wolfe's sensitive, sophisticated and hyper-analytical perspective. He was famous during his own lifetime.
After Wolfe's death, his chief contemporary William Faulkner said that Wolfe may have had the best talent of their generation. Wolfe's influence extends to the writings of famous Beat writer Jack Kerouac, authors Ray Bradbury and Philip Roth, among others. He remains one of the most important writers in modern American literature, as he was one of the first masters of autobiographical fiction. He is considered North Carolina's most famous writer.
Early life
Wolfe was born in Asheville, North Carolina, the youngest of eight children of William Oliver Wolfe (1851–1922) and Julia Elizabeth Westall (1860–1945). The Wolfes lived at 92 Woodfin Street, where Tom was born. His father, a successful stone carver, ran a gravestone business. His mother took in boarders and was active in acquiring real estate. In 1904, she opened a boarding house in St. Louis, for the World's Fair. While the family was in St. Louis, Wolfe's 12-year-old Grover died of typhoid fever.
In 1906, Julia Wolfe bought a boarding house named "Old Kentucky Home" at nearby 48 Spruce Street in Asheville, taking up residence there with her youngest son while the rest of the family remained at the Woodfin Street residence. Wolfe lived in the boarding house on Spruce Street until he went to college in 1916. It is now the Thomas Wolfe Memorial. Wolfe was closest to his brother Ben, whose early death at age 26 is chronicled in Look Homeward, Angel. Julia Wolfe bought and later sold many properties, eventually becoming a successful real estate speculator.
Wolfe began to study at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) when he was 15 years old; he was a member of the Dialectic Society and Pi Kappa Phi fraternity and predicted that his portrait would one day hang in New West near that of celebrated North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance, which it does today. Aspiring to be a playwright, in 1919 Wolfe enrolled in a playwriting course. His one-act play, "The Return of Buck Gavin," was performed by the newly-formed Carolina Playmakers, then composed of classmates in Frederick Koch's playwriting class, with Wolfe acting the title role. He edited UNC's student newspaper The Daily Tar Heel, and won the Worth Prize for Philosophy for an essay titled "The Crisis in Industry." Another of his plays, The Third Night, was performed by the Playmakers in December 1919. Wolfe was inducted into the Golden Fleece honor society.
He graduated from UNC with a B.A. degree in June 1920. In September of that year, he entered the Graduate School for Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, where he studied playwriting under George Pierce Baker. Two versions of Wolfe's play The Mountains were performed by Baker's 47 Workshop in 1921.
In 1922, Wolfe received his Master's degree from Harvard. His father died in Asheville in June of that year, an event that would strongly influence his writing. Wolfe continued to study for another year with Baker in the 47 Workshop, which produced his ten-scene play, Welcome to Our City, in May 1923.
Wolfe visited New York City again in November 1923 and solicited funds for UNC while trying to sell his plays to Broadway. In February 1924, he began teaching English as an instructor at New York University (NYU), a position he occupied periodically for almost seven years.
Career
Unable to sell any of his plays after three years due to their excessive length, including a time when the Theatre Guild came close to producing his play Welcome to Our City before ultimately rejecting it, Wolfe found his writing style more suited to fiction than the stage. He sailed to Europe in October 1924 to continue writing. From England he traveled to France, Italy and Switzerland. On his return voyage in 1925, he met Aline Bernstein (1882–1955), a scene designer for the Theatre Guild. 18 years his senior, Bernstein was married to a successful stock broker with whom she had two children.
In October 1925, Wolfe and Bernstein became lovers and remained so for five years. Their affair was turbulent and sometimes combative, but she exerted a powerful influence, encouraging and funding his writing. He returned to Europe in the summer of 1926 and began writing the first version of a novel, O Lost, which eventually evolved into Look Homeward, Angel. An autobiographical novel that fictionalized his early experiences in Asheville, the narrative chronicled family, friends and the boarders at his mother's establishment on Spruce Street. In the book, he renamed the town Altamont and called the boarding house "Dixieland." His family was fictionalized under the name Gant, with Wolfe calling himself Eugene, his father Oliver, and his mother Eliza.
The original manuscript of O Lost was over 100 pages and 66,000 words longer and considerably more experimental in character than the final edited version of Look Homeward, Angel. The editing was done by Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's, the most prominent book editor of the time, who also worked with Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Initially, Wolfe expressed gratitude to Perkins for his disciplined editing. It has been said that Wolfe found a father figure in Perkins, who had five daughters and found in Wolfe a sort of foster son relationship. Perkins cut the book to focus more on the character of Eugene, a stand-in for Wolfe himself.
When the novel was published 11 days before the stock market crash of 1929, Wolfe dedicated it to Bernstein. Soon after the book's publication, Wolfe returned to Europe and ended his affair with Bernstein. The publication of the novel caused a stir in Asheville, with its over 200 thinly disguised local characters. Wolfe chose to stay away from Asheville for eight years due to the uproar; he traveled to Europe for a year on a Guggenheim fellowship. Look Homeward, Angel was a bestseller in the United Kingdom and Germany. Some members of Wolfe's family were also upset with their portrayal in the book, but his sister Mabel wrote to him that she was sure he had the best of intentions.
After four more years writing in Brooklyn, the second novel Wolfe submitted to Scribner's was The October Fair, a multi-volume epic roughly the length of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. After considering the commercial possibilities of publishing the book in full, Perkins opted to cut it down significantly and create a single, bestseller-sized volume, which would be titled Of Time and the River. This novel was more commercially successful than Look Homeward, Angel. In a twist from the publication of his previous novel, the citizens of Asheville were more upset this time if they hadn't been included than if they had. The character of Esther Jack was based on Bernstein. In 1934, Maxim Lieber served as his literary agent.
Wolfe left Scribner's and signed with Harper Bros. By some accounts, Perkins' severe editing of Wolfe's work prompted him to leave the Scribner imprint. Other accounts describe Wolfe's growing resentment that some attributed his success to Perkins' work as editor. In 1936, Bernard DeVoto, reviewing The Story of a Novel for Saturday Review, wrote that Look Homeward, Angel was "hacked and shaped and compressed into something resembling a novel by Mr. Perkins and the assembly-line at Scribners."
Wolfe spent much time in Europe and was especially popular and at ease in Germany, where he made many friends. However, in 1936, he witnessed discriminatory incidents towards Jewish people that upset him and changed his mind about the political developments in the country. Wolfe returned to America and published a short story chronicling the incidents called "I Have a Thing to Tell You" in the New Republic. Following that publication, Wolfe's books were banned by the German government and he was prohibited from traveling there. Wolfe did return to Asheville in the summer of 1937 for the first time since publication of his first book.
Death
In 1938, after turning in a large body of manuscript materials, over one million words, to his new editor, Edward Aswell, Wolfe left New York for a tour of the West. On the way, he stopped at Purdue University and gave a lecture, "Writing and Living," then spent two weeks traveling through 11 national parks in the West, the only part of the country he had never visited before. Wolfe wrote to Aswell that while he had focused on his family in his previous writing, he would now take a more global perspective. In July, Wolfe became ill with pneumonia while visiting Seattle, spending three weeks in the hospital there. His sister Mabel closed her boardinghouse in Washington, DC and went to Seattle to care for him. Complications arose, and Wolfe was eventually diagnosed with miliary tuberculosis of the brain.
On September 6, he was sent to Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital for treatment under the most famous neurosurgeon in the country, Dr. Walter Dandy, but an attempt at a life-saving operation revealed that the disease had overrun the entire right side of his brain. Without regaining consciousness, he died 18 days before his 38th birthday. His last writing, a journal of his two-week trip through the national parks, was found in his belongings hours after his death.
Despite his disagreements with Perkins and Scribner's, on his deathbed Wolfe wrote a deeply moving letter to Perkins, whom he considered to be his closest friend. He acknowledged that Perkins had helped to realize his work and had made his labors possible. In closing he wrote:
I shall always think of you and feel about you the way it was that Fourth of July day three years ago when you met me at the boat, and we went out on the cafe on the river and had a drink and later went on top of the tall building, and all the strangeness and the glory and the power of life and of the city was below.
Thomas Wolfe is interred in Riverside Cemetery, Asheville, North Carolina, beside his parents, W.O. and Julia Wolfe, and his siblings.
The next day, the New York Times wrote:
His was one of the most confident young voices in contemporary American literature, a vibrant, full-toned voice which it is hard to believe could be so suddenly stilled. The stamp of genius was upon him, though it was an undisciplined and unpredictable genius.... There was within him an unspent energy, an untiring force, an unappeasable hunger for life and for expression which might have carried him to the heights and might equally have torn him down.
Time magazine wrote: The death last week of Thomas Clayton Wolfe shocked critics with the realization that, of all American novelists of his generation, he was the one from whom most had been expected." Due to his early death, Wolfe spent the shortest amount of time writing of any major novelist during that time, with a career less than half as long as Fitzgerald, Hemingway, or Faulkner.
Upon publication of Look Homeward, Angel, most reviewers responded favorably, including John Chamberlain, Carl Van Doren, and Stringfellow Barr. Margaret Wallace wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Wolfe had produced "as interesting and powerful a book as has ever been made out of the drab circumstances of provincial American life." An anonymous review published in Scribner's magazine compared Wolfe to Walt Whitman, and many other reviewers and scholars have found similarities in their works since.
When published in the UK in July 1930, the book received similar reviews. Richard Aldington wrote that the novel was "the product of an immense exuberance, organic in its form, kinetic, and drenched with the love of life... I rejoice over Mr. Wolfe." Both in his 1930 Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech and original press conference announcement, Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature, said of Wolfe, "He may have a chance to be the greatest American writer.... In fact I don't see why he should not be one of the greatest world writers."
Critical reception and legacy
Upon publication of his second novel, Of Time and the River, most reviewers and the public remained supportive, though some critics found shortcomings while still hailing it for moments or aspects of greatness. The book was well-received by the public and became his only American bestseller. The publication was viewed as "the literary event of 1935"; by comparison, the earlier attention given to Look Homeward, Angel was modest. Both the New York Times and New York Herald Tribune published enthusiastic front-page reviews. Clifton Fadiman wrote in The New Yorker that while he wasn't sure what he thought of the book, "for decades we have not had eloquence like his in American writing." Malcolm Cowley of The New Republic thought the book would be twice as good if half as long, but stated Wolfe was "the only contemporary writer who can be mentioned in the same breath as Dickens and Dostoevsky." Robert Penn Warren thought Wolfe produced some brilliant fragments from which "several fine novels might be written." He went on to say: "And meanwhile it may be well to recollect that Shakespeare merely wrote Hamlet; he was not Hamlet." Warren also praised Wolfe in the same review, though, as did John Donald Wade in a separate review.
While acclaimed when alive as one of the most important American writers of equal quality to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner, Wolfe's reputation has been "all but destroyed" since his death, although the New York Times wrote in 2003 that Wolfe's reputation and related scholarship appeared to be on an "upswing." He is often left out of college courses and anthologies devoted to great writers. Faulkner and W.J. Cash listed Wolfe as the ablest writer of their generation, although Faulkner later qualified his praise. Despite his early admiration of Wolfe's work, Faulkner subsequently concluded that his novels were "like an elephant trying to do the hoochie-cooochie." Ernest Hemingway's verdict was that Wolfe was "the over-bloated Lil Abner of literature."
Two universities hold the primary archival collections of Thomas Wolfe materials in the United States: the Thomas Clayton Wolfe Papers at Harvard University's Houghton Library, which includes all of Wolfe's manuscripts, and the Thomas Wolfe Collections in the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. UNC-Chapel Hill presents the annual Thomas Wolfe Prize and Lecture each October at the time of Wolfe's birthday to a contemporary writer, with past recipients including Roy Blount, Jr., Robert Morgan, and Pat Conroy.
Wolfe inspired the works of many other authors, including Betty Smith with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek, and Prince of Tides author Pat Conroy, who has said, "My writing career began the instant I finished Look Homeward, Angel." Jack Kerouac idolized Wolfe. Ray Bradbury was both influenced by and included Wolfe as a character in his books. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Language as rich and ambitious and intensely American as any of our novelists has ever accomplished.
Charles Frazier (Cold Mountain)
Look Homeward, Angel is one of the most important novels of my life. . . . It's a wonderful story for any young person burning with literary ambition, but it also speaks to the longings of our whole lives; I'm still moved by Wolfe's ability to convey the human appetite for understanding and experience.
Elizabeth Kostova (The Historian)
Wolfe made it possible to believe that the stuff of life, with all its awe and mystery and magic, could by some strange alchemy be transmuted to the page.
William Gay (The Long Home)
As so many other American boys had before and have since, I discovered a version of myself in Look Homeward, Angel, and I became intoxicated with the elevated, poetic prose.
Robert Morgan (Gap Creek)
Discussion Questions
1. Like Faulkner and Joyce, Wolfe has been acclaimed for his evocation of place. What details in Look Homeward, Angel evoke its setting, and what is the relation between its setting and its themes?
2. Describe the structure of Look Homeward, Angel. Discuss Wolfe's literary voice and his use of dramatic episodes and lyricism. How does Wolfe use both angels and trains symbolically? What significance does the title Look Homeward, Angel gather in the course of the novel?
3. In what ways does the novel powerfully represent the American struggle to go beyond the limitations of home and hometown? In what ways is the novel a search for America as well?
4. Describe the conflict which rages inside of Eugene Gant? How does it become the underlying force in the story?
5. Look Homeward, Angel is concerned with family and breaking away. Discuss this theme as it emerges in the book as well as in the exchanges between Eugene and Eliza, Eugene and Mr. Gant, Eugene and Ben.
6. Wolfe clearly states in the opening pages:
That we are born alone—all of us who ever lived or will live—that we live alone, and die alone, and that we are strangers to one another, and never come to know one another.
How does this sentiment pervade the novel? How does Wolfe develop it as a leitmotiv? Who else in the novel, besides Eugene, is alone?
7. Women play a significant role in Wolfe's novel, especially Eliza, Margaret, Laura James, and Helen. What distinguishes Wolfe's female characters? What do they all have in common? How do these women shape events? What impact do they have on Eugene's growth and ultimate transformation?
8. Discuss the impetus Wolfe's male characters provide Eugene. What characterizes Wolfe's male characters? How do Mr. Gant, Ben, Steve, and Luke contribute to Eugene's ultimate fate? What role do Wolfe's male characters play in the events, in the family?
9. How might Wolfe perceive his own characters? Does he offer any insights into their troubles? Does he treat them sympathetically? If so, how? In what ways do Wolfe's characters, in particular Eugene, try to win love? What keeps them from obtaining it? Do Wolfe's characters ever break through to one another? If so, who, how, and when?
10. Beginning with the death of Mr. Gant's grandfather, to the death of Mr. Gant's first child, death is a constant presence in Look Homeward, Angel. What impact does Ben's death have on the Gant family? Specifically, how does it alter Eugene's life and perspective? Why is Ben's death ironic in the novel? How does the story build to this climax? What does Ben's death accomplish that his life could not?
11. Why might Wolfe have ended the novel with a visitation of Ben's ghost with Eugene? What is its significance both for Eugene and for the novel?
12. What vision of human nature does Look Homeward, Angel seem to express? Does Wolfe prove or suggest a vision of an ideal world? What might it be?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Lookaway, Lookaway
Wilton Bernhardt, 2013
St. Martin's Press
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250020833
Summary
Jerene Jarvis Johnston and her husband Duke are exemplars of Charlotte, North Carolina’s high society, where old Southern money—and older Southern secrets—meet the new wealth of bankers, boom-era speculators, and carpetbagging social climbers.
Steely and implacable, Jerene presides over her family’s legacy of paintings at the Mint Museum; Duke, the one-time college golden boy and descendant of a Confederate general, whose promising political career was mysteriously short-circuited, has settled into a comfortable semi-senescence as a Civil War re-enactor. Jerene’s brother Gaston is an infamously dissolute bestselling historical novelist who has never managed to begin his long-dreamed-of literary masterpiece, while their sister Dillard is a prisoner of unfortunate life decisions that have made her a near-recluse.
And the four Johnston children wander perpetually toward scandal and mishap. Annie, the smart but matrimonially reckless real estate maven; Bo, a minister at war with his congregation; Joshua, prone to a series of gay misadventures, and Jerilyn, damaged but dutiful to her expected role as debutante and eventual society bride. Jerene must prove tireless in preserving the family's legacy, Duke’s fragile honor, and what's left of the dwindling family fortune. She will stop at nothing to keep what she has—but is it too much to ask for one ounce of cooperation from her heedless family?
In Lookaway, Lookaway, Wilton Barnhardt has written a headlong, hilarious narrative of a family coming apart, a society changing beyond recognition, and an unforgettable woman striving to pull it all together. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1960
• Where—Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA
• Education—B.A., Michigan State University; M.Phil,
Oxford University
• Currently—lives in Raleigh, North Carolina
Wilton Barnhardt is a former reporter for Sports Illustrated and is the author of Emma Who Saved My Life (1989), Gospel (1993), Show World (1999), and Lookaway, Lookaway (2013).
Barnhardt took his B.A. at Michigan State University, and was a graduate student at Brasenose College, University of Oxford, where he read for an M.Phil. in English. He teaches fiction-writing to undergraduate and graduate students at the North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where he is a faculty member in the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/18/2013.)
For a longer and much funnier version of his bio, visit the author's website.
Book Reviews
A dishier array of secrets animates Lookaway, Lookaway, Wilton Barnhardt’s big, enveloping novel about a status-conscious North Carolina family.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Lacerating but affectionate, as exuberant as it is shrewd, Lookaway, Lookaway is a Southern novel so sure-footed the only real question for Barnhardt is, "What took you so long?"…Southern literature is full of humor but strangely short on satire. Barnhardt gleefully leaps into this gap like a man with a very long to-do list, eviscerating rituals and rascals ranging from sorority rush and Civil War re-enactments to back-stabbing church ladies…. Lookaway, Lookaway is that rare thing: an excellent long novel that's not long enough.
Malcolm Jones - New York Times Book Review
Sprawling, generous, delightful.... I didn't want it to end. Lookaway is both dishy an dliterary, but like all good novels, there's a nourishing quality as well.
Charlotte Observer
Scathing yet touching, this is a delicious saga of Old South meets New, a story of America lurching toward the future.
People
One helluva barn burner.
Elle
North Carolina native Barnhardt’s frothy, satirical latest is Southern gothic at its most decadent and dysfunctional.... [T]he sprawling saga of an esteemed clan’s fall from grace and fortune spools out in fits and starts.... As the scandals pile up...this mess of a family has nowhere left to go but up—well, not if they can help it.
Publishers Weekly
Told with great humor and precision, Barnhardt's fourth novel (after Show World) is a searing look at the new South, with all its contradictions. Verdict: Fans of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections will appreciate this satisfying, multigenerational tale. A fresh take on the family saga told with both Southern charm and pathos. —Jennifer B. Stidham, Houston Community Coll., Northeast
Library Journal
Dixieland was never so dishy nor dysfunctional as in Barnhardt’s ribald send-up of the conflagration that ensues when Old South tradition confronts New South tackiness…. Barnhardt’s satirical scorching of southern culture comes in second only to Sherman’s fiery march.
Booklist
(Starred review.) [A] revelation: witty, savage and bighearted all at once, it is the Southern novel for the 21st century. The Jarvis-Johnston clan is a Charlotte, N.C., family of distinction; they have all that matters to society.... But, as each family member is revealed...the ruin of the family becomes imminent.... Barnhardt masterfully reimagines the Southern gothic: There is every kind of sordid deed committed, but there is also an abundance of humanity and grace.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Lookaway, Lookaway is filled with memorable characters: indomitable Jerene, wounded but charismatic Duke, savagely funny Gaston, the adult Johnston children. Who is your favorite and why?
2. Though contemporary, this is definitely a “Southern” novel. Could this take place in another part of the country? What does it mean to be Southern anymore? Is it a nostalgia kept alive by a few old Civil war-enthusiasts and deluded High Society matrons, or is there really such a thing as “Southern”?
3. What is Jerene Johnston doing five years from the end of the novel? She’s a survivor, of course, but what will her life look like?
4. Self-destructive doesn’t even begin to describe the Johnstons. Who do you think is responsible for the family’s dysfunction? Is Duke’s failure to live up to his promise the start of it or does it go back even farther?
5. Bo and Kate once thought they would form a model Christian couple, with Bo emphasizing the institutional church life and Kate always hankering for the mission fields and the active, even radical faith. At the end of the book, have they gone their separate ways for good? How much did their differing views of religion contribute to their break-up?
6. What happens to Jerene’s family art collection? Who inherits it?
7. None of the Johnston children should write a romantic advice column. But who will end up the happiest? Is it improbably possible that Nonso and Joshua will have the best chance of living happily ever after? Despite Duke and Jerene’s solid union, none of the children seems to have figured out how to make a good match or marriage. Is there a reason for that?
8. Gaston adds himself to the pile of badly behaving, flagrantly drunken/unhappy Southern male writers (Faulkner, Wolfe, Dickey, Penn Warren, Capote, Tennessee Williams, et al). Is Norma correct—do these men just play at “Southern writer” or is there something especially destructive that lurks in the Southern literary profession?
9. What will Annie’s relationship with her mother be like after her father passes away? Will they be estranged or make some kind of détente? At the end of the book, Annie is free of the South and the pressures of the family? Will she be happier?
10. Race. Most chapters brush against (or take head-on) the inescapable topic of race in the South. The bad old days of Jim Crow may be gone, but how does the ever-changing mechanics of race-awareness and racism, overt as well as passive, limit and influence the white characters’ lives?
11. Class. Mrs. Johnston swears a couple can hail from different countries, different races or religions, but providing they share their class in common it might work out. Annie insists “class” is dead as a concept in America and that love will overcome all. Is Jerene right?
12. The Civil War—still alive, in some mutated fashion, in the South. (Maybe even still being fought.) Does anyone care about the war anywhere else in the country? Has a defeat for a lost and inglorious cause 150+ years ago truly cast that long and lasting a shadow over the American South?
13. Lookaway, Lookaway pokes a lot of fun at the Old Confederacy’s concepts of honor and the glorious gesture. Is Gaston and Duke’s final such gesture, their “honorable” solution to the inevitable decay and indignity that awaits them, merely ludicrous or is it actually chivalrous, a last romantic gesture and quest for a kind of nobility?
14. Humor is central to Barnhardt’s telling of the story. While the characters are strong and dominant, they are also really funny—intentionally or otherwise. Why is a sense of humor so important when reading this book? Which character do you think is the funniest and why?
15. Dorrie and Kate are the book’s outsiders, the eyes and thoughts of the reader. Are they changed for the better by entangling themselves with the Johnstons, or damaged? Does Kate depart the South for the mission fields mostly to escape the Johnstons and their values? Will Dorrie continue to be a faithful friend to Joshua and to Jerene?
16. Granted, Jerene is adept at fraud and petty criminality (particularly where shaking people down for money is concerned) and could probably kill detractors with her bare hands, but aren’t her sins in the service of her family? Or is she motivated by the false god of Society’s opinion and outward appearances? Is she admirable, or at least likable? Every family has a Jerene to some degree…in your family, is it you?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Looker
Laura Sims, 2018
Sribner
292 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781501199110
Summary
A dazzling, razor-sharp debut novel about a woman whose obsession with the beautiful actress on her block drives her to the edge.
"I’ve never crossed their little fenced-in garden, of course. I stand on the sidewalk in front of the fern-and-ivy-filled planter that hangs from the fence—placed there as a sort of screen, I’m sure—and have a direct line of view into the kitchen at night.
"I’m grateful they’ve never thought to install blinds. That’s how confident they are. No one would dare stand in front of our house and watch us, they think. And they’re probably right: except for me."
In this taut and thrilling debut, an unraveling woman, unhappily childless and recently separated, becomes fixated on her neighbor—the actress.
The unnamed narrator can’t help noticing with wry irony that, though she and the actress live just a few doors apart, a chasm of professional success and personal fulfillment lies between them. The actress, a celebrity with her face on the side of every bus, shares a gleaming brownstone with her handsome husband and their three adorable children, while the narrator, working in a dead-end job, lives in a run-down, three-story walk-up with her ex-husband’s cat.
When an interaction with the actress at the annual block party takes a disastrous turn, what began as an innocent preoccupation spirals quickly, and lethally, into a frightening and irretrievable madness.
Searing and darkly witty, Looker is enormously entertaining—a psychologically suspenseful and fearlessly original portrait of the perils of envy. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—?
• Where—Richmond, Virginia, USA
• Education—B.A., College of William and Mary; M.F.A., University of Washington
• Awards—Alberta Prize from Fence Books
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York
Laura Sims is an American poet and fiction writer, whose debut novel Looker (2019) sparked a bidding war, resulting in a major deal with Scribner. The book follows the spiraling descent of a woman obsessed—with the end of her marriage, with her inability to have a child, with her infuriatingly bourgeois Brooklyn neighborhood, and with her movie star neighbor.
Poetry
Prior to her novel, Sims published four books of poetry: Staying Alive (2016), My god is this a man (2014), Stranger (2009), and Practice, Restraint (2005). In 2014, she compiled and edited Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson. She has published five poetry chapbooks, including POST- (2011).
Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Aufgabe, Black Clock, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Crayon, and Denver Quarterly, among others.
She has published book reviews and essays in Boston Review, New England Review, Rain Taxi, and The Review of Contemporary Fiction.
Education
Sims is a graduate of the College of William and Mary. She received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Washington. She is a professor of creative writing, literature and composition who currently teaches at New York University.
She has been a featured writer for Harriet, the Poetry Foundation's blog, and she is a co-editor of Instance Press with poets Elizabeth Robinson, Beth Anderson, and Susanne Dyckman. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Honors
2005 - Alberta Prize for Practice, Restraint from Fence Books
2006 - Creative Artists Exchange Fellowship from the Japan-US Friendship Commission
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
In prose that moves between lyrical and caterwauling, the poet Laura Sims has pulled off the high-wire act of making bitterness delicious (Most Anticipated Books of 2019).
Vogue
This debut is a penetrating and unsettling psychological thriller.… It’s a novel about identity, appearances, and envy, and it’s one of the season’s most timely reads, an innovative experiment in what a thriller can be (Most Anticipated Books of 2019).
Literary Hub
In this electrifying Hitchcockian debut, an unhappy woman’s obsession with a nearby actress will push the boundaries between insanity and desperation.
Washington Independent Review of Books
Tense, twisted and briskly paced.… Somewhat surprisingly, the most disturbing thing about Looker is the creeping sense of complicity that Sims engenders in the reader… [compelli g] us to ask: Have we been deranged, predatory voyeurs into the actress's life—or into the narrator's?
Shelf Awareness
Laura Sims’ sharp debut novel is a thriller about an unhealthy fixation between neighbors, one that’s propelled by the unnamed narrator’s unraveling as she descends into a vortex of resentment and obsession (Best New Books Winter 2019).
Southern Living
(Starred Review) [C]hilling and riveting. In this tightly plotted novel, Sims takes the reader fully into the mind of a woman becoming increasingly unhinged, and turns her emotionally fraught journey into a provocative tale about the dangers of coveting what belongs to another
Publishers Weekly
[A] gripping and intense debut.…This twisted and tightly coiled tale will define obsession on a new level.
Library Journal
Readers fond of protagonists who profess to guzzling wine at nine a.m. will breeze right through this one's bad decisions, moments of shocking clarity and cruelty, and—no spoilers!—total undoing. A dark and stylish drama featuring a self-aware yet unstable narrator.
Booklist
Like a modern-day version of Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," Sims' novel shows the warped reality and claustrophobic mentality of a person losing a grip on her moral compass. But this reality is conveyed with slack language and a piling on of plot turns…. Its most original and electric moments [are] when the narrator dives into the edgy poems she teaches her students.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. At the very beginning of the novel, the narrator says that the actress “belongs to us. To our block, I mean,” (page 1). Why does she correct herself? And how does this set up the narrator’s increasingly intense feelings about the actress?
2. The narrator is very familiar with the actress’s roles, thinking, for instance, of her breakout in The Sultan of Hanover Street, which she watched with Nathan. How does her engagement with the actress’s many on-screen roles color her understanding of the actress as a wife, mother, and neighbor?
3. One of the reasons for the dissolution of the narrator’s marriage seems to be that the narrator was unable to conceive a child. How does this impact the narrator’s feelings about herself?
4. The narrator teaches her students that Emily Dickinson poems are “full of sex and rage,” (page 55). Why are these themes particularly resonant? Are there other ways of interpreting the poems she assigns?
5. When the narrator has lunch with her friend Shana, she at first believes she’s getting “appreciative looks” from every man in the room (page 58), but then realizes this might not be the case. How does this shift in reality complicate your understanding of the narrator’s reliability? What are other instances of her unreliability?
6. Describe the narrator’s transition from tolerating Cat to desperately holding on to her. How does she convince herself that Cat belongs with her?
7. When the narrator feels insecure in front of her students, she wears an outfit that “mirrors the one the actress wore to teach in every single scene of Working Class,” (page 83). Why? How would you describe the narrator’s feelings towards the actress?
8. The narrator fills up the room once intended for her and her husband’s child with the actress’s discarded family belongings, making the room into a kind of shrine. How do the narrator’s changing feelings about these belongings illuminate her moods?
9. Why do you think the narrator is so fixated on the block party?
10. Why does the narrator engage with Bernardo? Is he the unstable one, or is she?
11. After her months-long obsession with the block party, the narrator’s interaction with the actress does not go as expected. Why do you think the narrator, even after the incident with Nathan, chooses to go to the actress’s house? What does she hope to get out of the experience?
12. The narrator assigns Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” to her students (page 141). How does it speak to the way the narrator has responded to losing the things she once had—her job, her marriage, the possibility of a child?
13. On her final day with Cat, why does the narrator make the decision to act as she does? Is it planned, or an act of desperation?
14. The narrator envisions achieving a rapturous closeness with the actress as the novel comes to an end. Are these just fantasies, or are they more sinister than that?
15. How did you feel after spending so much time in the narrator’s head? When you finished reading, did you have sympathy for her? What did you think was going to happen to her afterwards?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Looking for Me
Beth Hoffman, 2013
Pamela Dorman Books
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780670025831
Summary
Beth Hoffman’s bestselling debut, Saving CeeCee Honeycutt, won admirers and acclaim with its heartwarming story and cast of unforgettable characters. Now her unique flair for evocative settings and richly drawn Southern personalities shines in her compelling new novel, Looking for Me.
Teddi Overman found her life’s passion for furniture in a broken-down chair left on the side of the road in rural Kentucky. She learns to turn other people’s castoffs into beautifully restored antiques, and eventually finds a way to open her own shop in Charleston. There, Teddi builds a life for herself as unexpected and quirky as the customers who visit her shop. Though Teddi is surrounded by remarkable friends and finds love in the most surprising way, nothing can alleviate the haunting uncertainty she’s felt in the years since her brother Josh’s mysterious disappearance. When signs emerge that Josh might still be alive, Teddi is drawn home to Kentucky. It’s a journey that could help her come to terms with her shattered family—and to find herself at last. But first she must decide what to let go of and what to keep.
Looking for Me brilliantly melds together themes of family, hope, loss, and a mature once-in-a-lifetime kind of love. The result is a tremendously moving story that is destined to make bestselling author Beth Hoffman a novelist to whom readers will return again and again as they have with Adriana Trigiani, Fannie Flagg, and Joshilyn Jackson. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Ohio, USA
• Currently—lives in Newport, Kentucky
Beth Hoffman was president and co-owner of a major interior design studio in Cincinnati, Ohio, before selling her business to write full time. (From the publisher.)
More
In her own words:
I was born on an elevator during a snowstorm, a story my father often enjoyed telling whenever the opportunity arose. For the first five years of my life, I lived (along with my mom, dad, and older brother) on my grandparents’ farm in northern Ohio. It was a rural area, and other than a few tolerant garden toads, a highly social chicken, and Midnight, our family dog, there wasn’t anyone to play with. So I created imaginary friends. I’d draw pictures of them and build them homes out of shoeboxes—replete with interiors furnished by pictures I’d cut from a Sears & Roebuck catalog. Eventually I wrote stories about my friends, giving them interesting names and complex lives.
From earliest memory, there were two things I loved above all else: writing and painting. I wrote my first short story when I was eleven and sold my first painting at the age of fourteen. I believed the sale of the painting was a sign of what direction I should take in life. So I chose a career in art that eventually segued into interior design, but I still kept writing and dreaming of becoming a novelist. Life sent me on many creative journeys and I ultimately landed in Cincinnati, Ohio, becoming the president and co-owner of an interior design studio.
Years went by, long hours and hard work brought success, and with it came the inevitable stresses of business ownership. During the busiest year of my professional life, I nearly died from the same infection that took puppeteer Jim Henson’s life—group A streptococcal infection that resulted in septic shock. After finally being discharged from the hospital, I returned home to convalesce. I spent weeks reevaluating my life—the good, the bad, and the downright painful. As I struggled to regain my health and find spiritual ballast, my dream of writing a novel resurfaced. But no matter how I looked at it, there simply weren’t enough hours in the day to fulfill the demands of my career and write a novel. So I let the dream go.
Then, on a snowy morning in January of 2004, a complete stranger said something to me. And like an unexpected gust of fresh air, his words blew the door wide open. In an eye-blink I knew if I were to write a novel, it had to be now or never. I chose now. I sold my portion of the design business, and after a month of sleeping and meditating and realigning my energies, I plunked down at my computer. Day after day my fingers blazed over the keyboard, and I didn’t come up for air until I typed “The End” nearly four years later.
If there’s a moral to my story, it’s this: take a chance, embrace your dreams, forgive, let go, move on. And if life gives you a big smackdown, there’s a reason—and it just might lead toward your own little piece of the rainbow.
Oh, and there’s one more thing: be mindful of the words of strangers. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Upon graduating from high school, Theodora “Teddi” Overman leaves her childhood home in rural Kentucky to pursue her passion for restoring old furniture.... One item from her past, however, continues to haunt her: the still-unexplained disappearance of her brother, Josh.... Though readers may question certain plot turns, these less plausible moments won’t detract too much from the enjoyment to be found in Teddi’s story.
Publishers Weekly
Hoffman has a good ear for dialogue, and Teddie and her friends are realistic, appealing characters. Perfect for fans of family-centered women’s fiction, this book will have special appeal to readers interested in antiques and 'shabby chic' style.
Booklist
Self-taught furniture restorer and successful business owner Teddi Overman has built a good life. Yet a mystery from her past lingers.... Just as love begins to nudge at the edges of Teddi's life, she is forced to reckon with [her brother] Josh's disappearance and her mother's dashed expectations. Hoffman's...novel confusingly mingles a charming Southern-girl romance with a weighty mystery. The romance resolves predictably, yet the mystery leaves far too many loose threads.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Teddi follows her dream to work with furniture despite her mother's lack of support, and she works hard to make her vision a reality. Do you have a similar passion or drive?
2. Why did Hoffman choose birds as the animals that mean the most to Josh? What does a bird represent?
3. On page 197, Teddi's grandmother says, "Sometimes it's not what we hold onto that shapes our lives but what we let go of." How does this apply to Teddi? To your own life?
4. Teddi finds a beautiful silk nightgown in her mother's dresser. Why do you think her mother kept it for so many years?
5. The novel is filled with colorful characters. Besides Teddi, who was your favorite and why?
6. Hoffman writes that the difficulty of returning home is that "a piece of us stays behind when we leave-a piece we can never reclaim, one that awaits our next visit and demands that we remember" (page12). Do you agree?
7. Teddi struggles to get her mother to see her for what she really is. Did she succeed? Did you have a similar situation with your own parents? With your own children?
8. Do you think that Josh killed the poacher?
9. Looking beyond the events of the novel, do you imagine that Teddi and Josh will be reunited?
10. In the hospital, Teddi nearly tells her mother that she loves her but decides against it. Why? If she had, how do you think her mother would have reacted?
11Why does Hoffman end the novel with the word "Menewa"?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Lord of Misrule
Jaimy Gordon, 2010
Knopf Doubleday
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307946737
Summary
Winner, 2010 National Book Award for Fiction
A brilliant novel that captures the dusty, dark, and beautiful world of small-time horse racing, where trainers, jockeys, grooms and grifters vie for what little luck is offered at a run-down West Virginia track.
Tommy Hansel has a plan: run four horses, all better than they look on paper, at long odds at Indian Mound Downs, then grab the purse—or cash a bet—and run before anyone’s the wiser. At his side is Maggie Koderer, who finds herself powerfully drawn to the gorgeous, used up animals of the cheap track. She also lands in the cross-hairs of leading trainer Joe Dale Bigg.
But as news of Tommy’s plan spreads, from veteran groom Medicine Ed, to loan shark Two-Tie, to Kidstuff the blacksmith, it’s Maggie, not Tommy or the handlers of legendary stakes horse Lord of Misrule, who will find what's valuable in a world where everything has a price. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 4, 1944
• Where—Baltimore, Maryland, USA
• Education—B.A., Antioch College; M.A., Ph.D.,
Brown Univeristy
• Awards—National Book Award
• Currently—lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan
Jaimy Gordon is an American writer. She graduated from Antioch College in 1966, received an M.A. in English from Brown University in 1972, and earned Doctor of Arts in Creative Writing in l975, also from Brown.
She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she teaches in the MFA program of Western Michigan University. She is author of the underground fantasy classic Shamp of the City-Solo. Her fourth novel, Lord of Misrule, won the 2010 National Book Award for fiction. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Perhaps Lord of Misrule would not be so startling if Ms. Gordon's other books had been more widely read. But this novel is so assured, exotic and uncategorizable, with such an unlikely provenance, that it arrives as an incontrovertible winner, a bona fide bolt from the blue…Ms. Gordon is magically adept at fusing the banal and the mythic…She's also keenly attuned to all the aspects of carnality and power that infuse this story, from the way horses feel in human hands to the way Tommy uses his physical magnetism both to dominate Maggie and to use her as a tease for others.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Gordon has completely mastered the language of the racetrack, and formed it into an evocative and idiosyncratic style. Lord of Misrule...abounds with observations and aphorisms about horses, money and luck. It's replete with the rhythm and wisdom of this way of looking at life, but Gordon has thought so thoroughly about her characters that each voice dips into racetrack lingo in a distinctive way. It is an impressive performance…such a beautifully written novel that I wish I could say that every element works to perfection; I can't. But for that sense of being steeped in a specific and alien world, it is remarkable.
Jane Smiley - Washington Post
National Book Award-finalist Gordon's new novel begins and ends at a backwoods race track in early-1970s West Virginia, where horse trainer Tommy Hansel dreams up a scam. He'll run four horses in claiming races at long odds and get out before anyone realizes how good his horses are. But at a track as small as Indian Mound Downs, where everyone knows everybody's business, Hansel's hopes are quickly dashed. Soon his luminous, tragic girlfriend, Maggie, appears, drawing the eye of everyone, including sadistic gangster Joe Dale Bigg. Though Maggie finds herself with an unexpected protector in family gangster Two-Tie, even he can't protect her from her own fascination with the track and its misfit members. While Gordon's latest reaches for Great American Novel status, and her use of the colloquial voice perfectly evokes the time and place, constant shifts in perspective make the novel feel over-styled and under-plotted. And Maggie's supposed charisma clashes with her behavior, leaving the feeling that something's missing whereas Hansel is more witnessed than examined, his character developing almost entirely through the eyes of others, creating uncertainty that often borders on indifference.
