Fiction - Results from #2700

Sister Mine
Tawni O'Dell, 2007
Crown Publishing
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307351678

Summary
Shae-Lynn Penrose drives a cab in a town where no one needs a cab—but plenty of people need rides. A former police officer with a closet full of miniskirts, a recklessly sharp tongue, and a tendency to deal with men by either beating them up or taking them to bed, she has spent years carving out a life for herself and her son in Jolly Mount, Pennsylvania, the tiny coal-mining town where she grew up.

Two years ago, five of Shae-Lynn’s miner friends were catapulted to media stardom when they were rescued after surviving four days trapped in a mine. As the men struggle to come to terms with the nightmarish memories of their ordeal, along with the fallout of their short-lived celebrity, Shae-Lynn finds herself facing harsh realities and reliving bad dreams of her own, including her relationship with her brutal father, her conflicted passion for one of the miners, and the hidden identity of the man who fathered her son.

When the younger sister she thought was dead arrives on her doorstep, followed closely by a gun-wielding Russian gangster, a shady New York lawyer, and a desperate Connecticut housewife, Shae-Lynn is forced to grapple with the horrible truth she discovers about the life her sister’s been living, and with one ominous question: Will her return result in a monstrous act of greed or one of sacrifice?

Tawni O’Dell’s trademark blend of black humor, tenderness, and a keen sense of place is evident once again as Shae-Lynn takes on past demons and all-too-present. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1964
• Where—Indiana, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A. Northwest University
• Currently—lives in Pennsylvania

Tawni O'Dell is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Fragile Beasts, Sister Mine, Coal Run, and Back Roads, which was an Oprah's Book Club pick and a Book-of-the-Month Club Main Selection. She is also a contributor to several anthologies including Becoming Myself: Reflections on Growing Up Female. Her work has been translated into 8 languages and been published in 20 countries. (From Wikipedia.)

Born and raised in Indiana, Pennsylvania, O'Dell graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in journalism. She lived for many years in the Chicago area before moving back to Pennsylvania, where she now lives with her two children and her husband, literary translator Bernard Cohen (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
Tawni O’Dell’s energy bursts off the page. Sister Mine is one of those novels that insist on being read, front to back, as fast as possible.
Boston Globe

Bitterly poignant in places, it’s also a rollicking good read — and Shae-Lynn’s richly drawn character resonates long after her final wisecrack.
People

Sister Mine delivers a luxurious read, a novel worthy of the literary equivalent of a Grammy or an Oscar. This is a novel for people who devour good writing and craft-intensive storytelling, who savor the haven, both safe and fraught with danger, of a world in which fiction becomes the kind of truth that sets you free. Or, at the very least, makes you laugh and think and wish you’d discovered Tawni O’Dell before now
Portland Oregonian

The strength of O’Dell’s narrative is that she lets her characters tell the story. There is much to recommend. Shae-Lynn’s voice is entrancing in its honesty, and O’Dell’s ability to continue to freshly capture her mining communities is impressive… a worthy read.
Denver Post

Sister Mine is packed with flawed characters formed by violence and neglect who quickly become embedded in the reader’s heart. O’Dell sketches her characters with telling details and cop-shop crackling dialogue..Amid chick lit and knit lit and Brit lit, Sister Mine rates as true-grit lit.
USA Today

O'Dell, whose debut, Back Roads(2000), was an Oprah pick, returns with a terrific third novel set in a Pennsylvania coal country of broken families, altercations and smalltown coping. Policewoman-turned-cabbie Shae-Lynn Penrose, a little over 40 and back in Jolly Mount after a rent-a-cop stint in Washington, D.C., raised son Clay (24 and the town deputy) on her own. For the past 18 years, she has believed that her sister, Shannon, was killed by their abusive father while Shae-Lynn was at college. (Their mother died of complications after giving birth to Shannon; their father was killed much later in a mine explosion.) When a New York lawyer turns up asking for Shannon Penrose, whom he seems to have seen recently, Shae-Lynn is shocked; when Shannon herself suddenly turns up, very pregnant, Shae-Lynn's reaction is primal and tactile. As O'Dell slowly unspools Shannon's very-much-of-her-own-doing predicament, O'Dell demonstrates her mastery of set-piece dialogue, reeling off stingingly acute encounters that are as funny as they can be crushingly sad. Ne'er-do-well Choker Simms (and his two kids, Fanci and Kenny), lawyer Gerald Kozlowski, mine owner Cam Jack, Shae-Lynn's nonboyfriend E.J., Shannon's sort-of-boyfriend Dmitri and others are all wonderfully drawn through Shae-Lynn's keen observations. Family saga O'Dell-style crackles with conflict and a deep understanding of the complications and burdens that follow attachment, sex, love and kinship.
Publishers Weekly

Be prepared for an emotional roller-coaster ride with this latest from O'Dell (Coal Run). The author's focus is Jolly Mount, a small Pennsylvania coal-mining town, but abuse and baby-selling figure into the mix. Years ago, adult siblings Shae-Lynn and Shannon escaped their abusive widowed father: single mother Shae-Lynn took a detour, with young son in tow, and did a six-year stint as a Washington, DC, police officer; younger sister Shannon, however, vanished one day and never resurfaced. Feisty Shae-Lynn, now a cab driver back in Jolly Mount, has long theorized about Shannon's whereabouts. So when a variety of shady sorts begins popping up in Jolly Mount searching for Shannon, Shae-Lynn's suspicions are naturally aroused. O'Dell successfully combines the story of negligent coal-mine owners and unfortunate, disabled, or dead miners with Shae-Lynn's own troubled past in this intense, racy, raucous, and often hilarious novel. Although she occasionally includes some jarring topics that veer toward the sentimental, she also packs this gripping tale with loads of action, intrigue, and suspense. Strongly recommended for all public library collections.
Andrea Tarr - Library Journal

From Oprah Book Club alum O'Dell (Back Roads, 2000, etc.), the far-fetched tale of a cab driver whose long-lost sister turns out to be a surrogate-mother-for-hire. Narrator Shae-Lynn Penrose, the author's first female protagonist, is a ballsy, sassy delight, but the story she tells verges on ridiculous. Shae-Lynn's sister Shannon turns up after 18 years, pregnant with her tenth baby and planning, as usual, to sell it to a wealthy couple. Shannon has run out on the sleazy New York lawyer who sets up the adoptions because she's made her own deal with a Connecticut woman and doesn't want to share the money. Both of these caricatures come looking for her in Centresburg, the Penroses' hard-pressed hometown in Pennsylvania coal country; so does an equally cartoonish Russian gangster, the buddy of another guy Shannon double-crossed. How did Shae-Lynn's sister get to be so callous? The answer lies in the girls' miserable childhood with a widowed father so brutal that when Shannon disappeared, her sister assumed he'd killed her. Shae-Lynn has blunt, bracing things to say about the complicity of their blue-collar community, which disapproved of Dad beating his daughters but did nothing to stop him; she saw lots of domestic abuse swept under the rug during her years as a police officer in Centresburg. Dad wasn't the only brutal coalminer, and even good men like Shae-Lynn's beloved friend E.J., who survived a cave-in two years ago, bear the physical and psychic wounds inflicted by their back-breaking profession. O'Dell's unsentimental, loving depiction of working-class life is as moving as ever. Also familiar, unfortunately, is her weakness for lurid plotting, which here includes the heavily foreshadowed exposure of the man who fathered Shae-Lynn's illegitimate baby and the mustache-twirling cynicism with which he reveals his base nature to their horrified adult son. Many wonderful scenes bear witness for people too often left voiceless in American literature, but coming on the heels of the majestic, passionate Coal Run (2004), this undisciplined novel is a disappointment.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Tawni O’Dell has populated Jolly Mount with some wonderful, fully-fleshed characters: swearing, miniskirt-wearing Shae-Lynn; rugged and quiet E.J.; whisky-drinking, one-legged Jimmy; delightfully precocious Fanci and her little brother Kenny, just to name a few. Who was your favorite character, and why?

2. What was your first impression of E.J.? Did your opinion of him change over the course of the book? If so, how and why?

3. Shae-Lynn treasures a series of National Geographic books that were given to her by Jimmy and Isabel. There seem to be particular photographs that she revisits time and again. What is the books’ significance to her?

4. The Penrose house was not a happy place in which to grow up. And while their neighbors were good to the girls, no one ever stepped in and confronted their father on their behalf. “Ostracism is the only way people around here deal with unsavory family situations, and if it doesn’t cause the families to change, everyone washes their hands of them.” (p. 174) Does this seem to be an accurate portrayal of how things are handled in Jolly Mount? Is Shae-Lynn’s involvement with Fanci and Kenny a conscious protest of the status quo, or simply the only thing Shae-Lynn knows to do?

5. Shae-Lynn says “a mother’s love is not warm and cuddly like a soft blanket as it’s popularly portrayed. It’s a fierce, rabid love, like having a mad dog living inside you all the time.” (p.332) Do you agree with her assessment of motherly love?

6. Shae-Lynn believes that “a man spends his whole life trying to prove his worth to others. A woman spends her life trying to prove her worth to herself.” (p. 220) Discuss the implications of this statement, especially as they apply to both Shae-Lynn and Shannon. Do you agree with Shae-Lynn?

7. E.J. says that the only thing Shae-Lynn is good at is fighting. (p.92) Much of what we see her do seems to prove him right. So how did Shae-Lynn manage to raise such a level-headed, responsible son?

8. Was Shae-Lynn right to keep Clay’s father’s identity a secret all those years?

9. Did Shannon come back to Jolly Mount with the intention of leaving her baby with Shae-Lynn?

10. Do you think Shannon would have been a different person had her mother been alive to raise her? Do you think all her problems stem from growing up without a mother? Why or why not?

11. Through the course of the novel, Shae-Lynn begins to have trouble getting access to the safe room she imagines for herself. At one point, she becomes startled by the appearance of a face at the window of her safe room. After she surrenders to her physical desire for E.J., she says “for the first time I see what the purpose of my furnished soul has become, no longer to shelter me from monsters but to help me cope with the emptiness of a ransacked heart.... I know now it was [E.J.’s] face at my window, not trying to get in but telling me it’s time to come out.” (pp. 320-321) Discuss this revelation and its impact on Shae-Lynn and her relationship with E.J.

12. After sleeping with E.J. for the first time, Shae-Lynn has a disturbing dream, described on page 327. What do you think it means?

13. What do you think of the mining company’s tradition of giving the mines women’s names? How does it change your view of the mines themselves, and the men who work them?

14. The Jolly Mount Five decide to drop their lawsuit against Cam Jack so that the mines will remain open and continue to provide employment for the men of their town. Do you agree with their decision? Do you think there might have been another option that could have saved the mines and also taken a stand against Cam Jack? Which do you believe was more important: keeping the mines open, or holding Cam Jack accountable for their poor maintenance?

15. It’s six months after the novel ends...where do you see the characters? Are E.J. and Shae-Lynn together? Has Shannon been heard from again? Is Cam Jack alive? Is life the same in Jolly Mount?
(Questions from the author's website.)

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Sister of My Heart
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, 2000
Knopf Doubleday
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385489515

Summary
From the award-winning author of Mistress of Spices, the bestselling novel about the extraordinary bond between two women, and the family secrets and romantic jealousies that threaten to tear them apart.

Anju is the daughter of an upper-caste Calcutta family of distinction. Her cousin Sudha is the daughter of the black sheep of that same family. Sudha is startlingly beautiful; Anju is not. Despite those differences, since the day on which the two girls were born, the same day their fathers died—mysteriously and violently—Sudha and Anju have been sisters of the heart. Bonded in ways even their mothers cannot comprehend, the two girls grow into womanhood as if their fates as well as their hearts were merged.

But, when Sudha learns a dark family secret, that connection is shattered. For the first time in their lives, the girls know what it is to feel suspicion and distrust. Urged into arranged marriages, Sudha and Anju's lives take opposite turns. Sudha becomes the dutiful daughter-in-law of a rigid small-town household. Anju goes to America with her new husband and learns to live her own life of secrets. When tragedy strikes each of them, however, they discover that despite distance and marriage, they have only each other to turn to.

Set in the two worlds of San Francisco and India, this exceptionally moving novel tells a story at once familiar and exotic, seducing readers from the first page with the lush prose we have come to expect from Divakaruni. Sister of my Heart is a novel destined to become as widely beloved as it is acclaimed. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 29, 1956
• Where—Kolkata, India
• Education—B.A., Kolkata University; Ph.D., University of
California, Berkeley
• Currently—lives in Houston, Texas and San Jose, Calif.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is the author of the bestselling novels Queen of Dreams, Mistress of Spices, Sister of My Heart, and The Vine of Desire, and of the prizewinning story collections Arranged Marriage and The Unknown Errors of Our Lives. Her writings have appeared in more than 50 magazines, including Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker.

Divakaruni was born in India and came to the United States at 19. She put herself through Berkeley doing odd jobs, from working at an Indian boutique to slicing bread in a bakery. She lives in Houston, Texas, and teaches creative writing at the University of Houston. (Adapted from the publisher.)

Extras
Excerpts from a 2004 Barnes & Noble interview:

• During graduate school, I used to work in the kitchen of the International House at the University of California, Berkeley. My favorite task was slicing Jell-O.

• I love Chinese food, but my family hates it. So when I'm on book tour I always eat Chinese!

• I almost died on a pilgrimage trip to the Himalayas some years back—but I got a good story out of it. The story is in The Unknown Errors of Our Lives—let's see if readers can figure out which one it is!

• Writing is so central to my life that it leaves little time/desire/need for other interests. I do a good amount of work with domestic violence organizations—I'm on the advisory board of Asians Against Domestic Violence in Houston. I feel very strongly about trying to eradicate domestic violence from our society.

• My favorite ways to unwind are to do yoga, read, and spend time with my family.

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

Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. I read this when I was in grad school, and it really made me examine my own role as a woman of color living in the U.S. It made me want to start writing about my own experiences. It made me think that perhaps I, too, had something worthwhile to write about. ("Extras" from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
Banerjee's poetically embroidered storytelling powers are in evidence.... [A] bittersweet fairy tale.
Anderson Tepper - New York Times

Ms. Divakaruni emphasizes the cathartic force of storytelling with sumptuous prose...she defies categorization, beautifully blending the chills of reality with rich imaginings.
Wall Street Journal

Her literary voice is a sensual bridge between worlds. India and America. Children and parents. Men and women. Passion and pragmatism.
USA Today

The power of stories and the strength of the women who tell them are lovingly rendered...a novel fragrant in rhythm and language.
San Francisco Chronicle

Like the old tales of India that are filled with emotional filigree and flowery prose, Divakaruni's (The Mistress of Spices) latest work is a masterful allegory of unfulfilled desire and sacrificial love. It is also an intricate modern drama in which generations and castes struggle over old and new mores. Anju and Sudha are cousins, born in the same household in Calcutta on the same day—which is also the day on which their mothers learn that both their husbands have been killed in a reckless quest for a cave full of rubies. Sudha grows up believing her father was a no-good schemer who brought ruin on his cousin, Anju's upper-class father. As they mature, Anju dreams of college, Sudha of children, but arranged marriages divide and thwart them. Anju adjusts to life in California with a man who lusts after Sudha; Sudha grapples with a mother-in-law who turns to the goddess Shasti to fill Sudha's barren womb rather than to a doctor for her sterile son. Ultimately, the tie between Anju and Sudha supersedes all other love, as each sustains painful loss to save the other. When Sudha learns the truth about her father and no longer needs to right his wrongs, she sees that all along her affection for Anju has not been dictated by necessity. An inspired and imaginative raconteur, Divakaruni is sure to engender comparisons with Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things), but Divakaruni's novel stands in its own right as a compelling read. If her prose sometimes veers toward the purple, her mesmerizing narrative sustains it well.
Publishers Weekly

Divakaruni's debut novel, The Mistress of Spices, was a word-of-mouth hit; its blend of magical realism and culinary sensuality also appealed to fans of Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate. This second novel is a bit more earth-bound. Born on the same day their fathers die in a mysterious accident, Sudha and Anju are more than just cousins; although Anju is the daughter of an upper-caste Calcutta family and Sudha the daughter of a black-sheep renegade, they are sisters of the heart, bound by a deep love. Narrated by Sudha and Anju in alternate chapters, this is the tale of their relationship over the years, a friendship that is almost destroyed by jealousy and family secrets. Although much of the plot is contrived (the final revelation is no big surprise) and the male characters are stock cliches, this is still an engaging read, filled with tender, moving moments.
Library Journal

Discussion Questions
1. What kind of relationship is there between the older generation in India, who live in a world full of mystical tales and magical occurrences, and Anju and Sudha's generation, which is more drawn to Western ideals? Why are both cousins, especially Anju, skeptical of their own culture and interested in the west, particularly America? How do they incorporate each world into their lives?

2. How are Sudha and Anju different, and how are they similar? Despite their differences, what continues to keep their relationship strong?

3. The mothers tell the girls that loving someone too much is dangerous. What are they trying to achieve with this warning?

4. What does the ruby symbolize? What is the significance of Anju and Sudha being so "unlucky" in the circumstances under which they were born? Why was it significant for Sudha to know the truth about her past and not be able to tell Anju?

5. There is often a great disparity between what is the proper thing to do and what is the fun, exciting thing to do. How does this theme play itself out in the novel?

6. Why does Anju's mother welcome Sudha and her mother into the family even though she knows the truth about Sudha's father? In contrast, why is Sudha's mother so harsh and seemingly ungrateful? Do she and her daughter belong in the house?

7. The mothers often tell stories and gossip. What role do these stories play in their livesand in the lives of Sudha and Anju?

8. According to Bidhata Purush's predictions, Anju is supposed to be brave and clever, fight injustice, marry a fine man and travel the world, while Sudha is supposed to have a life ofsorrow. Do the girls live up to these predictions? If not, how else would you characterize each?

9. How did having a man enter each of their lives affect the girls' friendship? Would the friendship have evolved differently had they not married? Are men portrayed positively or negatively in this book?

10. Why is there jealousy between the two cousins? Is it inevitable despite their mutual love? Do they ever successfully rise above it?

11. How does Anju change after she comes to America? Would she have been as independent and assertive if she had stayed in India?

12. Sudha defies traditional Indian culture by leaving her husband and raising her child on her own. How do her actions affect her deep connection to Indian culture? How does the author portray Sudha's decision?

13. The keeping of secrets and the telling of lies play a huge part in the novel. Why are so many secrets kept? Is it better to keep some secrets and to tell some lies or to always share the truth?

14. Discuss your reaction to finding out Singhji's identity. Was Sudha's response reasonable?

15. Should Sudha have gone with Ashok? Throughout the novel, does Sudha give up too much for Anju? Are sacrifices required of a true friend?

Consider these next four questions if you have read Divakaruni's other novels and short stories.

16. What do the characters in lose and gain as they become more "American"?

17. In the story "Affair, " Abha says, "It's not wrong to be happy, is it? To want more out of life than fulfilling duties you took on before you knew what they truly meant?" How is this idea further developed in The Mistress of Spices? In Sister of my Heart?

18. In Divakaruni's stories, women are wives and mothers, but the men are portrayed primarily as husbands, not fathers. How are the men's roles in the novels similar to or different from those in the stories?

19. How does the Indian immigrant experience compare to that of other immigrants—Spanish, Italian, Chinese?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Sisterland
Curtis Sittenfeld, 2013
Random House
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812980332

Summary
Curtis Sittenfeld, New York Times bestselling author of American Wife and Prep, returns with a mesmerizing novel of family and identity, loyalty and deception, and the delicate line between truth and belief.

From an early age, Kate and her identical twin sister, Violet, knew that they were unlike everyone else. Kate and Vi were born with peculiar “senses”—innate psychic abilities concerning future events and other people’s secrets. Though Vi embraced her visions, Kate did her best to hide them.

Now, years later, their different paths have led them both back to their hometown of St. Louis. Vi has pursued an eccentric career as a psychic medium, while Kate, a devoted wife and mother, has settled down in the suburbs to raise her two young children. But when a minor earthquake hits in the middle of the night, the normal life Kate has always wished for begins to shift.

After Vi goes on television to share a premonition that another, more devastating earthquake will soon hit the St. Louis area, Kate is mortified. Equally troubling, however, is her fear that Vi may be right. As the date of the predicted earthquake quickly approaches, Kate is forced to reconcile her fraught relationship with her sister and to face truths about herself she’s long tried to deny.

Funny, haunting, and thought-provoking, Sisterland is a beautifully written novel of the obligation we have toward others, and the responsibility we take for ourselves. With her deep empathy, keen wisdom, and unerring talent for finding the extraordinary moments in our everyday lives, Curtis Sittenfeld is one of the most exceptional voices in literary fiction today. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—August 23, 1975
• Where—Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
• Education—B.A., Stanford University; M.F.A., Iowa Writers' Workshop
• Currently—lives in St. Louis, Missouri

Elizabeth Curtis Sittenfeld is an American writer, the author of several novels and a collection of short stories.

Sittenfeld was the second of four children (three girls and a boy) of Paul G. Sittenfeld, an investment adviser, and Elizabeth (Curtis) Sittenfeld, an art history teacher and librarian at Seven Hills School, a private school in Cincinnati.

She attended Seven Hills School through the eighth grade, then attended high school at Groton School, a boarding school in Groton, Massachusetts, graduating in 1993. In 1992, the summer before her senior year, she won Seventeen magazine's fiction contest.

She attended Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, before transferring to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. At Stanford, she studied Creative Writing, wrote articles for the college newspaper, and edited that paper's weekly arts magazine. At the time, she was also chosen as one of Glamour magazine's College Women of the Year. She earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.

Novels
• Prep
Her first novel Prep (2005) deals with coming of age, self-identity, and class distinctions in the preppy and competitive atmosphere of a private school.

• The Man of My Dreams
Sittenfeld's second novel, The Man of My Dreams (2006), follows a girl named Hannah from the end of her 8th grade year through her college years at Tufts and into her late twenties.

• American Wife
Sittenfeld's third novel, American Wife (2008), is the tale of Alice Blackwell, a fictional character who shares many similarities with former First Lady Laura Bush.

• Sisterland
Her fourth novel, Sisterland (2013), concerns a set of identical twins who have psychic powers, one of whom hides her strange gift while the other has become a professional psychic.

• Eligible
A 21st-century retelling of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Eligible was released in 2016. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 6/12/2013.)

Book Reviews
Delicious insights into sisterhood and motherhood are peppered throughout Sittenfeld’s novel about identical twins with ESP. The story, though, isn’t as convincing as the twins, who are rendered so vividly that readers would be able to pick them out of a crowd.... Sittenfeld offers no fresh perspective on ESP or living with giftedness but delivers a rich and intimate tale of imperfect, well-meaning, ordinary people struggling to define themselves and protect the people they love.
Publishers Weekly

Her psychic sister's prediction of a major earthquake unsettles a St. Louis woman's life in the latest from best-selling Sittenfeld (American Wife, 2008, etc.). Although identical twins Violet and Daisy Shramm as girls both had "the senses," Daisy suppressed her abilities as part of her transformation into ordinary Kate Tucker.... She's mortified...when Vi publicly contradicts seismologist Courtney Wheeling, who says a small quake that rattles St. Louis in September 2009 is not necessarily a prelude to a bigger one.... A rich portrait of intricate relationships within and among families by one of commercial fiction's smartest, most perceptive practitioners.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. What and where is Sisterland? If you have a sister, do you see any of your own relationship with her reflected in the relationship between Kate and Vi?

2. The novel opens with a description of the 1811 earthquake in New Madrid, although everything that follows is set in the near-present. Why do you think the novel begins in this way? How does the historical context change how we see Kate’s story?

3. Do you believe that people can have psychic powers? Have you ever experienced strong intuitions about events that happened later?

4. Do you understand why Kate tries to escape her powers? Would you prefer, like Kate, to be normal, or to be special, like Vi?

5. Kate transforms herself from Daisy Shramm to Kate Tucker. How do names define and shape us?

6. Near the end of the novel, Kate and Vi make an important discovery about their “senses” that upsets everything they thought they knew. Were you as surprised by this revelation as the twins? How do you think it might change their understanding of their childhood?

7. Do Kate and Jeremy have a good marriage?

8. Were you surprised by Kate’s choices at the end? How will her family’s life in the future be different from what it was in the past? Do you think it’s plausible that she can continue to conceal her secret indefinitely?

9. Twins are intriguing to many people. Do you think the interest they elicit is justified? Have you known twins in your own life? If you are a twin, did Sittenfeld’s portrayal of them strike you as realistic?

10. Have you read any of Curtis Sittenfeld’s other novels? If so, do you think this one is like or unlike her earlier work?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Sisters
Nancy Jensen, 2011
St. Martin's Press
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312542702

Summary
Growing up in hardscrabble Kentucky in the 1920s, with their mother dead and their stepfather an ever-present threat, Bertie Fischer and her older sister Mabel have no one but each other—with perhaps a sweetheart for Bertie waiting in the wings. But on the day that Bertie receives her eighth-grade diploma, good intentions go terribly wrong. A choice made in desperate haste sets off a chain of misunderstandings that will divide the sisters and reverberate through three generations of women.

What happens when nothing turns out as you planned? From the Depression through World War II and Vietnam, and smaller events both tragic and joyful, Bertie and Mabel forge unexpected identities that are shaped by unspeakable secrets. As the sisters have daughters and granddaughters of their own, they discover that both love and betrayal are even more complicated than they seem.

Gorgeously written, with extraordinary insight and emotional truth, Nancy Jensen’s powerful debut novel illuminates the far-reaching power of family and family secrets.

In the tradition of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, a dazzling debut novel about the family bonds that remain even when they seem irretrievably torn apart. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Nancy Jensen is a graduate of the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College. Her short stories and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Northwest Review, Other Voices, Under the Sun, ACM: Another Chicago Magazine, and Louisville Review, as well as in the anthology I to I: Life-Writing by Kentucky Feminists.

Since 2007, her work has been honored with an Artist Enrichment Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, an Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council, and two nominations for the Pushcart Prize. She shares her home with ten rescued cats and her dog, Gordy, who is her partner on a pet-therapy team visiting hospitals, nursing homes, assisted-living facilities, and daycare centers. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Like so many painful family stories, this one begins with a miscommunication.... Engrossing though all this is, Jensen’s strenuous manipulations, all done to keep the estranged sisters apart, can be maddening.... Nonetheless, Jensen’s portraits of these women are richly alive.... As the sisters continue to orbit away from each other, a new generation of remarkable women “raised up on secrets” takes center stage.... Here The Sisters tells a bigger story. The women change in accordance with the times, captured in vivid details.
Caroline Leavitt - New York Times

This first novel from Nancy Jensen is an extremely ambitious effort to recount American history during the 20th century...through the experiences and perceptions of women. It’s an interesting idea, but Jensen sketches her characters primarily by what they do, rather than what they think or feel. And these women, in general, don’t do very much.... Jensen can’t seem to get the car jump-started. These characters never come to life. The author writes in a foreward that her story is based on a mysterious 50-year estrangement between her grandma and a long-dead sister. But in this narrative, events seem not just mysterious but intractably implausible.
Carolyn See - Washington Post

As the years pass, each [sister] nourishes a hidden sadness that reverberates through time as their daughters and granddaughters, "raised up on secrets," struggle with the deep-rooted consequences.... Jensen's likable story argues for openness and forgiveness between sisters, for their own sake and for the health of their families.
Anne Leslie - People

Fans of The Help will be beguiled by Jensen's debut novel. Set in rural Kentucky in the midst of the Depression, and inspired by Jensen's own family history, it centers on an incident that created a lifelong breach between two sisters, one that reverberates throughout three generations. It's a sweet but never saccharine tribute to the pull of family.
Whole Living

First-time novelist Jensen—tracing the lives of two sisters separated in their youth by a tragic misunderstanding—[has] an observant eye, adept characterization, and a keen grasp of social issues.
Publishers Weekly

All families have secrets, and those kept by the Fischer family are particularly shameful and life changing. In 1927, sisters Mabel and Bertie are separated for life when their stepfather commits suicide and Mabel runs off with Bertie's boyfriend.... Verdict: Set against the dramatic backdrop of American history from the Great Depression into the 21st century, this beautiful but disturbing debut novel, inspired partly by the author's own family history, will engage readers of well-written, thought-provoking women's fiction. —Andrea Kempf, formerly with Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, KS
Library Journal

(A Best Book of 2011.) A single tragic event shapes four generations of American women in this accomplished and poignant debut.... Encompassing the lives of women in the 20th century, this sprawling saga is tender and satisfying, with a heartbreaking end.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. There are many secrets in The Sisters, beginning with Mabel’s decision not to tell Bertie about Jim Butcher. In trying to understand her sister’s behavior, fourteen-year-old Bertie wonders if “the things she didn’t know were what kept her safe.” What secrets do other characters keep, and how do you think the secrets ultimately help or hurt their loved ones?

2. How does the period in which each woman comes of age affect her experience and shape her outlook on what is possible?

3. How do the main characters perceive loyalty? Betrayal? What do you think of their perceptions?

4. How do Bertie’s girlhood losses affect her daughters’ and granddaughters’ relationships with men?

5. Bertie, Alma, and Lynn are accused by other characters of being hard and cold. How do you see them? To what extent do you think they change in the course of the novel?

6. At the end of her life, Bertie struggles to cry out to Rainey and Lynn, “Forgive. Forgive.” Why do you believe some characters are able to forgive and others not? Do you believe everything can or should be forgiven?

7. What does the novel suggest about whether families are born or made?

8. When Daisy expresses her concern that Mabel is setting herself up for emotional pain by photographing young men bound for Vietnam, Mabel tells Daisy, “You can’t protect yourself from loss.” Do you think this is true? What happens to the characters in the novel, and to people in your experience, when they try?

9. In her interview with Ed Bradley, Mabel says, “I don’t think any real war [is ever over]—large, small, between countries, between people. Even the wars inside ourselves. Something always remains.” Do you agree—in the novel and/or in real life?

10. The Sisters is structured as a series of chronological, interlocking narratives, sometimes with strikingly different perspectives of the same events. In what ways does this structure reflect the experience of an individual within a family?

11. Bertie tells Grace, “Something can happen to change your life so sudden, you can’t get over it fast enough…And that changes things for them too, all in a line.” Do you think that happens in most people’s lives at one time or another? If so, is the chain reaction inevitable, or can someone choose to break the chain?

12. How were you affected when Bertie wrote Deceased on the letter from Mabel, and Mabel later decided not to follow up on Nick’s possible lead about Bertie’s whereabouts? Can you imagine either of them acting differently? Did you find the conclusion satisfying?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Sisters & Husbands
Connie Briscoe, 2009
Grand Central Publishing
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780446534895

Summary
Ten years have passed since Sisters and Lovers, and Beverly, now 39, is engaged to Julian, a man her family and friends agree is the epitome of a great catch: he's gorgeous, loyal, trustworthy, successful, and very much in love with her. Since this is Beverly's third engagement in the past five years, after breaking off the previous two at the last moment, everyone's happy that she's finally settling down.

For Beverly and Julian, nothing could be better than being in love and planning their wedding. That is until Beverly's oldest sister's marriage falls apart and dampens the mood of what should have been the happiest time in Beverly's life. Now, second-guessing her impending nuptials, Beverly is forced to wonder if marriage really works.

Will she stick it out? Or will her fears cloud her judgment once again? (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—December 31, 1952
• Where—Washington, DC, USA
• Education—B.A. Hampton University; M.A., American
University
• Currently—lives in Maryland, USA

Connie Briscoe has been a full-time published author for more than ten years. Born with a hearing impairment, Connie never allowed that to stop her from pursuing her dreams—writing. Since she left the world of editing to become a writer, Connie has hit the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Boston Herald, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists. (From the publisher.)

More
Her own words:

When I wrote Sisters and Lovers, the prequel to Sisters and Husbands, I had recently entered my 40s. I was single after a divorce many years earlier, and most of my girlfriends were also single. I remember thinking how different life was for me and many of my girlfriends than it had been for my parents' generation. Back then, most women were married with children in college by age 40. Yet, women in my generation were less inclined to even marry before reaching their 30s. Many of us, whether single by choice or chance, had to learn to accept living much of our lives without a permanent mate. That's how Beverly was born. When Sisters and Lovers opens, she's 39, still single and struggling with her situation.

Flash forward. In Sisters and Husbands it's 10 years later and Beverly is engaged to be married. After a string of lovers, she's about to take a husband, or so it seems. By this time, though, Beverly has learned to accept life as a single woman and even to embrace it. She questions the necessity of marriage, especially since she's nearly past childbearing age. Plus, over the years she's seen the marriages of her sisters and girlfriends all fall apart, whether married 2 years or 20. Beverly's fiancé is the man of her dreams, but she's not convinced they need to marry. When Sisters and Husbands opens, she's got cold feet.

I went through a similar phase. I first got married in my twenties. It lasted less than a year. He wasn't the right man for me, and I got out. I couldn't understand how I could have been so mistaken about a man, and the experience soured me on marriage for years. But I've always liked the idea of marriage—companionship for life, a sex partner for life, raising children and growing old together. My parents had that. So 15 years later I decided to give marriage another try, and my husband and I are going on 10 years of marriage now.

With age, wisdom and experience maybe you can succeed where before you failed. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Sisters & Lovers [sold] 750,000 copies. [Now comes] the long-awaited sequel, Sisters & Husbands, with high hopes it will become a fixture in beach bags this summer. It's not all happily ever after for Briscoe's three fictional sisters, who live and love and bicker in the affluent, integrated suburbs of Washington, D.C., terrain the Washington native knows firsthand. There is Beverly, a journalist and serial runaway bride; unlucky-in-love Charmaine; and the seemingly perfect Evelyn, a married psychologist. In Husbands, the trio copes with cares and woes more commonly found on Wisteria Lane than in the housing projects of The Wire. Lawyer-husbands having midlife crises. Sassy spoiled stepdaughters. Ticking biological clocks. Sibling rivalry over $500 Prada handbags. The big theme in Sisters & Husbands is marriage, or "how do you keep it alive and fresh?"
USA Today

What I appreciated most about the book was the practicality of the issues at hand. Briscoe considers real-life situations, like blended families, mid-life crisis, and the pre-wedding jitters that many people experience prior to their first marriage. Nothing seems far-fetched or unrealistic. Nonetheless, I did find the characters to be kind of on the mawkish side. Sometimes their emotional reactions to situations made them seem silly, almost corny and difficult to believe. However, the page-turning drama and the situations in the novel make this an easy, fun read. I did find myself pondering the idea and the institution of marriage. Buried in the drama and the sex and the fighting and the emotions of this novel are several questions: Are all people capable of cheating? Is being in love enough? What makes a marriage last? Although Briscoe doesn't exactly provide the answers to these questions, she certainly provides an interesting springboard for discussion in Sisters and Husbands, which is sure to be a summertime hit.
Alysa Hyman - African American Literature Book Club (aalbc.com)

Discussion Questions
1. For those who have read Sisters & Lovers, how have Beverly, Charmaine, and Evelyn grown or changed over the past ten years?

2. Which of the three sisters has grown the most? Which has grown the least?

3. Did Beverly make the right decision about whether or not to marry Julian? If so, why? If not, why not?

4. Do too many American women have unrealistic expectations of marriage? Do they expect marriage to be a perfect life, or like a fairy tale?

5. What are Beverly’s greatest strengths and weaknesses?

6. What are Charmaine’s greatest strengths and weaknesses?

7. What are Evelyn’s greatest strengths and weaknesses?

8. Which sister is your favorite and why?

9. Which sister is you least favorite and why?

10. Was Charmaine right to go to bat for her son Kenny, even at the risk of destroying her marriage?

11. Do you think that Beverly and Julian will last?

12. Do you think that Charmaine and Tyrone will last?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Sisters & Lovers
Connie Briscoe, 1994
Random House
409 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780804113342

Summary
Beverly, Charmaine, and Evelyn are three sisters living in the same city, but in very different worlds. They have at least one thing in common though: in their own corners of Washington, D.C., they are reaching their personal breaking points. Beverly, twenty-nine, is successful, reluctantly single, and perennially disappointed. Evelyn, thirty-seven, is educated and ambitious, with a husband, two great kids, and a house in the suburbs; but the secure world she has built for herself is quite possibly about to crumble. And Charmaine, thirty-five, struggles to support her son as well as her useless husband, all the while wondering what either of her sisters has to complain about.

As this frank and funny novel unfolds, Beverly will find and lose more men than she'd like to admit, Charmaine will kick her husband out and let him back in more times than she'd like her sisters to know about, and Evelyn will try to keep it a secret that her husband isn't Mr. Perfect after all. But what these three women discover is that having a sister gives you one of the few things you can really rely on.

In Sisters & Lovers, debut novelist Connie Briscoe has drawn a vivid and dramatic portrait that will make readers laugh out loud and nod their heads in recognition. It is a novel that announces the welcome arrival of a truly fresh new voice? (From the publisher.)

Also, see the novel's sequel, Sisters and Husbands, which was published in 2009.

Author Bio
• Birth—December 31, 1952
• Where—Washington, DC, USA
• Education—B.A. Hampton University; M.A., American University
• Currently—lives in Maryland, USA

More
Her own words:

With age, wisdom and experience maybe you can succeed where before you failed. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Although Briscoe lapses into soap opera at times, on the whole, she does a good job of dealing with her characters' sociocultural differences while telling a convincing, passionate contemporary tale. Briscoe knows her D.C. setting well, from her position as managing editor of "American Annals of the Deaf" at Gallaudet University.
Booklist

Set in and around Washington, D.C., Briscoe's earnest debut novel centers on three sisters attempting to balance their needs for love and their self-respect in a male-defined society. Beverly, Charmaine and Evelyn each represent stereotypical "successful" African American women, forced to compromise their desires in order to hold on to their male partners. Charmaine, 35, is a secretary, mother of one and pregnant; she struggles to cope financially and emotionally with her immature, underachieving husband as he weaves bold-faced lies about work, drugs and money. Evelyn, a 37-year-old psychologist and mother of two, resists her lawyer husband's desire to start his own firm, fearing that their standard of living will suffer. Magazine editor Beverly, perhaps the most interesting of the trio, is single, "picky" and reluctantly watching her biological clock tick its way to 30. Determined to move on after her boyfriend takes up with another woman, Beverly finds herself resorting to blind dates, considering artificial insemination and dating white men. Briscoe's writing lacks the energy and sass that Terry McMillan (Waiting to Exhale) brought to the same theme, and her passages of introspection can be awkward and heavy-handed. The audience for this book will find it enjoyable but not memorable.
Publishers Weekly

In this well-paced first novel by journalist Briscoe, three middle-class African American sisters living in the Washington, D.C., area face love, choices, and crises as they journey through life. Beverly, Charmaine, and Evelyn are quite different, yet the bonds of sisterly love remain strong. Briscoe's finely crafted novel is slightly reminiscent of Terri McMillan's Waiting To Exhale and will attract many of the same readers. It is at once humorous, poignant, realistic, and romantic and skillfully uses witty but realistic dialog to keep the story moving along. Because the lives of African Americans are so varied, it is refreshing to read fiction portraying black women in a positive light. Destined to become a keeper , this is recommended for all fiction collections and for libraries supporting African American collections, which far too often simply mirror the interests of "mainstream" America. — Angela Washington-Blair, Dallas
Library Journal

Imagine Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale without the sex, the sizzle, and the funky humor and you have a fair idea of Briscoe's first novel about three black sisters and their problems with their menfolk. Evelyn, Charmaine, and Beverly live in and around Washington, DC. Smart, materialistic Evelyn has it all: a super husband (lawyer Kevin), two great kids, an upscale suburban home, and work she enjoys as a psychologist. Charmaine, a secretary, has her own home, a young son by an ex-boyfriend, and a sexy but shiftless husband, Clarence. Magazine editor Beverly, the baby at 29, is still single and lives alone. Briscoe gives each sister a problem to chew on—nothing wrong with that, except the laborious chewing lasts all novel long. Evelyn's Kevin wants to leave his prestigious law firm and start his own: Will Evelyn's resistance endanger their marriage? Clarence's lies and debts are driving Charmaine crazy: Should she throw the bum out? Beverly has just ditched boyfriend Vernon for apparently two-timing her: Can she relax her high standards and forgive him? Beverly's dilemma leads to a more general complaint: "What's the matter with these black men?'' Her two post-Vernon dates are such dogs that she has a fling with a white guy who turns out to be an anal-retentive nut. The sisters support one another to a point, but sibling rivalries ensure that their relationships stay sweet and sour and add to the novel's most lasting impression, that of a peevish calling to account. Smoothly readable, but flat and uninventive.
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 Sisters & Lovers:

1. Talk about the differences between the three sisters. What are each of their strengths and weaknesses? Do you have a favorite sister...if so, who and why?

2. What views or expectations does each sister have of marriage? Realistic or not?

3. By the end, what have the three women learned—about themselves, each other, their husbands, and the institution of marriage? How have they changed if, in fact, they have? Has one of the sisters had more to learn than the others?

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

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The Sisters Brothers
Patrick deWitt, 2011
HarperCollins
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062041265

Summary
Winner, 2011 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction
Winner, 2011 Writers' Trust of Canada Fiction Prize

Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. The enigmatic and powerful man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and his henchmen, Eli and Charlie Sisters, will make sure of it.

Though Eli doesn't share his brother's appetite for whiskey and killing, he's never known anything else. But their prey isn't an easy mark, and on the road from Oregon City to Warm's gold-mining claim outside Sacramento, Eli begins to question what he does for a livingand whom he does it for.

With The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt pays homage to the classic Western, transforming it into an unforgettable comic tour de force.

Filled with a remarkable cast of characterslosers, cheaters, and ne'er-do-wells from all stripes of life and told by a complex and compelling narrator, it is a violent, lustful odyssey through the underworld of the 1850s frontier that beautifully captures the humor, melancholy, and grit of the Old West and two brothers bound by blood, violence, and love. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1975
• Where—Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada
• Education—N/A
• Awards—Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction
Writers' Trust of Canada Fiction Prize, Rogers Prize,
Stephen Leacock Award
• Currently—lives in Portland, Oregon, USA

Patrick deWitt is a Canadian novelist and screenwriter. He was born on Vancouver Island, British Columbia and later lived in California and Washington. He currently lives in Portland, Oregon.

His first book, Ablutions (2009), was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice book. His second book, The Sisters Brothers (2011), was shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and the 2011 Governor General's Award for English language fiction. He was one of two Canadian writers, alongside Esi Edugyan, to make all four award lists in 2011.

On November 1, 2011, he was announced as the winner of the Rogers Prize, and on November 15, 2011, he was announced as the winner of Canada's 2011 Governor General's Award for English language fiction. On April 26, 2012, the book The Sisters Brothers won the 2012 Stephen Leacock Award. Alongside Edugyan, The Sisters Brothers was also a shortlisted nominee for the 2012 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/7/2013.)

Book Reviews
[G]ritty, as well as deadpan and often very comic…DeWitt has chosen a narrative voice so sharp and distinctive…it’s very narrowing of possibilities opens new doors in the imagination.
New York Times

[deWitt] rides parallel to the trails of Jack Shaefer, James Carlos Blake and Cormac McCarthy, but he frequently crosses into comic territory to produce a story that's weirdly funny, startlingly violent and steeped in sadness…As the novel runs along, deWitt shifts the story in unpredictable directions, slowing the pace for a surreal finale in the woods that's touched with alchemy.
Ron Charles - Washington Post

A feast of delights in short punchy chapters.... Deliciously original and rhapsodically funny, this is one novel that ropes you in on page one, and isn’t about to ride off into the sunset any time soon.
Boston Globe

[F]ull of surprises, among them…is the quirky beauty of the language Patrick deWitt has devised for his narrator.... The Sisters Brothers is deWitt’s second novel…and is an inventive and ingenious character study. It will make you impatient for the third.
Dallas Morning News

If Cormac McCarthy had a sense of humor, he might have concocted a story like Patrick DeWitt’s bloody, darkly funny western The Sisters Brothers.... [DeWitt has] a skillfully polished voice and a penchant for gleefully looking under bloody bandages.
Los Angeles Times

Wandering his Western landscape with the cool confidence of a practiced pistoleer, deWitt’s steady hand belies a hair trigger, a poet’s heart and an acute sense of gallows humor…the reader is likely to reach the adventure’s end in the same shape as Eli: wounded but bettered by the ride.
Time Out New York

Thrilling…a lushly voiced picaresque story…so richly told, so detailed, that what emerges is a weird circus of existence, all steel shanks and ponies, gut shots and medication poured into the eyeholes of the dying. At some level, this too is a kind of revenge story, marvelously blurry.
Esquire

[Q]uirky and stylish revisionist western.... [A] frontier baron known as the Commodore orders Charlie and Eli Sisters, his hired gunslingers, to track down and kill a prospector named Herman Kermit Warm.... Charlie and Eli ...come off looking less and less like killers and more like traumatized young men.... DeWitt has produced a genre-bending frontier saga that is exciting, funny, and, perhaps unexpectedly, moving.
Publishers Weekly

[E]ngrossing...a gritty, unapologetic homage to pulp Westerns (with perhaps a nod to Cormac McCarthy as well). In the final pages, however, as the hired guns at the center of the story are forced by circumstances to rethink their lives, the novel turns into something much more philosophical, existential, and extraordinary.... It becomes, in effect, a different kind of novel, profoundly literary, and devoted to serious philosophical meditation. —Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT
Library Journal

A calmly vicious journey into avarice and revenge. The unusual title refers to Charlie and Eli Sisters, the latter of whom narrates the novel. The narrative style is flat, almost unfeeling, though the action turns toward the cold-blooded. It's 1851, and the mysterious Commodore has hired the Sisters brothers to execute a man who's turned against him.... DeWitt creates a homage to life in the Wild West but at the same time reveals its brutality.
Kirkus Reviews

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

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

We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.

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The Montclair Sisters
Cathy Holton, 2012
Branwell Books
366 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781938529009

Summary
The last thing twenty-one-year-old Stella Nightingale wants is a job as a caregiver for wealthy Alice Montclair Whittington. Alice, a ninety-four-year-old Southern grande dame with a dry sense of humor and a wicked tongue, has already run off a long line of caregivers.

But Stella, a former runaway from a broken home who's only recently begun to put her life back together, is desperate for work. And she figures she can handle Alice. But strange things are happening at Alice's rambling mountaintop estate. As an unlikely friendship develops between the two women, Alice, whose memory comes and goes, begins to reveal long-ago tales of her illustrious past, tales that pose more questions than they answer. Who is her mysterious sister, Laura? Why won't Alice and her sister, Adeline, ever speak of her? And why are the other caregivers afraid to go down in the basement?

As Stella tries to separate fact from fiction in Alice's life, she struggles to overcome her own devastating family secret, compelled by a deepening friendship that will change the lives of both women forever. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—June 24, 1956
• Where—Lakeland, Florida, USA
• Education—Michigan State University
• Currently—lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee

Cathy Holton, the daughter of a college professor and an artist, grew up in college towns in the American South and Midwest. As a child, she entertained her classmates with tales of a scaled creature that lived in her carport shed and a magical phone that hung in her family’s bathroom that could be used to summon an English butler (this was in North Carolina in the 1960’s and her family lived in married student housing).

Once, in a moment of epiphany, she overheard two neighbors discussing her.

“That child is quite the story-teller,” one woman said
“That child is the biggest liar on God’s green earth,” the other woman replied. “She wouldn’t know the truth if it fell out of the sky and clumped her on the head.”

