The Weight of Blood
Laura McHugh, 2014
Random House
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812995206
Summary
A gripping, suspenseful novel about two mysterious disappearances a generation apart.
The town of Henbane sits deep in the Ozark Mountains. Folks there still whisper about Lucy Dane’s mother, a bewitching stranger who appeared long enough to marry Carl Dane and then vanished when Lucy was just a child. Now on the brink of adulthood, Lucy experiences another loss when her friend Cheri disappears and is then found murdered, her body placed on display for all to see. Lucy’s family has deep roots in the Ozarks, part of a community that is fiercely protective of its own.
Yet despite her close ties to the land, and despite her family’s influence, Lucy—darkly beautiful as her mother was—is always thought of by those around her as her mother’s daughter. When Cheri disappears, Lucy is haunted by the two lost girls—the mother she never knew and the friend she couldn’t save—and sets out with the help of a local boy, Daniel, to uncover the mystery behind Cheri’s death.
What Lucy discovers is a secret that pervades the secluded Missouri hills, and beyond that horrific revelation is a more personal one concerning what happened to her mother more than a decade earlier.
The Weight of Blood is an urgent look at the dark side of a bucolic landscape beyond the arm of the law, where a person can easily disappear without a trace. Laura McHugh proves herself a masterly storyteller who has created a harsh and tangled terrain as alive and unforgettable as the characters who inhabit it. Her mesmerizing debut is a compelling exploration of the meaning of family: the sacrifices we make, the secrets we keep, and the lengths to which we will go to protect the ones we love. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1974-75
• Where—Iowa, USA
• Raised—Tecumseh, Missouri
• Education—B.A., Truman State University; B.A., M.S.,
University of Missouri-Columbia
• Currently—lives in Columbia, Missouri
Laura McHugh was born in Iowa and moved at the age of seven to Tecumseh, Missouri, in the Ozarks. As a child, she loved writing stories and dreamed of becoming a writer. But after graduating from Truman State University in 1996 with a degree in English with an emphasis on creative writing, she realized she needed more stable work than writing would provide.
Laura returned to school, this time earning a Master's in Information Science and Learning Technologies. A year later, she earned a second Bachelor's in Computer Science. She worked as a software developed until she was laid off in 2009 during the economic recession.
By then Laura was the mother of two school-aged girls. With encouragement from her husband, she decided to begin writing again, working each day after she dropped the girls off at school and at night after they went to bed.
Laura lives with her family in Columbia, Missouri. The Weight of Blood is her first novel. (Adapted from Jefferson City News Tribune.)
Book Reviews
In this clever, multilayered debut, McHugh deftly explores the past of an Ozark Mountain family...with plenty to hide and the ruthlessness to keep their secrets hidden.... This is an outstanding first novel, replete with suspense, crisp dialogue, and vivid Ozarks color and atmosphere
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Debut novelist McHugh comes out swinging with this gripping tale set in the Ozarks of Missouri.... Her prose will not only keep readers turning the pages but also paints a real and believable portrait of the connections, alliances, and sacrifices that underpin rural, small-town life in Henbane. —Amy Hoseth, Colorado State Univ. Lib., Fort Collins
Library Journal
McHugh sets her first novel in a starkly rendered fictional Missouri town located in the Ozarks.... [A] suspenseful novel, with a barn burner of a plot...[and] despite some missteps, McHugh shows herself to be a compelling writer intimately familiar with rural poverty and small-town weirdness; the best is yet to come. —Joanne Wilkinson
Booklist
A teenager investigates a friend's murder and learns much more than she bargained for.... McHugh's evocation of the rugged setting and local speech patterns starkly reveals the menace lurking beneath Henbane's folksy facade.... An accomplished literary thriller.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The novel alternates between narrators, giving us many of the characters’ perspectives but mostly going back and forth between Lila and Lucy. Did you find this multiple-voice narrative effective? Could the story have been told successfully in one voice?
2. How do you interpret the relationship between Crete and Carl? Carl consistently turns a blind eye toward Crete’s questionable behavior. Do you think this is a weakness of Carl’s character, or do you believe that Carl is rightly loyal to his brother? If you were Carl, how would you have handled your relationship with Crete?
3. Lucy carries around Cheri’s necklace throughout the novel, a broken blue butterfly, until she leaves it with the flowers in the cave. Discuss the significance of the necklace.
4. The novel is set deep in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri. Describing the valley where her family first settled, Lucy tells us, “What was left of the homestead now was a cluster of tin-roofed out-buildings in various states of decomposition, a collapsed barn, a root cellar with its crumbled steps leading into the earth, and the stone foundation and chimneys of the main house. Walnut trees had sprouted in the spaces between the buildings.” Discuss the role the setting plays in the novel.
5. Both Lila and Cheri were treated poorly by the people of Henbane. Did they have similar qualities that made them easy targets? Discuss how superstitions played a role in this.
6. Why do you think the town turned a blind eye to Crete's behavior and illegal activities?
7. What do you think about Ransome? Do you agree with her actions? Do you think she could have done more to help Lila?
8. Discuss the book’s title, The Weight of Blood. Ultimately, what does the novel have to say about “blood,” and the meaning of family? Did your interpretation of the title evolve from the beginning to the end of the novel? If so, how?
9. The Weight of Blood ends with Lucy and Daniel together on a blanket, lost in their own world. Lucy tells us, “I let myself get lost in the moment, looking neither forward nor back, seeking nothing absent but embracing what was right in front of me.” How does this ending resonate with the rest of the story, and the struggles Lucy has had to face?
10. At the end of the novel Lucy says that she is “done waiting for ghosts.” Do you think she will be able to walk away from her “ghosts” forever? Discuss whether or not you think it’s possible to truly put away the past.
(Questions from the author's website.)
The Weight of Heaven
Thrity Umrigar, 2009
HarperCollins
386 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061472558
Summary
The Weight of Heaven is an emotionally charged story about unexpected death, unhealed wounds, and the price one father will pay to protect himself from pain and loss. Additionally, it offers unique perspectives, both Indian and American, on the fragmented nature of globalized India.
When Frank and Ellie Benton lose their only child, seven-year-old Benny, to a sudden illness, the perfect life they had built is shattered.
Filled with wrenching memories, their Ann Arbor home becomes unbearable, and their marriage founders. Then an unexpected job half a world away in Girbaug, India, offers them an opportunity to start again. But Frank's befriending of Ramesh—a bright, curious boy who quickly becomes the focus of his attentions—will lead the grieving man down an ever-darkening path with stark repercussions.
A devastating look at cultural clashes and divides, Thrity Umrigar's The Weight of Heaven is a rare glimpse of a family and a country struggling under pressures beyond their control. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Mumbai, India
• Education—B.A., Bombay, University; M.A., Ohio State
University; Ph.D., Kent State University
• Awards—Neiman Fellowship to Harvard
• Currently—lives in Cleveland, Ohio, USA
A journalist for seventeen years, Thrity Umrigar has written for the Washington Post, Cleveland Plain Dealer, and other national newspapers, and contributes regularly to the Boston Globe's book pages. She teaches creative writing and literature at Case Western Reserve University.
The author of The Space Between Us; Bombay Time, the memoir First Darling of the Morning: Selected Memories of an Indian Childhood, and The Weight of Heaven, she was a winner of the Nieman Fellowship to Harvard University. She has a Ph.D. in English and lives in Cleveland, Ohio. (From the publisher.)
Learn more about Umrigar from an interview on author's website.
Book Reviews
Powerful.... Twisty, brimming with dark humor and keen moral insight, The Weight of Heaven packs a wallop on both a literary and emotional level.... Umrigar...is a descriptive master.
Christian Science Monitor
Umrigar (The Space Between Us) continues her exploration of cultural divides in this beautifully written and incisive novel about an American couple's experience in India. Frank and Ellie Benton, grappling with the death of their seven-year-old son, move from Ann Arbor, Mich., to Girbaug, India, where Frank takes a job running a factory. While he tackles the barriers faced by an educated, wealthy American in charge of a Third World work force, Ellie, a psychologist, makes inroads with the impoverished locals at a health clinic. Frank has a difficult time adjusting at work, and at home he takes an interest in their housekeepers' son, Ramesh, and begins tutoring him. While Frank buries his grief by helping Ramesh, he ends up in competition with the boy's bitter father, Prakash, and further damaging his already troubled marriage. Umrigar digs into the effects of grief on a relationship and the many facets of culture clash-especially American capitalism's impact on a poor country-but it is the tale of how Frank's interest in Ramesh veers into obsession and comes to a devastating end that provides the gripping through line. Umrigar establishes herself as a singularly gifted storyteller.
Publishers Weekly
Frank and Ellie are two attractive people who have basically led charmed lives. Frank's absent father notwithstanding, they each grew up in fairly secure surroundings and attended college and professional school, meeting and marrying and living in bliss. Suddenly, the world spins out of control when their seven-year-old son dies from meningitis. Soon afterward, they have an opportunity to make a work-related move to a seaside town in India, providing the panacea that will help them heal from their loss. As educated, liberal, progressive Americans, they cannot anticipate how they will react as they become part of the class struggle within Indian society; nor can they know how attached they will become to the son of their servants. Although it may be risky to latch on to bright young Ramesh, they convince themselves that they are helping the boy by providing him with things that his parents could never afford. Self-deception runs rampant, and Frank is eventually overcome by emotional turmoil, which leads him to make a fatal error in judgment. Umrigar (The Space Between Us) finely plumbs the depths of the human heart, from the heights of joy and passion to the very deepest despair. Recommended for all fiction collections. —Susanne Wells
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Umrigar (First Darling of the Morning, 2008) renders melancholy novels that resonate with rich prose and vibrant depictions of India, where she spent the first 21 years of her life before moving to the States. The Weight of Heaven is a bold, beautifully rendered tale of cultures that clash and coalesce. —Allison Block
Booklist
Sorrow turns to obsession when Ellie and Frank Benton move from Ann Arbor, Mich., to India shortly after the death of their seven-year-old son.... Umrigar's portrait of Frank's descent into obsessive madness is well paced, as are her descriptions of the couple's loneliness together, but the novel stumbles with two long flashbacks—one describing Frank and Ellie's courtship and the other Benny's death—that add little. By the end, Frank's preoccupation turns to wickedness and violence. Not as unified as Umrigar's previous novels...but an unflinching portrait of parental bereavements.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What does the title The Weight of Heaven mean?
2. Who are Ellie and Frank Benton? What kind of people are they? What do they believe in? What were they like before and after their son Benny's death?
3. When Ellie learns of the job in Girbaug, India, she sees it as "a chance to save her marriage. To start clean in new place." Is this a false hope? Is it possible to start again after suffering a terrible tragedy?
4. What are Ellie and Frank's perceptions of India before they moved? How do their ideas compare with the real India they discover?
5. How does their adopted culture change the American couple? Though they live in the same house, interact with many of the same people, do they experience the same India? How do their experiences affect their behavior?
6. Consider Edna and Prakash, the housekeeper and cook. How do they compare to Ellie and Frank? If you were in Edna and Prakash's place, how would you feel about Frank's interest in Ramesh?
7. How did Frank's money and attention affect Ramesh? Is Frank wrong to want to give the boy a better life?
8. What kind of a father is Frank? What about Prakash? How do their childhood experiences influence the men—and the fathers—they are?
9. In The Weight of Heaven, Thrity Umrigar explores interwoven themes of marriage, love, family, home, jealousy, fear, guilt, responsibility, class, power. How do these themes drive the story?
10. The conflict between rich and poor is central to the novel. How is the struggle between Frank and Prakash reflective of the battle between the factory workers and the executives who run HerbalSolutions? Between America and India?
11. The ideas of Eden and paradise are interwoven throughout The Weight of Heaven. How are they manifested in the stories of Ellie and Frank and Edna and Prakash? How do ignorance and knowledge guide their happiness and despair?
12. What is the role of Ellie and Frank's friends, Shashi and Nandita?
13. What are your impressions of Gulab Singh? Why do you think he was so willing to side with Frank against his own people?
14. Think about Ellie and Frank's experiences as foreigners adapting to a strange new land. Can you imagine the reverse—what it might be like for Edna, Prakash, and Ramesh to make a new life in America?
15. When a young Indian journalist interviews Frank, she asks, "Do you think it is ethical for a foreign company to own natural resources in another country?" How would you answer this? What if another nation owned some of America's natural resources?
16. The journalist also raises the notion of moral responsibility. Does the West have a moral obligation to developing nations? How does moral responsibility differ from legal responsibility?
17. Frank questions and redefines his faith, first when he learns that Benny is seriously ill, and later when he has pneumonia in India. How do these philosophical crises influence his actions?
18. Frank offered the promise of a different life for Ramesh. What do you think will ultimately happen to the boy? What do you think the future holds for Frank?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Weight of Ink
Rachel Kadish, 2017
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
576 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780544866461
Summary
An intellectual and emotional jigsaw puzzle of a novel for readers of A. S. Byatt’s Possession and Geraldine Brooks’s People of the Book
Set in London of the 1660s and of the early twenty-first century, The Weight of Ink is the interwoven tale of two women of remarkable intellect: Ester Velasquez, an emigrant from Amsterdam who is permitted to scribe for a blind rabbi, just before the plague hits the city; and Helen Watt, an ailing historian with a love of Jewish history.
As the novel opens, Helen has been summoned by a former student to view a cache of seventeenth-century Jewish documents newly discovered in his home during a renovation.
Enlisting the help of Aaron Levy, an American graduate student as impatient as he is charming, and in a race with another fast-moving team of historians, Helen embarks on one last project: to determine the identity of the documents' scribe, the elusive "Aleph."
Electrifying and ambitious, sweeping in scope and intimate in tone, The Weight of Ink is a sophisticated work of historical fiction about women separated by centuries, and the choices and sacrifices they must make in order to reconcile the life of the heart and mind. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1969-70
• Where—N/A
• Education—B.A., Princeton University; M.A., New York University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Newtonville, Massachusetts
Rachel Kadish is an American novelist, author of The Weight of Ink (2017), Tolstoy Lied: a Love Story (2006), and From a Sealed Room (1998), as well as the novella "I Was Here." She received her Bachelor's from Princeton and her Master's from New York University. Currently, Kadish teaches creative writing in Lesley University's MFA Creative Writing Program. She lives outside of Boston, Mass., with her family.
Her work has appeared on NPR and in the New York Times, Ploughshares, and Tin House, and has been anthologized in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and elsewhere.
Kadish has been a fiction fellow of both the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, as well as a writer-in-residence at Stanford University. Literary prizes include the John Gardner Fiction Award and the Koret Foundation's Young Writer on Jewish Themes Award. (Adapted from the author's website. Retrieved 6/14/2017.)
Book Reviews
[An] emotionally rewarding novel follows the familiar pattern of present-day academics trying to make sense of a mystery from the past.… Helen and Aaron’s sparking relationship is vivid and memorable, as the two historians discover how desire can transcend time.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) This astonishing third novel from Kadish introduces readers to the 17th-century Anglo-Jewish world with not only excellent scholarship but also fine storytelling. The riveting narrative and well-honed characters will earn a place in readers' hearts."
Library Journal
[A] richly textured, addictive novel stretching back and forth through time, from contemporary London to the late seventeenth century… [with] a suspenseful literary tale that serves as a compelling tribute to women across the centuries committed to living, breathing, and celebrating the life of the mind.
Booklist
Kadish's characters are memorable, and we're treated to a host of them: pious rabbis and ribald actors, socialites and troubled young men, Mossad agents and rule-worshipping archivists.… Kadish leaves no stone unturned in this moving historical epic. Chock-full of rich detail and literary intrigue.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Describing the impact of his blindness, the rabbi says to Ester, "I came to understand how much of the world was now banned from me—for my hands would never again turn the pages of a book, nor be stained with the sweet, grave weight of ink, a thing I had loved since first memory." For the rabbi and for Ester, ink means many things—among them freedom, community, power, and danger. What does the written word mean to you? Is it as powerful today, amid all our forms of media, as it was to the rabbi and to Ester?
2. The novel opens with a quote from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 71: "Nay, if you read this line, remember not / The hand that writ it". Which characters in the novel choose to give anonymously, or without receiving any credit? Would you be willing to have your most meaningful accomplishments remain anonymous or even be attributed to others? In today’s interconnected world, with privacy so hard to achieve, is there anything you would write or say if you knew your words would be anonymous?
3. In order to write, Ester betrays the rabbi’s trust. Yet in her final confession Ester says, "Yet I would choose again my very same sin, though it would mean my compunction should wrack me another lifetime and beyond." Is Ester’s betrayal of the rabbi’s trust forgivable? When freedom of thought and loyalty argue against each other, which should a person choose?
4. William, Manuel, and Alvaro offer Ester very different sorts of love. What does each offer her, and what sacrifice does each require? How might you answer this question for the love between Dror and Helen?
5. Both Helen and Ester fear love. How do they wrestle with this fear? Could they have made choices other than the ones they made?
6. In what ways did Aaron mature throughout the book?
7. Did the motivations of Ester, Helen, and Aaron change as the novel progressed?
8. Ester’s life is shaped by the wrenching between the life of the mind and the life of the body. Can a woman today freely choose to combine love, motherhood, and the life of the mind, without unacceptable sacrifices?
9. What story do you imagine Dror would tell about his experience with Helen?
10. Ester grows up in a community of Portuguese Inquisition refugees who are fiercely focused on ensuring their safety in the "New Jerusalem" of Amsterdam; they place great importance on reviving Jewish learning and they give their harshest punishment to Spinoza for his heretical pronouncements. When Helen goes to Israel, she encounters Holocaust survivors struggling with the legacy of their losses and the need to establish safety in their new home. In what ways are these communities similar, and in what ways are they different?
11. What clues does the author include as to the identity of the true grandfather of the female scribe? Did Lizabeta (Constantina’s mother) make the right choice in refusing to play on his pity and beg him to keep her and her daughter in London?
12. After months of chafing at the Patricias’ strict stewardship of the rare manuscript room, Aaron has this epiphany: "and as if his own troubles had given him new ears, Aaron understood that her terseness was love—that all of it was love: the Patricias’ world of meticulous conservation and whispering vigilance and endless policing over f-cking pencils." What sorts of love are on display in unexpected ways in The Weight of Ink? In what unexpected ways does love show itself in your own world?
(Questions issued from the author's website.)
The Weight of Silence
Heather Gudenkauf, 2009
Mira Books
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780778327400
Summary
It happens quietly one August morning. As dawn's shimmering light drenches the humid Iowa air, two families awaken to find their little girls have gone missing in the night.
Seven-year-old Calli Clark is sweet, gentle, a dreamer who suffers from selective mutism brought on by tragedy that pulled her deep into silence as a toddler
Calli's mother, Antonia, tried to be the best mother she could within the confines of marriage to a mostly absent, often angry husband. Now, though she denies that her husband could be involved in the possible abductions, she fears her decision to stay in her marriage has cost her more than her daughter's voice.
Petra Gregory is Calli's best friend, her soul mate and her voice. But neither Petra nor Calli has been heard from since their disappearance was discovered. Desperate to find his child, Martin Gregory is forced to confront a side of himself he did not know existed beneath his intellectual, professorial demeanor.
Now these families are tied by the question of what happened to their children. And the answer is trapped in the silence of unspoken family secrets. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Wagner, South Dakota, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Iowa
• Awards—Edgar Award Finalist
• Currently—lives in Dubuque, Iowa
Heather Gudenkauf was born in Wagner, South Dakota, the youngest of six children. At one month of age, her family returned to the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota where her father was employed as a guidance counselor and her mother as a school nurse. At the age of three, her family moved to Iowa, where she grew up.
Born with a profound unilateral hearing impairment (there were many evenings when Heather and her father made a trip to the bus barn to look around the school bus for her hearing aids that she often conveniently would forget on the seat beside her), Heather tended to use books as a retreat, would climb into the toy box that her father's students from Rosebud made for the family with a pillow, blanket, and flashlight, close the lid, and escape the world around her. Heather became a voracious reader and the seed of becoming a writer was planted.
Gudenkauf graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in elementary education, has spent the last sixteen years working with students of all ages and is currently an Instructional Coach, an educator who provides curricular and professional development support to teachers. Heather lives in Dubuque, Iowa with her husband, three children, and a very spoiled German Shorthaired Pointer named Maxine. In her free time Heather enjoys spending time with her family, reading, hiking, and running.
Novels
2009 - The Weight of Silence
2011 - These Things Hidden
2012 - One Breath Away
2014 - Little Mercies
2016 - Missing Pieces
(Adapted from the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Gudenkauf’s tightly plotted debut packs a lot of unsavory doings into a few unfortunate summer days in Willow Creek, Iowa. Seven-year-old Calli Clark hasn’t spoken a word in the three years since a particularly nasty run-in with her violent, wife-beating father, Griff. During a bender, Griff suddenly decides to haul his mute daughter into the nearby forest, where they get lost. At the same time, Calli’s best friend Petra goes missing, and a manhunt is launched, led by deputy sheriff Loras Louis, who still carries a torch for Calli’s mother. Gudenkauf moves the story forward at a fast clip and is adept at building tension. There’s a particular darkness to her heartland, rife as it is with predators and the walking wounded, and her unsentimental take on the milieu manages to find some hope without being maudlin.
Publishers Weekly
Discussion Questions
1. Antonia describes herself as a bad mother while Louis reassures her that she, indeed, is a good mother. What evidence from the book supports each of their beliefs? How does Louis’ history with Antonia effect his own decisions as a husband and father?
2. Antonia and Louis’ long history together is integral to The Weight of Silence. As a deputy sheriff, what, if any, ethical or moral boundaries did Louis cross in the search for Calli?
3. Ben and Calli grew up with an abusive, alcoholic father. Knowing that abuse is often passed on from generation to generation, what are Ben’s and Calli’s chances of breaking the cycle of abuse in their future relationships? What instances from the book lead you to believe this?
4. How does the death of Antonia’s mother play into the decisions Antonia made as a wife and mother? How do you think Antonia’s life would be different if her mother had lived?
5. Martin Gregory, a proper, disciplined professor of economics has always valued order, predictability, and restraint in all areas of his life. How does his decision to seek retribution against the man he was sure violated his daughter fit into his belief system?
6. Antonia, Louis, Martin, and Petra’s perspectives are told in the first person present tense point of view while Calli’s is told in third person past tense? Why do you think the author decided to write the story in this way?
7. What does the title The Weight of Silence mean to you? How does the title relate to each of the main characters’ lives?
8. Before Calli and Petra’s disappearance, the Willow Creek Woods was a haven for Calli, Ben, and Toni. Calli, fearful of the forest after her ordeal, asked her mother if she ever got scared when walking in the woods. Toni replied, “It sent you back to me, didn’t it?” What did Toni mean by this?
9. Martin Gregory had worked so hard to leave behind his farming roots by becoming a college professor, but after Petra’s abduction and serious injuries, Martin subsequently moved with his family from Willow Creek to a farm. Why did Martin and Fielda decide to do this?
10. Toni describes Calli and Petra as “kindred spirits.” What makes their friendship so special? Do you think Calli and Petra’s friendship will last into their adulthood? Why or why not? Who do you consider to be your kindred spirit? Why?
(Questions from the back pages of the novel.)
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The Weight of Water
Anita Shreve, 2004
Little, Brown & Co.
260 pp.
ISBN-13: 780316780377
Summary
On a small island off the New Hampshire coast in 1873, two women were brutally murdered by an unknown assailant. A third woman survived the attack, hiding in a sea cave until dawn.
More than a century later, a photographer, Jean, comes to the island to shoot a photo-essay about the legendary crime. Immersing herself in accounts of the lives of the fishermen's wives who were its victims, she becomes obsessed with the barrenness of these women's days: the ardor-killing labor, the long stretches of loneliness, the maddening relentless winds that threatened to scour them off the rocky island. How could a marriage survive those privations? Was this misery connected to the killings?
Jean's marriage is enduring heavy weather of its own. On the boat she has chartered for this project, she and her husband are falling apart. Their nights are full of drink and terrible silences, and Jean feels jealousy and distrust invading her life and her work.
The forces that blasted the island a century earlier come alive inside Jean, bringing her to the verge of actions she never dreamed herself capable of—with no idea whether her choices will destroy all she has ever valued or bring her safely home. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1946
• Raised—Dedham, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A. Tufts University
• Awards—PEN/L.L. Winship Award; O. Henry Prize
• Currently—lives in Longmeadow, Massachusetts
Anita Shreve is the acclaimed author of nearly 20 books—including two works of nonfiction and 17 of fiction. Her novels include, most recently, Stella Bain (2013), as well as The Weight of Water (1997), a finalist for England's Orange prize; The Pilot's Wife (1998), a selection of Oprah's Book Club; All He Even Wanted (2003), Body Surfing (2007); Testimony (2008); A Change in Altitude (2010). She lives in Massachusetts. (From the publisher.)
More
For many readers, the appeal of Anita Shreve’s novels is their ability to combine all of the escapist elements of a good beach read with the kind of thoughtful complexity not generally associated with romantic fiction. Shreve’s books are loaded with enough adultery, eroticism, and passion to make anyone keep flipping the pages, but the writer whom People magazine once dubbed a “master storyteller” is also concerned with the complexities of her characters’ motivations, relationships, and lives.
Shreve’s novels draw on her diverse experiences as a teacher and journalist: she began writing fiction while teaching high school, and was awarded an O. Henry Prize in 1975 for her story, "Past the Island, Drifting." She then spent several years working as a journalist in Africa, and later returned to the States to raise her children. In the 1980s, she wrote about women’s issues, which resulted in two nonfiction books—Remaking Motherhood and Women Together, Women Alone—before breaking into mainstream fiction with Eden Close in 1989.
This interest in women’s lives—their struggles and success, families and friendships—informs all of Shreve’s fiction. The combination of her journalist’s eye for detail and her literary ear for the telling turn of phrase mean that Shreve can spin a story that is dense, atmospheric, and believable. Shreve incorporates the pull of the sea—the inexorable tides, the unpredictable surf—into her characters’ lives the way Willa Cather worked the beauty and wildness of the Midwestern plains into her fiction. In Fortune’s Rocks and The Weight of Water, the sea becomes a character itself, evocative and ultimately consuming. In Sea Glass, Shreve takes the metaphor as far as she can, where characters are tested again and again, only to emerge stronger by surviving the ravages of life.
A domestic sensualist, Shreve makes use of the emblems of household life to a high degree, letting a home tell its stories just as much as its inhabitants do, and even recycling the same house through different books and periods of time, giving it a sort of palimpsest effect, in which old stories burn through the newer ones, creating a historical montage. "A house with any kind of age will have dozens of stories to tell," she says. "I suppose if a novelist could live long enough, one could base an entire oeuvre on the lives that weave in and out of an antique house."
Shreve’s work is sometimes categorized as "women’s fiction," because of her focus on women’s sensibilties and plights. But her evocative and precise language and imagery take her beyond category fiction, and moderate the vein of sentimen-tality which threads through her books. Moreover, her kaleidoscopic view of history, her iron grip on the details and detritus of 19th-century life (which she sometimes inter-sperses with a 20th-century story), and her uncanny ability to replicate 19th-century dialogue without sounding fusty or fussy, make for novels that that are always absorbing and often riveting. If she has a flaw, it is that her imagery is sometimes too cinematic, but one can hardly fault her for that: after all, the call of Hollywood is surely as strong as the call of the sea for a writer as talented as Shreve. (Adapted from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
In 1873, two women living on the Isles of Shoals, a lonely, windswept group of islands off the coast of New Hampshire, were brutally murdered. A third woman survived, cowering in a sea cave until dawn. More than a century later, Jean, a magazine photographer working on a photoessay about the murders, returns to the Isles with her husband, Thomas, and their five-year-old daughter, Billie, aboard a boat skippered by her brother-in-law, Rich, who has brought along his girlfriend, Adaline. As Jean becomes immersed in the details of the 19th-century murders, Thomas and Adaline find themselves drawn together—with potentially ruinous consequences. Shreve perfectly captures the ubiquitous dampness of life on a sailboat, deftly evoking the way in which the weather comes to dictate all actions for those at sea. With the skill of a master shipbuilder, Shreve carefully fits her two stories together, tacking back and forth between the increasingly twisted murder mystery and the escalating tensions unleashed by the threat of a dangerous shipboard romance. Written with assurance and grace, plangent with foreboding and a taut sense of inexorability, The Weight of Water is a powerfully compelling tale of passion, a provocative and disturbing meditation on the nature of love.
Publishers Weekly
Professional photographer Jean thinks her latest assignment on New England's Isle of Shoals is a good chance to combine work with a family getaway. Her mistake is soon clear. Tensions build among the five passengers on a relative's sailboat as she begins to question her husband's relationship with a beautiful young woman. While researching the 1873 double murder of two Norwegian immigrants, Jean discovers a heretofore unknown diary kept by Maren Hontvedt, lone survivor of the mayhem. In separate chapters Maren passionately recounts the grisly events, while Jean finds a peculiar resonance between Maren's situation and her own, leading inexorably to a terrible denouement. Shreve moves the action along deftly, and if plot details sometimes veer perilously close to soap opera, the level of writing is far above the typical best-seller treatment of similar themes. A good choice for libraries where fiction readers want historical drama and family suspense. —Starr E. Smith, Marymount Univ. Lib., Arlington, VA
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1, What are the similarities between Jean and Maren? In what ways are they different?
2. The Weight of Water is both a love story and a whodunit. Who do you think really killed Anethe and Karen? What evidence is there to support Louis Wagner's innocence or guilt?