Publishers Weekly
This is not the world of Seabiscuit or Secretariat, where the right horse winning the right race makes everything good; this is a goofered world ruled by misrule. But sometimes, as Gordon tells it, the smell of pine tar and horse manure can function like a “devil’s tonic.” Words can do that, too, as this nearly word-perfect novel makes abundantly clear. —Bill Ott
Booklist
A novel of luck, pluck, farce and above all horse racing—not at tony and elegant sites like Churchill Downs and Ascot but rather at a rinky-dink racetrack in Indian Mound Downs, W.Va. Gordon (Bogeywoman, 1999, etc.) clearly loves the subculture of grifters and ne'er-do-wells whose lives center on a venue that obviously has never and will never bring them success. Her lowlifes have names like Two-Tie, Medicine Ed, Kidstuff and Deucey, and they're capable of speaking a kind of racetrack patois occasionally reminiscent of Damon Runyon characters: "So I want you should write me a race, well, not me personally, fellow from Nebraska, kid I used to know back when—actually I used to know his mother...She was very good to me. Alas, I fear I did not return the favor like I should have." At the center of the novel is Tommy Hansel, a horse trainer with a get-rich-quick scheme that he feels cannot fail. He plans to enter "sure-fire" winners in claiming races, benefit from the long odds, then get out of town quickly. Nothing, of course, goes according to plan, especially since everyone seems on to his scheme, and the horses aren't as cooperative as Tommy would like them to be. Complicating the issue is the quirky, intelligent Maggie Koderer, new to the horse-race business but nonetheless Tommy's love. Maggie is college-educated but is drawn to the seamy underbelly of the track and the broken-down beauty of the horses. Gordon structures the narrative around the four horses, the last best hope being Lord of Misrule, and she seamlessly moves the reader from one narrative consciousness to another without being manipulative or intrusive. The writing about the races themselves is a tour de force of energy and esprit. By the end of the novel none of the characters quite have what they want, but most of them get what they deserve. Exceptional writing and idiosyncratic characters make this an engaging read.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What does Maggie’s arrival at Indian Mound Downs establish about the way things work at the track? What do Medicine Ed and Deucey’s reactions to Maggie demonstrate about the pecking order at the track?
2. Why do Ed and Deucey put up with the deprivations and humiliations of their daily routines? What comforts or satisfactions does hanging out at the track provide?
3. What aspects of Maggie’s past and character account for her attraction to Tommy? What qualities make him appealing to her? What are the implications of her recognition that “He wasn’t quite right in the soul, really” [p. 22]?
4. Deucey tells Maggie, “I wrote the book on two-faced false-hearted luck, girlie, anything you want to know about going it on your own at the races, come to me” [p. 23]. What roles does Deucey assume in Maggie’s life? What does she teach Maggie, either directly or by example, about being a woman in a man’s world?
5. In what ways does Medicine Ed embody the characteristics of racetrack habitués at every level, from owners to grooms, petty crooks to inveterate fans? What does he demonstrate about the opposing pulls of actual experience and the fantasies and hopes that shape our lives?
6. Gordon has discussed the similarity between Medicine Ed and Two-Tie, describing them as “lonely and childless old men deeply tired of the daily work they do, facing their last years without the protection of family” [National Book Foundation interview with Bret Anthony Johnston]. What reasons does Two-Tie offer for the way his life turned out? In what ways does his Jewish background shape his identity and influence his worldview?
7. At the beginning of the novel, Maggie projects a girlish innocence and an eagerness to experience life. How does she change over the course of the novel? What light do her musings at the end of the novel [p. 289-90] shed on what she has lost and gained? What do her reactions to Tommy’s deterioration reveal about the woman she has become?
8. In a review in The Washington Post [November 16, 2010] Jane Hamilton wrote, “[Gordon’s] four horse characters—Mr. Boll Weevil, Little Spinoza, Pelter and Lord of Misrule—are bursting with personality.” From their names to their histories to their performances in races, how does Gordon bring out the distinctive qualities of each horse? Does she avoid anthropomorphizing them? What does the novel show about the gap between human assumptions and the horses’ innate intelligence and their accommodations to the regimens and expectations imposed by humans?
9. One critic called Maggie’s “relationship with horses the most erotic one in the book” [Bob Hoover, Philly.com 11/27/10]. Do the descriptions of Maggie’s tending to the horses (pp. 110, 133, and 199, for example) support this judgment
10. Luck is a central theme in Lord of Misrule:
For Tommy, “[luck] came because you called to it, whistled for it, because it saw you wouldn’t take no for an answer” [p 22]. According to Maggie, “A person had to see himself, or herself, as lucky not just once in a while, but plugged into a steady current of luck, like an electrical appliance.... People who thought they couldn’t lose—Joe Dale Bigg, for one—were some kind of machinery” [p. 159].
How are these different approaches or concepts reflected in the actions taken by Tommy and Bigg? Are any of the characters able to resist or defeat the whims of luck and chance? If so, what allows them to do so?
11. Most of the novel is written in the third person. How does Gordon make the thoughts and the conversational styles of each character distinct? Discuss her use of racetrack slang and nicknames, invented words, and dialect in bringing to life an unfamiliar milieu and its denizens.
12. Why does Gordon switch to the second person in the chapters devoted to Tommy? What are the benefits and the limitations of this unusual narrative voice? Does it bring Tommy into sharper focus? How does his self-image differ from the perceptions of others and in what ways does it confirm them? What do the intimate tone, uninhibited language, and graphic sexual descriptions of these sections add to the novel?
13. Does the structure of the novel—the chapter-by-chapter focus on particular horses and races—enhance the reader’s involvement with the story? Does it help to illuminate the diverse factors that influence the characters’ actions? How does it affect the progress of the plot and the build-up to the final race?
14. Gordon weaves many literary and religious allusions into the story. The name of Hansel’s horse, the Mahdi (the redeemer of the world in Islamic religion), is one example; what other references can you identify? What literary motifs or narrative traditions are evoked in the accounts of the horses’ lineage [p. 114]; Tommy’s obsession with a long-lost twin [pp. 22, 160] and the “might-could-be twin brothers” Mr. Boll Weevil and the Mahdi [p. 43]; the description of Lord of Misrule [p. 217-219]; and Two-Tie’s relationships with Maggie and Donald?
15. Gordon’s writing style—her use of metaphor, poetic imagery, literary and religious allusions and references—is unusual in a novel about lowlifes and violent acts. Do you find the seemingly incompatible juxtaposition effective?
16. The world of thoroughbred horse racing has been the subject of several popular books and films, including Laura Hillenbrand’s bestselling Seabiscuit. What does Lord of Misrule share with other depictions of racing you have read or seen? What new insights does it provide into the racing community?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Lord of the Flies
William Golding, 1954
Penguin Group USA
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780399537424
Summary
William Golding's compelling story about a group of very ordinary small boys marooned on a coral island has become a modern classic. At first it seems as though it is all going to be great fun; but the fun before long becomes furious and life on the island turns into a nightmare of panic and death. As ordinary standards of behaviour collapse, the whole world the boys know collapses with them—the world of cricket and homework and adventure stories—and another world is revealed beneath, primitive and terrible.
Lord of the Flies remains as provocative today as when it was first published in 1954, igniting passionate debate with its startling, brutal portrait of human nature. Though critically acclaimed, it was largely ignored upon its initial publication. Yet soon it became a cult favorite among both students and literary critics who compared it to J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye in its influence on modern thought and literature.
Labeled a parable, an allegory, a myth, a morality tale, a parody, a political treatise, even a vision of the apocalypse, Lord of the Flies has established itself as a true classic. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September 19, 1911
• Where—Conwall, England, UK
• Death—near Truro, Cornwall
• Where—June 19, 1993
• Education—B.A., Oxford University
• Awards—Nobel Prize; Man Booker Prize; James
Tait Black Memorial Prize
Sir William Gerald Golding was a British novelist, poet, playwright and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate, best known for his novel Lord of the Flies. He was also awarded the Booker Prize for literature in 1980 for his novel Rites of Passage, the first book of the trilogy "To the Ends of the Earth."
In 2008, The Times (London) ranked Golding third on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945."
Early years
William Golding was born in his grandmother's house in Newquay, Cornwall, England, and he spent many childhood holidays there. He grew up at his family home in Marlborough, Wiltshire, where his father, Alec Golding, was a science master at Marlborough Grammar School (1905 to retirement). Alec Golding was a socialist with a strong commitment to scientific rationalism, and the young William and his elder brother Joseph attended the school where his father taught. His mother, Mildred, kept house and supported the moderate campaigners for female suffrage.
In 1930 Golding went to Oxford University as an undergraduate at Brasenose College, where he read Natural Sciences for two years before transferring to English Literature. Golding took his B.A. (Hons) Second Class in the summer of 1934, and later that year his first book, Poems, was published in London through the help of his Oxford friend, the anthroposophist Adam Bittleston.
Golding married Ann Brookfield, an analytic chemist, in 1939. The couple had two children, Judy and David.
War service
Golding joined the Royal Navy in 1940. During World War II, Golding fought in the Royal Navy and was briefly involved in the pursuit and sinking of Germany's mightiest battleship, the Bismarck. He also participated in the invasion of Normandy on D-Day, commanding a landing ship that fired salvoes of rockets onto the beaches, and then in a naval action at Walcheren in which 23 out of 24 assault craft were sunk. At the war's end, he returned to teaching and writing.
Writing
In September 1953, Golding sent a manuscript to Faber & Faber of London. Initially rejected by a reader there, the book was championed by Charles Monteith, then a new editor at the firm. He asked for various cuts in the text and the novel was published in September 1954 as Lord of the Flies. It was shortly followed by other novels, including The Inheritors, Pincher Martin and Free Fall.
Publishing success made it possible for Golding to resign his teaching post at Bishop Wordsworth's School in 1961, and he spent that academic year in the United States as writer-in-residence at Hollins College, near Roanoke, Virginia. Having moved in 1958 from Salisbury to nearby Bowerchalke, he met his fellow villager and walking companion James Lovelock. The two discussed Lovelock's hypothesis that the living matter of the planet Earth functions like a single organism, and Golding suggested naming this hypothesis after Gaia, the goddess of the earth in Greek mythology.
In 1970, Golding was a candidate for the Chancellorship of the University of Kent at Canterbury, but lost to the politician and leader of the Liberal Party Jo Grimond. Golding won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1979, and the Booker Prize in 1980. In 1983 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, a choice which was, according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ONDB), "an unexpected and even contentious choice, with most English critics and academics favouring Graham Greene or Anthony Burgess." He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1988.
Golding's later novels include Darkness Visible (1979), The Paper Men (1984), and the comic-historical sea trilogy To the Ends of the Earth, comprising the Booker Prize-winning Rites of Passage (1980), Close Quarters (1987), and Fire Down Below (1989).
The ONDB asserts that "At the end of the twentieth century, Golding's reputation was at its highest in continental Europe, particularly in Belgium, Holland, Germany, and France."
Later years and death
In 1985, Golding and his wife moved to Tullimaar House at Perranarworthal, near Truro, Cornwall, where he died of heart failure, eight years later, on 19 June 1993. He was buried in the village churchyard at Bowerchalke, South Wiltshire (near the Hampshire and Dorset county boundaries). He left the draft of a novel, The Double Tongue, set in ancient Delphi, which was published posthumously. He is survived by his daughter, the author Judy Golding, and his son David, who still lives at Tullimaar House. (Adapted from Wikipedia..)
Book Reviews
(Books prior to the Internet have few, if any, mainstream reviews online. See Amazon or Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
Since first published in 1954, Lord of the Flies has stood as a sort of Rorsach test. Some readers see it as a religious allegory between good and evil...others as a Freudian battle between id vs. superego...still others as a history of the rise of civilization. Finally, many see it as a commentary on the world's political institutions.Any, in fact all of those readings lend themselves to Golding's chilling tale of boys gone bad. Read more
LitLovers LitPicks - Dec. 2011
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 Lord of the Flies:
1. Talk about the differences between the two main antagonists, Ralph and Jack. How are they different from one another, and what broad "types" of individuals do they represent?
2. In what way can Piggy with his eye glasses be seen as representing the rational, scientific aspects of society?
3. What role does the conch play? How does it represent a civilizing force?
4. What does the beast represent? How is it used by Jack to control the others? Are there parallels for "the beast" in the real world, the one outside of fiction?
5. What does Simon mean when he suggests that the beast is only the boys themselves?
6. Why do the littleuns choose to follow Jack and the hunters rather than Ralph? Is it because they feel safer with Jack's group, believing that Jack can protect them? Or do they enjoy what the hunters do?
7. What do you feel Golding's vision of humanity is? Do you think he believes we born with an instinct for peace and cooperation...or for dominance and savagery? Does his vision accord with your own?
8. What do you think about the rules of civilization? Do they free us and enable us to rise to our best selves? Or do the rules constrain our bad nature that lie at the heart of ourselves?
9. What does hunting mean to Jack...at the beginning, and then later? What happens to his mental state after he kills his first pig?
10. What is ironic about the naval officer who arrives to "rescue" the boys? How does Ralph feel about returning to the safety of civilization? Why does he weep—is it relief, or something else?
m. Golding wrote his novel 10 years after the close of World War II and during the era of Communist containment. In what way does his book reflect the particular world politics of his time? Does the book have relevance today?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Lord of the Rings (50th Anniversary One Volume Edition)
J.R.R. Tolkien, 1937-49
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
1216 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780618640157
Summary
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
In ancient times the Rings of Power were crafted by the Elven-smiths, and Sauron, the Dark Lord, forged the One Ring, filling it with his own power so that he could rule all others. But the One Ring was taken from him, and though he sought it throughout Middle-earth, it remained lost to him. After many ages it fell by chance into the hands of the hobbit Bilbo Baggins.
From Sauron's fastness in the Dark Tower of Mordor, his power spread far and wide. Sauron gathered all the Great Rings to him, but always he searched for the One Ring that would complete his dominion.
When Bilbo reached his eleventy-first birthday he disappeared, bequeathing to his young cousin Frodo the Ruling Ring and a perilous quest: to journey across Middle-earth, deep into the shadow of the Dark Lord, and destroy the Ring by casting it into the Cracks of Doom.
The Lord of the Rings tells of the great quest undertaken by Frodo and the Fellowship of the Ring: Gandalf the Wizard; the hobbits Merry, Pippin, and Sam; Gimli the Dwarf; Legolas the Elf; Boromir of Gondor; and a tall, mysterious stranger called Strider. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 3, 1892
• Where—Bloemfontein (Orange Free State), South Africa
• Raised—Sarehole, England, UK
• Death—September 2, 1973
• Where—Oxford, England, UK
• Education—B.A. and M.A., Oxford University 1919
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on the 3rd January, 1892 at Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State, but at the age of four he and his brother were taken back to England by their mother. After his father's death the family moved to Sarehole, on the south-eastern edge of Birmingham. Tolkien spent a happy childhood in the countryside and his sensibility to the rural landscape can clearly be seen in his writing and his pictures.
His mother died when he was only twelve and both he and his brother were made wards of the local priest and sent to King Edward's School, Birmingham, where Tolkien shine in his classical work. After completing a First in English Language and Literature at Oxford, Tolkien married Edith Bratt.
He was also commissioned in the Lancashire Fusiliers and fought in the battle of the Somme. After the war, he obtained a post on the New English Dictionary and began to write the mythological and legendary cycle which he originally called "The Book of Lost Tales" but which eventually became known as The Silmarillion.
In 1920 Tolkien was appointed Reader in English Language at the University of Leeds which was the beginning of a distinguished academic career culminating with his election as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford.
Meanwhile Tolkien wrote for his children and told them the story of The Hobbit. It was his publisher, Stanley Unwin, who asked for a sequel to The Hobbit and gradually Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings, a huge story that took twelve years to complete and which was not published until Tolkien was approaching retirement.
After retirement Tolkien and his wife lived near Oxford, but then moved to Bournemouth. Tolkien returned to Oxford after his wife's death in 1971. He died on 2 September 1973 leaving The Silmarillion to be edited for publication by his son, Christopher. (From Barnes & Noble, courtesy of HarperCollins, UK.)
Book Reviews
J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a genuine masterpiece. The most widely read and influential fantasy epic of all time, it is also quite simply one of the most memorable and beloved tales ever told. Originally published in 1954, The Lord of the Rings set the framework upon which all epic/quest fantasy since has been built. Through the urgings of the enigmatic wizard Gandalf, young hobbit Frodo Baggins embarks on an urgent, incredibly treacherous journey to destroy the One Ring. This ring—created and then lost by the Dark Lord, Sauron, centuries earlier—is a weapon of evil, one that Sauron desperately wants returned to him. With the power of the ring once again his own, the Dark Lord will unleash his wrath upon all of Middle-earth. The only way to prevent this horrible fate from becoming reality is to return the Ring to Mordor, the only place it can be destroyed. Unfortunately for our heroes, Mordor is also Sauron's lair. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is essential reading not only for fans of fantasy but for lovers of classic literature as well
Barnes & Noble Reviews
Among the greatest works of imaginative fiction of the twentieth century.
Sunday Telegraph (UK)
An extraordinary work — pure excitement
New York Times
A masterful story — an epic in its own way — with elements of high adventure, suspense, mystery, poetry and fantasy.
Boston Herald
One of the great fairy-tale quests in modern literature.
Time Magazine
A work of immense narrative power that can sweep the reader up and hold him enthralled for days and weeks.
The Nation
Discussion Questions
The Fellowhip of the Ring
1. "I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size)," wrote Tolkien to a correspondent in 1958. "I like gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated).... I like, and even dare to wear these dull days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field); have a very simple sense of humour (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much." How would you describe the hobbits' way of life and behavior? How are they different from us, and how are they similar?
2. "I have, I suppose," wrote Tolkien in 1958, "constructed an imaginary time, but kept my feet on my own mother-earth for place.... Middle-earth is ... a modernization or alteration ... of an old word for the inhabited world of Men." How has Tolkien created a sense of an actual world with seemingly real landmarks and a credible imaginary history?
3. How is it significant that Gollum had been a hobbit before acquiring the Ring? To what degree can the Ring's powers be used for good or evil depending on the moral character of its bearer?
4. Gandalf tells Frodo, "But you have been chosen and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have" (p. 60). How are Frodo, Sam, and others called upon to use their "strength and heart and wits"?
5. How would you explain Sam Gamgee's determination to stay with Frodo no matter what? What qualities, talents, and shortcomings does Sam reveal as the journey continues, and how is he changed by his experiences?
6. Strider says of Gandalf that "this business of ours will be his greatest task" (p. 169). In what ways does this turn out to be true, and how is Gandalf himself unpredictably affected by "this business of ours"?
7. How do the Black Riders' methods of sensing their surroundings link them with evil and the dark and make them particularly terrifying? What do you think Strider means when, speaking of the Dark Riders, he tells the hobbits, "You fear them but you do not fear them enough, yet" (p. 162)?
8. After being wounded in his fight with the Black Rider, Frodo realizes "that in putting on the Ring he obeyed not his own desire but the commanding wish of his enemies" (p. 194). In what other instances do characters act against their own best interests?
9. "And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom," Gandalf proclaims to Saruman (p. 252). How does this idea manifest itself throughout The Lord of the Rings?
10. Saruman advises Gandalf that their best choice would be to join with the "new Power" that is rising so "to direct its course, to control it" (p. 253). To what extent is the main theme of The Lord of the Rings the uses, abuses, and consequences of power?
11. Elrond tells the Company: "The road must be trod, but it will be very hard. And neither strength nor wisdom will carry us far upon it. This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere" (p. 262). How do Elrond's comments apply to the quest?
12. Why does Gandalf say that it would "be well to trust rather in friendship than to great wisdom" in deciding who should accompany Frodo (p. 269)? In what ways might friendship be more powerful than great wisdom?
13. Before the Lady Galadriel's gaze, each member of the Company felt "that he was offered a choice between a shadow full of fear that lay ahead, and something that he greatly desired" (pp. 348-9). Why might that choice be important for each?
14. Boromir argues that the Company's choice is between destroying the Ring and destroying "the armed might of the Dark Lord" (p. 360). Is his argument valid? To what extent does the completion of either task depend upon the completion of the other?
15. How would you characterize the conflict between Aragorn and Boromir? In what ways is that conflict important to our understanding of Aragorn and the purpose of his quest?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
_______________
The Two Towers
1. Aragorn says to Gimli, "We must guess the riddles, if we are to choose our course rightly" (p. 406). How does choosing the right course of action, in The Lord of the Rings and in life, depend upon guessing riddles correctly?
2. "Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight?" Eomer asks. How would you explain Aragorn's response: "A man may do both" (p. 424)?
3. Merry and Pippin look back out of the shadows of Fangorn, "little furtive figures that in the dim light looked like elf-children in the deeps of time peering out of the Wild Wood in wonder at their First Dawn" (p. 449). How do the initial innocence and lasting hopefulness of the hobbits provide a balance to the more complex experience of men, the Elves' ancient knowledge, Gandalf's wisdom, and Sauron's evil?
4. Treebeard says of Saruman, "He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things"(p. 462). How does Tolkien illustrate the limitations and menace of technology and the benevolence and rewards of growing things?
5. "Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear," says Aragorn, "nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men" (p. 428). Why does the struggle between good and evil continue much the same from age to age, from place to place, and from one group to another?
6. If a wizard as wise and powerful as Saruman can be corrupted, what chance does anyone have against the forces of evil? How are Gandalf, Aragorn, Frodo, and others able to withstand the temptations and desires to which Saruman, Gollum, Wormtongue, and others succumb?
7. What does Treebeard mean when he says that "songs like trees bear fruit only in their own time and their own way" (p. 475)? To what extent might this be true of people in The Lord of the Rings?
8. "Often does hatred hurt itself," says Gandalf (p. 571). How might this be true of hatred and evil in the novel and in life?
9. What lineage does Faramir claim, and how is it related to Aragorn's? What other family pedigrees does Tolkien present, and why do you think family histories and ancestral lines are so important?
10. When Sam speaks about "the old tales and songs," what does he say characterizes the tales and songs that really matter? How does he distinguish between "the best tales to hear" and "the best tales to get landed in" (p. 696-7)?
11. What do you find characteristic of each dwelling and community in the various regions of Middle-earth? How is each specific in terms of its locale and the culture of its residents?
12. In what ways are Faramir and Gandalf alike? How is Sam's observation that Faramir reminds him of Gandalf supported by Faramir's actions and statements?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
_______________
The Return of the King
1. How are Gandalf's power, wisdom, and majesty manifested throughout the novel? How, and with what consequences, does he apply his powers in his relationships with the various other residents of Middle-earth?
2. How would you characterize the relationship between Faramir and his father, Denethor? What causes Denethor to be so critical of his son?
3. Éowyn protests to Aragorn, "All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house" (p. 767). What are Eowyn's and Aragorn's opposing views of a woman's duties and roles?
4. Why might "all great lords, if they are wise" use others as their weapons, as Denethor notes (p. 800)? What instances do you find in The Lord of the Rings and in our world of leaders using others to obtain their ends?
5. How would you describe "the joy of battle" that comes upon the Rohirrim as they advance on besieged Minas Tirith (p. 820)? What other instances of it occur in the novel? What might be the consequences of giving oneself up to "the joy of battle"?
6. Seeing the dead porter at the Closed Door, Gandalf exclaims of the Enemy, "Such deeds he loves: friend at war with friend; loyalty divided in a confusion of hearts" (p. 833). What other deeds and estrangements does the Enemy love, and how does each serve Sauron's purposes?
7. Mourning Theoden in the Houses of Healing, Merry apologizes for his sarcasm by saying, "But it is the way of my people to use light words at such times and say less than they mean. We fear to say too much. It robs us of the right words when a jest is out of place" (p. 852). What does he mean? At what other serious moments do the hobbits engage in humor?
8. "It is best to love first what you are fitted to love, I suppose," says Merry; "you must start somewhere and have some roots" (p. 852). How is this true of the hobbits and others?
9. Speaking of the Orcs, Frodo tells Sam, "The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own" (p. 893). Why is it significant that, while good can create "real new things," evil can merely counterfeit or mock creation?
10. When Sam sees the white star twinkling through the cloud-wrack above the Morgai, "the beauty of it smote his heart [and] the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing" (p. 901). In what ways is the Shadow of evil finally only "a small and passing thing"?
11. What does Gandalf mean when he tells the hobbits that they must settle the affairs of the Shire themselves? In what ways have they been "trained" for just that task, according to Gandalf, and in what ways have they "grown indeed very high" (p. 974)?
12. Just before Frodo boards the ship in the Grey Havens, he says to Sam, "It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them" (p. 1006). How is this true in the novel and in our own lives?
13. What kind of lives do you think Sam and Rosie, Merry, and Pippin have after Frodo and Gandalf's departure? What might be the significance of the novel's ending with Sam and Rosie enjoying the comfort and love of their new home (p. 1008)?
(Questions issued by Random House.)
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Losing My Identity
Rashmita Patel, 2014
New Generation Publishing
140 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781910394427
Summary
From Aloo Gobi to Matar Paneer, two sisters take the plunge to sort their love lives out when they both fall in love with a guy from a different culture. Kiran totally goes off the rails by leaving home to live with her so called boyfriend Ryan, but not all ends well when Kiran’s life turns sour with Ryan leaving her when she is pregnant and Kiran left to face the music.
Ash on the other end thinks she’s one who would never take the wrong path, ends up in a deep hole with a guy she meets up at college. At first Ash thinks he’s all wonderful until her parents find her a suitable rishta and she has to tell Rehaan that she can no longer keep their relationship going.
Her marriage to Aman is finalized and all is going as planned until Ash discovers that Aman her fiancé knows Rehaan. Again the awful nightmares begin for Ash as she starts to get freaked out about Rehaan shadowing her once more.
Ash finally gets the courage to tell Aman the truth about her relationship with Rehaan. The only thing left for Ash to do now is to see that her sister, Kiran who has helped her tremendously, attend her wedding but at the same time convince Mum and Dad that Kiran desperately needs their help and to bring her home once and for all. All ends well with Ash managing to score goals on all sides of the coin.
Author Bio
• Birth—May 10, 1971
• Where—Birmingham, England, UK
• Education—B.A., University of Central England
• Currently—lives in Birmingham, England
Rashmita's writing career began when she noticed that there was a gap in the market for Asian Teenage novels. She decided to write novels aiming at highlighting Asian characters.
Her first novel came out in 2006 called Tina 'n' Nikil—one sided-love which focused on arranged marriage. In 2008 she published her 2nd novel called Web of Lies: Priya Ki Kahani which looked at Asian Teenage Pregnancy, and her latest novel which came out in 2014 is called Losing My Identity which is based on mixed marriage and drugs. Rashmita is also a freelance journalist and school librarian. (From the author.)
Visit the author's website.
Follow Rashmita on Facebook.
Book Reviews
Losing My Identity is a gripping story about a conflicted young girl trying to fit her traditional values into a confusing, modern world. Passions run high in this dramatic yet believable tale. Complex and thought provoking, Losing My Identity will keep you hooked until the end.
Andrew Casey
Rashmita Patel’s Asian novels set to create waves. Rashmita Patel has had a love affair with books since her childhood. She wrote many short novels as a child and mastered the art of sticking and pasting pictures to make her books look real. Her dreams have started getting fulfilled and she has become a published author and appears on course of becoming a prolific novelist. She has already made her mark as a teenage fiction author. Rashmita Patel is doing a fabulous job and it seems a matter of time for her work to spread far and wide in the Asian communities all over the world. Her novels should also have considerable appeal in the massive South Asian market.
Jumbo Infomedia
I enjoyed reading your book aimed at teenagers. I think this book would attract a variety of teenage readers.
Prabha Patel, freelance educator, KS3 & KS4 teacher
Discussion Questions
1. How did Ash react when Kiri tells her that her boyfriend is white?
2. What did Ash mean when she said Kiri was Losing her Identity?
3. What was the family expecting from Kiri when she said she wanted to get married.
4. Why was Ash's mum and dad and brother all furious when Kiri mentioned that she was in love and wanted to get married to Robby?
5. Why was Ash unhappy when she picked up her exam results?
6. Why is Ash reluctant to go out with Rehaan when she falls in love with him?
7. What kind of a friend is Kelly from the way she behaves with Ash over her boyfriend?
8. What kind of life had Kiri had with Robby?
9. How do you think Ash must have felt when she finds out about Rehaan's involvement in drugs?
10. Why did Ash not tell anybody about Rehaan after finding out that he was involved in drugs?
11. Why do you think Ash told Aman about Rehaan?
13. Why did Ash want her family to forgive Kiri?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)
Lost & Found (Peaks Island Novel 1)
Jacqueline Sheehan
HarperCollins
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061128646
Summary
A poignant and unforgettable tale of love, loss, and moving on...with the help of one not-so-little dog.
Rocky's husband Bob was just forty-two when she discovered him lying cold and lifeless on Quitting her job, chopping off all her hair, she leaves Massachusetts—reinventing her past and taking a job as Animal Control Warden on Peak's Island, a tiny speck off the coast of Maine and a million miles away from everything she's lost.
She leaves her career as a psychologist behind, only to find friendship with a woman whose brain misfires in the most wonderful way and a young girl who is trying to disappear. Rocky, a quirky and fallible character, discovers the healing process to be agonizingly slow.
But then she meets Lloyd.
A large black Labrador retriever, Lloyd enters Rocky's world with a primitive arrow sticking out of his shoulder. And so begins a remarkable friendship between a wounded woman and a wounded, lovable beast. As the unraveling mystery of Lloyd's accident and missing owner leads Rocky to an archery instructor who draws her in even as she finds every reason to mistrust him, she discovers the life-altering revelation that grief can be transformed...and joy does exist in unexpected places. (From the publisher.)Lost & Found is the first of Jacqueline Sheehan's two Peaks Island novels. Picture This (2012) is the sequel.
Author Bio
Jacqueline Sheehan, Ph.D., is a fiction writer and essayist. She is a New Englander through and through, but spent twenty years living in the western states of Oregon, California, and New Mexico doing a variety of things, including house painting, freelance photography, newspaper writing, clerking in a health food store, and directing a traveling troupe of high school puppeteers.
Currently on the faculty of Writers in Progress and Grub Street in Massachusetts, she also offers international workshops on the combination of yoga and writing. She writes travel articles about lesser-known destinations and lives in Massachusetts.
Novels
Sheehan's books include Truth (2003), reissued as The Comet's Tale: A Novel About Sojurner Truth (2011); Now & Then (2009); two Peaks Island novels, Lost & Found (2007) and Picture This (2012); and, most recently, The Center of the World (2015). (Adapted from the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[A] contemporary tale of grief featuring Rocky Pelligrino, a woman reeling from her husband's death....[who] moves to Peak's Island, Maine.... Dog lovers will adore Sheehan's portrayal of Cooper, who, in contrast to all the human suffering, comprises the bright spot in a melancholy novel.
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 Lost & Found
1. Rocky finds that the usual platitudes about grief offer her no comfort. What are some of those platitudes...which we have all uttered to those suffering loss. In fact, what can we offer someone bereft of a loved one?
2. Describe Roxanne, or Rocky. How does she live up to her nickname? What finally enables her to gain enough composure to leave town and start again.
3. Other than Rocky (and Lloyd...we'll get to him later), which characters in Peak's Island do you most enjoy or find sympathetic—Melissa, Tess, Hill...?
4. Rocky recognizes in Melissa the type of young girl she avoided in her therapeutic practice. She sees Melissa as belonging to that "unhappy army of girls, defined by skin, bones and grit." Why did she avoid treating girls like Melissa, and what does her description of them—as bones and grit— mean?
5. Lloyd. Did you fall in love? What is it about dogs that makes them our soul mates and that enables them to heal desperately ill, troubled human beings? What is about Lloyd/ Cooper, in particular, that Rocky responds to, that helps her on her journey back to wholeness? Do other animals share dogs' therapeutic abilities?
6. Did you enjoy having the story narrated from Lloyd's point of view?
7. Discuss each of Rocky's new friends and the role each plays in her healing process. What does each of them have to offer? What does Rocky offer them in turn?
8. In the end, what does Rocky learn about her own capacity to move out of grief and reach for joy?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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The Lost and Found Bookshop
Susan Wiggs, 2020
HarperCollins
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062914095
Summary
In this thought-provoking, wise and emotionally rich novel, bestselling author Susan Wiggs explores the meaning of happiness, trust, and faith in oneself as she asks the question, "If you had to start over, what would you do and who would you be?"
There is a book for everything…
Somewhere in the vast Library of the Universe, as Natalie thought of it, there was a book that embodied exactly the things she was worrying about.
In the wake of a shocking tragedy, Natalie Harper inherits her mother’s charming but financially strapped bookshop in San Francisco. She also becomes caretaker for her ailing grandfather Andrew, her only living relative—not counting her scoundrel father.
But the gruff, deeply kind Andrew has begun displaying signs of decline. Natalie thinks it’s best to move him to an assisted living facility to ensure the care he needs. To pay for it, she plans to close the bookstore and sell the derelict but valuable building on historic Perdita Street, which is in need of constant fixing.
There’s only one problem–Grandpa Andrew owns the building and refuses to sell. Natalie adores her grandfather; she’ll do whatever it takes to make his final years happy. Besides, she loves the store and its books provide welcome solace for her overwhelming grief.
After she moves into the small studio apartment above the shop, Natalie carries out her grandfather’s request and hires contractor Peach Gallagher to do the necessary and ongoing repairs. His young daughter, Dorothy, also becomes a regular at the store, and she and Natalie begin reading together while Peach works.
To Natalie’s surprise, her sorrow begins to dissipate as her life becomes an unexpected journey of new connections, discoveries and revelations, from unearthing artifacts hidden in the bookshop’s walls, to discovering the truth about her family, her future, and her own heart. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 17, 1958
• Where—N/A
• Education—B.A., Harvard University
• Awards—4 RITA Awards from Romance Writers of America: for Best Romance, Favorite Book of the Year, and twice for Best Short Historical; Holt Medallion; Career Achievement Award from Romance Times (twice)
• Currently—lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington, USA
Susan Wiggs is an American author of historical and contemporary romance novels. She began writing as a child, finishing her first novel, A Book About Some Bad Kids, when she was eight. She temporarily abandoned her dream of being a novelist after graduating from Harvard University, becoming a math teacher instead . She continued to read, especially reveling in romance novels.
Writing
After running out of reading material one evening in 1983, Wiggs began writing again, using the working title A Book About Some Bad Adults. For three years Wiggs continued to write, and in 1987 Zebra Books published her first novel, a Western historical romance named Texas Wildflower. Her subsequent historical and contemporary romances have been set in a wide range of settings and time periods. Many of her novels are set in areas where she's lived or visited. She gave up teaching in 1992 to write full-time, and has since completed an average of two books per year.
In 2000, Wiggs began writing single-title women's fiction stories in addition to historical romance novels. The first, The You I Never Knew, was published in 2001. After writing mass-market original novels for several years, Wiggs made her hardcover debut in 2003 with Home Before Dark.
Many of her novels are connected, allowing Wiggs to revisit established characters. Her books have been published in many languages, including French, German, Dutch, Latvian, Japanese, Hungarian and Russian.
Recognition
Wiggs's books are frequently named finalists for the RITA Award, the highest honor given in the romance genre. She received the Romance Writers of America RITA Award for Best Romance of the year in 1993 for Lord of the Night. She won a second RITA in 2000 when The Charm School was named "Favorite Book of the Year."
She has also won the RITA in 2001 for Best Short Historical for The Mistress and, again, in 2006 for Lakeside Cottage. She has also been the recipient of the Holt Medallion, the Colorado Award of Excellnce, and the Peninsula Romance Writer's of America Blue Boa Award. Romantic Times has twice named her a Career Achievement Award winner.[4]
Personal
Wiggs lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington with her family. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/9/2012.)
Book Reviews
An unputdownable, true book lover's book that fans of women's fiction, slow-burning romance, and the novels of Nora Roberts and Kristin Hannah will love. —Debbie Haupt, St. Charles City-Cty. Lib. Dist., St. Peters, MO
Library Journal
A gentle love story perfect for anyone looking for love amid personal, family, and financial crises.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. After her mother dies, Natalie reflects: "No one knew what to say to people facing a grief so big and shocking. Natalie wouldn’t know, either." Is there a right thing to say in these moments? What would you do if Natalie were your friend?
2. "There was a book for everything. Somewhere in the vast Library of the Universe, as Natalie thought of it, her mom could find a book that embodied exactly the things Natalie was worrying about." Which books have helped you overcome difficult moments, or been a cure for your worries or caused a revelation in your life? How do books help the different characters in this novel?
3. At Blythe’s funeral her friend Frieda reads a passage from the children’s book Charlotte’s Web. If you could have any book be part of your memorial service, what would it be?
4. Natalie tells her mother that her schoolmates’ reaction to her non-traditional family—a single mother, grandfather, and grandfather’s Chinese girlfriend—make her feel like a"freak." How did growing up in this non-traditional family shape Natalie? How did being raised by a single father shape her mother Blythe’s life? What about Peach and Dorothy?
5. When Natalie finds out that her mother had taken a DNA test she thinks to herself: "Who were her ancestors? Oftentimes throughout her life, she’d felt like a stranger to herself.Was that the reason?" Does learning more about her family history—though the DNA test and other ways—help Natalie, or Grandy Andrew? Do you know anyone who has had a similar experience uncovering their family history, either by DNA tests or more traditional methods?
6. Blythe finds running the bookstore "a grand adventure" but Natalie’s corporate work at the winery: "…was the opposite of a grand adventure. But then she would remind herself about the steady salary, the benefits and pension plan, and decide it was all worthwhile.Stability had its price." Are you more of a Blythe or a Natalie in your approach to work?Does Natalie ultimately change her mind and come to accept the "grand adventure" of being a bookstore owner?
7. "Your mother used to say you’ll never be happy with what you want until you can be happy with what you’ve got," Cleo tells Natalie. Do you agree? What does Susan Wiggs say about happiness throughout this novel? What does it mean that Grandy Andrew’s book about his life is called "A Brief History of Happiness?"
8. When they find the military medal hidden in the store’s walls, Grandy insists that they return it to the owner’s heirs despite their shaky financial situation: "After learning of its value, Andrew had toyed for the briefest of moments with the notion of selling it. But there was no profit in keeping something that rightfully belonged to someone else."Would you have done the same?
9. When Trevor confesses the truth about his background to Natalie, admitting that he’s a"fraud" and a "hoax," she tells him "For what it’s worth, it wouldn’t have mattered…I love what you’ve done with your life. You turned it into something really beautiful." Would you have responded the same way? What did you think about Trevor once his deceptions had been revealed?
10. At the end of the novel, Susan Wiggs gives us an update on the characters’ lives. What do you think the future holds for Natalie and Peach? For Grandy Andrew? For the Lost and Found Bookstore itself?