Cathy knew then that she would be a writer.

She studied Creative Writing at Michigan State University under Professor Albert Drake. She has worked as a dude ranch hand, a university seminar coordinator, a paralegal, and an assistant in a fire investigation firm. The mother of three grown children, she lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee with her husband and a rescue dog named Yoshi. She is the author of Revenge of the Kudzu Debutantes, Secret Lives of the Kudzu Debutantes, Beach Trip, and Summer in the South, all published through Random House/Ballantine Books.

Her fifth novel, The Sisters Montclair, is about a twenty-one-year old runaway who takes a job as a caregiver for a ninety-four year old Southern grande dame, a woman fleeing her own mysterious past. Think Girl, Interrupted meets Driving Miss Daisy. With a twist. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
(Mainstream press reviews have not yet appeared online for Holton's newest book. Included are reviews from her previous novels.)

Revenge of the Kudzu Debutantes

Holton has a lively, fluid style that shifts easily among the viewpoints’ of several characters and goes down as easily as sweet tea.
Boston Globe

Three Southern Belles wreak havoc in the lives of their cheating husbands in this light, likable debut.
Kirkus Reviews

Secret Lives of the Kudzu Debutantes

Holton’s headstrong heroines deliver homespun wisdom and hearty laughs in this uproarious sequel.
Booklist

Sharp, witty, and warm.
Entertainment Weekly

Beach Trip

A brilliant, bubbly, bracing novel...packed with hilarity and heartache.
Wichita Falls Times Record News

A poignant tale of heartbreak and happiness that celebrates the resiliency of women.
Chattanooga Times Free Press

Summer in the South

Brimming with unforgettable characters, smart conversations, and an engaging mystery that makes spending a summer in the south a tantalizing proposition.
Kirkus Reviews

Part gothic mystery, part romance…sit back with a cold drink on a shady porch, and enjoy.
Roanoke Times

Discussion Questions
1. What was The Sisters Montclair about? What are some of the book’s themes?

2. How realistic were the characters of Stella and Alice? Did you like them? Hate them?

3. The relationship between Stella and Alice is central to the novel. Have you ever experienced a similar friendship with another woman, something perhaps unexpected because of your backgrounds and interests?

4. By falling in love with Brendan, Alice made a choice that had moral implications in the story. Would you have made the same decision? Why or why not?

5. When Professor Dillard asks Stella why she stays with Alice, Stella replies, “Because she’s wounded.” How does this statement relate to Stella’s abandonment by her own mother? How does it relate to the central themes of love, friendship, and support that develop between Stella and Alice?

6. How did the relationship between Alice and her sister, Laura, parallel Alice’s relationship with Stella?

7. Stella and Alice are products, not only of their class, but also of their generation. If Alice had been born into the freedoms afforded women of Stella’s generation, would her life have been different? In what ways? Are there clues in the novel about how Alice fantasized, as a young woman, about living her life?

8. Stella and Alice’s background are so completely different that each has difficulty clearly seeing the other. Alice’s elite upbringing makes her naive about Stella’s past, and Stella has a tendency to believe that money is a protection from tragedy. But does anyone ever truly have a perfect life? Have you ever known someone who seemed to “have it all,” only to discover later that they had suffered through some unimaginable tragedy?

9. The novel essentially takes place in two different time periods. How did the author handle this? Did you feel you were experiencing the time and place in which the book was set?

10. How was Laura’s tragic fate foreshadowed in the novel? Were you surprised by the ending, or expecting it?

11. Were you surprised at the end of the novel by Alice’s confession:

There’s all kinds of love. There’s the kind that comes over you like a sickness, and there’s the kind that comes on after years of shared struggle and companionship. And I can tell you, from my experience, it’s the second kind that lasts longest. The other eventually burns away like a fever. Leaving what—guilt, regret? Would I have been happier with Brendan Burke? I don’t think so. He wasn’t the man I thought he was. I got the life I needed with Bill Whittington, even if it didn’t seem like the one I wanted at the time.

12. Did your impression of Brendan Burke change over the course of the novel? Of Bill Whittington?

13. Did the story pull you in, or did you have to force yourself to finish it?

14. How did the book compare to other books by the author? Would you recommend this book to other readers?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Six of Crows
Leigh Bardugo, 2015
Henry Holt & Co.
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781627792127

Summary
Ketterdam: a bustling hub of international trade where anything can be had for the right price—and no one knows that better than criminal prodigy Kaz Brekker.

Kaz is offered a chance at a deadly heist that could make him rich beyond his wildest dreams. But he can't pull it off alone...

A convict with a thirst for revenge.
A sharpshooter who can't walk away from a wager.
A runaway with a privileged past.
A spy known as the Wraith.
A Heartrender using her magic to survive the slums.
A thief with a gift for unlikely escapes.

Six dangerous outcasts. One impossible heist. Kaz's crew is the only thing that might stand between the world and destruction—if they don't kill each other first. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1975
• Where—Jerusalem, Israel
• Education—B.A., Yale University
• Currently—lives in Hollywood, California, USA

Leigh Bardugo is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Shadow and Bone (2012) and Siege and Storm (2013). Ruin and Rising (2014) is the third installment in her Grisha Trilogy.

Six of Crows came out in 2015, which, although not yet announced, appears to be the first volume of a new series.

Leigh was born in Jerusalem, grew up in Los Angeles, and graduated from Yale University. She has worked in advertising, journalism, and most recently, makeup and special effects. These days, she’s lives and writes in Hollywood where she can occasionally be heard singing with her band. (Adapted from the author's website .)

Book Reviews
(Starred review.) Bardugo reveals intriguing new depths and surprises. This has all the right elements to keep readers enthralled: a cunning leader..., nigh-impossible odds, ...skilled misfits, a twisty plot, and a nerve-wracking cliffhanger (Ages 12 & up).
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) [W]ildly imaginative....[with] fully fleshed out, dynamic protagonists who will engage and enchant readers. What a thrill it is to return to the world [Bardugo] created with her popular Grisha Trilogy.... [U]unsettling, captivating, magical (Gr 7 & up). —Jane Henriksen Baird, Anchorage Public Library, AK
Library Journal

(Starred review.) This book can be fully enjoyed without having read any previous title. Great characters with complex backstories, dynamic relationships that show growth, and plenty of action to keep the pace lively. The criminal elements that pervade the story give a pleasantly gritty edge to it all. (Ages 15-18). —Stacey Hayman
VOYA

(Starred review.) Adolescent criminals seek the haul of a lifetime in a fantasyland at the beginning of its industrial age.... Cracking page-turner with a multiethnic band of misfits with differing sexual orientations who satisfyingly, believably jell into a family (Ages 14 & up).
Kirkus Reviews

Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for Six of Crows:

1.. How do the characters—Kaz and his crew of five—differ from one another? Start, perhaps, with each one's defining characteristics; then consider...
♦ their individual motivations
♦ their skills (what talent each brings to the heist)
♦ their past histories
♦ how each views the society they live in, the job at hand, and one another.

2. To what extent do any of the characters grow or change by the end of the book? Do any (or all) reach a new level of maturity, gain insights, or find peace and redemption from their pasts?

3. Do you have any favorites within the Dregs? Is there one you relate to or sympathize with more than any of the others?

4. Six of Crows is set in the same world as Bardugo's Grisha Trilogy. If you've read any of the books in that trilogy, how does this one compare? If you haven't, was it hard to find your footing at first?

5. Did you enjoy the book's structure—a story told through five different characters? Do the differing voices progress seamlessly through the book, or does the storyline feel disjointed? Why might Bardugo have chosen to tell her story using different points of view?

6. Talk about the various loyalties and friendships that exist among and between crew members—there's Nina and Inej, as well as Jesper, Wylan, and Matthias.

7. What is going on between Nina and Matthias—do they love or hate one another? Or are their conflicted feelings flip sides of the same coin?

8. Follow-up to Question 7: What about the romance between Kaz and Inej? What does Inej mean when she says to Kaz, "I will have you without armor, Kaz Brekker. Or I will not have you at all"? What are his feelings toward her?

9. Fantasy/dystopian literature is frequently a veiled allusion to the ills of contemporary, society, perhaps serving as a warning. What aspects of Ketterdam, though exaggerated, might be a reflection of our own 21st-century society?

10. Were you surprised by the twists and turns of the plot? Or did you "see it coming."

11. If Six of Crows is the first installment of a series, as most believe, will you be read the next volume?

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

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Skeletons at the Feast
Chris Bohjalian, 2008
Crown Publishing
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307394965

Summary
A masterful love story set against a backdrop of epic history and unforgettable courage.

In the waning months of World War II, a small group of people begin the longest journey of their lives.

At the center is eighteen-year-old Anna, the daughter of Prussian aristocrats, and her first love, a twenty-year-old Scottish prisoner of war named Callum. With his boyish good looks and his dedication to her family, he has captured Anna’s heart.

But he is the enemy, and their love must remain a closely guarded secret. Only Manfred, a twenty-six-year-old Wehrmacht corporal, knows the truth. And Manfred, who is not what he seems to be, is reluctantly taken with Anna, just as she finds herself drawn uncomfortably to him.

As these unlikely allies work their way west, their flight will test both Anna’s and Callum’s love, as well as their friendship with Manfred—and will forever bind the young trio together. (From the publisher.)

Christopher Aram Bohjalian, who goes by the pen name Chris Bohjalian, is an American novelist. Bohjalian is the author of 15 novels, including New York Times bestsellers Midwives, Secrets of Eden, The Law of Similars, Before You Know Kindness, The Double Bind, Skeletons at the Feast, and The Night Strangers.

Bohjalian is the son of Aram Bohjalian, who was a senior vice president of the New York advertising agency Romann & Tannenholz. Chris Bohjalian graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College, where he was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. In the mid-1980s, he worked as an account representative for J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in New York.

He and his wife lived in a co-op in Brooklyn until March 1986, when the two were riding in a taxicab in which the driver refused to let them out of the car for 45 minutes, ignoring all traffic lights and stop signs. Around midnight, the driver dropped them off at a near-deserted street in front of a crack house, where the police were conducting a raid and Bohjalian and his wife were forced to drop to the ground for their protection. The incident prompted the couple to move from Brooklyn; Bohjalian said, "After it was all over, we just thought, "Why do we live here?" A few days later, the couple read an ad in The New York Times referencing the "People's Republic of Vermont," and in 1987 the couple moved to Lincoln, Vermont.

Early career
After buying their house, Bohjalian began writing weekly columns for local newspaper and magazine about living in the small town, which had a population of about 975 residents. The Concord Monitor said of Bohjalian during this period, "his immersion in community life and family, Vermont-style, has allowed him to develop into a novelist with an ear and empathy for the common man." Bohjalian continued the column for about 12 years, writing about such topics as his own daily life, fatherhood and the transformation of America. The column has run in the Burlington Free Press since 1992. Bohjalian has also written for such magazines as Cosmopolitan, Reader's Digest and the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine.

Bohjalian's first novel, A Killing in the Real World, was released in 1988. Almost two decades after it was released, Bohjalian said of the book, "It was a train wreck. I hadn't figured things out yet." His third novel, Past the Bleachers, was released in 1992 and adapted as a Hallmark Channel television movie in 1995.

In 1998, Bohjalian wrote his fifth book, Midwives, a novel focusing on rural Vermont midwife Sibyl Danforth, who becomes embroiled in a legal battle after one of her patients died following an emergency Caesarean section. The novel was critically acclaimed and was selected by Oprah Winfrey as the October 1998 selection of her Oprah's Book Club, which helped push the book to great financial success. It became a New York Times and USA Today bestseller. Victoria Blewer has often described her husband as having "a crush" on the Sybil Danforth character. In 2001, the novel was adapted into a Lifetime Movie Network television film starring Sissy Spacek in the lead role. Spacek said the Danforth character appealed to her because "the heart of the story is my character's inner struggle with self-doubt, the solo road you travel when you have a secret."

Later career
Bohjalian followed Midwives with the 1999 novel The Law of Similars, about a widower attorney suffering from nameless anxieties who starts dating a woman who practices alternative medicine. The novel was inspired by Bohjalian's real-life visit to a homeopath in an attempt to cure frequent colds he was catching from his daughter's day care center. Bohjalian said of the visit, "I don't think I imagined there was a novel in homeopathy, however, until I met the homeopath and she explained to me the protocols of healing. There was a poetry to the language that a patient doesn't hear when visiting a conventional doctor." The protagonist, a father, is based in part on Bohjalian himself, and his four-year-old daughter is based largely on Bohjalian's daughter, who was three when he was writing the book., Liz Rosenberg of The New York Times said the novel shared many similarities with Midwives but that it paled in comparison; Rosenberg said, "Unlike its predecessor, it fails to take advantage of Bohjalian's great gift for creating thoughtful fiction featuring characters in whom the reader sustains a lively interest." Megan Harlan of The Boston Phoenix described it as "formulaic fiction" and said Bohjalian focused too much on creating a complex plot and not enough of complex characterizations. The Law of Similars, like Midwives, made the New York Times bestsellers list.

He won the New England Book Award in 2002, and in 2007 released "The Double Bind," a novel based on Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

In 2008, Bohjalian released Skeletons at the Feast, a love story set in the last six months of World War II in Poland and Germany. The novel was inspired by an unpublished diary written by German citizen Eva Henatsch from 1920 to 1945. The diary was given to Bohjalian in 1998 by Henatsch's grandson Gerd Krahn, a friend of Bohjalian, who had a daughter in the same kindergarten class as Bohjalian's daughter. Bohjalian was particularly fascinated by Henatsch's account of her family's trek west ahead of the Soviet Army, but he was not inspired to write a novel from it until 2006, when he read Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, Max Hastings' history of the final years of World War II. Bohjalian was struck not only by how often Henatsch's story mirrored real-life experiences, but also the common "moments of idiosyncratic human connection" found in both. Skeletons of the Feast was considered a departure for Bohjalian because it was not only set outside of Vermont, but set in a particular historical moment.

His 2010 novel, Secrets of Eden, was also a critical success, receiving starred reviews from three of the four trade journals (Booklist, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly), as well as many newspapers and magazines. It debuted at # 6 on The New York Times bestseller list.

His next novel, The Night Strangers, published in 2011, represents yet another departure for Bohjalian. The is both a gothic ghost story and a taut psychological thriller.

He has written a weekly column for Gannett's Burlington Free Press since February 1992 called "Idyll Banter." His 1,000th column appeared in May 2011.

Personal comments
In a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview, Bohjalian offered up these personal comments:

I was the heaviest child, by far, in my second-grade class. My mother had to buy my pants for me at a store called the "Husky Boys Shop," and still she had to hem the cuffs up around my knees. I hope this experience, traumatizing as it was, made me at least marginally more sensitive to people around me.

I have a friend with Down syndrome, a teenage boy who is capable of remembering the librettos from entire musicals the first or second time he hears them. The two of us belt them out together whenever we're driving anywhere in a car.I am a pretty avid bicyclist. The other day I was biking alone on a thin path in the woods near Franconia Notch, New Hampshire, and suddenly before me I saw three bears. At first I saw only two, and initially I thought they were cats. Then I thought they were dogs. Finally, just as I was approaching them and they started to scurry off the path and into the thick brush, I understood they were bears. Bear cubs, to be precise. Which is exactly when their mother, no more than five or six feet to my left, reared up on her hind legs, her very furry paws and very sharp claws raised above her head in a gesture that an optimist might consider a wave and guy on a bike might consider something a tad more threatening. Because she was standing on a slight incline, I was eye level with her stomach—an eventual destination that seemed frighteningly plausible. I have never biked so fast in my life in the woods. I may never have biked so fast in my life on a paved road.

I do have hobbies—I garden and bike, for example—but there's nothing in the world that gives me even a fraction of the pleasure that I derive from hanging around with my wife and daughter.

He lives with his wife and daughter in Lincoln, Vermont, where he is active in the local church and the Vermont theater community—always off-stage, never on.

Writing style
Bohjalian novels often focus on a specific issue, such as homelessness, animal rights and environmentalism, and tend to be character-driven, revolving around complex and flawed protagonists and secondary characters. Bohjalian uses characteristics from his real life in his writings; in particular, many of his novels take place in fictional Vermont towns, and the names of real New Hampshire towns are often used throughout his stories. Bohjalian said, "Writers can talk with agonizing hubris about finding their voices, but for me, it was in Vermont that I discovered issues, things that matter to me." His novels also tend to center around ordinary people facing extraordinarily difficult situations resulting from unforeseen circumstances, often triggered by other parties. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Bohjalian's sense of character and place, his skillful plotting and his clear grasp of this confusing period of history make for a deeply satisfying novel, one that asks readers to consider, and reconsider, how they would rise to the challenge of terrible deprivation and agonizing moral choices.
Margot Livesey - Washington Post

A poignant account of the conflict's last year.... Harrowing.... In creating the Emmerichs and their relationship to Uri, Bohjalian has given us something new and disturbing. He has also created a wonderful character in the protected child, Theo, whose gradual understanding of what is happening to them is moving and real.... Bohjalian has given us an important addition to the story of World War II, and, not at all incidentally, may expand the vision of those who may have avoided "Holocaust literature" in the past.
Roberta Silman - The Boston Globe

Harrowing...ingenious...compelling.... Judging who's right or wrong is difficult in Skeletons at the Feast, and one senses that's just the way Bohjalian wants it.... A tightly woven, moving story for anyone who thinks there's nothing left to learn, or feel, about the Second World War. That Bohjalian can extract greater truths about faith, hope and compassion from something as mundane as a diary is testament not only to his skill as a writer but also to the enduring ability of well-written war fiction to stir our deepest emotions.
Paula L. Woods - Los Angeles Times

Reading Bohjalian's descriptions of terror and tragedy on the road has just as much impact as seeing newsreels from the end of World War II.... While creating suspense, Bohjalian agilely balances the moral ambiguities of war.... Right and wrong shift depending on the situation. Ignorance is tolerated and murder is justified. But Bohjalian does posit that one absolute exists: No one wins at war.
Dennis Moore - USA Today

In his 12th novel, Bohjalian (The Double Bind) paints the brutal landscape of Nazi Germany as German refugees struggle westward ahead of the advancing Russian army. Inspired by the unpublished diary of a Prussian woman who fled west in 1945, the novel exhumes the ruin of spirit, flesh and faith that accompanied thousands of such desperate journeys. Prussian aristocrat Rolf Emmerich and his two elder sons are sent into battle, while his wife flees with their other children and a Scottish POW who has been working on their estate. Before long, they meet up with Uri Singer, a Jewish escapee from an Auschwitz-bound train, who becomes the group's protector. In a parallel story line, hundreds of Jewish women shuffle west on a gruesome death march from a concentration camp. Bohjalian presents the difficulties confronting both sets of travelers with carefully researched detail and an unflinching eye, but he blinks when creating the Emmerichs, painting them as untainted by either their privileged status, their indoctrination by the Nazi Party or their adoration of Hitler. Although most of the characters lack complexity, Bohjalian's well-chosen descriptions capture the anguish of a tragic era and the dehumanizing desolation wrought by war.
Publishers Weekly

Bohjalian (The Double Bind) leaves his traditional Vermont milieu for this wellcrafted, deeply moving historical novel in which he traces the last months of World War II Germany through various lives, masterfully describing landscape and struggle.... Bohjalian fans will applaud; highly recommended.
Joyce Kessel - Library Journal

Love in a time of war, 1945-1948. Though occasionally groaning under the weight of its mighty themes—man's-inhumanity-to-man, the-horror-the-horror, hope-rising-from-rubble—sheer storytelling here ultimately wins out, trumping the novel's self-consciously mythic ambitions. It features a desperate trio: Anna Emmerich, Prussian aristocrat with "[h]air the color of corn silk," her strapping lover, Callum Finnella, Scottish POW, and the mysterious Manfred, Wehrmacht corporal. Bohjalian (The Double Bind, 2007, etc.) brings them together for an epic romance based on a true-life World War II diary. Callum and Anna, her family in tow, are fleeing Russian invaders, crossing the iced-over Vistula as the Reich nears its bitter end. In their death throes, the Nazis have erupted into spasmodic violence—"live babies held by their ankles and swung like scythes into stone walls while their mothers were forced to watch...." Turns out Manfred's not an actual fascist but the underground alias of Uri Singer, a Jewish refugee masquerading, exchanging his yellow Star of David for a "Nuremberg eagle made of bronze." Outwitting the SA, who'd crammed him and his kin onto an Auschwitz-bound train, Uri had made a run for it, leaping from the boxcar. So, too, had Callum arrived dramatically into Anna's life, jumping from an airplane machine-gunned behind enemy lines, then being captured, and finally farmed out to the Emmerichs as a forced laborer. The three lives intersect as the tale winds through savaged cities. Bohjalian is especially good at conveying the surreal "beauty," the misshapen lyricism, of the war-torn landscape: "Even the stone church had collapsed upon itself...the once imposing pipes of the organ reshaped by heat and flame into giant copper-colored mushrooms." From harrowing to inspiring.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Do you know–or are you yourself–a veteran of World War II? Discuss what you know of the war and any reminiscences that veterans may have shared.

2. Both of Anna’s parents are members of the Nazi Party–though it is clear that they are not die-hard believers. Living on their farm in rural Prussia, they are largely sheltered from the atrocities perpetrated against the Jews. As Germans, do you think they share responsibility for the Nazis’ actions even if they didn’t know the full extent of what was happening? Why did they join the party? Did they have a choice? Consider Helmut’s teacher who questions the boy about his father’s loyalty to Hitler and the consequences of resisting. If failure to join meant death for you, what would you have done?

3. A group of POWs is brought to the Emmerich family’s farm to help with the harvest, including a Scot named Callum Finella. He and Anna fall in love. What brings them together? Does the kindness of the Emmerich family, and Callum’s love for their only daughter, change his view of the German people as a whole?

4. We meet Uri on the train to Auschwitz. What kind of man is he? How does he behave on the train? Imagine yourself in those deplorable conditions. Do you think you would seize the opportunity for freedom and jump as Uri did, leaving behind your family to an uncertain future?

5. While arguing with Anna about what is really happening to Jews, Callum says, “Suppose my government in England just decided to ‘resettle’ the Catholics–to take away their homes, their animals, their possessions, and just send them away?” What if this was happening where you live? What actions would you be willing to take to protect your friends and neighbors? At what point would the risks have been too great?

6. To survive, Uri impersonates a German soldier, stealing papers and uniforms from soldiers he either kills or finds dead. Discuss the events that lead up to his first killing of a Nazi. Discuss his reaction to what he has done (page 59). Do you believe his actions were warranted?

7. Although the world is essentially collapsing around them, Anna and Callum fall in love, Theo cries over leaving his beloved horse behind, and Mutti carefully drapes the furniture in sheets to protect it before they flee their home ahead of the Russians. What do these simple, ordinary actions reveal about them as people? About the human capacity for hope?

8. Theo is only a child but he feels lacking in comparison to his older brothers Werner and Helmut, both off fighting in the war. What kind of child is he? Does he fit in with his peers? Why doesn’t Theo tell his mother about his foot? What does this reveal about him? Does Theo change over the course of the novel?

9. Describe Cecile. What kind of woman is she? What keeps her going in spite of the cruelty and degradation she suffers every day? How is she different from her friend Jeanne? Do you think you would act more like Cecile or Jeanne in the same circumstances?

10. In Chapter Eight, Helmut and his father, Rolf, try to convince Uncle Karl to leave his home along with the Emmerichs. He refuses, keeping his daughter, daughter-in-law, and grandson with him in spite of the danger. Why won’t he evacuate? Why won’t he let the women and the child leave? On page 118 he refers to them and their way of life as “skeletons at the feast.” What does he mean by this?

11. Describe the circumstances that bring Uri and the Emmerichs together. Why does he choose to stay with them after running alone for so long? How does he feel about them initially? How do his feelings for them change?

12. On page 178, Callum is thinking about bringing Anna home with him to Scotland after the war. How does he think she will be received? Why is he troubled?

13. During their long march from the prison camp to the factory, Jeanne and another prisoner find soldiers’ rations and eat them. They do not wake Cecile to share them with her. Why? In the same circumstances, what would you have done?

14. Given the odds of success, would you have been brave enough to attempt to escape with Cecile and her friends?

15. Describe Mutti. What was she like at the beginning of the war? At the end? What does she view as her primary responsibility? On pages 291—293, she remembers burying the young German pilot whose plane crashed in her park. Why was burying him—and the enemy Russian soldiers—important to her?

16. How does Anna change as the novel progresses? Why does she feel the need for personal forgiveness at the end? Is she right to feel guilty?

17. Discuss the importance of hope in survival. Which character is the most hopeful? Which character is the most defeated? What moments at the end of the novel symbolize hope most poignantly?

18. Discuss the legacy that Mutti’s generation left for Anna’s. As a nation, what kind of legacy are we leaving for our children?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Skinny Legs and All
Tom Robbins, 1990
Random House
422 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780553377880

Summary
An Arab and a Jew open a restaurant together across the street from the United Nations....

It sounds like the beginning of an ethnic joke, but it's the axis around which spins this gutsy, fun-loving, and alarmingly provocative novel, in which a bean can philosophizes, a dessert spoon mystifies, a young waitress takes on the New York art world, and a rowdy redneck welder discovers the lost god of Palestine—while the illusions that obscure humanity's view of the true universe fall away, one by one, like Salome's veils.

Skinny Legs and All deals with today's most sensitive issues: race, politics, marriage, art, religion, money, and lust. It weaves lyrically through what some call the "end days" of our planet. Refusing to avert its gaze from the horrors of the apocalypse, it also refuses to let the alleged end of the world spoil its mood. And its mood is defiantly upbeat.

In the gloriously inventive Tom Robbins style, here are characters, phrases, stories, and ideas that dance together on the page, wild and sexy, like Salome herself. Or was it Jezebel?. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 22, 1932
• Where—Bowling Rock, North Carolina, USA
• Reared—near Richmond, Virginia
• Education—attended Washington and Lee University;
Virginia Commonwealth University; University of
Washington, for a Masters degree.
• Currently—lives in La Conner, Washington

So much mythology swirls around Pacific Northwest novelist Tom Robbins that sorting fact from fiction is a daunting challenge. Born Thomas Eugene Robbins in 1936 in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, he was raised from age 11 on in a suburb near Richmond, Virginia. He attended Washington and Lee University but did not graduate. Instead, he quit college and spent a year hitchhiking, settling for a while in New York City.

Robbins enlisted in the Air Force in 1957, just one step ahead of the draft, and served three years in Korea. Upon discharge, he moved back to Virginia to attend art school at Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University), graduating in 1961. During this time he worked as a copy editor for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

According to Robbins, the South's hidebound racism— perfectly mirrored in the newspaper's policy—prompted him to move as far away from Richmond as possible "while still remaining in the continental United States." He ended up in Seattle in the early 1960s, enrolled in the University of Washington to pursue his Masters, and went to work for the Seattle Times. If we are to believe the story, it was around this time that he first sampled LSD (not yet an illegal substance). Blown away by the experience, he chucked both grad school and his job at the paper and spent the rest of the decade bouncing between the East and West Coasts—writing, working as a DJ in alternative radio, and partaking liberally of the countercultural smorgasbord of the day.

Towards the end of the '60s, Robbins began working seriously at his writing, culminating in 1971 with the publication of his first novel, the comic absurdist tale, Another Roadside Attraction. A failure in hardcover, it nevertheless sold well as a paperback, prompting publishers to release his next book—1976's Even Cowgirls Get the Blues—in both formats simultaneously. Although he has not been a hit with most mainstream critics, Robbins has achieved rarified cult status with successive generations of 20-somethings who adore his goofy, upbeat satirical fiction. He claims to never read reviews but is pleased to have enjoyed a steady string of bestsellers starting with Still Life with Woodpecker in 1980. In 2005, he produced Wild Ducks Flying Backward, a volume of shorter works, including poems, stories, essays, articles, and reviews.

Rumor has it that Robbins polishes each sentence to perfection before moving on to the next. Whether or not that's true, he does admit to being a slow writer—and to needing a long period of rest and recuperation (usually involving travel to some exotic place) in between books. All of which explains why his output is surprisingly slender, especially for a writer who inspires such passionate, fanatical devotion!

Extras
• An accomplished artist, Robbins is one of only a handful of writers to have cover design built into their book contracts.

• When Elvis Presley died of an overdose in his bathroom on August 16, 1977, there was rumored to be a copy of Another Roadside Attraction on the floor beside him.

• While working as a journalist and DJ in Washington state, Robbins attended a 1967 Doors concert in Seattle. He claims that the origins of his unique writing style can be found in that piece.

• Robbins has enjoyed friendships with a group of widely people, from '60s countercultural icons like Alan Ginsberg and Timothy Leary to mythologist Joseph Campbell (with whom he once traveled to South America).

• Robbins has appeared in several films, including Made in Heaven; Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle; Breakfast of Champions, and Gus Van Sant's 1993 adaptation of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. (From Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
Robbins possesses magnet-like power.
USA Today

In a phantasmagorical, politically charged tale you wish would never end, Robbins holds forth—through a variety of ingenious, off-beat mouthpieces—on art (with and without caps), the Middle East, religious fanaticism of many stripes, and the seven veils of self-deception. Salome, skinny legs and all, belly-dances rapturously at Isaac & Ishmael's, a much-molested restaurant located across the street from the U.N., founded by an Arab and a Jew as an example of happy, peaceful and mutually beneficial coexistence. Ellen Cherry Charles, artist and waitress, heir to the most positive legacy of Jezebel, works at the same joint, nursing a broken heart inflicted by Boomer Petway, redneck welder/bemused darling of the New York art scene. Meanwhile, Can o' Beans, Dirty Sock, Spoon, Painted Stick and Conch Shell traverse half the world on a hejira to Jerusalem—where Conch and Painted Stick will resume religious duties in the Third Temple, dedicated (of course) to Astarte. Unless, mind you, Ellen Cherry's boil-encrusted uncle Buddy, a radio evangelist who gets turned on by Tammy Faye Bakker, manages to start WW III first.... Robbins's lust for laughs is undiminished; this prescription for sanity couldn't be better.
Publishers Weekly

A painter's struggle with her art, a restaurant opened as an experiment in brotherhood, the journey of several inanimate objects to Jerusalem, a preacher's scheme to hasten Armageddon, and a performance of a legendary dance: these are the diverse elements around which Robbins has built this wild, controversial novel. Ellen Cherry Charles, one of the "Daughters of the Daily Special" from Robbin's previous Jitterbug Perfume, takes center stage. She has married Boomer Petway and moved to New York, hoping to make it as a painter. Instead, she winds up a waitress at the Isaac and Ishmael, a restaurant co-owned by an Arab and a Jew. Robbins's primary concern is Middle Eastern politics, supplemented along the way with observations on art, religion, sex, and money. Few contemporary novelists mix tomfoolery and philosophy so well. This is Robbins at his best.
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 Skinny Legs and All:

1. Robbins uses the Dance of the Seven Veils as the structure of his novel. Identify and talk about the seven self-deceptions that he sees humans living under.

2. In what way is the biblical Jezebel significant to Ellen Cherry Charles?

3. What is true art? How does the New York art scene misrepresent the artistic ideal? Who represents the ideal in this novel and in what way? Consider this quotation: "In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak." Who says it and what does it mean?

4. Why would Robbins's use inanimate objects, like a can of beans, a sock, and a stick?

5. How does this story comment on the state of human affairs—what is Robbins overall view of our ability to solve our political and religious differences? Consider Issac and Ishmael, the two men who own the cafe in New York.

6. Who or what does Buddy represent?

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

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Skipping Christmas
John Grisham, 2001
Random House
277 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780440422969

Summary
Luther and Nora Krank are fed up with the chaos of Christmas. The endless shopping lists, the frenzied dashes through the mall, the hassle of decorating the tree... where has all the joy gone? This year, celebrating seems like too much effort. With their only child off in Peru, they decide that just this once, they'll skip the holidays. They spend their Christmas budget on a Caribbean cruise set to sail on December 25, and happily settle in for a restful holiday season free of rooftop snowmen and festive parties.

But the Kranks soon learn that their vacation from Christmas isn't much of a vacation at all, and that skipping the holidays has consequences they didn't bargain for...

A modern Christmas classic, Skipping Christmas is a charming and hilarious look at the mayhem and madness that have become ingrained in our holiday tradition. (From the publisher.)

A 2004 film version of the book, renamed Christmas with the Kranks, stars Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis.

Author Bio
• Birth—February 8, 1955
• Where—Jonesboro, Arkansas, USA
• Education—B.S., Mississippi State; J.D., University of Mississippi
• Currently—lives in Oxford, Mississippi and Albermarle, Virginia

John Ray Grisham, Jr. is an American lawyer, politician, and author, best known for his popular legal thrillers. He has written more than 25 novels, a short story collection (Ford County), two works of nonfiction, and a children's series.

Grisham's first bestseller was The Firm. Released in 1991, it sold more than seven million copies. The book was later adapted into a feature film, of the same name starring Tom Cruise in 1993, and a TV series in 2012 which "continues the story of attorney Mitchell McDeere and his family 10 years after the events of the film and novel." Eight of his other novels have also been adapted into films: The Chamber, The Client, A Painted House, The Pelican Brief, Skipping Christmas, The Rainmaker, The Runaway Jury, and his first novel, A Time to Kill. His books have been translated into 29 languages and published worldwide.

As of 2008, his books had sold over 250 million copies worldwide. Grisham is one of only three authors to sell two million copies on a first printing; the others are Tom Clancy and J.K. Rowling.

Early life and education
Grisham, the second oldest of five siblings, was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, to Wanda Skidmore Grisham and John Grisham. His father was a construction worker and cotton farmer; his mother a homemaker. When Grisham was four years old, his family started traveling around the South, until they finally settled in Southaven in DeSoto County, Mississippi. As a child, Grisham wanted to be a baseball player. neither of his parents had advanced education, he was encouraged to read and prepare for college.

As a teenager, Grisham worked for a nursery watering bushes for $1.00 an hour. He was soon promoted to a fence crew for $1.50 an hour. At 16, Grisham took a job with a plumbing contractor. Through a contact of his father, he managed to find work on a highway asphalt crew in Mississippi at the age of 17.

It was during this time that an unfortunate incident made him think more seriously about college. A fight broke out among the crew with gunfire, and Grisham ran to the restroom for safety. He did not come out until after the police had "hauled away rednecks." He hitchhiked home and started thinking about college.

His next work was in retail, as a salesclerk in a department store men's underwear section, which he described as "humiliating." He decided to quit but stayed when he was offered a raise. He was given another raise after asking to be transferred to toys and then to appliances. A confrontation with a company spy posing as a customer convinced him to leave the store. By this time, Grisham was halfway through college.

He went to the Northwest Mississippi Community College in Senatobia, Mississippi and later attended Delta State University in Cleveland. Grisham drifted so much during his time at the college that he changed colleges three times before completing a degree. He graduated from Mississippi State University in 1977, receiving a BS degree in accounting.

He later enrolled in the University of Mississippi School of Law planning to become a tax lawyer. But he was soon overcome by "the complexity and lunacy" of it. He decided to return to his hometown as a trial lawyer, but his interest shifted to general civil litigation. He graduated in 1983 with a JD degree.

Law and politics
Grisham practiced law for about a decade and also won election as a Democrat in the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1983 to 1990 at an annual salary of $8,000. By his second term at the Mississippi state legislature, he was the vice-chairman of the Apportionment and Elections Committee and a member of several other committees.

With the success of his second book The Firm, published in 1991, Grisham gave up practicing law. He returned briefly in 1996 to fight for the family of a railroad worker who had been killed on the job. It was a commitment made to the family before leaving law to become a full-time writer. Grisham successfully argued his clients' case, earning them a jury award of $683,500—the biggest verdict of his career.

Writing
Grisham said that, sometime in the mid-1980s, he had been hanging around the court one day when he overheard a 12-year-old girl telling the jury how she been beaten and raped. Her story intrigued Grisham, so he began to watch the trial, noting how members of the jury wept during her testimony. It was then, Grisham later wrote in the New York Times, that a story was born. Musing over "what would have happened if the girl's father had murdered her assailants," Grisham took three years to complete his first book, A Time to Kill.

Finding a publisher was not easy. The book was rejected by 28 publishers before Wynwood Press, an unknown publisher, agreed to give it a modest 5,000-copy printing. It was published in June 1989. The day after Grisham completed A Time to Kill, he began work on his second novel, the story of an ambitious young attorney "lured to an apparently perfect law firm that was not what it appeared." The Firm remained on the the New York Times' bestseller list for 47 weeks and became the bestselling novel of 1991.

Beginning with A Painted House in 2001, the author broadened his focus from law to the more general rural South, but continued to write legal thrillers. He has also written sports fiction and comedy fiction.

In 2005, Grisham received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.

In 2010, Grisham started writing legal thrillers for children 9-12 years old. The books featured Theodore Boone, a 13-year-old boy, who gives his classmates legal advice—everything from rescuing impounded dogs to helping their parents prevent their house from being repossessed. His daughter, Shea, inspired him to write the Boone series.

Marriage and family
Grisham married Renee Jones in 1981, and the couple have two grown children together, Shea and Ty. The family spends their time in their Victorian home on a farm outside Oxford, Mississippi, and their other home near Charlottesville, Virginia.

The Innocence Project
Grisham is a member of the Board of Directors of The Innocence Project, which campaigns to free unjustly convicted people on the basis of DNA evidence. The Innocence Project argues that wrongful convictions are not isolated or rare events but instead arise from systemic defects. Grisham has testified before Congress on behalf of the Project and appeared on Dateline on NBC, Bill Moyers Journal on PBS, and other programs. He also wrote for the New York Times in 2013 about an unjustly held prisoner at Guantanamo.

Libel suit
In 2007, former legal officials from Oklahoma filed a civil suit for libel against Grisham and two other authors. They claimed that Grisham and the others critical of Peterson and his prosecution of murder cases conspired to commit libel and generate publicity for themselves by portraying the plaintiffs in a false light and intentionally inflicting emotional distress. Grisham was named due to his publication of the non-fiction book, The Innocent Man. He examined the faults in the investigation and trial of defendants in the murder of a cocktail waitress in Ada, Oklahoma, and the exoneration by DNA evidence more than 12 years later of wrongfully convicted defendants Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz. The judge dismissed the libel case after a year, saying, "The wrongful convictions of Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz must be discussed openly and with great vigor."

Misc.
The Mississippi State University Libraries maintains the John Grisham Room, an archive containing materials related to his writings and to his tenure as Mississippi State Representative.

Grisham has a lifelong passion for baseball demonstrated partly by his support of Little League activities in both Oxford, Mississippi, and Charlottesville, Virginia. He wrote the original screenplay for and produced the 2004 baseball movie Mickey, starring Harry Connick, Jr. He remains a fan of Mississippi State University's baseball team and wrote about his ties to the university and the Left Field Lounge in the introduction for the book Dudy Noble Field: A Celebration of MSU Baseball.

In an October 2006 interview on the Charlie Rose Show, Grisham stated that he usually takes only six months to write a book and that his favorite author is John le Carre. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/6/2013.)

Book Reviews
For all its clever curmudgeonly edge and minor charms, no way does this Christmas yarn from Grisham rank with A Christmas Carol, as the publisher claims. Nor does it rank with Grisham's own best work. The premise is terrific, as you'd expect from Grisham. Fed up with the commercial aspects of Christmas, particularly all the money spent, and alone for the holiday for the first time in decades (their daughter has just joined the Peace Corps), grumpy Luther Krank and his sweeter wife, Nora, decide to skip Christmas this year to forgo the gifts, the tree, the decorations, the cards, the parties and to spend the dollars saved on a 10-day Caribbean cruise. But as clever as this setup is, its elaboration is ho-hum. There's a good reason why nearly all classic Christmas tales rely on an element of fantasy, for, literarily at least, Christmas is a time of miracles. Grisham sticks to the mundane, however, and his story lacks magic for that. He does a smartly entertaining job of satirizing the usual Christmas frenzy, as Luther and Nora resist entreaties from various charities as well as increasing pressure from their neighbors (all sharply drawn, recognizable members of the generic all-American burb, the book's setting) to do up their house in the traditional way, including installing the giant Frosty that this year adorns the roof of every home on the block except theirs. And when something happens that prompts the Kranks to jump back into Christmas at the last minute, Grisham does slip in a celebration of the real spirit of Christmas, to the point of perhaps squeezing a tear or two from his most sentimental readers (even if he comes uncomfortably close to It's a Wonderful Life to do so). But it's too little, too late. The misanthropy in this short novel makes a good antidote to the more cloying Christmas tales, and the book is fun to read. To compare it to Dickens, however, is...humbug.
Publishers Weekly

Accountant Luther Krank is a Scrooge for the new millennium. He calculates that he and his wife, Nora, can take a Caribbean cruise during Christmas for much less money than they spent during the previous year's Christmas season. But Luther doesn't just want to take a vacation during Christmas; he wants to take a vacation from Christmas and skip it altogether. This means that the Kranks will not buy a Christmas tree or calendar, put up any decorations, send any Christmas cards, give any gifts, or attend or host any parties much to the chagrin of their hyperfestive neighbors. However, an unexpected phone call at the last minute leads to a change in plans. Hilarity ensues, but the poignant conclusion is unforgettable. Grisham astutely captures the way many people spend the holiday season, from fighting the crowds to commenting on their neighbors' Christmas trees. A Painted House was Grisham's first departure from the legal thriller genre, and this further demonstrates his ability to tell a story with nary a courtroom in sight. Highly recommended for all public libraries. —Samantha J. Gust, Niagara Univ. Lib., NY
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)
• and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Skipping Christmas:

1. This book has been called a "modern day Christmas classic." What does the term mean—what makes the book a "Christmas classic"? Do you agree that it is?

2. As you were reading the book, did you find yourself siding with the Kranks' decision to skip Christmas...or disgreeing with them?

3. What are your feelings toward the Christmas holidays? Has this book affected how you will view the season?

4. When friends and neighbors learn that the Kranks plan to skip Christmas, they try to convince them to change their minds. Why do the neighbors find the Kranks' plans so disturbing? Do you find the neighbors' interference appropriate ... or inappropriate?

5. When the Kranks learn Blair is returning from Peru for the holidays, they decide to cancel their cruise and celebrate the holidays as they had in the past. Yet they decided not to tell Blair what they had been planning. Why? Does it seem strange that parents would behave this way toward an adult child?

6. Have you seen Christmas with the Kranks, the 2004 film based on the book and starring Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis? If so, how does it compare to the book? If not, do you want to see it after having read the book?

7. Talk about the commercialization of the Christmas season. Do you agree with the Kranks that it's excessive and detracts from the true meaning of Christmas? Or do you feel that the holiday with all its commercial trappings is festive and exciting...that the Kranks are Scrooges...and that you need to take the good with the bad? (There's no "right" answer here....) Is it possible to avoid or escape the commercialism and still celebrate Christmas?

8. Once the Kranks change their plans with Blair's arrival, the neighbors pull together to help them pull off their traditional holiday celebration. Did your opinion of the neighbors change?

9. If you skipped Christmas, what would you miss the most? Alternatively...what would you enjoy the most?

10. Did you find this story enjoyable, even endearing? Or do you think John Grisham should stick to writing legal thrillers?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Skippy Dies
Paul Murray, 2010
Faber & Faber
672 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780865478619

Summary
As promised, 14-year-old Daniel “Skippy” Juster dies in the opening scene of Paul Murray’s tragicomic masterwork. But much remains to be seen in the ensuing chapters. Who is responsible for his demise? And why does he die such a weird death, gasping for air on the floor of a doughnut shop without having eaten any doughnuts? And what are we to make of his final message, written on the floor in syrupy raspberry filling: “TELL LORI”?

Set in Dublin at the Seabrook College for boys, Skippy Dies combines the visceral power of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest with the raw anxieties of life in the 21st century. The result is a dazzling and uproarious novel in which nearly all the characters are at odds with one another (and with themselves) as they walk the line between fantasy and reality, spectacular deception and jaw-dropping revelation.

While a ruthless Acting Principal (“the Automator”) tries to dissolve the school’s affiliation with the Holy Paraclete Fathers, faculty and students alike revel in unholy obsessions. For the teenage drug dealer Carl, it’s porn, laced with his borderline psychotic fantasies. For the pudgy young genius Ruprecht, it’s a quest to open a portal to a parallel universe. Unable to get his students to understand the magnitude of the Great War, the history teacher Howard Fallon spends equal time trying to get it on with his sexy colleague Aurelie. For Eoin “MC Sexecutioner” Flynn, life is an endless hip-hop soundtrack.

As for Skippy, with a distracted father and a cancer-stricken mother, he simply dreams of a day when no one harasses him anymore. There’s not enough Ritalin in the world to bring normalcy to Seabrook, but then again, normalcy is all relative within those historic walls.

Hailed by The New Yorker as an author who “gets away with just about everything,” Paul Murray reinvents adolescence, adulthood, and storytelling itself in Skippy Dies. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1975
• Where—Dublin, Ireland
• Education—B.A., Trinity College, Dublin; M.A.,
University of East Agnlia.
• Currently—lives in

Murray was born in Dublin in 1975, the son of a professor of Anglo-Irish Drama in UCD and a teacher mother. Murray attended Blackrock College in south Dublin, an experience that would later provide the basis for the school in Skippy Dies. He studied English literature at Trinity College, Dublin, and subsequently completed his Masters in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. He also spent time in Barcelona as an English teacher, a time he did not enjoy, describing it as "a brief and unhappy stint teaching English to a Catalan businessman, who pointed out many faults in my grammar I had not known about hitherto". He describes Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow as a very influential book to him.

Murray has written two novels: his first, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Prize in 2003 and nominated for the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. His second novel Skippy Dies was longlisted for the 2010 Booker Prize and shortlisted for the 2010 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. It was also #3 on Time magazine's top ten works of fiction from 2010. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Extravagantly entertaining . . . One of the great pleasures of this novel is how confidently [Paul Murray] addresses such disparate topics as quantum physics, video games, early-20th-century mysticism, celebrity infatuation, drug dealing, Irish folklore and pornography . . . Six hundred sixty-one pages may seem like a lot to devote to a bunch of flatulence-obsessed kids, but that daunting length is part and parcel of the cause to which Skippy Dies, in the end, is most devoted. Teenagers, though they may not always act like it, are human beings, and their sadness and loneliness (and their triumphs, no matter how temporary) are as momentous as any adult’s. And novels about them—if they’re as smart and funny and touching as Skippy Dies—can be just as long as they like.
Dan Kois - New York Times

Dazzling.... If killing your protagonist with more than 600 pages to go sounds audacious, it’s nothing compared with the literary feats Murray pulls off in this hilarious, moving and wise book.... Murray is an expansive writer, bouncing around in time, tense and point of view. He’s unafraid to tempt sentimentality, to write directly at his deep themes, to employ shameless cliffhangers. And he’s talented enough to get away with most of it.... The mixture of tones is the book’s true triumph, oscillating the banal with the sublime, the silly with the terrifying, the sweet with the tragic. In short, it’s like childhood. In shorter, like life.... Murray makes the right choices, refusing to spare kid and kidult alike the gorgeous harshness of the world, filled as it is with ‘a sadness everyone can recognize, a sadness that is binding and homelike.
Jess Walter - Washington Post Book World

He really does die. It’s in the opening scene. But as Paul Murray’s novel backtracks to explain what brought about his death, Skippy is so desperately, painfully alive that you hope the mere act of reading about him will save him.... Murray balances.... forces in finely tuned chords of pathos and comedy, a virtuosic display you’d expect from a writer with the confidence to kill of his title character in the title.
Radhika Jones - Time

At Dublin's Seabrook College, Skippy survives the daily indignities common to a boarder's life in an elite boys school. Still, something's wrong. Why does he want to quit the swim team? Why are his grades slipping? And who's the dark-haired St. Brigid's girl Skippy is always trying to spy on with his roommate's telescope? Seabrook is the world in miniature, and its gates threaten to burst from the hugger-mugger of cruelty, scandal, and materialism teeming within. It takes Skippy's tragic death and a sequence of events both hilarious and horrifying to recover the consolations provided by sympathy and friendship. Whether these will be enough to redeem Seabrook remains anyone's guess, though Murray suggests that a fleeting sense of grace may be all we can hope for and more than we deserve. Verdict: Murray's second novel (after An Evening of Long Goodbyes) is almost flawless, a gift for fans of character and plot. In addition to his masterly use of James Joyce and Robert Graves throughout, Murray has created a social realism that holds its own with that of Dickens. Skippy Dies deserves to be widely read and loved. —J. Greg Matthews, Washington State Univ. Lib., Pullman
Library Journal

(Starred review.) An extremely ambitious and complex novel, filled with parallels, with sometimes recondite references to Irish folklore, with quantum physics, and with much more. Hilarious, haunting, and heartbreaking, it is inarguably among the most memorable novels of the year to date. —Michael Cart
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. What were your initial theories about why Skippy died?