3. Atmosphere — the terribly rough climate and unbearably close living quarters — plays a significant role in the characters' psychological states. To what extent are these external conditions responsible for the events of the novel?
4. "No one can know a story's precise reality," Jean points out (p. 117). Discuss the significance of this statement as it applies to Jean's reading of Maren's journal. Should she — should we — believe Maren's document as truth? To what extent does Jean fill in the blanks of Maren's story to explain her own life? Do you think Jean maintains enough objectivity to write a fair account of the murders?
5. The Weight of Water is concerned with the subject of jealousy and its consequences. Discuss this theme as it emerges in the exchanges between Jean and Maren and their families. Do you believe that Adeline and Thomas were having an affair?
6. Maren and Evan have a very close sibling relationship. What events from their childhood fostered this attachment? Is there evidence that their relationship goes beyond that of brother and sister? How does Anethe's arrival on the scene affect this relationship?
7. Jean ponders, "What moment was it that I might have altered? What point in time was it that I might have moved one way instead of another, had one thought instead of another?" (p. 192). Are there moments in which Jean could have acted differently and thereby changed the course of the events that followed? If so, identify them. How much control do Jean and Maren have over their respective fates? How much does anyone?
8. It is often small resentments and indiscretions that lead to greater misdeeds. What small offenses do Jean and Maren commit? Do you feel these acts should be taken into account when determining their culpability for greater crimes?
9. How does the structure of the story — the weaving together of Maren's story with Jean's — underscore the novel's theme? Have you ever been so influenced by an event in the past that it changed your present or your future?
10. Jean's story begins with a plea for absolution: "I have to let this story go. It is with me all the time now, a terrible weight." Similarly, Maren's document opens with an appeal for vindication: "If it so please the Lord, I shall, with my soul and heart and sound mind, write the true and actual tale of the incident which continues to haunt my humble footsteps." (p. 39). How do these pleas affect you as a reader? Does it make you more sympathetic to the characters, more willing to believe in their innocence?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Weird Sisters
Eleanor Brown, 2011
Penguin Group USA
336 pp.
ISBN-13:
Summary
There is no problem that a library card can't solve. The Andreas family is one of readers. Their father, a renowned Shakespeare professor who speaks almost entirely in verse, has named his three daughters after famous Shakespearean women.
When the sisters return to their childhood home, ostensibly to care for their ailing mother, but really to lick their wounds and bury their secrets, they are horrified to find the others there. See, we love each other. We just don't happen to like each other very much. But the sisters soon discover that everything they've been running from-one another, their small hometown, and themselves-might offer more than they ever expected. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Born—ca. 1973
• Where—outside Washington, D.C., USA
• Education—M.A., in literature (incl. a year at Oxford University)
• Currently—lives outside Denver, Colorado
Eleanor Brown is the author of two novels: The Light of Paris (2016) and The Weird Sisters (2011), which became a New York Times bestseller, receiving both popular and critical praise. Her writing has also appeared in anthologies, magazines, and journals.
She was born in the Washington D.C. area, one of three sisters. She taught middle school for seven years, earned an M.A. in literature, and now teaches writing workshops in the Denver, Colorado, area. She lives with thriller writer J.C. Hutchins. (Adapted from the publisher.)
Book Reviews
A family drama, gracefully costumed in academic garb and lit with warm comedy, 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished…if you know a Stratfordian who's always quoting the Bard, get thee to a bookstore…Brown is such a clever writer, and she's written such an endearing story about sisterly affection and the possibilities of redemption, that it's easy to recommend The Weird Sisters.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
You don't have to have a sister or be a fan of the Bard to love Brown's bright, literate debut, but it wouldn't hurt. Sisters Rose (Rosalind; As You Like It), Bean (Bianca; The Taming of the Shrew), and Cordy (Cordelia; King Lear)—the book-loving, Shakespeare-quoting, and wonderfully screwed-up spawn of Bard scholar Dr. James Andreas—end up under one roof again in Barnwell, Ohio, the college town where they were raised, to help their breast cancer stricken mom. The real reasons they've trudged home, however, are far less straightforward: vagabond and youngest sib Cordy is pregnant with nowhere to go; man-eater Bean ran into big trouble in New York for embezzlement, and eldest sister Rose can't venture beyond the "mental circle with Barnwell at the center of it." For these pains-in-the-soul, the sisters have to learn to trust love--of themselves, of each other--to find their way home again. The supporting cast--removed, erudite dad; ailing mom; a crew of locals; Rose's long-suffering fiancé--is a punchy delight, but the stage clearly belongs to the sisters; Macbeth's witches would be proud of the toil and trouble they stir up.
Publishers Weekly
This lovely debut novel is a tale of three sisters: Rosalind, Bianca, and Cordelia. Named by their father, a famous Shakespeare professor who communicates primarily in Shakespearean verse, they grew up surrounded by books near the campus of a small Midwestern college. Rose, the oldest, stays close to home and follows her father into academia. Bean, the middle child, leaves home for an exciting life in New York City. Cordy, the youngest, drifts aimlessly across the country. Life isn't turning out to be what the sisters expected, so each decides separately to return home to care for their sick mother. The sisters are less than thrilled when they learn all three have run home. Unfortunately, the key to starting the next chapters of their lives isn't hiding between the pages of one of their beloved books. Verdict: This novel should appeal to Shakespeare lovers, bibliophiles, fans of novels in academic settings, and stories of sisterhood. The narration is a creative and original blending of the three "Weird Sisters" as one. —Shaunna Hunter, Hampden-Sydney Coll., VA
Library Journal
There are no false steps in this debut novel: the humor, lyricism, and realism characterizing this lovely book will appeal to fans of good modern fiction as well as stories of family and of the Midwest. —Ellen Loughran
Booklist
In a debut about growing up, secrets and failures are predictably resolved when a family crisis reunites three bright but unhappy siblings. As the daughters of a Shakespeare scholar, the Andreas girls are no strangers to the Bard. Oldest Rosalind (known as Rose) is named after the heroine of As You Like It, Bianca (Bean) has the name of the tamed shrew's sister and daddy's girl Cordelia (Cordy) bears the name of King Lear's devoted youngest. Their "weird"ness refers to Macbeth, although the three are far from witch-like, just averagely bookish women grappling with their unusual upbringing and some dubious adult choices. Drawn home to Barnwell, Ohio, because of their mother's breast cancer, the sisters reassemble uneasily in their parents' house—footloose Cordy, now pregnant; self-hating, morally dubious Bean, sacked after embezzling from her New York employers; and overly dutiful Rose. Quirky and perky, Brown's narrative uses light comedy to balance the serious life issues. The family's habit of quoting Shakespeare at every turn is less amusing, and there's also the curious plural narrative voice—"our sister," "our parents,"—seemingly the collective point of view of all three daughters. The story itself is a lengthy account of the women facing their demons, assisted by saintly parents, friends and neighbors who offer jobs, reassurance and romance. All's well that ends well. Readable, upmarket, non-mold-breaking escapism.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1.The Andreas family is dedicated to books, particularly Shakespeare. Would the family be different if their father were an expert on a different writer? Edgar Allan Poe, let's say, or Mark Twain? What if they were a family of musicians or athletes, rather than readers? How might that change their dynamic? Is there an interest that unites your family in the same way that reading unites the Andreas family?
2.The narration is omniscient first person plural ("we" rather than "I"). Why do you think the author chose to write the novel in this way? Did you like it?
3.Which sister is your favorite? Why? Which sister do you most identify with? Are they the same character?
4.Do you have any siblings? If so, in what way is your relationship with them similar to the relationship among the Andreas sisters? In what way is it different?
5.Each of the sisters has a feeling of failure about where she is in her life and an uncertainty about her position as a grown-up. Are there certain markers that make you an adult, and if so, what are they?
6.In what ways are the sisters' problems of their own making? Does this make them more or less sympathetic?
7.The narrator says that God was always there if the family needed him, "kind of like an extra tube of toothpaste under the sink." Is that true, or does the family's religion have a larger effect on the sisters than they claim? How does your own family's faith, or lack thereof, influence you?
8.In many ways, the Andreas sisters' personalities align with proposed birth-order roles: Rose, the driven caregiver; Bean, the rebellious pragmatist; and Cordy, the free-spirited performer. How important do you think birth order is? Do you see those traits in your own family or in people you know?
9.Father Aidan tells Bean, "Your story, Bean, is the story of your sisters. And it is past time, I think, for you to stop telling that particular story, and tell the story of yourself. Stop defining yourself in terms of them. You don't just have to exist in the empty spaces they leave." Do you agree with Father Aidan? Is it possible to identify one's self not in relationship to one's siblings or family?
10.Is it irresponsible of Cordy to keep her baby?
11.How does the Andreas family deal with the mother's illness? How would your family have coped differently?
12.The sisters say that "We have always wondered why there is not more research done on the children of happy marriages." How does their parents' love story affect the sisters? How did your own parents' relationship affect you?
13.What do you think of the sisters' father, James? Is he a good parent? What about their mother?
14.Why do you think the mother is never given a name?
15.The narrators' mother admits that she ended up with the girls' father because she was scared to venture out into the world. Yet she doesn't seem to have any regrets. Do you think there are people who are just not meant to leave home or their comfort zone?
16.Bean and Cordy initially want to leave Barnwell behind, yet they remain, while Rose is the one off living in Europe. Do you think people sometimes become constrained by childhood perceptions of themselves and how their lives will be? How is your own life different from the way you thought it would turn out?
17.When you first saw the title, The Weird Sisters, what did you think the book would be about? What do you think the title really means?
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Welcome to Night Vale
Joseph Fink, Jeffrey Cranor 2016
HarperCollins
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062351425
Summary
Located in a nameless desert somewhere in the great American Southwest, Night Vale is a small town where ghosts, angels, aliens, and government conspiracies are all commonplace parts of everyday life.
It is here that the lives of two women, with two mysteries, will converge.
Nineteen-year-old Night Vale pawn shop owner Jackie Fierro is given a paper marked "KING CITY" by a mysterious man in a tan jacket holding a deer skin suitcase. Everything about him and his paper unsettles her, especially the fact that she can't seem to get the paper to leave her hand, and that no one who meets this man can remember anything about him. Jackie is determined to uncover the mystery of King City and the man in the tan jacket before she herself unravels.
Night Vale PTA treasurer Diane Crayton's son, Josh, is moody and also a shape shifter. And lately Diane's started to see her son's father everywhere she goes, looking the same as the day he left years earlier, when they were both teenagers.
Josh, looking different every time Diane sees him, shows a stronger and stronger interest in his estranged father, leading to a disaster Diane can see coming, even as she is helpless to prevent it.
Diane's search to reconnect with her son and Jackie's search for her former routine life collide as they find themselves coming back to two words: "KING CITY." It is King City that holds the key to both of their mysteries, and their futures...if they can ever find it. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Joseph Fink created and co-writes the Welcome to Night Vale podcast and touring live show. In his mid-twenties he started Commonplace Books, a very small publishing company, producing two collections of short works which he edited and laid out at his office job when his boss wasn't looking.
Later Jeffrey approached Joseph with the idea of writing a play about time travel. They co-wrote and performed this play in the East Village in August of 2011. Soon afterwards, Joseph started brainstorming a new project he and Jeffrey could co-write and this led to the pilot episode of Welcome to Night Vale. He is from California but doesn't live there anymore. (He live in Brooklyn, New York City.)
Jeffrey Cranor co-writes—along with Joseph Fink—the hit podcast and touring live show Welcome to Night Vale. He also makes theater and dance. He has written more than 100 short plays with the New York Neo-Futurists, co-wrote and co-performed a two-man show (What the Time Traveler Will Tell Us) with Joseph, and collaborated with choreographer (also wife) Jillian Sweeney to create three full-length dance pieces: Imaginary Lines, This could be it, and Vulture-Wally. Jeffrey lives in New York State. (Author bios from the publisher.)
Book Reviews
The book is charming and absurd—think This American Life meets Alice in Wonderland.
Washington Post
Hypnotic and darkly funny.... Belongs to a particular strain of American gothic that encompasses The Twilight Zone, Stephen King and Twin Peaks, with a bit of Tremors thrown in.
Guardian (UK)
Fink and Cranor’s prose hints there’s an empathetic humanity underscoring their well of darkly fantastic situations.... [T]he book builds toward a satisfyingly strange exploration of the strange town’s intersection with an unsuspecting real world.
Los Angeles Times
As a companion piece, Welcome to Night Vale will be hard to resist. Though the book builds toward a satisfyingly strange exploration of the strange town’s intersection with an unsuspecting real world, its mysteries—like the richest conspiracy theories—don’t exist to be explained. They just provide a welcome escape.
Detroit Free Press
The charms of Welcome to Night Vale are nearly impossible to quantify. That applies to the podcast, structured as community radio dispatches from a particularly surreal desert town, as well as this novel, written by the podcast’s co-creators, Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Longtime listeners and newcomers alike are likely to appreciate the ways in which Night Vale, as Fink puts it, “treats the absurd as normal and treats the normal as absurd.” What they might not foresee is the emotional wallop the novel delivers in its climactic chapters.
Austin Chronicle
This is a splendid, weird, moving novel…. It manages beautifully that trick of embracing the surreal in order to underscore and emphasize the real - not as allegory, but as affirmation of emotional truths that don’t conform to the neat and tidy boxes in which we’re encouraged to house them.
NPR.org
Though the book meanders a bit in the middle, the end is satisfying, with a surprising origin story for one of the characters.... This unusual experiment in format-shifting works surprisingly well.
Publishers Weekly
Fans of the podcast will enjoy learning more Night Vale lore, and fantasy readers may also enjoy, depending on how tolerant they are of non sequiturs. Others, though, may not find enough to sustain a novel of this length. —Kate Gray, Boston P.L., MA
Library Journal
(Starred review.) It's all pretty far out there on the weird-ometer, but the novel is definitely as addictive as its source material.... A delightfully bonkers media crossover that will make an incredible audiobook
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Questions have not yet been issued by the publisher... so use these LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for Welcome to Night Vale...then take off on your own:
1. These are are the choices—take your pick: This American Life meets Alice in Wonderland ... or Twiight Zone meets Twin Peaks ... or Neil Gaiman/Stephen King meets Lake Woebegon. Seriously. How would you describe Night Vale. (Have some fun.)
2. Since you've chosen to read this book, very likely you're already a fan of the Welcome to Night Vale podcast. How does the novel stack up against the audio show? If you haven't listened to the podcast series (you haven't?... Seriously...?), did you feel like a small ball in tall weeds, utterly lost? Or did you find the novel easy to follow?
3. In their podcast, and now in their novel, Fink and Cranor have created a self-contained world all unto itself. Describe that world—its weirdness, even scariness, its humor and downright absurdity. What made you laugh out loud: the toxic librarians, maybe...or the local paper editor who hatchets bloggers?
4. The writing about Danny is particulary charming. Danny is a shape-shifter; how does that trait play into adolescence angst when it comes to self-identity, attractiveness, and likeability?
5. What about Jackie and Diane? Are they well-developed as characters? Do you develop sympathy Talk about them individually and as a duo when the two decide, grudgingly, to work together.
6. And then there's Cecil and his radio show. Both Diane and Jackie find comfort in his radio show. How does he move the plot along? And as you discuss this, do not—absolutely do not—mention (or touch) the flamingos.
7. Were you surprised (creeped out?) toward the end of the book with its revelations about the nature of the town and its residents?
8. Talk about the ways in which Welcome to Night Vale uses—and satirizes—cosmic horror. Here's a good description of the genre, perfected by H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), from an article in the UK's Guardian:
Alien horrors break through the thin delusion we call human perception with nasty results.... Cosmic horror is the realm not only of the unspoken, but the unspeakable; not only the invisible, but that which we refuse to see. It works by drawing out our unspoken anxieties and giving them monstrous form.
(Questions by LitLovers. Feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks..)
Welcome to the World, Baby Girl
Fannie Flagg, 1998
Random House
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780804118682
Summary
Once again, Flagg's humor and respect and affection for her characters shine forth. Many inhabit small-town or suburban America.
But this time, her heroine is urban: a brainy, beautiful, and ambitious rising star of 1970s television. Dena Nordstrom, pride of the network, is a woman whose future is full of promise, her present rich with complications, and her past marked by mystery.
Among the colorful cast of characters are:
- Sookie, of Selma, Alabama, Dena's exuberant college roommate, who is everything that Dena is not; she is thrilled by Dena's success and will do everything short of signing autographs for her; Sookie's a mom, a wife, and a Kappa forever.
- Dena's cousins, the Warrens, and her aunt Elner, of Elmwood Springs, Missouri, endearing, loyal, talkative, ditsy, and, in their way, wise.
- Neighbor Dorothy, whose spirit hovers over them all through the radio show that she broadcast from her home in the 1940s.
- Sidney Capello, pioneer of modern sleaze journalism and privateer of privacy, and Ira Wallace, his partner in tabloid television.
- Several doctors, all of them taken with—and almost taken in by-Dena
There are others, captivated by a woman who tries to go home again, not knowing where home or love lie. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Real Name—Patricia Neal
• Birth—September 21, 1944
• Where—Birmingham, Alabama, USA
• Education—University of Alabama
• Currently—lives in Montecito, California
Fannie Flagg began writing and producing television specials at age nineteen and went on to distinguish herself as an actress and writer in television, films, and the theater. She is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (which was produced by Universal Pictures as Fried Green Tomatoes), Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!, Standing in the Rainbow, and A Redbird Christmas. Flagg’s script for Fried Green Tomatoes was nominated for both the Academy and Writers Guild of America awards and won the highly regarded Scripters Award. Flagg lives in California and in Alabama.
Before her career as a novelist, Flagg was known principally for her on-screen television and film work. She was second banana to Allen Funt on the long-running Candid Camera, perhaps the trailblazer for the current crop of so-called reality television. (Her favorite segment, she told Entertainment Weekly in 1992, was driving a car through the wall of a drive-thru bank.) She appeared as the school nurse in the 1978 film version of Grease, and on Broadway in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. And she was a staple of the Match Game television game shows in the '70s.
Quite early on in her writing career, Fannie Flagg stumbled onto the holy grail of secrets in the publishing world: what editors are actually good for.
Attending the Santa Barbara Writer's Conference in 1978 to see her idol, Eudora Welty, Flagg won first prize in the writing contest for a short story told from the perspective of a 11-year-old girl, spelling mistakes and all—a literary device that she figured was ingenious because it disguised her own pitiful spelling, later determined to be an outgrowth of dyslexia. But when a Harper & Row editor approached her about expanding the story into a full-length novel, she realized the jig was up. In 1994 she told the New York Times:
I just burst into tears and said, "I can't write a novel. I can't spell. I can't diagram a sentence." He took my hand and said the most wonderful thing I've ever heard. He said, "Oh, honey, what do you think editors are for?"
Writing
And so Fannie Flagg—television personality, Broadway star, film actress and six-time Miss Alabama contestant—became a novelist, delving into the Southern-fried, small-town fiction of the sort populated by colorful characters with homespun, no-nonsense observations. Characters that are known to say things like, "That catfish was so big the photograph alone weighed 40 pounds."
Her first novel, an expanded take on that prize-winning short story, was Coming Attractions: A Wonderful Novel, the story of a spunky yet hapless girl growing up in the South, helping her alcoholic father run the local bijou. But it was with her second novel where it all came together. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe—a novel, for all its light humor, that infuses its story with serious threads on racism, feminism, spousal abuse and hints at Sapphic love -- follows two pairs of women: a couple running a hometown café in the Depression-era South and an elderly nursing home resident in the late 1980s who strikes up an impromptu friendship with a middle-aged housewife unhappy with her life.
The result was not only a smash novel, but a hit movie as well, one that garnered Flagg an Academy Award nomination for adapting the screenplay. She won praise from the likes of Erma Bombeck, Harper Lee and idol Eudora Welty, and the Los Angeles Times critic compared it to The Last Picture Show. The New York Times called it, simply, "a real novel and a good one."
As a writer, though, this Birmingham, Alabama native found her voice as a chronicler of Southern Americana and life in its self-contained hamlets. "Fannie Flagg is the most shamelessly sentimental writer in America," The Christian Science Monitor wrote in a 1998 review of her third novel. "She's also the most entertaining. You'd have to be a stone to read Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! without laughing and crying. The cliches in this novel are deep-fat fried: not particularly nutritious, but entirely delicious."
The New York Times, also reviewing Baby Girl, took note of the spinning-yarns-on-the-front-porch quality to her work: "Even when she prattles—and she prattles a great deal during this book—you are always aware that a star is at work. She has that gift that certain people from the theater have, of never boring the audience. She keeps it simple, she keeps it bright, she keeps it moving right along—and, most of all, she keeps it beloved."
But, lest she be pegged as simply a champion of the good ol’ days, it's worth noting that her writing can be something of a clarion call for social change. In Fried Green Tomatoes, Flagg comments not only on the racial divisions of the South but also on the minimization of women in both the 1930s and contemporary life. Just as Idgie Threadgoode and Ruth Jamison commit to a life together—without menfolk—in the Depression-era days of Whistle Stop, Alabama, middle-aged Evelyn Couch in modern-day Birmingham discovers the joys of working outside the home and defining her life outside meeting the every whim of her husband.
On top of her writing, Flagg has also stumped for the Equal Rights Amendment.
I think it's time that women have to stand up and say we do not want to be seen in a demeaning manner," Flagg told a Premiere magazine reporter in an interview about the film adaptation of Fried Green Tomatoes.
Extras
• Flagg approximated the length of her first novel by weight. Her editor told her a novel should be around 400 pages. "So I weighed 400 pages and it came to two pounds and something," she told the Los Angeles Times in 1987." I wrote until I had two pounds and something, and, as it happened, the novel was just about done."
• She landed the Candid Camera gig while a writer at a New York comedy club. When one of the performers couldn't go on, Flagg acted as understudy, and the show's host, Allen Funt, was in the audience.
• Flagg went undiagnosed for years as a dyslexic until a viewer casually mentioned it to her in a fan letter. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
I found the whole thing rather enjoyable....[Flagg] keeps it simple, she keeps it bright, she keeps it moving right along.
Robert Plunket - New York Times
Because so much of Flagg's third novel takes place in the 1970s media-celebrity echelons of New York City, it doesn't offer the regional and historical color and texture of its predecessor, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. Instead, Flagg's achievement here lies in a well-choreographed story of loyalty and survival that zigzags deftly across the post-war years, panning in on the never-changing decency of Elmwood Springs, Mo., then pulling back to watch national TV news devolve into sensationalism--all the while drawing us into the compelling life of Dena Nordstrom. Star of America's most popular morning news show, Dena shuts herself down and shuts men out for painful reasons that are unknown even to her. Only after the stress of ambush- and sound-byte journalism brings on a hemorrhaging ulcer does Dena slowly unearth the scandal that, when Dena was four, drove her mother from Elmwood Springs, hometown of the war hero father that Dena never knew. That her mother's nemesis is a newspaper gossipmonger is nicely ironic, although her mother's secret shame seems slightly larger than life. In contrast, Dena's college friend Sookie and great aunt Elner are reminders of how well Flagg can cook up memorable women from the most down-to-earth ingredients, while a cameo by Tennessee Williams is uncannily true to life. Fans may be sorry at first to leave Elmwood Springs for the big city, but even the most reluctant will get wrapped up in Dena's search for the truth about her family and her past.
Publishers Weekly
Ultimately, the experience of reading Baby Girl is much like eating a chocolate eclair (or, if you prefer, like having mediocre sex). In other words, you have to go through a lot of air and fat before you get to the custard. Not that the book isn't highly readable—it is, much like the back of a cereal box is readable. It's also exasperating, and in the end, the episodic nature and often-ponderous dialogue make it seem more like watching a TV movie than reading a novel. —Cara Jepsen
BookPage
The author of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe returns with another engaging paean to the joys of down-home southern life. Gorgeous, ambitious Dena Nordstrom is doing very well in '70s Manhattan. She's the popular star of a network morning show, poised to rise as the ratings-driven TV industry promotes appealing women to make palatable the increasingly nasty interviews that are turning the news into scandal mongering 'entertainment.' Dena barely remembers Elmwood Springs, Missouri, where she spent four happy years before her mysterious mother abruptly left town and embarked on a decade of wandering before vanishing from 15-year-old Dena's life altogether in 1959. But the folks back in Elmwood Springs remember Baby Girl, daughter of a local boy killed in WWII, and Flagg has some obvious but effective fun with the contrast between the townspeople's homey-to-the-verge-of-caricature existence and Dena's high-powered urban-professional lifestyle. Of course, she's not really happy: she drinks too much and has bleeding ulcers that send her, acting reluctantly on doctor's orders, to a handsome psychiatrist (who falls in love with her at first sight, natch) and then back to Elmwood Springs to recuperate from overwork. Readers may share Dena's initial reaction to the relentlessly folksy locals ('Get me out of here,' she commands her agent), but the New York cast of characters is just as cliched: noble, Walter Cronkite-like anchorman; sleazy network executive; sleazier 'researcher"/dirt-digger. The author does, however, know how to spin a rattling good yarn. Even those who gag at the way she holds up 'Neighbor Dorothy' and her hokey 1940s radio show as the epitome of small-town goodness will probably find themselves flipping pages rapidly to discover what happened to Dena's mother. The denouement has a clever twist, and if the happy ending is not exactly a surprise, it taps into enough classic American fantasies about getting out of the rat race to be quite moving. Shamelessly corny and extremely enjoyable.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. This novel tells of Dena's long journey home. What does home look and sound and smell like to you? Is it a place or a state of mind?
2. "Elmswood Springs is a town that likes itself." Do you agree with this assessment of Dena's hometown? How does Dena's opinion of the town change over the course of the novel?
3. The Smith family talks about being able to stop time. Would you like to have this power? If you could, when would you freeze time in your own life?
4. Aunt Elner would want to be at home with her family and friends if she knew the end of the world was coming. What would you do?
5. What has caused Dena's identity crisis? How does she manage to keep the people in her life fooled about her real condition for so long?
6. Why are people in Dena's life so persistent even though she continually shuts them out? Did you ever lose patience with her?
7. Why does Gerry O'Malley believe in true love? Do you think it exists?
8. Why does Dena sleep through Christmas every year and then lie about it? Many people have very conflicted feelings about the holidays for a whole host of reasons. How do you feel about holidays? Do you ever want to sleep through them?
9. Dena is initially very resistant to therapy. How much do you think therapy helped her in the end? Did this novel challenge or confirm your own opinions about therapy?
10. Dena's therapist tells her: I think you are mistaking a profession for a personal identity." Discuss the meaning of this statment. Does it apply to anyone you know?
11. Ask each person in your reading group to give three answers to the question: who are you? How easy or difficult is thisto do? Do you have any answers in common?
12. What was the significance of Dena's recurring dream about the house with the carousel?
13. Dena gets to interview Tennessee Williams, an artist who inspired her. If you could interview a person who has had a major impact on your personal/and or professional development, who would it be? What would you ask them?
14. This novel examines the nature of celebrity in modern America. Why does Dena want to be famous? And why does she eventually reject it? Is celebrity something you would want for yourself?
15. Discuss the negative impact gossip in the media has on various characters in this novel. Where do you think the line should be drawn regarding the private lives of public people?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
A Well-Behaved Woman: A Novel of the Vanderbilts
Therese Anne Fowler, 2018
St. Martin Press
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250095473
Summary
The riveting novel of iron-willed Alva Vanderbilt and her illustrious family as they rule Gilded-Age New York, from the New York Times bestselling author of Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald.
Alva Smith, her southern family destitute after the Civil War, married into one of America’s great Gilded Age dynasties: the newly wealthy but socially shunned Vanderbilts.
Ignored by New York’s old-money circles and determined to win respect, she designed and built 9 mansions, hosted grand balls, and arranged for her daughter to marry a duke.
But Alva also defied convention for women of her time, asserting power within her marriage and becoming a leader in the women's suffrage movement.
With a nod to Jane Austen and Edith Wharton, in A Well-Behaved Woman Therese Anne Fowler paints a glittering world of enormous wealth contrasted against desperate poverty, of social ambition and social scorn, of friendship and betrayal, and an unforgettable story of a remarkable woman.
Meet Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont, living proof that history is made by those who know the rules—and how to break them. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—April 22, 1967
• Raised—Milan, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., M.F.A., North Carolina State University
• Currently—lives in Wake Forest, North Carolina
Therese Anne Fowler (pronounced ta-reece) is the author of severl books, including: A Good Neighborhood (2020), A Well Behaved Woman: A Novel of the Vanderbilts 2018),and Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (2013).
Fowler is the third child and only daughter of a couple who raised their children in Milan, Illinois. An avowed tomboy, Therese thwarted her grandmother’s determined attempts to dress her in frills—and, to further her point, insisted on playing baseball despite her town having a perfectly good girls’ softball league.
A
Thanks to the implementation of Title IX legislation and her father’s willingness to fight on her behalf, Therese became one of the first girls in the U.S. to play Little League baseball.
Her passion for baseball was exceeded only by her love of books. A reader since age four, she often abused her library privileges by keeping favorite books out just a little too long. When domestic troubles led to unpleasant upheaval during her adolescence, the Rock Island Public Library became her refuge. With no grounding in Literature per se, she made no distinction between the classics and modern fiction. Little Women was as valued as The Dead Zone. A story’s ability to transport her, affect her, was the only relevant matter.