11. Do you have a favorite local bookstore? What do you love about it?
(Questions issued by the publishers.)
12. WHAT IS IT ABOUT BOOKSTORES? Why do you think so many authors use them as settings for their novels? This is the 11th such book on LITLOVERS; here are the others:
Lost and Wanted
Nell Freudenberger, 2019
Knopf Doubleday
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385352680
Summary
An emotionally engaging, suspenseful new novel, told in the voice of a renowned physicist: an exploration of female friendship, romantic love, and parenthood--bonds that show their power in surprising ways.
Helen Clapp's breakthrough work on five-dimensional spacetime landed her a tenured professorship at MIT; her popular books explain physics in plain terms.
Helen disdains notions of the supernatural in favor of rational thought and proven ideas. So it's perhaps especially vexing for her when, on an otherwise unremarkable Wednesday in June, she gets a phone call from a friend who has just died.
That friend was Charlotte Boyce, Helen's roommate at Harvard. The two women had once confided in each other about everything--in college, the unwanted advances Charlie received from a star literature professor; after graduation, Helen's struggles as a young woman in science, Charlie's as a black screenwriter in Hollywood, their shared challenges as parents.
But as the years passed, Charlie became more elusive, and her calls came less and less often. And now she's permanently, tragically gone.
As Helen is drawn back into Charlie's orbit, and also into the web of feelings she once had for Neel Jonnal—a former college classmate now an acclaimed physicist on the verge of a Nobel Prizewinning discovery—she is forced to question the laws of the universe that had always steadied her mind and heart.
Suspenseful, perceptive, deeply affecting, Lost and Wanted is a story of friends and lovers, lost and found, at the most defining moments of their lives. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—April 21, 1975
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard Univeristy
• Awards—PEN/Malamud Award; Whiting Writer's Award; Guggenheim Fellowship
• Currently—lives in New York City (Brooklyn)
Nell Freudenberger is the author of three novels—Lost and Wanted (2019), The Newlyweds (2012), and The Dissident (2006). Her 2003 story collection, Lucky Girls, was winner of the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library, she was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40.” She lives in Brooklyn with her family. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Beautiful, startling, affecting.… Freudenberger joins [an] august tradition of yoking poetry to cutting-edge science. She navigates complicated concepts from physics with admirable clarity. This is a novel about female friendship begun in America in the 1990s, when women didn’t talk about sexual harassment and friends didn’t talk about race; when women (and especially women of color) were trying to build careers and no one was acknowledging how much harder it would be for them than for white men. Under such strain, the book seems to say, it’s incredible that women sustain any friendships at all. And yet in this novel, even the distance between Charlie and Helen is moving: the space that opens between them reverberates with what might have been. I was moved by intimacies near and far, real and imagined, lost and found..
Louisa Hall - New York Times Book Review
Dazzling, ingenious… a gorgeous literary novel about loss and human limitations. Over the months that follow her friend Charlie’s death Helen, a distinguished professor of physics at MIT, grapples with grief, midlife regrets and the disruptive possibility of life after death. Freudenberger dramatizes, through Helen, both the dawning awareness that life doesn’t always allow for second chances and the great midlife consolation prize: a greater appreciation for those chances—and people—one has been given. Helen’s thoughts meander from a wry social observation to a digression on physics to a heart-rending epiphany [and] the novel ends with its own version of a "big bang." Freudenberger has a penetrating imagination.
Maureen Corrigan - Washington Post
Insightful… a search for a ripple in space-time becomes a symbol of how lives are changed by forces we cannot see. Freudenberger relates the momentous discovery by physicists of a gravitational wave. What other wonders might we be missing simply because, for the moment, we lack the instruments to detect them? The phenomenon that troubles Lost and Wanted is life after death—an age-old concern viewed here [through] the narrator, an MIT physicist. This novel is smart about the ways that parents try to explain mortality to children—kids are usually patronized in works of fiction, but in this book they’re on equal footing with the adults, who have no clearer understanding of what awaits us after death than they do.
Wall Street Journal
Absorbing, intelligent, touching… a bittersweet love story about a lost friend, a missed romance, and an all-consuming career. Freudenberger deploys physics as a catalyst for new perspectives on time and our trajectories through it, rather than just metaphorical ballast. She balances the science with tender, convincing portraits of two kids. Enriched by multi-level discussions about the spacetime continuum, whether Einstein believed in God, uncertainty, gravity, and, most notably, the force we exert on each other, Lost and Wanted is a moving story about down-to-earth issues: an outstanding achievement.
NPR
What do physics and grief have in common? How can a scientist reckon with the inexplicable, for instance, the appearance of a ghost? These are but two of the big questions that power this intellectually rich and soulfully deep novel by one of our most talented fiction writers.
Oprah Magazine
What happens to our souls when we die? Does our consciousness leave a trace on earth? Freudenberger explores the complicated nature of friendship—especially the relationships that we form in youth, as we are trying to discover ourselves—and delves into the existential questions that plague physicists and laypeople alike.… Lost and Wanted is prescient [in] connecting scientific and metaphysical faith in things that cannot be seen with the naked eye.
Newsday
Freudenberger’s novel is set in a Boston that calls to mind Henry James country, a bastion of correctness and rational thought. It is all the more jarring, then, when Helen Clapp, a single mother and tenured chair in MIT’s physics department, receives a phone call and then text messages from the afterlife. Helen doesn’t write off the transmissions as a hoax—she sits tight and collects data, all the while conducting a meticulous reexamination of her long and bewildering relationship with her estranged best friend, Charlie, who moved to Hollywood after college and died from an autoimmune disease. The book takes up weighty themes such as grief and sexism in the worlds of academia and entertainment, peppering the narration with evocative asides on black holes and quantum entanglement.… The prose is enticing [on] friendship, that most unstable and mysterious of connections.
Vogue
An affecting female friendship tale—Charlie, glamorous and alluring, and Helen, cerebral and self-assured—that takes a turn for the otherworldly.
Entertainment Weekly
A truly lovely story about friendship.
Cosmopolitan
(Starred review) Freudenberger explores the convergence of scientific rationality and spirituality in this stunning portrayal of grief.… Helen’s journey… is about grief not only at the loss of her friend but also at the demise of countless possible futures. This is a beautiful and moving novel.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) [M]agnificent… a warm and insightful look into human relationships and the mysteries of time. Refreshingly, the… [scientific] concepts that Freudenberger describes are integral to the plot. And the story takes unexpected turns on its way to a heartbreaking conclusion.
BookPage
(Starred review) Compelling, seductively poetic; deeply involving, suspenseful and psychologically lush.… Freudenberger is spellbinding in her imaginative use of particle physics as a mirror of human entanglement and uncertainty.
Booklist
(Starred review) Brimming with wit and intelligence and devoted to things that matter: life, love, death, and the mysteries of the cosmos. Nell Freudenberger is good at explaining physics, but her real genius is in the depiction of relationships.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What was your impression of Helen at the beginning of the novel as compared to the end? Even with her rare intellectual abilities, and her scientific ways of thinking, does she discover new things to learn, and new parts of herself, in response to Charlie’s death?
2. What do you think brought Charlie and Helen together as friends in the first place? How did they learn to speak the same language, despite their different interests and backgrounds? And does this change, when Charlie passes away?
3. Describe the process by which Helen chose Jack’s father. Were you surprised by her preferences in the sperm donor, and what she values in Jack based on his father’s traits (including how different some of them are from her own)?
4. When Helen and Neel create the Clapp-Jonnal model at Harvard, she describes feeling…
the way people describe falling in love but it was so much better than the reality of that. The model gave me a kind of happiness that didn’t depend upon anyone else; it could be carried with you. I thought that this was what religious faith must be like, the peace in knowing that there was something beyond the world you knew, and that your own inner experience would indeed endure (42).
How does this reflect Helen’s own understanding of the limits of human knowledge?
5. Each of the three main characters—Helen, Charlie, and Neel—have their own feelings of not fitting in somehow. How does being different from others people bring these people toward one another? Consider also what Helen says about how, unlike herself, her friends weren’t "finding that their own ideas shifted under the influence of powerful fields created by two equally magnetic friends" (63–64). What does this suggest about Helen’s confidence in her own powers of attraction and influence on others?
6. Charlie comes from an affluent black family, with highly-educated parents, in Boston; Helen grew up in a middle-class white family in Los Angeles. Each of them ends up settling in the opposite city, on opposite coasts. How have both women sought to move away from their upbringings in adulthood? How do their family backgrounds—and the colors of their skin—continue to influence their lives they live?
7. What was your initial reaction to the messages Helen receives from Charlie’s phone? If you were Helen, how would you react? Do you think that her response to Simmi’s confession reflects relief or disappointment? And what was your own response to the story’s answer to that mystery?
8. Compare the children’s understanding of death and higher powers with that of the adults in the novel. Which kind of faith proves more accurate, and how might you see the children’s perspective influencing the adults’—and vice versa?
9. Charlie characterizes lupus as a disease that "basically rewires your neural pathways, so that your brain is getting messages that your body hurts when it really shouldn't doesn’t" (169). How is this reflected in what happens leading up to and after her death?
10. Many in her circle were alarmed and upset by Charlie’s decision to end her own life, especially her parents. Discuss the echoes of this decision on her family and her circle overall. Do you think she did the right thing?
11. There are many different kinds of love in the novel. Where are the lines drawn among certain kinds of love—romantic, platonic, unconditional—and when, if ever, does love become dangerous? Helen and Neel vacillate between romantic attraction and another kind of force-field. Discuss what happens to each of them at the end of the novel and whether it seems satisfying to them both to remain friends with a history. What do you think is surprising, if anything, about the fact that both Neel and Terrence are attractive to Helen?
12. Charlie’s experience with Pope radically changes the course of her time at Harvard, her career, and her friendship with Helen. How would someone in her situation react in today’s environment, perhaps especially on a highly-charged college campus? What did you think about the way Helen, years later, gets involved?
13. Neel comes back to Boston as part of the LIGO team, which is well on its way to making a huge discovery. How does the LIGO research on gravitational waves impact Neel and Helen’s careers—and also their relationship? Consider Helen’s comment that she is "betting on the idea that LIGO would record not only the gravitational waves from colliding black holes, but from pairs of neutron stars, exploding in what is called a kilonova" (115). Do you think that Helen and Neel’s professional rivalry is healthy or even productive?
14. At the end of the novel, after Terrence and Simmi leave the Boston area and the LIGO scientists win the Nobel Prize, Helen reflects that "to understand more of our cosmology, we’re going to have to admit that there may be laws so different from the ones we know, so seemingly counterintuitive, that it will take all our imagination to uncover them" (3157). Is there anything that Helen does know more definitively, after all she experienced? Have her own expectations of her life’s work, as a scientist, mother, and friend, changed?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Lost Art of Mixing
Erica Bauermeister, 2013
Penguin Group (USA)
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780399162114
Summary
Erica Bauermeister returns to the enchanting world of The School of Essential Ingredients in this luminous sequel.
Lillian and her restaurant have a way of drawing people together. There’s Al, the accountant who finds meaning in numbers and ritual; Chloe, a budding chef who hasn’t learned to trust after heartbreak; Finnegan, quiet and steady as a tree, who can disappear into the background despite his massive height; Louise, Al’s wife, whose anger simmers just below the boiling point; and Isabelle, whose memories are slowly slipping from her grasp. And there’s Lillian herself, whose life has taken a turn she didn’t expect.
Their lives collide and mix with those around them, sometimes joining in effortless connections, at other times sifting together and separating again, creating a family that is chosen, not given. A beautifully imagined novel about the ties that bind—and links that break—The Lost Art of Mixing is a captivating meditation on the power of love, food, and companionship. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1959
• Where—Pasadena, California, USA
• Education—Ph.D., University of Washington
• Currently—lives in Seattle, Washington
In her words:
I was born in Pasadena, California in 1959, a time when that part of the country was both one of the loveliest and smoggiest places you could imagine. I remember the arching branches of the oak tree in our front yard, the center of the patio that formed a private entrance to our lives; I remember leaning over a water faucet to run water across my eyes after a day spent playing outside. It’s never too early to learn that there is always more than one side to life.
I have always wanted to write, but when I read Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” in college, I finally knew what I wanted to write – books that took what many considered to be unimportant bits of life and gave them beauty, shone light upon their meaning. The only other thing I knew for certain back in college, however, was that I wasn’t grown up enough yet to write them.
So I moved to Seattle, got married, and got a PhD. at the University of Washington. Frustrated by the lack of women authors in the curriculum, I co-authored 500 Great Books by Women: A Reader’s Guide with Holly Smith and Jesse Larsen and Let’s Hear It For the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14 with Holly Smith. In the process I read, literally, thousands of books, good and bad, which is probably one of the best educations a writer can have. I still wrote, but thankfully that material wasn’t published. I taught writing and literature. I had children.
Having children probably had the most dramatic effect upon how I write of anything in my life. As the care-taker of children, there was no time for plot lines that couldn’t be interrupted a million times in the course of creation. I learned to multi-task, and when the children’s demands were too many, we created something called the “mental hopper.” This is where all the suggestions went — “can we have ice cream tonight?” “can we take care of the school’s pet rat over the summer?” “can I have sex at 13?” The mental hopper was where things got sorted out, when I had time to think about them. What’s interesting about the mental hopper is that when something goes in there, I can usually figure out a way to make it happen (except sex at 13).
And that is how I write now. All those first details and amorphous ideas for a book, the voices of the characters, the fact that one of them loves garlic and another one flips through the pages of used books looking for clues to the past owner’s life, all those ideas go in the mental hopper and slowly but surely they form connections with each other. Stories start to take shape. It’s a very organic process, and it suits me. So when people say being a mother is death for writers, I disagree. Yes, in a logistical sense, children can make writing difficult. In fact, I don’t think it is at all coincidental that my first novel was published after both my children were in college. But I think differently, I create the work I do, because I have had children.
It’s been more than thirty years since I first read Tillie Olsen. My children are now mostly grown. I’ve been married for three decades to the same man; I’ve lived in Italy; I’ve stood by friends as they faced death. I’ve grown up a bit, and I’ve returned, happily and naturally, to fiction.
Novels
The first result was The School of Essential Ingredients, a novel about eight cooking students and their teacher, set in the kitchen of Lillian’s restaurant. It’s about food and people and the relationships between them – about taking those “unimportant” bits of life and making them beautiful. The response to School has been a writer’s dream; the book is currently being published in 23 countries and I have received letters and emails from readers around the world.
My second novel, Joy For Beginners came out two years later (see how much more quickly you can write when the children are in college?). Joy For Beginners follows a year in the life of seven women who make a pact to each do one thing in the next twelve months that is new, or difficult, or scary – the twist is that they don’t get to choose their own challenges. It has been a marvelous experience to watch this book become a catalyst for readers and entire book clubs, and to read the letters of those who have decided to change their lives or who have simply gained insight through the characters.
My third novel was published in early 2013. The Lost Art of Mixing returns to some of the characters from The School of Essential Ingredients whose stories simply weren’t finished (although I have to say, even I was surprised to learn where those stories went). It begins one year later, and throws four completely new characters into the mix, in an exploration of miscommunication, serendipity, ritual, and (well, of course) food. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Harrowing and graceful at once, this is some of Bauermeister's strongest writing.
Seattle Times
Erica Bauermeister's characters are alive and savory as the food she describes so well... Most chapters in The Lost Art of Mixing could stand independently, but blended together, they make a memorable novel. The Seattle author reminds us how the rituals surrounding food sustain us emotionally and spiritually by giving us opportunities to gather as family and community, sharing more fully in one another's lives by taking the time to break bread together.
Portland Oregonian
In her sequel to The School of Essential Ingredients, Bauermeister picks up the threads of many of the characters first brought together in Lillian’s cooking classes, adding a few new stories to the mix. Here we follow Al, the restaurant’s accountant, soothed by numbers and flavors but unable to connect with Louise, his wife of 29 years; Chloe, the young sous-chef made timid by a failed relationship; Isabelle, the elderly woman with whom Chloe lives, struggling against the onset of Alzheimer’s; and Finnegan, the impossibly tall dishwasher taking his first stab at independence. Lillian remains a sort of mythic background figure, although her unexpected pregnancy tests her and the touchy relationship she’s having with Tom, a widower. Bauermeister weaves these individual stories in and among one another, but never stays with one character long enough for the reader to grow very attached, robbing each of depth. Still, Bauermeister’s prose is strong, particularly when it comes to food, and her novel brings to life the adage “be kinder than necessary, for everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.”
Publishers Weekly
A Seattle chef and her circle of friends cope with life's pivotal moments. In this follow-up to The School of Essential Ingredients (2009), Chef Lillian continues to run her small restaurant, which has become a hub for people in transition. In what is essentially a collection of linked stories...the narrative, carried by so many disparate points of view, never quite comes into focus. So robust and resilient are Bauermeister's characters that readers may wish she had challenged them with thornier dilemmas.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. At the beginning of the book, there is a quote by Aesop: “Every truth has two sides.” What do you think is the importance of that quote to the novel as a whole?
2. At first glance, Al appears to be a staid accountant, comfortable with numbers and order, never doing anything unexpected. And yet, he engages in a secretive and odd behavior: masquerading as a published author at nearby bookstores. Why does he do this? Did you find this strange or understandable?
3. Consider the relationships between Isabelle, her children Abby and Rory, and her grandson, Rory. How do their familial ties differ from relationships that are based on friendship or love, such as Isabelle’s bond with Chloe or Lillian?
4. In her family, Abby is regarded as the responsible one, a wet blanket who focuses on obligations instead of fun. Is this characterization fair? How does Abby see herself? What stereotypes or roles have been assigned to you that aren’t entirely accurate?
5. Chloe and Finnegan’s relationship is rife with false starts, progress forward, and then backward slides. What about their individual personalities prevents them from connecting at first?
6. Each chapter takes you deep into the perspective of a different character. How did this structure influence your views of the characters? Did your feelings about any of the protagonists change when you entered his or her point of view?
7. Think about the various rituals that take place in the novel—for instance, Chloe’s walk with the empty suitcase, or Isabelle’s birthday celebration. What is the importance of these rituals? What rituals do you practice in your own life, and what meaning do they hold for you?
8. What role do Finnegan’s blue notebooks play in his life? What do you think it means to him when he hands Isabelle her book to keep?
9. Tom’s character is struggling with a great loss, and his lingering sadness in many ways impedes his new relationship with Lillian. How did you feel about his emotional journey? What allowed him finally to move on?
10. In the novel, as in real life, a deeper issue often underlies a superficial conflict. What do lightbulbs mean to Louise? And to Al?
11. The author has referred to The Lost Art of Mixing as a series of dominoes, each character tipping another (or others) forward, often unknowingly. How does Louise and Abby’s near miss at the intersection factor into the lives of the other characters? What might this say about life in general?
12. Which was your favorite character in the book, and why? Who did you relate to the most?
(Questions from author's website.)
The Lost Book of Adana Moreau
Michael Zapata, 2020
Hanover Square Press
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781335010124
Summary
The mesmerizing story of a Latin American science fiction writer and the lives her lost manuscript unites decades later in post-Katrina New Orleans.
In 1929 in New Orleans, a Dominican immigrant named Adana Moreau writes a science fiction novel. The novel earns rave reviews, and Adana begins a sequel.
Then she falls gravely ill. Just before she dies, she destroys the only copy of the manuscript.
Decades later in Chicago, Saul Drower is cleaning out his dead grandfather’s home when he discovers a mysterious manuscript written by none other than Adana Moreau.
With the help of his friend Javier, Saul tracks down an address for Adana’s son in New Orleans, but as Hurricane Katrina strikes they must head to the storm-ravaged city for answers.
What results is a brilliantly layered masterpiece—an ode to home, storytelling and the possibility of parallel worlds. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Michael Zapata is a founding editor of MAKE Literary Magazine. He is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for Fiction, the City of Chicago DCASE Individual Artist Program award and a Pushcart nomination.
As an educator, he taught literature and writing in high schools servicing dropout students. He is a graduate of the University of Iowa and has lived in New Orleans, Italy and Ecuador. He currently lives in Chicago with his family. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Instead of using a story-within-a-story framework (think Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love), or an entangled symmetry (David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas), Zapata layers his worlds flat atop one another. The reader has to hunt for traces of communication between story lines…. When Zapata… favors people over events, their stories come alive…. Through the allegory of the multiverse, Zapata reinterprets… the gulf between universes of human experience.
Will Chancellor - New York Times Book Review
[S]edate and ruminative… imbued with a fairy-tale vibe…. Overlaying the deftly conjured 20th- and 21st-century settings and events is a sense of eternality, of archetypes and mythic patterning… [and] Zapata’s own evident love… of science fiction…. Zapata’s carefully crafted prose oscillates between matter-of-fact and lyrically poetic, a tonal range that provides a very pleasant reading experience. Also stuffed, not inelegantly, between the microcosmic doings are several larger incidents that limn the bloody and brutal history of the two centuries, including South American totalitarianism, European pogroms and the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina.
Paul Di Filippo - Washington Post
[B]ig-hearted…. Full of stories within stories, Zapata builds his layers with a light touch…. Politically engaged, the book is deeply critical of betrayals and injustices of all kinds and in all parts of the globe, reckoning unsparingly with humanity’s hard-wired propensity both to destroy and to self-destruct…. Remarkably, Zapata’s tone is frequently gently or even absurdly comic and his sensibility is one of great love for human beings and for life itself. This seeming contradiction operates as the central tension that animates the entire novel…. [A] jubilant and generous story-teller.
Kathleen Rooney - Chicago Tribune
Smart and heart-piercing, Lost Book is a story of displacement, erasure, identity, mythology, and the ability of literature to simultaneously express and transcend our lives—not to mention reality…. Zapata tackles huge feelings and ideas… [but] makes it look effortless…. [His] multilayered concepts—most prominently, the theory of multiple worlds—underscore his more immediate themes of family, diaspora, and the sway that patterns hold over our lives…. Zapata illuminates the reality-inventing power of storytelling itself.
Jason Hellor - NPR
[A] stirring debut…. Zapata expertly blends the drama of the lost manuscript with the on-the-ground chaos and tumult caused by the storm.… [His] marriage of speculative and realist styles makes for a harrowing, immersive tale.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) [R]eaders will be mesmerized by the unraveling of how the protagonists’ lives interconnect.... The story-within-a-story structure might lose some…. However, patient readers will be rewarded with an illuminating work.... A heady literary and genre-bending novel.
Library Journal
(Starred review) Zapata spins an iridescent web of grief, loss, and memory… an enchanting blend of history, science, and fairy tale.… [U]nforgettable characters… preserve "lost worlds" in the stories they tell and by "reading" the night sky…. A lush, spellbinding tale.
Booklist
Two strangers are unknowingly connected by a rare manuscript.… Zapata’s debut novel is a wonderful merging of adventure with thoughtful but urgent meditations on time, history, and surviving tragedy.… A luminous novel about the deep value of telling stories.
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 Lost Catacomb
Shifra Hochberg, 2014
Enigma Press
358 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780615975696
Summary
An intoxicating blend of Vatican thriller and heart-rending love story, The Lost Catacomb's multiple timeline moves seamlessly across the centuries, from the early Roman Empire to the present and to World War II, where it explores the motif of loss—lost lovers, lost identity, and lost treasures—against the backdrop of the Holocaust in Italy.
At its center is Nicola Page, a beautiful young art historian who flies to Rome to assess a newly discovered catacomb of enigmatic provenance. Its magnificent frescoes hold the clues to a centuries-old murder and the existence of a fabled treasure from the ancient Temple in Jerusalem. Assisted by a handsome Italian archaeologist, Nicola is quickly drawn into a tangled web of intrigue and peril, masterminded by a powerful priest who is determined to destroy those who would reveal the dark secrets of the past.
And as Nicola uncovers layer after layer of this deadly past, she is brought face to face with shocking facts about her own family history—facts that will forever change the course of her life.
Author Bio
• Birth—December 13, 1949
• Where—Detroit, Michigan, USA
• Education—Ph.D., New York University
• Currently—lives in Jerusalem, Israel
Shifra Hochberg, who received her Ph.D. in English literature from New York University, has published over 20 academic essays, mainly in the field of nineteenth-century fiction and feminist literary theory. She currently teaches at Ariel University in Israel and makes her home in Jerusalem.
In the course of writing The Lost Catacomb, Shifra visited Italy 14 times, making on-site visits to all locations in the novel and meeting with families of Italian Holocaust survivors. She was also privileged to view a special collection of Jewish catacomb artifacts at the Vatican Museum that is normally closed to visitors. (From the author.)
Visit the author's website.
Follow Shifra on Facebook.
Book Reviews
A marvelous book--thrilling and literary. A compelling depiction of the Vatican, with its profound mysteries and troubling ties to the Holocaust, riveting action, and a tender love story that will appeal to a wide audience.
Aryeh Lev Stollman, author of The Far Euphrates and The Illuminated Soul
I was impressed by the extensive on-site research [Hochberg] conducted.... The Lost Catacomb is a thoughtful and erudite yet fast-moving thriller about archaeological and personal discoveries. At its center is Nicola Page, an American art historian with Italian roots who is brought to Rome to examine the provenance of a newly uncovered catacomb; at the same time, she hopes to uncover long-buried secrets about her family.
Sarah Johnson - Reading the Past
[F]ast-moving, fascinating.... Hochberg is...a master storyteller in the way that, from the beginning, she drops little hints of what is to come in the book—such as references to the Nazi era. For anyone interested in historical fiction, the troubled history of Jews in Italy, art history, and above all, the great Eternal City of Rome, The Lost Catacomb is a valuable treasure in itself.
Raanan Geberer - Reader's Favorite
Discussion Questions
1. What are the thriller elements in The Lost Catacomb and how are they given literary resonance?
2. How does the search for the provenance of an ancient catacomb become a metaphor for the personal issues that Nicola faces?
3. How do the three central love stories echo and reinforce each other?
4. Discuss the two major metaphors in the novel--the stars and the myth of Andromeda.
5. Which of the three female figures in the love stories do you identify with the most and why?
6. Discuss the thematic relevance of the epigraphs that precede each section of the novel.7. What did you learn about the history of Italian Jewry that you were unaware of before you read The Lost Catacomb?
7. How do you feel about the implications of the relationship of the Vatican with the Nazis during World War Two as depicted in the novel?
8. What literary allusions and subtexts did you find in the novel and how do they enrich the text?
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9. Discuss the theme of loss in the novel. Which plot elements does it include?
(Discussion questions courtesy of the author.)
Lost Children Archive
Valeria Luiselli, 2019
Knopf Doubleday
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525520610
Summary
An emotionally resonant, fiercely imaginative new novel about a family whose road trip across America collides with an immigration crisis at the southwestern border—an indelible journey told with breathtaking imagery, spare lyricism, and profound humanity.
A mother and father set out with their two children, a boy and a girl, driving from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. Their destination: Apacheria, the place the Apaches once called home.
Why Apaches? asks the ten-year-old son. Because they were the last of something, answers his father.
In their car, they play games and sing along to music. But on the radio, there is news about an "immigration crisis": thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States, but getting detained—or lost in the desert along the way.
As the family drives—through Virginia to Tennessee, across Oklahoma and Texas—we sense they are on the brink of a crisis of their own. A fissure is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet.
They are led, inexorably, to a grand, harrowing adventure—both in the desert landscape and within the chambers of their own imaginations.
Told through several compelling voices, blending texts, sounds, and images, Lost Children Archive is an astonishing feat of literary virtuosity. It is a richly engaging story of how we document our experiences, and how we remember the things that matter to us the most.
With urgency and empathy, it takes us deep into the lives of one remarkable family as it probes the nature of justice and equality today. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 16, 1983
• Where—Mexico City, Mexico
• Education—B.A., National Autonomous University of Mexico; Ph.D., Columbia University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in New York, New York
Valiera Luiselli is a Mexican-born author and academic, who lives in the United States. Her most recent novel Lost Children Archive was published in 2019.
Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Africa. She has since lived in the U.S., Costa Rica, South Korea, India, Spain, and France. After earning a B.A. in Philosophy from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Luiselli moved to New York City to dance.
After a time, Luiselli returned to academia, studying Comparative Literature at Columbia University and completing her Ph.D. Currently, she lives in New York City, where she teaches literature and creative writing at Hofstra University. She also collaborates as a writer with a number of art galleries and has worked as a librettist for the New York City Ballet.
Writing and recognition
Luiselli is the author of the book of essays Sidewalks (2013) and the internationally acclaimed novel Faces in the Crowd (2012), which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her novel The Story of My Teeth (2015) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Los Angeles Times Prize for Best Fiction and the Azul Prize in Canada.
Her most recent nonfiction book, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions (2017), was described by the Texas Observer as "the First Must-Read Book of the Trump Era." It was also a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.
In 2014 Luiselli was the recipient of the National Book Foundation "5 under 35" award. Luiselli's books have been translated into more than 20 languages, and her work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, Granta, McSweeney’s and The New Yorker. (From various online sources including Wikipedia. Retrieved 3/7/2019.)
Book Reviews
Engrossing…brilliantly intricate and constantly surprising—a passionately engaged book [with] intellectual amplitude and moral seriousness, [and] a beautiful, loving portrait of children and of the task of looking after them. It is a pleasure to be a part of the narrator’s family; just as pleasurable is the access we gain to the narrator’s mind—a comprehensive literary intelligence.… Luiselli [is] playful and brave.
James Wood - The New Yorker
A highly imaginative, politically deft portrait of childhood within a vast American landscape—a rollicking tale that contains within it an extremely disciplined exercise in political empathy. Luiselli takes the minds of children seriously, and the reader witnesses their intelligent eyes and ears recording each detail of the borderlands and registering the full terror of them. Luiselli braids and reworks disparate texts….[Characters’] experiences overlap to create a patchwork representation of how America might see itself. The novel’s most thrilling section [is] a single sentence sustained for some twenty pages near the end, which remains measured and crystalline, expertly controll[ed]…. Luiselli shows the reader something she wouldn’t normally see, and also maps the past onto the present in ways that can reveal hidden contours in both.
Lidija Haas - Harper’s
(Starred review) Luisell's powerful, eloquent novel… demonstrates how callousness toward other cultures erodes our own. Her superb novel makes a devastating case for compassion by documenting the tragic shortcomings of the immigration process (31 photos).
Publishers Weekly
The shifting sensibility from observer to child to child migrant gradually pulls readers inside the migrants' nightmare journey to create a story that, if fragmented, feels both timely and intelligent. —Reba Leiding, emerita, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA
Library Journal
(Starred review) Poignant, intense, keenly timely.… [P]olitically relevant. Stories of Latin American asylum seekers and the disappeared Apaches overlap and converge.… This is one of few novels that… conveys the urgency of this unsettling situation.
Booklist
(Starred review) Remarkable, inventive.… As the novel rises to a ferocious climax, Luiselli thunderously, persuasively insists that reckoning with the border will make deep demands of our emotional reserves. A powerful border story, at once intellectual and heartfelt.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Whom do you immediately associate with the "lost children" of the title? How many layers of getting lost appear throughout the novel, and is it always/only children who are lost?
2. What are some of the reasons behind the family’s trip to Apacheria? Discuss the parents’ separate and combined work projects and their expectations for what will happen to the family once they reach their destination.
3. What is the difference between a documentarian and a documentarist? How do the two forms of study, observation, interpretation, and synthesis make their way into the story of the family and the structure of the novel itself?
4. Can you identify the source(s) of conflict between the husband and wife? Which memories of their early life together and time at home with the children, as well as how they respond to the children during the car ride, suggest why they might not be able (or willing) to stay together?
5. The wife/mother is the arguably the primary narrator of the novel, and it’s through her that we understand the goings-on of the trip. Does she prove herself a reliable narrator, and if not, what are her biases in telling this story?
6. The seven boxes in the family’s trunk each belong to a different family member. Do you think you could identify the owner of each box based solely on its contents? What does this suggest about how the characters know one another, and also about how they chose to represent themselves in what they packed for the trip? Consider the wife’s question, "How many possible combinations of all those documents were there? And what completely different stories would be told by their varying permutations, shufflings, and reorderings?" (57).
7. Maps, news clippings, sound recordings, photographs, books, poems, loose notes—these are some of the items that appear in the boxes/text. The family also listens to music, and to audiobooks, in the car. How does having different media contribute to the polyphony of the novel? What do these documents suggest about whether the characters can, or cannot, know a definitive "truth"?
8. For most of the book the four family members don’t have first names, except their chosen Apache names: Swift Feather, Papa Cochise, Lucky Arrow, and Memphis. How are these names more or less representative of their identities in this time period, and to what degree are they chosen or given? How do they ultimately help unite the family when they’re separated, literally and figuratively?
9. How do the stories of Manuela’s daughters and the children on the plane motivate the mother on her journey and in her work?
10. What are the most memorable and significant stops the family makes along the way? How do they reinvent themselves in various situations, and what does this flexibility in their identity suggest both about their bonds and about America today?
11. Consider the repeated stories that are told and read throughout the novel: Geronimo’s fall, Elegies for Lost Children, "Space Oddity," Lord of the Flies, etc. How do they overlap with and inform the narrative of the novel? Do these connections influence your understanding of the novel as an "archive" in and of itself?
12. Although "the boy" is biologically related to his father and "the girl" to her mother, what connects the boy to the mother in the novel? Describe their bond, including how they test and support each other along this journey, and how they share space as.
13. How do the sections in Part II and Part III narrated from the boy’s point of view reflect or shift the mother’s point of view? Reading his interpretation of the events she narrated, did you find any holes, gaps, or misunderstandings in what she knew about him and Memphis—or (potentially surprising) similarities?
14. How does the boy’s voice differ from the mother’s, besides the obvious differences of their age and life experience? Consider his reliance on his camera, the Polaroids in his box, and the stream-of-consciousness narrative in the "Echo Canyon" chapter.
15. What are the children’s ideas about what it will mean to be lost, and how do they each work to stay together even when they’re forced apart? In this sense, are they more in control of their memories—that is, are they more or less "lost"—than their parents?
16. By the end of the novel, has the meaning of "home" changed for the characters? What are some of the ways home was lost, found, and reimagined?
17. The author offers a Works Cited at the end of the book to describe the various references and allusions she draws upon throughout the novel. How does this information change your understanding of what is fact versus fiction, and of the ways stories get passed down among works of art over time? After reading Luiselli’s description of her methodology, would you describe her as a documentarian or a documentarist?
18. The novel draws upon a number of real-life current events and stories about the immigration crisis in the United States. How did you feel about the way this situation was presented? Does the author’s referencing of so many histories and time periods, and narratives of displacement, create a more universal portrayal of being uprooted or without a country? Have you ever felt a similar kind of displacement?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Lost City Radio
Daniel Alarcon, 2007
HarperCollins
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060594817
Summary
For ten years, Norma has been the voice of consolation for a people broken by violence. She hosts Lost City Radio, the most popular program in their nameless South American country, gripped in the aftermath of war. Every week, the Indians in the mountains and the poor from the barrios listen as she reads the names of those who have gone missing, those whom the furiously expanding city has swallowed. Loved ones are reunited and the lost are found. Each week, she returns to the airwaves while hiding her own personal loss: her husband disappeared at the end of the war.
But the life she has become accustomed to is forever changed when a young boy arrives from the jungle and provides a clue to the fate of her long-missing husband.
Stunning, timely, and absolutely mesmerizing, Lost City Radio probes the deepest questions of war and its meaning: from its devastating impact on a society transformed by violence to the emotional scarring each participant, observer, and survivor carries for years after. This tender debut marks Alarcón's emergence as a major new voice in American fiction. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1977
• Where—Lima, Peru
• Reared—Birmingham, Alabama, USA
• Education—B.A., Columbia University; M.A. Iowa Writers'
Workshop.
• Awards—Fulbright Scholarship; Guggenheim Fellowship;
Lannan Fellowship
• Currently—lives in Oakland, California, USA
Daniel Alarcon’s work has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Virginia Quarterly Review and elsewhere, and anthologized in Best American Non-Required Reading 2004 and 2005. His non-fiction has appeared in Salon.com and Eyeshot, and he is Associate Editor of the Peruvian magazine Etiqueta Negra. He edited a portfolio for the magazine A Public Space on the writing of Peru. He is a former Fulbright Scholar to Peru.
Alarcon, a native of Peru, was raised, from the age of 3, in Birmingham, Alabama, U.S. and is an alumnus of Indian Springs School in Shelby County, Alabama. He holds a bachelors degree in anthropology from Columbia University and a masters from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has studied in Ghana and taught in New York City.
His first book War by Candlelight was a finalist for the 2006 PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award. He was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Fellowship, nominated "One of 21 Young American Novelists" under 35 by Granta magazine.
His debut novel, Lost City Radio, was published in 2007. Both his books have been translated into Spanish. Lost City Radio will be also published in French and Italian in 2008.
Daniel Alarcon lives in Oakland, California, where he is the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Mills College.(From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
This book ... lacks the dramatic punch of [his previous] stories.... He never establishes a solid relationship between the story and [the omniscient] narrator, who becomes increasingly intrusive. The first third of the book is evenhanded, allowing various characters to come forward. But the final parts capriciously switch point of view within chapters, sections, even paragraphs....This tactic diffuses the impact of the war...on which the plot hinges.... The final half of the book is marred by dull descriptions ... that lapse into sentimentality (“Norma smiled at him, and she looked like sunshine”), as well as stylistic tics in which fragments echo sentences. Still, there’s enough here to confirm that Alarcón is talented—and wise—beyond his years, that he remains intent on challenging himself and his readers.
Sarah Fay - New York Times Book Review
Daniel Alarcón's thoughtful, engaging first novel is set in a fictitious South American country where the reader will immediately recognize fragments of recent history in Argentina, Chile and...Peru. No name is ever given to the country: Alarcon means the novel to be a fable about civil wars and their repercussions, rather than an account of a specific war within a specific place.... Alarcon ... express[es], eloquently and exactly, the self-destructiveness of violent insurgency and official retaliation. The victims are the people whom the revolution ostensibly aims to serve. This has been true in just about every actual country in Latin America, as it is true in the fictional one that Alarcón has invented. Lost City Radio is a fable for an entire continent, and is no less pertinent in other parts of the world where different languages are spoken in different climates but where the same ruinous dance is played out.
Jonathan Yardley - Washington Post
Set in a fictional South American nation where guerrillas have long clashed with the government, Alarcon's ambitious first novel (after the story collection War by Candlelight) follows a trio of characters upended by civil strife. Norma, whose husband, Rey, disappeared 10 years ago after the end of a civil war, hosts popular radio show Lost City Radio, which reconnects callers with their missing loved ones. (She quietly entertains the notion that the job will also reunite her with her missing husband.) So when an 11-year-old orphan, Victor, shows up at the radio station with a list of his distant village's "lost people," the station plans a special show dedicated to his case and cranks up its promotional machine. Norma, meanwhile, notices a name on the list that's an alias her husband used to use, prompting her to resume her quest to find him. She and Victor travel to Victor's home village, where local teacher Manau reveals to Norma what she's long feared—and more. Though the mystery Alarcón makes of the identity of Victor's father isn't particularly mysterious, this misstep is overshadowed by Alarcon's successful and nimbly handled portrayal of war's lingering consequences.