2. Why can't Howard be happy with Halley? Is his obsession with Aurelie any different from Skippy's obsession with Lori?

3. Who are the heroes and villains in this novel? Is the bad behavior due to bad parenting, high testosterone levels, materialism, lack of belief in a difficult God? Other factors?

4. How does Seabrook compare with your high school? Which characters most closely resemble you and your circle of friends?

5. What do the novel's priests have to say about the nature of the suffering they see at Seabrook? Do they defy or fit the stereotype of prep-school priests?

6. When Carl's parents fight loudly (David versus jealous mother Lucia), what do you think they're teaching him about love? How do they manage to stay so clueless about their son?

7. With his emphasis on marketing, branding, and public relations, does the Automator (Greg Costigan) reflect a typical trend in education today?

8. Would the novel have been as interesting if it had been set at the all-girl's school St. Brigid's? Are teenage girls as destructive as teenage boys?

9. Howard tells the Automator that Skippy earned his nickname because he has buck teeth, which cause him to make a kangaroo-like noise when he speaks. What makes Skippy an easy target? Are those who pick on him (including Father Green, badgering Skippy about obscenity in front of the whole French class) sadistic?

10. Google "M-theory." What do the articles seem to say about the search for order in the universe, even before the Big Bang? Why is it an ideal theory for Ruprecht's obsession, and for this novel?

11. Part I closes with a blend of Professor Tamashi's interview on the eleventh dimension and scenes from Skippy's "seduction" by Lori. What does it take to give and get love in Skippy Dies? What do those scenes say about the reality that love creates? What does the novel say about the reality that drugs create?

12. Lori's father, Gavin Wakeham, is an alumnus of Seabrook, and he is eager to share with Skippy his recollections of the faculty (which included a fondler, alumni who returned to their alma mater to teach when other opportunities didn't work out, and the perennially socially conscious Father Green). What impressions did the school make on Mr. Wakeham? What impressions will it leave on Skippy's class?

13. Discuss Ruprecht's quartet and the musical performance he links to communicating with the dead. Is it a step forward or backward for him, mentally

14. Which came first: Carl's drug use or his obsession with power and violent sex? When he became haunted by Dead Boy, did you think he was seeing a hallucination or a ghost? Reread his explosive closing scene. Is he a Demon, or the victim of one?

15. After Skippy's funeral, his father tells Howard that Skippy's great-grandfather served in Gallipoli. Does Skippy's generation lack valor?

16. Howard and Father Green are appalled to see the Automator defend Coach Roche. Is Tom worthy of defense?

17. Ultimately, who is to blame for Skippy's death?

18. Discuss part IV, "Afterland." Is Greg's message a victory letter? Did he get everything he wanted?
(Discussion Questions by publisher.)

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Slaughterhouse-Five: Or, the Children's Crusade, A Duty-Dance With Death
Kurt Vonnegut, 1969
Random House
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780440180296

Summary
Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes 'unstuck in time' after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden.

Slaughterhouse-Five is not only Vonnegut's most powerful book, it is also as important as any written since 1945. Like Catch-22, it fashions the author's experiences in the Second World War into an eloquent and deeply funny plea against butchery in the service of authority. Slaughterhouse-Five boasts the same imagination, humanity, and gleeful appreciation of the absurd found in Vonnegut's other works, but the book's basis in rock-hard, tragic fact gives it unique poignancy—and humor. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—November 11, 1922
• Where—Indianapolis, Indiana, USA
• Education—Cornell University; Carnegie Institute of Technology;
Univeristy of Tennessee; M.A., University of Chicago
• Died—April 11, 2007
• Where—New York, New York

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was a 20th-century American writer. His works such as Cat's Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Breakfast of Champions (1973) blend satire, gallows humor, and science fiction. As a citizen he was a lifelong supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union and a critical leftist intellectual. He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association.

Early Years
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, to third-generation German-American parents, Kurt Vonnegut, Sr. and Edith (Lieber). Both his father and his grandfather Bernard Vonnegut attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology and were architects in the Indianapolis firm of Vonnegut & Bohn. His great-grandfather Clemens Vonnegut, Sr. was the founder of the Vonnegut Hardware Company, an Indianapolis institution.

Vonnegut graduated from Shortridge High School in Indianapolis in May 1940 and matriculated into Cornell University that fall. Though majoring in chemistry, he was Assistant Managing Editor and Associate Editor of The Cornell Daily Sun. He was a member of the Delta Upsilon Fraternity, as was his father. While at Cornell, Vonnegut enlisted in the U.S. Army. The Army transferred him to the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering.

On Mothers' Day in 1944, when Vonnegut was 21, his mother committed suicide with sleeping pills.

World War II
Kurt Vonnegut's experience as a soldier and prisoner of war had a profound influence on his later work. As a private with the 423rd Infantry Regiment, 106th Infantry Division, Vonnegut was captured during the Battle of the Bulge on December 19, 1944, after the 106th was cut off from the rest of Courtney Hodges's First Army. Imprisoned in Dresden, Vonnegut was chosen as a leader of the POWs because he spoke some German. After telling the German guards "...just what I was going to do to them when the Russians came..." he was beaten and had his position as leader taken away. While a prisoner, he witnessed the fire bombing of Dresden in February 1945 which destroyed most of the city.

Vonnegut was one of a group of American prisoners of war to survive the attack in an underground slaughterhouse meat locker used by the Germans as an ad hoc detention facility. The Germans called the building Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five) which the Allied POWs adopted as the name for their prison. Vonnegut said the aftermath of the attack was "utter destruction" and "carnage unfathomable." This experience was the inspiration for his famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, and is a central theme in at least six of his other books. In Slaughterhouse-Five he recalls that the remains of the city resembled the surface of the moon, and that the Germans put the surviving POWs to work, breaking into basements and bomb shelters to gather bodies for mass burial, while German civilians cursed and threw rocks at them. Vonnegut eventually remarked, "There were too many corpses to bury. So instead the Germans sent in troops with flamethrowers. All these civilians' remains were burned to ashes."

Vonnegut was liberated by Red Army troops in May 1945 at the Saxony-Czechoslovakian border. Upon returning to America, he was awarded a Purple Heart for what he called a "ludicrously negligible wound," later writing in Timequake that he was given the decoration after suffering a case of "frostbite".

Post-War Career
After the war, Vonnegut attended the University of Chicago as a graduate student in anthropology and also worked at the City News Bureau of Chicago. Vonnegut admitted that he was a poor anthropology student. According to Vonnegut in Bagombo Snuff Box, the university rejected his first thesis on the necessity of accounting for the similarities between Cubist painters and the leaders of late 19th Century Native American uprisings, saying it was "unprofessional."

He left Chicago to work in Schenectady, New York, in public relations for General Electric, where his brother Bernard worked in the research department. Vonnegut was a technical writer, but was also known for writing well past his typical hours while working. While in Schenectady, Vonnegut lived in the tiny hamlet of Alplaus...and rented an upstairs apartment located across the street from the Alplaus Volunteer Fire Department, where he was an active Volunteer Fire-Fighter for a few years. To this day, the apartment where Vonnegut lived still has a desk at which he wrote many of his short stories; Vonnegut carved his name on its underside. The University of Chicago later accepted his novel Cat's Cradle as his thesis, citing its anthropological content, and awarded him the M.A. degree in 1971.

In the mid-1950s, Vonnegut worked very briefly for Sports Illustrated magazine. On the verge of abandoning writing, Vonnegut was offered a teaching job at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. While he was there, Cat's Cradle became a best-seller, and he began Slaughterhouse-Five, now considered one of the best American novels of the 20th century, appearing on the 100 best lists of Time and the Modern Library.

Early in his adult life he moved to Barnstable, Massachusetts, a town on Cape Cod, where he managed the first Saab dealership established in the U.S.

Personal Life
The author's name appears in print as "Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." throughout the first half of his published writing career; beginning with the 1976 publication of Slapstick, he dropped the "Jr." and was simply billed as Kurt Vonnegut. His older brother, Bernard Vonnegut, was an atmospheric scientist at the University at Albany, SUNY, who discovered that silver iodide could be used for cloud seeding, the process of artificially stimulating precipitation.

After returning from World War II, Kurt Vonnegut married his childhood sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox, writing about their courtship in several of his short stories. In the 1960s they lived in Barnstable, Massachusetts, where for a while Vonnegut worked at a Saab dealership. The couple separated in 1970. He did not divorce Cox until 1979, but from 1970 Vonnegut lived with the woman who would later become his second wife, photographer Jill Krementz. Krementz and Vonnegut were married after the divorce from Cox was finalized.

He raised seven children: three from his first marriage; three of his sister Alice's four children, adopted by Vonnegut after her death from cancer; and a seventh, Lily, adopted with Krementz. His son, Mark Vonnegut, a pediatrician, wrote two books, one about his experiences in the late 1960s and his major psychotic breakdown and recovery, and one which includes anecdotes of growing up as his father was a struggling writer, his subsequent illness and a more recent breakdown in 1985, and what life has been like since then. Mark was named after Mark Twain, whom Vonnegut considered an American saint.

Of Vonnegut's four adopted children, three are his nephews: James, Steven, and Kurt Adams; the fourth is Lily, a girl he adopted as an infant in 1982. James, Steven, and Kurt were adopted after a traumatic week in 1958, in which their father James Carmalt Adams was killed on September 15 in the Newark Bay rail crash when his commuter train went off the open Newark Bay bridge in New Jersey, and their mother—Kurt's sister Alice—died of cancer. In Slapstick, Vonnegut recounts that Alice's husband died two days before Alice herself, and her family tried to hide the knowledge from her, but she found out when an ambulatory patient gave her a copy of the New York Daily News a day before she herself died. The fourth and youngest of the boys, Peter Nice, went to live with a first cousin of their father in Birmingham, Alabama, as an infant. Lily is a singer and actress.

Vonnegut's first wife Jane Marie Cox later married Adam Yarmolinsky and wrote an account of the Vonneguts' life with the Adams children. It was published after her death as the book Angels Without Wings: A Courageous Family's Triumph Over Tragedy.

A lifelong smoker, Vonnegut smoked unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes, a habit he referred to as a "classy way to commit suicide." On November 11, 1999, an asteroid was named in Vonnegut's honor: 25399 Vonnegut.

Vonnegut died on April 11, 2007 after falling down a flight of stairs in his home and suffering massive head trauma.

Writing Career
Vonnegut's first short story, "Report on the Barnhouse Effect" appeared in the February 11, 1950 edition of Collier's (it has since been reprinted in his short story collection, Welcome to the Monkey House). His first novel was the dystopian novel Player Piano (1952), in which human workers have been largely replaced by machines. He continued to write short stories before his second novel, The Sirens of Titan, was published in 1959. Through the 1960s, the form of his work changed, from the relatively orthodox structure of Cat's Cradle to the acclaimed, semi-autobiographical Slaughterhouse-Five, given a more experimental structure by using time travel as a plot device. These structural experiments were continued in Breakfast of Champions (1973), which includes many rough illustrations, lengthy non-sequiturs and an appearance by the author himself, as a deus ex machina.

Vonnegut attempted suicide in 1984 and later wrote about this in several essays.

Breakfast of Champions became one of his best-selling novels. It includes, in addition to the author himself, several of Vonnegut's recurring characters. One of them, science fiction author Kilgore Trout, plays a major role and interacts with the author's character.

In 1974, Venus on the Half-Shell, a book by Philip José Farmer in a style similar to that of Vonnegut and attributed to Kilgore Trout, was published. This caused some confusion among readers, as for some time many assumed that Vonnegut wrote it; when the truth of its authorship came out, Vonnegut was reported as being "not amused". In an issue of the semi-prozine The Alien Critic/Science Fiction Review, Farmer claimed to have received an angry, obscenity-laden telephone call from Vonnegut about it.

In addition to recurring characters, there are also recurring themes and ideas. One of them is ice-nine (a central wampeter in his novel Cat's Cradle).

With the publication of his novel Timequake in 1997, Vonnegut announced his retirement from writing fiction. He continued to write for the magazine In These Times, where he was a senior editor, until his death in 2007, focusing on subjects ranging from contemporary U. S. politics to simple observational pieces on topics such as a trip to the post office. In 2005, many of his essays were collected in a new bestselling book titled A Man Without a Country, which he insisted would be his last contribution to letters.

The April 2008 issue of Playboy featured the first published excerpt from Armageddon in Retrospect, the first posthumous collection of Vonnegut's work. It included never before published short stories by the writer and a letter that was written to his family during World War II when Vonnegut was captured as a prisoner of war. The book also contains drawings by Vonnegut and a speech he wrote shortly before his death. The introduction was written by his son, Mark Vonnegut.

Vonnegut also taught at Harvard University, where he was a lecturer in English, and the City College of New York, where he was a Distinguished Professor.

Art Career
Vonnegut's work as a graphic artist began with his illustrations for Slaughterhouse-Five and developed with Breakfast of Champions, which included numerous felt-tip pen illustrations. Later in his career, he became more interested in artwork, particularly silk-screen prints, which he pursued in collaboration with Joe Petro III.

Politics
Vonnegut was deeply influenced by early Socialist labor leaders, especially Indiana natives Powers Hapgood and Eugene V. Debs, and he frequently quoted them in his work. He named characters after both Debs (Eugene Debs Hartke in Hocus Pocus and Eugene Debs Metzger in Deadeye Dick) and Russian Communist leader Leon Trotsky (Leon Trotsky Trout in Galápagos). He was a lifetime member of the American Civil Liberties Union and was featured in a print advertisement for them.

In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

Vonnegut frequently addressed moral and political issues but rarely dealt with specific political figures until after his retirement from fiction. Though the downfall of Walter Starbuck, a minor Nixon administration bureaucrat who is the narrator and main character in Jailbird (1979), would not have occurred but for the Watergate scandal, the focus is not on the administration. His collection God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian referenced controversial assisted suicide proponent Jack Kevorkian.

Though he was a dissident to the end, Vonnegut held a bleak view on the power of artists to effect change. "During the Vietnam War," he told an interviewer in 2003, "every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high."

Religion
Vonnegut described himself variously as a skeptic, freethinker, humanist, Unitarian Universalist, agnostic, and atheist. He disbelieved in the supernatural, considered religious doctrine to be "so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash," and believed people were motivated by loneliness to join religions.

Vonnegut considered humanism to be a modern-day form of freethought, and advocated it in various writings, speeches and interviews. Vonnegut went on to serve as honorary president of the American Humanist Association (AHA), having taken over the position from his late colleague Isaac Asimov, and serving until his own death in 2007.

Vonnegut was at one time a member of a Unitarian congregation. Vonnegut identified Unitarianism as the religion that many in his freethinking family turned to when freethought and other German "enthusiasms" became unpopular in the United States during the World Wars.

While he often identified himself as an agnostic or atheist, he also frequently spoke of God. Despite describing freethought, humanism and agnosticism as his "ancestral religion," and despite being a Unitarian, he also spoke of himself as being irreligious. A press release by the American Humanist Association described him as "completely secular." (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Pre-Internet books have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.

I now, I know (as Kurt Vonnegut used to say when people told him that the Germans attacked first). It sounds crazy. It sounds like a fantastic last-ditch effort to make sense of a lunatic universe. But there is so much more to this book. It is very tough and very funny; it is sad and delightful; and it works. But is also very Vonnegut, which mean you'll either love it, or push it back in the science-fiction corner.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt - New York Times

Poignant and hilarious, threaded with compassion and, behind everything, the cataract of a thundering moral statement.
Boston Globe

Splendid art.... A funny book at which you are not permitted to laugh, a sad book without tears.
Life

(Audio version.) "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time." So begins Vonnegut's absurdist 1969 classic. Hawke rises to the occasion of performing this sliced-and-diced narrative, which is part sci-fi and partially based on Vonnegut's experience as a American prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany during the firebombing of 1945 that killed thousands of civilians. Billy travels in time and space, stopping here and there throughout his life, including his long visit to the planet Tralfamador, where he is mated with a porn star. Hawke adopts a confidential, whisper-like tone for his reading. Listening to him is like listening to someone tell you a story in the back of a bus—the perfect pitch for this book. After the novel ends, Vonnegut himself speaks for a short while about his survival of the Dresden firestorm and describes and names the man who inspired this story. Tacked on to the very end of this audio smorgasbord is music, a dance single that uses a vintage recording of Vonnegut reading from the book. Though Hawke's reading is excellent, one cannot help but wish Vonnegut himself had read the entire text.
Publishers Weekly

Discussion Questions
1. After reading the book, why do you think that Vonnegut dedicated his novel to Mary O’Hare and Gerhard Muller?

2. Why does Vonnegut choose to write a “jumbled and jangled” war book?

3. What is the significance of the phrase “so it goes”?

4. What is the significance of the bird cry “poo-tee-weet”?

5. Explain the subtitle, "The Children’s Crusade or a Dirty Dance With Death."

6. Discuss the major themes of Slaughterhouse-Five?

7. How does Vonnegut use time to communicate his themes?

8. Discuss the use of irony in the novel.

9. Are we intended to believe Billy’s tales of Tralfamadore or are we, like Barbara, supposed to assume that Tralfamadore is a figment of Billy’s post-brain-damaged imagination?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Sleepwalker
Chris Bohjalian, 2017
Knopf Doubleday
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780804170994

Summary
A spine-tingling novel of lies, loss, and buried desire—the mesmerizing story of a wife and mother who vanishes from her bed late one night.

When Annalee Ahlberg goes missing, her children fear the worst.

Annalee is a sleepwalker whose affliction manifests in ways both bizarre and devastating. Once, she merely destroyed the hydrangeas in front of her Vermont home. More terrifying was the night her older daughter, Lianna, pulled her back from the precipice of the Gale River bridge.

The morning of Annalee's disappearance, a search party combs the nearby woods. Annalee's husband, Warren, flies home from a business trip. Lianna is questioned by a young, hazel-eyed detective. And her little sister, Paige, takes to swimming the Gale to look for clues.

When the police discover a small swatch of fabric, a nightshirt, ripped and hanging from a tree branch, it seems certain Annalee is dead, but Gavin Rikert, the hazel-eyed detective, continues to call, continues to stop by the Ahlbergs' Victorian home.

As Lianna peels back the layers of mystery surrounding Annalee's disappearance, she finds herself drawn to Gavin, but she must ask herself: Why does the detective know so much about her mother? Why did Annalee leave her bed only when her father was away? And if she really died while sleepwalking, where was the body?

Conjuring the strange and mysterious world of parasomnia, a place somewhere between dreaming and wakefulness, The Sleepwalker is a masterful novel from one of our most treasured storytellers. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1960
• Where—White Plains, New York, USA
• Education—Amherst College
• Awards—Anahid Literary Award, 2000; New England Book Award, 2002
• Currently—lives in Lincoln, Vermont

Christopher Aram Bohjalian, who goes by the pen name Chris Bohjalian, is an American novelist. Bohjalian is the author of nearly 20 novels, including New York Times bestsellers Midwives, Secrets of Eden, The Law of Similars, Before You Know Kindness, The Double Bind, Skeletons at the Feast, and The Night Strangers.

Bohjalian is the son of Aram Bohjalian, who was a senior vice president of the New York advertising agency Romann & Tannenholz. Chris Bohjalian graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College, where he was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. In the mid-1980s, he worked as an account representative for J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in New York.

He and his wife lived in a co-op in Brooklyn until March 1986, when the two were riding in a taxicab in which the driver refused to let them out of the car for 45 minutes, ignoring all traffic lights and stop signs. Around midnight, the driver dropped them off at a near-deserted street in front of a crack house, where the police were conducting a raid and Bohjalian and his wife were forced to drop to the ground for their protection. The incident prompted the couple to move from Brooklyn; Bohjalian said, "After it was all over, we just thought, "Why do we live here?" A few days later, the couple read an ad in The New York Times referencing the "People's Republic of Vermont," and in 1987 the couple moved to Lincoln, Vermont.

Early career
After buying their house, Bohjalian began writing weekly columns for local newspaper and magazine about living in the small town, which had a population of about 975 residents. The Concord Monitor said of Bohjalian during this period, "his immersion in community life and family, Vermont-style, has allowed him to develop into a novelist with an ear and empathy for the common man." Bohjalian continued the column for about 12 years, writing about such topics as his own daily life, fatherhood and the transformation of America. The column has run in the Burlington Free Press since 1992. Bohjalian has also written for such magazines as Cosmopolitan, Reader's Digest and the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine.

Bohjalian's first novel, A Killing in the Real World, was released in 1988. Almost two decades after it was released, Bohjalian said of the book, "It was a train wreck. I hadn't figured things out yet." His third novel, Past the Bleachers, was released in 1992 and adapted as a Hallmark Channel television movie in 1995.

In 1998, Bohjalian wrote his fifth book, Midwives, a novel focusing on rural Vermont midwife Sibyl Danforth, who becomes embroiled in a legal battle after one of her patients died following an emergency Caesarean section.

The novel was critically acclaimed and was selected by Oprah Winfrey as the October 1998 selection of her Oprah's Book Club, which helped push the book to great financial success. It became a New York Times and USA Today bestseller. Victoria Blewer has often described her husband as having "a crush" on the Sybil Danforth character. In 2001, the novel was adapted into a Lifetime Movie Network television film starring Sissy Spacek in the lead role. Spacek said the Danforth character appealed to her because "the heart of the story is my character's inner struggle with self-doubt, the solo road you travel when you have a secret."

Later career
Bohjalian followed Midwives with the 1999 novel The Law of Similars, about a widower attorney suffering from nameless anxieties who starts dating a woman who practices alternative medicine. The novel was inspired by Bohjalian's real-life visit to a homeopath in an attempt to cure frequent colds he was catching from his daughter's day care center. Bohjalian said of the visit, "I don't think I imagined there was a novel in homeopathy, however, until I met the homeopath and she explained to me the protocols of healing. There was a poetry to the language that a patient doesn't hear when visiting a conventional doctor."

The protagonist, a father, is based in part on Bohjalian himself, and his four-year-old daughter is based largely on Bohjalian's daughter, who was three when he was writing the book., Liz Rosenberg of The New York Times said the novel shared many similarities with Midwives but that it paled in comparison; Rosenberg said, "Unlike its predecessor, it fails to take advantage of Bohjalian's great gift for creating thoughtful fiction featuring characters in whom the reader sustains a lively interest." Megan Harlan of The Boston Phoenix described it as "formulaic fiction" and said Bohjalian focused too much on creating a complex plot and not enough of complex characterizations. The Law of Similars, like Midwives, made the New York Times bestsellers list.

He won the New England Book Award in 2002, and in 2007 released "The Double Bind," a novel based on Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

In 2008, Bohjalian released Skeletons at the Feast, a love story set in the last six months of World War II in Poland and Germany. The novel was inspired by an unpublished diary written by German citizen Eva Henatsch from 1920 to 1945. The diary was given to Bohjalian in 1998 by Henatsch's grandson Gerd Krahn, a friend of Bohjalian, who had a daughter in the same kindergarten class as Bohjalian's daughter. Bohjalian was particularly fascinated by Henatsch's account of her family's trek west ahead of the Soviet Army, but he was not inspired to write a novel from it until 2006, when he read Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, Max Hastings' history of the final years of World War II. Bohjalian was struck not only by how often Henatsch's story mirrored real-life experiences, but also the common "moments of idiosyncratic human connection" found in both. Skeletons of the Feast was considered a departure for Bohjalian because it was not only set outside of Vermont, but set in a particular historical moment.

His 2010 novel, Secrets of Eden, was also a critical success, receiving starred reviews from three of the four trade journals (Booklist, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly), as well as many newspapers and magazines. It debuted at # 6 on The New York Times bestseller list.

His next novel, The Night Strangers, published in 2011, represents yet another departure for Bohjalian. The is both a gothic ghost story and a taut psychological thriller.

He has written a weekly column for Gannett's Burlington Free Press since February 1992 called "Idyll Banter." His 1,000th column appeared in May 2011.

Personal comments
In a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview, Bohjalian offered up these personal comments:

I was the heaviest child, by far, in my second-grade class. My mother had to buy my pants for me at a store called the "Husky Boys Shop," and still she had to hem the cuffs up around my knees. I hope this experience, traumatizing as it was, made me at least marginally more sensitive to people around me.

I have a friend with Down syndrome, a teenage boy who is capable of remembering the librettos from entire musicals the first or second time he hears them. The two of us belt them out together whenever we're driving anywhere in a car.I am a pretty avid bicyclist. The other day I was biking alone on a thin path in the woods near Franconia Notch, New Hampshire, and suddenly before me I saw three bears. At first I saw only two, and initially I thought they were cats.

Then I thought they were dogs. Finally, just as I was approaching them and they started to scurry off the path and into the thick brush, I understood they were bears. Bear cubs, to be precise. Which is exactly when their mother, no more than five or six feet to my left, reared up on her hind legs, her very furry paws and very sharp claws raised above her head in a gesture that an optimist might consider a wave and guy on a bike might consider something a tad more threatening. Because she was standing on a slight incline, I was eye level with her stomach—an eventual destination that seemed frighteningly plausible. I have never biked so fast in my life in the woods. I may never have biked so fast in my life on a paved road.

I do have hobbies—I garden and bike, for example—but there's nothing in the world that gives me even a fraction of the pleasure that I derive from hanging around with my wife and daughter.

He lives with his wife and daughter in Lincoln, Vermont, where he is active in the local church and the Vermont theater community—always off-stage, never on.

Writing style
Bohjalian novels often focus on a specific issue, such as homelessness, animal rights and environmentalism, and tend to be character-driven, revolving around complex and flawed protagonists and secondary characters.

Bohjalian uses characteristics from his real life in his writings; in particular, many of his novels take place in fictional Vermont towns, and the names of real New Hampshire towns are often used throughout his stories. Bohjalian said, "Writers can talk with agonizing hubris about finding their voices, but for me, it was in Vermont that I discovered issues, things that matter to me."

His novels also tend to center around ordinary people facing extraordinarily difficult situations resulting from unforeseen circumstances, often triggered by other parties. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Sex, secrets and the mysteries of sleep: These are the provocative ingredients in Chris Bohjalian’s spooky thriller The Sleepwalker. It’s a dark, Hitchcockian novel… Trust me, you will not be able to stop thinking about it days after you finish reading this book.
Carol Memmott - Washington Post

Great mystery writers, like great magicians, have the ability to hide the truth that’s right before your eyes. Best-selling novelist Chris Bohjalian is at the full power of his literary legerdemain in his newest book, The Sleepwalker…. Bohjalian teases and tantalizes the reader…. Masterful plotting evokes a magician who distracts his audience to look this way, not that way. The ending will have the reader rereading for missed clues. The Sleepwalker is Bohjalian at his best: a creepily compelling topic and an illusionist’s skill at tightening the tension. This is a novel worth losing sleep over.
Patty Rhule - USA Today

Literary and compelling, a combination so rare I’m tempted to apply for federal intervention.... I hesitate to say more, because to know too much may spoil the fun of discovery. Rest assured the denouement is perfect. This is Bohjalian at his very best.
Curt Shleier - Seattle Times

A perfectly crafted surprise ending…. Bohjalian succeeds in making us accomplices in a dark world we never knew existed.
Laura Patten - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

After a chronic sleepwalker goes missing, the general consensus is accidental death. But nothing is what it seems in this gripping mystery.
Cosmopolitan

[A] stylish fusion of mystery and domestic thriller.... Powered by brilliantly rendered characters, an intriguing topic (parasomnia), and a darkly lyrical...this novel has only one weak point—its highly improbable conclusion, which may leave readers unsatisfied.
Publishers Weekly

It takes unexpected answers to solve this mystery. Bohjalian’s latest will captivate readers who crave an edge-of-your-seat page-turner they can’t put down. —Susan Carr
Library Journal

Annalee Ahlberg…is never seen again…. Bohjalian raises essential questions of identity and heredity, sexuality and desire, bringing the Ahlberg family conundrum into focus with a didn’t-see-that-one-coming powerhouse ending. —Carol Haggas
Booklist

The problem with the novel is primarily one of shape. The first two-thirds of the book are spent wondering whether Annalee is missing or dead.... [T]he only reason the ending is a surprise is because...[of] red herrings. Sensational subject matter aside, this thriller is a sleeper.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. What were your initial theories about Annalee’s disappearance? As the characters reacted to the evidence, what did they reveal about themselves?

2. When you read Annalee’s emails, along with reminiscences of her, what were your impressions? What was it like to get to know her through Lianna’s eyes?

3. Does Warren’s career as a literature professor (specializing in poetry, no less) enhance his ability to cope with his wife’s sleepwalking, or is science the only way to understand it?

4. How does the relationship between Lianna and Paige compare to the relationship between you and your siblings? What determines whether siblings will take care of each other or become rivals?

5. Spoiler alert! Lianna looks like her mother and takes on some of Annalee’s responsibilities even though she is only twenty-one years old. Is it ethical for thirty-three-year-old Gavin to date Lianna, or is he the key to her healing?

6. The author provides detailed images of how a missing person’s body might look after being ravaged by a river. How did this description affect you? Does the physical body or the psyche or the soul play the primary role in making us who we are?

7. The Sleepwalker takes place in the year 2000, just before the dawn of smart phones and the profusion of social media. How does this make for a better storyline?

8. Lianna has a talent for magic. Why is she drawn to creating illusions, and to being in control of the reality behind them?

9. As the Ahlbergs confront the role of genetics in their family tragedy, what issues are raised about the heart of our identities? Are the Ahlberg girls shaped more by nature or nurture?

10. Spoiler alert! How did you react as you read about the court cases of defendants who were sleepwalking (and the sexual assault accusations Gavin faced when he was younger, described on page 177)? Who is responsible for protecting society from the crimes of a sleepwalker?

11. How would you describe the portrait of a marriage that emerges in the novel? How was trust formed and tested between Annalee and Warren? Did secrecy strengthen or weaken their relationship?

12. In the end, when the meaning of the italicized passages became clear, what did you discover about the nature of guilt? Could anything have prevented Annalee’s disappearance?

13. Spoiler alert! What does sexsomnia tell us about the human sex drive? When Lianna has sleep sex with Gavin for the first time, is she having an encounter with his true self?

14. What surprising facts did you learn about sleepwalking, and sleep in general, as you read this novel? If you were a sleepwalker, what would your strongest impulses be?

15. In a review for Library Journal, Barbara Hoffert observed that Chris Bohjalian “never writes the same book twice. From the rural Vermont-set Midwives to the historical The Sandcastle Girls to the close-at-hand dystopia of Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands, he charts crucial moments in different settings and with different sensibilities.” Although he is a master of variety, what common strands appear in his depictions of humanity? How did The Sleepwalker enhance your experience of other Bohjalian novels?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing
Mira Jacob, 2014
Random House
512 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812994780

Summary
A winning, irreverent debut novel about a family wrestling with its future and its past.

With depth, heart, and agility, debut novelist Mira Jacob takes us on a deftly plotted journey that ranges from 1970s India to suburban 1980s New Mexico to Seattle during the dot.com boom.

The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing is an epic, irreverent testimony to the bonds of love, the pull of hope, and the power of making peace with life’s uncertainties.

Celebrated brain surgeon Thomas Eapen has been sitting on his porch, talking to dead relatives. At least that is the story his wife, Kamala, prone to exaggeration, tells their daughter, Amina, a photographer living in Seattle.

Reluctantly Amina returns home and finds a situation that is far more complicated than her mother let on, with roots in a trip the family, including Amina’s rebellious brother Akhil, took to India twenty years earlier. Confronted by Thomas’s unwillingness to explain himself, strange looks from the hospital staff, and a series of puzzling items buried in her mother’s garden, Amina soon realizes that the only way she can help her father is by coming to terms with her family’s painful past. In doing so, she must reckon with the ghosts that haunt all of the Eapens. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—New Mexico, USA
• Education—M.F.A., New School of Social Research
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City

Mira Jacob is the founder of Pete’s Reading Series in New York City and has an MFA from the New School for Social Research. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son. The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing is her first novel. (From the publisher.)

Read about Mira and her parents in Vogue.

Book Reviews
Beautifully wrought, frequently funny, gently heartbreaking.... Moving forward and back in time, Jacob balances comedy and romance with indelible sorrow, and she is remarkably adept at tonal shifts. When her plot springs surprises, she lets them happen just as they do in life: blindsidingly right in the middle of things.
Boston Globe

Jacob’s novel is light and optimistic, unpretentious and refreshingly witty. Jacob has created characters with evident care and treats them with gentleness even as they fight viciously with each other. Her prose is sharp and true and deeply funny.... This is the literary fiction I will be recommending to everyone this summer, especially those who love multigenerational, multicultural family sagas.
Associated Press

[A]lways engrossing and often feels so true to life that it’s a surprise that it’s not.
Austin Chronicle

The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing is a rich, engrossing debut told with lightness and care, as smart about grief as it is about the humor required to transcend it.
Kansas City Star

[A] sprawling, poignant, often humorous novel that’s worth missing cocktails on the deck in order to finish a chapter.... Told with humor and sympathy for its characters, the book serves as a bittersweet lesson in the binding power of family, even when we seek to break out from it.
Oprah Magazine

With wit and a rich understanding of human foibles, [Mira] Jacob unspools a story that will touch your heart.
People

This debut novel so fully envelops the reader in the soul of an Indian-American immigrant family that it's heart-wrenching to part with them.... Thanks to Jacob’s captivating voice, which is by turns hilarious and tender and always attuned to shifts of emotion, her characters shimmer with life.
Entertainment Weekly

[E]motionally bountiful debut.... The author has a wonderful flair for recreating the messy sprawl of family life, with all its joy, sadness, frustration, and anger. Although overlong, the novel, through its lovingly created and keenly observed characters, makes something new of the Indian immigrant experience in America.
Publishers Weekly

Jacob’s writing is refreshing, and she excels at creating a powerful bond between the reader and her characters, all wonderfully drawn and with idiosyncratic natures—the mother, Kamala, for instance, is a born-again Christian—that make them enchanting. Recommended for those who like engaging fiction that succeeds in addressing serious issues with some humor.
Library Journal

(Starred review.) Jacob's darkly comic debut—about a photographer's visit to her parents' New Mexico home during a family crisis—is grounded in the specifics of the middle-class Indian immigrant experience while uncovering the universality of family dysfunction and endurance.... [Written] with naked honesty about the uneasy generational divide among Indians in America and about family in all its permutations.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The book starts in India, but doesn’t go back. Why do you think the author chose to open the book there? 2. Why do you think Amina was unhinged by taking the picture of Bobby McCloud? Do you believe her own explanation?

3. What do you think compelled Amina to photograph the worst moments at the wedding?

4. Sanji is presented as different than the rest of the adults in the Albuquerque “family.” What might make her different and why?

5. Kamala is a very polarizing character in the book. Were you drawn to or repelled by her? How do you think the author feels about her?

6. Kamala and Amina seem at odds most of the time, but what traits do they have in common?

7. Amina uses the camera to express herself. Kamala uses her cooking. Is there anything that you use (cooking, art, music, work) to connect to your world and the people in your life?

8. Akhil is angry with America in a way that Amina isn’t. What is the source of his anger?

9. If Akhil had lived longer, who else would he have painted on his ceiling?

10. Do you think Sunil was really sleepwalking when he set fire to the house?

11. All of the Eapens go through tremendous change, though Amina’s are more subtle than most. What is the biggest change in Amina’s personality?

12. If Jamie and Amina hadn’t shared their past, do you think she would have been able to trust him?

13. When Thomas sees Akhil, he believes it’s a genuine visit, not a side effect of his tumor. When Amina sees Akhil, she thinks it’s a symptom of her depression. Which explanation are you more inclined to believe?

14. What invention do you imagine Thomas was last working on?

15. Why do you think the author titled her novel The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Sliver of Truth (Ridley Jones series #2)
Lisa Unger, 2007
Crown Publishing
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307338495

Summary
Ridley Jones is being careful about where she steps and trying to get on with her life when a seemingly mundane act—picking up a few envelopes of prints at a photo lab—puts her at the nexus of a global network of crime. A shadowy figure of a man appears in almost every picture she’s taken in the last year, lurking just far enough away to make identification impossible. Now the FBI is at her door, some serious bad guys are following her every move, and the family she once loved and relied on is more distant than ever.

The only thing Ridley knows for sure is that she has to get to the truth about herself and her past if she’s ever going to find her way home. Charged with relentless intensity and kinetic action, playing out with unnerving suspense on the streets of New York and London, and seen through the terrified but determined eyes of a young woman whose body and heart are pushed to the point of shattering, Sliver of Truth is another triumph from the New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Lies. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—April 26, 1970
• Where—New Haven, Connecticut, USA
• Reared—The Netherlands, UK, and New Jersey, USA
• Education—New School for Social Research
• Currently—lives in Florida

Lisa Unger is an award winning New York Times, USA Today and international bestselling author. Her novels have been published in over 26 countries around the world.

She was born in New Haven, Connecticut (1970) but grew up in the Netherlands, England and New Jersey. A graduate of the New School for Social Research, Lisa spent many years living and working in New York City. She then left a career in publicity to pursue her dream of becoming a full-time author. She now lives in Florida with her husband and daughter.

Her writing has been hailed as "masterful" (St. Petersburg Times), "sensational" (Publishers Weekly) and "sophisticated" (New York Daily News) with "gripping narrative and evocative, muscular prose" (Associated Press).

More
Her own words:

I have always most naturally expressed myself through writing and I have always dwelled in the land of my imagination more comfortably than in reality. There’s a jolt I get from a good story that I’m not sure can be duplicated in the real world. Perhaps this condition came about because of all the traveling my family did when I was younger. I was born in Connecticut but we moved often. By the time my family settled for once and all in New Jersey, I had already lived in Holland and in England (not to mention Brooklyn and other brief New Jersey stays) for most of my childhood. I don’t recall ever minding moving about; even then I had a sense that it was cool and unusual. But I think it was one of many things that kept me feeling separate from the things and people around me, this sense of myself as transient and on the outside, looking in. I don’t recall ever exactly fitting in anywhere. Writers are first and foremost observers … and one can’t truly observe unless she stands apart.

For a long time, I didn’t really believe that it was possible to make a living as a writer … mainly because that’s what people always told me. So, I made it a hobby. All through high school, I won awards and eventually, a partial scholarship because of my writing. In college, I was advised by teachers to pursue my talent, to get an agent, to really go for it. But there was a little voice that told me (quietly but insistently) that it wasn’t possible. I didn’t see it as a viable career option as I graduated from the New School for Social Research (I transferred there from NYU for smaller, more dynamic classes). I needed a “real job.” A real job delivers a regular pay check, right? So I entered a profession that brought me as close to my dream as possible … and paid, if not well, then at least every two weeks. I went into publishing.

When I left for Florida, I think I was at a critical level of burnout. I think that as a New Yorker, especially after a number of years, one starts to lose sight of how truly special, how textured and unique it is. The day-to-day can be brutal: the odors, the noise, the homeless, the trains, the expense. Once I had some distance though, New York City started to leak into my work and I found myself rediscovering many of the things I had always treasured about it. It came very naturally as the setting for Beautiful Lies. It is the place I know best. I know it as one can only know a place she has loved desperately and hated passionately and then come to miss terribly once she has left it behind.

But it is true that we can’t go home again. I live in Florida now with my wonderful husband, and I’m a full-time writer. There’s a lot of beauty and texture and darkness to be mined in this strange place, as well. I’m sure I’d miss it as much in different ways if I returned to New York. I guess that’s my thing … no matter where I am I wonder if I belong somewhere else. I’m always outside, observing. It’s only when I’m writing that I know I’m truly home. (Author bio from the author's website.)

Book Reviews
Bestseller Unger's sensational second thriller (after Beautiful Lies) puts her in the same league as such genre masters as Peter Straub and Peter Abrahams. From the cryptic opening section, which ends with a New York Times reporter finding her husband bleeding to death, Unger grabs the reader by the throat and doesn't let go. Meanwhile, the FBI informs Ridley Jones, a magazine writer, that her late uncle, Max Smiley (who's really her biological father), is still alive and being sought by assorted international players on all sides of the law. Rapidly finding that little in her life is what it seems, Jones is horrified to be confronted with evidence indicating that Smiley is a misogynistic monster of the first order, who may have played a role in the murder of the reporter's husband. Unger's gifts for dialogue and pacing set this far above the standard novel of suspense and will leave many anxiously awaiting her third book.
Publishers Weekly

Freelance journalist Ridley Jones stops by the photo lab to pick up her pictures and is taken in for questioning by FBI agents on her way home. It seems that a mysterious figure is hovering in the background in several of her photos, and Special Agent Dylan Grace believes that the figure is Ridley's Uncle Max, whom she thought was dead. In Unger's follow-up to Beautiful Lies, Ridley must face the fact that her beloved uncle may not only be alive but that he wasn't the man she believed him to be. The FBI wants her to lead its agents to him, but she doesn't completely trust anyone now, including her boyfriend, Jake, who informs her that Max was part of a vicious crime ring. Determined to discover the truth in the web of lies surrounding her, Ridley decides to do some investigating on her own and encounters danger and deception at every turn. A fast-paced story that readers will find difficult to put down; recommended.
Library Journal

More identity crisis for New York City journalist Ridley Jones in this murky follow-up to Unger's debut (Beautiful Lies, 2006). Just when she thought she'd figured out who her real father is, single working girl Ridley is confronted with fresh evidence that her dead Uncle Max Smiley, revealed a year ago (and in Unger's previous book) to be her biological father, might in fact still be alive, and responsible for a series of ghastly assaults on women. Max, an abused child himself, was a self-made real-estate developer and the shadowy head of the Project Rescue organization, which ostensibly saved at-risk children from abusive parents, but in some cases actually abducted children and placed them in foster homes. Ridley's adoptive parents, Ben and Grace Jones, were also involved in Project Rescue, and adopted Ridley as a child. At this point in her life, Ridley is still picking up the pieces of her identity, having been involved in the last year with Jake, a former Project Rescue baby who is still obsessed with Max's whereabouts. Meanwhile, Ridley is being trailed by FBI Special Agent Dylan Grace, who ties her to the recent disappearance of a New York Times journalist, Myra Lyall. In a development that turns these characters into paranoid, damaged people, it's revealed that Agent Grace's mother happened to have been a spy and one of Max's victims. And with everyone looking for Max, possibly at the center of a sex slave trade, the trail leads naturally to Ridley, the beloved daughter he will surely reveal himself to at the novel's 11th hour. Ridley is a character still in search of herself, and this effort offers appealing moments of first-person honesty, but could lose readers unfamiliar with Unger's first.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Of all the baffling plot twists in Sliver of Truth, which one caught you most by surprise? Why?

2. The book’s pivotal scene—where Ridley confronts Max at Potter’s Field—bookends the novel, appearing at the beginning and near the conclusion. Why do you think the author chose to structure this scene like this? What did you think of having it split in this way?

3. In chapter 2, Ridley describes her childhood habit of hiding from adults, saying, “I just got better and better at finding places to hide. Eventually I had to reveal myself or never be found” (page 21). In the context of the novel, does this statement have another meaning? If so, what?

4. What was your opinion of Dylan Grace? At first, did you think he was being honest with Ridley about his motives for finding Max?

5. “Some of us are lost and some of us are found. I think that’s really the difference Max had observed” (page 273). Who are the “lost” characters in Sliver of Truth, and who are “found”? What are the differences between these characters?

6. Talk about the relationship between Dylan and Ridley. Did you expect that he and Ridley would get together? Why do you think they were so attracted to each other?

7. “I was filled with dread and fury, and yes, the slightest glimmer of hope,” Ridley says after she finds out Max is still alive (page 283). Why hope? Does this foreshadow her ultimate encounter with Max? At any point in the novel did you believe Max was alive?

8. Ghosts and hauntings are recurrent themes in Sliver of Truth. Discuss some instances where they are prominent, and their significance. Does the author employ other symbols like these?

9. “I have a tremendous ability to compartmentalize my emotions. Some call it denial, but I think it’s a skill to be able to put unpleasant things out of your head for a little while in order to accomplish something else,” (page 98). Consider this statement of Ridley’s. What does it reveal about her personality? Do you agree with what she says?

10. Nature versus nurture is a theme Ridley frequently debates with herself: Is her true self a result of her adoptive parents’ upbringing, or is she Max’s daughter (and therefore shares his traits)? What do you think? Are we really products of our DNA, or do the people around us shape who we become?

11. Discuss Jake. Did you imagine that he was not who he claimed to be? Were you surprised to discover what his real identity actually was? Do you think Ridley suspected that Jake was lying to her?

12. If you read Beautiful Lies, did you realize that Jake lied to Ridley on the Brooklyn Bridge?

13. Why was Ridley unable to see the real Max, despite the attempts by many to inform her of his wrongdoings? For that matter, why does it seem that all the men in Ridley’s life (Dylan, Jake, her ex-boyfriend Zack, even her adoptive father, Ben) hid their true selves from her?

14. “I’m sure you were hoping for a neater package–the villain is caught and brought to justice. I live happily ever after” (page 351). What did you think of the book’s ending? When Ridley’s real intentions against Max were revealed, were you surprised?

15. What do you think the title means?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Slumdog Millionaire (originally published as Q & A)
Vikas Swarup, 2005
Simon & Schuster
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781439136652

Summary
Vikas Swarup's spectacular debut novel opens in a jail cell in Mumbai, India, where Ram Mohammad Thomas is being held after correctly answering all twelve questions on India's biggest quiz show, Who Will Win a Billion? It is hard to believe that a poor orphan who has never read a newspaper or gone to school could win such a contest. But through a series of exhilarating tales Ram explains to his lawyer how episodes in his life gave him the answer to each question.

Ram takes us on an amazing review of his own history—from the day he was found as a baby in the clothes donation box of a Delhi church to his employment by a faded Bollywood star to his adventure with a security-crazed Australian army colonel to his career as an overly creative tour guide at the Taj Mahal.