Therese married at eighteen, becoming soon afterward a military spouse (officially referred to at the time as a "dependent spouse"). With customary spirit, she followed her then-husband to Texas, then to Clark Air Base in the Philippines—where, because of politics, very few military spouses could find employment. Again, books came to her rescue as the base library became her home-away-from-home and writers such as Jean Auel, Sidney Sheldon, and Margaret Atwood brought respite from boredom and heat.
Her own foray into writing came years later, after a divorce, single parenthood, enrollment in college, and remarriage. A chance opportunity during the final semester of her undergrad program led to her writing her first short story, and she was hooked.
Having won an essay contest in third grade and seen her writing praised by teachers ever since, she knew she could put words on paper reasonably well. This story, however, was her first real attempt at fiction. Her professor told her she had a knack for it, thus giving her the permission to try she hadn’t known she was waiting for.
After an intensive five-year stint that included one iffy-but-completed novel followed by graduate school, some short-fiction awards, an MFA in creative writing, teaching undergraduates creative writing, and a second completed novel that led to literary representation, Therese was on the path to a writing career. It would take more writing (some of which is published) and a great deal more reading, though, before she began to grasp Literature properly–experience proving to be the best teacher.
Therese has two grown sons and two nearly grown stepsons. She currently lives in North Carolina with her husband. (Adapted from the author's website. Retrieved 2/28/2020.)
Visit Therese Anne Fowler on Facebook.
Book Reviews
(Starred review) As accomplished as its subject, redoubtable socialite and women’s suffrage crusader Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, Fowler’s engrossing successor to 2013’s Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, again showcases her genius for seeing beyond the myths of iconic women.
Publishers Weekly
With you-are-there immediacy fueled by assured attention to biographical detail and deft weaving
of labyrinthine intrigue, Fowler creates a thoroughly credible imagining of the challenges and
emotional turmoil facing this fiercely independent woman.
Booklist
(Starred review) Portrait of the Gilded Age socialite and suffragist who famously followed her own advice: "First marry for money, then marry for love."…Watching Fowler's heroine vanquish the gatekeepers and minions who stand in her way is nothing short of mesmerizing.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. A Well-Behaved Woman opens with this compelling passage: "When they asked about the Vanderbilts and the Belmonts, about their celebrations and depredations…when they asked why she did the extreme things she’d done, Alva said it all began quite simply: Once there was a desperate young woman whose mother was dead and whose father was dying almost as quickly as his money was running out…. She was twenty-one years old, ripened unpicked fruit rotting on the branch." (3) How would you characterize Alva’s circumstances at the start of the novel and as her story goes on? How does she begin to flourish?
2. The author’s descriptions of tenement life in lower Manhattan are especially vivid and heartbreaking. Would you consider the city and surrounding environs a character in the novel? How does the setting—a budding New York City becoming a world-class capital for art, architecture, and society, and a hub for all walks of life—enhance the drama on the page?
3. How do Alva’s increasingly dire circumstances change once she has married into the Vanderbilts family? Do these changes alter her essential nature or character? Does she stay devout to her sense of ethics or empathy?
4. What are marriage markets and debuts, and how do these elaborate presentations work out for the women of the novel? For Alva, Consuelo Yznaga, or any of Alva’s young sisters or daughter? How much choice do these young women have to participate in finding an attractive suitor, and what risks do they face?
5. "Money was no fix for that girl, true—But please, God, she thought, let it be for me." (8) What freedom does money buy for women in this generation? Do the trappings of wealth justify the opportunity to escape a place like Five Points?
6. "Love was a frivolous emotion, certainly no basis for a marriage—every young lady knew this. You must always put sense over feeling." (24) Is Alva content with her choice to marry William at his proposal? How does she justify this decision? Does it matter if there is no love in a marriage? Or can love grow in such conditions?
7. What gives Alva her confidence and courage? Is it rooted in her privileged birth and experiences, in continued access to the best life has to offer? How does adversity—personal and societal—challenge and invigorate her?
8. Alva and her upper-class contemporaries are seemingly, and not uncommonly, in the dark about the most basic functions of their physical bodies. How have things changed for women in the last century and a half—and how do we share information about such core experiences as sexuality, pregnancy, childbirth, and aging? How has this change in knowledge-sharing, care, and education improved our lives? Have cultural attitudes shifted when it comes to perceptions of female sensuality and a wife’s "duty?"
9. "Whatever he believed was correct in regard to her keeping, he could enact." (75) This is the chilling thought Alva has on her wedding day when she considers the kinds of power her new husband will have over her. Not exclusive to women of wealth, this kind of male privilege affected women of all social classes. How does Alva test and successfully reshape this power and control?
10. "After all, by connecting him securely to the Vanderbilts, he would profit as much as she. It was a business arrangement." (61) Here the New York social scene is a world built on alliances. Who succeeds in such a setting? How does Ward McAllister make his mark and thrive? Who orchestrates these rigid society-life rules?
11. What is Alva’s take on the "old money" versus "new money" conflict? How are the two worlds described in the novel and what defines them? Is "new money" gauche? How do the nouveaux riches behave generally and what resistance awaits them from the "old money" types?
12. How does Alva rebel within her role as societal and charitable maven at the helm of one of America’s most powerful dynasties? As a woman in 1880s New York City, what does she shake up and which principles and duties does she adhere to? Is Alva "the well-behaved woman" of the book’s title? Discuss.
13. "He had his hand on her collarbone now and was saying, ‘why would you want to be bothered with all that political nonsense? What’s wrong with simply enjoying being a lady of privilege?’" "‘Ask your sisters. They want more, too.’" (138) How did you feel reading passages like the one quoted here? Inspiration, admiration, camaraderie? Something else? What is at stake for Alva when she campaigns for suffrage and other social movements? What promise did social change hold for her?
14. What does Oliver Belmont represent to Alva, and does that change over time? Why does Alva initially reject her feelings—is it all strategic?
15. Why does Alva ignore the gossip about her husband’s infidelities in the course of their marriage? What changes?
16. "‘I’m going to make the most of it, Mary. All of it. I’m going to beat society at its own game.’" (151) Does Alva succeed with this bold assertion? What does the grand house on Fifth Avenue come to symbolize for her at its building (and then well into her marriage)? How does Alva leave her mark on the Vanderbilt name, New York society, and the lives around her? How does she reinvent herself and the literal landscape of the city?
17. Compare Alva’s attitudes and passions in life to those of her sister-in-law Alice. Though both women are immensely wealthy and socially influential, how differently do each of them choose to wield their power? In what ways do they diverge?
18. "They and their friends existed on a joyous merry-go-round of wealth." (202) How would you characterize the lives and fancies of the wealthiest families at the turn of the 20th century? How do they spend their days and fortunes? What marks their privilege—and does this privilege extend beyond their material belongings to their seemingly-no-consequences-behavior? Discuss the boating accident scene.
19. Why does Alva choose to confess her secret desire for Oliver to Lady Consuelo? Aside from deepening the intimacy of their friendship, does the revelation open new avenues of trouble for them? What, if anything, might have been different had Alva kept this truth to herself?
20. How does Alva direct her daughter Consuelo’s marriage prospects? What risks does she warn her daughter of and how does she choose to educate her? Given her own experiences, why doesn’t Alva encourage a marriage based on love? Do you agree with her guidance?
21. "The cost of any and all of it was merely money, and he had more of that than he could ever spend." (284) Is it hard to imagine having this kind of extreme existence and wealth? Do you think this untouchable status would influence the decisions you’d make? Do money and power corrupt? Was Alva immune to it?
22. "An intelligent woman in this world takes her chances where she finds them." (170) What are those chances for Alva? What about for you personally?
23. Does Consuelo Yznaga’s plight make her a sympathetic character? How does her lifelong friendship and intimacy with the Vanderbilts shape the arc of the story? Could you forgive her shocking betrayal, as Alva considers on the final page? Why or why not?
24. "‘Miss Harper likened you to an ox. She said sometimes you just put your head down and push until you get where you wish to be.'" (295) Alva was unequivocally a woman of action. Would you call her shrewd or brilliant, ahead of her time? Does she remind you of any change makers, in or out of the public eye?
25. "‘My entire life, Consuelo. That’s how long women have been patiently speaking on this subject to one another and to the men in charge—who take advantage of our habits of being polite and cooperative while censuring every opposite behavior. Men only respect power. So we must be powerful.’" (381) How does this advice resonate with you as a modern reader?
26. Were you inspired to dive deeper into the lives, lavish residences, and artifacts of the Vanderbilt and Belmont families while reading this book? How does the author’s note at the end of the book help orient you with what was crafted by the author’s imagination and what elements were factual? Were you surprised by any findings?
27. What would you wish for Alva—or Consuelo Yznaga—if their stories continued on after the last page?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Wench
Dolen Perkins-Valdez, 2010
HarperCollins
293 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061706547
Summary
An ambitious and startling debut novel that follows the lives of four women at a resort popular among slaveholders who bring their enslaved mistresses
wench 'wench n. from Middle English "wenchel," 1 a: a girl, maid, young woman; a female child.
Tawawa House in many respects is like any other American resort before the Civil War. Situated in Ohio, this idyllic retreat is particularly nice in the summer when the Southern humidity is too much to bear. The main building, with its luxurious finishes, is loftier than the white cottages that flank it, but then again, the smaller structures are better positioned to catch any breeze that may come off the pond. And they provide more privacy, which best suits the needs of the Southern white men who vacation there every summer with their black, enslaved mistresses. It's their open secret.
Lizzie, Reenie, and Sweet are regulars at Tawawa House. They have become friends over the years as they reunite and share developments in their own lives and on their respective plantations. They don't bother too much with questions of freedom, though the resort is situated in free territory-but when truth-telling Mawu comes to the resort and starts talking of running away, things change.
To run is to leave behind everything these women value most-friends and families still down South-and for some it also means escaping from the emotional and psychological bonds that bind them to their masters. When a fire on the resort sets off a string of tragedies, the women of Tawawa House soon learn that triumph and dehumanization are inseparable and that love exists even in the most inhuman, brutal of circumstances-all while they arebearing witness to the end of an era.
An engaging, page-turning, and wholly original novel, Wench explores, with an unflinching eye, the moral complexities of slavery. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Memphis, Tennessee, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard University
• Currently—lives in Washington, DC, and Seattle Washington
Dolen Perkins-Valdez's fiction and essays have appeared in StoryQuarterly, Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories 2009, The Kenyon Review, PMS: PoemMemoirStory, North Carolina Literary Review, and "Richard Wright Newsletter."
Born and raised in Memphis, a graduate of Harvard, and a former University of California postdoctoral fellow, Perkins-Valdez teaches creative writing at the University of Puget Sound. She splits her time between Washington, DC and Seattle, Washington. This is her first novel. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
In her debut, Perkins-Valdez eloquently plunges into a dark period of American history, chronicling the lives of four slave women—Lizzie, Reenie, Sweet and Mawu—who are their masters’ mistresses. The women meet when their owners vacation at the same summer resort in Ohio. There, they see free blacks for the first time and hear rumors of abolition, sparking their own desires to be free. For everyone but Lizzie, that is, who believes she is really in love with her master, and he with her. An extended flashback in the middle of the novel delves into Lizzie’s life and vividly explores the complicated psychological dynamic between master and slave. Jumping back to the final summer in Ohio, the women all have a decision to make—will they run? Heart-wrenching, intriguing, original and suspenseful, this novel showcases Perkins-Valdez’s ability to bring the unfortunate past to life.
Publishers Weekly
In this memorable first novel by Memphis-born Perkins-Valdez (English, Mary Washington Coll.), four friends meet each summer at a resort in Ohio but can share only snatches of time. Lizzie, Reenie, Sweet, and Mawu are black slaves brought to the resort each year by their vacationing Southern masters as personal servants and sexual companions. Their presence discomfits the Northern whites and black servants in the free state of Ohio, but the real angst lies within each woman's struggles: Mawu is determined to escape her sadistic master; Lizzie admires Mawu's independent spirit but concentrates her efforts on wheedling her master into granting freedom to her own children. VERDICT Readers of historical fiction centering on Southern women's stories like Lalita Tademy's Cane River or Lee Smith's On Agate Hill will be moved by the skillful portrayal of Lizzie's precarious situation and the tragic stories of her fellow slaves. —Laurie A. Cavanaugh, Brockton P.L., MA
Library Journal
A striking debut intimately limns a Southern slave's complicated relationship with her master. Perkins-Valdez (English/Univ. of Puget Sound) builds a convincing, nuanced portrait of Lizzie, a slave on Nathan Drayle's Tennessee plantation. Nathan took Lizzie as his mistress (if such a word can be used for the enslaved) as an adolescent; by the age of 16 she had borne him a son and daughter. He shows unguarded favor to Lizzie, moving her into the guestroom across from his wife's bedroom, teaching her to read and speak like a lady, seeming to need and care for her. In addition, her two light-skinned children are his only offspring. In the summer of 1852 Nathan takes his favored slave Philip and Lizzie to Tawawa House, an Ohio resort where Southern men bring their slave women. Ohio is a revelation to Lizzie. Free black men and women are employed at the hotel, and Lizzie sees a nearby resort catering to well-to-do African-Americans. For Lizzie and the other slaves she befriends that summer, this seems like the world turned upside down. The Southern men spend much of their time hunting, leaving Lizzie the opportunity to imagine a life away from slavery with Sweet (pregnant and doomed), Reenie (defeated by her master, who is also her white half-brother) and Mawu (redheaded, fierce and possessing voodoo charms). They meet Glory, an abolitionist Quaker who is the first white woman to speak to Lizzie as an equal. Mawu, Reenie and Philip talk of escaping, but Lizzie, fearing the slave catchers might hurt them, tells Nathan of their plan. The next summer, barely forgiven by the others for her betrayal, Lizzie begins to wonder why she loves Nathan, her protector and tormentor since childhood. This wondering is her first step toward freedom, and the potential of what the next summer may bring. Compelling and unsentimental.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Lizzie is a house slave. How does this position differ from working in the fields? How does this status affect her day-to-day existence? What impact does it have for her children?
2. Unlike many slaves, Lizzie learned to read. Why did Drayle teach her? What does this ability offer her? Does her ability influence the other slaves she lived with?
3. When Mawu asks Lizzie about Drayle, Lizzie hears the question, "Is he good to you?" Later she comes to understand that Mawu wanted to know, "Is he God to you?" How would you answer both questions? How do these questions relate to one another in the context of Lizzie's life?
4. Lizzie claims that she loves Drayle. Does she? Does he love her? How would you describe their bond? Can love truly exist when there is such an imbalance of power between two people? What about Drayle and his wife, Fran? Talk about their marriage and compare it to the relationship between Lizzie and Drayle.
5. How would you describe Drayle? What kind of a slave owner is he? What does Lizzie mean to Drayle? How does he treat her? How does he treat their children? Lizzie begs Drayle to free their son and daughter. Why won't he?
6. Describe the relationship between Drayle's wife, Fran, and Lizzie. How do the women view each other? How are their positions similar?
7. When Drayle receives an offer to sell Phillip he refuses. Why? What eventually makes him change his mind? What does Lizzie think about Phillip's chance at freedom? Why does she refuse to help him when she is first asked—and what changes her mind?
8. Compare and contrast the four women at the heart of the novel: Lizzie, Mawu, Sweet, and Reenie. Though they are all slaves, are their experiences the same? What accounts for any differences?
9. How did Lizzie feel about going to Tawawa? What did the resort offer her that her life in Tennessee did not? How do her experiences at the resort change her over the course of the summers she is there?
10. What was Lizzie's opinion of Mawu when she first met her? Describe the arc of their relationship. What events changed they way they saw each other?
11. Describe the women's white masters. What are their relationships like with their slaves? Do these relationships offer any benefits to the women? Are these women entirely powerless? If not, what power do they have?
12. Why does Lizzie tell Drayle about Mawu's plan to escape? Is she surprised by Mawu's punishment? Why doesn't Mawu hate Lizzie for what she did? When Mawu finally escapes, she stays behind, waiting for Lizzie? Why does she risk herself for Lizzie? What do they all see in Lizzie—why is she special?
13. Tawawa was very near to where free colored folk also vacationed, a place called Lewis House. What do the slaves think of Lewis House? Why didn't more slaves try to escape when freedom was so near? Why do you think the Northern whites who also summered at Tawawa didn't help them find freedom?
14. What role does the white woman, Glory, play in the novel? When they first meet her, they are startled by her behavior. "These slaves had been around Northern whites long enough to recognize one who didn't understand the rules." Why doesn't Glory seem to "understand the rules?" How does meeting her influence the slaves, especially Lizzie?
15. Many events happen during Lizzie's visits to Ohio, from the discovery of the abolitionist pamphlet to the trip to Dayton to meeting Glory and Phillip's fiancé. Talk about the significance of each and explain how they shaped Lizzie's outlook about her life and herself. How does she change by the novel's end? What about the other characters?
16. What does freedom mean to you? What does it mean to Lizzie and the other slaves?
17. Lizzie lived a life defined by indignity and degradation. How did she cope and overcome her pain?
18. After Sweet learns that all of her children have died from cholera, she tells her friends that she wants to die. Is death better than a life in chains?
19. Discuss the evils of slavery. How does it degrade the soul of both the enslaved and their masters?
20. Unlike the characters in the story, you, the reader, know that the Civil War will occur in less than a decade. How does the knowledge shape your experience reading the story? Does it give you hope for Lizzie and her children?
21. What did you learn from reading Wench? What affected you most about the story?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
top of page (summary)
West of Sunset
Stewart O'Nan, 2015
Viking Adult
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780670785957
Summary
A novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last years in Hollywood
In 1937, F. Scott Fitzgerald was a troubled, uncertain man whose literary success was long over. In poor health, with his wife consigned to a mental asylum and his finances in ruins, he struggled to make a new start as a screenwriter in Hollywood. By December 1940, he would be dead of a heart attack.
Those last three years of Fitzgerald’s life, often obscured by the legend of his earlier Jazz Age glamour, are the focus of Stewart O’Nan’s gorgeously and gracefully written novel.
With flashbacks to key moments from Fitzgerald’s past, the story follows him as he arrives on the MGM lot, falls in love with brassy gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, begins work on The Last Tycoon, and tries to maintain a semblance of family life with the absent Zelda and daughter, Scottie.
Fitzgerald’s orbit of literary fame and the Golden Age of Hollywood is brought vividly to life through the novel’s romantic cast of characters, from Dorothy Parker and Ernest Hemingway to Humphrey Bogart. A sympathetic and deeply personal portrait of a flawed man who never gave up in the end, even as his every wish and hope seemed thwarted. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 4, 1961
• Raised—Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.S., Boston University; M.F.A., Cornell University
• Awards—Drue Heinz Literature Prize; Pirate's Alley Faulkner Prize
• Currently—lives in Avon, Connecticut
Stewart O'Nan is an American novelist, born in 1961 to John Lee O'Nan and Mary Ann O'Nan, (nee Smith). He and his brother were raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
He earned his B.S. at Boston University in 1983. While in Boston, O'Nan became a fan of the Red Sox. On October 27, 1984, he married Trudy Anne Southwick, his high school sweetheart. They moved to Long Island, New York, and he went to work for Grumman Aerospace Corporation in Bethpage, New York, as a test engineer from 1984 to 1988.
Encouraged by his wife to pursue a career in writing, they moved to Ithaca, New York, and O'Nan returned to college and graduated with his M.F.A. from Cornell University in 1992. His family and he then moved to Edmond, Oklahoma, and he taught at the University of Central Oklahoma and the University of New Mexico.
O'Nan's first book, and only collection of short stories, In the Walled City, was awarded the 1993 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. The same year, he was able to find a publisher for his second book, and first novel, Snow Angels—based on the story "Finding Amy" from his In the Walled City collection—when the manuscript earned him the first Pirate's Alley Faulkner Prize for the Novel, awarded by the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society of New Orleans. In 2007 Snow Angels was adapted for a film of the same title, directed by David Gordon Green, who also wrote the screenplay, and starring Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale.
In 1995, his family and he moved to Avon, Connecticut. He was a writer-in-residence and taught creative writing at Trinity College in nearby Hartford until 1997. The research he did for his novel The Names of the Dead led to the creation of a class that studied Vietnam War memoirs as a form of literature, which he also initially taught. In 1996, Granta named him one of America's Best Young Novelists.
In a 2002 article, "Finding Time to Write," O'Nan wrote:
Very simple things like keeping the manuscript with you at all times. Always keep it with you. That way you can always go back to it. Doesn't have to be the whole manuscript.
Another way to do this is to bring only the very last sentence that you worked on--where you left off, basically. Bring it with you on a sheet of paper or index card. Keep it on your person so that if you're running around the building where you're working, you take that five seconds to pull it out and look at it and say, "Okay, oh, maybe I'll do this with it. Maybe I'll do something else with it. Maybe I'll fix it there.
In the spring of 2005 O'Nan spoke at the Lucy Robbins Welles Library in Newington, Connecticut, as the featured author in its One Book, 4 Towns program. When asked about Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season, the book he co-authored with Stephen King, O'Nan replied, "Who would have thought that writing a book about the Red Sox would be the luckiest thing I ever did in my life."
In 2008, Lonely Road Books sold out its pre-orders for O'Nan's latest writing, a screenplay simply titled Poe. It is a dramatic retelling of the life of Edgar Allan Poe. The screenplay was released as a limited edition of 200 copies and as a lettered edition of 26 copies. It features a foreword by Roger Corman and frontispieces by Jill Bauman.
Works
1993 - In the Walled City (Stories)
1987 - Transmission
1994 - Snow Angels
1996 - The Names of the Dead
1997 - The Speed Queen
1998 - A World Away
1999 - A Prayer for the Dying
2000 - The Circus Fire (Nonfiction)
2001 - Everyday People
2002 - Wish You Were Here
2003 - The Night Country
2004 - Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans... (Nonfiction w/ Stephen King)
2005 - The Good Wife
2007 - Last Night at the Lobster
2008 - Songs for the Missing
2008 - Poe (Screenplay)
2011 - Emily, Alone
2012 - A Face in the Crowd (Novella e-book w/ Stephen King)
2012 - The Odds
2015 - West of Sunset
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/16/2015.)
Book Reviews
[The] grim yet undeniably fascinating last act of Fitzgerald’s life is the subject of Stewart O’Nan’s gorgeous new novel.... West of Sunset is a pretty fine Hollywood novel, too, but it’s an even finer novel about a great writer’s determination to keep trying to do his best work.
Maureen Corrigan - Washington Post
A mesmerizing and haunting novel.... O’Nan’s prodigious power as a novelist asserts itself, which is to say you forget utterly that he’s behind the curtain and pulling a dazzling number of strings.... Above all, O’Nan delivers—whole-body—the sensation that you are deep inside a living, breathing, suffering consciousness.... Another triumph of the novel surfaces in O’Nan’s wily insinuation into Fitzgerald’s creative life, how it breathes through his everyday existence. Movingly and believingly, the manner in which a writer works—thinks, processes, assimilates, envies—is given life. And that is ultimately what makes the book so special.
Boston Globe
Just as O'Nan succeeded in drawing readers inside the heads of such ordinary people as the elderly widow Emily in Emily, Alone, or Manny DeLeon, the hapless chain-restaurant manager in Last Night at the Lobster, he inhabits Fitzgerald's very being and authentically depicts the writer's fluctuating mind-sets during the final years of his life…an intimate portrayal of a flawed man who never gave up.
Philadelphia Inquirer
There’s a certain romance to the tortured genius mythology, but Stewart O’Nan makes quick work of dispelling it in this beautifully written historical novel which follows Fitzgerald's stint as a screenwriter during the 1930s, captures that era of Hollywood well, offering juicy scenes with Humphrey Bogart, Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, and other Fitzgerald friends and hangers-on, while lending witty dialogue to his affair with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, a doomed romance that's worthy of a classic film.
Entertainment Weekly
O’Nan, an accomplished, award-winning writer who has clearly done his biographical homework, polishes this saga to a seductive sheen, populates it with persuasive incarnations of Dorothy Parker, Humphrey Bogart, Ernest Hemingway, and others, and takes us to a very dark place indeed.
Elle
[E]arnest but only fitfully interesting.... The book inadvertently illustrates the truth of Fitzgerald’s famous dictum: "There are no second acts in American lives."... The book is thoroughly researched, featuring a huge supporting cast of famous players...but it feels more like a television docudrama than a fully realized novel.
Publishers Weekly
F. Scott Fitzgerald's final years, when he worked unhappily as a Hollywood screenwriter.... Fitzgerald comes across as a haunting, multifaceted, sympathetic character.... The slide into drugs, alcoholism, and the heart disease that shortened his life is tragic to behold; Fitzgerald fans will mourn his loss all over again. —Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA
Library Journal
It would appear to be a daunting task to write a biographical novel of one of our most iconic writers, yet O’Nan avoids every pitfall.... O’Nan renders a heartbreaking portrait of an artist soldiering on in the face of personal and professional ruin.... O’Nan’s convincing characterization of a man burdened by guilt and struggling to hold onto his dignity is, at once, a moving testament to grace under pressure and an intimate look at legend.
Booklist
[A] sympathetic portrayal of a troubled genius, a kind but deeply flawed man trying to stay on the wagon while keeping the peace between his unstable wife and their teenage daughter.... O'Nan has crafted an insightful glimpse into a sad period in Fitzgerald's life, as he fades into poverty, drunkenness and anonymity among a cast of notables, after his and Zelda's reign as America's literary golden couple and before his resurgence into universal acclaim.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Stewart O’Nan chooses to begin West of Sunset, not with Scott’s arrival in Hollywood, but with a meeting between Scott and Zelda. What does his story gain from this subtle and interesting choice?
2. O’Nan uses a variety of details to evoke the madness and absurdity of Hollywood culture. What images did you find most effective in this regard, and why?
3. What is the significance of the novel’s title, and how does that title bear upon the ensuing action?
4. Based on what you have read in West of Sunset, do you consider F. Scott Fitzgerald a brave man, a coward, or a bit of both? Explain your reaction.
5. Some have seen West of Sunset as, above all, a love story. If this is correct, who or what is the true object of Scott’s love: Zelda? Sheilah? Himself? Someone or something else? Discuss your answer.
6. O’Nan writes of Fitzgerald, "He was a poor boy from a rich neighborhood, a scholarship kid at boarding school, a Midwesterner in the East, an easterner out West" (pg. 208). Do you accept the idea that a Princeton man who is friends with Hemingway, Bogart, and Dorothy Parker can still claim to be an outsider? Why or why not?
7. Fitzgerald wonders whether he has mistaken oblivion for joy (pg. 166). How is it possible to confuse the two?
8. In West of Sunset, Fitzgerald, a superb novelist and sparkling writer of short stories, tries to make it as a screenwriter, an artistic milieu in which he seems desperately out of water. Why, apart from money, does he attempt this seemingly doomed transformation? Why might a writer who is so successful in one idiom fail so miserably in another?
9. The real Fitzgerald once wrote, "The two basic stories of all times are 'Cinderella' and 'Jack the Giant Killer'—the charm of women and the courage of men." Was he correct? Does O’Nan's novel undermine or confirm Fitzgerald’s statement?
10. In West of Sunset, Hemingway accuses Fitzgerald of betraying his gift. Is it his gift that Scott most significantly betrays, or someone or something else? What?
11. What do you think is Stewart O’Nan’s most penetrating insight into the life of a professional writer?
12. Compare Zelda and Sheilah. What does each woman represent in Fitzgerald’s life? Why does he seem to need them both?
13. Imagine that you are Scottie Fitzgerald. What would you most want from your parents that they are not giving you? Would there be anything you could do to try to get it?
14. Fitzgerald, a Midwesterner by birth, seems caught between the American East and the American West. What does each offer that the other denies him, and in which of the two places does he more naturally belong? Why?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
What Alice Forgot
Liane Moriarty, 2010
Penguin Group USA
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780425247440
Summary
Alice Love is twenty-nine years old, madly in love with her husband, and pregnant with their first child.
So imagine her surprise when, after a fall, she comes to on the floor of a gym (a gym! she HATES the gym!) and discovers that she's actually thirty-nine, has three children, and is in the midst of an acrimonious divorce.
A knock on the head has misplaced ten years of her life, and Alice isn't sure she likes who she's become.
It turns out, though, that forgetting might be the most memorable thing that has ever happened to Alice. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—November 1966
• Where—Sydney, Australia
• Education—M.A., Macquarie University
• Currently—lives in Sydney
Liane Moriarty is an Australian author and sister of author Jaclyn Moriarty. In its review of her 2013 novel, The Husband's Secret, she was referred to as "an edgier, more provocative and bolder successor to Maeve Binchy" by Kirkus Reviews.
Moriarty began work in advertising and marketing at a legal publishing company. She then ran her own company for a while before taking work as a freelance advertising copywriter. In 2004, after obtaining a Master's degree at Macquarie University in Sydney, her first novel Three Wishes, written as part of the degree, was published.
She is now the author of several other novels, including The Last Anniversary (2006) and What Alice Forgot (2010), The Hypnotist's Love Story (2011), and The Husband's Secret (2013). She is also the author of the Nicola Berry series for children.
Moriarty lives in Sydney with her husband and two children. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/5/2013.)