Publishers Weekly
Often compared to the work of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, Alarcón's harrowing tale of the breakdown of a society and the emotional price paid by its survivors will undoubtedly haunt you long after you've turned the last page.
Bookmarks Magazine
(Starred review.) Writing rapturously and elegiacally of the wildness in both jungle and city, creating indelible images that concentrate the horrors of war, and unerringly articulating the complex feelings of individuals caught in barbaric and senseless predicaments, Alarcon reaches to the heart of our persistent if elusive dream of freedom and peace. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
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 Lost Girls of Paris
Pam Jenoff, 2019
Park Row
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780778330271
Summary
A remarkable story of friendship and courage centered around three women and a ring of female secret agents during World War II.
1946, Manhattan
One morning while passing through Grand Central Terminal on her way to work, Grace Healey finds an abandoned suitcase tucked beneath a bench.
Unable to resist her own curiosity, Grace opens the suitcase, where she discovers a dozen photographs—each of a different woman. In a moment of impulse, Grace takes the photographs and quickly leaves the station.
Grace soon learns that the suitcase belonged to a woman named Eleanor Trigg, leader of a network of female secret agents who were deployed out of London during the war. Twelve of these women were sent to Occupied Europe as couriers and radio operators to aid the resistance.
But they never returned home, their fates a mystery.
Setting out to learn the truth behind the women in the photographs, Grace finds herself drawn to a young mother turned agent named Marie, whose daring mission overseas reveals a remarkable story of friendship, valor and betrayal.
Vividly rendered and inspired by true events, New York Times bestselling author Pam Jenoff shines a light on the incredible heroics of the brave women of the war and weaves a mesmerizing tale of courage, sisterhood and the great strength of women to survive in the hardest of circumstances. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Silver Spring, Maryland, USA
• Education—B.A., George Washington University; M.A., Cambridge University; J.D., University of Pennsylvania
• Currently—lives in Cherry Hill, New Jersey
Pam Jenoff was born in Maryland and raised outside Philadelphia. She attended George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and Cambridge University in England.
Upon receiving her master's in history from Cambridge, she accepted an appointment as Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Army. The position provided a unique opportunity to witness and participate in operations at the most senior levels of government, including helping the families of the Pan Am Flight 103 victims secure their memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, observing recovery efforts at the site of the Oklahoma City bombing and attending ceremonies to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of World War II at sites such as Bastogne and Corregidor.
Following her work at the Pentagon, Pam moved to the State Department. In 1996 she was assigned to the U.S. Consulate in Krakow, Poland. It was during this period that Pam developed her expertise in Polish-Jewish relations and the Holocaust. Working on matters such as preservation of Auschwitz and the restitution of Jewish property in Poland, Pam developed close relations with the surviving Jewish community.
Pam left the Foreign Service in 1998 to attend law school and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. She worked for several years as a labor and employment attorney both at a firm and in-house in Philadelphia and now teaches law school at Rutgers.
Pam is the author of The Kommandant's Girl, which was an international bestseller and nominated for a Quill award, as well as The Diplomat's Wife, The Ambassador's Daughter, Almost Home, A Hidden Affair and The Things We Cherished.
She lives outside Philadelphia with her husband and three children. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[The] emotional profundity [of The Orphan's Trail] is sadly lacking in Jenoff’s latest.… Jenoff has at her disposal a great, mostly untold story of heroism and espionage, both about the woman who trained an elite force of operatives and then spent years looking for them after their death, and also about what it was like to be one of those women, but the result has all of the tension of a Hallmark card. This is a slight re-telling of a remarkable story and an unusual slip-up from the dependable Jenoff.
USA Today
Jenoff brings serious girl power to this story of brave women and the war.
Cosmopolitan
A portrait of sisterhood, courage, and drama. A must-read.
Glamour
[A] fast-paced novel… Jenoff allows [her characters]distinct personalities to shine. This is a mesmerizing tale full of appealing characters, intrigue, suspense, and romance.
Publishers Weekly
[P]assion and heartache greet the brave patriot. Verdict: Jenoff weaves the stories of three remarkable women in this fast-paced title that boasts an intriguing plot and strong female characters. —Laura Jones, Argos Community Schs., IN
Library Journal
[A] gripping WWII-era tale…. Jenoff breathes life into the tale of a committed “Band of Sisters” who displayed boundless courage in the face of historically dire circumstances, creating a compelling and exciting read.
Booklist
Jenoff's wartime chronology is blurred by overly general date headings… and confusing continuity. Sparsely punctuated by shocking brutality and defiant bravery, the narrative is, for the most part, flabby and devoid of tension.… A sadly slapdash World War II adventure.
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 LOST GIRLS OF PARIS ... and then take off on your own:
1. What possesses Grace Healy to open the suitcase at Grand Central and abscond with the photos? Would you have done so?
2. What do we learn about Eleanor Trigg, who initially was a secretary at SOE? Why is she given the responsibility to put together the spy team—what qualifies her in terms of experience and character? (Eleanor is based on the real life of Vera Atkins: see below.)
3. What does Eleanor look for in her recruits? Why does she select each of the women she does?
4. Talk about the training process for the women and the rigors involved. Would you have made the grade? What would have been most difficult for you?
5. What about Marie, whose point of view we follow? During training, she has trouble mastering a number of the tasks, so much so that she would appear unqualified. Where you surprised at her later accomplishments?
6. The story has three different points of view and moves back and forth through time. Did you appreciate the shifting perspectives and chronology? Or was it difficult to follow at times?
7. Why do you think the romance between Marie and Julian is limited to eye contact and fleeting glances. Would you have preferred to have more of their relationship develop on the page, rather than off (not counting his profession of love much later in the book)?
8. Of the 12 women selected, do you have a favorite; do some impress you more than others?
9. Most of all, talk about the incredible courage all of these women possessed—and the horrific, life-threatening dangers they faced.
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Consider two nonfiction works on Britain's female spies:
• Helms, Sarah. A Life in Secret: Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII. Knopf Doubleday (2006).
• Loftis, Larry. Code Name: Lise: The True Story of the Woman Who Became World War II's Most Highly Decorated Spy. Gallery Books (2019)
The Lost Girls of Rome
Donato Carrisi, 2013
Little, Brown and Co.
4342 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316246798
Summary
A grieving young widow, seeking answers to her husband's death, becomes entangled in an investigation steeped in the darkest mysteries of Rome.
Sandra Vega, a forensic analyst with the Roman police department, mourns deeply for a marriage that ended too soon. A few months ago, in the dead of night, her husband, an up-and-coming journalist, plunged to his death at the top of a high-rise construction site. The police ruled it an accident. Sanda is convinced it was anything but.
Launching her own inquiries, Sanda finds herself on a dangerous trail, working the same case that she is convinced led to her husband's murder. An investigation which is deeply entwined with a series of disappearances that has swept the city, and brings Sandra ever closer to a centuries-old secret society that will do anything to stay in the shadows. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 25, 1973
• Where—Italy
• Education—law and criminology
• Awards—Premio Bancarella; Prix Livre de Poche; Prix SNCF du polar;
Premio Letterario Massarosa; Premio Camaiore di Letteratura Gialla;
• Currently—lives in Rome, Italy
Donato Carrisi studied law and criminology before he began working as a writer for television. The Whisperer (2009), Carrisi's first novel, won five international literary prizes, has been sold in nearly twenty countries, and has been translated into languages as varied as French, Danish, Hebrew and Vietnamese. Carrisi lives in Rome. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Carrisi takes an unsparing look at the nature of evil and guilt in this fascinating, if meandering, thriller. Sandra Vega, a forensic photographer with the Milan police, refuses to believe the official ruling that her photojournalist husband David Leoni’s death five months earlier was accidental.... [S]hifts between past and present make the complex plot, which moves at a halting pace, hard to follow.... [A] surprising climax.
Publishers Weekly
Multiple story lines weave a complicated web in this psychological thriller from Italian author Carrisi. Forensic analyst Sandra Vega...receives a phone call insinuating that her photographer husband's death may not have been the unfortunate accident she believes it to be.... Verdict: With a lot of separate subplots, intricate details, and twists, this novel has plenty for readers to follow, but those who can keep up will be rewarded with a satisfying conclusion. —Madeline Solien, Deerfield P.L., IL
Library Journal
.
Masterful. With each chapter, THE LOST GIRLS OF ROME jumps from one plotline to the next, back and forth between the present and one year ago. Carrisi uses this device to full advantage, building suspense to almost unbearable (and perhaps supernatural) levels, all the way to a truly surprising ending.
Bruce Tierney - BookPage
A secret sect worthy of a Dan Brown novel, the penitenzieri are a group of rogue Catholic clergymen who...mete out justice on their own.... Could this be the story that forensic analyst Sandra Vega’s journalist-husband was working on when he died?... This multilayered thriller was a best-seller in the author’s native Italy, but, while it may attract attention here, readers are likely to come away something short of satisfied. —Karen Keefe
Booklist
(Starred review.) With references to the Monster of Florence, a medieval serial murderer, and a secret Vatican sect, Carrisi's second literary thriller draws readers into a labyrinth of evil. In his derelict Rome villa, Jeremiah Smith lies comatose, "Kill Me" carved in his chest. The emergency responder physician begins working and then sees evidence that Smith is her twin sister's killer. With that, Carrisi's noir narrative descends into surrealism, soon drawing in Sandra Vega, police forensic analyst.... A powerful psychological drama.
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.
Lost Hearts in Italy
Andrea Lee, 2006
Random House
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812971132
Summary
The Italian phrase Mai due senza tre–“never two without three”–forms the basis of Andrea Lee’s spellbinding novel of betrayal. Sophisticated and richly told, Lost Hearts in Italy reveals a trio caught in the grip of desire, deception, and remorse.
When Mira Ward, an American, relocates to Rome with her husband, Nick, she looks forward to a time of exploration and awakening. Young, beautiful, and in love, Mira is on the verge of a writing career, and giddy with the prospect of living abroad.
On the trip over, Mira meets Zenin, an older Italian billionaire, who intrigues Mira with his coolness and worldly mystique. A few weeks later, feeling idle and adrift in her new life, Mira agrees to a seemingly innocent lunch with Zenin and is soon catapulted into an intense affair, which moves beyond her control more quickly than she intends.
Her job as a travel writer allows clandestine trysts and opulent getaways with Zenin to Paris, Monte Carlo, London, and Venice, and over the next few years, now the mother of a baby daughter, she struggles between resisting and relenting to this man who has such a hold on her. As her marriage erodes, so too does Mira’s sense of self, until she no longer resembles the free spirit she was on her arrival in the Eternal City.
Years later, Mira and Nick, now divorced and remarried to others, look back in an attempt to understand their history, while a detached Zenin assesses his own life and his role in the unlikely love triangle. Each recounts the past, aided by those witness to their failure and fallout.
An elegant, raw, and emotionally charged read, Lost Hearts in Italy is a classic coming-of-age story in which cultures collide, innocence dissolves, and those we know most intimately remain foreign to us. (From the publisher.
Author Bio
• Birth— N/A
• Where—Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., M.A., Harvard University
• Currently—lives in Turin, Italy
Andrea Lee was born in Philadelphia and received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Harvard University. She is a former staff writer for The New Yorker, and her fiction and nonfiction writing has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine and New York Times Book Review. She is the author of Russian Journal, the novel Sarah Phillips, and the short story collection Interesting Women. She lives with her husband and two children in Turin, Italy. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
The fall from innocence of Americans abroad is a Jamesian theme, but here the Grand Tour has been replaced by international finance and the naïfs are married Harvard grads, posted to Rome. The husband, the scion of a shabby but genteel New England clan, disdains his Wasp heritage and worships his black wife; she is drawn to a predatory Italian, a “peasant” who has bullied his way to the helm of a corporate empire. The adultery plays out in first-class airport lounges and ornate hotel rooms, and Rome reprises its traditional role as the city of dissolution, “rich and coarse at the same time, like a mixture of sackcloth and brocade.” In chillingly urbane prose, Lee takes the full measure of her characters’ folly, as they prove faithless not only to each other but to themselves.
The New Yorker
Two handsome young Americans marry, move to Rome, and pursue interesting careers while having a daughter. The wife, Mira, also pursues an enigmatic affair with coarse and calculating upstart Zenin, a toy-manufacturing billionaire. As readers know from page one, the marriage has failed painfully, with Mira having gone on to marry an Italian named Vanni and given birth to two sons. Meanwhile, embittered ex-husband Nick lives in London with his new wife and their two daughters. Because Mira is African American and Nick old-line (if not rich) New England, the failure of their relationship also seems like a failure of ideals. The novel treads between the 1980s and the mid-2000s, as Mira and Nick's daughter heads to Harvard, alma mater of her parents. The portraits are incisive, the cultural insights fresh, and the deliquescent prose a pleasure to read, yet the novel can seem static. With so much foretold, there's little sense of revelation, and though one can applaud Lee (Russian Journal) for her restrained approach, what reasons seem to surface for Mira's deserting Nick just don't add up for this reviewer. One can't turn down Lee's first novel in 20 years, but if delicious it's still a puzzle. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. Andrea Lee has created complex characters who have multifaceted emotions and motives–Zenin shows both coldness and tenderness, Nick is caring and bitter, Mira both loves and betrays. Which character do you identify most with, and which do you find most and least sympathetic?
2. When Zenin invites Mira on his yacht, she surprises herself and Zenin with her sudden forward behavior. Lee describes the moment as Mira “struggling not against him but against something in herself” (40). What motivation lies behind her action, and what effect does it have on both of them? What emotions are Mira grappling with?
3. When Zenin invites Mira on his yacht, she surprises herself and Zenin with her sudden forward behavior. Lee describes the moment as Mira “struggling not against him but against something in herself” (40). What motivation lies behind her action, and what effect does it have on both of them? What emotions are Mira grappling with?
4. How would you characterize the bond between Mira and Zenin? Is it mainly comprised of physical attraction, or is it a power struggle? Do you believe they love each other? Discuss how their relationship progresses over the course of the novel.
5. Discuss the theme of displacement—geographical, racial, and romantic—in Lost Hearts in Italy. Explore the ways Mira, Zenin, Nick, and other characters are foreigners.
6. Zenin is a character who doesn’t lack material goods, women, family, or career success, yet he lives in “a dark world of things lacking.” What is missing in his life? Do you think it is possible for Zenin to ever be content?
7. Dreams make frequent appearances throughout Lost Hearts in Italy. What is their purpose, and what insight do they shed?
8. The second time Mira goes to meet Zenin, she “feels as if she has come to the center of her life, to the center of a wood in which all the leaves on the trees are eyes. Or to the hidden center, the secret heart she has been searching for in the labyrinth of Rome” (116). What is Mira’s epiphany here?
9. When Nick finds out about Mira’s infidelity, he states that she’s lost her country now. What does his statement mean? What do you think is the point when Mira has gone too far for her marriage to remain salvageable?
10. What is the significance of the Bangladesh woman, Roushana, in Chapter 27? Compare and contrast her with the other women in the novel.
11. Nick has a theory that the more foreign places you live in, the less you absorb. Do you agree with this opinion? What have your traveling experiences been in relation to his statement?
12. How have Mira, Zenin, and Nick changed by the end of Lost Hearts in Italy, besides losing their naivete? In which ways are they more content, and how do they remain unfulfilled?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Lost in Shangri-La: A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II
Mitchell Zuckoff, 2011
HarperCollins
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061988349
Summary
In 1945, twenty-four American servicemen and women boarded a plane to see “Shangri-La,” a beautiful valley deep within Dutch New Guinea. But when the plane crashed, only three pulled through to battle for survival.
Emotionally devastated and badly injured, the trio faced certain death. Caught between spear-carrying tribesmen and enemy Japanese, they trekked down the jungle-covered mountainside and straight into superstitious natives rumored to be cannibals.
Drawn from interviews, Army documents, photos, diaries, and original film footage, Lost in Shangri-La recounts this true-life adventure for the first time. Mitchell Zuckoff reveals how the trio traversed the jungle; how brave Filipino-American paratroopers risked their lives to save the survivors; how a native leader protected the Americans; and how a cowboy colonel attempted an untried rescue mission to get them out.
A riveting work of nonfiction that brings to life an odyssey at times terrifying, enlightening, and comic, Lost in Shangri-La is a thrill ride from beginning to end. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—N/A
• Education—M.A., University of Missouri
• Awards—Distinguished Writing Award from the American
Society of Newspaper Editors; Livingston Award for
International Reporting; Heywood Broun Award; Public
Service Award from the AP Managing Editors
• Currently—lives in Newton, Massachusetts, USA
Mitchell Zuckoff is a professor of journalism at Boston University. He is the author of Lost in Shangri-La: A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II (2011); Robert Altman: The Oral Biography (2009); Ponzi’s Scheme: The True Story of a Financial Legend (2005) and Choosing Naia: A Family's Journey (2002); He is co-author with Dick Lehr of Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (2003).
His magazine work has appeared in The New Yorker, Fortune and elsewhere. As a reporter at the Boston Globe, Zuckoff was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for investigative reporting. He received the Distinguished Writing Award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the Livingston Award for International Reporting, the Heywood Broun Award, and the Associated Press Managing Editors' Public Service Award.
Zuckoff received a master’s degree from the University of Missouri and was a Batten Fellow at the Darden School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Zuckoff (Ponzi's Scheme) skillfully narrates the story of a plane crash and rescue mission in an uncharted region of New Guinea near the end of WWII. Of the 24 American soldiers who flew from their base on a sightseeing tour to a remote valley, only three survived the disaster, including one WAC. As the three waited for help, they faced death from untreated injuries and warlike local tribesmen who had never seen white people before and believed them to be dangerous spirits. Even after a company of paratroopers arrived, the survivors still faced a dangerous escape from the valley via "glider snatch." Zuckoff transforms impressive research into a deft narrative that brings the saga of the survivors to life. His access to journal accounts, letters, photos, military records, and interviews with the eyewitnesses allows for an almost hour-by-hour account of the crash and rescue, along with vivid portraits of his main subjects. Zuckoff also delves into the Stone Age culture of the New Guinea tribesmen and the often humorous misapprehensions the Americans and natives have about each other. In our contemporary world of eco-tourism and rain-forest destruction, Zuckoff's book gives a window on a more romantic, and naïve, era.
Publishers Weekly
Zuckoff presents an engaging story about the survival and ultimate rescue of three American service people who crashed in the dense jungles of New Guinea toward the end of World War II. While that is exciting enough in its own right, what makes Zuckoff's story an essential read is the interaction between these survivors and the indigenous tribe they encountered after crashing. Humorous and at times dangerous misunderstandings arose between the Americans and the indigenous people during the 46-day ordeal in the jungle. The tribe had never encountered white people before and assumed their "guests," including a young female WAC corporal, were spirits whose arrival fulfilled a prophecy of the end of the world. In a sense, this prophecy was true as after the rescue and the war, the Americans, Europeans, and Indonesians returned and changed the way of life that these tribes had followed for centuries. Verdict: This excellent book will be enjoyed by anyone who loves true adventure stories of disaster and rescue such as Alfred Lansing's Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage. —Michael Farrell, Reformed Theological Seminary Lib., Oviedo, FL
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)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Lost in Shangri-la:
1. What would it feel like to be dropped, literally, from the mid-20th century into the stone age? How would you cope? Had you survived the crash of the Gremlin, what would be most difficult for you—pain, lack of food and water, personal hygiene, fear, waiting...and waiting for rescue?
2. Do the Americans find Eden when they crash into the jungle of New Guinea? What role does war play in the Dani tribal culture? If you've ever read The Lord of the Flies, is there a strange parallel here?
3. What are the attitudes of the Dani islanders and Americans toward one another? In what way do those attitudes change...or do they? Discuss what happens when the paratroopers arrive to set up camp.
4. The Dani had a myth that one day pale spirits would descend from the sky...and nothing would ever be the same. Were the natives better off after their brush with the modern world...or not?
5. Author Zuckoff traces the lives of the crash survivors in later years. How were their lives affected by their month in the jungle?
6. Zuckoff provides a great deal of historical exposition—on military gliders, the WACs in World War II, and the native islanders' customs and warfare? Was the background material interesting? If so, what did you find most enlightening? Or is it "information overload," a distraction from what might have been a more dramatic, sharply focused narrative?
7. Trapped in such an isolated location, waiting for a way out, there is little to keep the survivors occupied. Many spend their time wishing they were somewhere else. Yet, later, one of the survivors said the experience was one of the highlights of his life. How might you have felt? How difficult would it be for you to pass the time?
8. Question #7 brings up the age old query: if you were shipwrecked on a desert (or jungle) island what would you wish to have with you (aside from the basic necessities of life)?
9. Who among the victims, survivors, native hosts, rescuers do you admire? Or find most interesting?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online of off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Lost Lake
Sarah Addison Allen, 2014
St. Martin's Press
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250019820
Summary
The first time Eby Pim saw Lost Lake, it was on a picture postcard. Just an old photo and a few words on a small square of heavy stock, but when she saw it, she knew she was seeing her future.
That was half a life ago. Now Lost Lake is about to slip into Eby’s past. Her husband, George, is long passed. Most of her demanding extended family are gone. All that’s left is a once-charming collection of lakeside cabins succumbing to the Southern Georgia heat and damp, and an assortment of faithful misfits drawn back to Lost Lake year after year by their own unspoken dreams and desires. It’s not quite enough to keep Eby from calling this her final summer at the lake, and relinquishing Lost Lake to a developer with cash in hand.
Until one last chance at family knocks on her door.
Lost Lake is where Kate Pheris spent her last best summer at the age of twelve, before she learned of loneliness and heartbreak and loss. Now she’s all too familiar with those things, but she knows about hope, too, thanks to her resilient daughter, Devin, and her own willingness to start moving forward. Perhaps at Lost Lake her little girl can cling to her own childhood for just a little longer… and maybe Kate herself can rediscover something that slipped through her fingers so long ago.
One after another, people find their way to Lost Lake, looking for something that they weren’t sure they needed in the first place: love, closure, a second chance, peace, a mystery solved, a heart mended. Can they find what they need before it’s too late?
At once atmospheric and enchanting, Lost Lake shows Sarah Addison Allen at her finest, illuminating the secret longings and the everyday magic that wait to be discovered in the unlikeliest of places. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Aka—Katie Gallagher
• Birth—ca. 1972
• Where—Ashville, North Carolina, USA
• Education—B.A., University of North Carolina, Asheville
• Currently—lives in Asheville, North Carolina
Garden Spells didn't start out as a magical novel," writes Sarah Addison Allen. "It was supposed to be a simple story about two sisters reconnecting after many years. But then the apple tree started throwing apples and the story took on a life of its own... and my life hasn't been the same since."
North Carolina novelist Sarah Addison Allen brings the full flavor of her southern upbringing to bear on her fiction—a captivating blend of fairy tale magic, heartwarming romance, and small-town sensibility.
Born and raised in Asheville, in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Allen grew up with a love of books and an appreciation of good food (she credits her journalist father for the former and her mother, a fabulous cook, for the latter). In college, she majored in literature—because, as she puts it, "I thought it was amazing that I could get a diploma just for reading fiction. It was like being able to major in eating chocolate."
After graduation in 1994, Allen began writing seriously. She sold a few stories and penned romances for Harlequin under the pen name Katie Gallagher; but her big break occurred in 2007 with the publication of her first mainstream novel, Garden Spells, a modern-day fairy tale about an enchanted apple tree and the family of North Carolina women who tend it. Booklist called Allen's accomplished debut "spellbindingly charming," and the novel became a BookSense pick and a Barnes & Noble Recommends selection.
The Sugar Queen followed in 2008, The Girl Who Chased the Moon in 2009, The Peach Keeper in 2011; and Lost Lake in 2014. Allen's 2015 novel First Frost returned to some of her charaters in Garden Spells.
Since then, Allen has continued to serve heaping helpings of the fantastic and the familiar in fiction she describes as "Southern-fried magic realism." Clearly, it's a recipe readers are happy to eat up as fast as she can dish it out.
Extras
From a 2007 Barnes and Noble interview:
• I love food. The comforting and sensual nature of food always seems to find its way into what I write. Garden Spells involves edible flowers. My book out in 2008 involves southern and rural candies. Book three, barbeque. But, you know what? I'm a horrible cook.
• In college I worked for a catalog company, taking orders over the phone. Occasionally celebrities would call in their own orders. My brush with celebrity? I took Bob Barker's order.
• I was a Star Wars fanatic when I was a kid. I have the closet full of memorabilia to prove it — action figures, trading cards, comic books, notebooks with ‘Mrs. Mark Hamill' written all over the pages. I can't believe I just admitted that.
• While I was writing this, a hummingbird came to check out the trumpet vine outside my open window. I stopped typing and sat very still, mesmerized, my hands frozen on the keys, until it flew away. I looked back to my computer and ten minutes had passed in a flash.
• I love being a writer.
• When asked what book most influenced her career as a writer, here is her response:
Every book I've ever read has influenced me in some way. Paddington Bear books and Beverly Cleary in elementary school. Nancy Drew and Judy Blume in middle school. The sci-fi fantasy of my teens. The endless stream of paperback romances I devoured as I got older. Studying world literature and major movements in college. Who I am, what I am, is the culmination of a lifetime of reading, a lifetime of stories. And there are still so many more books to read. I'm a work in progress. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Allen is the master of magical details and plots that combine a fairy-tale sensibility with character-driven pathos. This imaginative, lyrical novel is an intricate web of magical misfits, Southern gothic charm and the power of new possibilities, both romantic and redemptive.
NPR
It is always a pleasure to read Allen’s work. Her signature magical touches are something readers anticipate. They will not be disappointed with this story…There’s nothing like a little "Allen magic" sprinkled on a book to make it a fascinating reading experience to be savored.
Wichita Falls Times Record News
Allen's work is such a treat…Like a cook who seasons just so, she adds flavor but not too much, and serves a satisfying literary meal without making you overstuffed…Lost Lake is a delightful way to spend some time this winter.
Durham Herald-Sun
A romantic and dreamy story of love and second chances.
Asheville Citizen-Times
Sarah Addison Allen delivers a feel-good story with touches of magic.
Entertainment Weekly
All of the magic of Allen's previous books is present in this latest treasure, a feast of words. The author has the ability to capture the soul of her characters and make them relatable to every reader. This is a story of love, loss, grief, and starting over—it is truly a treat to be savored.
Romantic Times Book Reviews
Charming, bittersweet and ultimately hopeful, Lost Lake is a treat for fans of Addison's previous novels or those who simply love a good Southern story.
Shelf Awareness
[A] widow and her daughter find healing at a quirky summer resort.... The overused family business–versus-developers trope doesn’t particularly add to the story, and Allen’s trademark mystical touches are not as effective as usual, but her eccentric cast of characters and charming Southern setting will win readers over.
Publishers Weekly
A year after her husband's death...Kate and her eight-year-old daughter Devin leave the confines of Atlanta to explore Lost Lake in Suley, GA, and oh the adventures they have! A collection of quirky characters, all with wisdom to share, bring this story to life, and none shy away from the chance for even greater personal growth —Stacey Hayman, Rocky River P.L., OH
Library Journal
(Starred review.) A surefire star of feel-good fiction, Allen always manages to nimbly mask her potent messages of inspiration and romance beneath her trademark touches of mirth and magic, but this endearing tale of surprising second chances may just be her wisest work yet. —Carol Haggas
Booklist
Old wrongs are righted for a motley community of Southerners in this latest, semienchanted novel.... Tragic pasts abound...and each lakegoer is haunted to a different extent. It's clear from the beginning that healing is on the horizon for everyone. Light, sweet and sparkly.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The title of this book is Lost Lake, and the theme of loss runs throughout the entire narrative.
What did you think the titular lake’s name meant when you started reading the book, and did
that idea change for you over the course of the book?
2. Storytelling plays a large role in the lives of many of the characters in this story—and Kate, a
born storyteller, has the power to alter Wes’s perspective about his sad and troubled past just
through one powerful retelling. Who else tells themselves stories about their history, and do
you think all their stories are true?
3. Eby’s falling-down resort attracts misfits of all kinds, some more likable than others. Which
characters did you find the most endearing? And which, inversely, alienated you? Were there
others who won you over by the novel’s end?
4. Sarah Addison Allen writes a sort of everyday magic into her stories that sets her apart, and it
seems to touch every character in a different way. Lisette experiences a heartbreaking sort of
magic, in the haunting companion who shares her kitchen and her silence. Devin, meanwhile,
experiences a haunting of sorts too—but one that feels far more innocent and hopeful. Why do
you think these two characters are the ones to experience ghosts firsthand? What sets them
apart from their compatriots at the lake?
5. Other characters, like Kate and Eby, experience their life’s magic as a sort of enchantment,
unpredictable and yet not unpleasant. Did that carry over to you as you were reading it? Did
the characters’ easy acceptance of day-to-day magical happenings make it easier for you to
believe in them too?
6. The art from the postcards of Lost Lake hold great meaning to those who see them. Would any
of them make you want to visit Eby’s home? What did you think of the last one that shows a
young and in love Eby and George? Were they pictured the way you’d visualized them?
7. What was your view of Wes before you read the letter he finally shared with Kate? How did that
change when you learned what he had done all those years ago?
8. The women in Kate’s extended family are all too experienced with widowhood. Eby calls it the
"Morris curse." But all of the widows react very differently to their tragedies. What is it about
some of the Morris women that makes them especially vulnerable to losing themselves in grief?
What, do you think, would have happened to Kate and Devin had Kate never ‘woken up’ from
her own sorrow?
9. Eby says that if "we measured life in the things that almost happened, we wouldn’t get
anywhere." Do you agree? You may wish to talk about your own fateful "almosts" as well.
10. At the end of the book, Eby is bound for Europe again, traveling for the first time since her
honeymoon. What do you think draws her back there, and what do you imagine she might send
or bring home from her travels?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Lost Man
Jane Harper, 2019
Flatiron Books
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250105684
Summary
Two brothers meet in the remote Australian outback when the third brother is found dead, in this stunning new standalone novel from Jane Harper
Brothers Nathan and Bub Bright meet for the first time in months at the remote fence line separating their cattle ranches in the lonely outback.
Their third brother, Cameron, lies dead at their feet.
In an isolated belt of Australia, their homes a three-hour drive apart, the brothers were one another’s nearest neighbors. Cameron was the middle child, the one who ran the family homestead. But something made him head out alone under the unrelenting sun.
Nathan, Bub and Nathan’s son return to Cameron’s ranch and to those left behind by his passing: his wife, his daughters, and his mother, as well as their long-time employee and two recently hired seasonal workers.
While they grieve Cameron’s loss, suspicion starts to take hold, and Nathan is forced to examine secrets the family would rather leave in the past. Because if someone forced Cameron to his death, the isolation of the outback leaves few suspects.
A powerful and brutal story of suspense set against a formidable landscape, The Lost Man confirms Jane Harper, author of The Dry and Force of Nature, is one of the best new voices in writing today. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1979-80
• Where—Manchester, England, UK
• Education—B.A., University of Kent (Canterbury, England)
• Currently—lives in St. Kilda, Victoria, Australia
Jane Harper is an Englisn-born, partially Australian-raised writer, now living in Australia. She is the author of The Dry (2016/2017), Force of Nature (2018), and The Lost Man (2019)—all crime novels set in Australia.
Jane was born in Manchester, England, but her family moved to a subrub of Melbourne, Australia, where she lived till she was six. The family then returned to England, and Jane attended the University of Kent where she earned her B.A., in History and English.
Her first job out of school was as a journalist (yes, she actually had to pass a qualifying exam). She first worked for the Darlington & Stockton Times and, later, as senior news editor for the Hull Daily Mail, both papers in Yorkshire, England.
But Australia beckoned, and in 2008 Jane returned to her early childhood stromping grounds, again working in journalism—first for the Geelong Advertiser, then in 2011 for the Herald Sun in Melbourne.
After she had a short story accepted for inclusion in the annual Fiction Edition of The Big Issue (Melbourne), Jane turned to fiction writing in a serious way. In 2014, she signed up for a 12-week online creative writing course. The story she submitted for acceptance into the program turned out to be the beginning of her novel, The Dry. By the end of the three months, Jane had her first draft of the novel.
Making this almost a fairytale come true, Jane felt confident enough to enter the novel's third draft in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. It won the $15,000 prize in May, 2015, and Pan Macmillan paid a non-specified “six-figure” sum for a three-book deal.
Jane and her husband live in St. Kilda, outside of Melbourne, with their daughter. Jane now writes fiction full time. (Adapted from the author's website and news.com.au.)
Book Reviews
Harper's books succeed in part because she conveys how even now, geography can be fate. Heat and empty space in her work defeat modernity, defeat logic, technology and even love, throwing us back upon our irreducible selves. By the time she reveals the (brilliantly awful) back story about Nathan's banishment from the few human comforts of Balamara—the pub, for example—the reader feels frantic for their restoration. The final pages of The Lost Man are somewhat predictable, but Harper is skillful enough, a prickly, smart, effective storyteller, that it doesn't matter. She's often cynical, but always humane. Book by book, she's creating her own vivid and complex account of the outback, and its people who live where people don't live.
Charles Finch - New York Times Book Review
If you liked The Dry, you'll love it. The Lost Man is an even better book, gripping right to the end. This terrific piece of outback noir opens with the discovery of a body.… Harper… paints the menacing landscape brilliantly. The book's title could easily relate to several of the male characters. This engrossing novel will have you thinking long after you've turned the last page.
Melbourne Herald Sun (Aus)
Fabulously atmospheric, the book starts slowly and gradually picks up pace towards a jaw-dropping denouement.
Guardian (UK)
Her best yet; it's certainly one of the finest novels of any sort, not only within the genre, that I've read in many moons.… Harper adroitly blends the tension and brisk pace of a thriller with the psychological acuity and stylish prose of literary fiction.
Irish Independent
Engrossing…Storytelling at its finest.
Associated Press
Nothing about this novel is predictable. The characters are compelling, the plot is thrilling and the ending is so very satisfying. There’s something special about getting to the end of a book and figuring out the mystery. You’ll be left feeling content, a little shocked and desperate for more.
Marie Claire (Aus)
[A] crime masterpiece. The landscape and culture of this remote Australian territory are magnificently evoked as a story of family secrets unfolds. Rarely does a puzzle so complicated fit together perfectly—you’ll be shaking your head in amazement.
People
A nuanced but pulse-pounding thriller set in the heart of the Australian Outback, where two brothers find their sibling dead.
Entertainment Weekly
Harper’s sinewy prose and flinty characters compel, but the dreary story line may cause some readers to give up before the jaw-dropping denouement.
Publishers Weekly
[T]he Australian landscape looms large, and it's difficult to imagine the events in this novel playing out the same way anywhere else. Verdict: Even if readers guess why Cam died, they're likely to be kept guessing the how and the who until the end. —Stephanie Klose
Library Journal
The atmosphere is so thick you can taste the red-clay dust, and the folklore… adds an additional edge to an already dark and intense narrative. [A] surprising ending… reveals how far someone will go to preserve a life worth living in a place at once loathed and loved.
Booklist
★ [A] masterful narrative… in the middle of a desolate landscape… where the effects of long-term isolation are always a concern. The mystery… will leave readers reeling, and the final reveal is a heartbreaker. A twisty slow burner by an author at the top of her game.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use our GENERIC MYSTERY QUESTIONS to start a discussion for THE LOST MAN … then take off on your own:
GENERIC DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Mystery / Crime / Suspense Thrillers
1. Talk about the characters, both good and bad. Describe their personalities and motivations. Are they fully developed and emotionally complex? Or are they flat, one-dimensional heroes and villains?
2. What do you know...and when do you know it? At what point in the book do you begin to piece together what happened?
3. Good crime writers embed hidden clues in plain sight, slipping them in casually, almost in passing. Did you pick them out, or were you...clueless? Once you've finished the book, go back to locate the clues hidden in plain sight. How skillful was the author in burying them?
4. Good crime writers also tease us with red-herrings—false clues—to purposely lead readers astray? Does your author try to throw you off track? If so, were you tripped up?
5. Talk about the twists & turns—those surprising plot developments that throw everything you think you've figured out into disarray.
- Do they enhance the story, add complexity, and build suspense?
- Are they plausible or implausible?
- Do they feel forced and gratuitous—inserted merely to extend the story?
6. Does the author ratchet up the suspense? Did you find yourself anxious—quickly turning pages to learn what happened? A what point does the suspense start to build? Where does it climax...then perhaps start rising again?
7. A good ending is essential in any mystery or crime thriller: it should ease up on tension, answer questions, and tidy up loose ends. Does the ending accomplish those goals?
- Is the conclusion probable or believable?
- Is it organic, growing out of clues previously laid out by the author (see Question 3)?
- Or does the ending come out of the blue, feeling forced or tacked-on?
- Perhaps it's too predictable.
- Can you envision a different or better ending?
8. Are there certain passages in the book—ideas, descriptions, or dialogue—that you found interesting or revealing...or that somehow struck you? What lines, if any, made you stop and think?
9. Overall, does the book satisfy? Does it live up to the standards of a good crime story or suspense thriller? Why or why not?
(Generic Mystery Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Lost Memory of Skin
Russell Banks, 2011
HarperCollins
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061857638
Summary
Suspended in a strangely modern-day version of limbo, the young man at the center of Russell Banks’s uncompromising and morally complex new novel must create a life for himself in the wake of incarceration. Known in his new identity only as the Kid, and on probation after doing time for a liaison with an underage girl, he is shackled to a GPS monitoring device and forbidden to live within 2,500 feet of anywhere children might gather. With nowhere else to go, the Kid takes up residence under a south Florida causeway, in a makeshift encampment with other convicted sex offenders.
Barely beyond childhood himself, the Kid, despite his crime, is in many ways an innocent, trapped by impulses and foolish choices he himself struggles to comprehend. Enter the Professor, a man who has built his own life on secrets and lies. A university sociologist of enormous size and intellect, he finds in the Kid the perfect subject for his research on homelessness and recidivism among convicted sex offenders. The two men forge a tentative partnership, the Kid remaining wary of the Professor’s motives even as he accepts the counsel and financial assistance of the older man.
When the camp beneath the causeway is raided by the police, and later, when a hurricane all but destroys the settlement, the Professor tries to help the Kid in practical matters while trying to teach his young charge new ways of looking at, and understanding, what he has done. But when the Professor’s past resurfaces and threatens to destroy his carefully constructed world, the balance in the two men’s relationship shifts.
Suddenly, the Kid must reconsider everything he has come to believe, and choose what course of action to take when faced with a new kind of moral decision.
Long one of our most acute and insightful novelists, Russell Banks often examines the indistinct boundaries between our intentions and actions. A mature and masterful work of contemporary fiction from one of our most accomplished storytellers, Lost Memory of Skin unfolds in language both powerful and beautifully lyrical, show-casing Banks at his most compelling, his reckless sense of humor and intense empathy at full bore.