Swarup's Q & A [Slumdog Millionaire] is a beguiling blend of high comedy, drama, and romance that reveals how we know what we know — not just about trivia, but about life itself. Cutting across humanity in all its squalor and glory, Vikas Swarup presents a kaleidoscopic vision of the struggle between good and evil — and what happens when one boy has no other choice in life but to survive. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1963
• Where—Allahabad, India
• Education—Allahabad University
• Awards—Exclusive Book Boeke Prize (South Africa); Prix
Grand Public (France)
• Currently—posted to Pretoria, South Africa

Vikas Swarup is a 1986 Indian Foreign Service bureaucrat, an Indian novelist and diplomat who has served in Turkey, the United States, Ethiopia and Great Britain. He was born in Allahabad into a family of lawyers and did his schooling at Boys' High School & College, Allahabad. He pursued further studies at Allahabad University in Psychology, History and Philosophy. In 1986 he joined the Indian Foreign Service. Since August, 2006, he has been posted in Pretoria as India's Deputy High Commissioner to South Africa.

Swarup's debut novel, Q and A, [aka Slumdog Millionaire in film] tells the story of a penniless waiter in Mumbai who becomes the biggest quiz show winner in history. Critically acclaimed in India and abroad, this international bestseller has been translated into 41 languages.

Acclaim: book and film
• The novel was shortlisted for the Best First Book by the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and won South Africa’s Exclusive Books Boeke Prize 2006, as well as the Prix Grand Public at the 2007 Paris Book Fair.

• A BBC radio play based on the book won the Gold Award for Best Drama at the Sony Radio Academy Awards 2008 and the IVCA Clarion Award 2008.

• Harper Collins brought out the audio book, read by Kerry Shale, which won the Audie for best fiction audio book of the year.

• Film4 of the UK had optioned the movie rights and the movie titled Slumdog Millionaire (SDM) directed by Danny Boyle was first released in the US to great critical acclaim.

• SDM won the People's Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival and three awards (Best Film, Best Director and Most Promising Newcomer) at the British Independent Film Awards 2008.

• The National Board of Review picked SDM as the best film of 2008.

• The movie swept five awards out of its six nominations at the Critics' Choice Awards, and all four nominations awarded at the Golden Globe Awards which includes best director, picture, screenplay & score, and seven BAFTA Awards.

• It received 10 Oscar nominations of which it won 8, including Best Picture and Best Director, as well as prizes for cinematography, sound mixing, score and film editing. SDM’s eight Oscars was the largest total won by a single film since The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King won 11 in 2004.

More
Swarup's second novel Six Suspects, (2008) and has been translated into several languages and optioned for a film by the BBC and Starfield productions.

Swarup's short story "A Great Event" has been published in The Children’s Hours: Stories of Childhood, an anthology of stories about childhood to support Save the Children and raise awareness for its fight to end violence against children.

Vikas Swarup has participated in the Oxford Literary Festival, the Turin International Book Fair, the Auckland Writers’ Conference, the Sydney Writers’ Festival, the Kitab Festival in New Delhi, the St. Malo International Book & Film Festival in France, the Words on Water Literary Festival at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and the Jaipur Literature Festival in India.

He and his wife, Aparna, have two sons, Aditya and Varun. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
It was an inspired idea by Vikas Swarup to write Q & A.... A broad and sympathetic humanity underpins the whole book
Sunday Telegraph (London)

A rare, seemingly effortless brew of humour, drama, romance and social realism.... Swarup...has achieved a triumph with this thrilling, endearing work which gets into the heart and soul of modern India.
New Zealand Herald

Vikas Swarup weaves a delightful yarn. With an easy style, Q & A is sweet, sorrowful and funny. An enchanting tale.
Sunday Tribune (India)

Ram's funny and poignant odyssey explores the causes of good and evil and illustrates how, with a little luck, the best man sometimes wins. Deborah Donovan
Booklist

When Ram Mohammad Thomas, an orphaned, uneducated waiter from Mumbai, wins a billion rupees on a quiz show, he finds himself thrown in jail. (Unable to pay out the prize, the program's producers bribed local authorities to declare Ram a cheater.) Enter attractive lawyer Smita Shah, to get Ram out of prison and listen to him explain, via flashbacks, how he knew the answers to all the show's questions. Indian diplomat Swarup's fanciful debut is based on a sound premise: you learn a lot about the world by living in it (Ram has survived abandonment, child abuse, murder). And just as the quiz show format is meant to distill his life story (each question prompts a separate flashback), Ram's life seems intended to distill the predicament of India's underclass in general. Rushdie's Midnight's Children may have been a model: Ram's brash yet innocent voice recalls that of Saleem Sinai, Rushdie's narrator, and the sheer number of Ram's near-death adventures represents the life of the underprivileged in India, just as Saleem wore a map of India, quite literally, on his face. But Swarup's prose is sometimes flat and the story's picaresque form turns predictable. Ram is a likable fellow, but this q&a with him, though clever, grows wearying.
Publishers Weekly

Discussion Questions
1. Why does Vikas Swarup choose the name “Ram Mohammad Thomas” for his protagonist? The names represent three different religions—besides displaying India’s diversity, what does this say about Ram Mohammad Thomas as a person?

2. When Ram recounts the story of Father Timothy, he repeatedly refers to himself as an “idiot orphan boy” (pg. 49). Considering how well Father Timothy treats him, why does he describe himself in this manner?

3. Ram has a recurring dream of a tall woman with black hair that obscures her face. At what moments does he have this dream, and why? What does this woman represent? Is she his biological mother? A symbol of hope? Abandonment?

4. In telling Gudiya’s story, Ram asks “But what was Gudiya’s crime? Simply that she was born a girl and Shantaram was her father?” (pg. 68). Are there other women in this novel who are treated poorly simply because of their sex? Do any female characters not need Ram’s protection? How would you describe his relationships with women?

5. Several characters, especially Ram and Salim, are big movie fans. Is there a reason for this? Do films help them escape their frequently dreary lives, is it simply a significant part of their culture, or is there another reason?

6. What are Ram’s ambitions in life? Why does he tell Prem Kumar he doesn’t know how he’s going to spend the billion rupees? Why does Ram turn in Colonel Taylor? Is this retribution for the colonel’s spying, his derogatory comments about Indians, or for the way he treats his family? Or does Ram simply want to collect his wages before returning to Mumbai?

7. “The city may have chosen to ignore the ugly growth of Dharavi, but a cancer cannot be stopped simply by being declared illegal” (pg. 134). Are there any other problems that go unacknowledged because they’re too painful to face? If so, what impact does this have on the characters?

8. What do you think of Salim’s decision to give Ahmed, the hit man, a picture of Maman? Did Salim have another choice? Is he guilty of murder? Did Ram have other options besides throwing Shantaram down the stairs? Are these violent acts justifiable considering the behavior of the victims?

9. Consider the impact of Western culture on Ram. He dreams of eating at places like McDonald’s and Pizza Hut, and he practices “speaking Australian.” Why is this important to him?

10. Why does Ram want to have “manageable dreams” (pg. 279)? What does he mean by this? And does this conflict with him appearing on a game show to win one billion rupees?

11. Considering he believes he’s already murdered two people, why is Ram unable to kill Prem Kumar?

12. How do you think Ram changes, if at all, during his eighteen years? Is he a stronger person at the end of Q&A than he was as a boy? Which journey had the greatest impact on him, either for better or worse?

13. “I realized a long time ago that dreams have power only over your own mind; but with money you can have power over the minds of others” (pg. 316). In relation to this novel, would you agree with this statement? Are there characters without money that are able to influence others?

14. Despite his lack of formal education, Ram is able to answer twelve questions correctly in order to win a billion rupees. Was this pure luck, or do you think he’ll always be able to find the answers to life’s many questions? What do you envision the future holds for Ram?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Small Blessings
Martha Woodroof, 2014
St. Martin's Press
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250040527

Summary
From debut novelist Martha Woodroof comes an inspiring tale of a small-town college professor, a remarkable new woman at the bookshop, and the ten-year old son he never knew he had.

Tom Putnam has resigned himself to a quiet and half-fulfilled life.

An English professor in a sleepy college town, he spends his days browsing the Shakespeare shelves at the campus bookstore, managing the oddball faculty in his department and caring, alongside his formidable mother-in-law, for his wife Marjory, a fragile shut-in with unrelenting neuroses, a condition exacerbated by her discovery of Tom’s brief and misguided affair with a visiting poetess a decade earlier.

Then, one evening at the bookstore, Tom and Marjory meet Rose Callahan, the shop's charming new hire, and Marjory invites Rose to their home for dinner, out of the blue, her first social interaction since her breakdown.

Tom wonders if it’s a sign that change is on the horizon, a feeling confirmed upon his return home, where he opens a letter from his former paramour, informing him he'd fathered a son who is heading Tom's way on a train. His mind races at the possibility of having a family after so many years of loneliness.

And it becomes clear change is coming whether Tom’s ready or not.

A heartwarming story with a charmingly imperfect cast of characters to cheer for, Small Blessings's wonderfully optimistic heart that reminds us that sometimes, when it feels like life has veered irrevocably off track, the track shifts in ways we never can have imagined. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Martha Woodroof was born in the South, went to boarding school and college in New England, ran away to Texas for a while, then fetched up in Virginia. She has written for NPR, npr.org, Marketplace, and Weekend America, and for the Virginia Foundation for Humanities Radio Feature Bureau.

Her print essays have appeared in such newspapers as the New York Times, Washington Post, and San Francisco Chronicle. Small Blessings is her debut novel. She lives with her husband in the Shenandoah Valley. Their closest neighbors are cows. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Woodroof nails the debut novel: This warm, wise tale leaves a smile long after the final page is turned.
People Magazine

This book is a charmer: quirky, clear-hearted and effervescent.
Oprah.com

A delightful tale about what happens when good intentions go well.
Good Housekeeping

Woodroof’s charming debut deals with a bizarre paternity case set against the backdrop of a quirky college town.... Along with dark humor and a confident command of story, strong characters and absurdist twists add to the fun.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) A warm, caring and thoroughly entertaining debut that reads remarkably well.
Library Journal

Woodroof’s light hand and compassion for her characters make the story flow naturally. The question of what makes a family is gently asked and answered throughout. A pleasant read about ordinary people dealing with extraordinary circumstances and the optimism that guides them.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. At the beginning of the book, Tom Putman is resigned to a not very-fulfilling home life. Does this mean he’s kind or passive? Brave or timid? Did he make a mistake marrying Marjory?

2. Why has Rose Callahan worked in bookstores her entire professional life? How does the experience of working at The Bookstore for Mr. Pitts seem different to her from her earlier work experiences?

3. Why are Russell Jacobs and Iris Benson so antagonistic toward each other at the start of the story?

4. How does Agnes Tattle view her son-in-law? How does Tom view his mother-in-law?

5. What is the importance of Marjory Putnam inviting Rose to dinner?

6. How do you feel about Tom having a brief affair that seems to have produced a son?

7. How does Rose Callahan view her childhood? Her mother, Miss Mavis Callahan?

8. Does the community at small women’s college where Small Blessings takes place seem cozy and supportive, or isolated and self-absorbed?

9. What effect does Henry have on Tom? On Rose? On Agnes? On Russell?

10. Why does Agnes wear her long-dead husband's pajamas?

11. Does it take courage to admit you are happy? Does Small Blessings have a happy ending? If so, why?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Small Change
Lynn Rodolico, 2013
Eccolo Editions
334 pp.
ISBN-13: 9788890698668

Summary
NEWBORN TWINS ABANDONED IN DUMPSTER

From an act of desperation is born the inspiring tale of love and good fortune, not only for the twins but for the couple who have been waiting to adopt.

Set in England and Italy, Small Change is a poignant recounting of love, loss and steadfast commitment.

Rich in empathy and humor, embedded in delightful, thought-provoking prose, best-selling author Lynn Rodolico offers a viable alternative to the modern-day despair of the individual’s inability to make a difference.

Half the proceeds from Small Change are donated to Children’s Rights charities (From the publisher.)

See the video.

Author Bio
• Birth—April 1, 1953
• Where—Santa Monica, California, USA
• Education—Univeristy of California, Santa Barbara
• Awards—Book of the Month Award (France)
• Currently—lives in Sicily and Florence, Italy

Lynn April Barber Rodolico was born in Santa Monica, California, and grew up in the coastal town of Pacific Palisades. Her earliest, happiest memories come from inventing stories beneath the large fruit trees in her backyard, and later, when she was old enough to roam, the dramatic pounding of the Pacific Ocean below the town's cliffs.

Writing had always been a favorite pastime but it wasn't until she left her job as Administrator of a Shakespearean theatre company in Massachusetts that she started to write full time. She gave herself one year in which to succeed or fail as a writer. To perfect her skills, first in the Berkshires and later in New York City, she wrote commercial novels in the Romance genre under a series of pseudonyms. Her success was quick and exceptional.

Lynn's first published novel, Passion’s Flight sold 350,000 copies and was translated into seven languages. Her second novel, Heart & Soul, proved a greater success, both commercially and literary, winning the Book of the Month Award in France. Opening Bid was another best seller romance and was translated into eleven languages. Intimates moved out of the romance category, allowing for real character development, but its circulation was thwarted when her editor changed publishing houses and the book remained orphaned in the warehouse.

In 1985 Lynn moved to Italy for a year to finish a novel. On her first day in Florence she met the man who would transform her life from a solitary search to a unified communion. Two Seas is a fictionalized memoir of their life on an olive farm in the Tuscan hills and their unexpected love affair with the Island of Sicily. Her most recent novel, Small Change, takes place in Italy and England. It was published in 2013. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
Tender and eloquent...an extraordinary eye for detail.
Trisha Thomas - AP Journalist, Rome

A novel of great intercultural sensitivity.
Charles de Chassiron, London

The new book by Lynn Rodolico, Small Change, marks an interesting deviation from her previous novel, Two Seas. The change is not only literary in form, but alters the perspective about the essence of life itself. Two Seas is a romantic discovery of a new land where nature dominates the story with a continuous sense of wonder, which leads to an exploration of the self, whereas Small Change takes a modernistic approach, where the characters (some of whom appear in Two Seas) move the plot forward with their behavior, feelings and thoughts, while nature remains discreetly in the background. Written in a fluid and personal style, almost like an Impressionist painting, Small Change presents a fascinating story set in both England and Italy. Starting with the misery of a tragic decision, Small Change leads the reader through a tangled web of beautifully described situations, to a happy conclusion which, in a sort of modern catharsis, will transport the reader to an optimistic and confident view of the spontaneous goodness of humanity.
Luigi Giannitrapani, Genova

Discussion Questions
1. Love is presented in many forms in Small Change: a mother and her children; a wife and husband; a son’s devotion for his parents; sisters and friends. Which of these relationships is most successful and why? How are they similar or different from your definition of love and caring?

2. Small Change begins with a desperate act and deals with difficult issues, but Rodolico proposes the novel as “a viable alternative to modern-day despair." Did you find the novel inspiring? Did it make you want to better the world, even in a small way?

3. One of the characters is a self-confessed liar, and therefore may be considered an unreliable narrator. Did this short-coming influence your sense of compassion for her? Or did the complication in her character make her seem more human and therefore more worthy of your sympathy?

4. The protagonist, Christine, has a sixth sense, if and when she chooses to follow it. Does the unexplainable spiritual aspect of the story seem realistic or far-fetched?

5. Each of the characters in Small Change experiences an alteration during the course of the book. How does Thomas change? Christine? Anne? Does this metamorphosis occur for the secondary characters as well? Has their transformation altered you, as a reader?

6. In Rodolico’s previous novel, Two Seas, nature played a significant role, almost as if it were the protagonist of the story. How is nature portrayed in Small Change? How does it alter as the story shifts from the English countryside to London to Florence, Italy? Do the characters behave differently according to the nature that surrounds them?

7. Was the unfolding of Small Change predictable or unexpected? Were you surprised by the book's ending? Were you sorry to say goodbye to the characters?

8. How would you categorize Small Change? Is it a love story? A story about adoption? Family and Relationships? Mothers and Children? Human Rights?
(Questions provided courtesy of the author.)

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Small Great Things
Jodi Picoult, 2016
Random House
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345544957

Summary
Ruth Jefferson is a labor and delivery nurse at a Connecticut hospital with more than twenty years’ experience. During her shift, Ruth begins a routine checkup on a newborn, only to be told a few minutes later that she’s been reassigned to another patient.

The parents are white supremacists and don’t want Ruth, who is African American, to touch their child. The hospital complies with their request, but the next day, the baby goes into cardiac distress while Ruth is alone in the nursery. Does she obey orders or does she intervene?

Ruth hesitates before performing CPR and, as a result, is charged with a serious crime.

Kennedy McQuarrie, a white public defender, takes her case but gives unexpected advice: Kennedy insists that mentioning race in the courtroom is not a winning strategy. Conflicted by Kennedy’s counsel, Ruth tries to keep life as normal as possible for her family—especially her teenage son—as the case becomes a media sensation.

As the trial moves forward, Ruth and Kennedy must gain each other’s trust, and come to see that what they’ve been taught their whole lives about others—and themselves—might be wrong.

With incredible empathy, intelligence, and candor, Jodi Picoult tackles race, privilege, prejudice, justice, and compassion—and doesn’t offer easy answers. Small Great Things is a remarkable achievement from a writer at the top of her game. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 19, 1966
• Where—Nesconset (Long Island), New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Princeton University; M.Ed., Harvard University
• Currently—lives in Hanover, New Hampshire

Jodi Lynn Picoult is an American author. She was awarded the New England Bookseller Award for fiction in 2003. Picoult currently has approximately 14 million copies of her books in print worldwide.

Early life and education
Picoult was born and raised in Nesconset on Long Island in New York State; when she was 13, her family moved to New Hampshire. Even as a child, Picoult had a penchant for writing stories: she wrote her first story— "The Lobster Which Misunderstood"—when she was five.

While still in college—she studied writing at Princeton University—Picoult published two short stories in Seventeen magazine. To pay the bills, after graduation she worked at a variety of jobs, including copy writing and editing textbooks; she even taught eighth-grade English and attained a Masters in Education from Harvard University.

In 1989, Picoult married Timothy Warren Van Leer, whom she met in college, and while pregnant with their first child, wrote her first book. Song of the Humpbacked Whale, her literary debut, came out in 1992. Two more children followed, as did a string of bestseller novels. All told, Picoult has more than 20 books to her name.

Writing
At an earlier time in her life, Picoult believed the tranquility of family life in small-town New England offered little fodder for writing; the truly interesting stuff of fiction happened elsewhere. Ironically, it is small-town life that has ended up providing the settings for Picoult's novels. Within the cozy surroundings of family and friends, Picoult weaves complex webs of relationships that strain, even tear apart, under stress. She excels at portraying ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances. Disoriented by some accident of chance, they stumble, whirl, and attempt to regain a footing in what was once their calm, ordered world.

Nor has Picoult ever shied from tackling difficult, controversial issues: school shooting, domestic violence, sexual abuse, teen suicide, and racism. She approaches painful topics with sympathy—and her characters with respect—while shining a light on individual struggles. Her legions of readers have loved and rewarded her for that compassion—and her novels have been consistent bestsellers.

Personal life
Picoult and her husband Timothy live in Hanover, New Hampshire. They have three children and a handful of pets. (Adapted from a 2003 Barnes and Noble interview and from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/28/2016.)

Book Reviews
Leave it to Jodi Picoult to tackle the explosive subject of race—as she does in Small Great Things—with her signature stroke of compassion. In alternating chapters, Picoult uses those lovely, fluid sentences of hers to limn her characters and bring them to life. She even manages, surprisingly, to give a white supremacist his due.
Molly Lundquist - LitLovers

A compelling, can’t-put-it-down drama with a trademark [Jodi] Picoult twist.
Good Housekeeping

It’s Jodi Picoult, the prime provider of literary soul food. This riveting drama is sure to be supremely satisfying and a bravely thought-provoking tale on the dangers of prejudice.
Redbook

Jodi Picoult is never afraid to take on hot topics, and in Small Great Things, she tackles race and discrimination in a way that will grab hold of you and refuse to let you go.... This page-turner is perfect for book clubs.
Popsugar

[I]nspired by a Flint, Mich., event.... The author’s comprehensive research brings veracity to Ruth’s story as a professional black woman trying to fit into white society.... Unfortunately, the author undermines this richly drawn and compelling story with a manipulative final plot twist as well as a Pollyannaish ending.
Publishers Weekly

Picoult delivers what her fans expect with a controversial topic that includes plenty of courtroom drama and a surprise twist. The novel is well researched, although it raises the question: can a person of one race write authentically about being another race? —Amy Stenftenagel, Washington Cty. Lib., Woodbury, MN
Library Journal

[T]he pervasiveness of American racism...is the real story here—and the novel would have been stronger if it had been written from this perspective throughout.... [But] Picoult's conclusion occurs in a separate fairy-tale world where racism suddenly does not exist, resulting in a rather juvenile portrayal of racial politics in America.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Which of the three main characters (Ruth, Turk, or Kennedy) do you most relate to and why? Think about what you have in common with the other two characters as well—how can you relate to them?

2. The title of the book comes from the Martin Luther King, Jr. quote that Ruth’s mother mentions on p. 173: "If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way." What does this quote mean to you? What are some examples of small great things done by the characters in the novel?

3. Discuss Ruth’s relationship with her sister, Adisa. How does the relationship change over the course of the novel?

4. Kennedy seeks out a neighborhood in which she is the only white person to help her gain some perspective. Can you think of an example of a time when something about your identity made you an outsider? How were you affected by that experience?

5. All of the characters change over the course of the novel, but Turk’s transformation is perhaps the most extreme. What do you think contributed to that change?

6. Discuss the theme of parenthood in the novel. What does being a parent mean to Ruth, to Kennedy, and to Turk? What does it mean to you?

7. Why do you think Ruth lies to Kennedy about touching Davis when he first starts seizing? What would you have done in her position?

8. Why do you think Kennedy decides to take Ruth’s case? What makes it so important to her?

9. Discuss the difference between "equity" and "equality" as Kennedy explains it on p. 427. Do you think Ruth gets equity from the trial?

10. Was your perspective on racism or privilege changed by reading this book? Is there anything you now see differently?

11. Did the ending of Small Great Things surprise you? If so, why? Did you envision a different ending?

12. Did the Author’s Note change your reading experience at all?

13. Have you changed anything in your daily life after reading Small Great Things?

14. Whom would you recommend Small Great Things to? Why?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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A Small Indiscretion
Jan Ellison, 2015
Random House
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812995442

Summary
A Small Indiscretion fixes an unflinching eye on the power of desire and the danger of obsession as it unfolds the story of one woman's reckoning with a youthful mistake.

At nineteen, Annie Black trades a bleak future in her washed-out hometown for a London winter of drinking to oblivion and yearning for deliverance. Some two decades later, she is married to a good man and settled in San Francisco, with a son and two daughters and a successful career designing artistic interior lights.

One June morning, a photograph arrives in her mailbox, igniting an old longing and setting off a chain of events that rock the foundations of her marriage and threaten to overturn her family's hard-won happiness.

The novel moves back and forth across time between San Francisco in the present and that distant winter in Europe. The two worlds converge and explode when the adult Annie returns to London seeking answers, her indiscretions come to light, and the phone rings with shocking news about her son. Now Annie must fight to save her family by piecing together the mystery of her past—the fateful collision of liberation and abandon and sexual desire that drew an invisible map of her future.

A Small Indiscretion is a riveting debut novel about a woman's search for understanding and forgiveness, a taut exploration of a modern marriage, and of love -- the kind that destroys, and the kind that redeems. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1965-66
• Raised—Tujunga, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Stanford University; M.F.A., San Francisco State University
• Awards—O. Henry Prize
• Currently—lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, California

Jan Ellison is the author of the debut novel, A Small Indiscretion, which was both a San Francisco Chronicle Book Club Pick and an Oprah Editor’s Pick. Jan’s essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Narrative Magazine and elsewhere, and her first story to appear in print won a 2007 O. Henry Prize.

Jan grew up in Los Angeles, and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband of twenty years and their four children. When her children were small, she spent seven years taking classes at San Francisco State and finally earned her MFA. She had a brief career in her twenties at a Silicon Valley startup, marketing risk management software to derivatives traders. The company went public, Jan became a mother, and instead of leaning in she leaned out, became a stay-at-home mom, and began to write.

Before that, Jan abandoned a job in investment banking before she even started it to spend two years waitressing in Hawaii, temping in Australia, and backpacking through Southeast Asia. Her college days were spent at Stanford, where a degree in History taught her about stories, as did her creative writing classes. She left Stanford for a year at nineteen to live on a shoestring in Paris and work in an office in London. She scribbled notes on yellow legal pads, and years later those notes provided the inspiration for her debut novel. (From the author's website.)

Visit the author's website.
Follow Jan on Facebook.

Book Reviews
Delicious, lazy-day reading.... [Jan] Ellison describes her various love triangles in lavish prose...the real strengths of this novel are the foggy, intimate flashbacks that so perfectly capture the sexual and romantic confusion of a young woman in a foreign land (Editor’s Pick).
Leigh Newman - Oprah.com

Ellison is a tantalizing storyteller, dropping delicious hints of foreshadowing and shifting back and forth in time....moving her story forward with cinematic verve.... [She] masterfully captures the confusing and powerful moment when a young woman realizes her effect on men. Compellingly sympathetic characters bring the London chapter of Annie’s story to dramatic life. If you are clinging to a stash of letters and ticket stubs from old lovers, Indiscretion may have you rethinking the cost of holding on to the past rather than basking in the virtues of the present.
USA Today

Astonishing.... This voice is alive. It knows something. It will take us somewhere. The magic is accomplished so fast, so subtly, that most readers hardly notice.... A Small Indiscretion is rich with suspense.... Delectable elements of this terrific first novel abound: Its characters are round and real.... Ellison gives us an achingly physical sense of family life.... Lovely writing guides us through, driven by a quiet generosity.... This voice knows something, and by the end of the novel, so do we.
San Francisco Chronicle

Rich and detailed.... The plot explodes delightfully, with suspense and a few twists. Using second-person narration and hypnotic prose, Ellison’s debut novel is both juicy and beautifully written. How do I know it’s juicy? A stranger started reading it over my shoulder on the New York City subway, and told me he was sorry that I was turning the pages too quickly.
Flavorwire

Are those wild college days ever really behind you? Happily married Annie finds out.
Cosmopolitan

An impressive fiction debut....both a psychological mystery and a study of the divide between desire and duty.
San Jose Mercury News

A novel to tear through on a plane ride or on the beach.... I was drawn into a web of secrets, a
world of unrequited love and youthful mistakes that feel heightened and more romantic on the cold winter streets of London, Paris, and Ireland.
Bustle

Annie Black is a flawed heroine whose impulses we may distrust, but whose voice is compelling, drawing us in with her ruminating self-awareness and lively observations of those around her.... Ellison renders the California landscape with stunning clarity.... She writes gracefully, with moments of startling insight.... Her first novel is an emotional thriller, skillfully plotted in taut, visual scenes. The stakes are high from the start.... As Ellison pulls the thread that unravels the past, she weaves a rich tapestry of memory and desire, secrets and omissions, and exposes the knotted wages of love.... A Small Indiscretion resolves in an astonishing plot twist that offers both destruction and self-discovery.
Rumpus

The book is a page-turner but the crazy connections are too orchestrated to be believable, and the epistolary format doesn't fit. Would a mother really tell her son all the sordid details of her sexual past, even if it did reveal something about his patrimony?
Publishers Weekly

The author's prose repeatedly catapults readers from the present to the past by employing a second-person point of view that is often difficult to follow....Part romance novel, part coming-of-age story, and part family drama, this somber book about a perpetually flawed woman is a challenging and thought-provoking read. —Samantha Gust, Niagara Univ. Lib., NY
Library Journal

Hard to put down.... O. Henry Prize winner Jan Ellison’s debut novel is a puzzle with the outside pieces finished. Reading it is like compulsively fitting all those revealing middle pieces together. . . . Skillfully weaving two plots, Ellison unveils the details of each, piece by tantalizing piece
BookPage

[A] cleverly constructed debut....crafted, absorbing novel that peels back the layers of Annie’s character as it reveals the secrets of her past and present.
Booklist

Ellison keeps the mystery going by switching among Annie's life in London at age 20, parts of the recent past, and present-time diary-type chapters....that fiendishly answers only one question at a time. Connoisseurs of domestic suspense will finish this book in a few breathless sittings, then wait eagerly for Ellison's next trick.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. In the beginning of the novel, Annie writes: "Between those bookends was a family whose happiness might still be intact if only I’d been able to see the threats to it more clearly." Is Annie responsible for Robbie’s accident, and for her family’s unraveling? Is it in her power to protect them?

2. There is more than one indiscretion in the novel. Which do you think the title refers to, or might it refer to more than one?

3. On page 302, Annie writes that it is "easier to blame the impulsiveness of youth than the wanton self-indulgence of a grown woman." How can this statement be assessed in the context of Annie’s story? Why does Annie confess to Jonathan upon her return from London?

4. After Jonathan moves out, Clara and Polly are passed between their parents "like a restaurant desert." Is Jonathan’s decision to move out defensible? How are the girls’ childhoods altered by the events of the summer? How might they look back on this period in their lives?

5. The novel takes the form of a confessional letter from Annie to Robbie. It also moves back and forth across two decades and spans three continents. How did this structure affect your reading experience? Does the structure remind you of any other novels?

6. Annie’s youthful relationship with Patrick is tortured and unfulfilling, yet she continues to yearn for him for more than twenty years. What causes this obsession? And why does it fade once Annie finally meets Patrick in London as an adult?

7. On page 250, Patrick defines art as "whatever stands in the world with no other purpose than to move us." Annie in turn suggests that art should at least be beautiful. Do you agree with either of these definitions? What other scenes and situations in the novel speak to the themes of art and beauty?

8. Early in the novel, Annie writes: "The heart is large, and there is more than one material in the bucket we call love." How does the novel address the theme of the nature of love? How do notions or definitions of love evolve as the novel progresses, and Annie matures?

9. Alcoholism runs in Annie’s family, yet when she finds herself abroad at nineteen, she begins to drink heavily. How might Annie’s upbringing have influenced this behavior? What leads to Annie’s "bargain" with herself in the clinic in San Francisco, as described on page 209?

10. The letter Annie receives from Emme’s uncle contains a major revelation. Did this revelation come as a surprise? What previous scenes hint at this revelation? Is Emme justified in holding Annie responsible for the shaping of her own history?

11. Annie posits that a memory is "by its nature a revision.... shaped by the waves of time, and by the history that has rushed against it since..." How does the novel interrogate the nature of memory? Is Annie a reliable narrator? How would the story be different if it were told from Jonathan’s point of view? Or Robbie’s? Or Emme’s?

12. On page 273, Annie realizes that if she expects to be forgiven, she must "forgive indiscriminately" from now on. Which characters, besides Annie, seek forgiveness? Which characters are ultimately redeemed, and which, if any, are not?

13. The novel concludes without describing what happens when Annie flies to Paris to reveal to Robbie the truth about his paternity and about Emme’s motivations. How do you imagine events unfolding between Annie and Robbie, and ultimately, between Robbie and Emme?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Smile
Roddy Doyle, 2017
Penguin Publishing
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780735224445

Summary
Just moved into a new apartment, alone for the first time in years, Victor Forde goes every evening to Donnelly’s for a pint, a slow one.

One evening his drink is interrupted. A man in shorts and a pink shirt comes over and sits down. He seems to know Victor’s name and to remember him from secondary school. His name is Fitzpatrick.

Victor dislikes him on sight, dislikes, too, the memories that Fitzpatrick stirs up of five years being taught by the Christian Brothers. He prompts other memories—of Rachel, his beautiful wife who became a celebrity, and of Victor’s own small claim to fame, as the man who would say the unsayable on the radio.

But it’s the memories of school, and of one particular brother, that Victor cannot control and which eventually threaten to destroy his sanity.

Smile has all the features for which Roddy Doyle has become famous: the razor-sharp dialogue, the humor, the superb evocation of adolescence, but this is a novel unlike any he has written before. When you finish the last page you will have been challenged to reevaluate everything you think you remember so clearly. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 8, 1958
• Where—Dublin, Ireland
• Education—B.A., University College Dublin
• Awards—Booker Prize (more below)
• Currently—lives in Dublin

Roddy Doyle is an Irish novelist, dramatist and screenwriter. He is the author of more than ten novels for adults, eight books for children, seven plays and screenplays, and dozens of short stories. He was awarded the Booker Prize in 1993 for his novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.

Background
Doyle was born in Dublin and grew up in Kilbarrack, in a middle-class family. His mother, Ita Bolger Doyle, was a first cousin of the short story writer Maeve Brennan. Doyle graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from University College Dublin. He spent several years as an English and geography teacher before becoming a full-time writer in 1993. His personal notes and work books reside at the National Library of Ireland.

In addition to teaching, Doyle, along with Sean Love, established a creative writing centre, "Fighting Words", which opened in Dublin in January 2009. It was inspired by a visit to his friend Dave Eggers' 826 Valencia project in San Francisco. He has also engaged in local causes, including signing a petition supporting journalist Suzanne Breen, who faced gaol for refusing to divulge her sources in court, and joining a protest against an attempt by Dublin City Council to construct 9 ft-high barriers which would interfere with one of his favourite views.

In 1987 Doyle married Belinder Moller, granddaughter of former Irish President Erskine Hamilton Childers. They have three children; Rory, Jack and Kate.

Work
Doyle's writing is marked by heavy use of dialogue between characters, with little description or exposition. His work is largely set in Ireland, with a focus on the lives of working-class Dubliners. Themes range from domestic and personal concerns to larger questions of Irish history.

Novels for adults
Doyle's first three novels, The Commitments (1987), The Snapper (1990) and The Van (1991) comprise "The Barrytown Trilogy,"centred on the Rabbitte family, from their teens into adulthood. All three novels were made into successful films

In 1993, Doyle published Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, winner of the 1993 Man Booker Prize, which showed the world as described, understood and misunderstood by a ten-year-old Dubliner living in 1968.

Doyle's next novel dealt with darker themes. The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996), is the story of a battered wife, narrated by the victim Paula Spencer, who returns 10 years later, in Paula Spencer (2006).

Doyle's most recent trilogy of adult novels is "The Last Roundup" series, which follows the adventures of protagonist Henry Smart through several decades, from Ireland to America and back again. The titles include A Star Called Henry (1999), Oh, Play That Thing! (2004), and The Dead Republic (2010).

Doyle's most recent books are three novellas: Two Pints (2012), The Guts (2013), and Two More Pints (2014). The Guts continues the story of the Rabbitte family from the earlier Barrytown Trilogy, focusing on a 48-year-old Jimmy Rabbite and his diagnosis of cancer.

Novels for children
Doyle has also written many novels for children, including "The Rover Adventures" series, which includes The Giggler Treatment (2000), Rover Saves Christmas (2001), and The Meanwhile Adventures (2004). Other children's books include Wilderness (2007), Her Mother's Face (2008), and A Greyhound of a Girl (2011).

Plays, screenplays, short stories and non-fiction
Doyle is also a prolific dramatist, composing four plays and two screenplays. His plays with the Passion Machine Theatre company include Brownbread (1987) and War (1989), directed by Paul Mercier with set and costume design by Anne Gately. designed by Later plays include The Woman Who Walked into Doors (2003); and a rewrite of The Playboy of the Western World (2007) with Bisi Adigun.

Screenplays include the television screenplay for Family (1994), which was a BBC/RTE serial and the forerunner of the 1996 novel The Woman Who Walked into Doors. Doyle also authored When Brendan Met Trudy (2000), which is a romance about a timid schoolteacher (Brendan) and a spunky thief (Trudy).

Doyle has written numerous short stories, several of which have been published in The New Yorker; they have also been compiled in two collections. The Deportees and Other Stories was published in 2007, while the collection Bullfighting was published in 2011. Doyle's story "New Boy" was adapted into a 2008 Academy Award-nominated short film directed by Steph Green.

Awards
1991 - BAFTA Award (Best Adapted Screenplay): The Commitments
1993 - Man Booker Prize: Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
2009 - Irish PEN Award
2011 - French Literary Award: The Snapper
2013 - Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Awards (Novel of the Year): The Guts
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/10/2017.)

Book Reviews
In Fitzpatrick, Doyle has created an extraordinarily creepy antagonist: a bully who plays dumb but always gets under the hero's skin, a clumsy oaf who nevertheless can disappear like a cat into the darkness. Fitzpatrick's physical presence is palpable and unsettling, uncanny even.… Smile is something of a departure for Doyle — it's the closest thing he's written to a psychological thriller — but it nevertheless showcases his well-loved facility for character and dialogue. His ear and eye are peerless.
J. Robert Lennon - New York Times Book Review

The fear of honest disclosure is central to Mr. Doyle’s newest novel, Smile,about the lies men tell to make themselves appear normal.… Mr. Doyle’s signature clipped dialogue is still a feature of Smile, but this short, effective novel is about the truths that emerge when, despite himself, Victor lets himself talk.
Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal

Doyle was determined to write a novel that shocked — and succeeded.… This is a performance few writers could carry off: a novel constructed entirely from bar stool chatter and scraps of memory. But you can’t turn away.
Ron Charles - Washington Post

Has anyone written as beautifully as Doyle on how love and violence lean right up against each other in childhood?… From the Booker Prize winning Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha to Smile, Doyle’s books bruise and cheer at the same time.
Boston Globe

Doyle's finest work since The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, Smile combines tropes from the various strands of Doyle’s career … and merges them into a unique novel, one that is terribly moving.… Like all good literature, [Smile] will inspire debate but also admiration for the courage of a hugely successful writer who refuses to be predictable and uses the novel to challenge both the reader’s sense of ease and the nature of the form itself.
Guardian (UK)

Beautifully written, and beautifully observed.… Reading Smile, one is swept along — as in all Doyle’s novels — by the vibrancy of language, the vivid sense of character and place, but nothing prepares you for the final few pages where, in a twist of imaginative brilliance, everything you have read is turned completely on its head.
Daily Telegraph (UK)

[A] marvelous novel from this Irish master …in a novel that hinges on the fallibility of memory, a narrator’s misremembering of a crucial point is expected. What is unexpected it quite how far Doyle takes this.… It says a lot about Doyle’s power that he is able to create such an intensely moving book that yet drops so much of itself as it approaches its end.
Spectator (UK)

[Doyle] employs his sly humor and unparalleled ear for banter between convincingly imperfect characters to craft an unsettling work of psychological suspense . . . [an] artful meditation on pain, memory, and how we build the stories of our lives. It is his most powerful and sobering novel since The Woman Who Walked into Doors.
Seattle Times

Smile is no easy maneuver: tackling a sensitive subject with the grace and gravity it deserves, and freshly delivering what readers expect in Doyle’s fiction (wit, dialogue, and the accuracy of youth). That Doyle is also, 30 years in, inventing new ways of storytelling is brave and notable.
St. Louis Post Dispatch

Doyle’s command of voice is absolutely sure, his dialogue authentic and the Ireland his characters inhabit — still a patchwork of fifties pietism and noughties cosmopolitanism — completely available to his and the reader’s understanding.… [A]n absorbing and expertly told story.
Financial Times

(Starred review.)Doyle skillfully depicts the triumphs and tragedies of the everyday, how the aging process humbles and ennobles, and how a single hasty decision made in one’s youth can define and destroy a mind and thus a life.
Publishers Weekly

[Doyle’s] masterly language and honesty … [and] ability to convey so much meaning through rapid-fire dialog in the Irish vernacular is unsurpassed.… Readers anticipating Doyle’s trademark wit and warmth will instead encounter a psychological mystery with an enigmatic ending that will have them flipping to the beginning looking for clues.
Library Journal

Doyle flavors a compelling character study with a soupçon of suspense, misdirecting readers for a powerful purpose that is only revealed at the shocking, emotionally charged ending.
Booklist

(Starred review.) The first-person narrative is fresh and bracing from Page 1.… It isn't until the final pages that the reader understands just what Doyle has done, and it might take a rereading to appreciate just how well he has done it. The understatement of the narrative makes the climax all the more devastating.
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 Smile … then take off on your own:

1. The book's title is "Smile." Why is that ironic?

2. Describe the loneliness, perhaps despair, at the heart of Victor Forde's life. What role does Donnelly's pub play in easing his sadness? What does he want from his nightly visits?

3. Victor's career began with glittery promise. What happened? Same with his marriage.

4. What is it about Fitzpatrick that inspires in Victor an immediate dislike? What do you think of Fitzpatrick? How does he dredge up the pain of Victor's childhood — traumas which have lain buried within Victor's psyche for years?

5. What was the effect on Victor and his classmates of Brother Murphy's remark: "Victor, I can never resist your smile." Victor says, "I was doomed." In what way — what does he mean? Would such a remark as Brother Murray's be countenanced today? Why were they ignored or brushed off back then?

6. The tricks of memory, its unreliability, is one of the novel's themes. How does does memory both protect Victor and play tricks on him in this story? Have your own memories ever played tricks on you?

7. Did the novel's ending take you by surprise, perhaps shock, even disorient, you? What were your initial expectations?

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

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Snail & Boy: A Story About Peace, Love and Freedom
Gal Kleinman, 2014
Self Published
61 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781311803931 (Smashwords)
ASIN: B00JTR6KCW (Amazon digital)

Summary
Snail and Boy is a story about a boy who lost his family in the war. From the depths of despair, Boy overcomes his hardships, and discovers universal truths that give profound meaning to his life, and relationship to the world.

Boy's incredible transformation gets noticed by a very inquisitive snail, who eventually discovers Boy’s secrets, as they unfold, raising our awareness to deep life changing insights.

One day, Boy is astonished to discover a snail writing silvery letters on a wall, and from that moment on, a special relationship evolves between the two.

It is a story about love. It is a story about peace. It is a story about freedom. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1970
• Where—Jerusalem, Israel
• Education—N/A
• Currently—lives in Israel

Gal was born in Jerusalem, Israel, spending some of his childhood in the USA but eventually returning to Israel. This is Gal's first novel.

The son of a holocaust survivor, Gal has experienced war first hand. Due to his personal experiences, and realizing the futility of war, and the anguish it causes to all sides involved, Gal devotes his life to creating a new spirit of coexistence among the various peoples, religions and cultures within a single interconnected civilization. And inspiring feelings of compassion and understanding between human beings.

Gal is the founding director of a global educational project called Magical Moments Around the World. He is also the co-director of Education for Global Peace, which sets out to mainstream peace education in educational systems around the world. (From the author.)

Book Reviews
A niice little fable. This is a great little fable about how to live peaceably in the world. It is beautifully written and thought-provoking.
NM Reader

I really like how u can see a snails perspective as well as a boy and girls in this story. I also like all the proverbs and that this book promotes peace instead of war....[A] unique gem.
Angelica Dimeo "serenity20"

A worthwhile use of an hour.... This little book has many wonderful messages. So many, in fact, that to squeeze everything in, the author seemed "preachy" at times.... [T]he author...could easily make this into multiple books. For me, there could have been more story. All that said, I found this book thought provoking and inspirational, if rather heavy handed in all that it wanted to say to me.
jak717

[V]ery simplistic and yet the theme is one that we all need to adhere to... includ[ing]:
"If you want freedom, give freedom to someone else" (p. 45).
"If you want to be happy give happiness to someone else" (p. 49).
"Give peace and you will know peace" (p. 141).
Over all it is not a bad read, very quick and easy. I finished it in just over an hour.
Irishapples

Exploring possibilities for peace with two joyous and inquiring character.... This book is divided into short, easily read stories promoting peace. They also feature curiosity and empathy, joy, and freedom (peace's best friends). While the stories were rather didactic in some places, the overall reading experience is delightful.... My favorite quote: "Yes, this world needs a revolution. War is obsolete, and we must learn to live in peace" (p 24). I am ready for this revolution.
The Toucan

Discussion Questions
1. What do you think about the relationship between Snail & Boy?

2. Did you suspect the story would end the way it did?

3. In what ways did Girl contribute to Boy's transformation?

4. Has the story reminded you of a special connection you once felt toward animals and nature?

5. Movie time: who would you like to see play what part?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)

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Snapper
Brian Kimberling, 2013
Knopf Doubleday
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307908056

Summary
A great, hilarious new voice in fiction: the poignant, all-too-human recollections of an affable bird researcher in the Indiana backwater as he goes through a disastrous yet heartening love affair with the place and its people.

Nathan Lochmueller studies birds, earning just enough money to live on. He drives a glitter-festooned truck, the Gypsy Moth, and he is in love with Lola, a woman so free-spirited and mysterious she can break a man’s heart with a sigh or a shrug.

Around them swirls a remarkable cast of characters: the proprietor of Fast Eddie’s Burgers & Beer, the genius behind “Thong Thursdays”; Uncle Dart, a Texan who brings his swagger to Indiana with profound and nearly devastating results; a snapping turtle with a taste for thumbs; a German shepherd who howls backup vocals; and the very charismatic state of Indiana itself.

And at the center of it all is Nathan, creeping through the forest to observe the birds he loves and coming to terms with the accidental turns his life has taken. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—Evansville, Indiana
• Education—B.A., Indiana University; M.A., Bath
Spa University
• Currently—lives in England

Brian Kimberling grew up in southern Indiana and spent two years working as a professional birdwatcher before living in the Czech Republic, Turkey, Mexico, and now England. He received an MA in creative writing from Bath Spa University in 2010. Snapper (2013) is his debut novel. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Mr. Kimberling grew up in the Hoosier state, and the book captures the place with wry humor, affection for its woodlands and exasperation with its provincialism.
New York Times

Reading Brian Kimberling's debut novel, Snapper, is a fascinating and disorienting experience…Like Indiana's leaves, the colors of Kimberling's book are vivid, often startling, and so myriad that it's sometimes difficult to focus on all of them…[Nathan] Lochmueller is a wanderer at heart, and his tales of southern Indiana flit from event to event and character to character like the songbirds he studies.
Jennifer Miller - Washington Post

Poignant as well as thought-provoking—a delightful departure from the ordinary.... It’s quite a feat, to keep readers reading on the strength of laughter. Kimberling...turns the trick effortlessly.
Seattle Times

Brian Kimberling’s Snapper is a phenomenal book, quietly profound and as entertaining as any book I’ve read in the past five years.... Kimberling articulates, better than anyone I’ve read, the sorrow that arises from trying to find the magic of one’s youth with the original ingredients.
Weston Cutter - Minneapolis Star Tribune

This kind of small-town adolescence is uniquely American, and it’s a lifestyle that’s rapidly vanishing. Brian Kimberling perfectly captures this experience in his debut novel, Snapper.... Kimberling writes about all of this in a voice part John Audubon, part Holden Caulfield but uniquely his own. The book’s pace is leisurely, the mood is sometimes melancholy, and readers will finish the final page feeling thoroughly satisfied. CNN.com

[A] hilarious debut novel. (10 Titles to Pick Up Now)
Oprah Magazine

Brian Kimberling's debut novel, Snapper, is a lovely, loose-limbed collection of stories about an aimless ornithologist.
First Reads - NPR.com

[C]atchy, well-written debut novel. Nathan Lochmueller, a recent philosophy graduate, takes a low-paying job as a songbird researcher at his alma mater, Indiana University, during the mid-1990s.... Nathan, past 30 and still aimless, pins his hopes on a lead to work at a Vermont raptor hospital, but his love-hate relationship with Indiana makes it difficult to move away.... [An] accomplished, ironic Midwest coming-of-age tale.
Publishers Weekly

When a publicist says that a book is punch-in-the-gut-affecting and she wants to scream it from the rooftops, I sit up and listen. Now I'm sold on this debut. The topic might seem improbable—Nathan Lochmueller is a bird researcher in southern Indiana—but...the characters immediately attract.
Library Journal

In those awkward, drifting, post-college years, when many young men find themselves working behind a counter, Nathan Lochmueller learns he has a gift for tracking songbirds.... Told with precise and memorable prose in beautifully rendered, time-shifted vignettes, Snapper richly evokes the emotions of coming to adulthood.... Kimberling writes gracefully about absurdity, showing a rich feeling for the whole range of human tragicomedy. A delightful debut.
Booklist

A sad-sack ornithologist navigates the wilds of southern Indiana and its quirky denizens. Kimberling's debut is a collection of linked stories narrated by Nathan Lochmueller, a smart but mostly luckless man who stumbles into a job monitoring bird patterns.... This book has enough of a story arc that the fact that it's not a full-fledged novel is somewhat frustrating...a more intricately structured tale could give his character more resonance. A well-turned debut that airdrops its characters into an appealingly offbeat milieu.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The book opens with “I got my job by accident.” How does this set the tone of the book? Does it describe the path of Nathan’s life? How does this idea apply to the secondary characters in the book?