Book Reviews
This winning not-quite amnesia story parses what happens when Alice, a married mother of three whose marriage is disintegrating, takes a knock on the head and comes to thinking she is herself, but 10 years younger and in the middle of a blossoming young marriage, with her first child on the way. As younger Alice adjusts to her older life and body, she finds much to be surprised at: a wealthy lifestyle she never dreamed of, a rejuvenated mother with a surprising love interest, and a sister whose life has turned out unexpectedly disappointing. And everyone is so sorry for something that happened with her best friend Gina, whom she doesn't remember, but apparently who helped sow the seeds of her marriage's collapse. But as the young Alice takes over the older Alice's life and applies her goofy, laissez-faire approach to living, the tension builds: what will happen if old Alice regains her memory? Alice's journey of reconciling herself to how her life came to be what it is, and her slowly building understanding of how the threads of her marriage began to unravel, is moving, well-paced, and thoroughly pleasurable.
Publishers Weekly
When Alice Love passes out at the gym and bonks her head, she wakes up with no memory of the past decade. It's a complete shock to her that she is thin, has three children, and is in the midst of a nasty divorce. She also has no idea why people don't want to talk to her about a mysterious woman named Gina, who was apparently her best friend. Moriarity makes this more than just a one-note story, weaving in a plotline involving Alice's childless sister. Deeper and much more serious than Sophie Kinsella's similarly themed Remember Me?, Moriarty's (Three Wishes; The Last Anniversary) intriguing story will keep readers guessing and curious to know more about Alice.
Library Journal
From Australian Moriarty (The Last Anniversary, 2006, etc.), domestic escapism about a woman whose temporary amnesia makes her re-examine what really matters to her.... Moriarty handles the two Alice consciousnesses with finesse and also delves into infertility issues through Elizabeth's diary. Cheerfully engaging.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Did you like the younger Alice best? Or did you relate more to the older Alice?
2. What would your younger self of ten years ago think of the person you are today?
3. What would surprise your younger self most about the life you're currently leading? What would disappoint you?
4. What would you think of your children? Are they how you imagined they would be? Are you the parent you envisioned? Why or why not?
5. Alice is shocked by many transformations—her gym-toned body, her clothes, her house. Are you more or less polished than you were a decade ago? And do you think there's any deeper significance to such change?
6. Do you think it was realistic that Alice ended up back with Nick? Were you happy with that ending? Do you think they would have ended up together if she hadn't lost her memory?
7. In order for Nick to be successful at his job, was it inevitable that he would spend less time with his family and thereby grow apart from Alice?
8. How did you feel about the sections written from the perspectives of Elisabeth and Frannie? Did they add to your enjoyment of the book, or would you have preferred to have it written entirely from Alice's point of view?
9. Do you think it was unavoidable that Elisabeth and Alice had grown apart, because of the tension caused by Elisabeth's infertility versus Alice's growing family? Or do you think their rift had more to do with the kind of people both of them had become?
10. It's not only Alice who changed over the last decade. Elisabeth changed, too. Do you think she would have been so accepting of the new Alice at the end if she herself didn't get pregnant?
11. Out of all the characters in the book, who do you think had changed the most over the past decade and why?
12. The film rights to the book have been sold to Fox 2000—who do you think would be good in the lead roles?
13. If you were to write a letter to your future self to be opened in ten years, what would you say?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
top of page (summary)
What Happened to Anna K.
Irina Reyn, 2008
Simon & Schuster
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781416558941
Summary
Vivacious thirty-seven-year-old Anna K. is comfortably married to Alex, an older, prominent businessman from her tight-knit Russian-Jewish immigrant community in Queens.
But a longing for freedom is reignited in this bookish, overly romantic, and imperious woman when she meets her cousin Katia Zavurov's boyfriend, an outsider and aspiring young writer on whom she pins her hopes for escape. As they begin a reckless affair, Anna enters into a tailspin that alienates her from her husband, family, and entire world.
In nearby Rego Park's Bukharian-Jewish community, twenty-seven-year-old pharmacist Lev Gavrilov harbors two secret passions: French movies and the lovely Katia. Lev's restless longing to test the boundaries of his sheltered life powerfully collides with Anna's. But will Lev's quest result in life's affirmation rather than its destruction?
Exploring struggles of identity, fidelity, and community, What Happened to Anna K. is a remarkable retelling of the Anna Karenina story brought vividly to life by an exciting young writer. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Moscow, Russia
• Raised—Fairlawn, New Jersey, USA
• Education—B.A., Rutgers University; M.A.
University of Pittsburgh; M.F.A., Bennington
College
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York, and
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
Irina Reyn is a fiction and nonfiction writer who divides her time between Pittsburgh and Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in anthologies and publications such as The Forward, San Francisco Chronicle, The Moscow Times, Nextbook and Post Road. Born in Moscow, Irina was raised in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. (From the publisher and Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
It takes a lot of self-confidence to suggest that your first novel is a modern-day retelling of Anna Karenina. But once you're finished marveling at Reyn's audacity, her formidable storytelling gift sweeps you along and keeps you turning the pages in rapt anticipation, even as you're aware that the sound in the distance is the rumble of that inevitable approaching train.
Jeff Turrentine - New York Times
Set among early 21st-century Russian Jewish immigrants in New York City, Reyn's debut beautifully adapts Anna Karenina's social melodrama for a decidedly different set of Russians. Anna, 30-something with a string of bad relationships behind her and a restless, literarily inclined soul, is wooed into marriage by the financial stability and social appropriateness of Alex K., an older businessman with roots in her Rego Park, Queens, community. As Anna chafes at her unromantic life, trouble hits in the form of David, the hipster-writer boyfriend of her sweet, naïve cousin, Katia. The furiously flying sparks between Anna and David provide cover as Katia is quietly pursued by Lev, a young Bukharan Jew who, like Anna, is a dreamer whose relationship with the émigré community is fraught. Reyn's Anna is perhaps even harder to sympathize with than Tolstoy's original, but Reyn's sparkling insight into the Russian and Bukharan Jewish communities, and the mesmerizing intensity of her prose, make this debut a worthy remake. Lev's and Anna's divergent trajectories and choices illuminate how perilous the balance between self and society remains.
Publishers Weekly
All positive reviews are alike; each negative review is negative in its own way. Fortunately, there's no need to be negative here. Tolstoy himself would surely have given a nod to Reyn's re-creation of his Karenina, transported from glittering czarist Petersburg to Rego Park, Queens (a tragedy in itself!). Meet beautiful, alluring, Jewish Anna Roitman, who languidly accepts the proposal of Alex K., a Russian immigrant who's made good enough to escape the outer boroughs and establish himself on Manhattan's Upper East Side. You know the rest: wealth, childbirth, boredom, a new lover, and Anna K. forsakes home and hearth for her modern-day Vronsky, a struggling, ne'er-do-well writer and his six-story walk-up. First novelist Reyn, whose stories have appeared in Tin House, One Story, and the LA Times, among other publications, deftly fleshes out her unerring version of the Tolstoy classic. Equally absorbing is her pitch-perfect rendering of the life of newly arrived Russian immigrants in such neighborhoods as Brighton Beach and Rego Park. An impressive crossover; recommended not only for lovers of the classics but also those who prefer their fiction lite.
Edward Cone - Library Journal
(Starred review.) Reyn captures and reveals the intricately layered culture of “sausage immigrants,” casting the reader from New York’s Upper East Side, to the outskirts of Queens, and down to Coney Island. Her characters inhabit the interstitial place between immigration and assimilation, tradition and innovation, poised to create a postmodern culture of their own design. Pair this with Gary Shteyngart’s The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2002). —Heather Paulson
Booklist
In a tricky but deft debut, Anna Karenina is reincarnated as an Upper East Side cougar. Reyn lays her own ironic portrait of the Russian Jewish immigrant community in New York (its taste for discount shopping, its dubious fashion sense, etc.) over Anna Karenina's familiar framework. Anna Roitman was nine when her parents left Moscow for Queens, where she grew up bullied at school but found distraction in romantic fiction, reading Wuthering Heights 14 times. Her "Russian soul," her immigrant otherness and physical charms seem to set her apart, but after a sequence of unhappy love affairs she eventually enters into a late, loveless marriage with wealthy Alex K., with whom she has a son, Serge. Still yearning for intellectual companionship and "the wild beating of the heart," however, she falls for David, a young adjunct comp assistant professor and the boyfriend of her cousin Katia. Unable to keep the affair secret, Anna confesses her love to Alex and leaves her comfortable home to live with David where, after the initial rapture, anxiety and jealousy set in and money is tight. Meanwhile another romantic, Lev, has married Katia but fantasizes about Anna. Lev's marriage trembles but does not fall. Anna, despairing as David's shortcomings grow clearer and her own choices narrow, finds her destiny on Lexington Avenue, at the 6 subway station. Although short on tragic impact and mildly anachronistic, this transposition of a 19th-century literary paradigm to the 21st nevertheless offers wit and insight, and a pungent portrait of New York.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Though What Happened to Anna K. is a sharply contemporary novel, there are many structural nods to its source material, such as the introduction to new characters through the impersonal perspective of the wedding videographer. How else is the narrative like that of a nineteenth-century novel? Why do you think David's perspective is never fully revealed, unlike most of the other characters in the novel?
2. Describe the various types of romantic idealism depicted in the novel. Is there a conflict between Anna's traditional romanticism, tied to heroes like Darcy and Heathcliff, and her dreams of a Woody Allen-style New York love affair? How do these imagined passions compare to Lev's longing for the romance of French films? How do these scenarios contrast with real life? In what ways are these ideals destructive?
3. Anna is seen both from her own perspective and through the eyes of others. How does her sense of herself differ from how she is perceived? Is her own vision of herself the true one, or is she at times blind to truths that others observe?
4. In what ways is beauty used as currency in Anna's world? Why do you think Anna's aging changes her outlook so dramatically? If she had not been raised with the goal of attractiveness, would her story have been different? Do you think this standard for women is universal or specific to Anna's community?
5. Why do you think Anna never voices complaints within her marriage? Can Anna fault Alex for not knowing her, when she never truly attempted to communicate? Is she later guilty of not wanting to know the real David?
6. Anna wonders, "Is there room for the comfort of routine and the wild beating of the heart to coexist in a single life?" (Page 76) Why are these concepts at odds with one another? Do you believe that these two aspects of love can be combined in a relationship?
7. Meeting with Nadia at Bloomingdale's, Anna notices that "it seemed that no one cared she had had an affair; her biggest crime was in shattering their shared mythology by acting on it." (Page 137) Why do you think the "mythology" of marriage and money is so closely guarded? Why is it fragile? Why do you think these values take the place of moral consideration in this world?
8. How does Anna's tragedy compare to the histories of older generations -- their tales of poverty, starvation, illness, and persecution? Why is Anna separated from the "shared narrative" (page 40) of the more insulated Bukharian Jews? How does her broadened world and its expanded options help to create her depression?
9. Discuss the use of trains in What Happened to Anna K. Why do you think the train is such a powerful image for Anna? How does it evolve as a symbol throughout the novel?
10. Many possible causes of Anna's unhappiness are discussed, from her passion for the world of books to her alienation from every culture as an Americanized immigrant. Ultimately, why do you think Anna is so desperate to be saved by true love? Why does she feel the need to be a big story?
11. In both Tolstoy's epigraph and the context of David's father's book, Reyn mentions the idea that "it is in the everyday that history is revealed." (Page 178) How do you think this work speaks to the history of our own time?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
What I Had Before I Had You
Sarah Cornwell, 2014
HarperCollins
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062237842
Summary
Written in radiant prose and with stunning psychological acuity, award-winning author Sarah Cornwell's What I Had Before I Had You is a deeply poignant story that captures the joys and sorrows of growing up and learning to let go.
Olivia Reed was fifteen when she left her hometown of Ocean Vista on the Jersey Shore. Two decades later, divorced and unstrung, she returns with her teenage daughter, Carrie, and nine-year-old son, Daniel, recently diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
Distracted by thoughts of the past, Olivia fails to notice when Daniel disappears from her side. Her frantic search for him sparks memories of the summer of 1987, when she exploded out of the cocoon of her mother's fierce, smothering love and into a sudden, full-throttle adolescence, complete with dangerous new friends, first love, and a rebellion so intense that it utterly recharted the course of her life.
Olivia's mother, Myla, was a practicing psychic whose powers waxed and waned along with her mercurial moods. Myla raised Olivia to be a guarded child, and also to believe in the ever-present infant ghosts of her twin sisters, whom Myla took care of as if they were alive—diapers, baby food, an empty nursery kept like a shrine. At fifteen, Olivia saw her sisters for the first time, not as ghostly infants but as teenagers on the beach. But when Myla denied her vision, Olivia set out to learn the truth—a journey that led to shattering discoveries about herself and her family.
Sarah Cornwell seamlessly weaves together the past and the present in this riveting debut novel, as she examines the relationships between mothers and daughters, and the powerful forces of loss, family history, and magical thinking. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—Narberth, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—M.F.A, University of Texas-Austin
• Awards—Pushcart Prize; Gulf Coast Fiction Prize
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California
Sarah Cornwell grew up in Narberth, Pennsylvania. Her fiction has appeared in the 2013 Pushcart Prize Anthology, the Missouri Review, Mid-American Review, Gulf Coast, and Hunger Mountain, among others, and her screenwriting has been honored with a Humanitas Prize. A former James Michener Fellow at University of Texas-Austin, Sarah has worked as an investigator of police misconduct, an MCAT tutor, a psychological research interviewer, and a toy seller. She lives in Los Angeles. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
(Starred review.) The “you” in the title of this psychological mystery debut refers to children, not partners. In Olivia Reed’s case, what her mother Myla had before she had her were stillborn twins, infant ghosts she’s told will follow her through life.... Depth of insight, dreamy prose, and an engrossing storyline mark this wonderful debut.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Cornwell’s first novel is an authentic and artful coming-of-age story that is uniquely multigenerational. In lyrical language, she renders a turbulent adolescence that is achingly believable and a heartfelt tribute to the struggles of mental illness…. With great attention to detail and a smooth flow between past and present, this emotionally charged narrative is as memorable as it is compelling.
Booklist
[When her son] Daniel disappears, and as Olivia searches for him, she must confront the ghosts of her past.... Only the search for Daniel can heal the still-raw wounds. Gorgeously crafted, Cornwell's tale shimmers and shimmies with nimble dialogue and poignantly flawed characters.... Cornwell's debut novel enchants.
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.)
What I Know For Sure
Oprah Winfrey, 2014
Flatiron Books
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250054050
Summary
As a creative force, student of the human heart and soul, and champion of living the life you want, Oprah Winfrey stands alone.
Over the years, she has made history with a legendary talk show—the highest-rated program of its kind, launched her own television network, become the nation's only African-American billionaire, and been awarded both an honorary degree by Harvard University and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
From all her experiences, she has gleaned life lessons—which, for fourteen years, she's shared in O, The Oprah Magazine's widely popular "What I Know For Sure" column, a monthly source of inspiration and revelation.
Now, for the first time, these thoughtful gems have been revised, updated, and collected in What I Know For Sure, a beautiful cloth bound book with a ribbon marker, packed with insight and revelation from Oprah Winfrey.
Organized by theme—joy, resilience, connection, gratitude, possibility, awe, clarity, and power—these essays offer a rare, powerful and intimate glimpse into the heart and mind of one of the world's most extraordinary women—while providing readers a guide to becoming their best selves.
Candid, moving, exhilarating, uplifting, and frequently humorous, the words Oprah shares in What I Know For Sure shimmer with the sort of truth that readers will turn to again and again. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 29, 1954
• Where—Kosciusko, Mississippi, USA
• Raised—Milwaukee, Wisconsin
• Education—high school
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—maintains homes in New York, California, Hawaii, Colorado, Florida, and New Jersey
Oprah Gail Winfre is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist. Winfrey is best known for her talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show, which was the highest-rated program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011.
Dubbed the "Queen of All Media," she has been ranked the richest African-American of the 20th century, the greatest black philanthropist in American history, and is currently North America's only black billionaire. Several assessments regard her as the most influential woman in the world. In 2013, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama and honorary doctorate degrees from Duke and Harvard.
Background
Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She experienced considerable hardship during her childhood, saying she was raped at age nine and became pregnant at 14; her son died in infancy. Sent to live with the man she calls her father, a barber in Tennessee, Winfrey landed a job in radio while still in high school and began co-anchoring the local evening news at the age of 19. Her emotional ad-lib delivery eventually got her transferred to the daytime-talk-show arena, and after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place, she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated.
Credited with creating a more intimate confessional form of media communication, she is credited with having popularized and revolutionized the tabloid talk show genre pioneered by Phil Donahue, which a Yale study says broke 20th-century taboos and allowed LGBT people to enter the mainstream.
By the mid-1990s she had reinvented her show with a focus on literature, self-improvement, and spirituality. Though criticized for unleashing a confession culture, promoting controversial self-help ideas, and an emotion-centered approach, she is often praised for overcoming adversity to become a benefactor to others. From 2006 to 2008, her support of Barack Obama, by one estimate, delivered over a million votes in the close 2008 Democratic primary race. (Excerpted from Wikipedia. For more information, see the full version.)
Book Reviews
The 14 years during which this book’s contents were written (in her Oprah Magazine column) were eventful ones for “The Queen of All Media.” ...The events and the span of those years lend a sense of evolving consciousness to the dozens of...essays compiled in this ribbon-markered, clothbound bible of a book. If you’ve read, heard, watched, prayed to, or memorialized the gospel according to Oprah, there will be much to delight you here, and few surprises.
Boston Globe
Gentle and supportive, while concise and sincere, these brief observations invite readers to five minutes of quiet contemplation. Ask yourself what you know for sure, Winfrey says, and “what you’ll find along the way will be fantastic, because what you’ll find will be yourself.”
Publishers Weekly
Winfrey takes each moment and finds the good in it, takes pride in having lived it and embraces the message she’s received from that particular time.... [S]he shows readers how she's turned potentially negative moments into life-enhancing experiences...and found bliss in simple pleasures.
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 start a discussion for What I Know For Sure:
1. What does Oprah say about the importance of time? Why is time so important to her? How important is time your own life? How well do you make use of it?
2. How has Oprah's relationship to her body, specifically the numbers on the scale, affected her life? Talk about how her thoughts about her body have evolved over time. Does her discussion of weight have any resonance with you?
3. In what ways—and more importantly, why—do we allow others' perceptions shape how we see ourselves? How does Oprah suggest protecting, even enhancing, our sense of self-worth? What determines an somene's "worth"? In fact, what is individual worth, how do you define it?
4. In the book Oprah says, "Anything can be a miracle, a blessing, an opportunity if you choose to see it that way." Is she right? Is our ability to face up to our troubles—some truly dire, even fatal—a matter of attitude? Does that hold true for you or others you know? How can attitude affect outcome?
4. Talk about gratitude. What does Oprah say about its role in life? How grafeful are you—and what are you grateful for? Is it easy to feel gratitude?
5. The definition of "crisis" is a turning point. Oprah says, "Right now, no matter where you are, you are a single choice away from a new beginning." How can we apply that to the crises in our own lives?
6. Are the lessons in this book valuable? Have any of them touched you personally, given you pause, and made you examine your own life? Can reading a book like What I Know For Sure change lives?
7. How would you describe What I Know For Sure? Is it a book of practical advice...or a spiritual guide? Is it a rehash of tired ideas and bromides...or are its ideas fresh and insightful?
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)
What I Remember Most
Cathy Lamb, 2014
Kensington Publishing
486 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780758295064
Summary
In a new novel rich in grace, warmth, and courage, acclaimed author Cathy Lamb tells of one woman's journey of reinvention in the wake of deep betrayall.
Grenadine Scotch Wild has only vague memories of the parents she last saw when she was six years old, but she's never forgotten their final, panicked words to her, "Run, Grenadine, run!" The mystery of their disappearance is just one more frayed strand in a life that has lately begun to unravel completely.
One year into her rocky marriage to Covey, a well known investor, he's arrested for fraud and embezzlement. Grenadine, now a successful collage artist and painter, is facing jail time despite her innocence.
With Covey refusing to exonerate her unless she comes back to him, Grenadine once again takes the advice given to her so long ago: she runs. This time, instead of ending up in various foster homes, Grenadine ends up living in her car, for weeks, in winter. Hiding out in a mountain town in central Oregon until the trial, she eventually finds work as a bartender and as assistant to a furniture-maker who is busy rebuilding his own life.
Still haunted by what happened to her parents, she moves into a lovely apartment above a red barn, makes true friends, and finally learns to laugh and love.
Far from everything she knew, Grenadine is granted a rare chance, as potentially liberating as it is terrifying—to face down her past, her fears, and live a life as beautiful and colorful as one of her paintings. . . (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Newport Beach, California, USA
• Raised—state of Oregon
• Education—B.A., University of Oregon
• Currently—lives in Portland, Oregon
In her words:
I was born in Newport Beach, California and spent my first ten years playing outside like a wild vagabond.
As a child, I mastered the art of skateboarding, catching butterflies in bottles, and riding my bike with no hands. When I was ten, my parents moved me, my two sisters, a brother, and two poorly behaved dogs to Oregon before I could fulfill my lifelong dream of becoming a surfer bum.
I then embarked on my notable academic career where I earned good grades now and then, spent a great deal of time daydreaming, ran wild with a number of friends, and landed on the newspaper staff in high school. When I saw my byline above an article about people making out in the hallways of the high school, I knew I had found my true calling.
After two years of partying at the University of Oregon, I settled down for the next three years and earned my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education, and became a fourth grade teacher. I became a teacher because I wanted to become a writer. It was difficult for me to become proper and conservative but I threw out my red cowboy boots and persevered. I had no choice. I had to eat and health insurance is expensive. I loved teaching, but I also loved the nights and summers where I could write and try to build a career filled with creativity and my strange imagination.
I met my husband on a blind date. A mutual friend who was an undercover vice cop busting drug dealers set us up. My husband jokes he was being arrested at the time. That is not true. Do not believe him. His sense of humor is treacherous. It was love at third sight. We’ve now been married a long time.
Teaching children about the Oregon Trail and multiplication facts amused me until I became so gigantically pregnant with twins I looked like a small cow and could barely walk. With a three year old at home, I decided it was time to make a graceful exit and waddle on out. I left school one day and never went back. I later landed in the hospital for over six weeks with pre term labor, but that is another (rather dull) story. I like to think my students missed me.
When I was no longer smothered in diapers and pacifiers, I took a turn onto the hazardous road of freelance writing and wrote over 200 articles on homes, home décor, people and fashion for a local newspaper. As I am not fashionable and can hardly stand to shop, it was an eye opener to find that some women actually do obsess about what to wear. I also learned it would probably be more relaxing to slam a hammer against one’s forehead than engage in a large and costly home remodeling project. I also tried to write romance books, which ended ingloriously for years.
I suffer from, “I Would Rather Play Than Work Disease” which prevents me from getting much work done unless I have a threatening deadline, which is often. I like to hang with family and friends, walk, eat chocolate, travel, go to Starbucks, and I am slightly obsessive, okay very obsessive, about the types of books I read. I also like to be left alone a lot so I can hear all the bizarre and troubled characters in my head talk to each other and then transfer that oddness to paper. The characters usually don’t start to talk until 10:00 at night, however, so I am often up ‘til 2:00 in the morning with them. That is my excuse for being cranky. Really, I was just born a little cranky.
I adore my children and husband, except when he refuses to take his dirty shoes off and walks on the carpet. I will ski because my kids insist, but I secretly don’t like it at all. Too cold and I fall all the time.
I am currently working on my next novel and I’m not sleeping much. (From the author's website.)
Follow Cathy on Facebook.
Book Reviews
Lamb is an awesome storyteller and moves seamlessly from the past to the present.
RT Book Reviews
IF YOU COULD SEE WHAT I SEE: Lamb’s story is earnest, heartwarming and, at times, heartbreaking.
RT Book Reviews
THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF MY LIFE: The blending of three or more generations and the secrets they harbor keeps this story moving briskly, culminating in a satisfying ending that makes us believe that despite heartache and angst, there can be such a thing as happily ever after.
New York Journal of Books
SUCH A PRETTY FACE: Stevie’s a winning heroine
Publishers Weekly
HENRY’S SISTERS
An Indie Next List Notable Book.
A story of strength and reconciliation and change.
Sunday Oregonian
If you loved Terms of Endearment, the Ya Ya Sisterhood, and Steel Magnolias, you will love Henry’s Sisters. Cathy Lamb just keeps getting better and better.
Three Tomatoes Book Club
THE LAST TIME I WAS ME: Charming.
Publishers Weekly
JULIA’S CHOCOLATES: Julia's Chocolates is wise, tender, and very funny. In Julia Bennett, Cathy Lamb has created a deeply wonderful character, brave and true. I loved this beguiling novel about love, friendship and the enchantment of really good chocolate.
Luanne Rice, New York Times bestselling author
Discussion Questions
1. Which character did you most relate to and why? Was there any part of the book that made you laugh or cry? What was your favorite scene?
2. If you could spend the day with Grenadine, Kade, Rozlyn, the Hutchinsons, or Eudora, who would you choose and what would you do?
3. Grenadine says, about herself,
I’m a crack shot and can hit damn near anything…I’m a collage artist and painter…I used to have a little green house. I sold it. That was a huge mistake…I can smash beer cans on my forehead…I fight dirty. Someone comes at me, and my instinctive reaction is to smash and pulverize. It has gotten me into trouble…I have a temper, my anger perpetually on low seethe, and I have struggled with self esteem issues and flashbacks for as long as I can remember…I can wear four inch heels and designer clothes like wealthy women, make social chit chat, and pretend I’m exactly like them. I am not like them at all…
Write down, and then share, how you would describe yourself.
4. Grenadine speaks in the first person. However, there are also police and children’s services reports, memos, letters from a doctor, a teacher, and Grenadine, a report card, a court transcript, and third person passages from the point of view of Bucky. Did the structure work for you? Why?
5. Marley, a customer at The Spirited Owl said,
Women are so picky. If you don’t look like Brad Pitt or you’re not rich, they don’t want you.
I said,
No, they don’t want you, Marley, because you look like you have a baby in your stomach, you’re unshaven, you drink too much, and all you want to do is talk about yourself and whine in that whiny voice of yours. Would you be attracted to you? No? Then why would a woman be?
Why did the author give Grenadine a job at a bar? What do you think of her bar tending and communication abilities? If she gave you advice while you were drinking a margarita, what would she say to you?
6. What were the themes of the book?
7. Did the author portray Grenadine’s journey in foster care and the children’s services division workers accurately?
8. Why was Grenadine attracted to Kade? What did Kade have in common with her? Kade had spent time in jail because of gang related activities when he was younger. Would his record have stopped you from dating him?
9. From Bucky:
She never should have gotten away.
That was a mistake. He had not expected things to take so long. It had always bothered him.
He liked things neat. Planned. Perfect.
He wanted to see her again. Before.
He would do it! He would think of a way.
He pulled four strands of hair out of his head, then made a design on the table in front of him.
He giggled. He twitched in his chair.
He told himself a nursery rhyme. He changed the words to create a new rhyme. He sang it out loud. He wrote it in his rhyme book.
He giggled again, then he hurdled his rhyme book across the room, tilted his head back and screamed.
What element did Bucky bring to the story? Did it fit?
10. Grenadine deliberately shot two men who were attacking her in her car, then kept shooting to scare them off and disable their vehicle. She did not report the incident to police. What did both actions tell you about her?
11. What did you think of Covey? Was there any good in him?
12. How did Rozlyn live? How did she die? Did you learn anything from her about living or dying? Would it have been more realistic, or a better ending for you, if Rozlyn had lived? Why do you think the author chose for her to die?
13. Grenadine said,
I paint what’s in my head. I paint whatever I’m thinking about at the time. I’ll twist it up, spin it out, add color, add layers, add collage items, and I keep going until it feels done.
If you were to make a painting or collage that would tell the story of your life, what would it look like? What materials would you use? What would it say about you? Grab the artist in you and sketch it out….
(Questions courtesy of the author.)
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours: Stories
Helen Oyeyemi, 2016
Penguin Publishing
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594634635
Summary
An enchanting collection of intertwined stories.
Playful, ambitious, and exquisitely imagined, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours is cleverly built around the idea of keys, literal and metaphorical.
The key to a house, the key to a heart, the key to a secret—Oyeyemi’s keys not only unlock elements of her characters’ lives, they promise further labyrinths on the other side.
♦ In “Books and Roses” one special key opens a library, a garden, and clues to at least two lovers’ fates.
♦ In “Is Your Blood as Red as This?” an unlikely key opens the heart of a student at a puppeteering school.
♦ “‘Sorry’ Doesn’t Sweeten Her Tea” involves a “house of locks,” where doors can be closed only with a key—with surprising, unobservable developments.
♦ In “If a Book Is Locked There’s Probably a Good Reason for That Don't You Think,” a key keeps a mystical diary locked (for good reason).
Oyeyemi’s tales span multiple times and landscapes as they tease boundaries between coexisting realities. Is a key a gate, a gift, or an invitation? What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours captivates as it explores the many possible answers. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 10, 1984
• Where—Nigeria
• Raised—London, England, UK
• Education—B.A. Cambridge University
• Awards—Somerset Maughm Award
• Currently—lives in London, England
Helen Olajumoke Oyeyemi is a British author with five novels to her name. She was born in Nigeria and raised in London, England.
Oyeyemi studied Social and Political Sciences at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, graduating in 2006. While at Cambridge, two of her plays, Juniper's Whitening and Victimese, were performed by fellow students to critical acclaim and subsequently published by Methuen.
Novels
She wrote her first novel, The Icarus Girl, while still at school studying for her A levels at Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School.
In 2007 Bloomsbury published her second novel, The Opposite House which is inspired by Cuban mythology.
Her third novel, White is for Witching, described as having "roots in Henry James and Edgar Allan Poe" was published in 2009. It was a 2009 Shirley Jackson Award finalist and won a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award.