The perfect convergence of writer and subject, Lost Memory of Skin probes the zeitgeist of a troubled society where zero tolerance has erased any hope of subtlety and compassion—a society where isolating the offender has perhaps created a new kind of victim. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 28, 1940
• Where—Newton, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—University of North Carolina
• Awards—John Dos Passos Award for Fiction
• Currently—lives in upstate New York
Russell Banks was raised in a hardscrabble, working-class world that has profoundly shaped his writing. In Banks's compassionate, unlovely tales, people struggle mightily against economic hardship, family conflict, addictions, violence, and personal tragedy; yet even in the face of their difficulties, they often exhibit remarkable resilience and moral strength.
Although he began his literary career as a poet, Banks forayed into fiction in 1975 with a short story collection Searching for Survivors and his debut novel, Family Life. Several more critically acclaimed works followed, but his real breakthrough occurred with 1985's Continental Drift, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel that juxtaposes the startlingly different experiences of two families in America. In 1998, he earned another Pulitzer nomination for his historical novel Cloudsplitter, an ambitious re-creation of abolitionist John Brown.
Since the 1980s, Banks has lived in upstate New York—a region he (like fellow novelists William Kennedy and Richard Russo) has mined to great effect in several novels. Two of his most powerful stories, Affliction (1990) and The Sweet Hereafter (1991), have been adapted for feature films. He has also received numerous honors and literary awards, including the prestigious John Dos Passos Prize for fiction. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[A] major new work…destined to be a canonical novel of its time…it delivers another of Mr. Banks's wrenching, panoramic visions of American moral life…This book expresses the conviction that we live in perilous, creepy times. We toy recklessly with brand-new capacities for ruination. We bring the most human impulses to the least human means of expressing them, and we may not see the damage we do until it becomes irrevocable. Mr. Banks, whose great works resonate with such heart and soul, brings his full narrative powers to bear on illuminating this still largely unexplored new terrain.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
This is bleak stuff, with flashes of humor that land like sparks on dry grass, and also pretty fascinating. A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, Banks may be the most compassionate fiction writer working today, and the Kid is only his most recent lens into the souls of seemingly decent men who do terribly indecent things out of ignorance, thirst and desperation in a deeply uncaring world. Balancing impressively on a moral tightrope, Banks never absolves the Kid of his actions even as he sympathizes with him.
Helen Schulman - New York Times Book Review
[L]ike so much else Banks has written, this novel is ambitious and often compelling—a book that works with important ideas about the way we're reshaping our lives in the Internet age, while being reshaped ourselves, spiritually, sexually.
Sue Miller - Washington Post
Lost Memory of Skin...may be [Banks] boldest imaginative leap yet into the invisible margins of society...a haunting book, made so by the fraught, enigmatic relationship of the Professor and the Kid. The contradictions that seem to split the Kid—his obsession with sex but innocence of it, for instance—are never resolved. Mr. Banks in not an apologist, only an observer; he has brought the novelist's magnifying glass to bear on figures we otherwise try hard not to notice.
Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal
For his latest novel, the acclaimed author of Cloudsplitter and The Sweet Hereafter again takes inspiration from a sanctuary of sorts. "The Kid," a young sex offender, lives with other registered offenders (including a disgraced state senator) in a makeshift camp beneath a Florida causeway based on a real colony that was shut down in 2010. After a police raid, the Kid meets "the Professor," a pompous, rotund man claiming to be researching homelessness. He wants to study—and cure—the Kid in order to prove his theories about society. But just as the study commences, the Professor, claiming that his life is in danger because of past work as a government spy, turns the tables, paying the Kid to interview him instead. Bloated and remarkably repetitive, this is more a collection of ideas and emblems than a novel. Though the Kid remains mostly opaque, he's a sympathetic character, but the nature of his crime, once revealed, lets Banks off the hook and simplifies rather than complicates matters. Banks continually refers to the Professor's weight and mental superiority, the latter a contrivance allowing for long rhetorical passages into the nature of man, sexual obsession, pornography, truth, and commerce that come as no surprise. Most frustrating is Banks's almost pathological restating of his characters' traits and motives, resulting in a highly frustrating novel in desperate need of an editor.
Publishers Weekly
From his makeshift tent in the shantytown under the causeway, the Kid can see the sun rise over the city of Calusa and feel the Atlantic breeze riffling the royal palm fronds. But the dichotomy between paradise and the squalor of the encampment is not lost on him. The only area within the city limits that is more than 2500 feet from a school, park, or library, the causeway bridge shelters homeless sex offenders on probation with nowhere else to go. Living in anonymity, the damaged group runs the gamut from a politician with a penchant for little girls to this lonely, asocial boy, whose only sexual relationship took place in an Internet chat room. When the Professor arrives to interview the Kid for a sociological study, the Kid wants to trust the man, and we hope he'll be saved through human interaction. But the Professor has his own demons. Verdict: Multiaward winner Banks (Affliction) has written a disturbing contemporary novel that feels biblical in its examination of good and evil, penance and salvation, while issuing a cri de coeur for penal reform. The graphic language may be off-putting for some but necessarily advances the theme of illusion vs. reality in the digital world. —Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Myers, FL
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Banks is in top form in his seventeenth work of fiction, a cyclonic novel of arresting observations, muscular beauty, and disquieting concerns… a commanding, intrepidly inquisitive, magnificently compassionate, and darkly funny novel of private and societal illusions, maladies, and truths.
Booklist
Banks (The Reserve,2008, etc.) once again explores the plight of the dispossessed, taking a big risk this time by making his protagonist a convicted sex offender. He hedges his bets slightly: The Kid is a 22-year-old who got jailed for showing up at a 14-year-old girl's house,,,, Though there's plenty of plot, including a hurricane and a dead body fished out of a canal, the slow growth of the Kid's self-knowledge and his empathy for others is the real story, offering the only ray of hope in an otherwise bleak consideration of a broken society and the damaged people it breeds. Intelligent, passionate and powerful, but very stark indeed.
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 Lost Memory of Skin (Caution: PLOT SPOILERS ahead):
1. What do you make of the Kid? Do you find him sympathetic or unlikable? What is the nature of his sex offense? Does the punishment fit the crime?
2. What role did the Kid's mother play in his life and developing sex addiction? To what degree is she responsible or not responsible?
3. What is the symbolic significance of the Adam and Eve story? How does the story of Eden and the serpent tie into the Kid's sojourn in the Panzecola Swamp?
4. How do you feel about the Professor? In what ways is he similar to the Kid (starting with the fact that their last names are the same)? Is it difficult for you to get beyond his size to find him sympathetic—does his weight affect how you view him? Why might the author have chosen to create the Professor as an obese character?
5. Gloria, the Professor's wife, suggests that sex offenders are "just programmed to do what they do. You know, hardwired." The Professor disagrees, responding:
If, as it appears, the proportion of the male population who commit these acts has increased exponentially in recent years...then there's something in the wider culture itself that has changed..., and these men are like the canary in the mine shaft.... [It's] as if their social and ethical immune systems, the controls over their behavior, have been somehow damaged or compromised (p.125-hardcover).
Later, we learn that the Professor intends to cure the Kid of his pedophilia....
He intends to cure the Kid by changing his social circumstances. By giving him power. Autonomy. He believes that one's sexual identity is shaped by one's self-perceived social identity, that pedophilia...is about not sex, but power...about one's personal perception of one's power (p. 159-hardcover).
—Who do you think is correct? Is the Professor correct in his belief that pedophilia is a societal condition and curable? Or is Gloria correct in that pedophilia is hardwired into the brain and incurable?
6. What is the ongoing significance of Captain Kydd's treasure map? What is the Professor's purpose in telling the Kid about the buried treasure...and why does he provide him with a phony map?
7. Why do you think the Professor estranged from his parents? Why does he turn away at the last moment when he has driven all night to see them?
8. What symbolic role does weather play in this novel, especially the hurricane?
9. Do you believe the Professor's story? Do you believe he is murdered...or that he commits suicide? Does it matter? Why do you think the author has left his death an open question?
10 . The Writer tells the Kid whether something is true, or not, doesn't matter:
What you believe matters, however. It's all anyone has to act on. And since what you do is who you are, your actions define you. If you don't believe something is true simply because you can't logically prove what's true, you won't do anything. You won't be anything (p. 398-hardcover).
a) Do you agree with the Writer's philosophy? Or are you skeptical—like the Kid, who says, "If everything's a lie, then nothing's true."
b) Where do you think Russell Banks comes down on the question? In other words, does the weight of the novel suggest that the Writer or the Kid is correct?
11. Why does the Kid shy away from, even reject, Dolores's maternal kindness?
12. What role do pets play in this novel? Why is the Kid so devoted to them? Is there a difference between his attachment to Iggy at the beginning...and Annie and Einstein later on?
13. What is the significance of the book's title?
14. Why are the three main characters referred to as the Kid, the Professor, the Writer—their names aren't used, although the secondary characters are named.
15. Why does the Kid return to the Causeway at the end? And why does he decide to move his tepee out of the light and closer to the overhang of the Causeway?
16. The kid makes a distinction between shame and guilt. He comes to the conclusion that he is guilty but that he need not feel shame. Talk about his distinction. Do you agree with his assessment?
17. Should the Kid have returned the money to the Professor's wife or not? Did learning, later, that the Professor left the family well provided for affect your answer?
18. What revelation does the Kid undergo at the end of the novel. What future do you see for him?
19. Some reviewers claim that Banks hedges the very issue he wants to explore in his book by not making his protagonist a hardcore sex offender—that, because the Kid has engaged in a lighter offense, the author hasn't truely grappled with the hard issue of habitual sex offenders. What do you think?
20. Has your understanding, or your opinion, of sex offenders changed after reading Lost Memory of Skin? Is their position as society's untouchables fair or unfair, deserved or undeserved?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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The Lost Night
Andrea Bartz, 2019
Crown/Archetype
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525574712
Summary
What really happened the night Edie died? Years later, her best friend Lindsay will learn how unprepared she is for the truth.
In 2009, Edie had New York’s social world in her thrall.
Mercurial and beguiling, she was the shining star of a group of recent graduates living in a Brooklyn loft and treating New York like their playground.
When Edie’s body was found near a suicide note at the end of a long, drunken night, no one could believe it. Grief, shock, and resentment scattered the group and brought the era to an abrupt end.
A decade later, Lindsay has come a long way from the drug-addled world of Calhoun Lofts. She has devoted best friends, a cozy apartment, and a thriving career as a magazine’s head fact-checker.
But when a chance reunion leads Lindsay to discover an unsettling video from that hazy night, she starts to wonder if Edie was actually murdered—and, worse, if she herself was involved.
As she rifles through those months in 2009—combing through case files, old technology, and her fractured memories—Lindsay is forced to confront the demons of her own violent history to bring the truth to light. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Andrea Bartz is a Brooklyn-based journalist and coauthor of the blog-turned-book Stuff Hipsters Hate, which The New Yorker called "depressingly astute."
Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Marie Claire, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Women's Health, Martha Stewart Living, Redbook, Elle, and many other outlets, and she's held editorial positions at Glamour, Psychology Today, and Self, among others. (From the publisher .)
Book Reviews
[A]ccomplished debut…. As the story hurtles toward its dramatic conclusion, Lindsay realizes she can’t trust anyone, especially not herself. Fans of psychological thrillers will want to see more from this talented newcomer.
Publishers Weekly
★ [A] captivating psychological suspense novel full of moving pieces and is expertly paced. The tension is unmatched as the pieces fall into place, but not without the protagonist second-guessing herself.… [A] whip-smart and mysterious read.
Library Journal
★ A riveting debut with, yes, an echo of The Girl on the Train.
Booklist
[A]s much a portrait of post-recession Brooklyn hipster ennui as it is a thriller… also a reminder of how insufferable hipsters could be.… Readers nostalgic for… Molly-fueled ragers should enjoy the world Bartz creates here; those looking for a terse thriller might turn elsewhere
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Lindsay begins investigating Edie’s death after her catch-up dinner with Sarah. Would you have done the same or let sleeping dogs lie? What do you make of Lindsay’s compulsion to dig into Edie’s old case after so much time had gone by?
2. What made Edie so enchanting to Lindsay and the other residents at Calhoun Lofts?
3. How do Lindsay’s scattered memories contribute to the story? Did you feel she was a reliable narrator?
4. Which of the characters did you feel most connected to?
5. Do you think Edie was a good friend?
6. Why do you think Lindsay isolated herself from the rest of the group after Edie’s death?
7. Calhoun Lofts becomes a character in the story as much as any of the other people. Describe the effect the book’s setting had on you.
8. What do you make of Lindsay’s friendship with Tessa?
9. When Lindsay reveals what really happened during the Warsaw Incident, we learn about one of her most shameful secrets. Did it change how you thought of her? Why?
10. As the narrator, Lindsay is constantly picking apart and commenting on the social dynamics at play around her—trying to understand people’s motivations and intentions. Did you find that commentary relatable? What did it tell you about her character?
11. As Lindsay compares everyone’s recollections of what happened in 2009, she realizes there are many different interpretations of the same reality. Have you ever remembered a shared experience very differently from someone else? What happened?
12. Were you surprised by the ending? What did you think had actually happened to Edie?
13. Throughout the narrative, technology serves as both a memory aid and a marker for how different things are today vs. ten years ago. How do you use technology to document your life? How would you feel if, ten years from now, you could no longer access the photos and posts you took today?
14. The Lost Night is set in the present but centers on Lindsay’s life as a twentysomething, when she was out on her own with a new set of friends for the first time. How does her experience compare to that period in your life?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Lost Roses
Martha Hall Kelly, 2019
Random House
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781524796372
Summary
The million-copy bestseller Lilac Girls introduced the real-life heroine Caroline Ferriday. Now Lost Roses, set a generation earlier and also inspired by true events, features Caroline’s mother, Eliza, and follows three equally indomitable women from St. Petersburg to Paris under the shadow of World War I.
It is 1914, and the world has been on the brink of war so often, many New Yorkers treat the subject with only passing interest.
Eliza Ferriday is thrilled to be traveling to St. Petersburg with Sofya Streshnayva, a cousin of the Romanovs. The two met years ago one summer in Paris and became close confidantes.
Now Eliza embarks on the trip of a lifetime, home with Sofya to see the splendors of Russia: the church with the interior covered in jeweled mosaics, the Rembrandts at the tsar’s Winter Palace, the famous ballet.
But when Austria declares war on Serbia and Russia’s imperial dynasty begins to fall, Eliza escapes back to America, while Sofya and her family flee to their country estate. In need of domestic help, they hire the local fortune-teller’s daughter, Varinka, unknowingly bringing intense danger into their household.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Eliza is doing her part to help the White Russian families find safety as they escape the revolution. But when Sofya’s letters suddenly stop coming, she fears the worst for her best friend.
From the turbulent streets of St. Petersburg and aristocratic countryside estates to the avenues of Paris where a society of fallen Russian emigres live to the mansions of Long Island, the lives of Eliza, Sofya, and Varinka will intersect in profound ways.
In her newest powerful tale told through female-driven perspectives, Martha Hall Kelly celebrates the unbreakable bonds of women’s friendship, especially during the darkest days of history. (From the publisher.)
Visit the author's website for background on Lost Roses.
Author Bio
Martha Hall Kelly is a native New Englander who splits her time between Atlanta, Georgia; New York City; and Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. She spent a number of years in the advertising world as a copy writer before turning to writing historical fiction. Lilac Girls, her bestselling debut was published in 2016, which was followed in 2019 with that novel's prequel, Lost Roses.
She has three (mostly grown) children. (Adapted from Atlanta History Center.)
Book Reviews
Inspired by true events, just like its predecessor, and just as well-researched, Lost Roses is a remarkable story and another testament to female strength. This sweeping epic will thrill and delight fans of Lilac Girls and readers of historical fiction alike.
Popsugar
[L]ively, well-researched…. Some story lines strain credibility (coincidences and melodramatic cliffhangers abound)…. Nevertheless, Kelly memorably portrays three indomitable women who triumph over hardships and successfully brings a complex and turbulent time in history to life.
Publishers Weekly
Sofya has by far the most compelling story line, and some readers may get restless when reading about Eliza's relatively low-stakes activities.… Overall, this novel builds to an emotionally satisfying conclusion, and readers who loved Lilac Girls will likely be keen to learn more about the Ferridays. —Mara Bandy Fass, Champaign P.L., IL
Library Journal
(Starred review) Epic.… [Martha Hall] Kelly’s gift is bringing to life and to light the untold stories of women and families far away from the war front yet deeply affected by the decisions of leaders and the efforts of fighters. Fans of historical fiction… will want to clear their calendars when Lost Roses comes out.
Booklist
Though the writing is rich and vivid with detail about the period, the storytelling is quite a bit slower than in Kelly’s captivating debut, and both the plot and relationship development feel secondary to the historical scene-setting. A nuanced tale that speaks to the strength of women.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. You meet three very different heroines in Lost Roses: Eliza, Sofya, and Varinka. Who did you identify with most and why?
2. Mother-daughter relationships play a vital role in Lost Roses. How did these relationships impact Eliza, Sofya, and Varinka’s lives? Compare Eliza’s mother to Varinka’s. Were they both good mothers? In what ways? How did Sofya’s stepmother, Agnessa, affect Sofya and Luba emotionally? How did their mother’s legacy play a continuing role in their lives?
3. Caroline Ferriday, the protagonist of Lilac Girls, is a teenager in Lost Roses. Eliza’s real-life relationship with her daughter Caroline evolves over the course of the book. What did you like/not like about their portrayal?
4. Luba, whose name symbolizes love, is a key character in Lost Roses. Did you feel she was an important character in the story? What do you think of the author’s decision to open and close the novel with Luba’s voice?
5. Sofya had to make some impossible choices in the novel—choosing to leave her family, and then her child, in order to try to save them. How did you feel about her decisions? Did you agree with them? Why or why not?
6. Varinka and Taras have a complicated relationship. Did you find it compelling? Do you believe she loved Max? Why or why not? Were you shocked by the twist in her ending?
7. How did you feel when Eliza had a second chance to experience love with Merrill? Did you believe in their friendship and then love affair?
8. Were you satisfied with Sofya and Cook’s reunion? How do you imagine their relationship evolved after the novel ended?
9. Is there a particular scene in Lost Roses that has stayed with you? What will you remember most about this novel?
10. Did you learn new things about this period in history? Do you plan to read more—fiction or nonfiction—about the Russian Revolution?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott
Kelly O'Connor McNees, 2010
Penguin Group USA
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780399156526
Summary
In her debut novel, The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott, Kelly O’Connor McNees deftly mixes fact and fiction as she imagines a summer lost to history, carefully purged from Louisa’s letters and journals, a summer that would change the course of Louisa’s writing career—and inspire the story of love and heartbreak between Jo and Laurie, Jo’s kindred spirit.
In the summer of 1855, Walt Whitman’s controversial Leaves of Grass has just been released, and the notion of making a living as a writer is still a far-off dream for Louisa. She is twenty-two years old, vivacious, and bursting with a desire to be free of her family and societal constraints so she can do what she loves the most—write. The Alcott family, destitute as usual, moves to a generous uncle’s empty house in Walpole, New Hampshire, for the summer. Here, a striking but pensive Louisa meets the fictional Joseph Singer. Louisa is initially unimpressed by Joseph’s charms. But just as she begins to open her heart, she discovers that Joseph may not be free to give his away. Their newfound love carries a steep price, and Louisa fears she may pay with the independence she has fought so hard to protect.
Because Little Women borrows stories from Louisa’s own childhood, the real-life Alcott sisters depicted in The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott will feel like familiar old friends. But readers will learn how the Alcotts’ real life differed from the fictional March family. While Transcendentalist friends like Thoreau and Emerson were fixtures of Louisa’s youth, Bronson Alcott’s philosophical pursuits left the family finances in shambles. Unlike the wise and placid “Marmee,” Louisa’s mother, Abba, was often depressed and overwhelmed by poverty and disappointment.
The historical facts throughout Kelly O’Connor McNees’s debut will be a delicacy to Alcott fans, but first and foremost, The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott is a universal story of love and how it changes us in ways we could never imagine. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Kelly O'Connor McNees is a former editorial assistant and English teacher. Originally from Michigan, she now resides with her husband in Chicago, Illinois, USA. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
McNees gets the period details just right: the crinolines and carriages; the spare, aesthetic plainness of 19th-century New England. And although the love affair with Joseph is invented, she remains faithful to the broad outlines of Alcott's biography. In fact, The Lost Summer is the kind of romantic tale to which Alcott herself was partial, one in which love is important but not a solution to life's difficulties. Devotees of Little Women will flock to this story with pleasure.
Carrie Brown - Washington Post
McNees lightly imagines the life of Louisa May Alcott, whose Little Women has enjoyed generations-long success. The story begins with a 20-year-old Louisa unhappily moving with her family from Boston to Walpole, N.H., where her Transcendentalist philosopher father pursues a life sans material pleasure. Louisa, meanwhile, plans on saving enough money to return to Boston and pursue a career as a writer. Then she meets the handsome and charming Joseph Singer, who stirs up strong emotions in Louisa. Not wanting to admit that she is attracted to him, Louisa responds to Joseph with defensiveness and anger until, of course, she can no longer deny her feelings and becomes torn between her desires and her dreams. While certainly charming, the simply told, straightforward narrative reads like Young Adult fiction. It'll do the trick as a pleasant diversion for readers with fond memories of Alcott's work, but the lack of gravity prevents it from becoming anything greater.
Publishers Weekly
[T]he infusion of issue-driven material involving women’s rights lends a somewhat didactic air to a work that is, after all, romantic fiction. To her credit, McNees does a good job of re-creating the nineteenth-century milieu, and her readers will doubtless be inspired to read more—about and by—Alcott. Little Women, anyone? —Michael Cart
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. Have you ever read a poem or book that profoundly challenged or changed your worldview? How might the events of the novel have differed if Walt Whitman had not published Leaves of Grass in the summer of 1855?
2. What is Louisa’s relationship like with each of her sisters? Do any of these relationships change throughout the novel? If so, how? Do you think Louisa’s identity was defined by her sisters?
3. Abba says that men and women experience love differently: “For a man, love is just a season. For a woman it is the whole of the year.” Is that true in The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott? Is it true in your own personal experience?
4. Bronson Alcott was a truly unusual father and man. What is your impression of him? How do you think he affected his daughters, and did he affect each one differently?
5. Describe Bronson and Abba’s marriage. Do you think it influenced Louisa’s view of matrimony? If so, in what way?
6. Was Louisa right not to go with Joseph Singer to New York? Why or why not? What would you have done?
7. Why was Louisa so protective of her independence? Considering the greater opportunities available to women now, but also the frenetic pace of their lives and, in some ways, more complex obligations, do you think she would be as protective of her independence if she lived today?
8. At one point Abba tells Louisa, “We must never give if we are hoping for something in return.” Why does she say that? Do you think what she says is true?
9. At the end of the novel we learn that Louisa is taking care of her niece Lulu. What kind of parent do you think Louisa would be, and why?
10. Louisa tells Joseph, “My life is no longer my own.” And yet she chose to base Little Women, her most successful novel, on herself and her sisters. If writers use their own experiences as inspiration, are they inviting fans to pry into their personal lives? Or should their work be taken at face value?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Lost Symbol
Dan Brown, 2009
Knopf Doubleday
528 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400079148
Summary
In this stunning follow-up to the global phenomenon The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown demonstrates once again why he is the world's most popular thriller writer. The Lost Symbol is a masterstroke of storytelling—a deadly race through a real-world labyrinth of codes, secrets, and unseen truths, all under the watchful eye of Brown's most terrifying villain to date. Set within the hidden chambers, tunnels, and temples of Washington, D.C., The Lost Symbol accelerates through a startling landscape toward an unthinkable finale.
As the story opens, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is summoned unexpectedly to deliver an evening lecture in the U.S. Capitol Building. Within minutes of his arrival, however, the night takes a bizarre turn. A disturbing object—artfully encoded with five symbols—is discovered in the Capitol Building. Langdon recognizes the object as an ancient invitation ... one meant to usher its recipient into a long-lost world of esoteric wisdom.
When Langdon's beloved mentor, Peter Solomon—a prominent Mason and philanthropist —is brutally kidnapped, Langdon realizes his only hope of saving Peter is to accept this mystical invitation and follow wherever it leads him. Langdon is instantly plunged into a clandestine world of Masonic secrets, hidden history, and never-before-seen locations—all of which seem to be dragging him toward a single, inconceivable truth.
As the world discovered in The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons, Dan Brown's novels are brilliant tapestries of veiled histories, arcane symbols, and enigmatic codes. In this new novel, he again challenges readers with an intelligent, lightning-paced story that offers surprises at every turn. The Lost Symbol is exactly what Brown's fans have been waiting for his most thrilling novel yet. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 22, 1964
• Where—Exeter, New Hampshire
• Education—B.A., Amherst College; University
of Seville, Spain
• Currently—lives in New England
Novelist Dan Brown may not have invented the literary thriller, but his groundbreaking tour de force The Da Vinci Code—with its irresistible mix of religion, history, art, and science—is the gold standard for a flourishing genre.
Born in Exeter, New Hampshire in 1964, Brown attended Phillips Exeter Academy (where his father taught), and graduated from Amherst with a double major in Spanish and English. After college he supported himself through teaching and enjoyed moderate success as a musician and songwriter.
Brown credits Sidney Sheldon with jump-starting his literary career. Up until 1994, his reading tastes were focused sharply on the classics. Then, on vacation in Tahiti, he stumbled on a paperback copy of Sheldon's novel The Doomsday Conspiracy. By the time he finished the book, he had decided he could do as well. There and then, he determined to try his hand at writing. His first attempt was a pseudonymously written self-help book for women co-written with his future wife Blythe Newlon. Then, in 1998, he published his first novel, Digital Fortress—followed in swift succession by Angels and Demons, Deception Point, The Lost Symbol, and most recently Inferno.
Then, in 2003, Brown hit the jackpot with his fourth novel, a compulsively readable thriller about a Harvard symbiologist who stumbles on an ancient conspiracy in the wake of a shocking murder in the Louvre. Combining elements from the fields of art, science, and religion, The Da Vinci Code became the biggest bestseller in publishing history, inspiring a big-budget movie adaptation and fueling interest in Brown's back list.
In addition, The Da Vinci Code became the subject of raging controversy, inspiring a spate of books by scholars and theologians who disputed several of the book's claims and accused Brown of distorting and misrepresenting religious history. The author, whose views on the subject are stated clearly on his website, remains unperturbed by the debate, proclaiming that all dialogue, even the most contentious, is powerful, positive, and healthy.
More
Brown revealed the inspiration for his labyrinthine thriller during a writer's address in Concord, New Hampshire. "I was studying art history at the University of Seville (in Spain), and one morning our professor started class in a most unusual way. He showed us a slide of Da Vinci's famous painting "The Last Supper"... I had seen the painting many times, yet somehow I had never seen the strange anomalies that the professor began pointing out: a hand clutching a dagger, a disciple making a threatening gesture across the neck of another... and much to my surprise, a very obvious omission, the apparent absence on the table of the cup of Christ... The one physical object that in many ways defines that moment in history, Leonardo Da Vinci chose to omit." According to Brown, this reintroduction to an ancient masterpiece was merely "the tip of the ice burg." What followed was an in-depth explanation of clues apparent in Da Vinci's painting and his association with the Priory of Sion that set Brown on a path toward bringing The Da Vinci Code into existence.
If only all writers could enjoy this kind of success: in early 2004, all four of Brown's novels were on the New York Times Bestseller List in a single week!
Extras
From a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview:
• If I'm not at my desk by 4:00 a.m., I feel like I'm missing my most productive hours. In addition to starting early, I keep an antique hourglass on my desk and every hour break briefly to do push-ups, sit-ups, and some quick stretches. I find this helps keep the blood—and ideas—flowing.
• I'm also a big fan of gravity boots. Hanging upside down seems to help me solve plot challenges by shifting my entire perspective.
• When asked what book most influenced his career as a writer, here is his response:
Until I graduated from college, I had read almost no modern commercial fiction at all (having focused primarily on the "classics" in school). In 1994, while vacationing in Tahiti, I found an old copy of Sydney Sheldon's Doomsday Conspiracy on the beach. I read the first page...and then the next...and then the next. Several hours later, I finished the book and thought, Hey, I can do that. Upon my return, I began work on my first novel—Digital Fortress—which was published in 1996.
(Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Within this book's hermetically sealed universe, characters' motivations don't really have to make sense; they just have to generate the nonstop momentum that makes The Lost Symbol impossible to put down.... [The novel] manages to take a twisting, turning route through many such aspects of the occult even as it heads for a final secret that is surprising for a strange reason: It's unsurprising. It also amounts to an affirmation of faith. In the end it is Mr. Brown's sweet optimism, even more than Langdon's sleuthing and explicating, that may amaze his readers most.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
As a thriller, The Lost Symbol is exciting, although readers of The Da Vinci Code will notice that some of the same stock characters and creaky plot devices pop up.
Wall Street Journal
Writers envious of Brown's sales (who wouldn't be?) have devoted much ink to his deficiencies as a stylist. These are still in place.... So is Brown's habit of turning characters into docents. But so, too, is his knack for packing huge amounts of information...into an ever-accelerating narrative. Call it Brownian motion: a comet-tail ride of short paragraphs, short chapters, beautifully spaced reveals and, in the case of The Lost Symbol, a socko unveiling of the killer's true identity
Louis Bayard - Washington Post
The wait is over. The Lost Symbol is here—and you don't have to be a Freemason to enjoy it.... Thrilling and entertaining. Like the experience on a roller coaster.
Los Angeles Times
After scores of Da Vinci Code knockoffs, spinoffs, copies and caricatures, Brown has had the stroke of brilliance to set his breakneck new thriller not in some far-off exotic locale, but right here in our own backyard. Everyone off the bus, and welcome to a Washington, D.C., they never told you about on your school trip when you were a kid, a place steeped in Masonic history that, once revealed, points to a dark, ancient conspiracy that threatens not only America but the world itself. Returning hero Robert Langdon comes to Washington to give a lecture at the behest of his old mentor, Peter Solomon. When he arrives at the U.S. Capitol for his lecture, he finds, instead of an audience, Peter's severed hand mounted on a wooden base, fingers pointing skyward to the Rotunda ceiling fresco of George Washington dressed in white robes, ascending to heaven. Langdon teases out a plethora of clues from the tattooed hand that point toward a secret portal through which an intrepid seeker will find the wisdom known as the Ancient Mysteries, or the lost wisdom of the ages. A villain known as Mal'akh, a steroid-swollen, fantastically tattooed, muscle-bodied madman, wants to locate the wisdom so he can rule the world. Mal'akh has captured Peter and promises to kill him if Langdon doesn't agree to help find the portal. Joining Langdon in his search is Peter's younger sister, Kathleen, who has been conducting experiments in a secret museum. This is just the kickoff for a deadly chase that careens back and forth, across, above and below the nation's capital, darting from revelation to revelation, pausing only to explain some piece of wondrous, historical esoterica. Jealous thriller writerswill despair, doubters and nay-sayers will be proved wrong, and readers will rejoice: Dan Brown has done it again.
Publishers Weekly
Discussion Questions
1. How familiar were you with Freemasonry before reading the novel? How did your impressions of the organization shift throughout the book, from the chilling prologue to Peter Solomon's philosophical comments near the end?
2. How do Peter Solomon's students (including Robert) reconcile their admiration for him with the knowledge that he is a Mason? Did it surprise you to learn about well-known American historical figures who were Masons and to read about scientists who were intrigued by mysticism and other occult belief systems?
3. Discuss the novel's grand theme of architecture. How did The Lost Symbol change the way you think about the way buildings are designed and the intention of their architects (creators)? What most surprised you about the tributes to the past—and visions of the future—that are captured in the landmarks of Washington, D.C.?
4. Mal'akh considers the polarity of angels and demons noting that "the guardian angel who conquered your enemy in battle was perceived by your enemy as a demon destroyer." What does this indicate about Mal'akh's perception of himself in the world? How can his evil nature be explained? Why is he only able to consider his own suffering, while relishing the suffering of others?
5. How did you react to Katherine Solomon's work in Noetic Science? What motivates her to investigate the tangible aspects of the human soul (attempting to weigh it, even)? How would it change the world if there were more tangible evidence of the spiritual world? How is Katherine Solomon's perception of science different from Robert Langdon's?
6. At the heart of the novel is a quest to unlock wisdom, and the need to keep it "locked" because it can be used for destructive purposes. Do you believe that freedom of knowledge (Wikipedia, a world wide web) is a blessing or a curse?
7. The novel's epigraph, from Manly Hall's The Secret Teachings of All Ages, encourages readers to become aware of the meaning of the world. What mysteries about the world, and life, do you think are the most important ones to explore?
8. How did Mal'akh amass enough power to turn his personal plot into a national security threat? What does his rise to power indicate about the potential of mind over body and a human being's ability to play a variety of roles for unsuspecting audiences?
9. The final chapter raises intriguing questions about the possibility of a multi-faceted God and the potential to find God in all of humanity. Can there be a universal definition of enlightenment?
10. While interpreting the Masonic Pyramid's final inscription, Robert Langdon tries to bring order out of chaos by interpreting each symbol as a metaphor. Peter Solomon instructs him to be literal and accept the inscription as a true map. What does this exchange say about the best way to interpret all sacred messages?
11. What truths do Katherine Solomon and Robert Langdon experience in the epilogue, at sunrise, atop America's ultimate symbol? From your perspective, what does the Capitol symbolize?
12. What does The Lost Symbol indicate about the power of the Word—both ancient texts and bestselling twenty-first-century novels?
13. What common thread runs through this and each of Dan Brown's previous works? What makes The Lost Symbol unique? How has Robert Langdon's perspective changed from Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Lost Wife
Alyson Richman, 2011
Penguin Group USA
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780425244135
Summary
A rapturous new novel of first love in a time of war-from the celebrated author of The Last Van Gogh.
In pre-war Prague, the dreams of two young lovers are shattered when they are separated by the Nazi invasion. Then, decades later, thousands of miles away in New York, there's an inescapable glance of recognition between two strangers.
Providence is giving Lenka and Josef one more chance. From the glamorous ease of life in Prague before the Occupation, to the horrors of Nazi Europe, The Lost Wife explores the power of first love, the resilience of the human spirit—and the strength of memory. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 19, 1972
• Raised—on Long Island, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Wellsley College
• Currently—lives on Long Island, New York
Alyson Richman is the author of The Mask Carver's Son, Swedish Tango, and The Last Van Gogh. She lives in Long Island, New York, with her husband and two children. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Star-crossed lovers are separated during WWII in Richman's heart-wrenching fourth novel. Josef and Lenka meet as students in Prague in 1936 and fall instantly in love. Three years later, with Nazis crossing the border, they rush to marry, but circumstances then force them apart. Lenka remains in Europe, and Josef flees to America. For 61 years, each believes the other dead until they meet by chance at the wedding of their grandchildren, leading them to reflect on the past and the separate lives they've led: Josef ended up in New York, becoming a successful obstetrician because he was "tired of being haunted by death." Lenka wasn't so lucky. She's sent to a work camp, where her artistic talents connect her to "an underground network of painters illustrating the atrocities" of the Jewish ghettos. And then she's sent to, and survives, Auschwitz. Richman (The Last Van Gogh) once again finds inspiration in art, adding evocative details to a swiftly moving and emotionally charged plot. Richman's incremental descent into the horrors of the Holocaust lends enormous power to Lenka's experience and makes her reunion with Josef all the more poignant. Though the framing device of the decades-long separation can be cloying, this is a genuinely moving portrait.
Publishers Weekly
Discussion Questions
1. At its core, The Lost Wife is the love story between Lenka and Josef. Discuss the deep feelings that run between the two. How do you think that the love they shared managed to survive the long years of separation? Do you think you’d recognize a loved one after being apart for so long? In what ways do you think the love they shared helped them to survive the atrocities of the war?
2. Art and color maintain a great significance throughout the course of the novel—the green of Josef’s eyes, the red of the strawberries growing near his family’s country house, and then later, the drab browns and grays of the Terezin and Auschwitz. Discuss how the author’s description of color affected your perception of the novel.
3, Love is a theme throughout the course of The Lost Wife—not just the love between Lenka and Josef, but also the love between the families, the love shared between Lenka’s mother and Lucie, and even the love that develops between those kept at Terezin. Discuss the significance of that feeling as it is laid out in the book.
4, In the author’s note, Richman reveals that several of the characters that appear in the book actually existed. Did this change your perception of the novel after you read it?
5, Despite being overseas in America, Josef can never seem to let go of the memory of his wife. In what ways did his memories of Lenka serve as his own personal jail? What did you think of the relationship between Amalia and Josef? Considering they each were haunted by the death of their families, was it a relationship that worked for them or was it a relationship purely of sorrow? How does it contrast with Lenka and Carl’s marriage?
6. Dina is one of the characters that we later learn was based on an actual person. Discuss her significance in Lenka’s life, from when she first meets her on the streets of Prague, to when they reconnect at Auschwitz. How does Dina’s spirit help Lenka get through the trials of Auschwitz?
7. Discuss the underground painters’ movement at Terezin. Why do you think the men were so unwilling to allow Lenka to help at first? Was it merely because she was a woman, or do you think they had other reasons for wanting to protect her? In what ways did her taking part in the movement help shape the course of the rest of the novel?
8. In their own small way, Lenka and her mother attempted to maintain a sense of normalcy for the children at Terezin with their art classes and pilfered paints. What other instances of ‘normal’ life did you see at Terezin, and later Auschwitz? In what ways do you think that these efforts to maintain happiness even during hardship inform the power of the human spirit? How did you react to the children’s creation of the opera Brundibar? Like Brundibar, Schacter’s Requiem is also an act of defiance against the Nazis. Do you think such an act was worth the punishment of death?
9. What did you think of Lenka’s deep need to keep her family together despite all odds? In what ways do you think the course of her and Marta’s lives may have been altered had they opted to remain at Terezin, instead of following their parents to Auschwitz?
10. A lot of the history of the plight of Jews during World War II in Europe, and particularly the role of artists during the war, played a role throughout The Lost Wife. How did the research affect your reading of the novel? Did you learn new things about World War II and what happened to Jewish families? Were you inspired, after learning that some of the characters were real, to do any additional reading of your own?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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The Lotus Eaters
Tatjana Soli, 2010
St. Martin's Press
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312674441
Summary
Winner, 2010 James Tait Black Prize
A unique and sweeping debut novel of an American female combat photographer in the Vietnam War, as she captures the wrenching chaos and finds herself torn between the love of two men.
On a stifling day in 1975, the North Vietnamese army is poised to roll into Saigon. As the fall of the city begins, two lovers make their way through the streets to escape to a new life. Helen Adams, an American photojournalist, must take leave of a war she is addicted to and a devastated country she has come to love. Linh, the Vietnamese man who loves her, must grapple with his own conflicted loyalties of heart and homeland.
As they race to leave, they play out a drama of devotion and betrayal that spins them back through twelve war-torn years, beginning in the splendor of Angkor Wat, with their mentor, larger-than-life war correspondent Sam Darrow, once Helen's infuriating love and fiercest competitor, and Linh's secret keeper, boss and truest friend.