2. Snapper revolves around birdwatching. What part do animals play in the book? How do animals help to move the story and define the characters? In what way are they characters themselves?

3. Several of the stories feature Lola. Is Nathan’s infatuation with Lola affected by her unavailability? Does Nathan love Lola? How do Nathan’s other relationships compare to his with Lola?

4. How does Nathan treat his relationships? Does he have trouble committing to anything? To anyone? Is he better on his own or with someone?

5. Does the book portray men and women with mutual respect? Does one gender have more control or power than the other or are they equal?

6. Kimberling references Peter Taylor, a loyal Tennessee native, and Nathan is clearly from Indiana. How much are the main characters defined by their home states? If Dart and Loretta represent Texas, then how do they differ from the characters from Indiana? Is it significant that Nathan’s mother is from Texas and his father is from Indiana?

7. The author also references to Katherine Anne Porter, whose writing deals with topics like justice, betrayal, and the unforgiving nature of humans. How are these topics handled in the story?

8. Uncle Dart squares off with the Klan yet displays his own prejudices. Is this solely to bother Nathan? At what point is a joke to be taken seriously? Or is it simply wrong to joke about certain topics? Where do you believe the boundaries are?

9. Nathan claims to “wax wroth with Darcy” yet seldom speaks with anger or indignity. Does he believe he has stronger convictions than he shows? Does he take an active or passive approach? How does his taste in literature match his ideals and represent his values?

10. This book deals with tolerance on many different levels and on many topics. How much can be overlooked? Lola does not hide the fact that she has multiple lovers. How forgiving are we due to love, or lust? Dart and Loretta return to Texas. How much can we be expected to accept from our family?

11. Nathan parts ways with John at the end of chapter IV. Why do long friendships end or fail to be rekindled? Darren is obviously not an ideal roommate, but is allowed to stay until he hurts Nathan. When does the line get crossed with friends?

12. What can be taken from Nathan’s encounter with Maud and Ernie? Why were they offended? They welcome all to their diner. Are they choosing to turn a blind eye unless forced to do otherwise?

13. Nathan has encounters with veterans. Once in the woods, and another in the vet center. Compare the two encounters with each other and with Nathan`s experience in Outward Bound. How do these three experiences complement each other? How do they differ?

14. Have you tried, a la Ernest Hemingway, to write a story in six words? How long does a story need to be? Is this a story collection or a novel? What is the difference? How important is a plotline in telling a story? Is it more satisfying to have one or more enjoyable to be free of the bounds of the structure?

15. Lola has clearly changed in Nathan’s eyes later in the story. How has she changed? How has Nathan changed? Do they have the same values now as in their youth?

16. Nathan compares headlights and traffic lights to his patch of woods. He laments, “Oh, people. My people” (page 210). Would Nathan and Shane as young men stop to pick up an older Nathan waving his arms in the middle of the road?

17. How do these stories follow the tradition of American folk tales? How do they not?

18. The last chapter is titled “Elegy.” To whom or what does this refer?

19. Why is the book entitled Snapper?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Snow Child
Eowyn Ivey, 2012
Little, Brown & Co.
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316175678

Summary
Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel.

Childless, they are drifting apart—he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow.

The next morning the snow child is gone—but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees.

This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness.

As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—February 07, 1973
• Where—Alaska
• Education—B.A., Western Washington University
• Currently—lives in Alaska

Eowyn (A-o-win) LeMay Ivey was raised in Alaska and continues to live there with her husband and two daughters. Her mother named her after a character from J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.

Eowyn works at the independent bookstore Fireside Books where she plays matchmaker between readers and books. The Snow Child, her debut novel, appeared in 2012; her second, To the Bright Edge of the World, was published in 2016. Her short fiction appears in the anthology Cold Flashes, University of Alaska Press 2010, and the North Pacific Rim literary journal Cirque.

Prior to her career as a bookseller and novelist, Eowyn worked for nearly a decade as an award-winning reporter at the Frontiersman newspaper. Her weekly articles about her outdoor adventures earned her the Best Non-Daily Columnist award from the Alaska Press Club. Her articles and photographs have been published in the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Magazine, and other publications.

Eowyn earned her BA in journalism and creative writing through Western Washington University's honors program and studied creative nonfiction in University of Alaska Anchorage's graduate program. She is a contributor to the blog 49Writers and a founding member of Alaska's first statewide writing center.

The Snow Child is informed by Eowyn's life in Alaska. Her husband is a fishery biologist with the state of Alaska. While they both work outside of the home, they are also raising their daughters in the rural, largely subsistence lifestyle in which they were both raised.

As a family, they harvest salmon and wild berries, keep a vegetable garden, turkeys and chickens, and they hunt caribou, moose, and bear for meat. Because they don't have a well and live outside any public water system, they haul water each week for their holding tank and gather rainwater for their animals and garden. Their primary source of home heat is a woodstove, and they harvest and cut their own wood.

These activities are important to Eowyn's day-to-day life as well as the rhythm of her year. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
The best thing about The Snow Child—what sets it apart from genre fiction and keeps you reading—is the way Ivey declines to lay her cards on the table. Are we dealing with fantasy or reality here?... She is a careful, matter-of-fact writer, who, thankfully, doesn't resort to unnecessary poetics or artificial ratcheting-up of tension. This leaves your imagination free to hare off down as many trails as you like.
Carrie O'Grady - Guardian (UK)

Here's a modern retelling of the Russian fairy tale about a girl, made from snow by a childless couple, who comes to life. Or perhaps not modern—the setting is 1920s Alaska—but that only proves the timelessness of the tale and of this lovely book. Unable to start a family, middle-aged Jack and Mabel have come to the wilderness to start over, leaving behind an easier life back east. Anxious that they won't outlast one wretched winter, they distract themselves by building a snow girl and wrap her in a scarf. The snow girl and the scarf are gone the next morning, but Jack spies a real child in the woods. Soon Jack and Mabel have developed a tentative relationship with the free-spirited Faina, as she finally admits to being called. Is she indeed a "snow fairy," a "wilderness pixie" magicked out of the cold? Or a wild child who knows better than anyone how to survive in the rugged north? Even as Faina embodies a natural order that cannot be tamed, the neighborly George and Esther show Jack and Mabel (and the rest of us) how important community is for survival. Verdict: A fluid, absorbing, beautifully executed debut novel; highly recommended. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal

A couple struggling to settle in the Alaskan wilderness is heartened by the arrival of the child of their dreams—or are they literally dreaming her? Jack and Mabel, the protagonists of Ivey's assured debut, are a couple in their early 50s who take advantage of cheap land to build a homestead in Alaska in the 1920s. But the work is backbreaking, the winters are brutally cold and their isolation only reminds them of their childlessness. There's a glimmer of sunshine, however, in the presence of a mysterious girl who lurks near their cabin. Though she's initially skittish, in time she becomes a fixture in the couple's lives. Ivey takes her time in clarifying whether or not the girl, Faina, is real or not, and there are good reasons to believe she's a figment of Jack and Mabel's imaginations: She's a conveniently helpful good-luck charm for them in their search for food, none of their neighbors seem to have seen the girl and she can't help but remind Mabel of fairy tales she heard in her youth about a snow child. The mystery of Faina's provenance, along with the way she brightens the couple's lives, gives the novel's early chapters a slightly magical-realist cast. Yet as Faina's identity grows clearer, the narrative also becomes a more earthbound portrait of the Alaskan wilderness and a study of the hard work involved in building a family. Ivey's style is spare and straightforward, in keeping with the novel's setting, and she offers enough granular detail about hunting and farming to avoid familiar pieties about the Last Frontier. The book's tone throughout has a lovely push and pull—Alaska's punishing landscape and rough-hewn residents pitted against Faina's charmed appearances—and the ending is both surprising and earned. A fine first novel that enlivens familiar themes of parenthood and battles against nature.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. When Mabel first arrives in Alaska, it seems a bleak and lonely place to her. Does her sense of the land change over time? If so, how?

2. Why are Jack and Mabel emotionally estranged from each other in the beginning of the novel, and how are they able to overcome that?

3. How do Esther Benson and Mabel differ in temperament, and how does their friendship change Mabel?

4. The first time Garrett sees Faina in person is when he spies her killing a wild swan. What is the significance of this scene?

5. In what ways does Faina represent the Alaska wilderness?

6. Jack and Mabel?s only child is stillborn. How does this affect Mabel?s relationship with Faina?

7. When Jack is injured, Esther and Garret move to their farm to help them. How does this alter Jack and Mabel?s relationship?

8. Much of Jack and Mabel?s sorrow comes from not having a family of their own, and yet they leave their extended family behind to move to Alaska. By the end of the novel, has their sense of family changed? Who would they consider a part of their family?

9. Death comes in many forms in The Snow Child, including Mabel giving birth to a stillborn infant, Jack shooting a moose, Faina slaying a swan, the fox killing a wild bird, Jack and Mabel slaughtering their chickens, and Garrett shooting the fox. Why is this one of the themes of the book and what is the author trying to say about death?

10. What do you believe happened to Faina in the end? Who was she?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Snow Falling on Cedars
David Gutersonn, 1994
Knopf Doubleday
460 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679764021

Summary
Winner of the 1995 Pen/Faulkner Award

In 1954 a fisherman from San Piedro Island in Puget Sound is found suspiciously drowned, and a Japanese-American is charged with his murder. The trial is haunted by memories of what happened to the Japanese residents during World War II when the entire community was sent into exile.

Snow Falling on Cedars is a beautifully crafted courtroom drama, love story, and war novel, illuminating the psychology of a community, the ambiguities of justice, the racism that persists even between neighbors, and the necessity of individual moral action despite the indifference of nature and circumstance. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 4, 1956
• Where—Seattle, Washington, USA
• Education—M.A., University of Washington
• Awards—Pen/Faulkner Award, 1995
• Currently—lives on Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound,
Washington

David Guterson is the author of a collection of short stories, The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind; Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense; Snow Falling on Cedars, which won the 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award, the Pacific Northwest Bookseller Association Award, and was an international bestseller; and the national bestseller East of the Mountains.

More
Like many great writers before him, David Guterson draws on the rich local culture of the Pacific Northwest for inspiration in creating unforgettable characters and settings. Guterson credits many influences on his writing, beginning with his father, Murray Guterson, a distinguished criminal defense lawyer: His father's example taught him first and foremost to choose a career he would love, which also meant making positive contributions to the world.

Guterson was intrigued by the narrative of his father's cases. He often sat in on trials, but never felt the urge to become an attorney. When he started college, after one week in a creative writing class, he decided to become a writer. He eventually studied under Charles Johnson (author of Middle Passage), developing his ideas about the moral function of literature and concluded that it is the obligation of writers to present moral questions for reflection.

As Guterson honed his skills as a writer, he sought a variety of jobs that would afford him the time to practice his craft. He narrowed it down to firefighter or English teacher, and chose to become a teacher, mainly because he wanted to surround himself with books and writers on a daily basis. He moved to Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound, teaching English at the local high school and freelancing as a journalist for Sports Illustrated and Harper's magazine.

During his years as an English teacher, Guterson discovered another one of his life's great influences. Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird became his favorite book, using the structure as a basis for Snow Falling on Cedars and asking many of the same moral questions. He says of Harper Lee's only book, "No other book had such an enormous impact. I read it 20 times in 10 years and it never got old, only richer, deeper and more interesting."

Guterson's first published works were short stories, mostly about young men poised on the edge of manhood, set in the Pacific Northwest. The stories were eventually published under the title The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind in 1989.

Finally, after ten years of researching and writing, Guterson's first novel was released in1995. Snow Falling on Cedars is the story of a tranquil town of fishermen and strawberry farmers, captivated by the murder a local man and the resulting trial of his lifelong friend. But the novel is more than a historical novel about the internment of Japanese-Americans or an inter-racial love story. Ultimately, the narrative seeks to ask the most basic of questions. That is, in a universe so indifferent to our fate, what is the best way to endure? Readers and critics responded, and the novel won a string of awards, including a Barnes and Noble's Discover Great New Writers distinction and the 1995 Pen/Faulkner award.

Guterson's sophomore release in 1998 may have had some large shoes to fill, but the beautifully written East of the Mountains treated readers to a story of rebirth, set in the lush apple orchards of the Pacific Northwest. The novel details the final journey of a dying man's determination to end his life on his own terms, and contains Guterson's signature style of lustrous, emotional prose.

Fans of Guterson had to wait five more years for the 2003 release of Our Lady of the Forest, but readers and critics agree it was worth the wait. Guterson allows his characters to be all-to-human in this story of a young runaway who develops a following of believers after she reports seeing the Virgin Mary in the forest. His characters lust, fail and do the wrong thing, and even the landscape is imperfect in this suspenseful tale of what happens when one's faith is called into question. Classic Guterson.

Extras
• When he won the 1995 Pen/Faulkner award for Snow Falling on Cedars, Guterson quickly recognized the reclusive Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird for his success. He wrote to Lee asking her to come to the award ceremony in Washington, D.C., but being a highly private woman, she didn't attend.

• Snow Falling on Cedars was adapted for a 1999 film of the same title, directed by Scott Hicks and starring Ethan Hawke. The movie received an Academy Award nomination for cinematography. (From Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
Though the courtroom setting defines the present in Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson's finely wrought and flawlessly written first novel (he is the author of a book of short stories and a guide to home schooling), this meticulously drawn legal drama forms only the topmost layer of complex time strata, which Mr. Guterson proceeds to mine assiduously through an intricate series of flashbacks. Thus testimony slides ineluctably from merely verbal recollection into remembered incident into fully realized historical narrative—past events told from the numerous characters' points of view with all the detail and intensity of lives being lived before our very eyes.
Susan Kenney - The New York Times

Luminous... a beautifully assured and full-bodied novel [that] becomes a tender examination of fairness and forgiveness... Guterson has fashioned something haunting and true.
Time

Japanese American Kabuo Miyomoto is arrested in 1954 for the murder of a fellow fisherman, Carl Heine. Miyomoto's trial, which provides a focal point to the novel, stirs memories of past relationships and events in the minds and hearts of the San Piedro Islanders. Through these memories, Guterson illuminates the grief of loss, the sting of prejudice triggered by World War II, and the imperatives of conscience. With mesmerizing clarity he conveys the voices of Kabuo's wife, Hatsue, and Ishmael Chambers, Hatsue's first love who, having suffered the loss of her love and the ravages of war, ages into a cynical journalist now covering Kabuo's trial. The novel poetically evokes the beauty of the land while revealing the harshness of war, the nuances of our legal system, and the injustice done to those interned in U.S. relocation camps. Highly recommended for all fiction collections. —Sheila Riley, Smith- sonian Inst. Libs., Washington, D.C.
Library Journal

A 1954 murder trial in an island community off the coast of Washington state broadens into an exploration of war, race, and the mysteries of human motivation.... Guterson's first novel is compellingly suspenseful on each of its several levels. —Dennis Dodge
Booklist

Old passions, prejudices, and grudges surface in a Washington State island town when a Japanese man stands trial for the murder of a fisherman in the 1950s. Guterson (The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind, 1989, etc.) has written a thoughtful, poetic first novel, a cleverly constructed courtroom drama with detailed, compelling characters. Many years earlier, Kabuo Miyamoto's family had made all but the last payment on seven acres of land they were in the process of buying from the Heine family. Then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and Kabuo's family was interned. Etta Heine, Carl's mother, called off the deal. Kabuo served in the war, returned, and wanted his land back. After changing hands a few times, the land ended up with Carl Heine. When Carl, a fisherman, is found drowned in his own net, all the circumstantial evidence, with the land dispute as a possible motive, points to Kabuo as the murderer. Meanwhile, Hatsue Miyamoto, Kabuo's wife, is the undying passion of Ishmael Chambers, the publisher and editor of the town newspaper. Ishmael, who returned from the war minus an arm, can't shake his obsession for Hatsue any more than he can ignore the ghost pains in his nonexistent arm. As a thick snowstorm whirls outside the courtroom, the story is unburied. The same incidents are recounted a number of times, with each telling revealing new facts. In the end, justice and morality are proven to be intimately woven with beauty—the kind of awe and wonder that children feel for the world. But Guterson communicates these truths through detail, not philosophical argument: Readers will come away with a surprising store of knowledge regarding gill-netting boats and other specifics of life in the Pacific Northwest. Packed with lovely moments and as compact as haiku—at the same time, a page-turner full of twists.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Snow Falling on Cedars opens in the middle of Kabuo Miyamoto's trial. It will be pages before we learn the crime of which he has been accused or the nature of the evidence against him. What effect does the author create by withholding this information and introducing it in the form of flashbacks? Where else in the narrative are critical revelations postponed? How is this novel's past related to its fictional present?

2. The trial functions both as this novel's narrative frame and as its governing metaphor. As we follow it, we are compelled to ask larger questions about the nature of truth, guilt, and responsibility. How does the author interweave these two functions? Which characters are aware that what is at stake is more than one man's guilt?

3. When the trial begins, San Piedro is in the midst of a snowstorm, which continues throughout its course. What role does snow play—both literally and metaphorically—in the book? Pay particular attention to the way in which snow blurs, freezes, isolates, and immobilizes, even as it holds out the promise of an "impossible winter purity" [p. 8]. How does nature shape this novel?

4. Guterson divides his island setting into four zones: the town of Amity Harbor; the sea; the strawberry fields; and the cedar forest. What actions take place in these different zones? Which characters are associated with them? How does the author establish a different mood for each setting?

5. In his first description of Carl Heine [pp. 14-16], Guterson imparts a fair amount of what is seemingly background information: We learn about his mother's sale of the family strawberry farm; about Carl's naval service in World War II; and about his reticence. We learn that Carl is considered "a good man." How do these facts become crucial later on, as mechanisms of plot, as revelations of the dead man's character, and as clues to San Piedro's collective mores? Where else does the author impart critical information in a casual manner, often "camouflaging" it amid material that will turn out to have no further significance? What does this method suggest about the novel's sense of the meaningful—about the value it assigns to things that might be considered random or irrelevant?

6. When Carl's body is dredged from the water, the sheriff has to remind himself that what he is seeing is a human being. While performing the autopsy, however, Horace Whaley forces himself to think of Carl as "the deceased... a bag of guts, a sack of parts" [p. 54]. Where else in Snow Falling on Cedars are people depersonalized—detached from their identities—either deliberately or inadvertently? What role does depersonalization play within the novel's larger scheme?

7. What material evidence does the prosecution produce in arguing Kabuo's guilt? Did these bits of information immediately provoke the investigators' suspicions, or only reinforce their preexisting misgivings about Carl's death? Why might they have been so quick to attribute Carl's death to foul play? How does the entire notion of a murder trial—in which facts are interpreted differently by opposing attorneys—fit into this book's thematic structure?

8. Ishmael suffers from feelings of ambivalence about his home and a cold-blooded detachment from his neighbors. Are we meant to attribute these to the loss of his arm or to other events in his past? How is Ishmael's sense of estrangement mirrored in Hatsue, who as a teenager rebels against her mother's values and at one point declares, "I don't want to be Japanese" [p. 201]? To what extent do Kabuo and Carl suffer from similar feelings? How does this condition of transcendental homelessness serve both to unite and to isolate the novel's characters?

9. What significance do you ascribe to Ishmael's name? What does Guterson's protagonist have in common with the narrator of Moby-Dick, another story of the sea?

10. What role has the San Piedro Review played in the life and times of its community? How has Ishmael's stewardship of the paper differed from his father's? In what ways does he resemble his father—of whom his widow says, "He loved humankind dearly and with all his heart, but he disliked most human beings" [p. 36]? What actions of Ishmael's may be said to parallel the older man's?

11. Ishmael's experience in World War II has cost him an arm. In that same war Horace Whaley, the county coroner, lost his sense of effectiveness, when so many of the men he was supposed to care for died. How has the war affected other characters in this book, both those who served and those who stayed home?

12. Guterson tells us that "on San Piedro the silent-toiling, autonomous gill-netter became the collective image of the good man" [p. 38]. Thus, Carl's death comes to signify the death of the island's ideal citizen: he represents a delayed casualty of the war in which so many other fine young men were killed. Yet how productive does the ideal of silent individualism turn out to be? To what extent is Carl a casualty of his self-sufficiency? What other characters in this novel adhere to a code of solitude?

13. Kabuo and Hatsue also possess—and are at times driven by—certain values. As a young girl, Hatsue is taught the importance of cultivating stillness and composure in order "to seek union with the Greater Life" [p. 83]. Kabuo's father imparts to him the martial codes of his ancestors. How do these values determine their behavior, and particularly their responses to internment, war, and imprisonment? How do they clash with the values of the Anglo community, even as they sometimes resemble them?

14. Racism is a persistent theme in this novel. It is responsible for the internment of Kabuo, Hatsue, and their families, for Kabuo's loss of his land, and perhaps for his indictment for murder. In what ways do the book's Japanese characters respond to the hostility of their white neighbors? How does bigotry manifest itself in the thoughts and behavior of characters like Etta Heine—whose racism is keenly ironic in view of her German origins—Art Moran, and Ishmael himself? Are we meant to see these characters as typical of their place and time?

15. Although almost all the novel's white characters are guilty of racism, only one of them—Etta Heine—emerges unsympathetically. How do her values and motives differ from those of other San Piedrans? How is her hostility to the Japanese related to her distaste for farming? To what extent are Guterson's characters defined by their feelings for their natural environment?

16. Ishmael's adolescent romance with Hatsue has been the defining fact of his life, its loss even more wounding than the loss of his arm. Yet when Hatsue first remembers Ishmael, it is only as a "boy" [p. 86] and her recollection of their first kiss is immediately supplanted by the memory of her wedding night with Kabuo. How else does Guterson contrast Hatsue's feelings for these two men? (Note that Hatsue's feelings for both Ishmael and her husband become clear in the course of making love.) What does the disparity between Hatsue's memories and Ishmael's suggest about the nature of love? Where else in this novel do different characters perceive the same events in radically different ways—and with what consequences?

17. In choosing Kabuo, Hatsue acknowledges "the truth of her private nature" [p. 89]. That choice implies a paradox. For, if Kabuo is a fellow nisei, he is also rooted in the American earth of San Piedro's strawberry fields. How is this doubleness—between Japanese and American—expressed elsewhere in Snow Falling on Cedars?

18. Ishmael's attraction to Hatsue is closely connected to a yearning for transcendence, as indicated by their early conversation about the ocean. Ishmael says, "It goes forever, " while Hatsue insists, "It ends somewhere" [p. 97]. Typically, it is Ishmael who wishes to dissolve boundaries, Hatsue who keeps reasserting them, as when she gently withholds the embrace that Ishmael so desperately wants. What limits might Ishmael wish to transcend, even as a boy? Does he ever manage to do so? Does Snow Falling on Cedars hold the promise of transcendence for its characters or at best offer them a reconciliation with their limits?

19. One way that Guterson interweaves his novel's multiple narrative strands is through the use of parallelism: Ishmael spies on Hatsue; so does Kabuo. The two men are similarly haunted by memories of the war. Both Kabuo and Carl Heine turn out to be dissatisfied fishermen who yearn to return to farming. Where else in this novel does the author employ this method, and to what effect?

20. What is the significance of the novel's last sentence: "Accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart"?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
Lisa See, 2005
Random House
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812980356

Summary
Lily is haunted by memories-of who she once was, and of a person, long gone, who defined her existence. She has nothing but time now, as she recounts the tale of Snow Flower, and asks the gods for forgiveness.

In nineteenth-century China, when wives and daughters were foot-bound and lived in almost total seclusion, the women in one remote Hunan county developed their own secret code for communication: nu shu ("women's writing").

Some girls were paired with laotongs, "old sames," in emotional matches that lasted throughout their lives. They painted letters on fans, embroidered messages on handkerchiefs, and composed stories, thereby reaching out of their isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments.

With the arrival of a silk fan on which Snow Flower has composed for Lily a poem of introduction in nu shu, their friendship is sealed and they become "old sames" at the tender age of seven. As the years pass, through famine and rebellion, they reflect upon their arranged marriages, loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. The two find solace, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive.

But when a misunderstanding arises, their lifelong friendship suddenly threatens to tear apart.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a brilliantly realistic journey back to an era of Chinese history that is as deeply moving as it is sorrowful. With the period detail and deep resonance of Memoirs of a Geisha, this lyrical and emotionally charged novel delves into one of the most mysterious of human relationships: female friendship. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—February 18, 1955
• Where—Paris, France
• Education—B.A., Loyola Marymount University
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California

Lisa See is an American writer and novelist. Her Chinese-American family (See has one Chinese great-grandparent) has had a great impact on her life and work. Her books include On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family (1995) and the novels Flower Net (1997), The Interior (1999), Dragon Bones (2003), Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005), Peony in Love (2007), Shanghai Girls (2009), which made it to the 2010 New York Times bestseller list, and China Dolls (2014).

Flower Net, The Interior, and Dragon Bones make up the Red Princess mystery series. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and Peony in Love focus on the lives of Chinese women in the 19th and 17th centuries respectively. Shanghai Girls chronicles the lives of two sisters who come to Los Angeles in arranged marriages and face, among other things, the pressures put on Chinese-Americans during the anti-Communist mania of the 1950s. See published a sequel titled Dreams of Joy.

Writing under the pen name Monica Highland, See, her mother Carolyn See, and John Espey, published three novels: Lotus Land (1983), 110 Shanghai Road (1986), and Greetings from Southern California (1988).

Biography
Lisa See was born in Paris but has spent many years in Los Angeles, especially Los Angeles Chinatown. Her mother, Carolyn See, is also a writer and novelist. Her autobiography provides insight into her daughter's life. Lisa See graduated with a B.A. from Loyola Marymount University in 1979.

See was West Coast correspondent for Publishers Weekly (1983–1996); has written articles for Vogue, Self, and More; has written the libretto for the opera based on On Gold Mountain, and has helped develop the Family Discovery Gallery for the Autry Museum, which depicts 1930s Los Angeles from the perspective of her father as a seven-year-old boy. Her exhibition On Gold Mountain: A Chinese American Experience was featured in the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, and the Smithsonian. See is also a public speaker.

She has written for and led in many cultural events emphasizing the importance of Los Angeles and Chinatown. Among her awards and recognitions are the Organization of Chinese Americans Women's 2001 award as National Woman of the Year and the 2003 History Makers Award presented by the Chinese American Museum. See has served as a Los Angeles City Commissioner. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/21/2014.)

Book Reviews
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is written with a stately but unremarkable prettiness; it is not a book that will make its mark for reasons of style. But Ms. See has worked enough joy, pain and dramatic weepiness ("Oh, how I wanted to dip a cloth into that water and wipe away the cares that played across my laotong's features") to give it a quiet staying power. It's liable to be read by women's groups and valued for its quaintness. ("All people cherish the hair on their moles, but Uncle Lu's were splendid.") But what will work best for this book is its own secret message: cultures vary, but old sames and same-olds don't change.
Janet Maslin - The New York Times

The wonder of this book is that it takes readers to a place at once foreign and familiar—foreign because of its time and setting, yet familiar because this landscape of love and sorrow is inhabited by us all. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a triumph on every level, a beautiful, heartbreaking story.
Judy Fong Bates - The Washington Post

See's engrossing novel set in remote 19th-century China details the deeply affecting story of lifelong, intimate friends (laotong, or "old sames") Lily and Snow Flower, their imprisonment by rigid codes of conduct for women and their betrayal by pride and love. While granting immediacy to Lily's voice, See (Flower Net) adroitly transmits historical background in graceful prose. Her in-depth research into women's ceremonies and duties in China's rural interior brings fascinating revelations about arranged marriages, women's inferior status in both their natal and married homes, and the Confucian proverbs and myriad superstitions that informed daily life. Beginning with a detailed and heartbreaking description of Lily and her sisters' foot binding ("Only through pain will you have beauty. Only through suffering will you have peace"), the story widens to a vivid portrait of family and village life. Most impressive is See's incorporation of nu shu, a secret written phonetic code among women—here between Lily and Snow Flower—that dates back 1,000 years in the southwestern Hunan province ("My writing is soaked with the tears of my heart,/ An invisible rebellion that no man can see"). As both a suspenseful and poignant story and an absorbing historical chronicle, this novel has bestseller potential and should become a reading group favorite as well.
Publishers Weekly

Foot binding; nu shu, a secret language used exclusively by the women of Hunan Province for 1000 years; and laotong, the arranged friendship between little girls meant to last a lifetime, provide the framework for See's (Dragon Bones) riveting look at a little-known chapter in 19th-century Chinese history. In 1903, 80-year-old Lily looks back on her life, which was anchored by her laotong relationship with the beautiful Snow Flower. As little girls, the two communicated in nu shu, writing of their mutual devotion on a fan they passed between each other over the years. Raised according to the traditional restrictions of the times, they lived most of their lives confined to the upstairs women's chamber in their homes, enduring the relentless societal insistence that women are worthless except for their value in producing sons. The laotong bonds of Lily and Snow Flower endure through family tragedies, a typhoid-fever epidemic, and the Taiping Rebellion of 1851-64, but it is a misunderstood message in nu shu, the language that held them together for decades, that ultimately tears them apart. See's meticulous research and exquisite language deliver a story that is haunting, powerful, and, at times, almost too painful to bear. Highly recommended. —Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
Library Journal

A nuanced exploration of women's friendship and women's writing in a remote corner of Imperial China. At the end of her life, Lady Lily Lu, the 80-year-old matriarch of Tongkou village, sits down to write her final memoir-one that will be burned at her death. Using nu shu, a secret script designed and kept by women, Lily spends her final years recounting her training as a woman, her longing for love and the central friendship of her life. Born, in 1823, into an ordinary farming family, Lily might not have ended up as a wealthy matriarch. Her earliest memories are of running through the fields outside with her cousin Beautiful Moon in the last days before her foot-binding. But in childhood, Lily's middle-class fate changed dramatically when the local diviner suggested that her well-formed feet made her eligible for a high-status marriage and for a special ceremonial friendship with a laotong (sworn bosom friend). Accordingly, Lily became laotong with Snow Flower, a charming girl from an upper-class household. Together, the two begin a friendship and intimate nu shu correspondence that develops with them through years of house training, marriages, childbirths and changes in social status. See (Dragon Bones, 2003, etc.) is fascinated by imagining how women with constrained existences might have found solace-and poetry-within the unexpected, little known writing form that is nu shu. Occasionally, in the midst of notes about childbirth and marriages, Lily and Snow Flower wonder how to understand the value of their secret writing in relation to the men's "outside world." The question is left delicately open. As the Taiping Rebellion (1851-64) approaches the villages around them, threatening to disrupt the social order, Lily and Snow Flower's private intimacy changes, stretches and is strained. Taut and vibrant, the story offers a delicately painted view of a sequestered world and provides a richly textured account of how women might understand their own lives. A keenly imagined journey into the women's quarters.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Lily endures excruciating pain in order to have her feet bound. What reasons are given for this dangerous practice?

2. Did See's descriptions of footbinding remind you of any Western traditions?

3. If some men in 19th-century China knew about nu shu and “old same” friendships, why do you think they allowed these traditions to persist?

4. Reflecting on her first few decades, Lily seems to think her friendship with Snow Flower brought her more good than harm. Do you agree?

5. Lily's adherence to social customs can seem controversial to us today. Pick a scene where you would have acted differently. Why?

6. Lily defies the wishes of her son in order to pair her grandson with Peony. Does she fully justify her behavior?

7. Lily sometimes pulls us out of the present moment to reflect—as an old woman—on her youthful decisions. What does this device add to the story?

8. How would you film these moments of reflection?

9. If Lily is writing her story to Snow Flower in the afterworld, what do you think Snow Flower's response would or should be?

10. Did you recognize any aspects of your own friendships in the bond between Lily and Snow Flower?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Snow Queen
Michael Cunningham, 2014
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374266325

Summary
A darkly luminous new novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours.

Michael Cunningham’s luminous novel begins with a vision. It’s November 2004. Barrett Meeks, having lost love yet again, is walking through Central Park when he is inspired to look up at the sky; there he sees a pale, translucent light that seems to regard him in a distinctly godlike way. Barrett doesn’t believe in visions—or in God—but he can’t deny what he’s seen.

At the same time, in the not-quite-gentrified Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, Tyler, Barrett’s older brother, a struggling musician, is trying—and failing—to write a wedding song for Beth, his wife-to-be, who is seriously ill. Tyler is determined to write a song that will be not merely a sentimental ballad but an enduring expression of love.

Barrett, haunted by the light, turns unexpectedly to religion. Tyler grows increasingly convinced that only drugs can release his creative powers. Beth tries to face mortality with as much courage as she can summon.

Cunningham follows the Meeks brothers as each travels down a different path in his search for transcendence. In subtle, lucid prose, he demonstrates a profound empathy for his conflicted characters and a singular understanding of what lies at the core of the human soul.

The Snow Queen, beautiful and heartbreaking, comic and tragic, proves again that Cunningham is one of the great novelists of his generation. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—November 06, 1952
• Where—Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
• Education—B.A., Stanford; M.F.A., University of Iowa
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize; PEN/Faulkner Award; Whiting Writers Award
• Currently—lives in New York City

Michael Cunningham's novel A Home at the End of the World was published to acclaim in 1990; an excerpt, entitled "White Angel" and published in The New Yorker, was chosen for Best American Short Stories 1989. His novel Flesh and Blood was published in 1995, and that year he won a Whiting Writer's Award. The Hours, Cunningham's third novel, received the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award. (From the publisher.)

More
By the time he finished Virginia Woolf's classic Mrs. Dalloway at the age of fifteen to impress a crush who tauntingly suggested he "try and be less stupid" and do so, Michael Cunningham knew that he was destined to become a writer. While his debut novel wouldn't come until decades later, he would win the Pulitzer for Fiction with his third — fittingly, an homage to the very book that launched both his love of literature and his life's work.

After growing up Cincinnati, Ohio, Cunningham fled to the west coast to study literature at Stanford University, but later returned to the heartland, where he received his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1980. A writer recognized early on for his promising talent, Cunningham was awarded several grants toward his work, including a Michener Fellowship from the University of Iowa in 1982, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1988.

In 1984, Cunningham's debut novel, Golden States, was published. While generally well-received by the critics, the book — a narrative chronicling a few weeks in the life of a 12-year-old-boy — is often dismissed by Cunningham. In an interview with Other Voices, he explains: "I'm so much more interested in some kind of grand ambitious failure than I am in someone's modest little success that achieves its modest little aims. I felt that I had written a book like that, and I wasn't happy about it. My publisher very generously allowed me to turn down a paperback offer and it has really gone away."

With a new decade came Cunningham's stirring novel, A Home at the End of the World, in 1990. The story of a heartbreakingly lopsided love triangle between two gay men and their mutual female friend, the novel was a groundbreaking take on the ‘90s phenomenon of the nontraditional family. While not exactly released with fanfare, the work drew impressive reviews that instantly recognized Cunningham's gift for using language to define his characters' voices and outline their motives. David Kaufman of The Nation noted Cunningham's "exquisite way with words and...his uncanny felicity in conveying both his characters and their story," and remarked that "this is quite simply one of those rare novel imbued with graceful insights on every page."

The critical acclaim of A Home at the End of the World no doubt helped Cunningham win the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993 — and two years later, his domestic epic Flesh and Blood was released. Chronicling the dysfunctional Stassos family from their suburban present back through to the parents' roots and looking toward the children's uncertain futures, the sprawling saga was praised for its complexity and heart. The New York Times Book Review noted that "Mr. Cunningham gets all the little things right.... Mr. Cunningham gets the big stuff right, too. For the heart of the story lies not in the nostalgic references but in the complex relationships between parents and children, between siblings, friends and lovers."

While the new decade ushered in his impressive debut, the close of the decade brought with it Cunningham's inarguable opus, The Hours (1998). A tribute to that seminal work that was the author's first inspiration — Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway — the book reworks the events and ideas of the classic and sets them alternately in 1980s Greenwich Village, 1940s Los Angeles, and Woolf's London. Of Cunningham's ambitious project, USA Today raved, "The Hours is that rare combination: a smashing literary tour-de-force and an utterly invigorating reading experience. If this book does not make you jump up from the sofa, looking at life and literature in new ways, check to see if you have a pulse." The Hours won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and was adapted into a major motion picture starring the powerhouse trio of Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman in December 2002.

To come down from the frenetic success of The Hours, Cunningham took on a quieter project, 2002's tribute/travelogue Land's End: A Walk Through Provincetown. The first installment in Crown's new "Crown Journeys" series, the book is a loving tour through the eccentric little town at the tip of Cape Cod beloved by so many artists and authors, Cunningham included. A haven for literary legends from Eugene O'Neill to Norman Mailer, Cunningham is — rightfully — at home there.

Extras
• Cunningham's short story "White Angel" was chosen for Best American Short Stories 1989 — the year before his acclaimed novel A Home at the End of the World was published.

• When asked about any other names he goes by, Cunningham's list included the monikers Bree Daniels, Mickey Fingers, Jethro, Old Yeller, Gaucho, Cowboy Ed, Tim-Bob, Mister Lies, Erin The Red, Miss Kitty, and Squeegee. ("More" and "Extras" from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
At its best, the novel is Cunningham in his sweet spot, compassionate, emotionally exhilarating, devilishly fun.... Many things happen in this book, yet its prose is unhurried and sensuous. The Snow Queen takes hold of you in a manner that feels almost primal, the way a fragrance wafts into a room and changes your mood, before you even realize it.
Mario Russo - New York Times Book Review

For pure, elegant, efficient beauty, Cunningham is astounding. He’s developed this captivating narrative voice.... Half Henry James, half James Joyce, but all Cunningham, it’s an irresistible performance.
Ron Charles -Washington Post

Two brothers grapple with aging, loss, and spirituality in this haunting...novel.... As ever, Cunningham has a way with run-on sentences, and the novel’s lengthy monologues run the gamut from mortality to post-2000 New York City. But at its heart, Cunningham’s story is about family, and how we reconcile our closest human relationships with our innermost thoughts, hopes, and fears.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) [T]his new book by Cunningham explores the interconnected lives...awaiting deliverance from their own personal dystopia, a dilapidated Bushwick, Brooklyn, apartment.... Cunningham weaves the secret of transcendence through the mundane occurrences of everyday life. Those who enjoyed his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hours will be pleased to see similar themes emerging in his newest novel. —Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH
Library Journal

(Starred review.) Cunningham’s elegant and haunting new novel examines the complex dynamics among a couple and a brother.... Tender, funny, and sorrowful, Cunningham’s beautiful novel is as radiant and shimmering as Barrett’s mysterious light in the sky, gently illuminating the gossamer web of memories, feelings, and hopes that mysteriously connect us to each other as the planet spins its way round and round the sun. —Donna Seaman
Booklist

An apparition spotted in Central Park has a man marveling at the place of magic in our lives. Or is it all just a trick of the light?... [T]he novel [is] somewhat slight, particularly in comparison to his debut and The Hours (1998).... A drama...energizes the closing pages but feels distant from the book's central concerns. A stellar writer working on a small canvas; Cunningham has done greater work.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the novel’s title. Did your understanding of it shift throughout the book? How do the characters experience the Snow Queen’s “Mirror of Reason,” described in the epigraph by Hans Christian Andersen?

2. When we first meet Barrett, what are his impressions of his destiny? What shapes his understanding of fate and love as the novel unfolds?

3. What are your interpretations of The Snow Queen’s celestial lights? What is Barrett seeking while he watches the priest and parishioners in the Armenian church? What does he find?

4. How does Beth’s illness inspire those around her? What is her role within her circle of loved ones?

5. How were Tyler and Barrett affected by their mother’s sudden death and their father’s decision to remarry soon after? As brothers, how do they protect and provoke each other? What are the similarities and differences in their approaches to life?

6. What does the novel reveal about the many facets of addiction? How does Tyler respond to the various ways people react to his drug habit (including those who want to exploit it to support their own addiction)?

7. Which aspects of the story resonated with your own experience of love in all its forms, including kinship and the bonds of longtime friends?

8. Throughout her life, from defending her fragile sister to becoming an entrepreneur, Liz has put herself in positions of power. What accounts for her strength?

9. How were you affected by the scene aboard the Staten Island ferry? What transitions occur in the characters’ lives after that journey?

10. How has Barrett’s sense of self evolved by the time he meets Sam? Does Tyler experience a similar change in the way he approaches desire and fulfillment?

11. Discuss Andrew and Stella’s final scene. Are they capable survivors, or are they deeply vulnerable?

12. What makes the political climate of 2004–2008 an appropriate backdrop for the fears and longings of the characters? How does it echo the transformations

13. How does The Snow Queen enhance the humanity explored in Michael Cunningham’s previous novels?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man
Luke Harding, 2014
Knopf Doubleday
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780804173520

Summary
It began with a tantalizing, anonymous email: "I am a senior member of the intelligence community."

What followed was the most spectacular intelligence breach ever, brought about by one extraordinary man. Edward Snowden was a 29-year-old computer genius working for the National Security Agency when he shocked the world by exposing the near-universal mass surveillance programs of the United States government.

His whistleblowing has shaken the leaders of nations worldwide, and generated a passionate public debate on the dangers of global monitoring and the threat to individual privacy.

In a tour de force of investigative journalism that reads like a spy novel, award-winning Guardian reporter Luke Harding tells Snowden’s astonishing story—from the day he left his glamorous girlfriend in Honolulu carrying a hard drive full of secrets, to the weeks of his secret-spilling in Hong Kong, to his battle for asylum and his exile in Moscow. For the first time, Harding brings together the many sources and strands of the story—touching on everything from concerns about domestic spying to the complicity of the tech sector—while also placing us in the room with Edward Snowden himself.

The result is a gripping insider narrative—and a necessary and timely account of what is at stake for all of us in the new digital age. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1968
• Where—Great Britain
• Education—Oxford University
• Currently—lives in London, England

Luke Harding is an award-winning British foreign correspondent with the Guardian. He studied English at University College, Oxford. While there he edited the student newspaper Cherwell. He worked for the Sunday Correspondent, Evening Argus in Brighton and Daily Mail before joining the Guardian in 1996.

He has reported from Delhi, Berlin and Moscow and has also covered wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is the author of Mafia State (2011) and co-author of WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy (2011). He also wrote The Liar: The Fall of Jonathan Aitken (1997, nominated for the Orwell Prize) and The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man (2014). The film rights to WikiLeaks were sold to Dreamworks and the film, The Fifth Estate, came out in 2013.

Harding has lived in and reported from Delhi, Berlin and Moscow and has covered wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. He currently lives in London, England, with his wife and their two children

Russian expulsion
His 2011 book Mafia State discusses Harding's experience in Russia and the political system under Vladimir Putin, which he describes as a mafia state. In February 2011 he was refused re-entry into Russia, becoming the first foreign journalist to be expelled from Russia since the end of the Cold War. The Guardian said his expulsion was linked with his unflattering coverage of Russia, including speculation about Vladimir Putin's wealth and Putin's knowledge of the London assassination of ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko.

The director of Index on Censorship, John Kampfner, said "The Russian government's treatment of Luke Harding is petty and vindictive, and evidence—if more was needed—of the poor state of free expression in that country." Harding has said that during his time in Russia he was the subject of largely psychological harassment by the Federal Security Service, whom he alleges were unhappy at the stories he wrote.

Edward Snowden
Harding's 2014 book on Edward Snowden, The Snowden Files received positive reviews from the the Guardian and London Review of Books although a The Daily Telegraph review said, "complexity and nuance are banished. In particular, the real dilemmas of intelligence work are ignored." Michiko Kakutani wrote in her review for the New York Times that the book "reads like a le Carre novel crossed with something by Kafka."

The Snowden Files was initially criticised by Snowden associate, journalist Glenn Greenwald,* when he had only read extracts from Harding's book. Later, after reading the whole book, he conceded that it did not trash Snowden. Nontheless, on February 14, 2014 Greenwald told the Financial Times:

They are purporting to tell the inside story of Edward Snowden but it is written by someone who has never met or even spoken to Edward Snowden. Luke came here and talked to me for half a day without [my] realising that he was trying to get me to write his book for him. I cut the interview off when I realised what he was up to.

The Financial Times has since amended the article stating: "Harding insists that when he spoke to Greenwald in Rio, he made it very clear he was doing research for his book on Snowden." (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/6/2014.)

* Greenwald's own book—No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State—was also published in 2014.

Book Reviews
Reads like a le Carre novel crossed with something by Kafka.... A fast-paced, almost novelistic narrative.... [The book] gives readers...a succinct overview of the momentous events of the past year.... Leave[s] readers with an acute understanding of the serious issues involved.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

[Snowden’s] story is one of the most compelling in the history of American espionage. . . . Although the book is billed as “the inside story of the world’s most wanted man,” there is no indication that Harding had direct contact with his subject. Instead, it reads more like the inside account of Snowden’s interactions with the Guardian. The details drawn from those encounters are fascinating, if not always illuminating.The book captures the drama of Snowden’s operation in often-cinematic detail. . . . Harding has delivered a clearly written and captivating account of the Snowden leaks and their aftermath.
Greg Miller - Washington Post

Engaging and lucid... A gripping read.... Harding is a gifted writer.... The strength of Harding's book is its ability to bring Snowden's story to life while elucidating the contours of a much larger set of issues.... In rendering the complicated comprehensible in an entertaining way, Harding's book provides an important public service.
San Francisco Chronicle

The Snowden Files, the first book on what British journalist Luke Harding calls ‘the biggest intelligence leak in history,’ is a readable and thorough account. The narrative is rich in newsroom details, reflecting Harding's inside access as a correspondent for the London-based Guardian newspaper, which broke the story.... The writer deserves unqualified praise for fueling the debate on privacy that Snowden so hoped to ignite.
Newsday

A super-readable, thrillerish account of the events surrounding the reporting of the documents. . . . Harding has done an amazing—and speedy—job of assembling material from a wide variety of sources and turning it into an exciting account.
London Review of Books

Recounts the incredible story of how Snowden becomes angry about the abuses he says he witnessed inside the system, resolves to pull off a stunning electronic heist by downloading the NSA’s and its partners’ most sensitive files, and gives them to journalists he has persuaded to meet him in Hong Kong. Harding captures nicely the moment when the Guardian pushes the button on its first Snowden story, an intense, adrenaline-filled cocktail of high-minded journalistic zeal and the sheer thrill of publishing sensitive information.”
Financial Times

The telling is sympathetic towards Snowden.... And while the story sometimes lacks in insight from those directly involved and in the analysis that will be possible as we get more temporal distance from the events, Harding provides crucial context and history for the story. His compilation and synthesis of the records is useful for a reader in need of a primer.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) A newsworthy, must-read book about what prompted Edward Snowden to blow the whistle on his former employer, the National Security Agency.... Harding closes with the thought that Snowden may have no other home for some time to come.... Whether you view Snowden's act as patriotic or treasonous, this fast-paced, densely detailed book is the narrative of first resort.
Kirkus Reviews

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

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

(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)

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Snowdrops
A.D. Miller, 2010
Knopf Doubleday
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307739476

Summary
Finalist, 2011 Man Booker Prize

An intense psychological drama that echoes sophisticated entertainments like Gorky Park and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Nick Platt is a British lawyer working in Moscow in the early 2000s—a place where the cascade of oil money, the tightening grip of the government, the jostling of the oligarchs, and the loosening of Soviet social mores have led to a culture where corruption, decadence, violence, and betrayal define everyday life. Nick doesn’t ask too many questions about the shady deals he works on—he’s too busy enjoying the exotic, surreally sinful nightlife Moscow has to offer.