Mr Fox, Oyeyemi's fourth novel was published in 2011. Aimee Bender said in a New York Times review: "Charm is a quality that overflows in this novel." Kirkus Reviews, however thought that while readers might consider Mr. Fox "an intellectual tour de force," they might also find it "emotionally chilly."
Oyeyemi's fith novel, Boy, Snow, Bird, published in 2014, is a retelling of Snow White, set in Massachusetts in the 1950s.
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, released in 2016, is a collection of intertwined stories, all involving locks and keys.
Extras
• Oyeyemi is a lifelong Catholic who has done voluntary work for CAFOD in Kenya.
• In 2009 Oyeyemi was recognised as one of the women on Venus Zine’s “25 under 25” list.
(Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/18/2014.)
Book Reviews
Summarizing Oyeyemi is like trying to tell a dream.... Casual and accessible at the sentence level, [these stories] are not so much experimental as deeply comfortable with the pre-narrative and proto-narrative impulses at the heart of storytelling.
Chicago Tribune
Magical and show stopping.
Elle.com
An enchanting and beautifully crafted first collection of stories, linked by the recurrence of keys…Oyeyemi’s storytelling is without parallel.
BBC.com
In this collection of short stories, there are many keys that unlock many things. . . What links them all? You’ll want to open and see.
Cosmopolitan
These modern fairy tales from award-winning author Helen Oyeyemi…will unlock your imagination with stories of love, loss, and...keys...magical, feverish, spooky, and delightful.
Marie Claire
Helen Oyeyemi is a literary genius, and it shows in this fantastic collection of short stories.... With characters that will welcome you, push you, and surprise you, Oyeyemi's writing takes you past your expectations.
Bustle
In her first story collection, Oyeyemi conjures present-day Europe, made enticingly strange by undercurrents of magic, and populated by ghosts, sentient puppets, and possible witches alongside middle-aged psychiatrists, tyrants, and feminist undergrads.
Publishers Weekly
The prolific and immensely talented Oyeyemi presents fantastical short stories that all revolve around a key, whether literal or metaphorical.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) These nine casually interlocking stories, set in a familiar yet surreal contemporary world, overflow with the cerebral humor and fantastical plots that readers have come to expect from Oyeyemi.... For all the portentous metaphors (keys and locks appear in every story) and all the convoluted and fabulist narrations, Oyeyemi's stories are often cheerfully sentimental.
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 start a discussion for What Is Yours Is Not Yours...then take off on your own:
1. First, what is your favorite story within the collection and why? Which is the most puzzling? Which is your least favorite?
2. Consider the title of each story and its meaning within the context of the story. Is the title thematic...or ironic?
3. The overriding metaphors within the collection are locks and keys. Whats role do they play in each story, and what is their symbolic significance?
4. In what way is "Dornicka and the St. Martin's Day Goose" an inverted "Little Red Riding Hood"? Do any of the other stories play with fairy tale themes? Consider, for instance, the way "Is Your Blood as Red as This?" draws on "Pinocchio."
5. Trace the characters who appear in multiple stories. How do they, or their roles, change from one story to the other?
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)
What Is the What: The Authobiography of Valentino Achak Deng
Dave Eggers, 2006
Knopf Doubleday
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307385901
Summary
In a heartrending and astonishing novel, Eggers illuminates the history of the civil war in Sudan through the eyes of Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee now living in the United States.
We follow his life as he's driven from his home as a boy and walks, with thousands of orphans, to Ethiopia, where he finds safety — for a time. Valentino's travels, truly Biblical in scope, bring him in contact with government soldiers, janjaweed-like militias, liberation rebels, hyenas and lions, disease and starvation — and a string of unexpected romances. Ultimately, Valentino finds safety in Kenya and, just after the millennium, is finally resettled in the United States, from where this novel is narrated.
In this book, written with expansive humanity and surprising humor, we come to understand the nature of the conflicts in Sudan, the refugee experience in America, the dreams of the Dinka people, and the challenge one indomitable man faces in a world collapsing around him. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 12, 1970
• Where—Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• Reared—Lake Forest, Illinois
• Education—University of Illinois
• Currently—lives in San Francisco, California
Dave Eggers is the author of four books, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, You Shall Know Our Velocity!, How We Are Hungry, and What Is the What. He is the editor of McSweeney’s, a quarterly magazine and book-publishing company, and is cofounder of 826 Valencia, a network of nonprofit writing and tutoring centers for young people.
His interest in oral history led to his 2004 cofounding of Voice of Witness, a nonprofit series of books that use oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. As a journalist, his work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, and The Believer. He lives in the San Francisco Bay area with his wife and daughter. (From the publisher.)
More
Eggers was born in Boston, Massachusetts, grew up in suburban Lake Forest (where he was a high-school classmate of the actor Vince Vaughn), and attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He lives in San Francisco and is married to the writer Vendela Vida. In October 2005, Vendela gave birth to a daughter, October Adelaide Eggers Vida.
Eggers's brother Bill is a researcher who has worked for several conservative think tanks, doing research on privatization. His sister, Beth, claimed that Eggers grossly understated her role in raising their brother Toph and made use of her journals in writing A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius without compensating her. She later recanted her claims in a posting on her brother's own website McSweeney's Internet Tendency, referring to the incident as "a really terrible LaToya Jackson moment". On March 1, 2002, the New York Post reported that Beth, then a lawyer in Modesto, California, had committed suicide. Eggers briefly spoke about his sister's death during a 2002 fan interview for McSweeney's.
Eggers was one of three 2008 TED Prize recipients. His TED Prize wish: for community members to personally engage with local public schools.
Eggers began writing as a Salon.com editor and founded Might magazine, while also writing a comic strip called Smarter Feller (originally Swell, then Smart Feller) for SF Weekly. His first book was a memoir (with fictional elements), A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000). It focuses on the author's struggle to raise his younger brother in San Francisco following the sudden deaths of their parents. The book quickly became a bestseller and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. The memoir was praised for its originality, idiosyncratic self-referencing, and for several innovative stylistic elements. Early printings of the 2001 trade-paperback edition were published with a lengthy, apologetic postscript entitled "Mistakes We Knew We Were Making."
In 2002, Eggers published his first novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, a story about a frustrating attempt to give away money to deserving people while haphazardly traveling the globe. An expanded and revised version was released as Sacrament in 2003 and retitled You Shall Know Our Velocity! for its Vintage imprint distribution. He has since published a collection of short stories, How We Are Hungry, and three politically-themed serials for Salon.com. In November 2005, Eggers published Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated, compiling the book of interviews with exonerees once sentenced to death. The book was compiled with Lola Vollen, "a physician specializing in the aftermath of large-scale human rights abuses" and "a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley's Institute of International Studies and a practicing clinician." Novelist Scott Turow wrote the introduction to Surviving Justice. Eggers's most recent novel, What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (McSweeney's, 2006), was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Eggers is also the editor of the Best American Nonrequired Reading series, an annual anthology of short stories, essays, journalism, satire, and alternative comics.
Eggers is the founder of McSweeney's, an independent publishing house. McSweeney's produces a quarterly literary journal, McSweeney's, first published in 1998; a monthly journal, The Believer, which debuted in 2003 and is edited by wife Vida; and, beginning in 2005, a quarterly DVD magazine, Wholphin. Other works include The Future Dictionary of America, Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans, and the "Dr. and Mr. Haggis-On-Whey" children's books of literary nonsense, which Eggers writes with his younger brother. Ahead of the 2006 FIFA World Cup, Eggers wrote an essay about the US national team and soccer in the United States for The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup, a book published with aid of the journal Granta, that contained essays about each competing team in the tournament.
Eggers currently teaches writing in San Francisco at 826 Valencia, a nonprofit tutoring center and writing school for children that he cofounded in 2002. Eggers has recruited volunteers to operate similar programs in Los Angeles, New York City, Seattle, Chicago, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, all under the auspices of the nonprofit organization 826 National. In 2006, he appeared at a series of fundraising events, dubbed the Revenge of the Book–Eaters tour, to support these programs. The Chicago show, at the Park West theatre, featured Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard. Other performers on the tour included Sufjan Stevens, Jon Stewart and David Byrne. In September 2007, the Heinz Foundations awarded Eggers a $250,000 Heinz award given to recognize "extraordinary achievements by individuals". The award will be used to fund some of the 826 Valencia writing centers. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Mr. Eggers has produced What Is the What, a startling act of literary ventriloquism that recounts the harrowing story of a Sudanese refugee named Valentino Achak Deng, while reminding us just how eloquently the author can write about loss and mortality and sorrow.... [T]he book is flawed by an odd decision on Mr. Eggers’s part to fictionalize Mr. Deng’s story.... But while we start out wondering what is real and what is not, it is a testament to the power of Mr. Deng’s experiences and Mr. Eggers’s ability to convey their essence in visceral terms that we gradually forget these schematics of composition.... Yet as told by Mr. Eggers, Valentino Achak Deng’s story remains a testament to the triumph of hope over experience, human resilience over tragedy and disaster
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
Reading What Is the What does indeed make it impossible to pretend that Valentino Achak Deng and the other Lost Boys and all the men and women and children who have suffered, and continue to suffer, fates like his do not exist. Dave Eggers has made the outlines of the tragedy in East Africa — so vague to so many Americans — not only sharp and clear but indelible. An eloquent testimony to the power of storytelling, What Is the What is an extraordinary work of witness, and of art.
Francine Prose - New York Times
God has a problem with me," complains Valentino Achak Deng, the subject of Dave Eggers's extraordinary new novel, What Is the What. Coming from almost any other person on the planet, this lament would appear hopelessly self-pitying. But coming from Valentino, a Sudanese refugee, it sounds almost like an understatement. At a time when the field of autobiography seems dominated by hyperbolic accounts of what might be called dramas of privilege (substance abuse, eating disorders, unloving parents, etc.), What Is the What is a story of real global catastrophe—a work of such simple power, straightforward emotion and genuine gravitas that it reminds us how memoirs can transcend the personal to illuminate large, public tragedies as well.The book does this despite being, strictly speaking, a novel. Valentino, who survived almost 15 years of civil war and refugee-camp exile before coming to the United States in 2001, in fact does exist, but the book that purports to be his autobiography is actually a fictional recreation by Eggers. No secret is made of the fact that some of the characters in the book are composites, some episodes are invented, and much of the storyline has been reordered and reshaped for narrative effect. The result, however, is a document that—unlike so many "real" autobiographies—exudes authenticity.
Gary Krist - Washington Post
(Starred review.) Valentino Achak Deng, real-life hero of this engrossing epic, was a refugee from the Sudanese civil war—the bloodbath before the current Darfur bloodbath—of the 1980s and 90s. In this fictionalized memoir, Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) makes him an icon of globalization. Separated from his family when Arab militia destroy his village, Valentino joins thousands of other "Lost Boys," beset by starvation, thirst and man-eating lions on their march to squalid refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, where Valentino pieces together a new life. He eventually reaches America, but finds his quest for safety, community and fulfillment in many ways even more difficult there than in the camps: he recalls, for instance, being robbed, beaten and held captive in his Atlanta apartment. Eggers's limpid prose gives Valentino an unaffected, compelling voice and makes his narrative by turns harrowing, funny, bleak and lyrical. The result is a horrific account of the Sudanese tragedy, but also an emblematic saga of modernity—of the search for home and self in a world of unending upheaval.
Publishers Weekly
Eggers's well-received second novel, a moving first-person account based on the true experiences of Sudanese "lost boy" Valentino Achak Deng, makes an excellent audiobook. When Valentino was seven, his native Dinka village of Marial Bai was raided by Arab militiamen, sending him off on a strange and harrowing journey through depths of terror and despair, toward refuge in Ethiopia, Kenya, and, finally, the illusory promised land of America. Reading in a clear, convincingly expansive African cadence that is a pleasure to the ear, Dion Graham sounds all the right notes of bewilderment, fear, discovery, mirth, and joy in Valentino's coming-of-age in the Kakuma refugee camp and his abrupt exodus to the land of plenty, catching both the otherness and the universality of his experience and providing a compelling personal window on an ongoing global tragedy. A rewarding purchase for libraries of any size.
Library Journal
A few critics questioned where Deng's story ended and Eggers's literary license began, and the book as a whole could have been better edited. While visceral and heartrending, Deng's and Eggers's joint story is ultimately a powerful tale of hope. When both People and the ever-glum Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times rave, how can one resist?
Bookmarks Magazine
Discussion Questions
1. In what ways can What Is the What be understood as a hero’s journey? What features does it share with classic works like Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid or more modern works like Richard Wright’s Black Boy and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road? What are the most significant features of Valentino’s journey? In what ways is Valentino’s story both unique and universal?
2. When he is in the United States, Valentino says that he wants everyone to hear his stories. “Written words are rare in small villages like mine, and it is my right and obligation to send my stories into the world, even if silently, even if utterly powerless” [p. 29]. Through Eggers, Valentino has found a way to send his stories into the world. Are they powerless to alter the suffering he and his fellow Sudanese have endured? What powers do they possess?
3. What are Valentino’s most appealing qualities—as a character in his own story and as a narrator of that story?
4. What is the significance of Valentino addressing his stories to people who aren’t listening—to Michael, TV Boy, to Julian, the intake person at the hospital, to members of his gym, etc.? Why would Eggers make this narrative choice?
5. Why is a personal story—Valentino’s story—of the violence and oppression in Sudan more valuable than any purely historical account could be? What emotions does Valentino’s story arouse that a more objective treatment could not?
6. What are Valentino’s most harrowing experiences? In what ways do they shape his character? What enables him to survive these ordeals and even excel in the refugee camps?
7. What is the “what” of the “What Is the What” story? Does the novel point to a solution to this riddle?
8. At the end of the novel, Valentino addresses the reader directly: “All the while I will know that you are there. How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist” [p. 535]. Why would Eggers and Valentino choose to end the novel in this way? In what ways have Westerners pretended that people like Valentino don’t exist? What is Valentino saying here about the power of the imagination and the power of storytelling?
9. In what ways does What Is the What illuminate the genocide that is still ongoing in Sudan?
10. Explore the irony of Valentino escaping from Africa and the terrible violence there to being beaten and robbed in Atlanta. Why does Valentino feel, after he has been victimized—and after his experience with the police and the hospital—that he doesn’t actually exist?
11. Why does Valentino describe America as “a miserable and glorious place”? [p. 351]. How are his struggles in the United States both different from and similar to his struggles in Africa?
12. Valentino says that “the civil war became, to the world at large, too confusing to decipher, a mess of tribal conflicts with no clear heroes and villains” [p. 349]. To what degree is it true that there were no clear heroes and villains, no clear victims and oppressors, in Sudan’s civil war as Valentino describes it? In what ways do SPLA forces behave just as brutally as the murahaleen and government forces they are fighting?
13. When the Lost Boys are chased from a village by the SPLA, Valentino realizes that “there were castes within the displaced. And we occupied the lowest rung on the ladder. We were utterly dispensable to all—to the government, to the murahaleen, to the rebels, to the better-situated refugees” [p. 225]. What essential problem does Valentino’s realization reveal? Is this desire for hierarchy intrinsic to human nature or is it always historically conditioned?
14. What Is the What is about war and displacement and the struggle to survive. In what ways is it also a novel about friendship, love, and family? What moments of compassion stand out in the novel? What are Valentino’s most positive relationships?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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What Is Visible
Kimberly Elkins, 2014
Grand Central Publishing
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781455528967
Summary
A vividly original literary novel based on the astounding true-life story of Laura Bridgman, the first deaf and blind person who learned language and blazed a trail for Helen Keller.
At age two, Laura Bridgman lost four of her five senses to scarlet fever. At age seven, she was taken to Perkins Institute in Boston to determine if a child so terribly afflicted could be taught. At age twelve, Charles Dickens declared her his prime interest for visiting America.
And by age twenty, she was considered the nineteenth century's second most famous woman, having mastered language and charmed the world with her brilliance. Not since The Diving Bell and the Butterfly has a book proven so profoundly moving in illuminating the challenges of living in a completely unique inner world.
With Laura-by turns mischievous, temperamental, and witty-as the book's primary narrator, the fascinating kaleidoscope of characters includes the founder of Perkins Institute, Samuel Gridley Howe, with whom she was in love; his wife, the glamorous Julia Ward Howe, a renowned writer, abolitionist, and suffragist; Laura's beloved teacher, who married a missionary and died insane from syphilis; an Irish orphan with whom Laura had a tumultuous affair; Annie Sullivan; and even the young Helen Keller.
Deeply enthralling and rich with lyricism, What Is Visible chronicles the breathtaking experiment that Laura Bridgman embodied and its links to the great social, philosophical, theological, and educational changes rocking Victorian America. Given Laura's worldwide fame in the nineteenth century, it is astonishing that she has been virtually erased from history. What Is Visible will set the record straight. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—State of Virginia
• Education—B.A., Duke University, M.A., Florida State;
M.F.A., Boston University
• Currently—lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Kimberly Elkins’ fiction and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in The Atlantic Monthly, Best New American Voices, Iowa Review, Village Voice, Chicago tribune, Maisonneuve, Glamour, Prevention, Mcgraw-Hill's college textbook Arguing Through Literature, and Slice, among others.
She was a finalist for the 2004 National Magazine Award and has received fellowships from the Edward Albee and William Randolph Hearst foundations, the SLS fellowship in Nonfiction to St. Petersburg, Russia, the St. Botolph Emerging Artist Award, and a joint research fellowship from the Houghton Library at Harvard, the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe, and the Massachusetts Historical Society for research on her novel.
Residencies include the Millay Colony and Blue Mountain Center, and she was also the 2009 Kerouac Writer in Residence. Kimberly is the 2012 runner-up for the Nelson Algren Award and has also won a New York Moth Slam. She has taught at Florida State University and Boston University, and is currently a Visiting Lecturer and Advisor for the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Hong Kong, the first MFA in Asia.
Previous jobs include executive assistant to Harvey Weinstein at Miramax, and assistant to Elia Kazan at the Actors’ Studio Playwrights’ Unit. She has a B.A. from Duke University, an M.A. in Creative Writing from Florida State, and an MFA in Fiction from Boston University. Kimberly Elkins grew up in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, and currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
What Is Visible contemplates the bare requisites of being human, more fundamentally than most meditations on haves and have-nots. When Laura is put on display, she wants to be seen as “a present to them all from God, to show how little one can possess of what we think it means to be human while still possessing full humanity.” A novel’s extraordinary power is to allow a reader to take possession of the inner life of another. This one provides entree to a nearly unthinkable life, and while no one would want to live there, it’s a fascinating place to visit.
Barbara Kingsolver - New York Times Book Review
Based on historical fact, this fictional portrait of Laura Bridgeman, the world’s first deaf and blind prodigy (also living without the senses of taste or smell), is an engrossing and moving read. (Best Books of 2014: Most inspirational.)
Woman's Day
(Starred review.) Laura Bridgman...has been all but forgotten by history. Fortunately, Elkins revives this historical figure with a wonderfully imaginative and scrupulously researched debut novel.... Laura comes across as a willful, mysterious marvel, showing “how little one can posses of what we think it means to be human while still possessing full humanity.”
Publishers Weekly
The best historical fiction offers readers a new look at a well-known subject, or illuminates an episode or individual that has been lost to history. Playwright Kimberly Elkins achieves the latter in What Is Visible, a strikingly original debut novel. (Fiction Pick of the Month-June 2014.)
BookPage
The audacious liberties Elkins takes—inventing a romance for Laura, taking great pains to highlight the most tragically ironic hypocrisies of her famous caregivers—make the story sometimes feel like a writer's exercise rather than a novel. However, Elkins does inspire the reader to imagine life experienced only through touch. —Nicole R. Steeves, Chicago P.L.
Library Journal
Told in alternating chapters by Laura, Howe, his poet wife, and Laura’s beloved teacher, this is a complex, multilayered portrait of a woman who longed to communicate and to love and be loved. Elkins fully captures her difficult nature and her relentless pursuit of connection. —Joanne Wilkinson
Booklist
The story of Helen Keller's forgotten forerunner comes nimbly to life in Elkins' debut novel.... Flitting back and forth over the course of a half-century, the novel is told from alternating viewpoints, including Laura's own.... An affecting portrait which finally provides its idiosyncratic heroine with a worthy voice.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. How did reading What is Visible affect your ideas about sensory perception. Have you ever tried to imagine what it would be like to live with only one sense?
2. How did the multiple narrators featured in the book—Laura, Julia, Dr. Howe, Sarah—impact the storytelling for you? Who was your favorite narrator? Who was your least favorite? How would the story have been different if only one character told it?
3. How did the knowledge that What is Visible is based on historical fact influence your reading of the novel? How do you think fictionalizing a life, or writing a book “based” on a real historical person, influences our understanding of that character and their life and times?
4. Since Laura cannot see, what do you think the title, WHAT IS VISIBLE, might mean?
5. How did you feel about Laura’s occasional violence toward her teachers? At what point or points throughout the book could you empathize with Laura? When did you feel the most estranged from her thoughts and behavior?
6. Julia Ward Howe had a fairly unsympathetic relationship with the blind students at Perkins, and Laura in particular, for most of the book. Do you feel, however, that over the course of the book that Julia genuinely changed and grew and became a more sympathetic character?
7. Did you find Dr. Howe to be a likable character? If not, why not? Why do think he left Laura $2,000 in his will, and left his wife nothing? Did this surprise you?
8. Although Laura could not see, she was very concerned with her own concept of “appearance.” How did Laura’s appearance impact her life? Do you think that if Laura had been allowed to get glass eyes, as Helen Keller did, that her life would have been different?
9. Laura’s religion was deeply important to her. But how did her choice of religion contribute to her fall from grace, and even from history?
10. When she’s baptized, Laura believes she can see underwater for that one miraculous moment. What do you think about the possibility of such a miracle?
11. What do you really think Dr. Howe’s feelings were about Charles Sumner and Sumner’s about him? Does Sumner ultimately emerge as a sympathetic character?
12. Sarah Wight decided to stay with Edward Bond and even bear his children after finding out that he had syphilis. Do you feel she made the right choice? Do you think she regretted it?
13. Dr. Howe refused to take money to finance a lifelong teacher and companion after Sarah Wight was dismissed. Do you believe, as Helen Keller said, that if Laura had had her own Annie Sullivan that she would have “outshone” Helen and been remembered for her accomplishments?
14. Why do you think Laura engaged in self-cutting?
15. Laura claimed that she had actually regained her sense of taste temporarily. Do you think this was true or that it was wishful thinking—or perhaps a need to please Kate?
16. In the end, it is revealed that Dr. Howe was having an affair with Kate at the same time that Laura was. Were you surprised to find out that the baby was his? How did Laura’s misconception in thinking the baby was hers illuminate her skewed understanding of how things work in the world?
17. Consider Dr. Howe’s involvement with the Secret Six in financing John Brown’s campaign, ultimately leading to the massacre at Harper’s Ferry. Do you think that Dr. Howe was right to finance Brown as an expression of his fervent abolitionism?
18. What is Visible tells of how Helen Keller was chosen from a photograph to be “the second Laura Bridgman,” and about how Helen was given glass eyes—a secret that was kept from the public during her lifetime. Has the book changed the way you view Helen Keller or Annie Sullivan?
19. How would you answer the question Laura asks Helen that begins and ends the novel: which sense would you most treasure?
(Questions from author's website.)
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What Lies Between Us
Nayomi Munaweera, 2016
St. Martin's Press
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250043948
Summary
In the idyllic hill country of Sri Lanka, a young girl grows up with her loving family; but even in the midst of this paradise, terror lurks in the shadows.
When tragedy strikes, she and her mother must seek safety by immigrating to America.
There the girl reinvents herself as an American teenager to survive, with the help of her cousin; but even as she assimilates and thrives, the secrets and scars of her past follow her into adulthood.
In this new country of freedom, everything she has built begins to crumble around her, and her hold on reality becomes more and more tenuous. When the past and the present collide, she sees only one terrible choice.
From Nayomi Munaweera, the award-winning author of Island of a Thousand Mirrors, comes the confession of a woman, driven by the demons of her past to commit a single and possibly unforgivable crime. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1973
• Where—Colombo, Sri Lanka
• Raised—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Education—B.A., University of California (UCAL), Irving; M.A., UCAL, Riverside
• Awards—Commonwealth Book Prize (Asian Region)
• Currently—lives in the San Francisco Bay area
Nayomi Munaweera is a Sri Lankan American writer and author of two novels. Her 2012 debut Island of a Thousand Mirrors won Commonwealth Book Prize for the Asian Region in 2013 and was shortlisted for a number of other awards. In 2016 she released her second novel What Lies Between Us.
Nayomi Munaweera was born in Sri Lanka, but her family left to escape the ravages of the civil war. They went first to Nigeria then eventually settled in Los Angeles, California, where Munaweera spent her teenage years. She holds Bachelor's degree in Literature from the University of California, Irvine, and a Master's degree in South Asian Literature from the University of California, Riverside.
Novels
Island of a Thousand Mirrors, Munaweera's debut novel, was published in South Asia in 2012 and in the U.S. in 2014. It tells the story of the conflict between two main ethnic groups in Sri Lanka from the perspective of two girls who witness the horror of the civil war. The war officially began in 1983 and continued until 2009.
What Lies Between Us is the story of a young Sri Lankan teenager who outwardly has taken up the mantel of American adolescence. Underneath, however, she struggles to reconcile her life in the U.S. with her traumatic past. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 3/52016.)
Book Reviews
The paradisiacal landscapes of Sri Lanka are as astonishing as the barbarity of its revolution, and Munaweera evokes the power of both in a lyrical debut novel worthy of shelving alongside her countryman Michael Ondaatje or her fellow writer of the multigenerational immigrant experience Jhumpa Lahiri.
Publishers Weekly
[A] girl from Sri Lanka's beautiful hill country escapes terror by immigrating with her mother to America yet can't shake off the past and is eventually driven to commit a terrible crime.
Library Journal
This family tragedy begins in a prison cell, where the unnamed narrator wants to explain her (also unnamed) crime.... The melodramatic framing device only distracts from the crystalline precision with which Munaweera renders the richness of the immigrant experience as well as her character's singular longings, fears, joys, and demons.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Did you suspect who really was abusing the main character? What are the clues? What did you think of Samson? Do you think her mother may have suffered a similar transgression? Why did Ganga assume it was Samson all along? Why was she unable to remember the true abuser?
2. What is the book saying about the restorative powers of love. Why was Daniel's loyalty and love not able to save Ganga? Do you think he should have acted differently? What do you think he could have done to prevent what happened?
3. Childhood sexual abuse affects untold numbers of people all over the world. What is the book saying about the lifelong toll of trauma? About the weight of secrets untold upon a life?
4. Ganga's crime is one that is more common than you would think. She is also extremely regretful of her crime. Do you think she should be forgiven? Is this a crime that can be forgiven?
(Questions from the author's website.)
What Matters Most
Luanne Rice, 2007
Random House
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780553386868
Summary
Sister Bernadette Ignatius has returned to Ireland in the company of Tom Kelly to search for the past—and the son—they left behind. For it was here that these two long-ago lovers spent a season of magic before Bernadette’s calling led her to a vocation as Mother Superior at Star of the Sea Academy on the sea-tossed Connecticut shore.
For Tom, Bernadette’s choice meant giving up his fortune and taking the job as caretaker at Star of the Sea, where he could be close to the woman he could no longer have but whom he never stopped loving. And while one miracle drew them apart, another is about to bring them together again.
For somewhere in Dublin a young man named Seamus Sullivan is also on a search, dreaming of being reunited with his own first love, the only “family” he’s ever known. They’d been inseparable growing up together at St. Augustine’s Children’s Home, until Kathleen Murphy’s parents claimed her and she vanished across the sea to America.
Now, in a Newport mansion, that very girl, grown to womanhood, works as a maid and waits with a faith that defies all reason for the miracle that will bring back the only boy she’s ever loved.
That miracle is at hand—but like most miracles, it can come only after the darkest of nights and the deepest of heartbreaks. For life can be as precarious as a walk along a cliff, and its greatest rewards reached only by those who dare to risk everything for what matters most. (From the publisher.
Author Bio
• Birth—September 25, 1955
• Where—New Britain, Connecticut, USA
• Education—Connecticut College (did not take a degree)
• Currently—lives in Lyme, Connecticut and New York City
Luanne Rice is the New York Times bestselling author who has inspired the devotion of readers everywhere with her moving novels of love and family. She has been hailed by critics for her unique gifts, which have been described as "a beautiful blend of love and humor, with a little magic thrown in."
Rice began her writing career in 1985 with her debut novel Angels All Over Town. Since then, she has gone on to pen a string of heartwarming bestsellers. Several of her books have been adapted for television, including Crazy in Love, Blue Moon, Follow the Stars Home, and Beach Girls.
Rice was born in New Britain, Connecticut, where her father sold typewriters and her mother, a writer and artist, taught English. Throughout her childhood, Rice spent winters in New Britain and summers by Long Island Sound in Old Lyme, where her mother would hold writing workshops for local children. Rice's talent emerged at a very young age, and her first short story was published in American Girl Magazine when she was 15.
Rice later attended Connecticut College, but dropped out when her father became very ill. At this point, she knew she wanted to be a writer. Instead of returning to college, Rice took on many odd jobs, including working as a cook and maid for an exalted Rhode Island family, as well as fishing on a scallop boat during winter storms. These life experiences not only cultivated the author's love and talent for writing, but shaped the common backdrops in her novels of family and relationships on the Eastern seaboard. A true storyteller with a unique ability to combine realism and romance, Rice continues to enthrall readers with her luminous stories of life's triumphs and challenges.