Tatjana Soli paints a searing portrait of an American woman’s struggle and triumph in Vietnam, a stirring canvas contrasting the wrenching horror of war and the treacherous narcotic of obsession with the redemptive power of love. Readers will be transfixed by this stunning novel of passion, duty and ambition among the ruins of war. (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
[Q]uietly mesmerizing…Ms. Soli has done prodigious research about the Vietnam War, particularly about the role of female war photographers, and so is able to imbue an otherwise deeply romantic book with a strong sense of history.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Splendid…Helen's restlessness and grappling, her realization that "a woman sees war differently," provide a new and fascinating perspective on Vietnam. Vivid battle scenes, sensual romantic entanglements and elegant writing add to the pleasures of The Lotus Eaters.
Danielle Trussoni - New York Times Book Review
Though the novel explores war primarily from the journalists' viewpoint, the secondary characters are generously drawn. In Soli's hands, edgy, frightened soldiers and hardened commanders rise above stock characters. But Helen is at the heart of this story as she, like many journalists, pays a dear personal price for covering violence.
Marsha Hamilton - Washington Post
If it's possible to judge a novel by its first few lines, then The Lotus Eaters Tatjana Soli's fiction debut, shows great promise right from the start! The author explores Helen's psyche with startling clarity, and portrays the chaotic war raging around her with great attention to seemingly minor details. The real heartbreak in The Lotus Eaters is found in subtle, unexpected moments.
Boston Globe
This suspenseful, eloquent, sprawling novel illustrates the violence of the Vietnam War as witnessed by three interconnected photographers. Helen Adams, the first woman combat photographer sent to cover the Vietnam war, navigates the boys' club of war photographers, pushing her way onto military missions. Soon after her arrival in Saigon, she falls under the spell of seasoned, jaded, and married Pulitzer Prize–winning photojournalist, Sam Darrow, while also feeling a confusing pull toward his assistant, Linh, a Vietnamese ex-soldier and knowledgeable photographer and guide. Linh, who has lost his wife and entire family to the war, roams the country with Darrow and then Helen (whom Darrow asks Linh to protect). Soli looks at the complex motivations and ambitions of the waves of American photographers who descended on Vietnam seeking glory and fame through their gut-wrenching photos of mass graves, crippled children, and dying soldiers, while also reveling in sex, drugs, and good times as the war raged around them. This harrowing depiction of life and death shows that even as the country burned, love and hope triumphed.
Publishers Weekly
Seen through the lens of young American freelance photographer Helen Adams, this evocative debut novel is a well researched exploration of Vietnam between 1963 and 1975, when the United States pulled out of the conflict. Helen, who has come to Vietnam partly to discover what really happened to her brother, is determined to see the real Vietnam, combat and all. The narrative focuses on Adams, Pulitzer Prize-winning combat photojournalist Sam Darrow, and his Vietnamese assistant, Linh, revealing their relationships, loyalties, and ambitions and the terrible toll the war takes on them all. As readers, we come to understand the characters' attraction to and ambivalence about the war, how love can survive and thrive under such extreme conditions (Helen and Linh have an affair), the courage needed to report under war conditions and the journalistic principles involved, and the fragile beauty of this war-torn country and its people. Verdict: Like Marianne Wiggins's Eveless Eden and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried before it, Soli's poignant work will grab the attention of most readers. A powerful new writer to watch. —Gwen Vredevoogd, Marymount Univ., Arlington, VA
Library Journal
Soli’s debut revolves around three characters whose lives are affected by the Vietnam War. Helen Adams comes to Vietnam...and quickly falls into an affair with the grizzled but darkly charismatic war photographer Sam Darrow.... Darrow sends her his Vietnamese assistant, Linh.... While Linh wants nothing more than to escape the war, Darrow and Helen are consumed by it, unable to leave until the inevitable tragedy strikes. The strength here is in Soli’s vivid, beautiful depiction of war-torn Vietnam, from the dangers of the field, where death can be a single step away, to the emptiness of the Saigon streets in the final days of the American evacuation. —Kristine Huntley
Booklist
An impressive debut novel about a female photographer covering the Vietnam War. Helen Adams is an experienced photojournalist with ten years in Vietnam on her resume. The cinematic opening chapter shows her at the center of the chaotic, violent, desperate streets of Saigon in 1975, on the cusp of the communist takeover, as Vietnamese and Americans race to escape. The narrative then flashes back to a decade earlier, when Helen arrives in bustling Saigon as a young, naive photographer so anxious not to "miss out" on the war that she has dropped out of college to travel there.... This is a visceral story about the powerful and complex bonds that war creates. It raises profound questions about professional and personal lives that are based on, and often dependent on, a nation's horrific strife. Graphic but never gratuitous, the gripping, haunting narrative explores the complexity of violence, foreignness, even betrayal. Moving and memorable.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Soli pulled the novel’s title, "The Lotus Eaters," from an episode in Homer’s The Odyssey and uses Homer’s description of the land of the lotus eaters as the novel’s opening epigraph. What connection do you see between Homer’s lotus eaters and the main characters of this novel? What, if anything, in this novel acts like the lotus described by Homer, so powerful and seductive it causes one to abandon all thoughts of home? Does each character have a different “lotus” that draws them in? How does the title illuminate the main themes of the novel?
2. The novel begins with the fall of Saigon, and then moves back in time twelve years to the beginning of the war. How do you think this structure contributed to your experience of the novel? Did this glimpse of Helen in 1975 influence how you related to her character at earlier points in her life? Did knowing the outcome affect your judgment of her actions and the action of those around her?
3. Helen makes a pivotal decision at the end of Chapter One—to send Linh on the plane and stay behind to "see it end." Why does she make this decision? Ho did you feel about it? Did your feelings about it change over the course of the novel?
4. What does Helen think of Vietnam and the Vietnamese people when she first arrives in Saigon? How do her feelings evolve throughout the novel? How does this evolution affect how she comes to view the war and her role in it?
5. In Chapter Three, Darrow says, "The cool thing for us is that when this one’s done, there’s always another one.... The war doesn’t ever have to end for us." Why does he say this to Helen? What does it show about how Darrow views the war and about Darrow himself? When Helen repeats these words back to him in Chapter Eleven, how has their meaning changed?
6. In Chapter Nineteen, Helen believes that "Violence had poisoned them all." In what ways are Darrow, Helen, and Linh poisoned? What, if anything, keeps each of them from being destroyed by it?
7. Throughout the novel, Helen finds herself in love, and loved by, two very different men. How would you characterize each of her relationships? Did you prefer Helen in one relationship over the other? What are each relationship’s strengths and weaknesses? Which man do you ultimately believe is Helen’s great love?
8. Mark Twain said, "Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear." Bravery and courage are frequently mentioned in the novel. In what ways do the various characters display these traits? In what ways do they fail?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.
Adelle Waldman, 2013
Henry Holt
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780805097450
Summary
Bold, touching, and funny—a debut novel by a brilliant young woman about the coming-of-age of a brilliant young literary man
“He was not the kind of guy who disappeared after sleeping with a woman—and certainly not after the condom broke. On the contrary: Nathaniel Piven was a product of a postfeminist 1980s childhood and politically correct, 1990s college education. He had learned all about male privilege. Moreover, he was in possession of a functional and frankly rather clamorous conscience.” – From The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.
Nate Piven is a rising star in Brooklyn’s literary scene. After several lean and striving years, he has his pick of both magazine assignments and women: Juliet, the hotshot business reporter; Elisa, his gorgeous ex-girlfriend, now friend; and Hannah, “almost universally regarded as nice and smart, or smart and nice,” who is lively fun and holds her own in conversation with his friends.
In this 21st-century literary world, wit and conversation are not at all dead. Is romance? Novelist Adelle Waldman plunges into the psyche of a modern man—who thinks of himself as beyond superficial judgment, yet constantly struggles with his own status anxiety, who is drawn to women, yet has a habit of letting them down. With tough-minded intelligence and wry good humor The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. is an absorbing tale of one young man’s search for happiness—and an inside look at how he really thinks about women, sex and love. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Baltimore, Maryland, USA
• Education—B.A., Brown University; M.A., Columbia
University
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York, New York
Adelle Waldman is a graduate of Brown University and Columbia University's journalism school. She worked as a reporter at the New Haven Register and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal's website. Her articles also have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, New Republic, Slate, Wall Street Journal, and other national publications. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[A] smart, engaging 21st-century comedy of manners in which the debut novelist Adelle Waldman crawls convincingly around inside the head of one Nathaniel (Nate) Piven.... Nate is like a jigsaw puzzle.... [A]fter you’ve invested way too much time, you are going to realize that key pieces are missing. (Empathy? Self-awareness?).... This is also a book about a scene—the Brooklyn literary thing.... But Brooklyn feels a bit perfunctory, maybe a little stale (everyone apparently knows everyone in Brooklyn). A fuzzy sameness blurs the descriptions. “Francesca was a prettyish, stylish writer who’d been extremely successful with her first book at a young age.” They come at you in bland waves, these attractive young writers working for important magazines with six-figure deals whose books are long-listed for fairly prestigious prizes. Maybe it’s just hard to imagine—being one of the 13 American writers who don’t live in New York — but really: attractive writers? When did they start making those?
Jess Walter - New York Times Book Review
Adelle Waldman's debut novel…scrutinizes Nate and the subculture that he thrives in with a patient, anthropological detachment. Ms. Waldman has sorted and cross-categorized the inhabitants of Nate's world with a witty, often breathtaking precision, one eye always on the crude sexual politics of the culture industry…there are many rewards to be had in the elegant, careful way [Waldman] makes sense of Nate's struggle to be both a good person and a sexual person. This book takes seriously the question of romantic compatibility—of why we end up with one person and not another—and foregrounds the question of whether it's a subject even worth paying attention to…There is something beguiling about the very project of teasing out the thought processes of someone like Nate, who so often cuts and runs, avoiding spelling things out when feelings get complicated.
Maria Russo - New York Times
[A] pitch-perfect debut… In the demure tradition of the comedy of manners, Ms. Waldman is rarely mocking or mean-spirited.... Full disclosure: The setting of this novel is one with which I'm cringingly familiar. But even if you find hipster Brooklyn alien territory, Ms. Waldman's surgical skewering of its pretensions and hang-ups is a comic performance you shouldn't miss.
Wall Street Journal
Bright young men, do you feel that chilly wind of exposure? Somehow, Adelle Waldman has stolen your passive-aggressive playbook and published it in her first novel…Waldman offers a delectable analysis of contemporary dating among literary wannabes. You might think it'd be easier to find a parking space in Manhattan than to say anything new about that subject, but this dark comedy delivers one prickling insight after another…Neither chick lit nor lad lit…Waldman has captured a whole group of privileged people who've been seduced into believing that their choice of a spouse is just one more consumer purchase—like an expensive coffee maker, something to be considered according to its pros and cons and then constantly reevaluated for how much it satisfies the original expectations.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Incisive and very funny… This is an impressive book, full of sharp and amusing observations about urban life, liberal pieties and modern dating—that minefield of "intimate inspections" that often yields more loneliness than romance. Though Nate has an archetypal quality—his mix of lofty ideals and poor behaviour is not uncommon among the triumphant ex-nerds of literary Brooklyn—Ms Waldman has skilfully rendered him both fascinating and sympathetic. He is a man of his age, though his strengths and weaknesses are timeless.
Economist
Fiendishly readable… Most importantly, Waldman gets the big detail right: When it comes to women, Nate’s "clamorous conscience" comes into conflict with the exercise of his natural advantages as a single, successful, attractive heterosexual man in a sexual economy that, for him, is very much a buyer’s market…. He is misogynistic and ashamed of his misogyny.
Marc Tracy - New Republic
Although the novel is about his love affairs in Brooklyn, this is really a novel that reveals—astutely—how Nate thinks…. The book is an exacting character study and Waldman an excellent and witty prose stylist…. [Nate] is a frog in a wax tray, sliced open and pinned back, his innermost private thoughts on display for inspection by the reader…. One must read the magical ending to understand that although his thoughts on women will leave many outraged, his dissected frog's heart still beats.
Jennifer Gilmore - Los Angeles Times
While Lena Duham's TV series Girls and Noah Baumbach's film Frances Ha have reaffirmed Brooklyn's status as the capital of hipster cool, Waldman's debut novel offers a more critical look at the district's arty milieu... Her writing displays an awareness that the Brooklynites' middle-class problems don't amount to a hill of fair trade coffee beans in the real world. This is brilliantly observed stuff.
David Evans - Financial Times (London)
Every so often... a novel comes along that actually deserves the hype. Adelle Waldman's outstanding debut is one of these.... The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. is really something much darker, funnier, and more profound. It fixes for all time on the page a very particular type of man— the contemporary up-and-coming literary intellectual. And it isn't a pretty sight.... Psychologically astute, subtle, funny and whip-smart, this is a novel that anyone interested in how we live now should read.... With the insinuating sharpness of a stiletto blade, Waldman opens up Nate's interior to show us the mess inside.... she pieces together a portrait of contemporary upper-middle-class manhood. The level of insight is bracing... On every page of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. there is something that gives pleasure— the prose is razor-sharp, the characters in all their pretentions are lovingly skewered. This month's hot novel it may be, but this is a book that will bear repeated readings; funny, angry, subtle and sad, it is the debut of a novelist who's already the real, achieved thing. Highly recommended.
Sunday Business Post (London)
The best debut novel of the summer.… It’s hard to know whether Adelle Waldman’s portrait of Brooklyn’s sad young literary men in The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. is meant to be scathing satire or plain realism, but frankly, you won’t give a damn…. Waldman’s gift is to give voice to the minute calculations and fickle desires of modern manhood as we cringe and read just one more chapter, and then another, and then another.
Kira Henehan - GQ
Brooklynite Nathaniel Piven, “a product of a postfeminist, 1980s childhood,” is the modern male...[who] hates feeling guilty over the many women he hurts ... and [has earned] a rep for being “the kind of guy women call an asshole.” .... An acute study of present-day struggles with intimacy, Waldman seems to suggest that love is too constricting a tie for the 21st century, and that, perhaps, a different kind of connection might better define the contemporary couple. She navigates the male psyche and a highly entertaining hipster mindset, and sneaks in an unexpected, understated ending that brings this pulpy read a satisfying poignancy.
Publishers Weekly
Nathaniel P. is...[t]he sensitive, artistic sort who secretly turns out to be passive-aggressive and adverse to long-term commitment.... Waldman's debut ...makes this character the protagonist, and she builds such a solid point of view for her creation that the reader is drawn in despite the somewhat depressing subject matter.... Tales of relationship struggles are common, [but] Waldman takes a cliche and turns it on its ear.... For fans of relationship literature and those who prefer their summer reading sour instead of sweet. —Julie Elliott, Indiana Univ. Lib., South Bend
Library Journal
Reminiscent of classic realist novels from authors like Graham Greene or Henry James, this delightful debut jumps headfirst into the mind of one man, revealing what he really thinks about women, dating and success.
Megan Fishmann - Bookpage
Nate Piven's affairs are convoluted, to say the least, and some of his relationships seem to come right out of Seinfeld episodes.... Throughout the narrative, Waldman also flashes us back to Nate's earlier girlfriends, pals and hookups. The characters that populate Waldman's world are artistic, creative, funny and intelligent—except when it comes to matters of the heart, for they are constitutionally incapable of making long-term commitments. It would be refreshing to find one mature adult.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. How does Nate see himself, and how does this differ from the way his girlfriends see him? What is your view of Nate? Does he come off as pretentious? As a womanizer? Are you able to sympathize with his thoughts or actions? If you had to summarize what his main character flaw is, what would you say?
2. “Dating is probably the most fraught human interaction there is. You’re sizing people up to see if they’re worth your time and attention, and they’re doing the same to you.... We submit ourselves to these intimate inspections and simultaneously inflict them on others and try to keep our psyches intact.” Do you agree with this summary of the nature of dating? Is it as overwhelming as it is described, or is it really not “that big of a deal” as Nate believes?
3. The book delves into the psyche of a man, yet it is written by a woman. What effect does this have on the overall conversation and tone of the narrative? How would it be different if a man had written the book?
4. Do the male and female characters in the book seem to behave in ways that conform to or differ from our evolving conceptions of gender roles? Does the book present a world in which men and women are equal? If not, what inequalities seem to persist?
5. At one point, Nate wonders if he is a misogynist. He says that when he reads “something he admired…there was about an 80 percent chance a guy wrote it.” Do you think Nate is a misogynist? Later Hannah tells him that he “is treated like a big shot because he is a guy and has the arrogant sense of entitlement to ask for and expect to get everything he wanted.” Do you think the fact that Nate is male benefi ts him in terms of his career and the way he is seen in the world? He alsosilently criticizes Hannah for not working as hard at her writing as he does at his. Is that a fair criticism?
6. Aurit is the only major female character in the story who does not have a romantic history with Nate. Why is this, and what role does she play in the story and in Nate’s life?
7. Despite the fact that Nate initially found Hannah to be different from the other women he had dated, his attitude toward her eventually begins to change. Do you think there is a legitimate reason for this change? Or does it refl ect a limitation of Nate’s? What do you think keeps the relationship going after the initial excitement has died down?
8. Why does Hannah agree to salvage her relationship with Nate multiple times after it begins to turn sour? She says she feels “ashamed of [her]self” for changing for Nate and for making allowances for his bad behavior because she cares for him. Do you think that there is a difference in the way men and women change throughout a relationship? Is it necessary to change for your partner, and if so to what extent?
9. Nate has relationships with many different kinds of women, and yet he can’t seem to be content with any of them—Kristen the socially conscious do-gooder, Elisa the beautiful, and Hannah, who exhibits both cool and intelligence. Nat wonders, “Why [do] women say men [are] threatened by women who challenge them?” Do you believe that, in spite of his claim not to be, Nate may be threatened on some level? Is he truly fi nding himself incompatible with these women, or are his breakups results of his own insecurities? All of them or only certain ones?
10. Nate is largely infl uenced during his time in college by his male friends. How much of one’s mindset is infl uenced by his peers during these formative years in his life? Do you think that Nate would have had a different outlook on women and relationships had he chosen to associate with a different group of friends? Consider the male characters in the novel. What role do they play in Nate’s life, and how do they still infl uence the way he thinks?
11. Discuss the idea of being seen through others’ eyes in the context of the book. Throughout this novel, we see Nate’s views on others and also his thoughts on how people view him. Do you feel that it is a natural feeling to be validated through others’ opinions? Do we need reassurance from our partners in order to accept ourselves?
12. What do you think Nate takes away from each relationship, if anything? At the end of the novel, is Nate in a relationship that will last?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Love All
Callie Wright, 2013
Henry Holt and Co.
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780805096972
Summary
An addictive and moving debut about love, fidelity, sports, and growing up when you least expect it, told through the irresistible voices of three generations
It’s the spring of 1994 in Cooperstown, New York, and Joanie Cole, the beloved matriarch of the Obermeyer family, has unexpectedly died in her sleep. Now, for the first time, three generations are living together under one roof and are quickly encroaching on one another’s fragile orbits. Eighty-six-year-old Bob Cole is adrift in his daughter’s house without his wife. Anne Obermeyer is increasingly suspicious of her husband, Hugh’s, late nights and missed dinners, and Hugh, principal of the town’s preschool, is terrified that a scandal at school will erupt and devastate his life. Fifteen-year-old tennis-team hopeful Julia is caught in a love triangle with Sam and Carl, her would-be teammates and two best friends, while her brother, Teddy, the star pitcher of Cooperstown High, will soon catch sight of something that will change his family forever.
At the heart of the Obermeyers’ present-day tremors is the scandal of The Sex Cure, a thinly veiled roman à clef from the 1960s, which shook the small village of Cooperstown to the core. When Anne discovers a battered copy underneath her parents’ old mattress, the Obermeyers cannot escape the family secrets that come rushing to the surface. With its heartbreaking insight into the messy imperfections of family, love, and growing up, Love All is an irresistible comic story of coming-of-age—at any age. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1977-1978
• Raised—Cooperstown, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale; M.F.A., University
of Virginia
• Awards—Glimmer Train Short Story Award
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City
Callie Wright is a reporter–researcher at Vanity Fair. She graduated from Yale and earned her MFA at the University of Virginia, where she was a Poe/Faulkner Fellow in Creative Writing and won a Raven Society Fellowship. She is the recipient of a Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers and her short fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train and The Southern Review. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[A] winsome debut novel… Wright is a sure-handed writer who's at her strongest when describing the vicissitudes of marriage, which she does with great heart and originality… Love All is a study in intimacy—how we create it, how we bungle it; and, most of all, how we yearn for and require it, no matter how small or large our daily geography.
Oprah.com
The problem with most first novels is that they read like first novels. Callie Wright’s debut, Love All, reads like the work of a writer in mid-career… [Wright] has a feel for life among the small-town gentry reminiscent of Updike.
Vanity Fair
[A] fetching debut novel.
Elle Magazine
A generation after a salacious roman à clef airs an entire town’s dirty laundry, the tell-all book resurfaces in the same house it originally wreaked havoc on, forcing one family to ask if history will repeat itself… [LOVE ALL’s] storyline will launch any kind of gossip session or book club discussion.
Marie Claire
In this winning first novel, three generations of a Cooperstown, New York, clan find their lives upended by a long-buried copy of The Sex Cure—a real-life roman a clef from 1962 that scandalized town residents.
AARP Magazine
Three generations of a family in transition are at the center of Wright’s touching character-driven tale. Octogenarian grandfather Bob Cole is grieving the death of his wife.... But the Obermeyers have their own problems.... And The Sex Cure, a novel that was published in the 1960s—a thinly veiled expose of the town’s scandalous inhabitants—resurfaces, painfully connecting the generations. Wright’s greatest asset, her ability to switch voices as family members narrate in turn, is also the novel’s greatest weakness, skimming each story without gaining emotional resonance or tying together themes. But the prose is effortless, and the characters are accessible and genuine, making this a promising debut.
Publishers Weekly
[T]hree generations of the same family see their settled lives begin to splinter. Sex, marriage vows and teenage angst seam Wright's first novel, set in the small community of Cooperstown, made famous in the 1960s when a notorious novel, The Sex Cure, exposed the thinly veiled affairs of its citizens.... Narrated from multiple perspectives, some more compelling than others, and larded with themes, Wright's novel is overfreighted yet capable and humane. Inhabiting an appealing if familiar scenario, this is a novel long on empathy but missing the spark of animation.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Each chapter of Love All is told from the point of view of one of the five family members living at 59 Susquehanna, but only Julia’s chapters are in the first person. What is the significance of this? How does isolating the points of view from chapter to chapter affect the way the narrative comes together and how you felt about each character? Which Obermeyer did you connect to the most and why?
2. The power of secrets is a recurring theme in Love All. What are some of the secrets each character holds, and how do they impact the characters’ development? Do you think it is better to keep a damaging secret hidden, or is it better to reveal it, no matter the consequences?
3. The Sex Cure was a real novel published in the 1960s. How is the scandal of The Sex Cure reflected in the lives of the characters in the novel? Why do you think the author chose to use this as the foundation of her novel?
4. Each Obermeyer possesses certain unfulfilled desires or dreams that get in the way of their ideal happiness. How do the characters deal with their discontent as their plans go astray? What holds each of them back and do the reasons overlap? Do any of the characters resolve their inner conflicts?
5. Would things have turned out differently if Anne and Hugh had communicated their feelings to one another after the Valentine’s Day party back when their relationship was new? What attracted them to each other in the first place, and what changed in their relationship? Do you believe that their marriage could have been saved? When have you regretted a misstep in a relationship and what, if anything, would you have done differently?
6. How much does the unique setting of Cooperstown defi ne this story? How does the town act as a source of comfort, but also a crutch to its inhabitants?
7. Anne seems to place great importance on the way she is perceived. In what ways does her external posture differ from her internal self? Why does she become fascinated by The Sex Cure as a young girl? Why does she vandalize the author’s home? Why do you think she never shows Hugh the will she writes when she’s upset?
8. Why is Teddy so afraid to leave Cooperstown? What is the significance of the Ted Williams card and why do you think Teddy destroys it? What changes in Teddy after he finds out about his dad’s affair?
9. Hugh gains a new sense of power and resolve after the accident at his school and the onset of his affair overcoming the inertia that began with the death of his brother. What stirs this emotion in him? Do you sympathize with Hugh or do you think he is selfi sh as a husband and a father?
10. Bob never finds out if his wife knew about his ongoing affairs throughout their marriage. He says that he doesn’t care to look forward or back in life, but his past continues to haunt him even after the death of his wife. Do you think that it is possible to strictly live in the moment, or is your present state a constant blend of past, present, and future?
11. Julia says, “the only people who could really hurt us were the people we love.” Do you think this is true? Why does Julia write the letter about Carl? How is this manifested in the other relationships in the novel? Is it inevitable to hurt those we love the most? Why or why not?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Love and Other Consolation Prizes
Jamie Ford, 2017
Random House
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780804176750
Summary
From the bestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet comes a powerful novel, inspired by a true story, about a boy whose life is transformed at Seattle’s epic 1909 World’s Fair.
For twelve-year-old Ernest Young, a charity student at a boarding school, the chance to go to the World’s Fair feels like a gift.
But only once he’s there, amid the exotic exhibits, fireworks, and Ferris wheels, does he discover that he is the one who is actually the prize. The half-Chinese orphan is astounded to learn he will be raffled off — a healthy boy "to a good home."
The winning ticket belongs to the flamboyant madam of a high-class brothel, famous for educating her girls. There, Ernest becomes the new houseboy and befriends Maisie, the madam’s precocious daughter, and a bold scullery maid named Fahn. Their friendship and affection form the first real family Ernest has ever known — and against all odds, this new sporting life gives him the sense of home he’s always desired.
But as the grande dame succumbs to an occupational hazard and their world of finery begins to crumble, all three must grapple with hope, ambition, and first love.
Fifty years later, in the shadow of Seattle’s second World’s Fair, Ernest struggles to help his ailing wife reconcile who she once was with who she wanted to be, while trying to keep family secrets hidden from their grown-up daughters.
Against a rich backdrop of post-Victorian vice, suffrage, and celebration, Love and Other Consolation Prizes is an enchanting tale about innocence and devotion—in a world where everything, and everyone, is for sale. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 9, 1968
• Born—Eureka, California, USA
• Raised—Ashland, Oregon; Seattle, Washington, USA
• Education—Art Institute of Seattle
• Awards—Asian/Pacific American Award-Best Adult Fiction
• Currently—lives in Montana
Jamie Ford is an American author. He is best known for his debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. The book received positive reviews after its release, and was also awarded best "Adult Fiction" book at the 2010 Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature. The book was also named the #1 Book Club Pick for Fall 2009/Winter 2010 by the American Booksellers Association.
Background
Ford was born in Eureka, California, but grew up in Ashland, Oregon, and Port Orchard and Seattle, Washington. His father, a Seattle native, is of Chinese ancestry, while Ford’s mother is of European descent.
His Western last name "Ford" comes from his great grandfather, Min Chung (1850-1922), who immigrated to Tonopah, Nevada in 1865 and later changed his name to William Ford. Ford's great grandmother, Loy Lee Ford, was the first Chinese woman to own property in Nevada.
Ford earned a degree in Design from the Art Institute of Seattle and also attended Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts.
Writings
Ford is best known for his debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. The book received positive reviews after its release, and was also awarded best “Adult Fiction” book at the 2010 Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature.
In 2013, he released his second book, Songs of Willow Frost, and his third, Love and Other Consolation Prizes in 2017.
His stories have also been included in Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology and the The Apocalypse Triptych, a series of three anthologies of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey. (Excerpted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/28/2017 .)
Book Reviews
Combining rich narrative and literary qualities, the book achieves a multi-faceted emotional resonance. It is by turns heart-rending, tragic, disturbing, sanguine, warm, and life-affirming. Perceptive themes that run throughout culminate at the end. A true story from the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition inspired this very absorbing and moving novel. Highly recommended (Editor's Choice).
Historical Novel Society
The latter half of the book feels rushed, with what is perhaps a too-tidy ending. Still, it's a laudable effort that shines light on little-known histories.… [J]ust enough emotional resonance to move most readers. —Suzanne Im, Los Angeles P.L.
Library Journal
Poignant.… Vibrantly rendered
Booklist
Alternating between Ernest's past and present, Ford captures the thrill of first kisses and the shock of revealing long-hidden affairs. A lively history of romance in the dens of iniquity, love despite vice.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The story of Ernest starts off on a very sad note. Do you condemn Ernest’s mother for her actions, and if so, what were her alternatives?
2. The early suffrage movements in the U.S. all took place in what were regarded as frontier territories in the west. Why do you think the trends of suffrage and vice emerged at the same time, in the same places? (Like Wyoming, where women first got the vote in 1869).
3. Those suffrage campaigns were often intertwined with religious movements. When did women’s rights diverge somewhat from a religious underpinning and why?
4. This book ultimately deals with prostitution. Is there an intersection between prostitution, personal agency, and feminism? Or are these mutually exclusive concepts?
5. Caucasian prostitution in the early 20th century has often been glamorized, while Asian prostitution has been demonized. Is there truth behind those cultural tropes? Are our historical perceptions off? What’s the reality of those perceptions then—and now?
6. Madam Flora and Miss Amber have a unique relationship. Do you see this as one born of love, of shared business interests, or a bit of both?
7. Speaking of business interests, do you see Madam Flora and Miss Amber as two people exploiting young women, or benefiting them?
8. Early world’s fairs often had ethnographic exhibits — human zoos, if you will. When did this stop being socially acceptable and why the change?
9. World’s fairs also try to be predictive of the future. The 1962 World’s Fair boasted the latest technology and hinted at a grand technological leap. Were those predictions right?
10. At the Tenderloin (and in the character of Turnbull) we see wealthy, successful men breaking rules and social conventions. Is there a modern analog? Are wealthy men today able to live above and beyond the margins of law and civil discourse and if so, who, and how are they able to get away with such behavior?
11. For much of the book, the reader is wondering whom Ernest will ultimately end up marrying. Did he make the right choice? Why or why not?
12. Lastly, Ernest and Fahn read a certain book by Henry de Vere Stacpoole. How does that novel reflect the innocence and tragedy of their relationship? And do you know what that book is? (Hint, it was made into a somewhat cheesy movie in the 80s).
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Love and Ruin
Paula McLain, 2018
Random House
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781101967386
Summary
The bestselling author of The Paris Wife returns to the subject of Ernest Hemingway in a novel about his passionate, stormy marriage to Martha Gellhorn—a fiercely independent, ambitious young woman who would become one of the greatest war correspondents of the 20th century.
In 1937, twenty-eight-year-old Martha Gellhorn travels alone to Madrid to report on the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War and becomes drawn to the stories of ordinary people caught in the devastating conflict.
It’s the adventure she’s been looking for and her chance to prove herself a worthy journalist in a field dominated by men. But she also finds herself unexpectedly—and uncontrollably—falling in love with Hemingway, a man on his way to becoming a legend.
In the shadow of the impending Second World War, and set against the turbulent backdrops of Madrid and Cuba, Martha and Ernest’s relationship and their professional careers ignite.
But when Ernest publishes the biggest literary success of his career, For Whom the Bell Tolls, they are no longer equals, and Martha must make a choice: surrender to the confining demands of being a famous man’s wife or risk losing Ernest by forging a path as her own woman and writer.
It is a dilemma that could force her to break his heart, and hers.
Heralded by Ann Patchett as "the new star of historical fiction," Paula McLain brings Gellhorn’s story richly to life and captures her as a heroine for the ages: a woman who will risk absolutely everything to find her own voice. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1965
• Where— Fresno, California, USA
• Education—M.F.A., University of Michigan
• Currently—lives in Cleveland, Ohio
Paula McLain is an American author best known for her novel, The Paris Wife, a fictionalized account of Ernest Hemingway's first marriage. That work became a long-time New York Times bestseller. Her 2015 novel centering on female aviator Beryl Markham was released to excellent reviews in 2015.
McLain has also published two collections of poetry in 1999 and 2005, a memoir about growing up in the foster system in 2003, and the novel A Ticket to Ride in 2008.
McLain was born in Fresno, California. Her mother vanished when she was four, and her father was in and out of jail, leaving McLain and her two sisters (one older, one younger) to move in and out of various foster homes for the next fourteen years. It was an ordeal described in her memoir, Like Family: Growing Up in Other People's Houses.
When she aged out of the system, McLain supported herself by working in various jobs before discovering she could write. Eventually, she received an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan and has been a resident of Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony as well as the recipient of fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts.
She lives in Cleveland with her family. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/19/2015.)
Book Reviews
McLain strikingly depicts Martha Gellhorn’s burgeoning career as a writer and war correspondent during the years of her affair with and marriage to Ernest Hemingway.… Gellhorn emerges as a fierce trailblazer every bit Hemingway’s equal in this thrilling book.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [The] tempestuous relationship, a ferocious contest between two brilliant, willful, and intrepid writers. McLain’s fast-moving, richly insightful, heart-wrenching, and sumptuously written tale pays exhilarating homage to its truly exceptional and significant inspiration.
Booklist
Martha comes across as one tough cookie, Ernest as a great writer but a small man. This elegant if oddly bloodless narrative is a good introduction for those who know nothing of Gellhorn, but it basically rehashes information and sentiments.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Martha tells us from the outset that, for better or worse, she is a born traveler. What kind of expectation does that set up about her personality and disposition? What character traits might "born travelers" have that others don’t?
2. Just before Martha meets Ernest, her father dies. How might that make her more impressionable or susceptible to Ernest’s influence?
3. How would you describe Martha’s outlook as she heads off to Madrid? What are her reasons for going? What did the war seem to mean to her, and to others who volunteered?
4. When Martha begins to feel Ernest is drawn to her physically, she initially resists, saying he’s "too Hemingway." What does she mean by that? What is she afraid of?
5. Martha tells us that after three weeks in Madrid she felt she never wanted to leave, saying, "It was like living with my heart constantly in my throat." How could that feeling be perceived as positive? What are some of things she loves about Spain? About her circle of friends and colleagues at the Hotel Florida?
6. When Martha finds the house in Cuba, the Finca Vigía, she falls in love with it instantly, even though it’s in ruins. Why? What does she hope to gain by restoring the property and living there with Ernest? What are the risks?
7. When Martha accepts the assignment to travel to Finland for Collier’s, Ernest says teasingly to their group of friends in Sun Valley that she’s abandoning him. Is it really a joke or is there significant tension brewing? What are Martha’s reasons for going? How does she feel about her work in relation to her personal life? Can the two coexist? Can she—or anyone—have everything?
8. Though Martha is the one who chooses the Finca as a "beautiful foxhole" to share with Ernest, the house eventually begins to weigh on her. Why? What is draining to her about domesticity? Does Ernest have the same ambivalence? Why or why not?
9. Although Martha loves Ernest and doesn’t want to give up her life with him, she has a lot of trepidation about marrying him. Why? What factors contribute to her anxiety? What does she stand to lose?
10. When For Whom the Bell Tolls is published in 1940, it’s a runaway success, selling more copies than any American novel before it save Gone with the Wind. How do the book’s success and Ernest’s intensifying fame challenge Martha as his wife? What about as a writer?
11. When Martha and Ernest go off to China, they’re both working as reporters in search of a story. How do their journalistic methods differ? Are they different kinds of travelers, with different worldviews? Would you say they’re compatible? Why or why not?
12. As the world plunges toward war, Martha feels increasingly compelled to go to Europe to try to write about what’s happening, while Ernest becomes obsessed with his sub-hunting "mission." What are the instincts that pull them in opposite directions? Do we understand what drives them? Do they understand and have compassion for each other, or are they spiraling toward an impasse?
13. When Martha is finally convinced she must go to Europe to report on the war if she’s going to live with herself, Ernest feels more and more despondent and abandoned. Finally, he betrays her by taking her correspondent’s credentials from Collier’s, effectively replacing her on the masthead and making a place at the front lines impossible for her. Can we comprehend his actions and find empathy for him? Why or why not?
14. When the marriage disintegrates beyond repair, Ernest almost immediately finds a new love interest in Mary Welsh (who will become Mrs. Hemingway #4), while Martha turns to her work to ease her pain, finding strength in reclaiming her name and her independence. Do you think their contrasting strategies for surviving heartbreak symbolize the essential differences between Martha and Ernest as people? And do you believe that two such very different personalities could ever hope to find lasting happiness together?
(Questions from the author's website.)
Love and Treasure
Ayelet Waldman, 2014
Knopf Doubleday
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385533546
Summary
A spellbinding new novel of contraband masterpieces, tragic love, and the unexpected legacies of forgotten crimes, Ayelet Waldman’s Love and Treasure weaves a tale around the fascinating, true history of the Hungarian Gold Train in the Second World War.
In 1945 on the outskirts of Salzburg, victorious American soldiers capture a train filled with unspeakable riches: piles of fine gold watches; mountains of fur coats; crates filled with wedding rings, silver picture frames, family heirlooms, and Shabbat candlesticks passed down through generations. Jack Wiseman, a tough, smart New York Jew, is the lieutenant charged with guarding this treasure—a responsibility that grows more complicated when he meets Ilona, a fierce, beautiful Hungarian who has lost everything in the ravages of the Holocaust.
Seventy years later, amid the shadowy world of art dealers who profit off the sins of previous generations, Jack gives a necklace to his granddaughter, Natalie Stein, and charges her with searching for an unknown woman—a woman whose portrait and fate come to haunt Natalie, a woman whose secret may help Natalie to understand the guilt her grandfather will take to his grave and to find a way out of the mess she has made of her own life.
A story of brilliantly drawn characters—a suave and shady art historian, a delusive and infatuated Freudian, a family of singing circus dwarfs fallen into the clutches of Josef Mengele, and desperate lovers facing choices that will tear them apart—Love and Treasure is Ayelet Waldman’s finest novel to date: a sad, funny, richly detailed work that poses hard questions about the value of precious things in a time when life itself has no value, and about the slenderest of chains that can bind us to the griefs and passions of the past. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 11, 1964
• Where—Jerusalem, Israel
• Raised—Montreal, Canada; Rhode Island; Ridgewood, New
Jersey, USA
• Education—B.A., Weslyan University; J.D., Harvard
• Currently—lives in Berkeley, California
Ayelet (eye-YELL-it—"gazelle") Waldman is novelist and essayist who was formerly a lawyer. She is noted for her self-revelatory essays, and for her writing (both fiction and non-fiction) about the changing expectations of motherhood. She has written extensively about juggling the demands of children, partners, career and society, in particular about combining paid work with modern motherhood, and about the ensuing maternal ambivalence.
Waldman is the author of seven mystery novels in the series The Mommy-Track Mysteries and has published four novels of general interest, Daughter's Keeper (2003), Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (2006) Red Hook Road, (2010), and Love and Treasure (2014), as well as a collection of personal essays entitled Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (2009).
Personal Life
Waldman was born in Jerusalem, Israel. After the 1967 Six-Day War, when she was two and a half, her family moved to Montreal, Canada, then to Rhode Island, finally settling in Ridgewood, New Jersey. By then she was in sixth grade.