One day in the subway, he rescues two willowy sisters, Masha and Katya, from a would-be purse snatcher. Soon Nick, the seductive Masha, and long-limbed Katya are cruising the seamy glamour spots of the city. Nick begins to feel something for Masha that he is pleased to think is love. Then the sisters ask Nick to help their aged aunt, Tatiana, find a new apartment.

Of course, nothing is as it seems—including this extraordinary debut novel. The twists in the story take it far beyond its noirish frame—the sordid and vivid portrayal of Moscow serves as a backdrop for a book that examines the irresistible allure of sin, featuring characters whose hearts are as cold as the Russian winter. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1974
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—Cambridge University; Princeton University
• Currently—lives in London, England

A.D. Miller studied literature at Cambridge and Princeton, where he began his journalistic career writing travel pieces about America. Returning to London, he worked as a television producer before joining The Economist to write about British politics and culture. In 2004 he became The Economist's correspondent in Moscow, travelling widely across Russia and the former Soviet Union. He is currently the magazine's Britain editor; he lives in London with his wife Emma, daughter Milly and son Jacob. (From .)

Book Reviews
Compelling... Makes you see and feel the glitz, squalor, and violence of Moscow.
Boston Globe

[An] assured fiction debut.... [Miller] memorably captures Moscow's atmosphere during the glitzy, anything-goes era that succeeded Soviet Communism.
Seattle Times

Elegant and compact.... A superlative portrait of a country in which everything has its price.
Financial Times (UK)

[A]n electrifying tour ...[that] assaults all your senses with its power and poetry, and leaves you stunned and addicted.
Independent (UK)

Like Graham Greene on steroids... Tightly written.... Miller’s complex, gripping debut novel is undoubtedly the real thing.
Daily Mail (UK)

A deeply atmospheric, slow-burning examination of the effects of modern Russia on the soul of foreign visitors...beautifully drawn and mirrored in several ingenious subplots.... Miller is absolutely wonderful at evoking the seediness and cynicism of Moscow
Independent on Sunday (UK)

Strips away the layers of life in the Russian capital with subtle, pitiless grace....Paced almost ideally, with an atmosphere that scintillates with beguiling menace.
Literary Review (UK)

Things may not be what they appear, but they turn out to be exactly what readers will predict in this saggy debut about shady business deals in go-go capitalist Russia. Nick Platt, a lawyer who has traded his dull British life for pushing paper in Moscow, soon takes up with a leggy young Russian about whom he knows nothing and, at her behest, helps a babushka trade her fabulous apartment for a half-built place in the country. The deal seems like a scam, and, of course, it is, but Nick is blinded by lust and nearly always a step behind the reader. He blithely gets involved in a multimillion-dollar loan for an oil pipeline brokered by a dodgy fellow known only as "the Cossack," even after a key player goes missing. Most readers will not be so easily duped, and Nick's oft-repeated I-should-have seen-it-comings undercut any suspense that might remain, though there are interesting bits to be found in the travelogue-style writing about the new Russia.
Publishers Weekly

A sense of foreboding pervades this quietly intense novel, set in a freewheeling Russia of the early 21st century. British narrator Nick Platt describes two intersecting experiences of corruption and duplicity. One is his naive involvement in a scheme to bankrupt an innocent babushka. Distracted by his love affair with one of the con artists, Nick does not allow himself to realize that he is being used for his lawyerly skills. The other con occurs when the bank he represents is lured into releasing $500 million for a seemingly legitimate oil project. It is obvious that bad things are going to happen on both fronts, and the story becomes strangely gripping as the final details are revealed. Verdict: Martin Cruz Smith's Three Stations meets J. Robert Lennon's enigmatic but similarly paced Castle in this new work. A lesson in the art of self-delusion and the dog-eat-dog society of post-Soviet Russia, it's sure to be an instant success. Essential for committed readers of fiction and a discussion feast for book clubs. —Henry Bankhead, Los Gatos P.L., CA
Library Journal

(Starred review.) Written as a man’s confession to the woman he’s going to marry, Miller’s masterful debut chronicles British lawyer Nicholas Platt’s dubious dealings in Moscow at the turn of the twenty-first century.... A mesmerizing tale of a man seduced by a culture he fancies himself above, Miller’s novel is both a nuanced character study and a fascinating look at the complexities of Russian society. —Kristine Huntley
Booklist

The unbridled mayhem of the 1990s has died down a bit, but Western companies are still pouring money into the hands of newly minted Russian conglomerates, and British lawyer Nicholas Platt is writing the contracts.... Miller, formerly a Moscow correspondent for Economist, vividly evokes the no-holds-barred atmosphere of the city in its early-capitalist stage, but it's seedy rather than alluring, and as Nicholas deliberately ignores glaring signs that he's being conned, readers may well find him stupid rather than tragically deluded.... Good local color, but nothing much to care about here.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Is Nick Platt, the narrator of Snowdrops, a good man who turns bad, a bad man to start with, or neither?

2. Towards the end of the book, Nick says that Masha “had a better excuse.” Do you think Snowdrops is at heart a story about corrupt Russians or corruptible westerners?

3. How far should Nick’s behaviour be explained by his circumstances and opportunities in Moscow, and how far by his own temperament and psychology?

4. At what point did Nick begin to question his own motives and sense of ethics?

5. When Nick visits Tatiana Vladimirovna’s apartment for the first time, he says that he “liked her immediately, and…liked her right ‘til the end.” Is that true? If so, why doesn’t it affect how he behaves?

6. Do Nick’s feelings for his fiancée change as he is recounting his tale? How does the relationship implied in the framing device interact with or reinforce his Moscow story?

7. There are several plots in Snowdrops: the main drama involving Tatiana Vladimirovna; the one featuring the Cossack and the floating oil terminal; and the story of Nick’s neighbour, Oleg Nikolaevich, and his missing friend. How do these plots relate to each other?

8. At the beginning of the story, Nick tries to be kind to Oleg Nikolaevich. By the end of it, he is less kind and spends much less time with him. Who suffers most as a result?

9. “I liked the Cossack,” Nick says after their first meeting: “Something about him was endearing...It might be better to say I envied him.” What does he mean by that?

10. At the heart of the novel is Nick’s trip to the dacha in the forest with Masha and Katya: “my happiest time,” he says; “the time I would always go back to if I could”. What does Nick learn at the dacha—about the women and about himself?

11. How much, if anything, of what Masha and Katya tell Nick about themselves do you think is true?

12. The exact years that Nick lives in Moscow aren’t specified in the book. But, thinking about the attitudes of the lawyers and bankers in the story, do you think Snowdrops is amongst other things a pre-credit crunch tale?

13. At the end of Snowdrops, Nick says that when he thinks about what happened to him during his last winter in Moscow, “there is guilt”. But then he qualifies that by saying “there is some guilt”. Is Nick really sorry for what he did during his last winter in Moscow? Does he understand how serious it was?

14. At one point Nick describes the winter as an “annual oblivion…like temporary amnesia for a bad conscience”. What role do snow and the weather play in Snowdrops?

15. A snowdrop, as Nick’s friend Steve explains to him, is a body that lies buried or hidden in the snow, emerging only in the thaw. What does the image of the snowdrop symbolise in Snowdrops?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Snowman
Jo Nesbo, 2011
Random House
512 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307742995

Summary
Internationally acclaimed crime writer Jo Nesbo’s antihero police investigator, Harry Hole, is back: in a bone-chilling thriller that will take Hole to the brink of insanity.

Oslo in November. The first snow of the season has fallen. A boy named Jonas wakes in the night to find his mother gone. Out his window, in the cold moonlight, he sees the snowman that inexplicably appeared in the yard earlier in the day. Around its neck is his mother’s pink scarf.

Hole suspects a link between a menacing letter he’s received and the disappearance of Jonas’s mother—and of perhaps a dozen other women, all of whom went missing on the day of a first snowfall. As his investigation deepens, something else emerges: he is becoming a pawn in an increasingly terrifying game whose rules are devised—and constantly revised—by the killer.

Fiercely suspenseful, its characters brilliantly realized, its atmosphere permeated with evil, The Snowman is the electrifying work of one of the best crime writers of our time. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—March 29, 1960
• Where—Oslo, Norway
• Education—Norwegian School of Economics
• Currently—lives in Oslo

Jo Nesbo is a Norwegian author, musician, and former business analyst, whose books have been translated into over 50 languages and sold 23 million copies.

Personal
Nesbo grew up in Molde. He played top-flight football (soccer) for Molde FK until he tore the cruciate ligaments in his knee at the age of 18. When he could no longer play sports, he signed up for military service, spending spent three years in Norway's far north. Later he applied to and was accepted at the Norwegian School of Economics.

Graduating with a degree in Economics and Business Administration, Nesbo worked as a stockbroker and then financial analyst. He also found time to form a rock band as main vocalist and songwriter. Although the band—Di Derre (Them There)—topped the Norwegian charts with its second album—and their concerts were all sell-outs—Nesbo continued crunching numbers by day while gigging at night.

Eventually exhausted and burned out, Nesbo took flight, literally, to Australia. On the airplane for 30 hours, he fleshed out a story on his laptop—about a guy named Harry—and the rest is publishing history.

In addition to writing and music, Nesbo is a dedicated rock climber and has climbed sport routes up to French grade 7c. He lives close to his former wife and their daughter in Oslo.

Harry Hole
Nesbo is primarily known for his 10 crime novels featuring Inspector Harry Hole, a tough detective working for Crime Squad and later with the National Criminal Investigation Service (Kripos). His investigations take him from Oslo to Australia and the Congo Republic. Hole takes on seemingly unconnected cases, involving a range of criminals: serial killers, bank robbers, gangsters, or the establishment. But he also spends a significant amount of time battling alcoholism and his own demons. The Harry Hole novels are multi-layered, violent and often feature women in peril.

Doctor Proctor
Reminiscent of Roald Dahl's books, Nesbo's four Doctor Proctor books for young readers focus on the antics of a crazy professor, his next-door neighbor Lisa, and and Lisa's peculiar friend Nilly.The books are concerned with self-identify, imagination, and courage

Stand-alones
Blood on Snow follows Olav Johansen, a fixer for Oslo crime boss Daniel Hoffman. Olav has just found the woman of his dreams; the only problem is that she's his boss' wife and that his boss has hired him to kill her.

Midnight Sun features Jon, or Ulf as he calls himself, a hapless criminal on the run from his boss, an Oslo drug lord known as the Fisherman. (Author bio adapted from Wikipedia and the author's website. Retrieved 2/17/2016.)

Book Reviews
A fiendishly complex and terrifically entertaining plot.... Nesbo has a horrormeister's flair for transforming natural scenes into ominous situations.
Marilyn Stasio - New York Times

A superb thriller—smart, stylish, beautifully paced and meticulously plotted.
New York Newsday

This is crime writing of the highest order, in which the characters are as strong as the story, where an atmosphere of evil permeates, and the tension begins in the first chapter and never lets up.
London Times

Spine-chilling.... This most ambitious of Nesbo’s crime novels banishes any fears that the omniscient serial killer scenario has been exhausted.
Independent (UK)

Macabre and disturbing.... Deft plotting, strong characterization, adrenaline-fuelled action sequences and a whole raft of social issues raised along the way make this book a spectacularly good example of how a tried and tested (and often tired) formula can be made exhilarating and fresh.
Guardian (UK)

The writer most likely to take the ice-cold crown in the critically acclaimed—and now bestselling—category of Nordic noir.
Los Angeles Times

Nesbo's books have a serious, socially significant heft, as well as a confident (even cocky) narrative stride that is unmatched. These aren’t mere investigatory trifles to be enjoyed and forgotten; their unnerving horrors linger.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

Nesbo’s pace is unerring, and the way he builds up suspense will incite Pavlovian page-turning.
Time Out New York

The Snowman is strung together with great care, playful in certain stretches, grisly in others, all of it highly readable.
Newsweek

Nesbo explores the darkest criminal minds with grim delight and puts his killers where you least expect to find them.... His novels are maddeningly addictive.
Vanity Fair

This is reading as you experienced it in childhood, without any gap between eye and mind, but with the added pleasures that adult plots and adult characters can bring.... Unputdownable. The Snowman is probably the most terrifying and certainly the most addictive book in the whole series.
Slate

In this chilling installment in Nesbo's Insp. Harry Hole crime series, a snowman left in the front yard of Birte Becker's Oslo house is the only clue to the woman's disappearance.... Nesbo breathes new life into the serial killer subgenre, giving it a Norwegian twist and never losing his laconic hero in the process.
Publishers Weekly

Nesbo is being hailed as the next Stieg Larsson or Henning Mankell.... Apt comparisons, but they don't go far enough. This is simply the best detective novel this reviewer has read in years. —David Clendinning, West Virginia State Univ. Lib., Institute
Library Journal

[A] superb thriller.... Oslo detective Harry Hole returns, world-weary as ever, to puzzle out some very strange, and very discomfiting, events. [T]he story...unfolds at just the right pace. [A]smart, suspenseful cat-and-mouse game...and that's high praise indeed.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The Snowman begins with a disturbing scene set in 1980, more than two decades before the events that follow. How does the opening establish the mood of the rest of the novel? What recurring themes and motifs does it introduce?

2. In what ways does the investigative team—Magnus Skarre, Katrine Bratt, and Bjorn Holm—represent the different viewpoints and skills involved in police work? What do the details about their demeanor and interests (for example, the description of Bratt and the profile of Holm) as well as their reactions to Harry’s presentation of the case convey about their personalities?

3. Rakel, Skarre, and Hagen offer succinct descriptions of Harry and what motivates him. Can Harry’s “anger and the desire for revenge” and his history of alcoholism be attributed to his experiences as a police detective or are they personal flaws?

4. Do you agree with Hagen’s comparison between Harry and military leaders and his assertion that "There’s a strong social urge in man to be needed.... You want this case to be special. You want it so much that you can see the blackest of the black"?

5. What does Harry’s relationship with Rakel and especially with Oleg reveal about him? What personal principles, emotions, and values underlie his attachment to them? What incidents in the investigation also capture this side of him?

6. To what extent do the police rely on standard assumptions about the disappearance or deaths of women in their approach to solving the crimes? Do the circumstances of the individual women—including their relationships with their husbands and children and their reputations within the community—influence the direction of the investigations?

7. The murdered women all had secrets. Discuss the reasons for or explanations of Sylvia Ottersen’s, Eli Kvale’s, and Birte Becker’s lies and deceptions. What does their behavior demonstrate about their sense of power—or lack of power—in their marriages? What moral questions arise in each case?

8. The journalist and TV pundit Arve Stop says, “as a pressman and a liberalist I have principles to consider. The issue here is whether I, as a declared anti-establishment watchdog, should unconditionally make my services available to the ruling power’s forces of law and order” and goes on to say, “I promise to assist in any way I am able.... If you in the force assist us." Does this passage accurately illustrate the relationship between the police and the media? Can you offer real-life examples of cases that indicate cooperation, either blatant or covert, between them? Are there situations in which such collaboration is helpful?

9. During the investigation several people come under suspicion. Are the suspicions in each case supported by credible arguments and evidence? Which suspects seemed to you the most likely to have committed the murders and why?

10. How does Nesbo set the stage for the encounter between Bratt and Avre Stop? What aspects of Bratt’s personality—and of Stop’s—enable her to manipulate the dangerous course of events?

11. What characteristics, good and bad, does Harry share with Rafto? In what ways are their careers similar? How do they compare to other fictional detectives in classic and contemporary literature?

12. What are the major turning points in the investigation? What do the twists in the plot demonstrate about the interplay of routine procedures and intuition in solving the murders? Discuss why Harry attributes his identification of the killer to “a fluke. An atypical fluke” and what this implies about the nature of criminal investigations.

13. What drives the killer’s decision to “leave clear clues, show them the connections, give them the bigger picture”? In what ways do the killer’s actions and motivation conform to your beliefs or knowledge about serial murderers, both fictional and real? Consider such factors as psychological problems caused by childhood traumas; the possession of above-average intelligence; the ability to charm others; and the sense of superiority often associated with such criminals.

14. Harry’s mentor Stale Aune, says, “The more aged I become, the more I tend to the view that evil is evil, mental illness or not. We’re all more or less disposed to evil...we’re all sick with personality disorders. And our actions define how we are." To what extent do the characters in the novel—victims, suspects, and members of the police, including Harry—struggle with “personality disorders”? In your opinion, does some degree of mental illness explain most, if not all, criminal behavior?

15. What techniques does Nesbo use to control the pace and tension of the narrative? Discuss the effect of the flashbacks that interrupt the on-going investigation; Harry’s private moments with Oleg and Rakel; the casual interactions among the police team; and the detailed, graphic accounts of crimes and the discovery of bodies.

16. Do the descriptions of life in Norway—from the weather to the rivalry between the cities Oslo and Bergen, to discussions of crime and other societal problems—enhance the novel? What function do the references to the American elections and culture serve?

17. Jo Nesbo is one of several Scandinavian crime fiction authors who are increasingly popular in this country. In what ways does The Snowman, well as works by Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell, and Maj Sjowall, differ from American thrillers? What qualities, if any, distinguish Harry and his colleagues from the detectives depicted in American books, television shows, and movies?

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So Big
Edna Ferber, 1924
HarperCollins
252 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061859984

Summary
Winner, 1924 Pulitizer Prize

Widely considered to be Edna Ferber's greatest achievement, So Big is a classic novel of turn-of-the-century Chicago.

It is the unforgettable story of Selina Peake DeJong, a gambler's daughter, and her struggles to stay afloat and maintain her dignity and her sanity in the face of marriage, widowhood, and single parenthood.

A brilliant literary masterwork from one of the twentieth century's most accomplished and admired writers, the remarkable So Big still resonates with its unflinching view of poverty, sexism, and the drive for success. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—August 12, 1885
• Where—Kalazmazoo, Michigan, USA
• Death—April 16, 1968
• Where—New York, New York,
• Education—Lawrence University (briefly)
• Awards—Pulitizer Prize

Edna Ferber was an American novelist, short story writer and playwright. Her novels were especially popular and included the Pulitzer Prize-winning So Big (1924), Show Boat (1926; made into the celebrated 1927 musical), and Giant (1952; made into the 1956 Hollywood movie).

Ferber was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to a Hungarian-born Jewish storekeeper and his Milwaukee, Wisconsin-born wife, Jacob Charles and Julia (Neumann) Ferber. After living in Chicago, Illinois, and Ottumwa, Iowa, at age 12 Ferber and her family moved to Appleton, Wisconsin, where she graduated from high school and briefly attended Lawrence University. She took newspaper jobs at the Appleton Daily Crescent and the Milwaukee Journal before publishing her first novel. She covered the 1920 Republican National Convention and 1920 Democratic National Convention for the United Press Association.

Writing
Ferber's novels generally featured strong female protagonists, although she fleshed out multiple characters in each book. She usually highlighted at least one strong secondary character who faced discrimination ethnically or for other reasons; through this technique, Ferber demonstrated her belief that people are people and that the not-so-pretty persons have the best character.

Due to her skill in crafting scene, characterization and plot, several theatrical and film productions have been based on her works, including Show Boat, Giant, Ice Palace, Saratoga Trunk, Cimarron (which won an Oscar) and the 1960 remake. Three of these works—Show Boat, Saratoga Trunk and Giant—have been developed into musicals.

When composer Jerome Kern proposed turning the very serious Show Boat into a musical, Ferber was shocked, thinking it would be transformed into a typical light entertainment of the 1920s. It was not until Kern explained that he and Oscar Hammerstein II wanted to create a different type of musical that Ferber granted him the rights. Saratoga, based on Saratoga Trunk, was written at a much later date, after serious plots had become acceptable in stage musicals.

In 1925, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her book So Big, which was made into a silent film starring Colleen Moore that same year. An early talkie movie remake followed, in 1932, starring Barbara Stanwyck and George Brent, with Bette Davis in a supporting role. A 1953 remake of So Big starred Jane Wyman in the Stanwyck role, and is the version most often seen today.

Ferber was a member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of wits who met for lunch every day at the Algonquin Hotel in New York. Ferber and another member of the Round Table, Alexander Woollcott, were long-time enemies, their antipathy lasting until Woollcott's death in 1943, although Howard Teichmann states in his biography of Woollcott that their feud was due to a misunderstanding. According to Teichmann, Ferber once described Woollcott as "a New Jersey Nero who has mistaken his pinafore for a toga."

In 2008, The Library of America selected Ferber's article "Miss Ferber Views 'Vultures' at Trial" for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American True Crime.

On July 29, 2002, in her hometown of Appleton, Wisconsin, the U.S. Postal Service issued a Distinguished Americans series postage stamp honoring her. Artist Mark Summers, well known for his scratchboard technique, created this portrait for the stamp referencing a black-and-white photograph of Ferber taken in 1927.

Personal life
Ferber had no children, never married, and is not known to have engaged in a romance or sexual relationship with anyone of either gender. In her early novel Dawn O'Hara, the title character's aunt is said to have remarked, "Being an old maid was a great deal like death by drowning—a really delightful sensation when you ceased struggling." Ferber did take a maternal interest in the career of her niece Janet Fox, an actress who performed in the original Broadway casts of Ferber's plays Dinner at Eight and Stage Door.

Ferber died at her home in New York City, of stomach cancer at the age of 82. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
(Older works have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)

It is a thoughtful book...clean and strong, dramatic at times, interesting always, clear sighted, sympathetic, a novel to read and to remember..
New York Times (2/24/1924)

A masterpiece...It has the completeness, [the] finality, that grips and exalts and convinces.
Literary Review

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 So Big:

1. The book title's obvious reference is to Dirk DeJong's childhood nickname. What else, in the larger scope of the novel, might it signify?

2. Describe Salina Peake DeJong. What kind of a character is she? Is she believable? What do you think of the following remark...?

I want you to realize that this whole thing is just a grand adventure.... Living. All mixed up. The more kinds of people you see, and the more things you do, and the more things that happen to you, the richer you are. Even if they're not pleasant things.

Is this philosophy an indication of Salina's inner strength or her unguarded naivete? Does she hold true to her vision throughout the novel?

3. When Salina arrives in High Prairie, she is stuck by the beauty of things. In what sense does she find cabbages beautiful? What does this suggest about her sense of aesthetics? Is it a heightened sensitivity to beauty...or an indiscriminant one? What is meant by the sentence describing Salina: "Life has no weapon against a woman like that"?

4. What do you think of Pervus DeJong? What kind of man is he? Why does Salina marry him—a decision that yokes her to the monotonous, racking life led by the very farm women she once pitied? How would you describe their marriage?

5. Ferber offers readers an insight into rural life as exemplified by those in High Prairie. Talk about the hardships of those lives, especially in the absence of modern conveniences, even basic plumbing.

6. How does Ferber portray Chicago in So Big? In what way does August Hempel exemplify urban society and its values, as opposed to life in High Prairie? What comparison is Ferber attempting to draw for her readers?

7. What are the societal values that Dirk represents? Is he a sympathetic character? Does Salina sacrifice too much for him? Why does he turn away from what the teachings she attempted to instill in him? By the end of the novel, what, if anything, does Dirk come to understand?

8. Talk about the difference between the two types of students at Mid-Western University: Classified and Unclassified. What is the irony here? And what is Ferber satirizing?

9. What kind of character is Dallas O'Mara? How does she represent what is antithetical to August Hempel and his peers?

10. Is the ending of So Big satisfying to you? Do characters get what they want...or deserve?

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

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so brave, young, and handsome by leif enger

So Brave, Young, and Handsome
Leif Enger, 2008
Grove/Atlantic
287 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780802144171

Summary
A stunning successor to his best selling novel Peace Like a River, Leif Enger’s new work is a rugged and nimble story about an aging train robber on a quest to reconcile the claims of love and judgment on his life, and the failed writer who goes with him.

In 1915 Minnesota, novelist Monte Becket has lost his sense of purpose. His only success long behind him, Monte lives simply with his wife and son.

But when he befriends outlaw Glendon Hale, a new world of opportunity and experience presents itself.

Glendon has spent years in obscurity, but the guilt he harbors for abandoning his wife, Blue, over two decades ago, has lured him from hiding. As the modern age marches swiftly forward, Glendon aims to travel back to his past—heading to California to seek Blue’s forgiveness.

Beguiled and inspired, Monte soon finds himself leaving behind his own family to embark for the unruly West with his fugitive guide.

As they desperately flee from the relentless Charles Siringo, an ex-Pinkerton who’s been hunting Glendon for years, Monte falls ever further from his family and the law, to be tempered by a fiery adventure from which he may never get home. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1961
• Where—Sauk Centre, Minnesota, USA
• Education—Moorhead State University
• Currently—lives near Aitkin, Minnesota

Since his teens, Leif Enger has wanted to write fiction. He worked as a reporter and producer for Minnesota Public Radio from 1984 until the sale of Peace Like a River to publisher Grove/Atlantic allowed him to take time off to write.

In the early 1990s, he and his older brother, Lin, writing under the pen name L.L. Enger, produced a series of mystery novels featuring a retired baseball player.

Peace Like a River, published in 2001, has been described as "high-spirited and unflagging" and has received some notable acclaim in literary circles. His second novel, So Brave, Young, and Handsome is the story of an aging train robber's quest for self-discovery. Published in 2008, it received has excellent reviews. In 2018 Enger released Virgil Wander, a midwestern twist on magical realism about a town—and its inhabitants—struggling for a new lease on life.

Enger is married and lives on a farm in Minnesota with his wife. They have two sons. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
So Brave, Young, and Handsome is an adventure of the heart and mind as much as of the body. This second novel from Enger will not move you as deeply as Peace Like a River did, but it is far more than just a hectically plotted cowboy adventure story. A famous literary editor once said, "Never be sincere. Sincerity is the death of writing." But Enger proves him wrong. His new novel is romantic but not silly. It belongs to a golden time at the edge of our collective memory of what life—and stories—were like when the West was young and a tale was something to read aloud at night under the lamplight. The world Enger writes about here is a vanished one, but Enger has brought it back to life by the force of his belief.
Carrie Brown - Washington Post

[Leif Enger is] a formidably gifted writer, one whose fictions are steeped in the American grain.... [He] is-like Ron Hansen-a child-friendly, contemporary American heartland novelist, a writer unafraid to concoct and couch his stories in such terms as faith, miracle, sin and grace, repentance and redemption, atonement and absolution.... Enger is a masterful storyteller...possessed of a seemingly effortless facility for the stiletto-sharp drawing of wholly believable characters [and] a pitch-perfect ear for the cadences and syntax of Midwest and Great Plains vernacular. His Amishly carpentered prose smacks of plow work, prairie, flapjacks and cider, butter churns, denim and calico.... At times reminiscent of the sinew and gristle in the craggier work of Annie Proulx, and at other times aspiring to a Jean Shepherdesque folk poetry.... So Brave, Young, and Handsome is affable and human as all get out, homespun and sophisticated at once, wise and knowing about the ubiquity of the human condition and the vagaries of the human heart.
Bruce Olds - Chicago Tribune

A superbly written, utterly compelling story of self-discovery and redemption disguised as a cracking good adventure tale.... Enger has created a work of great humanity and huge heart, a riveting piece of fiction that while highly accessible is never shallow. This story of an ordinary man's discovery of who he is and his place in the world is exciting, admirable and ultimately very affecting.... After reading the final page, don't be surprised if you find yourself shaking your head and murmuring, "Wow. What a good book."
Peter Moore - Minneapolis Star Tribune

So Brave, Young, and Handsome is an almost perfect novel, lively and engrossing, full of surprises, funny, touching, and a great read.... [This novel] will appeal to fans of Larry McMurty's Western epics, but also to those who enjoy the magical realism of Isabel Allende and Alice Hoffman. The straightforward narrative, recounted in a single voice, keeps us turning the pages, faster and faster, and by the time the story comes full circle, Enger will have plenty of new fans hoping he gets to work soon on his next book.
Gail Pennington - St. Louis Post-Dispatch

An inviting voice guides readers through this expansive saga of redemption in the early 20th-century West and gives a teeming vitality to a period often represented with stock phrases and stock characters. Novelist Monte Becket isn't a terribly distinguished figure; his first and only published work hit five years before the story's start and he is about to reclaim his job at a smalltown Minnesota post office when he meets Glendon Hale, a former outlaw who is traveling to Mexico to find his estranged wife. He persuades Becket to join him, and the two set off on a long journey peopled with sharply carved characters (among them a Pinkerton thug tracking down Glendon) and splendid surprises. As Monte's narration continues, the tale veers away from Monte's artistic struggle and becomes an adventure story. The progress has its listless moments, but Enger crafts scenes so rich you can smell the spilled whiskey and feel the grit.
Publishers Weekly

Enger's (Peace Like a River) sophomore effort is at once engaging and curiously flat, somewhat like its Midwestern setting. In 1915 Minnesota, Monte Becket, a writer trying to follow up a runaway best seller (like Enger himself), leaves his incomplete novels, his wife, and his son to go on a quest. Glendon Hale, a boat builder with a checkered past, takes Monte with him on his journey to apologize to the wife he abandoned 20 years previously. Their trip takes many unexpected detours while they try to avoid the ex-detective who has pursued Glendon for several decades. What awaits them at the end of their journey surprises both men. This is a particularly American tale, with many elements from both penny Westerns and Mark Twain; the plot is improbable, but the writing is absorbing. Libraries where Enger's first novel was popular will want this book as well.
Amy Ford - Library Journal

A belated follow-up to a popular debut finds the Midwestern novelist in fine storytelling form, as he spins a picaresque tale of redemption and renewal amid the fading glories of the Old West. Some readers will undoubtedly find autobiographical implications in the protagonist conjured by Enger (Peace Like a River, 2001).... This story has its start in 1915, just as [author Monte] Becket abandons his final manuscript, when a mysterious geezer in a rowboat passes his Minnesota riverfront home (with a nod toward Enger's earlier novel, rivers run through this one) and ultimately entices Becket to join him on an adventure that will change both of their lives. The mysterious man's name may or may not be Glendon Hale; he may or may not be an outlaw on the run; and he most certainly is a boat-building alcoholic. With the encouragement of his painter wife, Becket leaves behind a comfortable home and a loving family to accompany Hale on a pilgrimage, one that will find Becket learning more about his companion's identity while assuming an alias of his own. As they head south toward Mexico and then west to California, they find their travels enlivened by a young accomplice who joins them and a pursuer who trails them, a former Pinkerton detective who has also enjoyed some literary success. Revelations abound, for both Becket and the reader. Though Becket laments that he "can't write a(nother) book that anyone will want to read," Enger has.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. What elements of Enger's book play off the conventions of cowboy movies and cowboy novels? In Chapter 12, we read "And so it came down to a farmhouse. As it so often does!" (p. 232) Monte's son, Redstart, "knew which members of the James Gang had once ridden into our town to knock over a bank and been shot to moist rags for their trouble" (p.4). What other traditions of the cowboy genres do you recognize in the book? The lore of train robberies? Cattle rustling? The nugget of goodness under the outlaw behavior?

2. How does Enger make these outsized characters convincing? Is there value as well as mayhem in these renegades? In their diction, do you find an odd level of civility even as death and destruction are threatened? For instance, look at some of the rather elegant locutions, such as that of Siringo on p. 115: "I'm leaving, you gentlemen may have this rocky paradise to yourselves."

3. Does it make sense that it is Susannah who sets Monte free to make his journey with Glendon "because he dreamed of his wife" (p. 37)? But then, "Love is a strange fact—it hopes all things, believes all things, endures all things. It makes no sense at all" (p. 37). Talk about love in the book, relationships that occur or are recalled.

4. How does Enger give us characters' inner lives? Are there some characters we feel we know inside and out? Which ones? Who in the book is most adept at holding us at a distance? Is that part of the person's charm as well as enigma?

5. We read about a number of marriages in So Brave, Young, and Handsome. We begin and end with that of Monte and Susannah. Do you think it is a good marriage? Talk also about Mr. and Mrs. Davies. What about Blue and Glendon? And later Blue/Arandana and Soto, as well as Charlie Siringo and his wife who forgot who he was. Does Monte learn from each of these tales? You might look again at question #3.

6. Monte and Siringo are juxtaposed as both adversaries and an oddly linked couple. Even as a captive, Monte maintains communication. "In the meantime I tried to remain pleasant company. He loved talking about books, especially his own, and his other favorite, Ecclesiastes. That treatise with its severe rhetoric—'all is meaningless'—he had by heart, often enlisting its author, Solomon, in his arguments against bothersome ideas like altruism and honor and clemency" (p. 207). Does this passage set an important dichotomy between Siringo and Monte? Why does Monte prefer Proverbs? Look, too, at Siringo's catechism on honor on p. 191.

7. Royal Davies, the Kansas City policeman, says, "You're doing these youngsters no service, you know...you authors, I mean—this world ain't no romance, in case you didn't notice." But Monte later says, "I take issue with Royal, much as I came to like him; violent and doomed as this world might be, a romance it certainly is" (p. 51). Talk about this idea. Think about the definition of "romance" as a medieval tale about a hero of chivalry. How has Enger explored "romance" in the book?

8. What is the result of Monte's weaving Susannah and Redstart into every turn of his story? Why do you think he consistently fails to write his wife? Ambivalence about what he's doing in this runaway adventure? Guilt? Another kind of writer's block?

9. How is Hood held up as a version of the chivalric hero? Is he almost a foundling for Monte and Glendon? How is he depicted as golden boy (cherubic, even), magnificent horseman, boon companion, and charismatic lover? After Hood's initial conquest on a horse, Monte says, "It was as stunning an ascension as any I have seen (p. 143). How is Hood like a comet? "A cowboy doesn't ask for much, that's my observation. A flashy ride, a pretty girl, momentary glory—for a day or two, I'm glad to say, Hood Roberts had them all" (p. 145). Was his reversal inevitable, do you think, given his character?

10. Describe Glendon as a phenomenon. What are traits you hold onto? Is it his melting disappearances? How are both Siringo and Glendon almost phoenixes, myths that resurface despite the odds?

11. In contrast to the romance of heroic exploits, what are some blasts of reality? Would you agree that this is not a comfortable fairy tale? "We were a dozen weary men in a damp room with one smoky candle for light and no prospect of rest" (p. 159). What are other times Monte and his cohorts are battered by weather, hunger, or assailants? Is the life of the outlaw worthwhile?

12. If you were to cast this book as a movie, who would play the principal roles? What would be essential scenes? As a director, how would you handle the frame tale of Monte, Susannah, and Redstart? Is there actually another frame tale?

13. Is it justice that Glendon is seeking in the novel? For whom? Do you think it is achieved? Is forgiveness as important as justice in the book?

14. The novel's humor is sometimes ironic or deadpan, other times pure slapstick. What purpose does recurrent comedy serve in a story with such violence and loss?

15. Almost every major character in the novel has more than one name, whether an alias (like Jack Waits), a stage name (Deep Breath Darla), or a translation (Blue). What is the significance of a person's "true name?" Does the revelation of one's true name put him, as Redstart claims, at the mercy of others? Is that a bad thing?

16. What is the time of the novel? Enger gives us a date, but what are other clues? Driving with pride eighty miles in a day? Pancho Villa?

17. How do books pervade the novel? Monte, of course, is an author, and we follow his discomfort about producing a second success. But books are important to other people, too. Who are they? Emma Davies? Her grandmother as literary critic? (see p. 53). What happens to the book Monte had inscribed to Emma? How does Siringo's easy writing and reciting of his compelling narrative affect Monte? How does the library of Claudio and Arandana define them?

18. "Most men are hero and devil," says Siringo (p. 224). Does that statement hold true in the book? And in general? Is it a description better reserved for leaders? Politicians, even statesmen, outlaws, C.E.O.s, Hollywood stars, sports idols? Who else? Do people in this book understand and accept this idea of human nature?

19. How is Darlys the Sharpshooter a pivotal figure? Think about her deft explosion of the glass orb in Monte's hand as well as her well practiced aim later at Siringo who has cruelly spurned her.

20. Siringo blazes from the pages, always surprising. This is the man who "left off cowboying when the profession of detective was chosen for him at a public demonstration of phrenology" (p. 173). Who is this "dark personage" (p. 178)? When do we see his menace most startlingly? He's an "old vulture" who "ate like a scavenging bird in big swallows without evident pleasure" (p. 197). Does that image tell us something about Siringo's other actions in the book? We know about his treachery to Monte. "That he could trust me was my own disgrace" (p. 205). Other times, "the old monster was capable of gratitude after all" (p. 180), to both Dr. Clary and Monte. Talk about his brilliant manipulation of the town of Alva. What is your ultimate evaluation of Siringo?

21. "Say what you like about melodrama, it beats confusion" (p. 262). Is this how we feel after reading a page-turner? Enger's book has ambiguity to spare, but are you in doubt at the end about events or characters?

22. Where do our sympathies lie in So Brave, Young, and Handsome? Did you feel a loss as Hood sank deeper into runaway crime? Is everyone on the trail tainted except maybe Monte? Is he, as well?

23. At the end, Glendon is able to give himself to the service of others, to Soto and Blue. Do you think he is truly selfless at this point? Can you possibly think he is not maneuvering? What is his persuasive act that settles the point?

24. The rivers, from the Cannon in Minnesota to the Rienda in California, link the sagas of the book and provide a central theme. Did you find it inevitable to compare Monte and Glendon to Huck and Jim in the Twain celebration of the Mississippi? "People on riverbanks understand one another. "If you can't be on a boat, a dock will do" (p. 55). The Kaw in Kansas City provides a moment of respite as well as another escape. How? How does the Hundred and One disaster, the Salt Fork flood, create a scene of biblical proportions? How is the post-lapsarian world a turning point and a rebirth for some of the characters?

25. Do you see an analogy with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in the book? (There are even recurrent windmills!) Can you talk about the idea of the Quest? The idealism, as well as the consistent blanket of reality? Give examples?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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So Cold the River
Michael Koryta, 2010
Little, Brown & Company
508 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316053648

Summary
It started with a documentary. The beautiful Alyssa Bradford approaches Eric Shaw to unearth the life story of her father-in-law, Campbell Bradford, a 95-year-old billionaire whose childhood is wrapped in mystery. Eric grabs the job, even though the only clues to Bradford's past are his hometown and an antique water bottle he's kept his entire life.

In Bradford's hometown, Eric discovers an extraordinary past—a glorious domed hotel where movie stars, presidents, athletes, and mobsters once intermingled. Long derelict, the hotel has just been restored to its former grandeur.

But something else has been restored too—a long-forgotten evil that will stop at nothing to settle a decades-old score. And with every move, Eric inches closer to the center of the building storm. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—January 1, 1982
• Where—Bloomington, Indiana, USA
• Education—B.A., Indiana University
• Awards—Best First Private Eye Novel from Private
Eye Writers of America/St. Martin's Press
• Currently—lives in St. Petersburg, Florida, and
Bloomington, Indiana

Michael Koryta (kor REE ta) is an American author of contemporary crime and mystery fiction. He is known for novels such as Tonight I Said Goodbye, Sorrow's Anthem, A Welcome Grave and The Silent Hour (The Lincoln Perry Series).

Koryta has received many awards, including the 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and his book Envy the Night has also been chosen for the 2009 Reader's Digest Select Editions. A former private investigator and newspaper reporter, Koryta graduated from Indiana University with a degree in criminal justice

Michael Koryta began writing at a very early age: At the age of 8, he began corresponding with his favorite writers. At 16, he decided he wanted to be a crime novelist—and later in high school started interning with a private investigator. When his crime novel Tonight I Said Goodbye won the St. Martin's Press/Private Eye Writers of America Best First Novel prize, he had yet to reach legal drinking age.

He currently lives in St. Petersburg, Florida, and Bloomington, Indiana. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
As plot hooks for suspense tales go, haunted water is certainly unexpected. Mr. Koryta decided to use it for a very specific reason. His inspiration for So Cold the River comes from its spectacular setting: the grand old West Baden Springs Hotel in rural Indiana. As a Hoosier with a keen sense of the hotel's history, Mr. Koryta has worked backward to concoct an eerie narrative and used the place for the basis of his own personal version of The Shining.
Janet Maslin - New York Times

A super-natural mystery that intensifies the suspense by thickening the atmosphere. So Cold the River…is a superior specimen, with its eerie tale of a lovely valley in Indiana where at one time an elixir known as Pluto Water bubbled up from the underground springs...Koryta sets a beautiful scene.
Marilyn Stasio - New York Times Book Review

So Cold the River takes a while to build up momentum, but the material is so fresh and the characters so appealing that my interest never flagged. After reading it, I'm sticking to good old D.C. tap water.
Dennis Drabelle - Washington Post

In this explosive thriller from Koryta (Envy the Night), failed filmmaker Eric Shaw is eking out a living making family home videos when a client offers him big bucks to travel to the resort town of West Baden, Ind., the childhood home of her father-in-law, Campbell Bradford, to shoot a video history of his life. Almost immediately, things go weird. Eric uncovers evidence of another Campbell Bradford, a petty tyrant who lived a generation before the other and terrorized the locals. The older Campbell begins appearing in horrific visions to Eric after he sips the peculiar mineral water that made West Baden famous. Koryta spins a spellbinding tale of an unholy lust for power that reaches from beyond the grave and suspends disbelief through the believable interactions of fully developed characters. A cataclysmic finale will put readers in mind of some of the best recent works of supernatural horror, among which this book ranks.
Publishers Weekly

Edgar Award nominee Koryta breaks from his Lincoln Perry PI series with this work of dark, supernatural horror that demonstrates the quality writing style and well-developed characters for which he is known. Down-and-out filmmaker Eric Shaw agrees to produce a biopic of an elderly billionaire from West Baden Springs, IN. While there, a bottle of "Pluto" water enhances Shaw's psychic abilities as he becomes increasingly caught up in the mystery surrounding his subject's family, in West Baden history, and in the water's source and powers. Actor/Audie Award nominee Robert Petkoff (robertpetkoff.com) renders Eric's visions and descendant Josiah Campbell's ruthless pursuit of fortune with veridical insight. Highly recommended for all audiences. —Sandy Glover, Camas P.L., WA
Library Journal

A gothic horror story set in-wait for it-rural Indiana. Filmmaker Eric Shaw, reduced to preparing video montages for memorial services since the failure of his Los Angeles career caused him to retreat to Chicago and leave his marriage to Claire, is approached by wealthy Alyssa Bradford, who offers him $15,000 to re-create the life of her father-in-law, Campbell, 95 and near death in a nursing home. The only clue to his past is a green glass bottle, still stoppered, that he's kept in his safe-a bottle of something called Pluto Water from some hidden spring between the twin towns of French Lick and West Baden, Ind. Quicker than Stephen King conjures goosebumps, Shaw finds himself hearing train whistles, having visions of an old gent in a bowler hat and suffering world-class headaches. Kellen Cage, a black student working on a doctoral thesis concerning French Lick and West Baden, offers some help. Meanwhile, the last Bradford, ne'er-do-well Josiah, hopes that the video may bring him money. The weather turns ominous. Shaw's headaches worsen. His scary visions continue. Would a sip of that reputed elixir, Pluto Water, help? As the visions intensify, Josiah turns more menacing, killing with no provocation a private eye sent from Chicago to stop Shaw. Old Anne, a weather spotter, senses that the wind is up. Shaw becomes obsessed with finding out more about Pluto Water. But four tornados will hit the county within an hour, the Lost River will rise and a major conflagration will almost annihilate Claire before the Campbell past is bottled up tight once more. A departure from Kortya's Lincoln Perry p.i. series (The Silent Hour, 2009) that's every bit as well-written.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. So Cold the River begins with the line “You looked for the artifacts of their ambition.” What are some examples of such artifacts in the book? Discuss what they reveal about the characters. Do you think that ambition manifests itself differently than other drives? How and why?

2. The first time that Eric Shaw sees the dome of the West Baden Hotel, he is filled with wonder. Have you ever had a similar reaction to a building or place? What was it about the sight that most strongly affected you?

3. On page 134, Anne McKinney thinks to herself, “Rare was the storyteller who got trapped by reality.” Do you think that writers have a responsibility to faithfully represent events as they actually happened? Why or why not? Do you hold writers of fiction to a different standard than you do writers of nonfiction?

4. Discuss Josiah Bradford. Do you think he is in control of his fate, or is he stuck on a predetermined path? Why or why not? Have there been times in your own life when you have felt like you have no control? When?

5. How does ego drive each of the characters? What are the differences between Eric’s, Campbell’s, and Josiah’s vanity?

6. Eric begins to have trouble distinguishing his visions from reality. Have you ever had a dream that was so vivid, you were certain that it was real? Why do you think it affected you so strongly?

7. How do you feel about Eric’s relationship with Claire? Why do you believe their marriage fell apart? What do you think will happen in the future?

8. As one of the oldest people in the two towns, Anne McKinney is a repository of historical information. As a self-taught meteorologist, she also looks toward the future. Can you reconcile these two different outlooks? How does history inform her predictions? What is her role in the story?

9. What do you think about Josiah and Danny’s relationship? Why do you think they are friends? Have you ever had an unequal friendship? Did you do anything to balance it?

10. Discuss the confrontation of perception and objective reality in the novel. When does the line between the two become unclear? Which do you think is more reliable: what one personally experiences or what is recorded or observed by the world?

11. What are the differences in the ways that Josiah and Eric experience their visions? Why do you think these visions occur?

12. Do you think that So Cold the River has a message about revenge or ambition? If so, what do you think it is? If not, why?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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So Long a Letter
Mariama Ba, (trans., Modupe Bode-Thomas) 1987
Heinemann Publishing
96 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780435913526

Summary
So Long a Letter is a sequence of reminiscences recounted by the (fictional) recently widowed Sengalese school teacher Ramatoulaye. It is a record of Ramatoulaye's emotional struggle for survival after her husband's abrupt decision to take a second wife.

The novel is a perceptive testimony to the plight of thoes articulate women who live in a social milieux dominated by attitudes and values that deny them their proper place.