In her words
From a 2008 Barnes & Noble interview:
• I take guitar lessons.
• I was queen of the junior prom. Voted in, according to one high school friend I saw recently, as a joke because my date and I were so shy, everyone thought it would be hilarious to see us onstage with crowns on our heads.
• I shared a room with both sisters when we were little, and I felt sorry for kids who had their own rooms.
• To support myself while writing in the early days, I worked as a maid and cook in one of the mansions in Newport, Rhode Island. I'd learned to love to cook in high school, by taking French cooking from Sister Denise at the convent next door to the school. The family I worked for didn't like French cooking and preferred broiled meat, well done, and frozen vegetables.
• I lived in Paris. The apartment was in the Eighth Arrondissement. Every morning I'd take my dog for a walk to buy the International Herald Tribune and have coffee at a cafe around the corner. Then I'd go upstairs to the top floor, where I'd...write.... Living in another country gave me a different perspective on the world. I'm glad I realized there's not just one way to see things.
• While living there, I found out my mother had a brain tumor. She came to Paris to stay with me and have chemotherapy at the American Hospital. She'd never been on a plane before that trip. In spite of her illness, she loved seeing Paris. I took her to London for a week, and as a teacher of English and a lover of Dickens, that was her high point.
After she died, I returned to France and made a pilgrimage to the Camargue, in the South. It is a mystical landscape of marsh grass, wild bulls, and white horses. It is home to one of the largest nature sanctuaries in the world, and I saw countless species of birds. The town of Stes. Maries de la Mer is inspiring beyond words. Different cultures visit the mysterious Saint Sarah, and the presence of the faithful at the edge of the sea made me feel part of something huge and eternal. And all of it inspired my novel Light of the Moon.
• During that period I also wrote two linked books Summer's Child and Summer of Roses...and became involved with trying to help families affected by abuse in particular.... [I also worked with] Deborah Epstein's domestic violence clinic at Georgetown University Law Center.... A counselor recommended The Verbally Abusive Relationshipby Patricia Evans. It is life-changing, and I have given it to many women over the years.
• I became a vegetarian. I decided...I wanted only gentleness and peace in my life.... A friend reminds me of a great quote in the Zen tradition: "How you do anything is how you do everything.
• When asked what book most influenced her life as a writer, here's what she said:
[There] are two books. The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson and Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger. Carson's book is scientific and poetic, and it taught me that every single thing we do contributes to the harm or well-being of ourselves and the oceans, the world at large. It influenced me to incorporate my love of nature into my fiction.
Franny and Zooey Glass are two of the all-time great siblings of fiction. Nothing has ever inspired me more than being a sister; when I was young, the only stories I wanted to write were about sisters from a close, funny, secretive family like mine. The Glass family was quirky and eccentric in ways that felt very familiar to me.... Salinger loved his characters so much...[he] taught me to love my characters. (Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
True love never dies-but it may need the helping hand of the Virgin Mary and the luck o' the Irish to survive in Rice's latest, effectively a sequel to last year's Sandcastles. Sister Bernadette Ignatius (the former Bernie Sullivan), Mother Superior at the coastal Connecticut Star of the Sea Academy, travels to Dublin with Tom Kelly, the academy's ombudsman, seeking James, the son they gave up over 20 years ago. In a parallel narrative set up in a prologue, young James and Kathleen, raised together as orphans, are devastated when they are forced to separate when Kathleen is 13. While Bernie and Tom look for James (now calling himself Seamus), James searches for Kathleen, who pines for him in a Newport, R.I., mansion, where she is a cook and maid for an atrocious, wealthy family. Rice juices up the predictable plot line with miraculous visions, ghosts, convenient encounters and melodramatic twists of fate-yet the effects are still lukewarm, though there's guilt, redemption and three-hankie moments aplenty for those who stick it out to the end.
Publishers Weekly
An emotionally exhaustive revisit with the two Irish-American families from Sandcastles (2006). This time around, Rice turns her attention to Sister Bernadette (Bernie) Sullivan and Thomas (Tom) Kelly. Long before Sister Bernie took her vows, she and Tom were young lovers. While on a romantic holiday to Ireland connecting with their roots, Bernie and Tom shared a single night of passion. Bernie became pregnant. Tom wanted to keep the baby, but Bernie struggled between her calling to the church and her love for Tom. Ultimately, the baby was given up for adoption. Now, 20-odd years later, Tom and Bernie decide to fly to Dublin to track down their son, Seamus, and introduce themselves as his parents. At the reunion, Seamus wants nothing to do with the family that abandoned him and left him in a crowded orphanage. To make matters more complicated, the disastrous meeting stirs up old passions between Tom and Bernie. Their romantic detente ends and their friendship is irrevocably altered. Tom makes a final effort to win over Seamus before flying back to America. Grudgingly, Seamus accepts Tom's help when Tom offers to use his influence to reunite Seamus with his lost love from the orphanage. With Tom's help, Seamus tracks down his love in America. At this point, the plot spins wildly out of control as the author tosses in one melodramatic, outlandish event after another. Though a few new characters are sprinkled in, it's impossible to care about them. Rice, usually good at bringing to life the Irish landscape, this time falls flat.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the role of miracles in What Matters Most. Which miracles were mixed blessings? Which ones brought unconditional joy to those who experienced them? If you had witnessed Bernadette’s vision, how would you have interpreted the words she heard: “Love my son”?
2. How are family and home defined in What Matters Most? Who forged the strongest family ties? What sort of home life existed for those who inhabited St. Augustine’s Children’s Home, compared to Star of the Sea and the Wells home in Newport?
3. How did you feel about Sister Eleanor Marie after learning about her childhood? Are actions such as hers unforgivable?
4. Tom experienced a lifetime of longing for Bernadette, becoming the caretaker at Star of the Sea so that he could be near her. Kathleen and Seamus’s love remained strong despite years of physical separation. What kept these lovers devoted to each other, regardless of the circumstances? Which is more powerful: devotion or fate?
5. In your opinion, why did Kathleen sleep with Pierce? How did their trysts reflect the loneliness and despair that had defined so much of her life?
6. Discuss the dynamics of the Wells household. Who are the most powerful family members? Do women or men dominate the decision making? What standards do the Wellses use to measure happiness and fulfillment?
7. What does it mean to be a member of the Kelly family? How do Dublin’s monuments and the legend of the sea monster convey their special legacy? What do the stark differences between Seamus’s heritage and Kathleen’s tell us about the consequences of knowing our genealogical roots?
8. What is the effect of Honor and John’s story, and their family’s ability to experience redemption, in the midst of Bernadette’s ordeal?
9. What was the result of the reunions featured in the novel? How do they compare to the reunion scenes anticipated and hoped for by the characters? With which figures from your past would you most want to be reunited?
10. In chapter sixteen, Tom says he believes Bernadette is exempt from fully living in this world; her life as Mother Superior insulates her from real-life woes. What are the benefits and limitations of her life as a nun? How does she perceive this identity?
11. What transformations have taken place in Seamus by the time he sees the ghost? Would the younger Seamus have been able to accept such an experience, or to even hear the ghost’s message?
12. What had you predicted for Bernadette and Tom as they crossed paths with John and Honor in the closing scenes of Sandcastles? What aspects of Bernadette and Tom’s quest surprised you the most? In what way does What Matters Most underscore other aspects of yearning and healing in previous Luanne Rice novels you have read?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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What My Sister Didn't Know
Janie De Coster, 2013
G Street Chronicles
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781938442728
Summary
Saphire seems to have it all as she handles the other men in her life while keeping the man she loves in the dark. Gade envies her sister Saphire, but she wants stability and commitment—and that she has with her man Lamonte...until Joe Burrels walks into her life.
Gade finds herself mimicking her sister as she forms a relationship with the new man. Saphire, the more experienced sister, steps into the picture when she meets Joe Burrels while she's out in a bar with her man Clay. Unbeknownst to Clay, Saphire makes a date to hook up with her sister's man and that's when the competition begins. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Janie De Coster love of reading is what inspired her to take a step into the writing world. Man of My Dreams, her first novel, was released in 2006. What My Sister Didn't Know, released April 26, 2013, has been featured in She Magazine and The Florence News and Journal. The novel has been reviewed by several book clubs including Apooo Book Club, Sister to Sister Book Club and Urban Reviews. Janie De Coster is currently working on several projects which will be released later in 2013. (From the author.)
Book Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What do you think of the relationship between Gade and her sister Saphire?
2. Do you think their behavior towards men stems from their father walking out on their mother when they both were young?
3. Do you think Saphire was really jealous of Gade, and not the other way around?
4. Do you think Clay saw what he wanted to see in his relationship with Saphire?
5. Do you think Saphire was really in love with Clay, or did she just marry him because she knew he was a sure thing?
(Questions provided courtesy of the author.)
What She Knew
Gilly Macmillan, 2015
HarperCollins
496 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062413864
Summary
[A] mother’s search for her missing son, weaving a taut psychological thriller as gripping and skillful as The Girl on the Train and The Guilty One.
In a heartbeat, everything changes…
Rachel Jenner is walking in a Bristol park with her eight-year-old son, Ben, when he asks if he can run ahead. It’s an ordinary request on an ordinary Sunday afternoon, and Rachel has no reason to worry—until Ben vanishes.
Police are called, search parties go out, and Rachel, already insecure after her recent divorce, feels herself coming undone.
As hours and then days pass without a sign of Ben, everyone who knew him is called into question, from Rachel’s newly married ex-husband to her mother-of-the-year sister. Inevitably, media attention focuses on Rachel too, and the public’s attitude toward her begins to shift from sympathy to suspicion.
As she desperately pieces together the threadbare clues, Rachel realizes that nothing is quite as she imagined it to be, not even her own judgment. And the greatest dangers may lie not in the anonymous strangers of every parent’s nightmares, but behind the familiar smiles of those she trusts the most.
Where is Ben? The clock is ticking... (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Swindon, Wiltshire, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Bristol University; M.A., Courtald Institute of Art
• Currently—lives in Bristol
Gilly Macmillan grew up in Swindon, Wiltshire and also lived in Northern California in her late teens. She studied History of Art at Bristol University and then at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.
She worked at The Burlington Magazine and the Hayward Gallery before starting a family, and since then has done some lecturing in "A" Level photography.
Gilly lives in Bristol, UK with her husband and three children and now writes full time. She’s currently working on her third novel (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
here's a depressing sameness to mysteries about missing children. A detective is bound to become obsessed with the case, one of the frantic parents is sure to come under suspicion, and there's only a 50-50 chance the child will be found alive. The British writer Gilly Macmillan introduces some smart variations on the theme in her debut mystery, What She Knew.
Marilyn Stasio - New York Times Book Review
A terrific debut.
Reader's Digest
A very clever, tautly plotted page turned from a terrific new writer.
Good Housekeeping
Heart-in-the-mouth excitement from the start of this electrifyingly good debut…an absolute firecracker of a thriller that convinces and captivates from the word go. A must read.
Sunday Mirror (UK)
One of the brightest debuts I have read this year - a visceral, emotionally charged story….heart-wrenchingly well told and expertly constructed, this deserves to stay on the bestseller list until Christmas.
Daily Mail (UK)
Macmillan’s magnificent debut delves into the emotional destruction wrought by Ben’s disappearance. No one is unaffected, and she draws out every inch of trauma suffered by all as they search for the boy. It’s a tour de force as the reader discovers on each page (Top Pick of December 2015).
Romatic Times Review
British author Macmillan alternates between two narrators in her haunting first novel: Rachel Finch, a grieving mother whose eight-year-old son, Ben, disappears...and Det. Insp. James “Jim” Clemo, who tirelessly searches to find Ben.... Readers will have a tough time putting this one down.
Publishers Weekly
Macmillan peppers her debut with subtle red herrings and a variety of potential suspects, ratcheting up the tension slowly but oh so deliciously.
Booklist
The requisite family secrets come to light, though Macmillan gets credit for some truly clever red herrings. While there's little new ground broken, the missing child scenario, when done reasonably well, as it is here, is a reliable hook, and with Macmillan's taut pacing, this is an engaging debut.
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 MYSTERY QUESTIONS
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for What She Knew...then take off on your own:
1. How does the novel's title, What She Knew, relate to the narrative? What is it's significance to the work?
2. What do you think of Rachel? What kind of mother is she? How does she evolve throughout the course of the novel? And what about Rachel's sister, Nicky, who seems to know more than she lets on?
3. Talk about DI Jim Clemo. In what way does his voice serve as a counterpoint to Rachel's? His involvement in the case is professional, but how does it affect him? Also talk about DC Emma Zhang, whom Clemo recommends, perhaps unwisely, as Family Liaison Officer.
4. What role does social media play in the novel? Do you think the online reaction is realistic?
5. Almost every reviewer refers to the book as a page-turner. Did you experience it that way? What creates the book's intensity?
6. Macmillan told Huffington Post that she wrote three different endings to the book: one too pat and easy, the second too dark, and the third, "a more truthful conclusion than the other two." What do you think of the ending? Is it satisfying? Want to take a stab at what the other two might have been like (Macmillan has not said, by the way)?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
What She Left Behind
Ellen Marie Wiseman, 2013
Kensington
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780758278456
Summary
In this stunning new novel, the acclaimed author of The Plum Tree merges the past and present into a haunting story about the nature of love and loyalty—and the lengths we will go to protect those who need us most.
Ten years ago, Izzy Stone's mother fatally shot her father while he slept. Devastated by her mother's apparent insanity, Izzy, now seventeen, refuses to visit her in prison.
But her new foster parents, employees at the local museum, have enlisted Izzy's help in cataloging items at a long-shuttered state asylum. There, amid piles of abandoned belongings, Izzy discovers a stack of unopened letters, a decades-old journal, and a window into her own past.
Clara Cartwright, eighteen years old in 1929, is caught between her overbearing parents and her love for an Italian immigrant. Furious when she rejects an arranged marriage, Clara's father sends her to a genteel home for nervous invalids. But when his fortune is lost in the stock market crash, he can no longer afford her care--and Clara is committed to the public asylum.
Even as Izzy deals with the challenges of yet another new beginning, Clara's story keeps drawing her into the past. If Clara was never really mentally ill, could something else explain her own mother's violent act? Piecing together Clara's fate compels Izzy to re-examine her own choices—with shocking and unexpected results.
Illuminating and provocative, What She Left Behind is a masterful novel about the yearning to belong—and the mysteries that can belie even the most ordinary lifes. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1961-62
• Where—Three Mile Bay, New York, USA
• Education—Lyme Central School
• Currently—lives on Lake Ontario in upstate New York
Ellen Marie Wiseman discovered her love of reading and writing while attending first grade in one of the last one-room schoolhouses in upper New York State.
Her debut novel The Plum Tree—a WWII story about a young German woman trying to save the love of her life, a Jewish man—was inspired by her mother's childhood in Germany during the Second World War. The book was published in 2013.
Wiseman's second novel, What She Left Behind, published in 2014, centers on the now-shuttered Willard Asylum for the Insane in Ovid, near Seneca Lake, New York, and involves a woman wrongly committed.
Coal River, Wiseman's 2016 novel, revolves around the efforts of a young woman to help at-risk workers in the Pennsylvania col mines.
The Life She Was Given, released in 2017, tells the story of two sisters: Lilly who is sold to the circus in 1931, and the other, years later, who inherits the family farm.
Originally from Three Mile Bay, New York, Wiseman lives on Lake Ontario with her husband. (Adapted from the publisher.)
Visit the author's website.
Book Reviews
The dearth of complex characters is overshadowed by the intensity of Clara and Izzy's life circumstances and internal struggles. Both stories are relentlessly bleak; Wiseman makes no attempt to sugarcoat what Izzy and Clara go through, representing them as strong women who are determined not to succumb to their challenges. For the shocking characterization of early insane asylums and compelling connection between Izzy and Clara, this novel would be a valuable addition to most school and public libraries. —Lindy Gerdes
VOYA
Discussion Questions
1. When Izzy first arrives at Willard, she’s afraid to go inside the old buildings because they remind her of visiting her mother in the psychiatric ward. She also has a difficult time handling the contents of the old suitcases because they remind her of the dead and dying. Some people would find the abandoned asylum fascinating, while others would stay away. Would you want to go inside the buildings? Would you want to go through the old suitcases?
2. Before coming to live with Peg and Harry, Izzy cut herself to deal with her emotions. Self-harm is most common in adolescence and young adulthood, usually appearing between the ages of twelve and twenty-four. Have you ever heard of self-injury as a way of dealing with emotional pain, anger, and frustration? Why do you think some people hurt themselves as a way of coping? What do you think would have happened to Izzy if she had lived during Clara’s time?
3. Displaying opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to a mother’s protective instinct, Izzy’s mother shoots her father to protect her, while Shannon’s and Clara’s mothers do nothing to protect them. Discuss the maternal instinct. Do you think it’s stronger in some women than in others? Do you think the difference is due to circumstances, as in the way women are brought up, or do you think the difference is due to genetics?
4. Clara tries everything she can think of to get out of Willard. Is there anything else she could have tried?
5. New York State has sealed the medical records of former mental patients, even denying access to the descendents. Why do you think they remain sealed? Do you think this law should be changed?
6. How do you think Izzy changed over the course of the novel? How did Clara change? What were the most important events that facilitated those changes?
7. At first, Dr. Roach truly believes Clara needs help, partly because of Clara’s father’s stories, and partly due to the era, when emotional outbursts were often seen as a sign of mental illness. Why do you think Dr. Roach refused to release Clara even though Bruno confirmed the truth about why she was there? Why do you think Dr. Roach committed Bruno to the asylum? Do you think Dr. Roach was more worried about his reputation and his job, or concealing the fact that he took Clara’s child?
8. Izzy refused to visit her mother in prison because she was afraid. Do you think she was angry with her mother, or just sad and scared?
9. Clara refused to go along with the arranged marriage to James because she was in love with Bruno. She had no idea her father would send her to an insane asylum. Hindsight is always 20/20 and, in Clara’s time, women were still subject to the whims of their husbands and fathers, but what would you have done in that situation? Would you have obeyed your parents’ wishes and married James? Would you have continued seeing Bruno?
10. Bruno had no idea Clara was at the Long Island Home because he never received her letters. Izzy couldn’t understand why her mother shot her father until she read her mother’s letters. Can you think of an instance in your life that would have turned out differently if you’d had more information? Do you think most people jump to conclusions, or that they try to find out all sides of a story?
11. Nurse Trench presented a tough exterior while hiding a soft interior. How did you feel about her when you first met her? How did you feel about her when she was an old woman? Do you think Nurse Trench could have tried harder to help Clara while she was at Willard? What could she have done?
12. Izzy feels like nothing will ever change when it comes to bullying. What do you think? What can be done to make those changes? Do you think we’ve made progress when it comes to bullying, or do you think things have gotten worse?
13. Clara is sterilized after she gives birth, because Dr. Roach felt it was his duty to keep her from passing along “inferior” genes. Do you think it was right for doctors to make that decision for patients who were considered mentally ill? Do you think the government should have a say in who can and cannot reproduce? How far do you think we’ve come when it comes to a woman’s reproductive rights and the right to choose?
14. Bruno had to nail Clara inside a coffin for them to have a chance to escape. Would you have been able to stand being nailed inside a coffin if it meant a chance to be free?
15. During the flood in the electroshock therapy room, someone grabs Clara underwater. Who do you think it was? 16. Do you think reuniting Clara with her daughter helped Izzy heal? In what way? How do you think Clara felt when she saw her daughter?
17. What She Left Behind is composed of two interweaving story lines—Clara’s in the past and Izzy’s quest in present day. Discuss the structure of each narrative. Did you enjoy the alternating stories and time frames? What are the strengths and drawbacks of this format?
18. Which “voice” did you prefer, Izzy’s or Clara’s? Is one more or less authentic than the other? If you could meet one of the two characters, which one would you choose?
19. How are Clara and Izzy the same? How are they different?
20. What do you think Izzy’s future looks like? What about Clara and her daughter’s future?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
What the Dead Know
Laura Lippman, 2007
HarperCollins
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061128868
Summary
Thirty years ago two sisters disappeared from a shopping mall. Their bodies were never found and those familiar with the case have always been tortured by these questions: How do you kidnap two girls? Who—or what—could have lured the two sisters away from a busy mall on a Saturday afternoon without leaving behind a single clue or witness?
Now a clearly disoriented woman involved in a rush-hour hit-and-run claims to be the younger of the long-gone Bethany sisters. But her involuntary admission and subsequent attempt to stonewall investigators only deepens the mystery.
Where has she been? Why has she waited so long to come forward? Could her abductor truly be a beloved Baltimore cop?
There isn't a shred of evidence to support her story, and every lead she gives the police seems to be another dead end-a dying, incoherent man, a razed house, a missing grave, and a family that disintegrated long ago, torn apart not only by the crime but by the fissures the tragedy revealed in what appeared to be the perfect household.
In a story that moves back and forth across the decades, there is only one person who dares to be skeptical of a woman who wants to claim the identity of one Bethany sister without revealing the fate of the other. Will he be able to discover the truth? (From the publisher.)
Author Bio• Birth—January 31, 1959
• Birth—January 31, 1959
• Where—Atlanta, Georgia, USA
• Education—B.S., Northwestern University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Baltimore, Maryland
Lippman was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the daughter of Theo Lippman Jr., a well known and respected writer at the Baltimore Sun, and Madeline Lippman, a retired school librarian for the Baltimore City Public School System. She attended high school in Columbia, Maryland, where she was the captain of the Wilde Lake High School It's Academic team.
Lippman is a former reporter for the (now defunct) San Antonio Light and the Baltimore Sun. She is best known for writing a series of novels set in Baltimore and featuring Tess Monaghan, a reporter (like Lippman herself) turned private investigator.
Lippman's works have won the Agatha, Anthony, Edgar, Nero, Gumshoe and Shamus awards. Her 2007 release, What the Dead Know, was the first of her books to make the New York Times bestseller list, and was shortlisted for the Crime Writer's Association Dagger Award. In addition to the Tess Monaghan novels, Lippman wrote 2003's Every Secret Thing, which has been optioned for the movies by Academy Award–winning actor Frances McDormand.
Lippman lives in the South Baltimore neighborhood of Federal Hill and frequently writes in the neighborhood coffee shop Spoons. In addition to writing, she teaches at Goucher College in Towson, Maryland, just outside of Baltimore. In January, 2007, she taught at the 3rd Annual Writers in Paradise at Eckerd College.
Lippman is married to David Simon, another former Baltimore Sun reporter, and creator and an executive producer of the HBO series The Wire. The character Bunk is shown to be reading one of her books in episode eight of the first season of The Wire. She appeared in a scene of the first episode of the last season of The Wire as a reporter working in the Baltimore Sun newsroom.
Awards
2015 Anthony Award-Best Novel (After I'm Gone)
2008 Anthony Award-Best Novel (What the Dead Know)
2008 Anthony Award-Best Short Story ("Hardly Knew Her")
2008 Barry Award-Best Novel (What the Dead Know)
2008 Macavity Award-Best Mystery (What the Dead Know)
2007 Anthony Award-Best Novel (No Good Deeds)
2007 Quill Award-Mystery (What the Dead Know)
2006 Gumshow Award-Best Novel (To the Power of the Three)
2004 Barry Award-Best Novel (Every Secret Thing)
2001 Nero Award (Sugar House)
2000 Anthony Award-Best Paperback Original (In Big Trouble)
2000 Shamus Award-Best Paperback Original (In Big Trouble)
1999 Anthony Award-Best Paperback Original (Butchers Hill)
1998 Agatha Award-Best Novel (Butchers Hill)
1998 Edgar Award-Best Paperback Original (Charm City)
1998 Shamus Award-Best Paperback Original (Charm City)
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
What the Dead Know, like the best books in this tradition, is doubly satisfying. You read it once just to move breathlessly toward the finale. Then you revisit it to marvel at how well Ms. Lippman pulled the wool over your eyes.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
As artful as she is at interweaving disarming scenes of two spirited girls on the day they vanished with painful moments in the lives of their parents—maintaining all the while a thread of continuity in the current-day police investigation—Lippman pulls off something more ambitious than a high-wire act of technical virtuosity. With great thought and compassion, she uses her fractured narrative style to delve into the ways in which every serious crime tears to shreds the lives of its victims
Marilyn Stasio - New York Times
If you only know her from her Tess Monaghan series, or if you don't know her work at all, read What the Dead Know. It's an all but flawless performance by a writer at the peak of her powers.
Patrick Anderson - Washington Post
Emond sounds more than a little like Laura Linney, and her plainspoken, occasionally whispery reading of Lippman's disturbing novel of buried secrets often brings the acclaimed actress to mind. Lippman's novel shuttles back and forth between the present, where a middle-aged woman is involved in a hit-and-run accident, and a past in which two girls are abducted from a mall and never seen again. Do the two events have anything to do with each other? Emond brings a sense of quiet force to Lippman's story, her voice imprinted with sadness and a sense of life's tragic surprises. Her reading bridges the unbridgeable gaps between past and present in Lippman's story, offering little in the way of surprises but a marked amount of suppressed, nearly palpable emotion.
Publishers Weekly
A woman is found disoriented and wandering the street after a hit-and-run accident. Although the accident is not that serious, police are intrigued by the woman's reluctance to provide identification and her claim to be one of a pair of sisters abducted from a shopping mall 30 years earlier. Following her statement, the woman clams up. No bodies were ever found, and many who worked on the missing sisters' case—including the girls' father—are dead or terminally ill. The story moves back and forth through time with suspenseful pacing as the listener gradually begins to understand the terrible consequences of this event. When the girls' mother is finally located, the dramatic suspense is breathtaking and leads to a finale that is completely plausible and satisfying. Linda Emond gives a wonderful performance, using different voices and accents to bring immediacy to the many characters and circumstances. Her pacing adds to the mystery and never leaves the listener in doubt as to the time frame and setting. Anyone who ever questioned why Lippman has won every major crime fiction prize will stop wondering after hearing this wonderful production. Highly recommended for adult and teen collections.
Barbara Valle - Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. Laura Lippman withholds a lot of information in the early going of the book. Is that a cheat, or true to the way the characters would have approached the information?
2. Lippman actually used historically accurate details in the book—Escape to Witch Mountain and Chinatown, for example, were the films at that movie theater at that time, and the story about the freak blizzard in '66, the rise of the home answering machine in the 1980s. But do those details add something above and beyond historical accuracy?
3. Who in this book could be described as evil, if anyone? On the morning in March that all these people's destinies collide and interlock—who's really at fault, if anyone?
4. Is Miriam a "bad" woman? Does she see herself as bad and believe that she is being punished for her misdeeds? How does Lippman want us to regard Stan Dunham—as Miriam does, or as Sunny does, or somewhere in-between?
5. What is Kay's role in the book? Is there any significance to the fact that she's reading Jane Eyre?
6. Why are Dave and Miriam so restless in the days before their daughters disappear? What are they wistful for? What do they regret?
7. Dave and Miriam choose very different ways of mourning their daughters. Dave enshrines the memory, choosing to vary almost nothing about his life, while Miriam flees, ultimately choosing to live in a place where no one can possibly know about the tragedy. Is Lippman suggesting that one way of mourning is more valid than the other? Is Dave's misery proof that he's made a mistake, or simply evidence of his own conflicted nature?
8. The five-fold path, which Dave practices, includes self-knowledge as its ultimate goal. Who in What the Dead Know attains self-knowledge? Who never quite gets there? Does self-knowledge necessarily involve change, or can one find peace even in a flawed self?
9. At one point, Nancy Porter notes that "Heather Bethany's" story is least convincing when it's at its most lurid. The ultimate fate of the Bethany girls turns out to be almost banal, a series of mistakes and accidents that led to a tragedy no one planned. Is the fate of the Bethany girls more or less disturbing as a result? Does it seem like something that really could happen?
10. The last line of the first chapter dwells on how freeing it is to say one's name (p. 10). The last line of the book says one's name is the most important word that anyone can ever hear (p. 373). The missing Bethany girl has had a number of names throughout her life and even her mother, Miriam, has availed herself of a slight name change, reverting to her maiden name, which feels like a new name because it's pronounced differently in Spanish. Do names matter so much? Why? How do our names shape our destinies?
11. At the end of the book, Kevin Infante reflects that the missing Bethany girl has always been out in the open, the kind of woman that other people observe, but don't truly see—a student, a store clerk, a support person in the office. What is Lippman trying to say about certain women in our culture? Who is it that we don't see, who fails to register in our day-to-day lives?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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What the Waves Know
Tamara Valentine, 2016
HarperCollins
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062413857
Summary
On the sharp crags of tiny Tillings Island lies the secret of Izabella Rae Haywood’s sixth birthday.
That night, her father vanished, taking her voice—and the truth of what really happened—along with him. In the autumn of 1974, after eight long years of unsuccessful psychiatrist visits and silence, Iz’s mother packs up the tattered remains of their life, determined to return to Tillings in one last attempt to reclaim Iz’s voice—and piece together the splintered memories of the day her words ran dry.
But when the residents of Tillings greet them with a standoffish welcome, it becomes clear that they know something about Iz, and the father she adored, that she does not.
Now, as the island’s annual Yemaya festival prepares to celebrate the ties that bind mothers to children, lovers to each other, and humankind to the sea, Iz must unravel the tangled threads of her own history...or risk losing herself—and any chance she may have for a future—to the past. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
For the past fourteen years, Tamara has held the position of Professor of English at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island, where she teaches an array of advanced writing, literature, and communication courses.