Waldman graduated from Wesleyan University, where she studied psychology and government and studied in Isreal for her her junior year. She returned to Israel after college, to live on a kibbutz, but finding it unsatisfying returned to the US. She entered Harvard University and earned her a J.D. in 1991 (she was a class-mate of Barack Obama’s).
After receiving her law degree, Waldman clerked for a federal court judge and worked in a large corporate law firm in New York for a year.
In 1993 she married Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon, whose novels include The Yiddish Policemen's Union, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and Wonder Boys. They met on a blind date, when both were living in New York City. They were engaged in three weeks and married a year later, in 1993.
After moving to California with Chabon, Waldman became a public defence lawyer and later taught law at the University of California at Berkeley. She left the legal profession altogether after the birth of her second child and, although she still calls herself a lawyer on her tax returns, says she will not be returning to the legal profession—preferring to work at home with her husband and their now four children.
Writing
She and Chabon work from the same office in the backyard of their home, often discussing and editing each other's work—critiquing each other's work in what Chabon has called a "creative freeflow."
While working as a university professor, Waldman attempted to research legal issues with a view to writing articles for legal journals and thus increasing her chances of a tenured job teaching law. She has said that every time she tried to write those scholarly articles she because bored or intimidated, so she began writing fiction instead.
Waldman has said that her fiction is all about being a bad mother. She has said she chose to write because it was not as time-consuming a career as the law, it gave her something to do during nap times, kept her entertained, because it gave her a way of putting off going back to work full-time. She has also written several times about her 2002 diagnosis of bipolar disorder, a disease that runs in her family, and has spoken publicly on parenting while having a mental illness. She has said, "When I write about being bipolar, I feel queasy and ashamed, but I also feel really strongly that I shouldn't feel this way, that this is a disease, like diabetes."
Waldman started writing mystery novels, thinking they would be “easy ... light and fluffy." At first she wrote in secret, then with her husband's encouragement. She has said that she chose mysteries because they are primarily about plot. Her Mommy-Track" series, seven mysteries in all, features "part-time sleuth and full-time mother" Juliet Applebaum.
She has also published three literary novels of general interest: Daughter's Keeper (2003) drew on Waldman's experience as a criminal defense lawyer and features a young woman who inadvertently becomes involved in the trafficking of drugs; Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (2006) is about a Harvard-educated lawyer dealing with a precocious step-son and the loss of a newborn child to SIDS; and Red Hook Road (2010) revolves around two bereaved families in a small village in Maine.
Waldman has also published short stories in McSweeney's anthologies, as well as essays in the New York Times, Guardian (UK), San Francisco Chronicle, Elle Magazine, Vogue, Allure, Cookie, Child, Parenting, Real Simple, Health and other publications.
Controversy
Waldmen became the center of controversy for an essay, "Motherlove," in which she wrote, "I love my husband more than I love my children." She went on to say that she could survive the death of her children, but not that of her husband, and summarized her ideal family dynamic as follows: "He [her husband, Chabon] and I are the core of what he cherishes ... the children are satellites, beloved but tangential.” The essay led to extensive and vitriolic debate on television shows like "The View" and "Oprah" (on which she was a guest). (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Waldman skillfully interweaves [a] striking and enigmatic object...into an ambitious sweep of history.... [She] sustains her multiple plot lines with breathless confidence and descriptive panache, fashioning complex personalities caught up in an inexorable series of events. Less satisfactorily, she never fully explains the provenance of the painting Amitai is hunting, and with the exception of Jack and Ilona...the love scenes are cliched.
Catherine Taylor - New York Times Book Review
This lush, multigenerational tale...traces the path of a single pendant.... Inventively told from multiple perspectives, Waldman's latest is a seductive reflection on just how complicated the idea of "home" is—and why it is worth more than treasure.
Publishers Weekly
A sensitive and heartbreaking portrayal of love, politics, and family secrets.... Waldman's appealing novel recalls the film The Red Violin in its following of this all-important object through various periods in history and through many owners. Fans of historical fiction will love the compelling characters and the leaps backward and forward in time.
Library Journal
A necklace with a peacock pendant raises provocative questions about loss, guilt and recovery in Waldman's intriguing new novel. The necklace is one of thousands of items confiscated from Hungary's Jews and found on a train seized in Austria by the U.S. Army in 1945.... No big points made here, just strong storytelling combined with thoughtful exploration of difficult issues
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Love and Treasure is a novel that illuminates the shifting nature of identity. In the beginning of the novel, Jack Wiseman is described as a New York Jew whose father’s parents are of “authentic German Jewish stock,” (page 18) yet he finds it a struggle to connect with both the American soldiers under his command and the European Jews he encounters. How does Jack’s definition of himself change over the course of the novel? How do Jack’s fellow soldiers view him? How is he viewed by the Hungarian civilians he meets? What does this say about the how cultural heritage is assigned or interpreted? 2. On page 12, Jack admits that for many years the “contents of the pouch had been a kind of obsession” to him. In what ways does his granddaughter internalize this obsession and make it her own? What drives Natalie’s quest? Did Jack send her on this mission out of duty to the owner or to renew the “glimmer of interest” (page 13) in his granddaughter that had been destroyed by her divorce? Both?
3. When Jack first meets Ilona, he declares that she is all “wire and sparks” (page 29). How does her presence help Jack to better understand his identity as a Jew? As an American? How does she challenge his views about the war or its aftermath?
4. Throughout the novel, Jack is caught between his duty to country (in maintaining his position of watching over the train) and his duty to the people of Hungary (in trying to ensure that the goods are returned to their rightful owners). How do these two missions conflict with each other?
5. Chart Jack’s view of the military over the course of the novel, taking into account his interactions with his fellow American soldiers. Does he relate to any of the soldiers? If so, who? Discuss his conversation with Lieutenant Hoyle at the bar after his breakup with Ilona. How did you interpret the violence at the end of this encounter?
6. Jack’s encounters with Aba Yuval give him a more fully realized understanding of the political situation facing the Jews of Europe. What is Jack’s mind-set going into the trip where he helps smuggle the refugees over the border? What are his feelings toward the group’s goal by the end of the mission? How does this encounter challenge his understanding of nationalism?
7. Ilona and Natalie are described as physically similar, with both having fiery red hair. Is the author’s choice to have the two women share this feature purposeful? What else, if anything, do the two women share?
8. On page 139, Natalie struggles to admit to Amitai that the pendant is stolen, instead saying her grandfather “found” it during the occupation. Why does she stumble over these words? What does her hesitation say about the definition of discovery? Of ownership? How are these problems echoed throughout the novel? How are they reflected in the world of stolen paintings that Amitai deals in?
9. Compare and contrast the failed marriages of Amitai and Natalie. How do their failed marriages prepare them for meeting each other? Discuss the symbolism of Natalie wearing the pendant to her wedding to Daniel.
10. Why is Amitai hesitant to share his military past with Natalie? What other sins of omission occur throughout the novel? ( page 156)
11. Amitai is Israeli but he craves “the anonymity of the immigrant, to be a man with a vague accent in a city of vague accents” (page 175). How does this desire for erasure contrast with Natalie’s desire to understand her cultural heritage? How do their respective homelands encourage or complicate those desires?
12. When Natalie Stein becomes Natalie Kennedy, she meaningfully disrupts the established script for her behavior. What does this say about the fluidity of identity? How does this transgression embolden her?
13. On page 221, the pendant is returned to as close to its rightful heir as possible. What was your reaction to Dalia’s request to get the necklace appraised? What does her indifference to the physical object say about the dilution of history over time? Of personal connection to the Holocaust? To kin?
14. On pages 224–225, Natalie and Amitai fill out the Page of Testimony for Vidor Komlos, Gizella Weisz, and Nina Einhorn. What is the significance of this act?
15. The events of part three are narrated from the perspective of Dr. Zobel, a Freudian analyst. Why do you think the author to choose to include this point of view? Is the doctor reliable as a narrator? What textual evidence exists to
16. Gizella and Nina are introduced as strong-willed women who are ahead their time: Nina dreams of medical school, and Gizella is active in radical politics. What challenges do these early feminists face, both from their countrymen and from their families? Why do you think Zobel seeks them out years later?
17. Stealing is a motif in the novel: Jack pockets the pendant; the American soldiers freely “shop” from the Gold Train; Natalie lifts a painting; Amitai deals in the world of stolen paintings. How do the motivations for these acts differ? Who is morally right in his actions? What does the novel as a whole assert about ownership?
18. Love and Treasure is a novel that weaves intricate plotlines among stunning character portraits, bringing to life a historical event with fictitious details. Yet as the history unravels, gaps emerge and often disrupt a clear narrative. What does this assert about memory, both collective and personal? About how history is interpreted or reinterpreted over time?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Rose of York: Love & War
Sandra Worth, 2002
Atlasbooks
340 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780975126400
Summary
Adventure, deadly passion and intrigue… History’s most enduring mystery… A love story that may have inspired a beloved fairy tale and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet…
Known as Shakespeare’s villain, Richard III is also the king who gave mankind “Blind Justice” and the legal concepts that flowered into modern Western democracy. Against the sweep of England’s fifteenth century Wars of the Roses, Love and War, the first book in the "Rose of York" series, recreates Richard’s tumultuous early years and his love affair with Anne Neville, the traitor’s daughter he made his queen. (From the publisher.)
More
In a tumultuous era marked by peril and intrigue, reversals of fortune and violent death, the passions of a few rule the destiny of England and change the course of history.
A stirring tale of passion, romance, friendship, honor, betrayal and civil strife, and the winner of a remarkable eight awards, including the 2005 Glyph Award for Best General Fiction, this historically accurate novel tells the true love story of two star-crossed lovers—Richard of Gloucester and Lady Anne Neville—before they become King and Queen of England. Set in Malory's England during the Wars of the Roses, The Rose of York: Love & War is a page turner that thrills as it enlightens. (Also from the publisher.)
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Author Bio
• Birth—1954
• Where—Canada
• Education_B.A. University of Toronto
• Awards—Gylph Award-Best General Fiction
Sandra Worth holds an honors B.A. in Political Science and Economics from the University of Toronto and was first published at twenty-three by University of Toronto Press. She is a frequent contributor of articles to The Ricardian Register, the quarterly publication of the U.S. Richard III Society and has been published by Blanc Sanglier, the publication of the Yorkshire, England, branch of the Richard III Society.
Sandra has been invited to teach the Wars of the Roses Course at Suite University, a Canadian internet university, commencing in late 2003. Love and War, her debut novel was nominated for the 2003 Dorothy Parker Award, awarded by the Reviewers International Organization. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Expounding an historical epic of honor and love during the time of the Wars of the Roses, The Rose Of York (Love & War) is both dramatic and evocative in its portrayal of struggling souls making the best choices they can in an unjust world. A deftly written, reader engaging, thoroughly entertaining and enthusiastically recommended historical novel which documents its author as a gifted literary talent.
MidWest Book Review
Worth has done meticulous research… Though conversations and some incidents must of necessity be invented, she makes them seem so real that one agrees this must have been what they said, the way things happened.
Myrna Smith - Ricardian Register (U.S. Richard III Society)
With her debut novel, author Sandra Worth takes readers on an unforgettable journey through the life of Richard Plantagenet III.... Ms. Worth is an extremely gifted writer with the ability to immerse her readers into the lives and world of her characters ... The Rose of York: Love and War isn't historical fiction; it is a time machine.... I know shall be placing this novel on my keeper shelf and anxiously await the remaining books.
Sharon McGinty - Library Reviews
Ms. Worth chronicles brilliantly his (Richard's) all too brief childhood and the events and the people that molded him into the thoughtful and insightful young man he became. It is powerful; it is heartbreaking; and it is a beautifully told love story.... The historical aspects will give you insights that the casual historical fiction reader has probably never thought of, as I can surely attest to.... oh for the lovers of history, and for those looking forward to a most passionate story of love, this for you is a marvelous treat!... Whether intentional or not, I found that the secondary romance between John Neville, Lord Montagu and his wife Isobel to be pure poetry...depicted so beautifully that it simply took my breath away. I am definitely looking forward to the next book in this planned trilogy and if the tone and finesse imbued in this, her debut novel is any indication of what to expect we are all in for a marvelous treat.
Marilyn Rondear - Historical Romance Writers.com
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 Rose of York: Love & War:
1. One of the overriding themes in this book is loyalty vs. betrayal. You might talk about the costs of loyalty.
2. Sandra Worth presents an honest, detailed and unvarnished view of life in the 15th century. You might discuss how she portrays that life, particularly for women.
3. Worth's portrait of Richard is vastly different from that of Shakespeare's version in Richard III. It would be interesting to compare the two views. You might read the Shakespeare play...well, okay. Here's another idea: rent Al Pacino's Looking for Richard (1996)—an intriguing and entertaining film in which Pacino plummets the character of Shakespeare's Richard.
4. Consider the political atmosphere of the time—then discuss the jurisprudence reforms Richard introduces: innocent till proven guilty, for one.
5. What were the events and people in Richard's young life that helped form and shape his later character— as a thoughtful, insightful adult?
6. You might want to explore the various romances in the story: that between Richard and Anne Neville, between Richard and Katherine Haute, and between John Neville and his wife Isobel.
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Love Anthony
Lisa Genova, 2012
Simon & Schuster
309 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781439164693
Summary
I’m always hearing about how my brain doesn’t work right.... But it doesn’t feel broken to me.
Olivia Donatelli’s dream of a “normal” life shattered when her son, Anthony, was diagnosed with autism at age three. Understanding the world from his perspective felt bewildering, nearly impossible. He didn’t speak. He hated to be touched. He almost never made eye contact. And just as Olivia was starting to realize that happiness and autism could coexist, Anthony died.
Now she’s alone in a cottage on Nantucket, separated from her husband, desperate to understand the meaning of her son’s short life, when a chance encounter with another woman facing her own loss brings Anthony alive again for Olivia in a most unexpected way.
Beth Ellis’s entire life changed with a simple note: “I’m sleeping with Jimmy.” Fourteen years of marriage. Three beautiful daughters. Yet even before her husband’s affair, she had never felt so alone. Heartbroken, she finds the pieces of the vivacious, creative person she used to be packed away in a box in her attic. For the first time in years, she uncaps her pen, takes a deep breath, and begins to write. The young but exuberant voice that emerges onto the page is a balm to the turmoil within her, a new beginning, and an astonishing bridge back to herself.
In a piercing story about motherhood, autism, and love, New York Times bestselling author Lisa Genova offers us two unforgettable women on the verge of change and the irrepressible young boy whose unique wisdom helps them both find the courage to move on. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—November 22, 1970
• Where—N/A
• Education—B.S. Bates College; Ph.D, Harvard University
• Currently—lives on Cape Cod, Massachusetts
Lisa Genova is an American neuroscientist and author of fiction. She graduated valedictorian, summa cum laude from Bates College with a BS degree in biopsychology and received her Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard University in 1998.
Genova did research at Massachusetts General Hospital East, Yale Medical School, McLean Hospital, and the National Institutes of Health. She also taught neuroanatomy at Harvard Medical School fall 1996.
Genova married and gave birth to a daughter in 2000. Four years later she and her husband divorced, and Genova began writing full-time. To hear Genova tell it:
When I was 33, I got divorced. I’d been a stay-at-home mom for four years, and I planned to go back to work as a health-care industry strategy consultant. But then I asked myself a question that changed the course of my life: If I could do anything I wanted, what would I do? My answer, which was both exciting and terrifying—write a novel about a woman with Alzheimer’s (Cape Cod Magazine.).
In 2007 she self-published her first novel, Still Alice, which went on to became a major best seller and award winning film. Since then, Genova has written three other fictional works about characters dealing with neurological disorders.
Still Alice
Genova's debut novel follows a woman suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Alice Howland, a 50-year-old woman, is a cognitive psychology professor at Harvard and a world-renowned linguistics expert. She is married to an equally successful husband, and they have three grown children. The disease takes hold swiftly, changing Alice’s relationship with her family and the world.
Self-published, Genova sold copies of the book out of the trunk of her car. The book was later acquired by Simon & Schuster and published in 2009. It appeared on the New York Times best seller list for more than 40 weeks, was sold in 30 countries, and translated into more than 20 languages.
The book was adapted for the stage by Christine Mary Dunford and performed by Chicago's Lookingglass Theatre Company in 2013.
A 2014 film adaptation starred Julianne Moore as the lead and co-starred Alec Baldwin, Kristen Stewart, and Kate Bosworth. Moore won an Oscar for Best Actress.
Other books
♦ Left Neglected (2011)
Genova's second novel tells the story of a woman who suffers from left neglect (also called hemispatial or unilateral neglect), caused by a traumatic brain injury. As she struggles to recover, she learns that she must embrace a simpler life. She begins to heal when she attends to elements left neglected in herself, her family, and the world around her.
♦ Love Anthony (2012)
Offering a unique perspective in fiction, this third novel presents the extraordinary voice of Anthony, a nonverbal boy with autism. Anthony reveals a neurologically plausible peek inside the mind of autism, why he hates pronouns, why he loves swinging and the number three, how he experiences routine, joy, and love. And it is the voice of this voiceless boy that guides two women in this powerfully unforgettable story to discover the universal truths that connect us all.
♦ Inside the O'Briens (2015)
In her fourth novel, Genova follows Joe O'Brien, a middle-aged Boston policeman diagnosed with Huntington's. There is no cure, and the disease is progressive and lethal. The story revolves around the fallout on Joe's family, including his daughter who is at risk for carrying the genes.
TV and film
Since her first novel was published, Genova has become a professional speaker about Alzheimer's disease. She has been a guest on the Today Show, Dr. Oz, CNN, PBS News Hour, and the Diane Rehm Show. She appeared in the documentary film To Not Fade Away. It is a follow-up to the Emmy Award-winning film, Not Fade Away (2009), about Marie Vitale, a woman who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease at the age of 45. (Adapated from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/6/2015.)
Book Reviews
Lisa Genova's novels ring true. Love Anthony, like Genova's two previous novels, is beautifully written, and poignant to the point of heartbreak.... Anyone who has had even a passing contact with an autistic child will relate.... Try not to weep.
USA Today
Genova's newest (after Left Neglected) tells the tales of two women struggling with a timely topic, but the device she uses to connect their stories—a bland bit of mysticism—obfuscates otherwise compelling narratives. Olivia's life is in shambles—she spent years coming to terms with her son, Anthony, being diagnosed with autism, only to lose him to a subdural hematoma at age 8. Now her husband's filing for divorce. Meanwhile, Beth is reeling from the discovery that her husband has been cheating on her for months. In an effort to cope, she returns to her former passion—writing—and begins a new book inspired by a dream. That story magically turns out to be Anthony's story, as told by him. Eventually, the women come together, and Olivia reads Beth's story and begins to heal. Though each story is engaging in its own right, the plot device that connects Beth and Olivia makes the book read like self-help.
Publishers Weekly
Writing with deep empathy and insight, Genova has created an engaging story that fearlessly asks the big questions.
Booklist
A story about unconditional love, loss and renewal by bestselling author Genova (Left Neglected, 2011, etc.). Nantucket residents Beth Ellis and Olivia Donatelli have both experienced life-shattering events that have left them raw and wounded and questioning everything that they ever believed to be true.... As Olivia turns to photography...Beth picks up a pen and reconnects with a passion she's long forgotten: writing. Ensconced in a comfortable area of the library, Beth writes the story of a young autistic boy with humor and intelligence and exuberance for life, who through her, can voice his thoughts and feelings and allow others to see into his world. And as she shares these words with Olivia, they provide the strength and understanding and purpose that both women need to come to terms with the past and move on with their lives. There's a point in the narrative where one of the characters becomes so engrossed in reading a book that she loses track of time. Readers of Genova's latest excellent offering might very well find the same happening to them.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. How much did you know about this condition before starting Love Anthony? Do you know anyone who has autism or an autistic person in their family?
2. What significance does the setting of Nantucket play in this story? Would the story have been different if it had taken place in New York City or Chicago?
3. Beth pulls a box out of her attic, filled with remnants from her old life, and is reminded of the woman she once was. If you were to go through a box from your attic, what items might you find?
4. On the subject of marriage and fidelity, Beth’s friend Courtney muses: “You’re always at the mercy of the people you’re in a relationship with, right?” (p. 171) Do you agree? What do you think of the advice she offers Beth?
5. Do you think the author accurately captured the voice of a young autistic boy in the Anthony chapters? Did these sections enhance Beth’s story for you? What about Olivia’s journal entries?
6. After receiving David’s letter about his impending engagement, Olivia ponders the concept of happiness: “He’s right. I forgot about happiness. At first, it wasn’t a priority. Anthony had autism, and every ounce of energy went into saving him. Her happiness was irrelevant.... And then, just when she was starting to realize that happiness and autism could co-exist in the same room, in the same sentence, in her heart, Anthony died, and happiness was no longer a concept she could fathom.” (p. 283) Do you think happiness is a conscious choice? Do you find it telling that Olivia uses the phrase “saving him” in reference to Anthony and his autism?
7. Toward the end of the story, Olivia has an epiphany when she realizes that “There was more to Anthony’s life than his death. And there was more to Anthony than his autism.” (p. 283) What do you think finally enables Olivia to have this realization? Was it a singular event or a process?
8. When Jimmy and Beth share their homework assignments given to them by Dr. Campbell, were you surprised by Beth’s initial reaction? Why is forgiving Jimmy the one thing Beth can’t do?
9. After reading Beth’s novel, Olivia is convinced Anthony is speaking to her through Beth. Skeptical, Beth discusses the idea with the more spiritual Petra, who feels “we’re all connected, even if we don’t know how. Maybe communicating through you gives you the something you need in this lifetime.” (p. 308) Do you agree or disagree with Petra?
10. Through writing her book, Beth realizes “this story was more about Anthony the boy than Anthony the boy with autism.... She was simply writing about Anthony, a boy worthy of happiness and safety, of feeling wanted and loved. Just like her. The more she wrote about Anthony, the more she realized that she was actually writing about herself.” (p. 331) How so?
11.Beth ultimately decides the lesson of her book is “Find someone to love and love without condition.” (p.332) Do you think this could also apply as an overall theme for Love Anthony? Can you find any others?
12.Which character did you relate to the most and why? Where do you see these characters in five years?
13.What do you think of Beth’s epilogue? Do you think it provides a satisfying ending to her story? To the novel as a whole?
14.Another recurring theme of Love Anthony is faith—having faith, losing faith, and taking a leap of faith. Can you remember a time in your own life when you took a leap of faith?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Love in Lowercase
Frascesc Miralles, 2010 (U.S., 2016)
Penguin Publishing
249 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143128212
Summary
A romantic comedy for language lovers and fans of The Rosie Project, about a brainy bachelor and the cat that opens his eyes to life’s little pleasures.
When Samuel, a lonely linguistics lecturer, wakes up on New Year’s Day, he is convinced that the year ahead will bring nothing more than passive verbs and un-italicized moments—until an unexpected visitor slips into his Barcelona apartment and refuses to leave.
The appearance of Mishima, a stray, brindle-furred cat, becomes the catalyst that leads Samuel from the comforts of his favorite books, foreign films, and classical music to places he’s never been (next door) and to people he might never have met (a neighbor with whom he’s never exchanged a word).
Even better, the Catalan cat leads him back to the mysterious Gabriela, whom he thought he’d lost long before, and shows him, in this international bestseller for fans of The Rosie Project, The Solitude of Prime Numbers, and The Guest Cat, that sometimes love is hiding in the smallest characters. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 27, 1968
• Where—Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
• Education—Autonomous University of Barcelona (no degree); B.A., University of
Barcelona
• Awards—Gran Angular Prize (YA novel); Torrevieja Prize
• Currently—lives in Barcelona
Francesc Miralles Contijoch is a Spanish writer, essayist, translator, and musician. He was born in Barcelona as the son of a dressmaker and an erudite office worker. After spending eight years in a religious school in la Ribera, he attended high school at the now-defunct academy Almi and Ies Montserrat.
Education
Despite his bad grades, he was accepted into the Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB) to study journalism, which he quit after four months. That the same year, he started to work as a waiter at Puces del Barri Gotic, a bar in the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona, where he learned to play the piano.
In the following year, Miralles returned to the UAB, this time to study English literature, which he combined with precarious language-teacher jobs. After five years of being a sloth, he stalled in his third year...and quit again.
A lover of travel, Miralles decided to leave everything behind to travel the world. A bunch of chance encounters led him to live in Croatia and Slovenia during the armed conflicts.
Upon returning to Barcelona, Miralles resumed his academic life as a student—this time of German literature—at the Universidad de Barcelona. Before finishing his postgraduate studies, he began work in the publishing business, initially as a translator of English and German spirituality and alternative-therapy books. Later he became an editor overseeing several collections of self-help books, even writing under a pseudonym.
Writing
Miralles eventually left publishing and promised himself he would never work for another company again. Instead, he decided to try his hand at writing a youth novel, a decision that payed off—he has since published some 30 books, including young adult, fantasy, and adult novels, as well as nonfiction.
His first adult novel, Love in Lowercase, came out in 2010 and has been translated into 20 languages. A sequel, Wabi-Sabi, was published in 2014 (so far only in Europe). In 2016, six years after it was first released, Love in Lowercase was published in the U.S.
Miralles currently dedicates his time to both literature and journalism, combining monthly contributions to newspapers and magazines, such as El Pais Semanal and Mente Sana, with his work as a literary adviser to publishers and a literary agency.
Music
Aside from his writing life, Miralles is also a musician. In 2007, he released an album of songs, which he wrote and played, called Hotel Guru. The next year, in 2008, he and a group of musicians who work in publishing got together and formed the band, Nikosia. The group has released a number of albums. (Author bio adapted from the author's website and Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/19/2016.)
Book Reviews
This novel, the quirky tale of Barcelona linguistics professor Samuel, a mysterious cat named Mishima, and the bumpy road to love, is an international bestseller in its original Spanish edition....
Publishers Weekly
[A] cat sneaks into the Barcelona apartment of forlorn linguistics professor Samuel and eventually leads him to his neighbors and his long-lost Gabriela. You've gotta love a book that's compared to Graeme Simsion's The Rosie Project and Paolo Giordano's The Solitude of Prime Numbers.
Library Journal
A lovely little book with nods to literature, philosophy and music that encourages us to wake up to our lives and to the people in them, and to let small coincidences lead us to love.
BookPage
[G]enuinely charming if a little predictable...[with] an easy protagonist to root for. The simplicity of Miralles' writing is also key; his short chapters are like brief, linked thoughts that highlight the magic in the ordinar.... A satisfyingly quaint romance.
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.)
Love in Mid Air
Kim Wright, 2010
Grand Central Publishing
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780446540438
Summary
A chance encounter with a stranger on an airplane sends Elyse Bearden into an emotional tailspin. Suddenly Elyse is willing to risk everything: her safe but stale marriage, her seemingly perfect life in an affluent Southern suburb, and her position in the community. She finds herself cutting through all the instincts that say "no" and instead lets "yes" happen.
As Elyse embarks on a risky affair, her longtime friend Kelly and the other women in their book club begin to question their own decisions about love, sex, marriage, and freedom. There are consequences for Elyse, her family, and her circle of close friends, all of whom have an investment in her life continuing as normal. But is normal what she really wants after all? In the end it will take an extraordinary leap of faith for Elyse to find—and follow—her own path to happiness.
An intelligent, sexy, absorbing tale and an honest look at modern-day marriage, Love in Mid Air offers the experience of what it's like to change the course of one's own destiny when finding oneself caught in mid air. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Kim Wright has been writing about travel, food, and wine for more than 25 years and is a two-time recipient of the Lowell Thomas Award for Travel Writing. Love in Mid Air is her first novel and she is presently at work on a mystery about Jack the Ripper. (From .)
Book Reviews
Astute and engrossing, this debut is a treat.
People
(Starred review.) Wright hits it out of the park in her debut, an engaging account of a woman contemplating divorce. Despite finally getting her husband, Phil, to attend counseling sessions with her, Elyse Bearden realizes her marriage is dead in the water. Though Phil’s a doting father and a decent man, he’s also the occasional jerk who snickers at his wife in lingerie and is generally indifferent to her. Elyse already knows she’s going to leave her husband when she meets Gerry Kincaid and soon begins an affair that allows her to escape from the crushing banality of her suburban life. Serving as Elyse’s foil is her beautiful best friend, Kelly, now married to an older, wealthy man. While the idea of housewives complaining about their husbands over lunch may strike some as a conventional hen-lit trope, Wright conveys friendships and the blasé everyday with authenticity and telling detail, while passages depicting Elyse’s inner life are rife with the same wit and insight that infuse the dialogue. Though this story is one that readers may have seen many times before, Wright delivers fresh perspective and sympathetic characters few writers can match.
Publishers Weekly
As Elyse questions what she wants out of life, she must weigh the risk of what will happen if, or when, her husband finds out about Gerry. An intense, thoughtful novel about love and friendship, or the lack thereof, in a marriage. —Hilary Hatton
Booklist
With a successful dentist husband, adorable young daughter and close-knit group of female friends, Elyse, like so many heroines who have it all, could not be more miserable. She’s stifled by her suburban life, and she cannot communicate with her taciturn hubby, Phil. She fortunately happens to have a creative outlet (she’s a talented potter) and it is during a flight for work that she finds herself seated next to Gerry, an attractive Boston-based investment banker who, like her, has a spouse at home. The two strangers have an instant rapport, and back at home in Charlotte, N.C., she calls him. That leads to an erotically charged encounter in New York, followed by brief monthly meetings that help to convince her that marrying Phil was a mistake. But while Gerry certainly seems besotted with Elyse, he offers her no promises. Phil, unaware of her infidelity but sensing her growing unease with their life, agrees to marriage counseling, as long as they use his best friend Jeff, their minister, as mediator. Big mistake. Elyse goes along with it while mentally making plans to leave him. Meanwhile, her affluent inner circle senses something is amiss, with her best friend Kelly, herself in a less-than-ideal marriage, feeling threatened by Elyse’s risky behavior. Knowing full well how her actions will impact her entire community, Elyse bides her time, until a shocking act of violence forces a decision. So will she choose her husband, her lover or neither? Sharply written and emotionally accessible, Wright’s debut offers a clear-eyed taste of hope without letting anyone, especially Elyse, off the hook. A modern take on adultery that does not shy away from the costs—and benefits—of a post-marriage life.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What do you think the title means? Obviously, Elyse meets Gerry on an airplane but in what other ways does she remain “in mid air” during the course of the novel? At what point, if any, would you say she finally lands?
2. Although the novel is told from Elyse’s point of view, the voices of the other women are a major part of the story and they represent varying, and at times contradictory, perspectives on love and marriage. Are all the viewpoints equally valid? Did you identify primarily with one character or did you find yourself siding with different women at different points in the novel?
3. When Elyse reflects on Kelly’s past affair she says “She was my best friend. It happened to one of us and so, in a way, it happened to both of us.” How do you think Kelly’s painful romantic history influences Elyse’s decisions? How does it influence the role Kelly plays as Elyse’s confidant?
4. What makes Gerry so irresistible to Elyse? Is it merely the fact he isn’t Phil, or are there other qualities in his personality and/or the way the two met that make it believable Elyse would be easily seduced?
5. Is an affair ever forgivable? Do you find Elyse’s situation sympathetic or do you see her as impulsive and selfish? Does the fact she has a child make the situation worse? Do you agree with Kelly that society’s double standard makes an affair more acceptable for a man than for a woman?
6. The story is set in the south and much of the action revolves around the social life of a church. Would Love in Mid-Air be a drastically different book if it were set in another part of the country or could these things happen in any affluent American suburb?
7. While watching a movie starring Elizabeth Taylor, Elyse says that she can’t bear to see other women unhappy and that this is why she moved to a place “where the women hide their pain so well.” Is this accurate? Is there evidence that other women in the group are also hurting or is the statement simply a projection of Elyse’s own state of mind? Is discontent among women really contagious? What signs are there at the end of the book that Elyse’s decisions have had an impact on how the other women view their own lives?
8. It would be easy to see a novel about a married woman who is having an affair as a classic woman-caught-between-two-men sort of story. How is Love in Mid-Air different from your standard love triangle?
9. The book is full of symbols – broken pottery, falling, myopia, vintage movies, the cat, the casseroles, the handcuffs, the old love letters Kelly gives to Elyse, even the fact the women walk in circles for exercise. What do you think these symbols mean to Elyse and how does their significance change through the course of the story?
10. Kelly tells Elyse that an affair is like cocaine because it takes more to get you off every time, and Elyse’s behavior does become increasingly reckless as the novel progresses. Do you think she’s lost touch with reality? That she wants to be caught? That she’s trying to force either Gerry or Phil to react in a way that takes the decision out of her hands?
11. Would things have worked out differently if Elyse and Phil had kept the original marriage counseling session they’d scheduled instead of choosing counseling with Jeff? Did the fact he was their pastor and friend hamper Jeff’s ability to understand what was really going on in their marriage?
12. Lynn is an enigmatic character throughout the book, but especially at the end when, after saying that “Jesus and Elvis and wild horses couldn’t drag me back” she abruptly reconciles with her ex-husband. Elyse imagines why Lynn might return to her marriage. Do you find Elyse’s fantasy plausible or do you think Lynn could have other reasons for going back? Why do you think Elyse’s postcard from Belize was the last to arrive? Why do you think she opts not to read it?
13. We see everything in the book through Elyse’s eyes. How would the story have been different if Kelly had been the narrator?
14. SPOILER ALERT: Elyse is upset that Tory is present during the scene on the church steps and wonders what stories she will tell herself later about what she’s witnessed. How do you think these events – the affair, seeing her father strike her mother, the ultimate divorce – will affect Tory’s future life?
15. SPOILER ALERT: Also in the scene on the church steps, Elyse literally “takes the fall” for something Kelly had done years earlier. Do you consider it ironic that it is her decision to keep Kelly’s letters, and not the affair that pushes the novel to its climax? Although Phil’s actions are surprising and violent, Elyse believes she’s been “set free on a technicality.” Why do you think she compares being struck to a kind of religious grace? Did the reactions of any of the other characters who witness the event surprise you?
16. Elyse clearly changes the most in the course of the novel but there are sizable shifts in other characters as well. How does Gerry change? Belinda? Jeff? Nancy? Phil?
17. Elyse recalls at one point that her grandmother told her “When you marry the man, you marry the life” and she concludes the inverse is also true; if she leaves Phil she will have to leave her comfortable life – i.e., economic security, the church, her close group of friends, and perhaps even her child. Is this what’s happening at the end of the book? Or are there signs that the transition might not be as wrenching as she predicted?
18. Would you say that Love in Mid Air has a happy ending?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Love in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1985
Knopf Doubleday
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307389732
Summary
In the late 1800s, in a Caribbean port city, a young telegraph operator named Florentino Ariza falls deliriously in love with Fermina Daza, a beautiful student. She is so sheltered that they carry on their romance secretly, through letters and telegrams. When Fermina Daza's father finds out about her suitor, he sends her on a trip intended to make her forget the affair. Lorenza Daza has much higher ambitions for his daughter than the humble Florentino. Her grief at being torn away from her lover is profound, but when she returns she breaks off the relationship, calling everything that has happened between them an illusion.
Instead, she marries the elegant, cultured, and successful Dr. Juvenal Urbino. As his wife, she will think of herself as "the happiest woman in the world." Though devastated by her rejection, Florentino Ariza is not one to be deterred. He has declared his eternal love for Fermina, and determines to gain the fame and fortune he needs to win her back. When Fermina's husband at last dies, 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days later, Florentino Ariza approaches Fermina again at her husband's funeral. There have been hundreds of other affairs, but none of these women have captured his heart as Fermina did. "He is ugly and sad," says one of his lovers, "but he is all love."
In this magnificent story of a romance, García Márquez beautifully and unflinchingly explores the nature of love in all its guises, small and large, passionate and serene. Love can emerge like a disease in these characters, but it can also outlast bleak decades of war and cholera, and the effects of time itself. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 06, 1928
• Where—Aracataca, Colombia
• Education—Universidad Nacional de Colombia; Universidad
de Cartagena
• Awards—Nobel Prize, 1982
• Currently—lives in Mexico City, Mexico
Gabriel García Márquez is the product of his family and his nation. Born in the small coastal town of Aracataca in northern Colombia, he was raised by his maternal grandparents. As a child, he was mesmerized by stories spun by his grandmother and her sisters — a rich gumbo of superstitions, folk tales, and ghost stories that fired his youthful imagination. And from his grandfather, a colonel in Colombia's devastating Civil War, he learned about his country's political struggles. This potent mix of Liberal politics, family lore, and regional mythology formed the framework for his magical realist novels.
When his grandfather died, García Márquez was sent to Sucre to live (for the first time) with his parents. He attended university in Bogotá, where he studied law in accordance with his parents' wishes. It was here that he first read The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka and discovered a literature he understood intuitively — one with nontraditional plots and structures, just like the stories he had known all his life. His studies were interrupted when the university was closed, and he moved back north, intending to pursue both writing and law; but before long, he quit school to pursue a career in journalism.
In 1954 his newspaper sent García Márquez on assignment to Italy, marking the start of a lifelong self-imposed exile from the horrors of Colombian politics that took him to Barcelona, Paris, New York, and Mexico. Influenced by American novelist William Faulkner, creator of the fictionalized Yoknapatawpha County, and by the powerful intergenerational tragedies of the Greek dramatist Sophocles, García Márquez began writing fiction, honing a signature blend of fantasy and reality that culminated in the 1967 masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude. This sweeping epic became an instant classic and set the stage for more bestselling novels, including Love in the Time of Cholera, Love and Other Demons, and Memories of My Melancholy Whores. In addition, he has completed the first volume of a shelf-bending memoir, and his journalism and nonfiction essays have been collected into several anthologies.
In 1982, García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In his acceptance speech, he called for a "sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth." Few writers have pursued that utopia with more passion and vigor than this towering 20th-century novelist.
Extras
• Gabriel José García Márquez' affectionate nickname is Gabo.
• García Márquez' first two novellas were completed long before their actual release dates, but might not have been published if it weren't for his friends, who found the manuscripts in a desk drawer and a suitcase, and sent them in for publication. (Bio from Barnes and Noble.)
Book Reviews
Suppose...it were possible, not only to swear love ''forever,'' but actually to follow through on it — to live a long, full and authentic life based on such a vow, to put one's alloted stake of precious time where one's heart is? This is the extraordinary premise of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's new novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, one on which he delivers, and triumphantly.... He writes with impassioned control, out of a maniacal serenity: the Garcimarquesian voice we have come to recognize from the other fiction has matured, found and developed new resources.
Thomas Pinchon - New York Times
Like many great novels, Gabriel Garc ía Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera portrays the tension between illusions and material reality, especially in the context of love. In the novel's final pages, when Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza are finally together in their old age, we are told that love "was more solid the closer it came to death" (p. 345). This statement exemplifies the novel's method—instead of saying what love is, and in this way judging the strength of its characters' grasp of reality, it articulates the relationship between love and something else, giving different perspectives but no definitions. This circling around love gives Love in the Time of Cholera the quality of capturing the ineffable.