So Long a Letter won the first Noma Award for Publishing in Africa, and was recognised as one of Africa's 100 Best Books of the 20th Century in an initiative organised by the Zimbabwe International Book Fair. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1929
• Where—Dakar, Senegal, Africa
• Died—1981
• Education—Ecole Normale, Senegal
• Awards—The first Noma Prize for Publishing in Africa, 1980

Mariama Ba was a Senegalese author and feminist, who wrote in French. Born in Dakar, she was raised a Muslim, but at an early age came to criticise what she perceived as inequalities between the sexes of the African and Islamic traditions.

Her frustration with the fate of African women is expressed in her first novel, So Long a Letter. In it she depicts the sorrow and resignation of a woman who must share the mourning for her late husband with his second and younger wife. Abiola Irele called it "the most deeply felt presentation of the female condition in African fiction." This short book was awarded the first Noma Prize for Publishing in Africa in 1980.

Ba died a year later, in 1981, after a protracted illness before publishing her second novel, Scarlet Song. That novel describes the hardships a woman faces when her husband abandons her for a younger woman.

In addition to her career as a writer, Ba was also a teacher and feminist. She was among the first to illustrate the disadvantaged position of women in African society, focusing on the importance of the grandmother, mother, sister, daughter, cousin and friend—how each deserves the title, “mother of Africa.” Her source of determination and commitment to the feminist cause stemmed from her background, her parent’s life and her schooling.

Ba was born in Dakar Senegal in 1929, into an educated and well-to-do Senegalese family. Her father was a career civil servant who became Minister of Health in 1956 (one of the first ministers of state). One of her grandfathers served as an interpreter in the French occupation regime.

After her mother’s death, Ba was raised largely in the traditional manner by her maternal grandparents. Altough she received an early education in French, and attended a Koranic school, her grandparents had no plans to educate her beyond primary school. It was ony at her father's insistence that she continued her studies, eventually entering the Ecole Normale, where she prepared for a career as a school teacher. Ba taught from 1947 to 1959, before transferring to the Regional Inspectorate of Teaching as an educational inspector. She also married a Senegalese member of Parliament, Obeye Diop, but divorced him and was left to care for their nine children.

Ba saw the failure of African liberation struggles, and her earliest works call for a rejection of the “French assimilationist policy.” She also advocated a reconsideration and reinvigor-ation of African life—criticizing the unequal balance of power between men and married women, in particular. Ba became active in women’s associations, defending women’s rights and promoting female education through speeches and articles in local newspapers. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
So Long a Letter is a landmark book—a sensation in its own country and an education for outsiders. Mariama Ba, a longtime women's activist, set out to write a book that exposed the double standard between men and women in Africa. The result, So Long a Letter, eventually won the first Noma Award for Publishing in Africa. The book itself takes the form of a long letter written by a widow, Ramatoulaye, to her friend, over the mandatory forty-day mourning period following the death of a husband. Both women had married for love and had happy, productive marriages; both were educated, had work they loved and were intellectually alive. During their lives, both of these women's husbands chose to take a second wife—and each woman then made a different choice. Ramatoulaye decided to stay married, although it meant rarely seeing her husband and knowing that he was squandering money on a young girl, a friend of her own daughter. Ramatoulaye's friend divorced her husband and eventually left the country, settling in the United States. In her letter, Ramatoulaye examines her life and that of other women of Senegal—their upbringing and training and the cultural restrictions placed upon them. It is a devastating attack, made all the more powerful because of the intelligence and maturity of the narrator and the ability of Mariama Ba to honor two very different choices within one framework.
Erica Bauermeister - 500 Great Books by Women

It is not only the fact that this is the most deeply felt presentation of the female condition in African fiction that gives distinction to this novel, but also its undoubted literary qualities, which seem to place it among the best novels that have come out of our continent.
West Africa

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 So Long a Letter:

1. Talk about the treatment of women—in terms of upbringing, training, and cultural restrictions—in Senegal.

2. How does Ramatoulaye's life in Africa and Aissatou's life in the United States differ? How do their view of men and marriage differ? Why does Ramatoulaye decide to stay married to her husband, while her friend divorces hers. Which woman's decision to you agree with...or were both decisions the correct one for each woman?

3. What, if anything, does Ramatoulaye learn from her correspondence with her girlhood friend?

4. How does Ramatoulaye rationalize the differences between men and women? Do you agree...or disagree with her views?

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

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So Much for That
Lionel Shriver Author, 2010
HarperCollins
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061978494

Summary
Shep Knacker has long saved for "The Afterlife": an idyllic retirement on a tropical island in the Third World where his nest egg can last forever. Traffic jams on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway will be replaced with "talking, thinking, seeing, and being" — and enough sleep.

When he sold his home repair business for a cool $1 million, his dream finally seemed within reach. Yet Glynis, his wife of twenty-six years, has concocted endless excuses why it's never the right time to go. Sick of working as a peon for the company he founded, Shep announces that he's leaving for what they've always tagged "The Afterlife," with or without her.

Just returned from a doctor's appointment, Glynis has some news of her own: Shep can't go anywhere because she desperately needs his health insurance. It rapidly becomes clear that this "health insurance company from hell" only partially covers the staggering bills for her treatments, and Shep's nest egg for The Afterlife soon cracks under the strain.

So Much for That follows the profound transformation of a marriage, for which grave illness proves an unexpected opportunity for tenderness, renewed intimacy, and dry humor, while also pressing the question: How much is one life worth? (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 18, 1957
• Where—Gastonia, North Carolina, USA
• Education—B.A., Barnard College; M.F.A., Columbia
University
• Awards—Orange Prize
• Currently—lives in London, England.

Lionel Shriver (aka Margaret Ann Shriver) is an American journalist and author born to a deeply religious family (her father is a Presbyterian minister). At age seven, Shriver decided she would be a writer. At age 15, she informally changed her name from Margaret Ann to Lionel because she did not like the name she had been given, and as a tomboy felt that a conventionally male name fitted her better.

Shriver was educated at Barnard College, Columbia University (BA, MFA). She has lived in Nairobi, Bangkok and Belfast, and currently in London. She is married to jazz drummer Jeff Williams.

Writing
Shriver had published six novels before the 2003 We Need to Talk About Kevin. She called it her "make or break" novel, referring to the years of "professional disappointment" and "virtual obscurity" preceding it.

Its publication in 2003, We Need to Talk About Kevin made Shriver a household name. Beautiful and deeply disturbing, the novel asks one of the toughest questions a parent can ask of themselves: have I failed my child? When Kevin Khatchadourian murders nine of his classmates at school, his vibrant mother Eva is forced to face, openly, her son's monstrous acts and her role in them.

Interestingly enough, her agent rejected the manuscript. Shriver shopped her book around on her own, and eight months later it was picked up by a smaller publishing company. The book created a good deal of controversy, but achieved success through word of mouth. As Publisher's Weekly comments, "A number of fictional attempts have been made to portray what might lead a teenager to kill a number of schoolmates or teachers, Columbine style, but Shriver's is the most triumphantly accomplished by far." Kevin won Shriver the 2005 Orange Prize.

Her experience as a journalist is wide having written for the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times, Economist, contributed to the Radio Ulster program Talkback and many other publications. In July 2005, Shriver began writing a column for the Guardian, in which she has shared her opinions on maternal disposition within Western society, the pettiness of British government authorities, and the importance of libraries (she plans to will whatever assets remain at her death to the Belfast Library Board, out of whose libraries she checked many books when she lived in Northern Ireland).

The Post-Birthday World was issued in 2007. The novel uses a parallel-universe structure to follow one woman's future as it unfolds under the influence of two drastically different men. In 2010 Shriver released So Much for That, which was subsequently named a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. Her work The New Republic came out in 2012, and Big Brother, inspired by the morbid obesity of one of her brothers, in 2013. (Adapted from Barnes & Noble and Wikipedia. Retrieved 6/11/2013.)

Book Reviews
[Shriver's] managed to take an idea for a kind of thesis novel and instead create a deeply affecting portrait of two marriages, two families, as cancer in one case and a rare, debilitating childhood condition in the other threaten to push their daily lives past their tipping points. Though there is one farcical plot development that is poorly woven into the emotional fabric of the story, and though some of the asides about health care feel shoehorned into the narrative, the author's understanding of her people is so intimate, so unsentimental that it lofts the novel over such bumpy passages, insinuating these characters permanently into the reader's imagination.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

If Jodi Picoult has her finger on the zeitgeist, Shriver has her hands around its throat. Not only does her new book wrestle with actual laws and prices…but it reminds us just how politically argumentative a novel can be. Like Upton Sinclair, she forces us to look at how the sausage is made; if anything, So Much for That is even bloodier than The Jungle.… I admire that what [Shriver's] done here is without a dose of sentimentality. Yes, it's gangling and pedantic and far, far too long, but its anger is infectious. If you can take the story's grisly details and Shriver's badgering insight into all things, this is the rare novel that will shake and change you. With these wholly realistic and sympathetic characters, she makes us consider the most existential questions of our lives and the dreadful calculus of modern health care in this country.
Ron Charles - Washington Post

(Refers to audio version.) [Shep's] lifelong goal of retiring to a remote, primitive country …is no whimsical daydream, but a desperate need that is at the very core of Shep's identity.… A "must listen."
Publishers Weekly

Shriver's strong, clear writing is marred by several complex subplots and lengthy rants…. [B]ut Shriver's fans and others willing to follow the author's turns will find themselves thinking about the novel long after they've finished it. —Christine Perkins, Bellingham P.L., WA
Library Journal

[W]hile this sometimes feels like an op-ed writ large, Shriver's skill at characterization is so solid that Jackson never becomes a plot device.… An overly schematic but powerful study of both marriage and medical care.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
The questions below were generously submitted to LitLovers by CHRISTINA CHICHESTER, Adult Services Libarian, Cinnaminson Branch Library, Burlington (New Jersey) County Library System. Many thanks, Christina:

1. Shep thinks, "people who acted above money …were the same folks who never earned any to speak of.” (p. 20). Is this true? How are beliefs about the importance of money shaped?'

2. Jackson wonders about his and Carol’s decision to pretend to medicate Heather. Was this a good idea? Is medicating children necessary or just trendy?

3. The book addresses many issues about the world of illness and insurance. Which insights stick out the most to you?

4. Consider Jackson’s paradigm of Mooch to Mug (p. 76-80). How accurate is it? What do you think are the percentages of each?

5. Shep is often frustrated by Beryl’s refusal to live within her own means. How do we avoid living in an economy based on sympathy? Is Beryl capable of being a more responsible adult?

6. What similarities and differences do you see between Flicka and Glynnis as patients? What conclusions do you draw from their attitudes?

7. Why do so many people respond to Glynis with fear? Why do we feel so helpless when a loved one suffers from a serious illness? How can we learn to better handle the social awkwardness of it?

8. Does Shep’s transformation from a self centered jerk to doting husband strike you as believable?

9. Glynis wants to sue the company responsible for the asbestos. What role do lawsuits play in these circumstances? Does winning a lawsuit provide satisfaction?

10. Glynis can be a difficult personality. Does this help or hinder her in her cancer battle? Does having a positive attitude help? Does having faith?

11. What are some ways we can be genuinely helpful to a person who is seriously ill?

12. Pogatchnik, Shep’s boss, is portrayed as a greedy, insensitive business man. What do you think of his argument that employers should not be burdened with the cost of health care? Why did the author choose to make Pogatchnik such an unsympathetic character?

13. Both Glynis and Jackson eventually blow up at Shep for being a pushover. Is Shep partially to blame for his problems? Why is Jackson so angry about it? Why does Shep so quickly overlook this outburst?

14. In what ways have you seen good come from terrible circumstances?

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

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Social Creature
Sara Isabella Burton, 2018
Knopf Doubleday
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385543521

Summary
A dark, propulsive and addictive debut thriller, splashed with all the glitz and glitter of New York City.

They go through both bottles of champagne right there on the High Line, with nothing but the stars over them. They drink and Lavinia tells Louise about all the places they will go together, when they finish their stories, when they are both great writers-to Paris and to Rome and to Trieste...

Lavinia will never go. She is going to die soon.

Louise has nothing. Lavinia has everything. After a chance encounter, the two spiral into an intimate, intense, and possibly toxic friendship. A Talented Mr. Ripley for the digital age, this seductive story takes a classic tale of obsession and makes it irresistibly new. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1990-1991
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—Ph.D., Oxford University
• Awards—Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize (Travel)
• Currently—lives in New York City, USA, and in Tiblisi, Georgia

Tara Isabella Burton is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. Winner of the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for Travel Writing, she completed her doctorate in 19th century French literature and theology at the University of Oxford and is a prodigious travel writer, short story writer and essayist for National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist’s 1843 and more.

She currently works for Vox as their Religion Correspondent, lives in New York, and divides her time between the Upper East Side and Tbilisi, Georgia (the country). (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Diabolical.… A wicked original with echoes of the greats (Patricia Highsmith, Gillian Flynn).
Janet Maslin - New York Times

[A] formidable burlesque…sharp as a shard of broken mirror.… Social Creature is at its strongest… when it's focusing on Louise's calculations as she's backdating Facebook posts to cover her tracks and stealing the affections of Lavinia's ex-boyfriend. Its superb dialogue and cutting sense of humor help it glide irresistibly past its peculiar conflicted unrealities.
Charles Finch - New York Times Book Review

(Starred review) [A] mousy girl–wild girl dynamic on display in Burton’s fiendishly clever debut.… This devious, satisfying novel perfectly captures a very narrow slice of the Manhattan demimonde.
Publishers Weekly

New York City, where aspiring writers come to make it big… and obsession looms, is the setting for this debut psychological thriller.… When the shocking plot twist arrives, readers will be glued to this contemporary take on Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley. —David Miller, Farmville P.L., NC
Library Journal

This fast-paced, stylish…debut…will definitvely ensnare readers. Diabolically playing on what we think we know about others and what we reveal about ourselves in the social-media age, it will give readers the creeps, too.
Booklist

(Starred review) Dark, stylish.… [E]very individual is both victim and villain… creating conflict that propels the book toward its shocking yet inevitale conclusion.… [A] thrilling and provocative crime novel, a devastating exploration of female insecurity, and …society's obsession with social media.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available. In the meantime, use our generic mystery questions to help start a discussion for SOCIAL CONTRACT… 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.)

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Solar
Ian McEwan, 2010
Knopf Doubleday
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307739537

Summary
Michael Beard is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist (and compulsive overeater) whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions, and halfheartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. Meanwhile, Michael’s fifth marriage is floundering due to his incessant womanizing.

When his professional and personal worlds collide in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself for Michael to extricate himself from his marital problems, reinvigorate his career, and save the world from environmental disaster. But can a man who has made a mess of his life clean up the messes of humanity?

A complex novel that brilliantly traces the arc of one man’s ambitions and self-deception, Solar is a startling, witty, and stylish new work—Ian McEwan at his finest. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—June 21, 1948
• Where—Aldershot, England, UK
• Education—B.A., University of Sussex; M.A. University of East Anglia
• Awards—(see blow)
• Currently—lives in Oxford, England

Ian Russell McEwan is an English novelist. He was born in Aldershot, Hampshire, the son of David McEwan and Rose Lilian Violet (nee Moore). His father was a working class Scotsman who had worked his way up through the army to the rank of major. As a result, McEwan spent much of his childhood in East Asia (including Singapore), Germany and North Africa (including Libya), where his father was posted. His family returned to England when he was twelve.

McEwan was educated at Woolverstone Hall School; the University of Sussex, receiving his degree in English literature in 1970; and the University of East Anglia, where he was one of the first graduates of Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson's pioneering creative writing course.

Career
McEwan's first published work was a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites (1975), which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976. He achieved notoriety in 1979 when the BBC suspended production of his play Solid Geometry because of its alleged obscenity. His second collection of short stories, In Between the Sheets, was published in 1978.

The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981) were his two earliest novels, both of which were adapted into films. The nature of these works caused him to be nicknamed "Ian Macabre." These were followed by The Child in Time (1987), winner of the 1987 Whitbread Novel Award; The Innocent (1990); and Black Dogs (1992). McEwan has also written two children's books, Rose Blanche (1985) and The Daydreamer (1994). His 1997 novel, Enduring Love, about the relationship between a science writer and a stalker, was popular with critics and adapted into a film in 2004.

In 1998, he won the Man Booker Prize for Amsterdam. His next novel, Atonement (2001), received considerable acclaim; Time magazine named it the best novel of 2002, and it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2007, the critically acclaimed movie Atonement, directed by Joe Wright and starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, was released in cinemas worldwide. His next work, Saturday (2005), follows an especially eventful day in the life of a successful neurosurgeon. Saturday won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 2005, and his novel On Chesil Beach (2007) was shortlisted for the 2007 Booker Prize.

McEwan has also written a number of produced screenplays, a stage play, children's fiction, an oratorio and a libretto titled For You with music composed by Michael Berkeley.

In 2008 at the Hay Festival, McEwan gave a surprise reading of his then novel-in-progress, eventually published as Solar (2010). The novel includes a scientist hoping to save the planet from the threat of climate change and got its inspiration from a 2005 Cape Farewell expedition. McEwan along with fellow artists and scientists spent several weeks aboard a ship near the north pole.

McEwan's twelfth novel, Sweet Tooth (2012), is historical in nature and set in the 1970. In an interview with the Scotsman newspaper, McEwan revealed that the impetus for writing the novel was a way for him to write a "disguised autobiography." McEwan's 13th novel, The Children Act (2014), is about a high court judge.

Controversy
In 2006 McEwan was accused of plagiarism, specifically a passage in Atonement that closely echoed one from a 2012 memoir, No Time for Romance, by Lucilla Andrews. McEwan acknowledged using the book as a source for his work; in fact, he had included a brief note at the end of the book referring to Andrews's autobiography, among several other works. Writing in the Guardian in November 2006, a month after Andrews' death, McEwan professed innocence of plagiarism while acknowledging his debt to the author.

The incident recalled critical controversy over his debut novel The Cement Garden, key plot elements that closely mirrored some of those in Our Mother's House, a 1963 novel by Julian Gloag, which had also been made into a film. McEwan denied charges of plagiarism, claiming he was unaware of the earlier work.

In 2011 McEwan caused controversy when he accepted the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society. In the face of pressure from groups and individuals opposed to the Israeli government, specifically British Writers in Support of Palestine (BWISP), McEwan wrote a letter to the Guardian in which he said...

There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics, and for me the emblem in this respect is Daniel Barenboim's West-Eastern Divan Orchestra—surely a beam of hope in a dark landscape, though denigrated by the Israeli religious right and Hamas. If BWISP is against this particular project, then clearly we have nothing more to say to each other.

He announced that he would donate the ten thousand dollar prize money to Combatants for Peace, an organization that brings together Israeli ex-soldiers and Palestinian ex-fighters.

Recognition
McEwan has been nominated for the Man Booker prize six times to date, winning the Prize for Amsterdam in 1998. His other nominations were for The Comfort of Strangers (1981, Shortlisted), Black Dogs (1992, Shortlisted), Atonement (2001, Shortlisted), Saturday (2005, Longlisted), and On Chesil Beach (2007, Shortlisted). McEwan also received nominations for the Man Booker International Prize in 2005 and 2007.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg, in 1999. He is also a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association. He was awarded a CBE in 2000. In 2005, he was the first recipient of Dickinson College's Harold and Ethel L. Stellfox Visiting Scholar and Writers Program Award, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, U.S. In 2008, McEwan received an honorary degree of Doctor of Literature by University College, London, where he used to teach English literature. In 2008, The Times (of London) featured him on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Personal
McEwan has been married twice. His 13-year marriage to spiritual healer and therapist Penny Allen ended in 1995 and was followed by a bitter custody battle over their two sons. His second wife, Annalena McAfee, was formerly the editor of the Guardian's Review section.

In 2002, McEwan discovered that he had a brother who had been given up for adoption during World War II when his mother was married to a different man. After her first husband was killed in combat, McEwan's mother married her lover, and Ian was born a few years later. The brothers are in regular contact, and McEwan has written a foreword to Sharp's memoir. (Excerpted and adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/4/2014.)

Book Reviews
Vivacious and sprawling, a beautifully and compellingly written novel.... [His] achievement is the brilliant creation of a flawed, larger than life character who all but walks off the page to shake your hand.
Times (London)

Despite the book's somber, scientific backdrop (and global warming here is little but that), Solar is Mr. McEwan's funniest novel yet—a novel that in tone and affect often reads more like something by Zoe Heller or David Lodge.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

McEwan writes sentences of such witty elegance that the loss of John Updike seems a little easier to bear.... [He] comes to this [climate change] debate with considerable sophistication.
Washington Post

Artistically ambitious [and] seriously entertaining... In Solar [McEwan has] elegantly discovered a terrible truth: that comedy is the only possible way to deal with the searing specter stalking the planet.
Wall Street Journal

Deft... McEwan’s background research is so seamlessly displayed that scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technoloy might wonder if he’s nicked their notes. But where Solar really succeeds—beyond the dark comedy—is the author’s ability to reveal the nature of the climate conundrum in the very human life of his protagonist.
Time

Beard is a fascinatingly repulsive protagonist, but he can't sustain a novel broken.... The scientific material is absorbing, but the interpersonal portions are much less so—troublesome, since McEwan seems to prefer the latter—making for an inconsistent novel that one finishes feeling unpleasantly glacial.
Publishers Weekly

[The] writing is beautiful and precise but [the] plot is encumbered by the details of Beard's self-absorbed, narcissistic life. Recommended only for inclusive collections, to satisfy demand for British fiction, and where McEwan does well. —Sandy Glover, Camas P.L., WA
Library Journal

While most critics on either side of the pond praised the author's intelligent plot (especially his command of science) and ample storytelling gifts, the majority agreed that Solar is not his best novel to date.
Bookmarks Magazine

Customarily, McEwan’s novels spring from a catastrophic incident in someone’s life, either a calamity that causes physical distress or a psychological trespass that causes emotional instability.... In his new novel, McEwan outdoes himself in terms of catastrophic occurrences.... [R]readers are taxed to even care about these crises. This draggy novel stands in stark contrast to its many beautiful predecessors.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Beard loves physics in part because he believes that it is “free of human taint” (p. 10). In what ways does the novel complicate this belief? In what sense is Beard’s own work “tainted” by human entanglements?

2. The narrative structure of Solar is mostly chronological. What effects does McEwan achieve by occasionally departing from a straightforward chronological progression?

3. Beard claims he does not believe in the possibility of “profound inner change” (p. 77). Does he remain unchanged over the course of the novel?

4. How does McEwan manage to make Beard such a sympathetic character despite his many foibles? What are his most salient character flaws?

5. Why is Beard so attached to preserving what he calls his “unshareable core”? (p. 307). Why does he find it impossible to tell Melissa that he loves her? Why do his marriages keep falling apart?

6. In what ways is Solar a satirical novel? What are its main satirical targets? How, for example, do postmodernists come off in the book?

7. What are some of the funniest moments in Solar? How does McEwan create such brilliant comedic effects?

8. Look at the encounters between art and science in the novel, those occasions when Beard squares off with people from the humanities—novelists, folklorists, postmodern feminists, etc. Who gets the better of these confrontations? Is the book as a whole making a point through its depiction of these encounters?

9. What is the significance of the entropy in the boot room on board the ship that is holding the conference on climate change? What does this chaos and carelessness suggest about humanity’s ability to stop global warming?

10. Beard has a remarkably clear conscience; he is largely untroubled by his affairs and deceits, his theft of Aldous’s ideas, his framing of Tarpin, etc. Why is he so free of the guilt that might afflict most other men?

11. Several times during the course of the novel it appears that public infamy—born of journalists’ insatiable desire for controversy and Beard’s own willingness to step into it—will doom Beard’s career. What enables him to emerge from these disasters relatively unscathed? Will he be as lucky getting out of the mess he’s created at the very end of the book? 12. How surprising is the ending of the novel, particularly the final sentence? What is the swelling sensation that Beard feels in his heart as his daughter approaches him? What is likely to happen to Beard next?

13. How does the appendix containing the presentation speech for Beard’s Nobel Prize alter the way Beard is finally viewed? Why would McEwan choose to attach this appendix to the body of the novel?

14. Solar is in many ways a picaresque and at times farcical novel, and yet it also engages a theme of major importance—global warming. What is the connection between personal and planetary catastrophe in the novel, between the meltdown of Beard’s personal and professional life and the kind of greed, dishonesty, rationalization, and failure to face facts that has resulted in the climate crisis? What is the significance, in this context, of Beard’s inability to moderate his eating habits and his sexual pursuits?

15. What does Solar contribute to our understanding of climate change?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Solitude of Prime Numbers
Paolo Giordano, 2010
Penguin Group USA
271 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780670021482

Summary
Alice and Mattia are both misfits who seem destined to be alone. Haunted by childhood tragedies that mark their lives, they cannot reach out to anyone else. When Alice and Mattia meet as teenagers, they recognize in each other a kindred, damaged spirit.

When Mattia accepts a research position that takes him thousands of miles away, the two are forced to separate. Then a chance occurrence reunites them, forcing a lifetime of concealed emotion to the surface. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1982
• Where—Turin, Italy
• Education—N/A
• Awards—Primio Stega (Italy)
• Currently—lives in Turin, Italy

Paolo Giordano is a professional physicist in particle physics. The Solitude of Prime Numbers, his first novel, took Italy by storm where it has sold over a million copies. It is being translated into thirty languages and has sold all over the world. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
[A] flawlessly smooth American English version by Shaun Whiteside.... Writers and filmmakers have mined the romance of the "outsider" for decades and longer. But Giordano deromanticizes social alienation. Much of the pathos in these pages comes from the pain his emotionally crippled characters inflict on the people who care about them, people who don't understand that Mattia and Alice are unreachable.... The story—the explanation, really—of how two people come to find solitude more comforting than companionship is the subtle work of Giordano's haunting novel, a finely tuned machine powered by the perverse mechanics of need.
Richard Eder - New York Times

The fascination of Giordano's writing lies in his deft delineation of the personalities congealed in these frozen figures. Mattia and Alice emerge like ice sculptures against a human backdrop that the author animates, but which the characters themselves don't treat as real. They stand apart, outside — by choice and by compulsion. Writers and filmmakers have mined the romance of the "outsider" for decades and longer. But Giordano deromanticizes social alienation. Much of the pathos in these pages comes from the pain his emotionally crippled characters inflict on the people who care about them, people who don't understand that Mattia and Alice are unreachable. Trapped in closed circuits of self-involvement, they resemble intelligent, defective automatons who inspire emotions in others that they cannot return.... The story — the explanation, really — of how two people come to find solitude more comforting than companionship is the subtle work of Giordano's haunting novel, a finely tuned machine powered by the perverse mechanics of need.
Liesl Schillinger - New York Times Book Review

A very accomplished book...A melancholic, but strangely beautiful, read. Shaun Whiteside's translation is exemplary and the acute descriptions of teenage competitiveness, angst and aspiration bring to mind Alan Warner's writing.
Guardian (UK)

In clear, heartbreakingly precise prose, the youngest ever winner of the prestigious Premio Strega (the Italian Man Booker) explores how trauma and guilt can capsize emotional stability and leave the vulnerable in a wash of unease and loss…a stunning achievement.
Daily Mail (UK)

Giordano's passionate evocation of being young and in despair will resonate strongly with readers under 30. Alas, overbearing parents, special-needs siblings, cruel classmates, physical and sexual insecurities, guilt, loneliness and grief are universal plagues.
Dierdre Donahue - USA Today

The misleading cover of the American edition features a photograph of two peas in a pod. But in truth, Alice and Mattia are only alike insofar as how strange and singular they are. They're twin primes, if you want to get fancy. Primes, Giordano writes, are "suspicious and solitary numbers," divisible only by one and by themselves. Twin primes "are close to each other, almost neighbors, but between them there is always an even number" that prevents them from truly touching." Trust Giordano on this one he's a professional physicist. Also, there are 271 pages in this singular novel. You do the math.
Entertainment Weekly

Italian author and mathematician Giordano follows two scarred people whose lives intersect but can't seem to join in his cerebral yet touching debut. Alice and Mattia, both survivors of childhood traumas, are the odd ones out amid the adolescent masses in their high school. Mattia has never recovered from the loss of his sister, while Alice still suffers the effects of a skiing accident that damaged her physically and stunted her ability to trust. Now teenagers, Mattia, also addicted to self-injury, has withdrawn into a world of numbers and math, and Alice gains control through starving herself and photography. When they meet, they recognize something primal in each other, but timing and awkwardness keep their friendship on tenuous ground until, years later, their lives come together one last time. Giordano uses Mattia and Alice's trajectory to ask whether there are some people—the prime numbers among us—who are destined to be alone, or whether two primes can come together. The novel's bleak subject matter is rendered almost beautiful by Giordano's spare, intense focus on his two characters.
Publishers Weekly

Just as a prime number is divisible only by one and itself, so, too, are Mattia and Alice both "primes": social misfits unable to fit others into their lives. Giordano's debut novel, winner of Italy's Premio Strega Award, explores these fascinating characters' inability to overcome the tragedies of their childhoods to form lasting bonds with their families and friends, or with each other. The author's straightforward and concise approach to storytelling is refreshing; actor/narrator Luke Daniels engagingly presents the material. Featuring complex characters worthy of discussion, this short work of literary fiction would make a great book-club pick. —Johannah Genett, Hennepin Cty. Libs., Minneapolis
Library Journal

Two traumatized loners who meet as teens spend years grappling with a powerful connection that terrifies them both. It's love, or something like it, for 15-year-old Alice Della Rocca when she first lays eyes on Mattia Balossino in the halls of her school. She recognizes a kindred spirit in the awkward, intelligent boy, who sports a bandage on his hand, the result of a shocking self-harming episode. Anorexic, with a bad leg from a childhood ski accident, Alice insinuates herself into Mattia's life in spite of the wall he has put up around himself, and the two settle into an odd but lasting friendship. Preferring not to be touched and feeling most at home in his math studies, Mattia comes to see both himself and Alice as "twin prime" numbers-similar, but always separated. Eventually, after graduating from college, he reveals to Alice the awful secret behind his cutting habit. At the age of seven he left his retarded twin sister Michela in a local park to attend a birthday party, and she was never seen again. His confession brings the two closer, but soon after Mattia takes a job at a university overseas, in part to escape his feelings for Alice. Once there he flourishes in his career while carefully avoiding personal entanglements. Alice in turn settles down with an outgoing doctor she believes can give her a normal life. But the two never forget each other, and when Alice's life takes a difficult turn she summons Mattia back to Italy. He comes, knowing full well that surrendering to his attraction to her holds equal parts pain and pleasure. A bestseller in Europe, winner of the Premio Strega in the author's native Italy, this compelling debut shows a remarkable sensitivity and maturity inthe depiction of its damaged soulmates. Fragile, unconventional love story by a talent to watch.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. What pleasure or power do Mattia and Alice get from harming their bodies? Think about the moments in the novel when these acts occur. Do you think they are in response to something and, if so, what?

2. There is a brief moment at Viola’s party where Alice and Mattia walk together and their respective scars seem to melt into one another and disappear. How? In what other ways are Mattia and Alice complementary?

3. Examine the relationship between Alice and Viola. Based on Alice’s feelings toward Viola and Viola’s treatment of Alice, what do you think about Alice’s actions when they meet later in life?

4. What is it about adolescence that makes people so cruel? What was your own adolescence like? Did Mattia’s and Alice’s experience with their peers echo your own in any way?

5. Where are the parents in this novel? What presence or power do they assert? Why?

6. Was Mattia’s action with his sister understandable? Was he aware of the possible consequences or not? Should children be held accountable when their actions have such severe consequences?

7. One of Alice’s few pleasures in life is photography, an art that consists of capturing a moment and presenting it according to one’s own perspective. Why is this pursuit appropriate for Alice?

8. Mattia believes that “feeling special is the worst kind of cage that a person can build.” What do you think he means by this?

9. Do you think Alice really sees Michela in the hospital or was she hallucinating? Why?

10. Examine the last paragraph of the novel. What is being said here? What happens to Alice? What happens to Mattia?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Some Luck (Last Hundred Years Trilogy, 1)
Jane Smiley, 2014
Knopf Doubleday
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307700315

Summary
From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize: a powerful, engrossing new novel—the life and times of a remarkable family over three transformative decades in America.

On their farm in Denby, Iowa, Rosanna and Walter Langdon abide by time-honored values that they pass on to their five wildly different children: from Frank, the handsome, willful first born, and Joe, whose love of animals and the land sustains him, to Claire, who earns a special place in her father’s heart.

Each chapter in Some Luck covers a single year, beginning in 1920, as American soldiers like Walter return home from World War I, and going up through the early 1950s, with the country on the cusp of enormous social and economic change.

As the Langdons branch out from Iowa to both coasts of America, the personal and the historical merge seamlessly: one moment electricity is just beginning to power the farm, and the next a son is volunteering to fight the Nazis; later still, a girl you’d seen growing up now has a little girl of her own, and you discover that your laughter and your admiration for all these lives are mixing with tears.;

Some Luck delivers on everything we look for in a work of fiction. Taking us through cycles of births and deaths, passions and betrayals, among characters we come to know inside and out, it is a tour de force that stands wholly on its own.

But it is also the first part of a dazzling epic trilogy—a literary adventure that will span a century in America: an astonishing feat of storytelling by a beloved writer at the height of her powers. (From the publisher.)

This is the first volume of the Last Hundred Years Trilogy. The second is Early Warning, published in April, 2015, and the third is Golden Age, published in October, 2015.

Author Bio
• Birth—September 26, 1949
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Rasied—Webster Groves, Missouri
• Education—B.A., Vassar College; M.A., M.F.A, and Ph.D., Iowa University
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize, 1992; National Book Critics Circle Award, 1991
• Currently—lives in Northern California

Jane Smiley is the author of numerous works of fiction, including The Age of Grief, The Greenlanders, Ordinary Love & Good Will, A Thousand Acres (for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize), and Moo. She lives in northern California. (From the publisher.)

More
Jane Smiley is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist.

Born in Los Angeles, California, Smiley grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, and graduated from John Burroughs School. She obtained a B.A. at Vassar College, then earned an M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. While working towards her doctorate, she also spent a year studying in Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar.

Smiley published her first novel, Barn Blind, in 1980, and won a 1985 O. Henry Award for her short story "Lily", which was published in the Atlantic Monthly. Her best-selling A Thousand Acres, a story based on William Shakespeare's King Lear, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992. It was adapted into a film of the same title in 1997. In 1995 she wrote her sole television script produced, for an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street. Her novella The Age of Grief was made into the 2002 film The Secret Lives of Dentists.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), is a non-fiction meditation on the history and the nature of the novel, somewhat in the tradition of E. M. Forster's seminal Aspects of the Novel, that roams from eleventh century Japan's Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji to twenty-first century Americans chick lit.

From 1981 to 1996, she taught undergrad and graduate creative writing workshops at Iowa State University. She continued teaching at ISU even after moving her primary residence to California.

In 2001, Smiley was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
(Starred review.) The saga of an Iowa farm family might not seem like an exciting premise, but Smiley makes it just that, conjuring a world—time, place, people—and an engaging story that makes readers eager to know what happens next. Smiley plans to extend the tale of the Langdon family well into the 21st century; she’s off to a very strong start.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) [A] wide-angle view of mid-century America. Told in beautiful, you-are-there language, the narrative lets ordinary events accumulate to give us a significant feel of life at the time, with the importance and dangers of farming particularly well portrayed. In the end, though, this is the story of parents and children, of hope and disappointment. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal

(Starred review.) Tremendous.... Smiley is a seductive writer in perfect command of every element of language....and she returns to that fertile ground to tell the stories of the Langdons, a clan deeply in accord with the land.... As barbed in her wit as ever, Smiley is also munificently tender....a supremely nuanced portrait of a family spanning three pivotal American decades. It will be on the top of countless to-read lists.—Donna Seaman
Booklist

(Starred review.) [W]hen Rosanna and Walter Langdon look at the 23 people gathered at Thanksgiving in 1948 and "agreed in an instant: something had created itself from nothing," it’s a moment of honest sentiment, honestly earned. An expansive tale showing this generally flinty author in a mellow mood: surprising, but engaging.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. What do you think the title means? Whose luck does it refer to? Is it only good or bad luck, or does the word “luck” shift in connotation as the novel goes forward?

2. Each chapter in the novel takes place over the course of one year. How does Smiley use this structure to propel her story?

3. Rosanna assigns personality traits to each of her children in infancy. When those traits prove true, do you think it’s because of nurture—her and Walter’s influence—or nature—personalities fully formed at birth?

4. How does Smiley use the children’s points of view at all ages—including when they are very small—to show their development and coming-of-age in real time? What are some of the memorable traits that carry from infancy to young adulthood for each of the five children?

5.   How does Mary Elizabeth’s death affect Rosanna? How does it change her relationship with the children who follow?

6. Throughout the story, Frank is described as persistent, if not outright stubborn. How does this quality help him in his life? Does it hinder him?

7. Variations on the story of Lucky Hans appear several times in the novel, including the version told by Opa to Frank in 1924, Lillian’s version remembered by Henry in 1947, and Arthur’s tale of Frank and the golden egg in 1952. What point is Smiley making by changing the mythology?

8. Over the course of the three decades Some Luck spans, various characters embrace or resist new technology—Walter and the tractor, Rosanna and electricity, Joey’s farming techniques, Frank’s study of German warfare. How does Smiley use their reactions to deepen our understanding of these characters and to show the passage of time?

9. On page 104, Eloise says to Frank, “Almost everyone sees things, but not everyone notices them.” What does she mean, and why is it fitting that she says this to Frank, of all her nephews and nieces? How does Frank exemplify the difference between seeing and noticing, especially as he uses his keen sense of “vision” to lead him throughout his life?

10.   What does Walter think and feel during the scene at the well? What do his decisions at that moment say about his own personality and the circumstances of the times? Why doesn’t he tell Rosanna about it until many years later?

11. What are examples of the different kinds of secrets that come in the novel—from those held by individuals to those of institutions, such as banks or the government? Do you have the sense that the book suggests a hierarchy of secrecy, or are all secrets equally dangerous?

12. How do you understand Andy’s identity crises and her other internal conflicts within the context of the novel? How do they reflect her relationship with Frank as well as the political and sociological forces at work during these beginning days of the Cold War?

13. What role do faith and religion play in the early parts of the novel? What about for the subsequent generation? Would you say that religion is related to the theme of luck?

14. Joey is distraught to learn of Jake’s death on page 229. Later, on page 373, he tells Lois, “I don’t get over things.” Is this why he’s so suited to farming? And does he, eventually, learn to get over things?

15. On Walter’s forty-seventh birthday, he lets each of his children select an item from a box he’d kept locked away. Joey chooses the sprig of lavender, Lillian the oriole feather, and Henry the gold coin; Claire was given the handkerchief; and Rosanna saves the photograph of Walter during the Great War for Frank. What do these totems represent?

16. Rosanna reflects on page 264, “Well, that’s what a war did for you—it made you look around at your shabby house and your modest family and give thanks for what you had and others had lost.... It made you stop talking about what you wished for, because, in the end, that might bring bad luck.” Frank was lucky and survived the war, but he’s far from unscathed when he returns home. Do his experiences verify or contradict Rosanna’s claim about the effects of war? How does what happened to him in Europe ripple throughout the rest of his life, as well as the lives of his family?

17.   How do the generations of men engage differently in the wars of their times? What does their involvement show about their respective personalities, the nature of war, and America’s evolving role in world conflict?

18. How does parenting change from one generation to the next? Compare Lillian and Andy to Rosanna, and Arthur and Frank to Walter. And what about the roles of the sexes?

19.   On page 392, Walter walks near the Osage-orange hedge: “Every year, Joe said, as Walter always had, that he was going to pull it up, but he never did—the roots had probably spread everywhere, and taking the thing out would be a major pain in the neck. There was always a reason not to bother. Walter touched one of the thorns. He was used to the hedge, but the thorns still seemed menacing.” What, if anything, do you think the Osage-orange hedge stands for, in the book as a whole? What metaphors are at work here?

20. By the end of Some Luck, Henry is just becoming an adult and Claire is still a child. What do you think might be ahead for them in the next book(s) of this trilogy?

21. Did your knowledge that Some Luck is the first of a trilogy affect your reading of the novel? In what ways is the conclusion of the book definitive, full circle, and in what ways does it leave things open-ended?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Someday, Someday, Maybe
Lauren Graham, 2013
Ballentine Books
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345532749

Summary
From Lauren Graham, the beloved star of Gilmore Girls and Parenthood, comes a witty, charming, and hilariously relatable debut novel about a struggling young actress trying to get ahead―and keep it together―in New York City.

It’s January 1995, and Franny Banks has just six months left of the three-year deadline she set for herself when she came to New York, dreaming of Broadway and doing “important” work. But all she has to show for her efforts so far is a part in an ad for ugly Christmas sweaters, and a gig waiting tables at a comedy club. Her roommates―her best friend Jane, and Dan, an aspiring sci-fi writer―are supportive, yet Franny knows a two-person fan club doesn’t exactly count as success.

Everyone tells her she needs a backup plan, and though she can almost picture moving back home and settling down with her perfectly nice ex-boyfriend, she’s not ready to give up on her goal of having a career like her idols Diane Keaton and Meryl Streep. Not just yet. But while she dreams of filling their shoes, in the meantime, she’d happily settle for a speaking part in almost anything—and finding a hair product combination that works.

Everything is riding on the upcoming showcase for her acting class, where she’ll finally have a chance to perform for people who could actually hire her. And she can’t let herself be distracted by James Franklin, a notorious flirt and the most successful actor in her class, even though he’s suddenly started paying attention. Meanwhile, her bank account is rapidly dwindling, her father wants her to come home, and her agent doesn’t return her calls. But for some reason, she keeps believing that she just might get what she came for.

Someday, Someday, Maybe is a story about hopes and dreams, being young in a city, and wanting something deeply, madly, desperately. It’s about finding love, finding yourself, and perhaps most difficult of all in New York City, finding an acting job. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—March 16, 1967
• Where—Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
• Raised—outside Washington, DC
• Education—B.A., Barnard College; M.F.A., Southern
Methodist University
• Currently—lives in New York City and Los Angeles, California

CLauren Helen Graham is an American actress, producer and novelist. She is best known for playing Lorelai Gilmore on the WB Network dramedy series Gilmore Girls and Sarah Braverman on Parenthood.

Graham was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. Her mother, Donna Grant, was a fashion buyer, and her father, Lawrence Graham, was a candy industry lobbyist, who is the current president for National Confectioners Association. Graham was raised Catholic, and has Irish ancestry. She was five years old when her parents were separated and moved to Washington, D.C., where her father became a congressional staffer. Her mother now lives in London. Graham has a half-sister and a half-brother from her father's second marriage and a British half-sister from her mother's second marriage, Shade Grant, who works at a talent agency.

As a girl, Graham rode horses competitively, but soon switched to acting, honing her talent at Langley High School, where she took part in the drill team and graduated in 1984. Graham earned her actor's equity card in 1988 after two years in summer stock at the Barn Theatre in Augusta, Michigan. She graduated from Barnard College of Columbia University in 1988 with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature. After moving to Texas in 1992, Graham earned a Master of Fine Arts in Acting Performance from Southern Methodist University.

Career
After completing her education, Graham moved back to New York City where she earned her living as a waitress and tutor teaching SAT test prep for The Princeton Review. While she aspired to become an actress, she made publicity appearances wearing the costume of Striker, the dog mascot of the US-based 1994 FIFA World Cup. In 1995, she relocated to Hollywood, California. She appeared in various commercials for products such as Dimetapp and Lean Cuisine and hosted free preview weekends on The Movie Channel.

In addition to her many guest starring and co-starring roles on prime-time television, Graham starred in four failed sitcoms, including Townies (with Molly Ringwald and Jenna Elfman), the short-lived sitcom Lush Life (with Lori Petty and Karyn Parsons), and M.Y.O.B., which was burned off by NBC in the summer months before the premiere of Gilmore Girls.

Between 1996 and 1997, Graham became a regular guest star on several hit NBC shows. She played a graduate student who caught the eye of Dick on 3rd Rock from the Sun, Richard's overly-optimistic girlfriend on Caroline in the City, and Jerry's speed-dial ranking girlfriend on Seinfeld. She played a Hollywood producer who had a love interest in Rey Curtis in a three-part episode of Law & Order, where she acted opposite Scott Cohen, who would later play one of Graham's love interests, Max Medina, on Gilmore Girls. She also portrayed an antagonizing but friendship-starved efficiency expert on Newsradio. She was meant to be the permanent replacement for the departing Newsradio regular Khandi Alexander, but viewers disliked the character.

In 2000, Graham landed her breakthrough role as Lorelai Gilmore on Gilmore Girls. For her work she received a nomination for Best Actress in a Television Series (Drama) at the 2001 Golden Globe Awards. Beginning with Season 7 episode "To Whom It May Concern" and continuing throughout the rest of the season, Graham served as a producer on Gilmore Girls. TV Guide reported that she received the position in an attempt to persuade her to sign for an eighth season.

Graham returned to her guest-starring roots when she portrayed herself in two episodes of NBC's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Graham has also appeared in the second season of Bravo's Celebrity Poker Showdown, co-hosted by Dave Foley of Newsradio. After winning her preliminary match, she came in second to another former Newsradio star, Maura Tierney, in the championship game.

Graham's film roles encompass several NYU student films and multiple major studio releases, including Sweet November, Bad Santa, The Pacifier, Because I Said So, and Evan Almighty.

Graham has said that she enjoys playing in short films, and acting in the Williamstown Theatre Festival. She has performed in numerous short films, including the 15-minute long Gnome. In 2007, Graham signed a seven-figure development deal with NBC in one of the year's richest TV talent pacts.

Graham has also worked as the voice-over announcer in national advertising for Kellogg's various Special K products, and in American Express ads introducing the Plum Card, which is targeted towards small and growing businesses.

Graham made her Broadway debut as Miss Adelaide in the revival of Guys and Dolls, which began preview performances at the Nederlander Theatre on February 5, 2009 and opened on March 1, 2009. Initial reviews for this performance have been mixed, but generally regard her fresh take on the character as a success. The production closed June 14, playing 113 shows and 28 previews.

On October 9, 2009, it was announced that Graham would replace Maura Tierney in the television series Parenthood as single mother Sarah Braverman. Tierney left the show to seek treatment for cancer. The series debuted on NBC the following year, and was later renewed for a second season.

In July 2012, Graham was a guest judge in the first episode of Season 10 of the reality television series Project Runway.

Writing
Graham's debut novel Someday, Someday, Maybe, a work based on a fictionalization of her experiences in the New York acting scene in the mid-1990s, was released in 2013.

Personal
Lauren Graham has reportedly dated Tate Donovan (2002), Matthew Perry (2003) and Marc Blucas (2005). She has been in a relationship with her Parenthood co-star Peter Krause since 2010. She owns an apartment in Manhattan and a house in Los Angeles. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/25/2013.)