During her years of writing, she has contributed to Parent’s Paper Magazine, Stillwater, The Maze, Teacher as Writer, and publications for the New England Association of Teacher’s of English, as well as select biographies and articles for the former Goosewing Press.
Presently, Tamara lives in Kingston, Rhode Island with her husband and three children where they spend their free time as accomplished beach bums—not far from where she began as a child—still seeking hidden worlds. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Valentine’s debut novel is a beautiful tale of loss, love and the fortitude of the human spirit.
Romantic Times BOOKclub
With the sass of Fannie Flagg and the subtle magic of Alice Hoffman, this short but powerful book should find readers of many generations.
Booklist
[W]ell-written, charming.... [Valentine] writes gracefully about loss and sadness and how time and good people can help to heal the wounds of a hurting child. The author also handles mental illness and the damage it can cause a family with tact and care. —Jennifer Mills, Shorewood-Troy Lib., IL
Library Journal
In a novel rich in mythology and childhood secrets, a girl searches for her voice in the Rhode Island town where she stopped speaking at age 6.... This dreamy coming-of-age mystery unfolds in tantalizing waves with keen insight and lush prose.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What the Waves Know is told from the first-person point of view of Izabella, who hasn’t spoken in eight years. The concept of stories and secrets rests at the heart of this piece. How does Izabella become the keeper of both through her silence?
2. How does the title What the Waves Know represent these elements of the work?
3. In what ways do religion and mythology make sense of the world for Izabella? What myths, specifically, does she embrace? Are there similarities between them even though they are drawn from different cultures?
4. Do you think it is true that Izabella cannot speak initially, or is she choosing her own silence?
5. Izabella not only accompanies her father on his adventures, she follows him into the stories that slowly take over reality for him. Is there a point when she makes a conscious decision to stop? If so, when?
6. The characters all represent different interpretations of what defines mental illness, as well as dramatically different responses to trauma and loss. How do they each reframe their lives in the face of devastation? How does each hold on to the past and let go of it?
7. The title plays not only on the theme of mental illness, but a person’s culpability, or lack of it, in the face of mental illness. In what passages do we see this?
8. Throughout the story, Izabella both wants to hear the Nikommo and is afraid of them. Why? How do they speak to the issues with her father? Why might it be important that they are tied to her father’s heredity? Is this potentially defining to Izabella?
9. Izabella is afraid that she is insane. Why? What does this reveal about her actual breadth of understanding about what happened with her father?
10. One of the elements of the story is that the past and present continuously weave and bob around one another. Why has the author created a storyline in which you are constantly being pulled from one point in time to another?
11. Not only is the reader being torn between the past and present, she is also being thrust in and out of stories and mythologies. Why? Is there a clear truth behind the fiction?
12. While in many ways Zorrie’s character is struggling to get Izabella to fall into societal norms, Remy’s character is intent on ignoring societal rules and norms. How are the two characters different? What role does Remy play in healing both Izabella and Zorrie?
13. Why does Remy become so entwined in Zorrie and Izabella’s life? How do the different members of the O’Malley family respond to Zorrie and Izabella returning to Tillings Island? How do the vastly different reactions represent the human experience of loss and grief?
14. Both of Izabella’s parents impart aspects of their philosophies about life to her, and both visions of the world become equally important in her recovery. What does each parent give Izabella and how does it become integral to her survival?
15. Competing images of light and darkness are used symbolically throughout the story. What do they represent in the struggle for Izabella to reclaim and make sense of what has happened? One of the issues central to her struggle is weighing what is real against what is fiction, from religion to perception. How does she resolve this?
16. Izabella says she first came to know what it meant to be God standing in the waters of Potter’s Creek. What do you think she means by this and how does it become a critical framework for the story?
17. Although the impetus of the story revolves around Ansel Haywood’s disappearance, the author has included repeating images and references to the Divine Feminine in Yemaya, the moon, the Virgin Mary, and Venus. Why does this become inherently important to the story?18. In ancient times, the moon was the sign of the “Triple Goddess,” representing maiden, mother, and crone. How is this interpretation realized in the text?
19. The salmon in Potter’s Creek becomes an important symbol for Izabella’s story. How does it foreshadow what is to come in the story?
20. In many ways, each of the characters has a separate understanding and interpretation of the past. How does this speak to the idea of stories defining our realities?
21. Does Izabella become the healed or the healer in the story?
22. Why might the author have chosen a stone to represent the process of carrying secrets? How does this come to represent both the interconnectivity and independence of our own existence and reality?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
What Was Lost
Catherine O'Flynn, 2007
Henry Holt & Co.
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780805088335
Summary
In the 1980s, Kate Meaney—“Top Secret” notebook and toy monkey in tow—is hard at work as a junior detective. Busy trailing “suspects” and carefully observing everything around her at the newly opened Green Oaks shopping mall, she forms an unlikely friendship with Adrian, the son of a local shopkeeper. But when this curious, independent-spirited young girl disappears, Adrian falls under suspicion and is hounded out of his home by the press.
Then, in 2003, Adrian’s sister Lisa—stuck in a dead-end relationship—is working as a manager at Your Music, a discount record store. Every day she tears her hair out at the outrageous behavior of her customers and colleagues. But along with a security guard, Kurt, she becomes entranced by the little girl glimpsed on the mall’s surveillance cameras. As their after-hours friendship intensifies, Lisa and Kurt investigate how these sightings might be connected to the unsettling history of Green Oaks itself. Written with warmth and wit, What Was Lost is a haunting debut from an incredible new talent. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1970
• Where—Birmingham, England, UK
• Awards—Costa First Novel Award
• Currently—lives in Birmingham, England
Catherine O’Flynn was born in Birmingham, England, in 1970, where she grew up in and around her parents’ candy store. She has been a teacher, Web editor, and mystery customer—and this, her first novel, draws on her experience of working in record stores. After spending several years in Barcelona, she now lives in Birmingham. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
What Was Lost is a delight to read—poignant, suspenseful, funny and smart.... [It] is a moving novel, bespeaking not only the energy and inventiveness of its author but also the power of good old realism.
Jane Smiley - Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review
The bravest and most appealing adolescent this side of The Lovely Bones, aspiring detective Kate Meaney vanishes partway through Catherine O’Flynn’s mesmerizing debut novel, What Was Lost.... There are many ways to feel invisible, we learn from this gentle, sharp-sighted tale of love and loneliness. And there are many ways to be found.
O, Oprah Magazine
Engrossing. . . With a sure hand for both suspense and satire, O’Flynn is a masterful writer, and her book a delicious mash-up of Nancy Drew and High Fidelity—teary and tart in the right proportions.
Marie Claire
(Starred review) Stirring and beautifully crafted, this debut novel recounts how the repercussions of a girl's disappearance can last for decades. In 1984, Kate Meaney is a 10-year-old loner who solves imaginary mysteries and guesses the dark secrets of the shoppers she observes at the Green Oaks mall. Kate's unlikely circle includes her always-present stuffed monkey; 22-year-old Adrian, who works at the candy shop next door; and Kate's classmate, Teresa Stanton, who hides her intelligence behind disruptive behavior. Kate's grandmother has plans for Kate: send her to boarding school. But Kate doesn't want to go. Fast forward to 2003, where it's revealed through Lisa, Adrian's sister, that Kate disappeared nearly 20 years ago, and Adrian, blamed in her disappearance, also vanished. Lisa works at a record store in Green Oaks and is drawn to Kurt, a security guard whose surveillance-camera sightings of a little girl clutching a stuffed monkey hint that he might have ties to Kate's disappearance. Teresa, meanwhile, now a detective, has her own reasons for being haunted by Kate's disappearance. Gripping to the end, the book is both a chilling mystery and a poignant examination of the effects of loss and loneliness.
Publishers Weekly
O'Flynn's debut begins with self-made detective and ten-year-old orphan Kate Meaney as she buses her way to the Green Oaks Shopping Mall, where she'll surveil the various customers who may want to commit crimes: "Crime was out there. Undetected, unseen." With notebook and stuffed monkey in tow, Kate spends her days when not in school either outside the mall looking to catch a thief or at a neighborhood store sharing her observations with the shop owner's son, 22-year-old Adrian Palmer. When Kate disappears one day, never to be seen again, suspicion falls on Adrian, and the two-decade-spanning, unsolved case wreaks destruction on the lives of those who had touched Kate's life in one way or another. This seamlessly written, character-driven novel offers up well-appreciated humor along with its darker material, and readers who enjoy sideswiping surprises will not be disappointed. Recommended for public libraries.
Jyna Scheeren - Library Journal
In 1984, Birmingham, England, is home to Kate Meaney, 10 years old, bright, self-possessed, and so obsessively engaged in the art of detection that she puts Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet to shame. Twenty years later, Kate is just a memory in a very few people's minds—and an obsession to a security guard at a Birmingham "shopping and leisure center." A peer but a stranger to Kate, he knows he saw her the day she disappeared, but, a child himself at the time, he hadn't reported his sighting. Now he sees her on the security cameras in the mall, and his new friend who works at the music store—and who has her own past with Kate—finds the little girl's toy monkey in the employees—only area of the complex. O'Flynn has created an ensemble cast of fully developed and engaging characters—children, adults, and adolescents—and placed them in a plot that twists and turns more than the underground and locked stretches of the mall. And she creates sentences and verbal images that are both finely honed and flawlessly flowing. This is a book with high appeal to mystery and suspense fans, and also to anyone who appreciates fine writing or mesmerizing storytelling. —Francisca Goldsmith, Halifax Public Libraries, Nova Scotia
School Library Journal
Debut novel, nominated for the Man Booker Prize, is part mystery, part ghost story, and altogether wonderful. The story begins in O'Flynn's hometown, Birmingham, England, in 1984. The heroine is Kate Meaney, ten-year-old private eye. Kate's interest in detective work is rooted in a fondness for film noir she shares with her father. When he dies, her amateur sleuthing helps her remain connected to his memory. Kate is a shy, serious, singular child, and her only friends are eccentrics and outcasts. There's Adrian, the adult son of a local shopkeeper; Teresa, the girl who sets new standards for naughtiness when she transfers to Kate's school; and Mickey, the plush monkey who accompanies her on stakeouts at the local mall. Kate's grandmother—who becomes her guardian when her father dies—wants Kate to go to boarding school, but Kate has other ideas. The narrative shifts to 2003. The mall where Kate followed suspects is still there, but now the action revolves around Kurt, a security guard, and Lisa, an assistant manager at a record store. Neither is happy at work, but these dead—end jobs are just symptoms of a more general malaise and paralysis. Both Kurt and Lisa are immobilized by tragedy, and both become obsessed with a little girl Kurt sees on a security camera one night—a little girl with a plush monkey peeking out of her backpack. This is, ultimately, the story of Kate's disappearance and the people transformed by it. It's also a mordantly funny depiction of the contemporary retail workplace. And it's a romance. These pieces should not fit together, but they do. O'Flynn is able to capture a character or a scene with a few perfect details, and she seems to possess an uncanny, ennobling sympathy for her characters. Heartbreaking, hilarious and immensely rewarding.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What drove Kate into an imaginary detective world? What sort of heroism does she fantasize about?
2. How was Kate influenced by her father, both before and after his death? How did his approach to parenting compare to her grandmother’s?
3. What makes Green Oaks so appealing to Kate? Why is it important for her to go where no one knows her?
4. How did you react to the shift in point of view after Kate disappeared? How did the adults’ perceptions compare to hers?
5. How does Lisa cope with the aftermath Kate’s isappearance has on her brother and her parents?
6. How would you characterize Kurt and Kurt Sr.? How do the differences between Kurt and his sister, Loretta, affect their roles in the family?
7. Discuss Green Oaks itself and the closed factory that looms in its history. What do shopping and stores such as Your Music bring to the community? How pervasive is mall culture in our society?
8. How did your understanding of Teresa unfold? What had the dynamics between Kate and Teresa been like when they first met? How was Teresa affected by abuse once she reached adulthood?
9. Ultimately, who was responsible for Kate’s death? Could it have been prevented?
10. What is evoked by the top-secret detective notebook entry that forms chapter 41 in the novel? In what way do Kate’s observations in those last scenes bring her story full circle?
11. How would you describe the relationship between Lisa’s co-workers? What do their interactions with each other and with the customers say about their personalities? Why do they stay in their jobs? How does Lisa handle the task of disciplining the volatile Steve in chapter 25? Why did Ian string Mr. Wake along for nearly two years regarding the classical-music cassette (chapter 31)?
12. Discuss the novel’s title and its double meanings. In what way does Kate’s disappearance serve as a metaphor for the other lost souls depicted by Catherine O’Flynn (including the mall generation itself)? How did Lisa and Kurt become lost? Is their apathy indicative of their generation as a whole?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
What Was Mine
Helen Klein Ross, 2016
Gallery Books
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781476732350
Summary
Simply told but deeply affecting, this urgent novel unravels the heartrending yet unsentimental tale of a woman who kidnaps a baby in a superstore—and gets away with it for twenty-one years.
Lucy Wakefield is a seemingly ordinary woman who does something extraordinary in a desperate moment: she takes a baby girl from a shopping cart and raises her as her own. It’s a secret she manages to keep for over two decades—from her daughter, the babysitter who helped raise her, family, coworkers, and friends.
When Lucy’s now-grown daughter Mia discovers the devastating truth of her origins, she is overwhelmed by confusion and anger and determines not to speak again to the mother who raised her. She reaches out to her birth mother for a tearful reunion, and Lucy is forced to flee to China to avoid prosecution.
What follows is a ripple effect that alters the lives of many and challenges our understanding of the very meaning of motherhood.
Author Helen Klein Ross, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, weaves a powerful story of upheaval and resilience told from the alternating perspectives of Lucy, Mia, Mia’s birth mother, and others intimately involved in the kidnapping.
What Was Mine is a compelling tale of motherhood and loss, of grief and hope, and the life-shattering effects of a single, irrevocable moment. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1954 (?)
• Raised—King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.S., Cornell University; M.F.A., New School for Social Research
• Awards—Shorty Award
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York, and Salisbury, Connecticut
Helen wrote her first novel in a composition notebook (you remember those). She was only eight, and the story revolved around a family of birds—proof that she's been interested in family dynamics for a long time.
Ross earned her B.S. from Cornell University and her M.F.A. from The New School for Social Research in New York. She spent the next 20 years working in advertising, in New York City and San Francisco, as a writer and creative director for top agencies and global brands.
When social media took off, Ross created her own blog, AdBroad. She then became noted for channeling Don Draper's wife Betty, from Mad Men, into an online presence. Ross gave Betty her own Twitter acount—@Betty Draper—a profile on Linked-In and Betty's own blog where she could kvetch about the woes of a 1960s housewife. These and other cross-platform type narratives, earned Ross a good deal of attention in the press and online media, including an article in the Wall Street Journal, as well as a Shorty Award. (Yes, the "Oscars for Twitter." Really.)
Ross is also an author of note. Her poetry, essays and fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times, and in literary journals and anthologies. Her first novel Making It: A Novel of Madison Avenue appeared in 2013, and her second, What Was Mine, in 2016. The second book debuted on January 5 and was sold out on Amazon before 8 A.M. People magazine selected it as a "Best New Book of 2016."
Ross lives with her husband in New York City and Salisbury, Connecticut. (Adapted from the author's website.)
Book Reviews
A suspenseful, moving look at twisted maternal love and the limits of forgiveness (Best New Books Pick).
People
Although the process by which Mia’s abduction comes out seems unrealistic and the shifting first-person narration doesn’t fully cohere, Ross deftly creates genuinely sympathetic characters and emotionally resonant prose around what could have felt sensationalistic.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [A] compelling and moving story that asks many questions about family, love, and justice.... Moving at a hard-to-put-down, breathless pace, this is suspenseful domestic fiction at its best. —Jan Marry, Williamsburg Regional Lib., VA
Library Journal
What Was Mine is an emotionally-grounded read.... By giving readers the chance to examine what may be unforgivable, Ross brings an entirely new twist to the usual abduction story. Fans of Gillian Flynn and Maria Semple will enjoy the intensely introspective What Was Mine.
Booklist
[An] improbable premise that an otherwise successful, stable woman would help herself to a stranger's baby. But suspending disbelief when reading well-written fiction can be pleasant. Ross' prose is both readable and enjoyable, and she touches on interesting ideas about identity, family, and the malleability of the human psyche.
Kirkus Reviews
A powerful plot told with exactly the right approach, What Was Mine is capable of sparking plenty of discussion, whether it is over a water cooler, in a book club or simply in the reader's mind.
Shelf Awareness
Discussion Questions
1. The title of the book, What Was Mine, gets at the themes of ownership and belonging. Discuss how that theme relates to the three main characters: Lucy, Marilyn, and Mia. What was theirs? What did they each lose throughout the story?
2. What is the effect of knowing from the beginning of the story that Lucy eventually gets caught?
3. In Lucy’s mind, aside from her one egregious act, she is a normal person—a good person, even. Is it possible for someone good and normal to stray so far from the path of what’s right and then simply return to it? Is it possible for a good person to do a bad thing, or are some acts so egregious as to define one as a bad person?
4. Marilyn’s character is portrayed as almost a different person before and after her daughter’s kidnapping. Discuss the ways in which she changes after going through this traumatic event.
5. "So much of who you are has to do with your mother." Do you agree with this statement?
6. Mia and Marilyn try to forgive Lucy for what she did, but others like Tom and even Lucy’s own sister, Cheryl, are not able to. Discuss the theme of forgiveness in the story. Why do you think two of the people most directly affected are the most willing to try to forgive? Have you ever been asked to forgive someone for something you thought was unforgivable?
7. Throughout the story, Lucy’s intentions don’t always line up with her actions. Even as she was kidnapping Mia, she was in denial about what she was doing, intending to give the baby back somehow. When she then almost lost Mia in a store, she "made promises to the universe" to set things right which she wouldn’t keep. She says she meant to tell Mia when she got older. "Part of me thought that if I waited long enough, if I used just the right words, perhaps she’d be able to understand." Do you think Lucy ever really intended to tell Mia the truth—or was she lying to herself about that, too?
8. After Mia discovers the truth about what happened to her, she has a hard time referring to either Lucy or Marilyn as "mother." Discuss what the word mother means to you. What makes a mother a mother? Is it the person who birthed you, whose genes you share, who raised you—and what if these don’t describe the same person? How do Mia’s feelings toward each of the women who think of themselves as her mother change over the next ten months?
9. When Lucy confesses her crime to Wendy, Wendy is kind and understanding, as she has a secret of her own to confess. Why do you think Wendy’s secret makes her sympathetic to Lucy? How do you think her secret compares with Lucy’s?
10. If the kidnapping hadn’t happened, Marilyn presumably would have chosen to remain employed and Mia would have been raised by a woman who, like Lucy, works outside the home. Compare and contrast the images presented in the book of different mothering styles and decisions that led to various choices. What do these differences in styles represent for Mia?
11. Marilyn and Tom both managed to eventually move on and make new lives for themselves after the kidnapping. Cheryl wonders how Lucy could ever "restore what she took from those parents[.] She took their baby. She took their marriage. She took the life they were meant to have." How do you think Marilyn and Tom would reconcile the regret of losing the life they were meant to have with embracing the seemingly happy lives they ended up with?
12. Does the fact that Lucy raised Mia with love excuse her actions? What does "restorative justice" mean in this case? How do you think she deserves to be punished for her crime?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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What Was She Thinking? (Notes on a Scandal)
Zoe Heller, 2003
Macmillan Picador
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312421991
Summary
More than a decade ago, Kazuo Ishiguro wowed readers with The Remains of the Day, a novel requiring readers to see past the self-deceptions of an uppity English narrator to understand the true significance of the story. In the same vein, Zoe Heller offers a riveting story of friendship, jealousy, and betrayal, with a narrator as unreliable as Ishiguro's infamous butler.
Heller's narrator is Barbara Covett, a British schoolteacher who lives a quiet, solitary life with an aging cat as her sole companion. For reasons she cannot comprehend, Barbara has never been good at making friends. But she is drawn to Sheba, a pretty new pottery teacher, and jealously tries to edge out the other teachers to win Sheba's friendship. When Sheba begins an inappropriate relationship with a young male student, it is Barbara in whom she confides. Soon, Barbara begins a written account of Sheba's illicit affair, detailing the actions of a woman caught in the grip of an obsession larger than herself.
As Barbara continues to infiltrate Sheba's life, their friendship acquires a dangerous undercurrent. And although the book title ostensibly refers to Sheba, readers might ask themselves the same question of Barbara, as this psychologically rich, complex tale unfolds. In penning her wickedly wonderful second novel, Zoe Heller certainly had her head squarely on her shoulders. (From Barnes & Noble.)
The novel was made into the 2006 film, Notes on a Scandal, staring Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett.
Author Bio
• Birth—July 7, 1965
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Oxford,; M.A., Columbia University
• Currently—lives in New York, New York
Zoe Heller was born in London and lives in New York City. She is the author of the novel Everything You Know; What Was She Thinking? and The Believer.
Extras
Excerpts are from a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview:
• My very first job was as a milkman's assistant on an electric milk float in London. (This was in the days when British homeowners got their milk delivered to their front doorsteps. I was 14 at the time. It was an okay job, but the smell of stale milk tended to linger horribly on my clothes.
• I wish I could have been a jazz singer.
• I am extremely fond of manatees.
• When asked about what book influenced her most as a writer, here is her response:
Perhaps Middlemarch by George Eliot? I read it when I was 17 years old and at that time, it seemed to me to be the wisest, most truthful piece of fiction I'd ever read. Eliot's account of her heroine's life is remarkably unsentimental and grown-up. I also loved Eliot's stately, slow narration and her long, windy digressions. It was one of the first books that really made me want to be a writer. (Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble)
Book Reviews
In the end, What Was She Thinking? isn't so much about the standard student-teacher affair as it is about the complicated weights and balances of female friendships. Some of the novel's funniest scenes show the women adopting a posture of honesty and ''supportiveness'' while privately judging or dismissing one another. It's a recognizable snit-fit of ''enough about you, what about me'' that pushes Barbara into her final betrayal. In a way, Barbara risks more for friendship than Sheba does for romance. The plot twist may not be a huge surprise, but Heller handles it with wry grace, managing to mock her characters without allowing their story to tip into farce.
Lisa Zeidner - New York Times
In literature as in life, one of the most dangerous turns of events is to get what you want, and for all its surface tawdriness and chatty asides, What Was She Thinking? achieves some worthy literary aims indeed.
Chris Lehmann - The Washington Post
Barbara Covett, a sixtyish history teacher, is the kind of unmarried-woman-with-cat whose female friends sooner or later decide she is "too intense." Thus when a beautiful new pottery teacher, Sheba Hart — a "wispy novice with a tinkly accent and see-through skirts" - chooses Barbara as a confidante, she is deeply, even rather sinisterly, gratified. Sheba's secret is explosive: married with two kids, she is having an affair with a fifteen-year-old student. The novel, Heller's second, is Barbara's supposedly objective "history" of the affair and its eventual discovery, written furtively while she and her friend are holed up in a borrowed house, waiting for Sheba's court date. Barbara has appointed herself Sheba's "unofficial guardian," protecting her from the salivating tabloids. Equally adroit at satire and at psychological suspense, Heller charts the course of a predatory friendship and demonstrates the lengths to which some people go for human company.
The New Yorker
Subtitled "Notes on a Scandal," Heller's engrossing second novel (after Everything You Know) is actually the story of two inappropriate obsessions-one a consummated affair between a high school teacher and her student, the other a secret passion harbored by a dowdy spinster. Sheba Hart, a new 40ish art teacher at a London school for working-class kids, has been arrested for having a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old student, Steven Connolly. The papers are having a blast. Sheba is herself the object of fascination for her older colleague and defender, Barbara Covett, whose interest in Sheba is not overtly romantic but has an erotic-and at times malevolent-intensity. Barbara narrates the story of Sheba's affair while inadvertently revealing her own obsession and her pivotal role in the scandal. The novel is gripping from start to finish; Heller brings vivid, nuanced characterizations to the racy story. Sheba is upper-class, arty, carelessly beautiful in floaty layers of clothing, with a full life of her own: doting older husband, impossible adolescent daughter, a son with Down's Syndrome, real if underdeveloped talent as a potter. She never got a driver's license, she tells Barbara, because she is always given rides; people want to do things for her. Barbara's respectable maiden-lady exterior hides a bitter soul that feasts on others' real and imagined shortcomings: one colleague's carelessly shaved armpits, another's risible baseball jacket. Even characters on stage for a minute (a Camden barman who hams it up for Barbara) live and breathe. Verdict: Some readers will pass this up as yet another take on the shopworn theme of student/teacher romance, but Heller's light touch will win over others and please reviewers.
Publishers Weekly
Ansay takes us on the dark, emotional journey of a mother's losing a child and brings us out on the other side into forgiveness and redemption. Meg and Rex Van Dorn's comfortable life in Meg's home town on the Wisconsin shore of Lake Michigan ends when their young son is killed in a car accident as Meg is driving him to school. Cindy Ann, the driver who caused the accident, was Meg's best friend in high school. Meg and Rex file a civil suit against Cindy but drop it when they find that bitterness is dominating their lives. Trying to start over, they buy a sailboat and move to the Caribbean. Their seafaring life, which Ansay depicts authentically in all its drudgery and danger, seems exotic but offers them little comfort. In time, Meg's feelings about Cindy evolve into something like a supernatural connection. When she learns that Rex is secretly pursuing the civil suit, the differences in how they cope with grief begin to pull their marriage apart. For all popular fiction collections; buy to please the many fans of Ansay's Oprah selection, Vinegar Hill. —Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ. Libs., Harrisonburg, VA
Library Journal
After Everything You Know (2000) comes the tale of a London art teacher, married with children, who has an affair with a student of 15. When Sheba (Bathsheba) Hart comes to St. George's school, she's completely inexperienced-as clueless about disciplining hormone-driven students as she is about how to dress, inclining toward the sheer, diaphanous, and fey when corduroy or tweed would be in order. More expert, however, is experienced faculty member Barbara Covett-40ish, single, lonely-who casts a cool eye on the exotic Sheba, gradually is drawn closer, and ends up an intimate friend: kind of Wuthering Heights's Nelly Dean to Sheba, making notes, keeping a timeline, and writing a narrative (this novel) of the whole debacle of Sheba's affair. Barbara's tale is often stiff and clumsy ("I daresay we shall never know for certain the exact progress of her romantic attachment"), but it neatly limns the contrast between Barbara's drab, spinsterish life and Sheba's charming, fecund, expansive domesticity, with her academic husband (though he's a snob), and her two healthy children (the older, though, a fiercely troubled teenager and the younger, doted on by Sheba, a victim of Down's syndrome). There's a major disconnect between all of this on the one hand and, on the other, Sheba's letting herself be seduced by the callow working-class Steven Connolly, then continuing the affair for months, keeping it a secret even from Barbara, until inevitable exposure and with it the promise of loss, penalty, breakup, dislocation, perhaps even imprisonment, though the story (wisely) ends with this last yet to come, leaving us only with a powerful sense of the piercing loneliness of Barbara of the inexplicably self-invited ruin of the charming and yet utterly lost Sheba—her family ruined, her future depraved. Unbelievable yet compelling: it's almost as if Heller tried for a salacious potboiler and ended up—her talent refusing not to intrude—with a portrait that remains indelible. Watch for her next, whatever it may be.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. There has traditionally been a taboo on older women/younger men relationships. In the novel, the news media describes the affair between Sheba and Connolly as "despicable" and "unhealthy." Why do you think it has historically been viewed this way, and do you agree?
2. Heller expertly captures the insulating and sometimes claustrophobic atmosphere of academia. Give examples of this, and discuss the differences and similarities between Sheba and Barbara that brought them to teach at the same institution.
3. Connolly's unabashed admiration and innocence prove irresistible to Sheba. How are Connolly's attentions much different from the oglings of her academic colleagues since both indicate that they find her sexually attractive. Why is one so much more flattering?
4. What makes a woman like Sheba behave so irresponsibly? How easy was it for her to risk everything for the danger of the relationship? Does Sheba really think about the consequences of her actions?
5. Why does Sheba's friendship with Sue Hodges seem so ill-founded to Barbara? Why would Sheba choose Sue her as her confidant—she never mentions Connolly's visits to Sue. How does Barbara seduce Sheba away from Sue?
6. Barbara observes that Connolly's overt effort to please Sheba is like "the cynicism of all courtship." Discuss what she means by this.
7. Barbara asks why Sheba insists on seeing Connolly as gifted and extraordinary in a sea of fairly ordinary, untalented students. Does the element of class exacerbate the forbidden nature of the relationship? Is Connolly exploiting this? What is his culpability in the situation?
8. Why, when Barbara seems like such a prim and formal person, is she initially so sympathetic to Sheba's predicament? Why is she not appalled? She says she thinks that Connolly is actually benefiting from the relationship, not being abused by it. Is it her desire for Sheba's friendship or pure feminist support? Does she take vicarious pleasure in it?
9. Sheba is presented throughout the first portion of the book as a very appealing character, seeking few of the advantages her money and class could provide. She bemoans her own lack of ambition. How much do her feelings of insecurity, boredom, and her problems with Polly affect her vulnerability to Connolly?
10. What is Barbara's reaction when she finally finds out about the affair? Is this the cause of her betrayal? Does it lead to her punishment at St. George's? Does Barbara have the right to set down the events in writing? Discuss how their friendship provides as fertile ground for mutual misunderstanding, jealousy, and treachery as does the illicit love affair.