Different ways of understanding, experiencing, and representing love are embodied by the novel's three central characters—Florentino Ariza, Fermina Daza, and Dr. Juvenal Urbino. For Florentino, love has the properties of a dream; its fullest expression occurs in art (especially in writing), and it stands in opposition to everyday reality, entirely resistant to rational understanding. Like Emma in Madame Bovary, Florentino is filled with notions of love derived from popular literature; he also becomes a comic figure when reality unexpectedly intrudes into the world of his imagination. The bird droppings that fall on Fermina's embroidery when they meet as teenagers in the park and the intestinal disruption that betrays him when they meet following Dr. Urbino's death both testify to the unavoidable fact of the material world. But Florentino's fate suggests neither acquiescence to reality nor the continuation of his belief in a wholly illusory kind of love.
As the relationship between Florentino and Fermina unfolds following Dr. Urbino's death, it seems enabled by Florentino's emergence from the imaginary world in which he has lived for so long—the very existence of his imaginary world is made possible by Fermina's absence from it. The letters Florentino writes to her after Dr. Urbino's death possess, in Fermina's words, "a foundation in reality" (p. 330), as opposed to the letters of his youth, inspired by "half-baked endearments taken whole from the Spanish romantics" (p. 75). But other aspects of the novel's conclusion complicate this interpretation. Before making love, Florentino tells Fermina, "I've remained a virgin for you" (p. 339). In light of his many trysts and affairs, in what sense could this be true other than an imaginary one? When asked how long their ship will sail, keeping up its deception by flying the yellow cholera flag, Florentino answers, "Forever" (p. 348), as if to specifically deny the reality of death.
Because of his belief in the power of the rational mind, Dr. Urbino often appears more grounded in reality than Florentino. He considers marriage "an absurd invention" (p. 209), and his marriage to Fermina represents a lifelong effort to defeat the absurd and replace it with something that can withstand logical analysis. After his death, Fermina recalls his belief that "the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability" (p. 300). On the night they consummate their marriage, Dr. Urbino readily admits to himself that he does not love Fermina, but "he was sure there would be no obstacle to their inventing true love" (p. 159). He thinks of love not as an unruly passion, but as if it can be brought into existence merely by an act of will. But his determination to avoid the chaos of emotion can make Dr. Urbino seem just as divorced from reality as Florentino. In his dissertation, Dr. Urbino asserts that, given the human organism's "many useless or duplicated functions...it could be more simple and by the same token less vulnerable" (p. 158-59). Is this idea any less illusory than the most extravagant of Florentino's ecstatic proclamations of his love for Fermina?
Between the extremes of Florentino and Dr. Urbino is Fermina. When Dr. Urbino first tells her about the importance of stability, she hears in it a "miserable threat," but when she remembers his words after he dies, she thinks of them as "the lodestone that had given them both so many happy hours" (p. 300). She ends her first affair with Florentino by telling him in a letter that "what is between us is nothing more than an illusion" (p. 102). As coldly precise as this declaration is, Fermina is nevertheless open to the emotional upheavals that attend her marriage to Dr. Urbino. When he confirms her suspicion of his adulterous affair with Barbara Lynch, she wishes he had denied it, preferring the illusion of his fidelity to the feeling that "her rage would never end" (p. 251). Sharing memories of Dr. Urbino with Florentino, Fermina "could not conceive of a husband better than hers had been, and yet when she recalled their life she found more difficulties than pleasures," admitting to Florentino that she does not "really know if it was love or not" (p. 329).
It is tempting to see Fermina as encompassing both the illusory and the real, but such symmetry would reduce her to a thematic device, as opposed to a fully alive character, capable of expecting nothing more from life after her husband dies and then falling in love with Florentino. The fact that neither she nor the novel ever arrive at a fixed definition of love suggests that its elusiveness is part of its very nature.
(Copyright 2007 by the Random House Publishing Group. Permission for use granted by Random House Inc.)
Discussion Questions
1. Why does García Márquez use similar terms to describe the effects of love and cholera?
2. Plagues figure prominently in many of García Márquez's novels. What literal and metaphoric functions does the cholera plague serve in this novel? What light does it shed on Latin American society of the nineteenth century? How does it change its characters' attitudes toward life? How are the symptoms of love equated in the novel with the symptoms of cholera?
3. What does the conflict between Dr. Juvenal Urbino and Florentino Ariza reveal about the customs of Europe and the ways of Caribbean life? How is Fermina Daza torn between the two?
4. Dr. Urbino reads only what is considered fine literature, while Fermina Daza immerses herself in contemporary romances or soap operas. What does this reveal about the author's attitude toward the distinction between "high" and "low" literature. Does his story line and style remind you more of a soap opera or a classical drama?
5. After rejecting Florentino's declaration of love following her husband's funeral, why is Fermina eventually won over by him?
6. Why does a change in Florentino's writing style make Fermina more receptive to him?
7. What does Florentino mean when he tells Fermina, before they make love for the first time, "I've remained a virgin for you" (p. 339)?
8. Why does Florentino tell each of his lovers that she is the only one he has had?
9. What does Florentino's uncle mean when he says, "without river navigation there is no love" (p. 168)?
10. Do Fermina and Dr. Urbino succeed at "inventing true love" (p. 159)?
11. Set against the backdrop of recurring civil wars and cholera epidemics, the novel explores death and decay, as well as love. How does Dr. Urbino's refusal to grow old gracefully affect the other two characters? What does it say about fulfillment and beauty in their society? Does the fear of aging or death change Florentino Ariza's feelings toward Fermina Daza?
12. Compare the suicide of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour at the beginning of the book with that of Florentino's former lover, América Vicuña at the end. How do their motives differ? Why does the author frame the book with these two events?
13. Why is Leona Cassiani "the true woman in [Florentino's] life although neither of them ever knew it and they never made love" (p. 182)?
14. When Tránsito Ariza tells Florentino he looks as if he were going to a funeral when he is going to visit Fermina, why does he respond by saying, "It's almost the same thing" (p. 65)? (Questions issued by publisher.)
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Love Is a Canoe
Ben Schrank, 2013
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374192495
Summary
Peter Herman is something of a folk hero. Marriage Is a Canoe, his legendary, decades-old book on love and relationships, has won the hearts of hopeful romantics and desperate cynics alike. He and his beloved wife lived a relatively peaceful life in upstate New York. But now it’s 2010, and Peter’s wife has just died. Completely lost, he passes the time with a woman he admires but doesn’t love—and he begins to look back through the pages of his book and question homilies such as: A good marriage is a canoe—it needs care and isn’t meant to hold too much—no more than two adults and a few kids.
It’s advice he has famously doled out for decades. But what is it worth?
Then Peter receives a call from Stella Petrovic, an ambitious young editor who wants to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Marriage Is a Canoe with a contest for struggling couples. The prize? An afternoon with Peter and a chance to save their relationship.
The contest ensnares its creator in the largely opaque politics of her publishing house while it introduces the reader to couples in various states of distress, including a shy thirtysomething Brooklynite and her charismatic and entrepreneurial husband, who may just be a bit too charismatic for the good of their marriage. There’s the middle-aged publisher whose imposing manner has managed to impose loneliness on her for longer than she cares to admit. And then there is Peter, who must discover what he meant when he wrote Marriage Is a Canoe if he is going to help the contest’s winners and find a way to love again.
In Love Is a Canoe, Ben Schrank delivers a smart, funny, romantic, and hugely satisfying novel about the fragility of marriage and the difficulty of repairing the damage when well-intentioned people forget how to be good to each other. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1969-1970
• Raised—Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Brown University; M.A., New York
University
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City
Ben Schrank published his first novel, Miracle Man, in 1999. The New Yorker selected it as one of six debut novels in that year’s fiction issue, saying “As the ethical lines blur, Schrank makes New York seem sharp and new.” Time magazine called it a “brilliantly observed story about the desire to live in an egalitarian world.”
In 2002 Schrank published his second novel, Consent. Leonard Michaels wrote of Consent: “It is a very serious story, and, in places, it is hilarious. As for the woman at the center, she is unforgettable.”
Schrank has taught at the MFA program at Brooklyn college. He was for some years the voice of "Ben’s Life," a fictional column for Seventeen magazine. He is currently publisher of Razorbill, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers. He grew up in Brooklyn where he now lives with his wife, Lauren Mechling, and son. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Despite a softly cynical underside, Love Is a Canoe is an affirmation that secrets, fantasies and wrong turns are part of both publishing careers and love. Schrank has done something here that may sound impossible: He’s written a funny novel about publishing that is not caustic but optimistic, not biting but bighearted—a story about the delusions with which self-aware, smart people are all too willing to live in order to avoid the painful (yet entertaining) upheaval that comes with truth.
Dean Bakopoulos - New York Times Book Review
(Starred review.) Three stories of personal and literary authenticity weave through this novel of love and books that gets sharper and smarter as it progresses. Forty years ago, Peter Herman penned Love Is a Canoe, a memoir and meditation on marriage that retains a devoted following. Canoe’s homilies from Peter’s adolescent summer spent in upstate New York with his grandparents as his own parents’ marriage crumbled contain a certain enduring quality: “A good marriage is a canoe—it needs care and isn’t meant to hold too much—no more than two adults and a couple of kids.” But as the recently widowed author ponders the course of his marriage and current relationship, straining against late-middle age, there’s a danger that his personal and literary fictions will unravel. The danger grows acute when Stella, a young book editor trying to spur sales on Canoe’s 40th anniversary, creates a contest for a couple in trouble; winners will spend an afternoon with the somewhat reclusive author in the hopes that their troubled relationship will be rescued. But as Emily and Eli Corelli, a young Brooklyn couple with a rocky marriage, enter Peter’s orbit, they, Peter, and Stella confront the underlying truths of their lives. The honesty doled out as events unspool is bracing and frank, and give these characters added depth and wisdom.
Publishers Weekly
The revival of a classic self-help book reveals some raw emotions in this canny novel by Schrank (Consent, 2002, etc.). Published in 1971, Peter Herman's Marriage Is a Canoe became the kind of '70s self-help book that everybody seemed to own yet nobody seemed to take seriously.... [I]n 2011, it's inspired Stella, a young editor at the book's publisher, to find a way to boost sales: A contest in which a couple with marriage troubles wins a weekend with Peter to talk out their issues.... Schrank has firm command of the story, never letting the plot turns descend into farce, and the closing pages are a convincing portrait of how relationships shift in ways no self-help book can anticipate. A wise imagining of modern-day love, unromantic but never cynical.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. How did your impressions of Eli and Emily shift throughout the novel? How does their marriage compare with Peter and Lisa’s?
2. What does the novel say about love in the twenty-first century? Have expectations for relationships changed very much since the 1960s and ’70s?
3. How were Emily and her sister, Sherry, affected by their mother’s experience as a wife?
4. Discuss Marriage Is a Canoe as if you had chosen it for your book group. Is Peter’s advice relevant to your situation? What inspiration can you take from his grandparents Hank and Bess? What metaphors, besides a canoe, would you use for marriage?
5. Peter and Helena talk candidly about the illusions and untested advice contained in Marriage Is a Canoe. Do self-help books have to be steeped in facts and reality in order to be helpful? Was Emily harmed by the fantasy of a watertight marriage?
6. In “Stolen Bases,” Peter tells the story of his friend Johnny, whose parents had a rough marriage but whose problems were easily sorted out by Hank. Why did Peter’s parents struggle so much in their relationship, despite the great role models of Hank and Bess?
7. What are the essential differences between Jenny and Emily? What does Eli need from each of them? Would you have stayed with Eli for as long as Emily did? Are he and Peter evidence that monogamy is unnatural, especially for men?
8. How did the success of the book help and harm Peter and Lisa’s marriage? How does Peter’s enterprise compare with Eli’s ambition for Roman Street Bicycles? How involved do spouses need to be in each other’s professional lives?
9. What kept Peter and Lisa together for so many years, despite severe disappointments, especially financial ones? How would the story of their marriage unfold if it were described from her point of view?
10. How does Belinda figure in Peter’s life? How does he see his role as a parent? When Eli andEmily considered becoming parents, what were their motivations?
11. During the contest award dinner, Peter prefers harmony and reconciliation, quashing any unpleasant topics that Eli and Emily try to raise. Does he prove to be good counselor? Wha would you have discussed with him if you had won the contest?
12. Why is it hard for Peter to commit to moving west with Maddie? What was he ultimately looking for in a relationship?
13. Why is Stella so intent on pleasing Helena? What does the Canoe project teach Stella about business and about love? What do you predict for her future with Ivan?
14. Reread the novel’s conclusion (the introduction to the revised, annotated, and retitled edition of Peter’s book). What do you make of the statement that “love is not so fickle and mean—not as tough as marriage can be,” and the idea that love is distinct from marriage?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Love Letters (Rose Harbor Series 3)
Debbie Macomber, 2014
Random House
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780553391138
Summary
In this enchanting novel set at Cedar Cove’s cozy Rose Harbor Inn, #1 New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber celebrates the power of love—and a well-timed love letter—to inspire hope and mend a broken heart.
Summer is a busy season at the inn, so proprietor Jo Marie Rose and handyman Mark Taylor have spent a lot of time together keeping the property running. Despite some folks’ good-natured claims to the contrary, Jo Marie insists that Mark is only a friend.
However, she seems to be thinking about this particular friend a great deal lately. Jo Marie knows surprisingly little about Mark’s life, due in no small part to his refusal to discuss it. She’s determined to learn more about his past, but first she must face her own—and welcome three visitors who, like her, are setting out on new paths.
Twenty-three-year-old Ellie Reynolds is taking a leap of faith. She’s come to Cedar Cove to meet Tom, a man she’s been corresponding with for months, and with whom she might even be falling in love. Ellie’s overprotective mother disapproves of her trip, but Ellie is determined to spread her wings.
Maggie and Roy Porter are next to arrive at the inn. They are taking their first vacation alone since their children were born. In the wake of past mistakes, they hope to rekindle the spark in their marriage—and to win back each other’s trust. But Maggie must make one last confession that could forever tear them apart.
For each of these characters, it will ultimately be a moment when someone wore their heart on their sleeve—and took pen to paper—that makes all the difference. Debbie Macomber’s moving novel reveals the courage it takes to be vulnerable, accepting, and open to love. (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
Prolific author Macomber’s mastery of women’s fiction is evident in her latest.... Macomber breathes life into each plotline, carefully intertwining her characters’ stories to ensure that none of them overshadow the others. Yet it is her ability to capture different facets of emotion which will entrance fans and newcomers alike.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Romance and a little mystery.... Innkeeper Jo Marie Rose is working through her grief over the loss of her husband—and...sets out to learn what she can about [Mark Taylor].... Macomber's latest...will have [fans]flipping pages until the end and eagerly anticipating the next installment. —Jane Blue, Prince William Cty. Lib. Syst., VA
Library Journal
Tensions rise when Mark discovers Jo Marie’s probing [into his past] and doesn’t like it one bit. Meanwhile, new guests arrive at the inn, bringing their own troubled pasts along with them.... As per usual, Macomber’s fans will be lining up to see what happens in this gentle and heartwarming read, and they won’t be disappointed. —Rebecca Vnuk
Booklist
[D]ud of a handyman, Mark Taylor...may be hiding a troubled past. Jo Marie's guests are in even more awkward predicaments.... Hurt feelings are mended in believable and unexpectedly uplifting ways, and a cliffhanger ending for Jo Marie begs for a swift resolution in the next book.
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.)
Love Medicine
Louise Erdrich, 1984 (rev. 2009)
HarperCollins
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061787423
Summary
Winner, 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award
The first book in Louise Erdrich's Native American series, which also includes The Beet Queen, Tracks, and The Bingo Palace, Love Medicine tells the story of two families—the Kashpaws and the Lamartines. Now resequenced by the author with the addition of never-before-published chapters, this is a publishing event equivalent to the presentation of a new and definitive text.
Written in Erdrich's uniquely poetic, powerful style, Love Medicine springs to raging life: a multigenerational portrait of new truths and secrets whose time has come, of strong men and women caught in an unforgettable drama of anger, desire, and the healing power that is "love medicine." Discover the writer whom Philp Roth called "the most interesting new American novelist to have appeared in years" all over again. (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 Award; 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
There are at least a dozen of the many vividly drawn people in this first novel who will not leave the mind once they are let in. Their power comes from Louise Erdrich's mastery of words. Nobody really talks the way they do, but the language of each convinces you you have heard them speaking all your life, and that illusion draws you quickly into their world, a place of poor shacks stuck amid the wrecks of old cars and other junk made beautiful in Miss Erdrich's evocation.
D.J.R. Bruckner - New York Times (1984)
A dazzling series of family portraits.... This novel is simply about the power of love.
Chicago Tribune
This reissue of Erdrich's exquisite first novel includes five new sections that color and complement the original multigenerational saga of two extended families who live on and around a Chippewa reservation in North Dakota. Each chapter is narrated in a memorable voice like the one of Lipsha Morrissey, a young man who is believed to have "the touch,'' with which he attempts to bring his wandering grandfather back to his long-suffering grandmother with a love medicine made from goose hearts. By placing us right inside the heads of her remarkable characters, Erdrich allows us to feel the despair that insensitive government policies, poverty, and alcoholism have brought them. For those who have yet to discover this magical novel and for those who will have the pleasure of re-experiencing its heartbreak and its hope, this new version is highly recommended. —Barbara Love, St. Lawrence Coll., Kingston, Ontario.
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. The novel deals extensively with the love-hate relationships between family members. What are some of the different kinds of familial bonds, positiveand negative? What themes are explored through these relationships? What does this novel suggest about the nature of families?
2. One theme of the novel is the unavoidable impact of the non-Indian world (for instance, Catholicism, alcohol, intermarriages, the Vietnam War, capitalism, the legal system) on the Chippewa. How does the interaction with outsiders affect specific characters? What does the novel suggest about the difficulties and consequences of dealing with a mixed world?
3. Why do you think Erdrich chose to write her novel in the way she did, using time leaps and a series of different narrators to recount their own tales? What do you think is gained by this form of narrative? How might the form's emphasis on individual storytelling relate to the novel's larger themes?
4. Why do you think the section "Love Medicine" was chosen as the title story of the novel? Would you have chosen another section on the basis of a strength or unifying theme?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
top of page (summary)
The Love of My Youth
Mary Gordon, 2011
Knopf Doubleday
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307377425
Summay
Miranda and Adam, high-school sweethearts now in their late fifties, arrive by chance at the same time in Rome, a city where they once spent a summer deeply in love, living together blissfully.
At an awkward reunion, the two—who parted in an atmosphere of passionate betrayal in the 1960s and haven’t seen each other since—are surprised to discover that they may have something to talk about. Both have their own guilt, their sense of who betrayed whom, and their long-held interpretation of the events that caused them not to marry and to split apart into the lives they’ve led since—both are married to others, with grown children. For the few weeks they are in Rome, Adam suggests that they meet for daily walks and get to know each other again. Gradually, as they take in the pleasures of the city and the drama of its streets, they discover not only what matters to them now but also more about what happened to them long ago.
Miranda and Adam are masterfully portrayed characters, intent upon understanding who they are in relation to who they were. A story about what first love means and how it is shattered, and the lessons old lovers may still have to share with each other many years later, The Love of My Youth is also a poignant look back at the hopes and dreams of a generation and what became of them. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Aka—Mary Gilmour
• Birth—December 8, 1949
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Barnard College; M.A., Syracuse
University
• Awards—Guggenheim Fellowship; O. Henry Award;
Janet Heidegger kafka Award
• Currently—lives in New York, New York
Mary Gordon is the author of the novels Spending, The Company of Women, and The Rest of Life, as well as the memoir The Shadow Man. She has received a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 1997 O. Henry Award for best short story. She teaches at Barnard College and lives in New York City. (From the publisher.)
Extras
From a 2004 Barnes & Noble interview:
• I don't have any great first job tales: I ve never worked on a tramp steamer or in a coal mine or anything like that. I think the inspiration for my writing came largely from my father and the joy that life in books represented to me."
• I love dancing; I adore salsa dancing and wish I could be in a Broadway chorus."
• I could not write without my dog, Rhoda, a Lab-chow mix."
• I would trade any writerly success if it would mean my children would be happy."
• I hate George Bush, John Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, and Cheney. I hate bullies. I hate people who say, It's so fun,' and say, 'literally,' when they mean, figuratively.' "
• When asked what book most influenced her life or career as a writer, here is what she said:
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. When I read it, I thought of myself as a poet. It made me aware that I could write prose that had the lyric power of poetry, and that I could explore the inner life of a woman with a depth and expansiveness I had never imagined.
(Author interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Emotionally engaging and smoothly flowing, The Love of My Youth showcases Gordon's power to write with controlled urgency, without dissembling or exaggeration, to reveal truths that are hard to face in the unsparing light of day, but without which we could not see ourselves as we are.
Liesl Schillinger - New York Times Book Review
Gordon...writes of the affection and wistfulness one has looking at the self growing smaller in the rearview mirror. And as a soulful and spiritual writer, the author of Final Payments and Circling my Mother, she is in many ways just the person to write such a book.... [The Love of My Youth] provides us a nice leisurely space to wander—and wonder.
Karen Sandstrom - Cleveland Plain Dealer
Thoughtful and moving, Gordon's latest captures the ardor and vulnerability of young love and the cautious circumspection of middle age. Miranda and Adam began a love affair in high school that endured through college only to end in a painful betrayal. When a mutual friend brings them together in present-day Rome, they haven't seen each other in more than three decades. Adam's ambitions to be a concert pianist never came to pass, and Miranda, once convinced that political activism could change the world, is now an epidemiologist. Both have married and raised children, but Rome still holds passionate memories for them. Though wary, they meet for daily walks, and Gordon's vividly detailed descriptions make Rome a palpable presence. Miranda and Adam tentatively reveal to each other the events of their lives, touching on aspirations, disillusionments, ideals, and desires, and these conversations set the pace of Gordon's novel. Only when Miranda is about to leave Rome are they able to fully express their emotions and achieve catharsis. Gordon's (Pearl) restraint is admirable, gradually exposing the differences in character that spelled the inevitable demise of this relationship. An accumulation of detail breathes life into her characters, and the writer's affection for this beloved, eternal city is endearing.
Publishers Weekly
The most honest scene in Gordon's new novel (after Pearl) has a 60-year-old Miranda in front of the full-length mirror in her Rome apartment dressing for a reunion dinner with old friends. She will be seeing Adam, who, decades ago, she believed to be the great love of her life. As she rejects one outfit after another she also tries on and casts off variations on how she will behave at this awkward gathering. Annoyance, excitement, and pride jockey for position as Miranda recalls Adam's long-ago betrayal. Ironically, Adam is performing the same ritual in front of his own armoire. He knows Italy and offers to meet Miranda, there on business, for daily walks that prove to be as aimless as their conversation, in which they needle each other while skirting around their big questions. It's only through flashbacks and interior monolog that readers meet the passionate, activist firebrand that was Miranda and the intense, insecure pianist that was Adam. But who are they now? Verdict: Gordon's stellar literary reputation ensures that her fans will line up for this latest entry. Their enjoyment, however, may hinge on whether they believe that Adam and Miranda were in love in their youth or just in love with their youth. —Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Myers, FL
Library Journal
The novel is also filled with small resonating details, from the architectural beauties of urban Rome to Adam and Miranda’s anxious glimpses of their aging bodies in front of hotel mirrors. The Love of My Youth is as much about how we feel about our past and the choices we made and make, as it is about the love story between two young people. —Lauren Bufferd
BookPage
(Starred review.) In her first novel since Pearl (2005), virtuoso and versatile Gordon offers brilliantly fresh takes on family conflicts, women's lives, war, and global suffering while ingeniously meshing classic love stories with modern mores, and ecstasy with wisdom, to create an enthralling drama of innocent passion, crushing tragedy, and the careful construction of stable, nurturing lives.... [An] alluring novel. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. The Love of My Youth is, from the title onward, a novel about age. Do Adam's and Miranda's experiences of youth and/or older age speak to your own? Do they ring true to the course of a life? When you are young, [Miranda] thinks, you never believe that courage isn t enough. That the imaginative, original decision isn t always the right one [p. 16]. How does the idea of choice play into their actions as teenagers and then at the end of the story, when they separately decide not to become lovers again?
2. Have you been to Rome? Do Gordon s descriptions of the piazzas and museums, the artwork and puppet theater, the poor beggars and the upscale restaurants reflect your memories of the city? How does having the main characters walk around the city help you experience it? How do you think the landscape and the food ( the vivid flavors, spicy tomato, peppery meat and beans, bitter greens drenched in salty fish and vinegar and oil [p. 81]) fit into Adam s and Miranda s ideas about beauty, especially in comparison to their different views on artists such as Bernini?
3. Do Adam and Miranda s discussions ring true to their characters? Why do you think Gordon chose to structure the novel in this way, focusing on their conversations, and then including flashbacks to the years of their youth? What do you make of Miranda's statement that it excites her to be speaking this way, a way she no longer speaks [p. 140]? Do you think there is a language you share with your first love that is different from any subsequent relationship?
4. This is a novel of firsts first loves and first endings. The phrase the first arises frequently, including for the first time she considers the possibility that she might wish he were other than he is [p. 188], and, regarding Beverly's attentions to Adam, the first thing he has been reluctant to talk about to Miranda [p. 202]. What other firsts take place in the novel, and how do they drive the narrative? What do they say about how we come to know ourselves and experience another person?
5. In what ways does Gordon bring to life the novel s two time periods: 1964 1970 and then 2007? Is one era more alive on the page or are they equally successful at illuminating Adam s and Miranda s pasts and presents, as individuals within a generation at the forefront of so many changes?
6. With the exception of the opening, Gordon titles each contemporary chapter with the date, place(s), and a quote. Why do you think she choose this format? Does it act to enrich or distract from your experience of the narrative? Why do you think a quote from Miranda almost always heads the chapters?
7. Do you find meaning in the fact that Adam's name exists in the reverse spelling of Miranda's? Adam is, of course, the name of the first man in the Bible, his story beginning before he and Eve taste of the Tree of Knowledge. Do you think Adam's name fits his character and, if so, in what ways?
8. Questions of self-identity play a fundamental role in the novel. Miranda asks, Are we fated to always be the people we were? Always making the same mistakes? [p. 29] and then, at a different moment, wonders Is this the most important thing that can be said about us, that we are not who we were? [p. 64]. Perhaps as a way of combining these ideas, she also says that she is someone to whom, like [Adam], a great many things have happened. So the person I am was the one I was and also another person, perhaps many other persons [p. 154]. What is Gordon saying about how well we can know ourselves? How is that related to our ability to deeply understand another person? Did Adam and Miranda truly know each other when they were young? Do they see each other, and themselves, more clearly now that they are older? Do you feel you have a confident grasp on your own identity, or do you feel it shifting through the years?
9. In what ways do Adam and Miranda experience the past is it an ever-present aspect in either of their lives, or does it seem that they don t often think of it? How do their ideas relate to Yonatan's, who lets the past go (except for what he cannot escape, his nightmares of the 67 war), and Clare, who is perhaps too young to have a past long enough to focus on or forget?
10. Adam and Miranda discuss money much less directly than other topics, though its absence or presence has greatly affected their lives. Miranda has always had money, though it s unclear if she realizes where her money came from, and how much there is (Adam wonders if she knows it was her mother's inheritance, not her father's business acumen). For Adam, money is always a worry from his youth, when the family tried to keep the cost of his music lessons from him, continuing throughout his life as a teacher and father. What do you see as the role of money in Adam's and Miranda's lives separately and when they were together?
11. Spend some time discussing Adam's and Miranda's marriages and families, both their families of birth and the ones they have created. Was Miranda fair to her parents, in keeping her distance from them? Why did she feel much closer to Adam's mother than her own? What does it mean that one of the reasons she married Yonatan was because he was so unlike Adam? Is the same true for Adam, in regard to both Beverly and Clare? What do you think about him having known Clare since she was thirteen? What parts do Adam's and Miranda's children, all four of them, and their siblings, Rob and Jo, play in the narrative?
12. Regret is a running thread throughout the novel. Do you think Adam and Miranda feel equal regret for their actions? What do you make of the section in which Miranda says In order to have had the children we have, we had to lead our lives exactly as we did. Therefore, there can be no regrets [p. 283] and Adam responds in part by asking Would it have been better if my son had not been born? [p. 285]. As someone with or without children, how would you react to their discussion?
13. Adam slept with Beverly twice and believed she was on birth control. Miranda slept with Toby and never told Adam. Adam's betrayal is assumed by both to be much greater. Why is that the case? Do you believe Miranda when she thinks, but does not say, I too am guilty of lying, by omission [p. 232]? Does Miranda believe that she has betrayed Adam? Do their actions bear greater weight because they were each other s first sexual relationship? When Miranda sleeps with Toby, is the greater betrayal the infidelity of the body or the emotional infidelity of the secret? For Adam, was he betrayed equally by Beverly, or should he assume all responsibility for her pregnancy? What do you make of the scene in which Miranda cuts off her hair, and Adam feels betrayed? What have you done to me? [p. 272] Adam asks, to which Miranda replies with the voice of a generation, To you? I thought it was my hair. My body [p. 272].
14. Miranda remarks that forgiveness is irrelevant now because the pain he caused her is long gone and, painless, forgiveness is not difficult, therefore perhaps not worth much [p. 41]. When considering how she has hurt other people, Miranda says, We can forgive those who trespass against us. We can t forgive those we ve trespassed against [p. 213]. What does it mean to forgive someone? Is there a need to forgive one's self? What do you make of Adam's dismissal of Miranda's confession that she slept with Toby? Me? I forgive you? It is I who need forgiveness [p. 291]. Do you think that Miranda truly forgives Adam? Does Adam forgive himself?
15. Miranda has converted to Judaism, while Adam stays an unbelieving Catholic I don t have it, the ear for faith [p. 228] though as a teenager he believed that sleeping with Miranda put him in a state of sin. Is faith an active element in either Adam's or Miranda's life? Is it perhaps expressed not through religious faith, but through their perspectives on the purpose of their lives? Or through some other outlet?
16. Adam's and Miranda's definitions of what constitutes an ethical and worthy life are different his music, her saving the world a divide that began in their youth, and remains their guide to how they see the world. Levi says to Adam, The question must be not only why do we live but what do we live for? And one of the most important answers, Adam, you must believe me about this, is for beauty. For beauty whose greatness goes on and on [p. 183]. Adam believes that his musical gift is the way in which he must make some kind of mark [p. 52], to create beauty [p. 83], while Miranda wants to relieve suffering [p. 83]. In the end, Adam has not achieved fame, success, even, but he has not given over his calling [p. 9]. Do you think Miranda feels the same way about her work? Does either of them deeply value what the other does, or even understand the other s work? What is your own definition of a worthy life, and in what ways has that question helped direct your life choices?
17. Do you recognize yourself in any of the characters, particularly with regards to Adam and Miranda, and their spouses, children, or parents? If so, in what ways are you similar, and to what extent do you differ?
18. Adam and Miranda discuss ideas of belief, age, self-identity, beauty, and what it means to live a moral life, among other issues. Gordon is an author who covers these concepts in compelling and complicated ways, in both her fiction and nonfiction. Have you read any of her other books? How do themes of faith, family, love, and redemption operate here and elsewhere in her work?
19. The final words in the novel are Adam's, as he mirrors Miranda's about being grateful to "These trees. This light" [p. 302]. These images, based in the natural world, refer in part to two losses Miranda s father, her estrangement from him and the way she is able to miss him through the trees he taught her to name; and Adam's loss of Beverly, or perhaps more truthfully, Beverly s inability to exist in the world (her suicide note: it s too dark for me [p. 283]). Why do you think Gordon chose to close The Love of My Youth with these words, and a focus on gratefulness? What was your emotional experience of these final lines, and of the novel as a whole?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Love Season
Elin Hilderbrand, 2006
St. Martin's Press
320pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312369699
Summary
It’s a hot August Saturday on Nantucket Island. Over the course of the next 24 hours, two lives will be transformed forever.
Marguerite Beale, former chef of culinary hot spot Les Parapluies, has been out of the public eye for over a decade. This all changes with a phone call from Marguerite’s goddaughter, Renata Knox.
Marguerite has not seen Renata since the death of Renata’s mother, Candace Harris Knox, fourteen years earlier. And now that Renata is on Nantucket visiting the family of her new fiance, she takes the opportunity, against her father’s wishes, to contact Marguerite in hopes of learning the story of her mother’s life—and death.
But the events of the day spiral hopelessly out of control for both women, and nothing ends up as planned.
Welcome to The Love Season—a riveting story that takes place in one day and spans decades; a story that embraces the charming, pristine island of Nantucket, as well as Manhattan, Paris and Morocco. Elin Hilderbrand’s most ambitious novel to date chronicles the famous couplings of real lives: love and friendship, food and wine, deception and betrayal—and forgiveness and healing. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1969-70
• Raised—Collegeville, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., Hopkins University; University of Iowa Writers' Workshop
• Currently—lives in Nantucket, Massachuestts
Elin Hilderbrand is an American writer of Summer beach read romance novels, some 20 in all. Her books have been set on and around Nantucket Island where she lives with her husband and three children.
Hilderbrand was born and raised in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. As a child, she spent summers on Cape Cod, "playing touch football at low tide, collecting sea glass, digging pools for hermit crabs, swimming out to the wooden raft off shore," until her father died in a plane crash when she was sixteen. She spent the next summer working—doing piecework in a factory that made Halloween costumes; she promised herself that the goal for the rest of her life would be that she would always have a real summer.
She graduated from Johns Hopkins University and became a teaching/writing fellow at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 1993 she moved to Nantucket, took a job as "the classified ads girl" at a local paper, and later started writing.
Her first novels were published by St. Martin's Press. With A Summer Affair, published in 2008, she moved to Little, Brown and Company. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 7/11/2013.)
Book Reviews
Hilderbrand serves up a mouthwatering menu, keeps the Veuve Clicquot flowing and tops it all with a dollop of mystery that will have even drowsy sunbathers turning pages until the very satisfying end.
People
Hilderbrand's fifth book is a fulfilling tale of familial excavation and self-exploration. Marguerite is a lonely chef on Nantucket Island who hasn't cooked for anyone since she sold her restaurant 14 years ago, following the death of her best friend Candace and her own brief stint in a psychiatric hospital. A quirky, endearingly insecure recluse, Marguerite is startled from her solitude by a late-night phone call from Renata Knox, whose question, "Aunt Daisy?" sends Marguerite scrambling to come to terms with her past. Nineteen-year-old Renata is Candace's daughter and Marguerite's estranged goddaughter, visiting the island with her wealthy fiance. The novel takes place over the day Marguerite spends preparing a meal to welcome Renata, whose own problems include an overbearing mother-in-law-to-be and an incomplete sense of her own mother. Desperate for nurturing and guidance, Renata turns to Marguerite, the woman who knew her mother best-and whom Renata has been forbidden to see most of her life. The story is crafted as expertly as Marguerite's dishes, seasoned with well-measured flashbacks and convincing details of island life and the restaurant business. It's a refreshing, resonant summertime treat.
Publishers Weekly
Here's a classic beach book with a summer locale (Nantucket), a sanctified dead mother, a child searching out the mysteries of her past, impossibly attractive and/or wealthy cast members, and some love and sex thrown into the mix. Renata is just 19, lovely and mostly innocent, but, impetuously, she has become engaged to Cade, a preppy child of Nantucket, and so they travel there to meet his rich parents. Over the course of one (very long) day, she arranges to meet her godmother, whose involvement in her mother's death when she was a tot has caused her father to forbid Renata from ever meeting her. Godmother Marguerite had a sumptuous restaurant on the island that was abruptly closed when Renata's mother was struck and killed by a drunk driver while jogging, and that story is very slowly revealed in flashbacks. A good page-turner that doesn't involve too much effort on the part of the reader.—Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., VA.
Library Journal
In Hilderbrand's fifth Nantucket novel, a vacationing college student arranges to meet with her mysterious godmother, a former restaurateur of renown, to learn more about her dead mother. Despite ambivalence, 19-year-old Columbia sophomore Renata has become engaged to Cade. While visiting his wealthy family at their Nantucket summer home, she calls her godmother Marguerite and arranges to have dinner. Renata wants to know more about her mother Candace, who died on the island 14 years earlier. Renata does not realize that Marguerite was so overcome by guilt and despair after Candace's death that she had a psychotic break, sold her very successful restaurant and has been living for years as an island recluse. The novel follows Renata and Marguerite's lives hour by hour throughout the day leading up to the dinner Marguerite prepares for them. While shopping for the meal, Marguerite visits key people from her past who force her to relive what happened years earlier: how she met her long-time, part-time lover Porter, and through him his half-sister Candace, who became her dearest friend; how Candace fell in love and married Dan, owner of the Beach Club; how they had Renata and moved away; how in a moment of despair after Porter's final rejection, Marguerite declared her love for Candace; how shortly thereafter Candace was hit by a drunk driver while jogging. Meanwhile, Renata is struggling against Cade's insufferable mother and against her own attraction to the handsome houseboy. She calls her father to announce her engagement, subconsciously knowing Dan will come to the rescue. He does, but not before Renata has come face to face with near tragedy and run away to Marguerite, leaving Cade's engagement ring behind. Dan, Marguerite and Renata finally reunite, truths are told and old wounds healed. Less chick-lit beach read than old-fashioned Joan Crawford tearjerker.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What is the love season? Is it a place in time? An environment? A feeling? Take a moment to discuss the meaning of the title.
2. A show of hands: Who has been to the island of Nantucket? How is it similar or different than portrayed in The Love Season? Others: Does this book make you want to go there for a visit?
3. The action in The Love Season centers around two elaborate meals: the one Marguerite prepares for Renata, and the dinner party at the Driscoll’s. What is the significance of food—how it’s prepared, served, and appreciated—in The Love Season? Discuss the dynamics, and politics, of the dining table.
4. In what ways is reading a good novel like eating a good meal? Are readers ever truly satisfied at “The End”? Or are they always left hungry for more?
5. What are the themes of hunger and nourishment that resonate throughout Marguerite’s life? And in this novel?
6. Renata believed that Marguerite was like a shipwreck——she had, somewhere within her hull, a treasure trove of information about Candace. Do you think, in the end, that Renata found the answers she was looking for? Can one individual ever reveal the “truth” about another’s life? How is it possible to discover someone’s essence after death?
7. Talk about the characters’ lives off the island of Nantucket—in Paris, Morocco, and New York City. What did these outside locations reveal about the inner lives of Marguerite, Candace, and Renata respectively?
8. During a moment of romantic desperation, the younger Marguerite had asked herself: Did love fall into categories, or was it a continuum? Were there right ways to love and wrong ways, or was there just love and its object? How might the more “modern” Renata answer these questions? How would you?
9. Discuss the symbolism of Renoir’s Les Parapluies painting as it’s represented and referenced in the book. (You may wish to have a reproduction of it on hand during your meeting as well.)
10. Marguerite, during her early visits with Porter, played a game called “One Word.” What word would each member of your group use to describe The Love Season?
(Questions issued by publisher.)