Book Reviews
Graham…has smartly mined just the right details from her own experience, infusing her work with crackling dialogue and observations about show business that ring funny and true. Despite its forays into predictable chick-lit territory, her book succeeds as a winning, entertaining read largely because of Graham's confidence and ceaselessly observant wit…just like the screenwriters of the best romantic comedies, she has taken elements of the familiar and spun them into a novel that's heartfelt, hilarious and, hopefully, just the first example of what she can do with the written word.
Jen Chaney - Washington Post

With insight, care, and an abundance of humor, [Graham] demonstrates that her acting chops are not her only talent.
Library Journal

In TV-star Graham's debut, an aspiring actress runs up against a self-imposed deadline: Make it in NYC within three years, or find another profession. It's 1995, and Franny is about to give up on her goal..... It's make it or break it time, but as is sometimes the case in semiautobiographical novels, the story seems to meander aimlessly, as it might in real life. However, thanks to Graham's affection for her characters as well as her authoritative exposition of the logistics of an actor's working...life, readers will excuse the detours. An entertainment-industry coming-of-age story that manages to avoid many of the cliches of the genre by repurposing them to humorous ends.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Why do you think the author chose to tell parts of the story through pages of Franny's Filofax planner? What elements does it add to the novel?

2. Is setting a deadline on your dream a good idea? Or is it unrealistic? Do you think it ultimately helped or hindered Franny's career?

3. Although he only appears as a recorded voice on the answering machine, Clark plays an important role in the story. What does his and Franny's back-up plan represent? What does his engagement force Franny to do?

4. For parts of the novel, Franny adapts to a situation by playing a character she is not. When is she being true to herself? When is she most happy?

5. Why didn't Franny sign with Barney Sparks? What would you have done in her position?

6. Franny appreciates the bridge on the D train because it helps her put things in perspective. Do you have a D train bridge in your life? What is it?

7. Do you agree with Franny's interpretation of love triangles on page 281?

8. Penelope and Franny have an interesting relationship throughout the novel. In what ways does it change? What does Penelope help Franny understand?

9. On page 307, the taxi driver remarks, "How'd it get this far and not go pop?" Why does this resonate with Franny? What could it represent in her life?

10. What does everyone else see in Franny that she doesn't see for herself?

11. On page 335, Franny's father tells her, "Imagine the best for yourself now and then, won't you, hon?" Discuss the importance of having a positive attitude, and how this changes for Franny.

12. The characters throughout the novel have their own individual takes on authenticity. What does it mean to James? How is that different from what it means to Dan, Franny, or Penny? VVhich definition do you agree with? Is it possible to be authentic in an industry that is in itself an artificial craft?

13. How has Franny changed by the end of the novel? What were her most transforming moments? Who most strongly influenced her?

14. Of all the themes in the novel—dreams, hope, friendship, believing in yourself, etc.—which did you find the most compelling? What do you think is the takeaway lesson of the book?
(Questins issued by the publisher.)

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Someone
Alice McDermott, 2013
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374281090

Summary
An ordinary life—its sharp pains and unexpected joys, its bursts of clarity and moments of confusion—lived by an ordinary woman: this is the subject of Someone, Alice McDermott’s extraordinary return, seven years after the publication of After This. Scattered recollections—of childhood, adolescence, motherhood, old age—come together in this transformative narrative, stitched into a vibrant whole by McDermott’s deft, lyrical voice.

Our first glimpse of Marie is as a child: a girl in glasses waiting on a Brooklyn stoop for her beloved father to come home from work. A seemingly innocuous encounter with a young woman named Pegeen sets the bittersweet tone of this remarkable novel. Pegeen describes herself as an “amadan,” a fool; indeed, soon after her chat with Marie, Pegeen tumbles down her own basement stairs. The magic of McDermott’s novel lies in how it reveals us all as fools for this or that, in one way or another.

Marie’s first heartbreak and her eventual marriage; her brother’s brief stint as a Catholic priest, subsequent loss of faith, and eventual breakdown; the Second World War; her parents’ deaths; the births and lives of Marie’s children; the changing world of her Irish-American enclave in Brooklyn—McDermott sketches all of it with sympathy and insight. This is a novel that speaks of life as it is daily lived; a crowning achievement by one of the finest American writers at work today. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—June 27, 1953
• Where—Brooklyn, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., State University of New York-Oswego;
M.A., University of New Hampshire
• Awards—National Book Award; American Book Award
• Currently—lives in Bethesda, Maryland

Alice McDermott is an American writer and university professor. For her 1998 novel Charming Billy she won an American Book Award and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.

McDermott is Johns Hopkins University's Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities. Born in Brooklyn, New York, McDermott attended St. Boniface School in Elmont, New York, on Long Island (1967), Sacred Heart Academy in Hempstead (1971), and the State University of New York at Oswego, receiving her BA in 1975. She received her MA from the University of New Hampshire in 1978.

She has taught at UCSD and American University, has been a writer-in-residence at Lynchburg College and Hollins College in Virginia, and was lecturer in English at the University of New Hampshire. Her short stories have appeared in Ms., Redbook, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker and Seventeen. She has also published articles in the New York Times and Washington Post.

Ms. McDermott lives outside Washington, D.C. with her husband, a neuroscientist, and three children.

Works
• 1982—A Bigamist's Daughter
• 1987—That Night (finalist for National Book Award, Pen/Faulkner Award, and Pulitzer Prize)
• 1992—At Weddings and Wakes (finalist for Pulitzer Prize)
• 1998—Charming Billy (winner, National Book Award and American Book Award)
• 2002—Child of My Heart (nominated for International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award)
• 2006—After This (finalist for Pulitzer Prize)
• 2013—Someone
• 2017—The Ninth Hour
(Author bio from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/14/13.)

Book Reviews
[T]he novel looks back on [Marie's] life—from her childhood in prewar Brooklyn…through the years of her marriage on Long Island…to her dotage in a nursing home. As such, it has something of the quality of a slide show, but one that's a bit jumbled…Each slide, each scene, from the ostensibly inconsequential to the clearly momentous, is illuminated with equal care. The effect on the reader is of sitting alongside the narrator, sharing the task of sifting the salvaged fragments of her life, watching her puzzle over, rearrange and reconsider them—and at last, but without any particular urgency or certitude, tilting herself in the direction of finally discerning their significance. This is a quiet business, but it's the sense-making we all engage in, the narrative work that allows us to construct a coherent framework for our everyday existence. It's also a serious business, the essential work of an examined life…McDermott's excellence is on ample display here.
Leah Hager Cohen - New York Times Book Review

In this deceptively simple tour de force, McDermott lays bare the keenly observed life of Marie Commeford.... We come to feel for this unremarkable woman, whose vulnerability makes her all the more winning—and makes her worthy of our attention.... [McDermott] is such an exceptional writer: in her hands, an uncomplicated life becomes singularly fascinating.
Publishers Weekly

All people are interesting if we only know their story.... [T]his novel moves from one emotionally rich touch point to the next in a nonlinear narrative that echoes memory itself.... McDermott continues to captivate readers by delving into ordinary, daily life with skill and compassion, showing us that we can't always see at the time what will be meaningful in our lives. —Gwen Vredevoogd, Marymount Univ. Libs., Arlington, VA
Library Journal

[McDermott] follows seven decades of a Brooklyn woman's modest life to create one of the author's most trenchant explorations into the heart and soul of the 20th-century Irish-American family.... Marie's straightforward narration is interrupted with occasional jumps back and forward in time that create both a sense of foreboding and continuity as well as a meditation on the nature of sorrow....McDermott's elegy to a vanished world.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Why does the memory of Pegeen resonate so profoundly for Marie? Is there a similar story from your youth that has had a lasting effect on your life?

2. What does Marie’s mother try to teach her about becoming a fulfilled woman? What exceptional qualities does Marie’s father possess? How does their marriage shape Marie’s vision of her future?

3. Discuss the novel’s Brooklyn neighborhood as if it were a character. What are its most colorful attributes? How is it transformed over the years while Marie grows up? Do its inhabitants support one another, or is their gossip judgmental? Think about their speculation over the gender of Dora Ryan’s spouse and Bill Corrigan’s frailties.

4. Why does Marie resist her mother’s attempts to urge her to adulthood, from how to read a recipe to the importance of finding a job?

5. How is Marie able to look past the tragic death of Mrs. Hanson and focus on the loveliness of Gerty and her baby sister, Durna? Throughout her life, what beauty does Marie find in mothering?

6. What is the role of fate versus free will in Someone? What did Gabe seek and find in religion? What truths about faith did he eventually learn to embrace?

7. What did Walter Hartnett ultimately get out of his time with Marie? Was she naïve to fall for him, or was he powerfully persuasive? What made Tom Commeford a good match for her?

8. What does Marie discover about life by working for Mr. Fagin?

9. Discuss the story of Margaret Tuohy. How was Marie affected by the bishop’s choice of elegant burial clothes for his sister? What did the experience show Marie about the role of the survivor?

10. As Gabe tells the story of the woman at his first parish who bought mints before attending church each week, what is revealed about the importance of avoiding assumptions? How do perceptions and misperceptions shape the novel’s storyline?

11. What is the effect of the novel’s first-person narration? As Marie narrates her life, what changes do you notice in her view of the world—literal ones, as she endures eye surgeries, and symbolic ones?

12. Discuss Marie’s relationship with her own children. What does she do differently from her parents? What traditions does she carry on? How does McDermott capture the revelations that life and loss bring?

13. How does the depiction of Irish identity and family life in Someone compare to that in similar worlds you’ve explored in other novels by Alice McDermott?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Someone Else's Love Story
Joshilyn Jackson, 2013
HarperCollins
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062105653

Summary
For single mom Shandi Pierce, life is a juggling act. She's finishing college, raising her delightful son Nathan, and keeping the peace between her eternally warring, long-divorced parents. She's got enough to deal with before she gets caught in the middle of a stickup in a gas station and falls in love with a man named William Ashe when he steps between the armed robber and her son to shield him from danger.

Shandi doesn't know that William has his own baggage. When he looked down the barrel of the gun in the gas station he believed it was destiny: it's been exactly one year since a tragic act of physics shattered his universe. But William doesn't define destiny the way other people do—to him destiny is about choice.

Now, William and Shandi are about to meet their so-called destinies head-on, making choices that will reveal unexpected truths about love, life, and the world they think they know. (From the publisher.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Reviews
[T]here is love at [this novel’s] heart… there is much to gain from a closer read. (3 out of 4 stars)
USA Today

A surprising novel, both graceful and tender. You won’t be able to put it down.
Dallas Morning News

Someone Else’s Love Story is worth reading, even studying. Expressions of love come in many forms, as Jackson shows.
Omaha World-Herald

Joshilyn Jackson is a brilliant storyteller and has a unique gift of bringing quirkiness to her characters and a lot of twists and turns to her tale.
Wichita Falls Times Record Review

Someone Else’s Love Story is never predictable, full of humor and heart and characters you can’t help but love.
Greenville News

Witty, cleverly constructed and including a truly surprising twist, Someone Else’s Love Story turns out to be a nuanced exploration of faith, family and the things we do for love. (3 ½ stars)
People

Finely drawn characters make the miraculous plausible, from the opening hostage scene in a North Georgia convenience store to an ending that hits the mark of "surprising yet inevitable" mastered and articulated by Flannery O’Connor.
Atlanta Magazine

[W]itty and insightful.... [A]a novel at once funny and touching, whose characters’ many flaws are overshadowed by all the ways in which they look out for one another. The final denouement of Jackson’s roller-coaster love story will leave the reader both thoroughly sated and hungry for more. Publishers Weekly

[O]riginal and amusing.... [T]he plot takes an unexpected turn with the introduction of a new character late in the book. Unfortunately, the clunky transitions among narrators and jumps between the past and present distract at times from the story. Still, Jackson's many fans and those who love authentic Southern fiction should enjoy this title. —Amber McKee, Cumberland Univ. Lib., Lebanon, TN
Library Journal

There are scenes that will make you gasp, pause or even tear up as Jackson’s characters fumble toward imperfect enlightenment. Someone Else’s Love Story will delight and surprise with its unexpected compassion, empathy and humanity.
BookPage

Jackson's novel perfectly captures the flavor and rhythm of Southern life as a young woman preparing for college finds herself caught up in a real-life drama ... Wrapped in a thoughtful, often funny and insightful narrative...Jackson presents the reader with a story that is never predictable and is awash in bittersweet love, regret and the promise of what could be. A surprising novel, both graceful and tender. You won't be able to put it down.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. What does the title tell you about the story this story? What do we learn from the first line? How does the book's opening set the stage for the events that follow?

2. "That afternoon in the Circle K, I deserved to know, right off, that I had landed bang in the middle of a love story. Especially since it wasn't—it isn't—it could never be, my own. " Why could this story never be Shandi's? If it's not hers, than whose love story is it?

3. Everyone sees William as a hero for his acts during the robbery. How does William answer this? Would you call it brave? Why did Shandi have such faith that William would save them?

4. Destiny and choice are major themes in the novel. What does destiny mean to William? What about Shandi?

5. Shandi and Walcott have known each other forever. Discuss their relationship. How is it transformed? Why do we often miss the obvious in our lives?

6. How do the religious references sprinkled through the story—Natty's virgin birth for example—add a deeper level of flavor and meaning to the book?

7. Why is William angry with Bridget and not her "imaginary God"? When bad things happen most people blame God. Why? Why doesn't William?

8. Think about the novel's structure. The story moves back in forth in time between Shandi and Williams's pasts and their present. How does this form of storytelling shape your reading experience and comprehension of events as they unfold? How would the story be different if it began with William instead of Shandi?

9. How does their meeting change both William and Shandi? Would you call their meeting fate or destiny or maybe a miracle? "It isn't every day he meets a girl who killed a miracle," William thinks when he agrees to help Shandi. Why does her having "killed" a miracle so intrigue him?

10. How do each of these characters' certainties and beliefs change when they are confronted by unexpected circumstances—the robbery, the fireworks, the DNA results, meeting Natty's father for example?

11. The possibility of goodness and forgiveness are also themes in the book. Talk about how they are demonstrated in various characters' lives and experiences.

12. How many different kind of love stories are in the book? How do they all intertwine?

13. We're you surprised at the ending? Was it exactly what should happen for all the characters?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Someone Knows My Name (The Book of Negroes)
Lawrence Hill, 2007
W.W. Norton & Co.
512 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393333091

Summary
Kidnapped as a child from Africa, Aminata Diallo is enslaved in South Carolina but escapes during the chaos of the Revolutionary War. In Manhattan she becomes a scribe for the British, recording the names of blacks who have served the King and earned freedom in Nova Scotia.

But the hardship and prejudice there prompt her to follow her heart back to Africa, then on to London, where she bears witness to the injustices of slavery and its toll on her life and a whole people. It is a story that no listener, and no reader, will ever forget. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Reared—Toronto, Canada
• Education—B.A., Laval University (Quebec); M.A., Johns
Hopkins University (USA)
• Awards—Rogers Writers' Trust Prize; Commonwealth
Writers' Prize (both Canadian).
• Currently—lives in Burlington, Ontario, Canada

Lawrence Hill is the author of the novels, Someone Knows My Name (published as The Book of Negroes in Cabada), Any Known Blood and Some Great Thing and of the nonfiction work The Deserter's Tale (with Joshua Key). He lives in Ontario, Canada. (From the publisher.)

More
Lawrence Hill is an award-winning Canadian novelist and memoirist. He is best known for the 2001 memoir Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada and the 2007 novel Someone Knows My Name (The Book of Negroes in Canada).

Hill, the son of social scientist and public servant Daniel G. Hill and social activist Donna Hill and the brother of singer-songwriter Dan Hill, grew up in the Don Mills neighbourhood of Toronto. He currently lives in Burlington, Ontario, with his wife and five children.

In 2007, Hill collaborated with former US-Army Soldier (now deserter) Joshua Key to write Key's account of the Iraq War. His book The Deserter's Tale, the story of an ordinary soldier who walked away from the war in Iraq is the result of their interviews and meetings.

Someone Knows / Book of Negroes was longlisted for the Giller Prize and won the 2007 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the 2009 edition of Canada Reads.

Hill also won the 2005 National Magazine Award for best essay for his work entitled "Is Africa's Pain Black America's Burden?", published in The Walrus. He also wrote the screenplay for Seeking Salvation, a documentary film about the Black church in Canada. Seeking Salvation won the American Wilbur Award for best national television documentary in 2005. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
In Lawrence Hill’s wonderfully written fictional slave narrative, the protagonist exhibits similar “proof on my flesh” of slavery’s barbarity.... In Someone Knows My Name, as in the slave narratives that inspired it, language is power. The slave owner marks the bodies of those he owns, but when the enslaved take possession of words, spoken and—especially—written, they move toward freedom. The young Frederick Douglass’s master knew this, admonishing his wife that if she taught Douglass how to read, “there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.”
Nancy Kline - New York times Book Review

Lawrence Hill's historical intelligence was already manifest in his 1997 novel, Any Known Blood, in which he used racial and geographic borders to explore and transform a Canadian story. In his new novel, Someone Knows My Name, Hill has extended his range and refined his craft to produce a compelling narrative that moves from mid-18th-century West Africa to South Carolina, Manhattan, Nova Scotia, Sierra Leone and London…Hill's hugely impressive historical work is completely engrossing and deserves a wide, international readership.
Delia Jarrett-Macauley - Washington Post

Stunning, wrenching and inspiring, the fourth novel by Canadian novelist Hill (Any Known Blood) spans the life of Aminata Diallo, born in Bayo, West Africa, in 1745. The novel opens in 1802, as Aminata is wooed in London to the cause of British abolitionists, and begins reflecting on her life. Kidnapped at the age of 11 by British slavers, Aminata survives the Middle Passage and is reunited in South Carolina with Chekura, a boy from a village near hers. Her story gets entwined with his, and with those of her owners: nasty indigo producer Robinson Appleby and, later, Jewish duty inspector Solomon Lindo. During her long life of struggle, she does what she can to free herself and others from slavery, including learning to read and teaching others to, and befriending anyone who can help her, black or white. Hill handles the pacing and tension masterfully, particularly during the beginnings of the American revolution, when the British promise to free Blacks who fight for the British: Aminata's related, eventful travels to Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone follow. In depicting a woman who survives history's most trying conditions through force of intelligence and personality, Hill's book is a harrowing, breathtaking tour de force.
Publishers Weekly

Around 1745, young Aminata Diallo is abducted from her West African home and sold into slavery in South Carolina. An observant and highly intelligent child, she quickly learns not only how to speak English but also how to read and write. On a trip to New York City with her master, Aminata escapes during chaotic anti-British demonstrations. She helps the embattled British compile "The Book of Negroes," a list of thousands of black Loyalists, and these slaves are transported to Nova Scotia and granted their freedom. Later some of them are sent to Sierra Leone as part of an abolitionist social experiment, and Aminata finally realizes her long-held dream of returning home. By setting the book early in the Revolutionary period, Canadian novelist Hill (Any Known Blood) finds something new in the familiar slave narrative. Unfortunately, his didactic purpose gets the upper hand and overwhelms the story. Aminata is simply too noble to be believable, and other major characters are mainly symbolic. Nevertheless, Hill's fascinating source material makes this a good choice for book clubs and discussion groups.
Edward St. John - Library Journal

(Adult/High School.) During the 18th century, Aminata Diallo is kidnapped from her village, survives the ocean voyage on a slave ship, is purchased by an indigo producer from South Carolina, and gets caught in the Revolutionary War. Later, she is traded to a Jewish duty inspector. She marries Chekura, a boy from a neighboring village, and gives birth to two children. Aminata's trials continue as she and her husband take part in Britain's promise of freedom for Loyalists by traveling to Nova Scotia, where she continues to long to return to Africa, but ends up in London instead. Throughout the story, her major assets are her ability to read and write and to serve as a midwife, which help in her quest for freedom. With mature themes (e.g., a rape scene on the ship, descriptive killings, and sexual situations), this book is suited for older teens. Hill clearly researched multiple people and sources to provide an accurate account of Aminata's heroic journey and brings to life crucial world history. Teens who enjoyed Sharon Draper's Copper Sun (2006) will appreciate this page-turning novel. —Gregory Lum, Jesuit High School, Portland, OR
School Library Journal

Discussion Questions
Introduction: Years before I began writing Someone Knows My Name, I came across two startling discoveries in a scholarly work. I read that thousands of African Americans fled slavery to serve the British, who promised to liberate them in return for service during the American Revolution. When the British lost the war, they sent those African Americans who could show that they had served the British for at least one year to Canada. Three thousand names were entered into a 150-page military ledger known as the "Book of Negroes," and, in the last half of 1783, the former slaves set sail to Nova Scotia.

Ten years later, many of these same former slaves were so disgruntled with the hardships they encountered in Canada—slavery, indentured servitude, anti-black race riots, and segregation—that in 1792 they accepted an offer from the British government and sailed to Africa in a flotilla of fifteen ships, to form the colony of Freetown in Sierra Leone. This was the first back-to-Africa exodus in the history of the Americas, and it turns out that a number of the adults swept up in this migration had actually been born in Africa.

As I began to write Someone Knows My Name, I imagined the life of an old woman on one of those vessels carrying liberated African Americans from Halifax to Freetown. What would she look like? Where had she been born in Africa? How had she been stolen into slavery, where had she lived in South Carolina, and how on earth did she find herself, in late life, sailing back to Africa from Canada? Someone Knows My Name is my attempt to give this fascinating but little-known story a human face. I gave the protagonist, Aminata Diallo, my eldest daughter's middle name. It is the story of a heroic woman in the eighteenth century, and I felt that the best way to lift her off the page was to love her like I love my own daughter. And indeed I loved Aminata from the moment I first started imagining her face, hearing her voice, seeing the way she walked with a platter balanced on her head.

My daughter, Genevieve Aminata Hill, was eleven years old when I started to write this story. The same age as my character when she is kidnapped by slave traders. What if this had happened to my own child? Aminata, the character, grew up under my tutelage. She learned to walk and then to read and to navigate her way in the world, and now this fictional creation of mine is all grown up and gone from the house. She belongs to the world of readers now, and I hope she will be well loved.

1. What is the significance of the title Someone Knows My Name?

2. What is your opinion about Hill's suggestion that Aminata's very youthfulness at the time of her abduction enables her emotional survival, even as some of the adults in her world show signs of crumbling?

3. The section of the book set in the sea islands of South Carolina depicts eighteenth-century indigo plantations where African American slaves and overseers are left largely to their own devices during the "sick season"—a good half of the year. To what degree does this cultural and social isolation allow for an interesting development and interaction of African American characters in the novel?

4. Aminata suffers some horrifying cruelties at the hands of her captors, but her relationships with her masters aren't always what you'd expect. How does Aminata's story reveal the complex ways that people react to unnatural, unequal relationships?

5. During the course of the story, Aminata marries and has a family. Although she is separated from them, she is reunited from time to time with her husband and one of her children. What does the work tell us about the nature of love and loyalty?

6. Aminata struggles to learn and master all sorts of systems of communicating in the new world: black English, white English, and Gullah, as well as understanding the uses of European money and maps. How do her various coping mechanisms shed light on her character?

7. Aminata longs for her home. What is the meaning of home in the novel, and how does the meaning change as the novel progresses?

8. What does the novel tell us about survival? Which characters fare best and why?

9. As Aminata moves from slavery to freedom, she finds that freedom is sometimes an empty promise. At what points in the novel did you feel this was true? Did it change how you thought about the meaning of freedom?

10. Aminata is a woman of extraordinary abilities—she is skillful with languages, literate, a speedy learner, a born negotiator. Why did Hill choose this story to be told by such a remarkable woman? What effect do her abilities have on the shaping of the story?

11. What do you think would be the challenges involved in writing a realistically painful novel that still offers enough light and hope to maintain the reader's interest and spirit?

12. What lessons does Aminata's tale hold for us in today's world?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Something Blue
Emily Giffin, 2005
St. Martin's Press
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312323868

Summary
Darcy Rhone thought she had it all figured out: the more beautiful the girl, the more charmed her life. Never mind substance. Never mind playing by the rules. Never mind karma.

But Darcy’s neat, perfect world turns upside down when her best friend, Rachel White, the plain-Jane “good girl,” steals her fiancé, while Darcy finds herself completely alone for the first time in her life…with a baby on the way.

Darcy tries to recover, fleeing to her childhood friend living in London and resorting to her tried-and-true methods for getting what she wants. But as she attempts to recreate her glamorous life on a new continent, Darcy finds that her rules no longer apply. It is only then that Darcy can begin her journey toward self-awareness, forgiveness, and motherhood.

Something Blue is a novel about one woman’s surprising discoveries about the true meaning of friendship, love, and happily-ever-after. It’s a novel for anyone who has ever, even secretly, wondered if the last thing you want is really the one thing you need. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—March 20, 1979
• Where—Baltimore, Maryland, USA
• Raised—Naperville, Illinois
• Education—B.A., Wake Forest University; J.D., University of Virginia
• Currenbtly—lives in Atlanta, Georgia

Emily Giffin is the bestselling American author of eight novels commonly categorized as "chick lit." More specifically, Giffin writes stories about relationships and the full array of emotions experienced within them.

Giffin earned her undergraduate degree at Wake Forest University, where she also served as manager of the basketball team, the Demon Deacons. She then attended law school at the University of Virginia. After graduating in 1997, she moved to Manhattan and worked in the litigation department of Winston & Strawn. But Giffin soon determined to seriously pursue her writing.

In 2001, she moved to London and began writing full time. Her first young adult novel, Lily Holding True, was rejected by eight publishers, but Giffin was undaunted. She began a new novel, then titled Rolling the Dice, which became the bestselling novel Something Borrowed.

2002 was a big year for Emily Giffin. She married, found an agent, and signed a two-book deal with St. Martin's Press. While doing revisions on Something Borrowed, she found the inspiration for a sequel, Something Blue.

In 2003, Giffin and her husband left England for Atlanta, Georgia. A few months later, on New Year's Eve, she gave birth to identical twin boys, Edward and George.

Something Borrowed was released spring 2004. It received unanimously positive reviews and made the extended New York Times bestsellers list. Something Blue followed in 2005, and in 2006, her third, Baby Proof, made its debut. No new hardcover accompanied the paperback release of in 2007. Instead, Giffin spent the year finishing her fourth novel and enlarging her family. Her daughter, Harriet, was born May 24, 2007.

More novels:
2008 - Love the One You're With
2010 - Heart of the Matter
2012 - Where We Belong
2014 - The One & Only
2016 - First Comes Love
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia.)

Visit the author's website.
Follow Emily on Twitter.

Book Reviews
Highly entertaining.... Despite a happy ending, Giffin raises thorny questions. A long friendship can (like marriage) turn claustrophobic or abusive. Is infidelity the solution? And why are pretty girls so easily taken in by scheming Plain Janes?
Boston Globe

Giffin’s plotting and prose are so engaging that she quickly becomes a fun, friendly presence in your reading life.
Chicago Sun-Times

Witty and compelling, Something Blue reaffirms a lesson we all should have learned long ago: Love doesn’t need a fairy tale, fancy wrapping or a big price tag. Often, it’s better without.
Charlotte Observer

Darcy is Scarlett O’Hara set in modern [day].... Giffin orchestrates her gradual change ingeniously and successfully answers any Gone With the Wind fan who wondered if, after Rhett Butler decided he didn’t give a damn, Scarlett ever morphed into someone softer.
Newark Star-Ledger

Giffin's writing is warm and engaging; readers will find themselves cheering for Darcy as she proves people can change in this captivating tale. —Kristine Huntley
Booklist

Giffin's sophomore effort—which tells the story that her bestselling Something Borrowed did from a different character's point of view—stars such an unsympathetic narrator that it's a little like reading a Cinderella story featuring one of the wicked stepsisters. Perhaps beautiful Darcy Rhone isn't really wicked, but she is one of the most shallow, materialistic, self-centered and naïve 29-year-olds around. Ostensibly a high-powered PR person in Manhattan (though she never seems to work), Darcy spends most of her time shopping, partying and getting ready for her wedding to perfect guy Dex. But an alcohol-fueled Hamptons fling with one of Dex's pals, Marcus, starts to break Darcy's perfect life down; and discovering Dex hiding in her best friend Rachel's closet really shatters it. Pregnant with Marcus's baby, Darcy decamps for London, where she crashes in high school pal Ethan's flat and annoys the heck out of him with her endless shopping and complete disregard for her impending mother-hood. But after a good lecture from Ethan, whom Darcy has started to fall for a little, Darcy embarks on a self-improvement plan, thereby demonstrating she can think about someone besides herself. And if readers don't mind the first 200 pages in which she doesn't, they'll enjoy her happy ending and the few surprises along the way. Fans of Something Borrowed, too, may relish the "she said, she said" fun.
Publishers Weekly

Discussion Questions
1. Many readers of Something Borrowed expressed doubts at being able to read and enjoy a book from Darcy’s point of view. Were you reluctant to read her story? Did your feelings about her ever change? If so, at what point in the story?

2. What do you view as Darcy’s greatest weakness? Could this also be considered her greatest strength? If so, how?

3. What do you think caused Darcy’s breakup with Marcus? Do you think Marcus was more or less responsible for it than Darcy?

4. In many ways this is a story about personal growth and transformation. Do you think people can fundamentally change? How difficult did it seem for Darcy to change? What role did Ethan play in those changes? What role did her pregnancy play?

5. What do you think would have become of Darcy if she had not become pregnant? If she hadn’t gone to London? What do you think some of the key differences in living life in London as opposed to New York? Do you think some of these differences helped Darcy evolve?

6. How do you think Darcy’s relationship with her mother played a role in the person she was?

7. In what ways are Dex, Marcus, and Ethan different? In what ways are they similar? Do you think their similarities are true of men in general?

8. Where do you see Darcy and Rachel in five years? Ten?

9. If you were Darcy, would you have been able to forgive Rachel? Would you have invited her to your wedding? Do you feel there is a line that can be crossed in friendship, where forgiveness isn't possible?

10. What are your views regarding the closing sentences of the book: “Love and friendship. They are what make us who we are, and what can change us, if we let them"?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Something Borrowed
Emily Giffin, 2004
St. Martin's Press
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312321192

Summary
Rachel has always been a good girl—until her thirtieth birthday, when her best friend Darcy throws her a party.

That night, after too many drinks, Rachel ends up in bed with Darcy's fiancé Dex. Rachel is horrified to discover that she has genuine feelings for Dex.

She prays for fate to intervene, but when she makes a choice she discovers that the lines between right and wrong are blurry, endings aren't always neat, and you have to risk all to win true happiness. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Giffin depicts the complex, shifting relationship of Rachel and Darcy, friends since grade school, into the five months between Darcy’s engagement and her wedding date. A thrill to read.
Washington Post

One of the hottest books of the summer...Giffin avoids what could have been a cliché-ridden tale by skillfully developing Rachel and her best friend Darcy into three-dimensional characters.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Something Borrowed captures what it’s like to be thirty and single in the city, when your life pretty much revolves around friendships and love and their attendant complexities.
San Francisco Chronicle

Giffin, a former lawyer turned debut novelist, infuses this romance with dead-on dialogue, real-life complexity, and genuine warmth.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Both hilarious and thoughtfully written, resisting the frequent tendency of first-time novelists to make their characters and situations a little too black-and-white. You may never think of friendships—their duties, the oblique dances of power and their give-and-take—quite the same way again.
Seattle Times

It's a gamble to cast her heroine in a potentially unsympa-thetic light, but Giffin manages to create empathy for her likable characters without cheapening the complexity of their situation, making for a genuinely winning tale. —Kristine Huntley
Booklist

An unexpected love affair threatens a long-lived friendship in this soap opera-like debut from Atlanta ex-lawyer Giffin. Since elementary school, Rachel and Darcy have been best friends, with Darcy always outshining Rachel. While single Rachel is the self-confessed good girl, an attorney trapped at a suffocating New York law firm, Darcy is the complete opposite, a stereotypical outgoing publicist, planning a wedding with the handsome Dex. After Rachel's 30th birthday party, she knocks back one drink too many and winds up in bed with Dex. Instead of feeling guilty about sleeping with her best friend's fiancé, Rachel realizes that Dex is the only man she's really loved, and that she's always resented manipulative Darcy. Rachel and Dex spend a few weekends in the city together "working" while Darcy's off with friends at a Hamptons beach share, but finally Rachel realizes she'll have to give Dex an ultimatum. The flip job Giffin pulls off—here it's the cheaters who're sympathetic (more or less)—gives Dex and Rachel's otherwise ordinary affair extra edge. Rachel would be a more appealing heroine if she were less whiny about her job and her romantic prospects, and rambling dialogue slows the story's pace, but this is an enjoyable beach read—one that'll make readers cast a suspicious eye on best friends and boyfriends who seem to get along just a little too well.
Publishers Weekly

In this debut novel—a bit of bridal lit just in time for the wedding season-good girl Rachel finally breaks the rules in a big way when she sleeps with best friend Darcy's fianc . Rachel knew Dex first (they met in law school), but she introduced him to Darcy, whose friendship has conditioned Rachel to accept being second best. Rachel and Dex's affair continues even as the wedding draws near, and it becomes clear that Dex is going to go through with the nuptials, leaving Rachel to suffer through the day as maid of honor. Things aren't all bad, though: Rachel begins to see Darcy for the superficial manipulator that she is, and when Rachel confronts Dex, she starts to realize what she's been missing by not going for what she wants in life. A surprise twist at the end seamlessly wraps up this fast-paced, enjoyable read. Recommended for most popular fiction collections. —Karen Core, Enoch Pratt Free Lib., Baltimore, MD
Library Journal

Discussion Questions
1. What do you think was the real impetus behind Rachel's decision to sleep with Dex after her birthday party? Was it about her desire to break out of her good girl persona? Was it about a long standing resentment toward Darcy? Or was it both?

2. How do you view Dex? How would you describe Dex and Rachel's relationship? What drew them together? Did you root for them to be together? Do you think they have true love?

3. Is anything about Rachel and Darcy's friendship genuine? Do you believe it has changed over time? Why does Rachel defend Darcy against attacks from Ethan and Hillary? Compare and contrast Rachel's friendship with Hillary and Ethan to her friendship with Darcy.

4. Do you think Dex and Darcy would have married if it weren't for Dex's affair with Rachel? Why did he stay with Darcy for so long?

5. How did Rachel's flawed self-image contribute to the dilemma that she faces? What do you see as her greatest weakness? Does she care too much about what people think of her?

6. Was Rachel's moral dilemma made easier because of Darcy's personality? Would she have acted on her attraction to Dex if Darcy were a different kind of person and friend? If Rachel had fallen in love with Julian, would she have pursued the same course of action? How does Rachel rationalize her affair with Dex?

7. What is the significance of the dice? What risks does Rachel take when she pursues her relationship with Dex? What is the biggest moment of risk for her? How does Rachel grow and change in the novel?

8. Disloyalty is a major theme in this novel. How differently do men and women view cheating on a friend? Why is Darcy so indignant when she catches Dex and Rachel together when she has been having an affair of her own?

9. Under what circumstances is it justified to choose love over friendship? How important is it for women to stick together? Have you ever been in a friendship like Darcy and Rachel's? Should you ever jettison a friendship that isn't working anymore?

10. This novel is told from Rachel's perspective. How do you think Darcy would tell the same story? How do you think she would describe Rachel? How do you think she views their friendship?

11. This book ends at a crossroads for all the characters. What do you see happening? Will Rachel's relationship last with Dex? Do you think Darcy got what she deserved in the end or do you feel sorry for her? Do you think she's capable of true love? Will Rachel and Darcy ever salvage their friendship? Do you think the ending of Something Borrowed is a happy one?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Something in the Water
Catherine Steadman, 2018
Random House
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781524797188

Summary
If you could make one simple choice that would change your life forever, would you?

Erin is a documentary filmmaker on the brink of a professional breakthrough, Mark a handsome investment banker with big plans. Passionately in love, they embark on a dream honeymoon to the tropical island of Bora Bora, where they enjoy the sun, the sand, and each other. Then, while scuba diving in the crystal blue sea, they find something in the water…

Could the life of your dreams be the stuff of nightmares?

Suddenly the newlyweds must make a dangerous choice: to speak out or to protect their secret. After all, if no one else knows, who would be hurt? Their decision will trigger a devastating chain of events.

Have you ever wondered how long it takes to dig a grave?

Wonder no longer. Catherine Steadman’s enthralling voice shines throughout this spellbinding debut novel. With piercing insight and fascinating twists, Something in the Water challenges the reader to confront the hopes we desperately cling to, the ideals we’re tempted to abandon, and the perfect lies we tell ourselves. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—February 8, 1987
• Where—New Forest in Southern England, UK
• Education—Oxford School of Drama
• Currently—lives in North London, England

Catherine Steadman is an English actress and author, best known for playing Mabel Lane Fox in Downton Abbey (series 5, 2014). She is the author of two psychological thrillers, Something in the Water (2018) and Mr. Nobody (2020).

Steadman trained at the Oxford School of Drama and made her screen debut playing Julia Bertram in the ITV adaptation of Mansfield Park opposite Billie Piper, James D'arcy, Rory Kinnear & Michelle Ryan. Since then she has appeared in television dramas such as the CBC/Showtime co-production The Tudors (playing Joan Bulmer), Holby City, Law & Order: UK, Missing, Lewis, Quirke (alongside Gabriel Byrne), Fearless (opposite Helen McCrory(, and Victoria.

Most notably she played Nurse Wilson in the ITV drama Breathless, Maggie Lewis in Tutankhamun, as well as Mabel Lane Fox in Downton Abbey. She has also appeared in several comedy series such as The Inbetweeners, Fresh Meat, Trying Again and Bucket. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 6/20/2018.)

Book Reviews
[A] deftly paced, elegantly chilly thriller… Steadman brings… wit, timing and intelligence to this novel…Something in the Water is a proper page-turner, not just a novel produced by a celebrity to whom some wine-weakened publisher said at a cocktail party, "You should write a book!"
Sara Lyall - New York Times

[T]hreats and increasingly bad decisions accelerate with Bourne-like velocity…. Although not all of the plot gambles prove equally successful, daring choices, such as opening with a scene of the desperate Erin digging a grave, mark Steadman as a newcomer worth watching.
Publishers Weekly

Documentary filmmaker Erin and banker Mark are on a glorious Bora Bora honeymoon when they discover a bag stuffed with glittering valuables, which changes their lives in a way that's not so good. A writing debut from the actress who played Mabel Lane Fox in Downton Abbey.
Library Journal

This debut’s opening hook, which jumps ahead in the story to reveal a shocking outcome, teamed with Erin’s spunk and the threat of Russian mobsters, creates irresistible suspense—of both the what-will-happen and the how-did-that-happen varieties.
Booklist

(Starred review) With unreliable characters, wry voices, exquisite pacing, and a twisting plot, Steadman potently draws upon her acting chops.… A darkly glittering gem of a thriller from a new writer to watch.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The novel begins with the striking scene of Erin digging a grave, then flashes back in time to describe the events leading up to it. Is this an effective way to enter the story? Did the opening pages hook you? Why or why not?

2. Erin’s career as a documentary filmmaker puts her in touch with incarcerated people she may never have met otherwise, and her relationship with Eddie is especially complex. She never tells Mark about him and is drawn to him during her interviews. She befriends a known criminal. Why does Erin become so closely involved with him? How genuine are her connections with her other documentary subjects, and how do those relationships affect the events in the novel?

3. Throughout the novel, Erin makes questionable decisions in order to secure what she thinks is the best future for her and Mark. Did you sympathize with her or criticize her actions? Does she ever become suspicious or untrustworthy as a narrator?

4. Catherine Steadman is a professional actress and wrote parts of Something in the Water whilst on set. Can you identify ways in which her writing process may have influenced the tone and/or structure of the novel? What struck you about her writing style?

5. After their discovery on the scuba dive, how does Erin and Mark’s relationship change? Despite the secrets they’re hiding from each other, they do not struggle intimately. Do they truly love each other?

6. Money is a motivating factor in Erin and Mark’s decisions, and the idea of the fiscal divide between the extremely wealthy and the middle classes percolates through the novel. Are the characters in the novel motivated by greed? Or survival? Do financial issues have the power to tear people apart?

7. Erin references her family only briefly, focusing most of the narrative on Mark and her documentary subjects. Why do you think her family gets so little page time? Eddie’s daughter, Charlotte McInroy, tells Erin that she disconnected from her family and created a life "from scratch." Do these two women have similar stories? Does Erin make a life "from scratch"?

8. Erin is often very empathetic, and she doesn’t blame Mark for the consequences of their actions until she has no other choice. Does this reflect a broader tendency for partners to excuse their spouses’ behaviors or put them on a pedestal? Is that reaction even more common among women than men?

9. Erin learns a striking piece of news in the closing pages of the book. Will this affect her character for the better—or for the worse? Do you think Erin is capable of committing a crime herself in the future?

10. The novel ends with Erin thinking, "You can’t save everyone. Sometimes you just have to save yourself." What sacrifices does Erin have to make to save herself? Does she leave anyone behind? Would you have made the same choices?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Something on the Side
Carl Weber, 2008
Kensington Publishing
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780758215796

Summary
Carl Weber—New York Times bestselling author of The First Lady and So You Call Yourself a Man—represents with a straight-up novel about friendship and love, sex and betrayal, and how getting some on the side is never as simple as it seems.

Meet Tammy, Egypt, Isis, Nikki, Coco, and Tiny—the bodacious women of the Big Girls Book Club. There's only one rule to being a member. You must be at least a size 14.

BGBC president Tammy loves everything about her life—her two kids, her fierce friends, her BMW. She especially loves taking care of business for her husband, Tim, for whom she'd do anything. This year, she intends to top all his past birthdays by having a threesome with her best friend, Egypt. Now, if only Egypt will agree to grant them this very special favor.

And then there's hot-to-trot Coco Brown, who has a habit of messing around with married men. It doesn't bother her, as long as they don't try to deny it. But now that she's hooked up with a man who makes his living being every woman's fantasy, all she cares about is making sure he doesn't stray.

But not every BGBC member is lucky with men. As insatiable about books as they are about love-or lust-these friends are about to discover how tough it is to keep it real when they all have Something on the Side. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Carl Weber is the New York Times bestselling author of The First Lady, So You Call Yourself a Man, The Preacher's Son, Player Haters, Lookin' for Luv, Married Men, and Baby Momma Drama. He is also the Publisher and Editorial Director of Urban Books.

He graduated from Virginia State University with a B.S. in accounting and has an MBA in marketing from the University of Virginia. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
In Something on the Side you'll fall in love with the members of the Big Girls Book club (BGBC). Besides loving a good book, there's only one other requirement to join: You have to be at least size 14. Tammy, BGBC's president, has as much drama going on as any of the books her members are reading. Consider this: Tammy loves her husband, Tim, so much that she wants to give him a threesome for his b-day. The other woman? Her best friend, Egypt, who, like you, will think homegirl has lost her mind. As he did in previous page-turners, Weber keeps the action moving while giving us some surprisingly touching moments that will make you pause just long enough to reach for a tissue.
Essence

The only requirement to joining the Big Girls Book Club is all ladies must be at least a size 14. Another unofficial rule appears to be having something going on in one's love life that's a little bit dangerous. But in Weber's raunchy romantic comedy, these babes find there's a consequence to every freaky action in or out of the bedroom. The BGBC president is Tammy, a "sexy egomaniac" whose marriage suffers after she persuades her best friend Egypt to participate in a threesome as a birthday gift for her hubby, Tim. Egypt's sister, Isis, must face the truth about her fiance, Tony, while Egypt learns keeping secrets from the girls isn't wise. Coco, BGBC's aggressive single, finally meets her match. And the trouble Nikki is having with Tiny, the woman she left her jealous husband for, gets intense after Nikki meets a new flame. Weber keeps things tight and funny; readers with a bent for the bootylicious will certainly want to pick this one up.
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 Something on the Side:

1. Of the five main characters—Nikki, Coco, Tammy, Isis, and Egypt, whom did you enjoy or sympathize with most? Which of the women annoyed you most? Do the women seem to represent prototypes?

2. Perhaps of all the women, Nikki seems to learn something by the end of the book. What does she come to understand?

3. Um...what was Tammy thinking? Good idea...or not so good?

4. Is this book simply for entertainment's sake...or do you feel it offers a genuine portrayal of women's lives? Or try this question: can a man write realistically about women? Does Weber?

5. How do the women handle their "plus" size? Does being large mean being miserable? Can big women have big lives?

6. Do you like how Weber switched points of view for each chapter? Why might he have structured the book as he did? Did you find the differing points of view absorbing or off-putting?

7. Was the ending predictable or surprising?

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

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Something to Talk About
Meryl Wilsner, 2020
Penguin Publishing
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780593102527

Summary
A showrunner and her assistant give the world something to talk about when they accidentally fuel a ridiculous rumor in this debut romance.

Hollywood powerhouse Jo is photographed making her assistant Emma laugh on the red carpet, and just like that, the tabloids declare them a couple.

The so-called scandal couldn't come at a worse time—threatening Emma's promotion and Jo's new movie.

As the gossip spreads, it starts to affect all areas of their lives. Paparazzi are following them outside the office, coworkers are treating them differently, and a “source” is feeding information to the media. But their only comment is “no comment”.

With the launch of Jo’s film project fast approaching, the two women begin to spend even more time together, getting along famously.

Emma seems to have a sixth sense for knowing what Jo needs. And Jo, known for being aloof and outwardly cold, opens up to Emma in a way neither of them expects. They begin to realize the rumor might not be so off base after all…but is acting on the spark between them worth fanning the gossip flames? (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Meryl Wilsner writes stories about queer women falling in love. Born in Michigan, Meryl lived in Portland, Oregon, and Jackson, Mississippi, before recently returning to the Mitten State. Some of Meryl's favorite things include: all four seasons, button down shirts, the way giraffes run, and their wife. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
(Starred review) Wilsner’s sparkling debut offers a glimpse at the truth behind the tabloid headlines.… Wilsner makes sure the reader knows both women intimately…, making the eventual payoff that much more rewarding.… [A] charming rom-com… a gem.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review) This debut is an unputdownable slow-burn romance with well-drawn and incredibly real characters. Wilsner does an amazing job exploring a Hollywood love story in the middle of a #metoo movement. —Kellie Tilton, Univ. of Cincinnati Blue Ash
Library Journal

(Starred review) Fleshed out with important female friendships and a timely look at sexual harassment in the film industry, Wilsner's tale maintains a primary focus on the delightful, developing romance. Completely captivating and so satisfying.
Booklist

(Starred review) Wilsner’s writing is matter-of-fact but effective, lending the novel a believable Hollywood insider vibe with a deftly handled #MeToo subplot. A sparkling debut with vibrant characters, a compelling Hollywood studio setting, and a sweet slow-burn romance.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. What effect did the rumors have on Jo and Emma’s relationship? Do you think they would have developed feelings, or recognized those feelings, had the rumors never existed?

2. Jo was worried about taking advantage of Emma. Why is this? How did she ensure the power imbalance from their working relationship didn’t make their personal relationship unhealthy?

3. How does the book portray sibling relationships? Compare and contrast Jo’s relationship with Vincent and Emma’s relationship with Avery.

4. What trade-offs do Jo and Emma have to consider when deciding to be in a relationship? How might their reputations and careers suffer? Do you think it’s worth it?

5. Why wasn’t Jo publicly out? What factors affected this decision?

6. Discuss Jo’s relationship with her father and how it affects her and her decisions.

7. Tikkun olam is a Jewish concept regarding an individual’s duty to improve or repair the world around them. How does tikkun olam influence Emma’s behavior throughout the book, but especially in response to Barry Davis?

8. Why might Annabeth Pierce not have come forward about Barry Davis’s behavior earlier? What factors affected her decisions, both to stay quiet, and to eventually come forward?

9. Why did the suits at the network suggest Jo be seen out with a man? How might they have reacted differently if the rumors involved Jo and a man instead of another woman?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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