11. At the end which woman is more sympathetic? Is Barbara friend, guardian, foe, jailer, interloper, predator? Is Sheba a victim of circumstances, an understandably bored housewife, or a selfish woman spoiled by privilege?
12. The story is finally about the two women, and the many facets of female friendship. Discuss the ways in which Heller's device of having Barbara tell the story serves to enrich the novel by revealing both women's emotional lives.
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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What We Keep
Elizabeth Berg, 1998
Random House
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345423290
Summary
In this rich new novel by beloved author Elizabeth Bert, a reunion between two sisters and their mother reveals secrets and complexities in the lives of the women in a family.
Ginny Young is on a plane, going to visit the mother she hasn't seen or spoken to for thirty-five years. She thinks back to the summer of 1958, when she was twelve years old and a series of dramatic events divided her family, separating her and her sister from their mother, seemingly forever.
Moving back and forth in time between the girl she once was and the woman she's become, Ginny confronts painful choices in a woman's life—even as surprising secrets are revealed about the family she thought she understood. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 2, 1948
• Where—St. Paul, Minnesota, USA
• Education—A.A.S, St. Mary’s College
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Chicago, Illinois
Before she became a writer, Elizabeth Berg spent 10 years as a nurse. It's a field, as she says on her website, that helped her to become a writer:
Taking care of patients taught me a lot about human nature, about hope and fear and love and loss and regret and triumph and especially about relationships—all things that I tend to focus on in my work.
Her sensitivity to humanity is what Berg's writing is noted for. As Publishers Weekly wrote in reviewing The Dream Lover, her 2015 portrayal of George Sand, "Berg offers vivid, sensual detail and a sensitive portrayal of the yearning and vulnerability" behind her main character.
Background
Berg was born in St. Paul Minneapolis. When her father re-enlisted in the Army, she and her family were moved from base to base—in one single year, she went to three different schools. Her peripatetic childhood makes it hard for Berg to answer the usually simple question, "where did you grow up?"
Berg recalls that she loved to write at a young age. She was only nine when she submitted her first poem to American Girl magazine; sadly, it was rejected. It was another 25 years before she submitted anything again—to Parents Magazine—and that time she won.
In addition to nursing, Berg worked as a waitress, another field she claims is "good training for a writer." She also sang in a rock band.
Writing
Berg ended up writing for magazines for 10 years before she finally turned to novels. Since her 1993 debut with Durable Goods, her books have sold in large numbers and been translated into 27 languages. She writes nearly a book a year, a number of which have received awards and honors.
Recognition
Two of Berg's books, Durable Goods and Joy School, were listed as "Best Books of the Year" by the American Library Association. Open House became an Oprah Book Club Selection.
She won the New England Booksellers Award for her body of work, and Boston Public Library made her a "literary light." She has also been honored by the Chicago Public Library. An article on a cooking school in Italy, for National Geographic Traveler magazine, won an award from the North American Travel Journalists Association.
Personal
Now divorced, Berg was married for over twenty years and has two daughters and three grandchildren. She lives with her dogs and a cat in Chicago. (Author bio adapted from the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Beautifully written.... [Ginny Young] crosses the country for a reluctant reunion with the mother she has not seen in 35 years. During the long hours of her flight, she returns in memory to the summer when she turned 12 and her family turned inside out.... What We Keep is about ties that are buried but not broken, wounds that are dressed but never heal, and love that changes form but somehow survives,
USA Today
Compelling... Reading [this] book is like having an intimate conversation with a friend who is baring her soul.”
Charleston Post and Courier
Berg knows the hearts of her characters intimately, showing them with compassion, humor, and an illuminating generosity.
The Seattle Times
"I don't like my mother. She's not a good person." So declares Ginny Young on a trip to California to visit her mother, Marion, whom she hasn't seen in 35 years. Ginny is only making the trip as a favor to her sister, Sharla, who has called to say she's awaiting the results of a cancer test. In flashback, Berg (Talk Before Sleep) revisits the events of the girls' childhood and the moments when their mother's problems began to reveal themselves. One night, Ginny and Sharla overhear their mother screaming at their father about her unhappiness and telling him that she never wanted children. Then she walks out with no explanations, returning briefly a few months later to explain that she's not coming back. The following years bring occasional visits that are impossibly painful for all concerned and so full of buried anger that the girls decide to curtail them altogether. When Sharla meets Ginny (now a mother herself) at the airport, and the two see their mother again, there are surprises in store, but not especially shocking ones. The reader, in fact, may feel there is less here than meets the eye: Marion's flight is never made psychologically credible. Berg's customary skill in rendering domestic details is intact, but the story seems stitched together. Crucial scenes feel highlighted rather than fleshed out, and Ginny's bitterness disappears into thin air as she reaches a facile, sentimental conclusion about her mother's needs.
Publishers Weekly
Berg excels at writing novels about the close personal relationships between women. As this new work opens, Ginny is flying to California to join her sister in a meeting with their mother, whom neither daughter has seen for 35 years. Ginny uses her travel time to reflect upon her memories of the summer when her mother withdrew from the family and became an outsider in her daughters' lives. Berg's precise, evocative descriptions create vivid images of Ginny's physical world, while Berg's understanding and perception are an eloquent testimony to Ginny's emotional turmoil. Berg cleverly examines the roles and relationships of mothers and daughters and reveals how truth, forgiveness, and understanding are possible in healing intergenerational rifts between women. Highly recommended. —Caroline M. Hallsworth, Cambrian Coll., Ontario
Library Journal
The prolific Berg's fifth novel pays an unremarkable visit to that overworked territory where mothers and daughters visit to blame and explain, this time in the story of a daughter on her way to meet the mother she hasnþt seen for 35 years. Berg has an easy style and good ear, which makes for agreeable storytelling, but, here, the story itself is less impressive. The trouble is that the plot fails to seem plausible or compelling, draining the emotion from what a supposedly dramatic meeting, with attendant explanatory revelations, of a mother and her two estranged daughters. The narrative is told in flashbacks younger daughter Ginny as she flies to San Francisco. There, she joins sister Sharla, who has persuaded Ginny to come along only by hinting that sheþs terminally ill and wants to make her peace with their mother. As for Mother, she seems a parody of a 1950s Mom: baking from scratch, dressing immaculately, even hosting a Tupperware party. Dad's also a stereotypeþa well-meaning man who works hard at a boring job, but isnþt sensitive (he doesn't get it, for instance, that his wife wants to go dancing). The two girls are happy, though: They love Mom's cooking and the way she helps them create nifty projects. And yet one summer, when glamorous free spirit Jasmine, allegedly on the run from her rich but abusive husband, moves next door, their lives fall apart. Mom gets restless and decides to leave Dad and the girls to become an artist. Which she does, and isn't forgiven until they all meet up again, realizing then just how unhappy Mom was. But why Mom had to make so extreme a gesture is never persuasively explained. An easy read, but intellectually and emotionally lite-fare, despite the suggestions of profundity ("I now believe we owe our mothers and our daughters the truth").
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Ginny possesses an extraordinary memory. In fact, she suggests that, through memory, "I become again the person I was then" (page 10) and thus captures a "true vision of the past" (page 11). What is a "true vision of the past"? Is it Ginny's twelve-year-old vision? Is it her adult vision? Does Ginny's effort to remember the past cause her to think about it differently?
2. Berg dedicates What We Keep to "women who risk telling the hard truths." What do you think of Martha Hamilton, the passenger on Ginny's flight who asks Ginny some very hard questions and makes a few tough statements? Does Martha push Ginny closer to "telling the hard truths"?
3. Martha notes that people like "differentness" (page 26) in everything except their mothers. What does Martha mean? Do you agree?
4. Throughout the novel Ginny suggests that she knows her mother intimately. In fact, Ginny's early fantasy about discovering her mother's "link with royalty" (page 17) suggests that Ginny knows her mother better than Marion knows herself. Why is this knowledge so important to Ginny?
5. When Sharla dreams that Marion has a third eye, Ginny expects that Marion will comfort Sharla: "Never mind the dream; no matter what it was, she would take it away" (page 105). Why is this dream so startling? Is Marion able to comfort her daughter? Why or why not?
6. Knowing, in retrospect, that neither shenor Sharla knew Marion as well as they thought, Ginny feels that her mother should have attempted to communicate with them that summer: "To say something about what she must have been thinking" (page 85). However, the narrative is full of moments in which Marion tries to tell her daughters about herself only to be interrupted or ignored. Stories of past boyfriends (page 66) and hints of Marion's own desires (page 89) are constantly squelched by Ginny and Sharla's demands. Why didn't the daughters listen? Why couldn't Marion communicate with her daughters successfully?
7. After her first long absence, Marion tries to tell her daughters about her experience. From the moment of its "odd beginning" (page 209), it's a story Ginny doesn't like. Marion isn't, Ginny suggests, a very good storyteller: "She would make up stories that were not very good, as this one was not" (page 211). Finally, Ginny interrupts her mother's story for another: "'I have so much history, ' I said. 'My teacher, Mr. Stoltz, he's nuts. He thinks all we have in our lives is history'" (page 214). Why is the word "history" emphasized in this way? What does Marion's story have to do with Ginny's "history"? Why does Ginny think her mother is a bad storyteller? What do you think of Marion's storytelling?
8. What We Keep is full of descriptions of houses. Ginny and Sharla sneak through Mrs. O'Donnell's dusty, empty rooms, and rifle through Jasmine's drawers. Both daughters are aware of Marion's "house folder" (page 87), and offer opinions about her furniture rearrangements (page 88), her Clear Falls apartment (page 225), and her California home (page 259). What is the significance of these spaces?
9. Marion appears to be the typical 1950s housekeeper—at ease in an apron, involved in the weekly neighborhood coffee klatch, a willing Tupperware party hostess. However, she seems to transform the ordinary meaning of even these events. For instance, why does Marion host a Tupperware party on her birthday? Why are her daughters so startled by this decision? What significance does her action have in their minds? In her own mind? In yours?
10. In what ways is Jasmine different from Marion? In what ways is she similar? How do you feel towards Jasmine initially? How do you feel about her at the conclusion of the novel? How responsible do you hold Jasmine for Marion's decisions?
11. Marion gives her daughters paintings for the first Christmas they spend apart. Ginny receives a painting of mother and child. Sharla receives a painting of a bird. What stories do these paintings tell? How are they related?
12. Sharla says that her painting "doesn't make any sense" (page 245), but the image of the bird certainly has meaning for Marion. Ginny realizes during her own flight to meet her mother that Marion freed the family parakeet, Lucky, during that summer (page 141). Ginny also remembers the moment in which she and Wayne witnessed Marion "flapping her arms like wings, and walking about in circles" (page 153), as well as the afternoon during which her Parents constructed collages with wings and airplanes. What meaning did these images hold for Marion?
13. Our earliest introduction to Ginny's father comes through her memories of him. How do you feel about Steven? Does Marion's story alter your feelings about him? Consider Steven's defense of Marion's absence: "I believe she thinks she has reasons" (page 241). Consider his silence when confronted with Sharla's conviction of her mother's lesbianism: "'What did he say?' I asked, and Sharla said, 'Nothing. He must have known'" (page 246). Do you think that his statement and his silence are defensible or not? Do you think he's a good father?
14. Wayne is the only other significant man in Ginny's life that summer. While Ginny feels a constant affection for her father, her feelings toward Wayne are rather ambivalent. She doesn't want her relationship with Wayne reduced to a "that-summer-at-the-lake story, " but suggests herself that she was acting out of a "pied-piper delirium" (page 165). Why does she describe her relationship with Wayne so ambivalently? Why is she relieved when he leaves so suddenly?
15. In what ways does Ginny's relationship with Wayne parallel her mother's relationship with Jasmine? Does her own relationship with Wayne help Ginny understand her mother?
16. Wayne tells Ginny that "people want to be fooled" (page 157). What does he mean? Do you think he's right?
17. The climax of the novel—the meeting of Ginny and her mother—is, in fact, not written. The women come face to face and, suddenly, the text stops. Ginny can't speak. Marion begins "saying syllables that are not words" (page 254). Why is this moment in the novel not written?
18. Marion confesses misgivings about her mothering while sitting on Ginny's bed: "I think I've raised you so wrong.... I did something wrong. I did everything wrong, and I'm sorry" (page 187). Do you think Marion's mothering was "wrong"? If so, was her choice to leave "right"?
19. Ginny is clearly aware of the impact that Marion's actions have had upon her own mothering. Has Ginny learned from Marion's errors? Do you consider Ginny to be a good mother?
20. Ginny herself asks the novel's most pressing questions: "I am wondering what it is that we ask of our mothers: what do they owe us? What is it that we owe them?" (page 270) How does she answer these questions? How do you answer them?
21. At the beginning of the novel Ginny acknowledges her love of science: "I would stare at formulas and admire them for their spare beauty without being able to grasp their meaning. The fact that they cleanly explained some higher law to someone else was enough for me. It comforted me" (p. 14). At the end of the novel, Marion makes a similar confession: "I would read something like the first law of thermodynamics, and just find it enormously comforting. I still do" (p. 261). What is it about science that comforts Ginny? Marion?
22. Why is the novel titled "What We Keep"? What is it that Ginny "keeps" from her experience?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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What We Lose
Zinzi Clemmons, 2017
Penguin Publishing
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780735221710
Summary
A stunning novel about a young African-American woman coming of age—a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, family, and country
Raised in Pennsylvania, Thandi views the world of her mother’s childhood in Johannesburg as both impossibly distant and ever present.
She is an outsider wherever she goes, caught between being black and white, American and not. She tries to connect these dislocated pieces of her life, and as her mother succumbs to cancer, Thandi searches for an anchor—someone, or something, to love.
In arresting and unsettling prose, we watch Thandi’s life unfold, from losing her mother and learning to live without the person who has most profoundly shaped her existence, to her own encounters with romance and unexpected motherhood.
Through exquisite and emotional vignettes, Clemmons creates a stunning portrayal of what it means to choose to live, after loss. An elegiac distillation, at once intellectual and visceral, of a young woman’s understanding of absence and identity that spans continents and decades, What We Lose heralds the arrival of a virtuosic new voice in fiction. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1984-85
• Raised—Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., Brown University; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California
Zinzi Clemmons is an American writer, teacher, and editor, whose debut novel What We Lose was published to wide acclaim in 2017. She was raised in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, by a mixed race South African mother and African-American father—and, like her novel's heroine, knows what it feels like to be an outsider. Swarthmore is a mostly white college town (yes, Swarthmore College) outside of Philadelphia: "we were the only black family, and foreign," Clemmons has said. Summers spent in Johannesburg, South Africa, only added to a sense of displacement. And, importantly, like her heroine, she too lost a mother.
Clemmons received her Bachelor's degree at Brown and Master's in Fiction from Columbia. Her writing has appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, Transition, Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. She is also a co-founder and former Publisher of Apogee Journal and a Contributing Editor to LitHub.com.
Married to poet and translator Andre Naffis-Sahely, Clemmons now lives in Los Angeles where she teaches literature and creative writing at The Colburn Conservatory and Occidental College. (Adapted from various online sources.)
Book Reviews
A stunning debut novel about a young African American woman and the kaleidoscope of identity.
Los Angeles Daily News
Potent.… A loosely autobiographical exorcism of grief. Boldly innovative and frankly sexual, the collage-like novel mixes hand-drawn charts, archival photographs, rap lyrics, sharp disquisitions on the Mandelas and Oscar Pistorius, and singular meditations on racism’s brutal intimacies..… A novel as visceral as it is cerebral, never letting us forget, over the course of its improbably expansive 200 pages, the feeling of untameable grief in the body.… One can’t help but think of Clemmons as in the running to be the next-generation Claudia Rankine.
Megan O’Grady - Vogue
Contrasting what it means to be black in America with being black in Johannesburg, where her mother’s relatives still live, Clemmons presents a brutally honest yet nuanced view of contemporary identity.… Raw and ravishing, this novel pulses with vulnerability and shimmering anger.
Nicole Dennis-Benn - Oprah Magazine
This affecting novel combines autobiographical vignettes with photos and pertinent charts—one tracks longevity by race—as the narrator reckons with her loss.
People
Remember this name: Zinzi Clemmons. Long may she thrill us with exquisite works like What We Lose, her debut. Young Thandi, our heroine, grows up in Pennsylvania feeling like a fish on a bicycle. Why? As a biracial woman whose mother hails from Johannesburg, South Africa, she struggles to define home. In Clemmons’s hands the book is a remarkable journey.
Patrick Henry Bass - Essence
This intimate novel from a talented new writer follows Thandi, a Philadelphia girl with a South African mom, who has a complicated relationship with her place in the world. Through prose, text messages, photos, and book excerpts, the cornucopia of storytelling activates all the feels.
Steph Opitz - Marie Claire
Clemmons’ debut novel is a stunning work about growing up, losing your parents, and being an outsider. Perfect for fans of tangled immigrant stories like Americanah.
Glamour.com
Stunning.… What We Lose doesn’t attempt to answer any of the questions it raises. Instead, it dwells in them—in ways that are sad, sometimes funny—and gives readers a sense of what it’s like to be constantly haunted in that headspace.
Kevin Nguyen - GQ.com
Zinzi Clemmons’ powerful debut novel tells the story of Thandi, a woman raised in Philadelphia who’s struggling to come to terms with the death of her mother, who left behind a complicated legacy of her own.
Cosmopolitan.com
This hauntingly honest novel celebrates the coming-of-age tale of a young African-American woman who chooses to live vibrantly in the face of loss, adversity, and devastation. Promised to be one of the most influential new voices in fiction, Zinzi Clemmons is a must for any serious beach reader. This is 2017’s most raw literary display of female emotions.
Redbook
Exacting reflections on race, mourning, and family are at the center of this novel about a college student whose mother dies of cancer.… Though too restrained, there are some inspired moments, and Clemmons admirably balances the story’s myriad complicated themes.
Publishers Weekly
Raised by a South African mother and an American father, Thandi walks the color line. Then she learns that her mother has cancer. Debuter Clemmons, who has a second novel signed, writes on the Black Lives Matter movement for Literary Hub.
Library Journal
The much-anticipated debut from Clemmons unfolds through poignant vignettes and centers on the daughter of an immigrant. Raised in Philadelphia, Thandi is the daughter of a South African mother and an American father. Her identity is split, and when her mother dies, Thandi begins a moving, multidimensional exploration of grief and loss.
BookPage
(Starred review.) Spectacular.… Clemmons performs an exceptional sleight of hand that is both affecting and illuminating.
Booklist
(Starred review.) A big, brainy drama told by a fearless, funny young woman.… Prepare for Thandi’s voice to follow you from room to room long after you put this book away. A compelling exploration of race, migration, and womanhood in contemporary America.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for What We Lose ... then take off on your own:
1. Thandi and her mother's relationship is at the center of this novel. How would you describe it? What issues are at the heart of their disagreements? Consider immigration, motherhood, gender.
2. How would you describe Thandi? What contributes to her sense of feeling like an outsider? Have you ever experienced a sense of not belonging?
3. Follow-up to Question 2: Thandi has been told "But you're not, like, a real black person." How does this add to her sense of alienation?
4. In what ways does her mother's death affect Thandi. Talk about how her grief manifests itself in decisions that may not be the best for her future.
5. Thandi confesses, "My theory is that loneliness creates the feeling of haunting." What does she mean?
6. Zinzi Clemmons' novel is a cornucopia of storytelling. Her narrative incorporates hand-drawn charts, photographs, rap lyrics, philosophical meditations on things as varied as the Mandelas and racism. How do these devices add to or detract from your experience of reading the novel?
7. How is being black in American different from being black in Johannesburg.
8. How does Thandi come to see her place in the world? How does she finally come to grips with her identity? Does she ever find home…or feel at home?
9. This novel, mostly about grief, is in parts funny. Where do you find humor?
10. Talk about the significance of the book's title.
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
What We Were Promised
Lucy Tan, 2018
Little, Brown & Company
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316437189
Summary
Set in modern Shanghai, a debut by a Chinese-American writer about a prodigal son whose unexpected return forces his newly wealthy family to confront painful secrets and unfulfilled promises.
After years of chasing the American dream, the Zhen family has moved back to China.
Settling into a luxurious serviced apartment in Shanghai, Wei, Lina, and their daughter, Karen, join an elite community of Chinese-born, Western-educated professionals who have returned to a radically transformed city.
One morning, in the eighth tower of Lanson Suites, Lina discovers that a treasured ivory bracelet has gone missing. This incident sets off a wave of unease that ripples throughout the Zhen household. Wei, a marketing strategist, bows under the guilt of not having engaged in nobler work.
Meanwhile, Lina, lonely in her new life of leisure, assumes the modern moniker taitai—a housewife who does no housework at all. She is haunted by the circumstances surrounding her arranged marriage to Wei and her lingering feelings for his brother, Qiang.
Sunny, the family's housekeeper, is a keen but silent observer of these tensions. An unmarried woman trying to carve a place for herself in society, she understands the power of well-kept secrets.
When Qiang reappears in Shanghai after decades on the run with a local gang, the family must finally come to terms with the past and its indelible mark on their futures.
From a silk-producing village in rural China, up the corporate ladder in suburban America, and back again to the post-Maoist nouveaux riches of modern Shanghai, What We Were Promised explores the question of what we owe to our country, our families, and ourselves. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1987
• Raised—Livingston, New Jersey, USA
• Education—B.A., New York University; M.F.A., University of Wisconsin
• Awards—August Derleth Prize
• Currently—living in Madison, Wisconsin
Lucy Tan grew up in New Jersey and has spent much of her adult life in New York and Shanghai. She received her B.A. from New York University and her M.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was awarded the 2016 August Derleth Prize.
Her fiction has been published in journals such as Asia Literary Review and Ploughshares, where she was winner of the 2015 Emerging Writer's Contest. This is her first novel. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[A]n elegant debut novel
Newark Star Ledger
The magnificence and splendor of modern Shanghai come to life in Lucy Tan's debut novel.
Palm Beach Post
[A] solid debut…. Sunny and Wei’s stories are arresting, but Qiang and Lina come off as entitled in spite of the author’s efforts to make them sympathetic. Despite this, the novel presents an intriguing portrait of class, duty, and family.
Publishers Weekly
Tan's talent as a storyteller clearly shines through her strong plot lines and characterization; readers will want to know more about each well-crafted player.… [A] surprising and down-to-earth tale and entertaining read. —Shirley Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA
Library Journal
Like the Emerald City in Oz… Shanghai provides the backdrop for an examination of the clash between old and new lifestyles and values…. Tan examines the tension behind the facade of the moneyed …where everyone seems to be an expat in their own country.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What promises—spoken and unspoken—have these characters made to one another, to themselves, and to the countries they feel allegiance to?
2. How do these self-expectations drive or limit their actions?
3. What is the significance of this story being set in Shanghai? How does the physical, cultural landscape serve as context for these characters’ lives?
4. How do Lina and Wei’s relationships to China and America change throughout time?
5. What is Sunny’s relationship with her hometown, and how does it evolve throughout the novel?
6. What are the ways in which the characters in this novel each assume the role of a caretaker? Do these different roles and responsibilities shift throughout the novel?
7. Lina feels that she may have limited herself in her youth by choosing between the Zhen brothers rather than pursuing a post-college plan of her own devising. Do you think she regrets her decision?
8. What do you think Lina and Wei’s hopes are for Karen’s future?
9. How has Sunny’s perception of her own identity and abilities evolved by the end of the novel?
10. "There’s a reason you’re drawn to whatever it is, or whoever it is, you’re falling for," says Qiang on page 187. "They have something you’re missing." Lina believes he is talking about her here. Do you agree?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
What You Wish For
Katherine Center, 2020
St. Martin's Press
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250219367
Summary
Samantha Casey is a school librarian who loves her job, the kids, and her school family with passion and joy for living.
But she wasn’t always that way.
Duncan Carpenter is the new school principal who lives by rules and regulations, guided by the knowledge that bad things can happen.
But he wasn’t always that way.
And Sam knows it. Because she knew him before—at another school, in a different life. Back then, she loved him—but she was invisible. To him. To everyone. Even to herself.
She escaped to a new school, a new job, a new chance at living.
But when Duncan, of all people, gets hired as the new principal there, it feels like the best thing that could possibly happen to the school—and the worst thing that could possibly happen to Sam.
Until the opposite turns out to be true. The lovable Duncan she’d known is now a suit-and-tie wearing, rule-enforcing tough guy so hell-bent on protecting the school that he’s willing to destroy it.
As the school community spirals into chaos, and danger from all corners looms large, Sam and Duncan must find their way to who they really are, what it means to be brave, and how to take a chance on love—which is the riskiest move of all.
With Katherine Center’s sparkling dialogue, unforgettable characters, heart, hope, and humanity, What You Wish For is the author at her most compelling best.
Author Bio
• Birth—March 4, 1972
• Raised—Houston, Texas, USA
• Education—B.A., Vassar College; M.F.A., University of Houston
• Currently—lives in Houston, Texas
Katherine Center is the author of several contemporary novels about love and family. She graduated from St. John's School in Houston, Texas, and later earned her B.A. from Vassar College, where she won the Vassar College Fiction Prize.
She went on to receive her M.A. in fiction from the University of Houston. While in graduate school, she distinguised herself as a writer and editor: she co-edited Gulf Coast, a literary fiction magazine, and her graduate thesis earned her a spot as a finalist for the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction.
Center is the author of 7 novels, starting in 2006 with: The Bright Side of Disaster. More recently she has published How to Walk Away (2018), which became a Book of the Month Club pick; Things to Save in a Fire (2019), and What You Wish For (2020). Center's work is often categorized as women's fiction, chick lit and mommy lit. She describes her books as "bittersweet comic novels."
Center currently lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband and two children.
Extras
- Along with Jeffrey Toobin and Douglas Brinkley, Center was one of the speakers at the 2007 Houston Chronicle Book and Author Dinner.
- Her first novel was optioned by Varsity Pictures.
- Center has published essays in Real Simple and the anthologies Because I Love Her, CRUSH: 26 Real-Life Tales of First Love, and My Parents Were Awesome.
- Center also makes video essays, one of which, a letter to her daughter about motherhood, became the very popular "Defining a Movement" video for the Mom 2.0 conference.
- As a speaker at the 2018 TEDx Bend, Center's talk was entitled, "We Need to Teach Boys to Read Stories About Girls."
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/15/2018.)
Book Reviews
This charming, often lighthearted novel touches on serious issues and celebrates the power of joy to trump fear and despair.
People
[Q]uirky…. The cast of eccentric supporting characters adds to a fast-paced tale steeped with whimsical, yet sometimes outlandish, plot points. This is one for the beach bag.
Publishers Weekly
[L]ibrarian Samantha Casey is distraught when her school's new principal turns out to be secret crush Duncan Carpenter from way back—and even more distraught to find that Duncan is a cold fish obsessed with rules and school safety.
Library Journal
(Starred review) Center uses familiar rom-com tropes but never in a way that feels forced or cliched. Instead, she fills even the lightest moments with a real, human sadness…. A timely, uplifting read about finding joy in the midst of tragedy, filled with quirky characters and comforting warmth.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1, On page 59, Sam recalls Max telling her to, "Pay attention to the things that connect you with joy." Did reading this also remind you to pay attention to what makes you happy? What are some things in your life that make you feel connected with joy?
2. What did you make of how affected Sam was by the news of Duncan coming to her school? Why do you think the idea of Duncan and Sam’s feelings for him have so much control over her and her thoughts?
3. What was your initial reaction when Duncan doesn’t recognize Sam? Did you suspect that he did and was keeping it a secret? Why do you think he did?
4. Sam knew that Duncan coming back into her life would be hard and stressful for her, but it turned out to be in a way entirely different from what she expected.Have you had any situations in your life where you similarly thought something would be challenging but it turned out to be so in a completely different way? How did you handle it?
5. On page 144, Duncan talks about painting over the butterfly mural and says,"When the world is a safer place, we’ll bring it back." What did you make of that comment? Did you believe Duncan and his motives? Did you begin to wonder why he was so concerned about safety?
6. At one point in the novel Sam says that she doesn’t have anyone in her life with whom she feels like she truly belongs. Did you see this come across as you were reading? How does this change over the course of the novel?
7. Sam makes it clear that her epilepsy has held her back from doing things like driving and dating. Do you think some of Sam’s past trauma with her epilepsy and her father walking out on her and her mother has affected her in other ways?
8. Duncan confesses his true feelings to Sam after his surgery, but he doesn’t remember doing so. Why do you think Sam doesn’t tell him what he told her? Why do you think she never has the nerve to when she has such strong feelings for him?
9. The library is a safe place for Sam that brings her joy. She also works very hard to make sure her students feel the same. Is there a place like this for you in your life? Was there one when you were a child?
10. As cruel as Tina Buckley is to Sam, we know that she has faced a lot of challenges in her life. What do you make of her evolution over the course of the novel, and the evolution of her relationship with Sam?
11. This story has a lot of lessons about how to live a more joyful life, even in the face of hardship. What insights from the book stood out for you? Are there ways you might approach your own life differently after reading this novel?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
What's Left of Me Is Yours
Stephanie Scott, 2020
Knopf Doubleday
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385544702
Summary
A gripping debut set in modern-day Tokyo and inspired by a true crime. What's Left of Me Is Yours charts a young woman's search for the truth about her mother's life—and her murder.
In Japan, a covert industry has grown up around the "wakaresaseya" (literally "breaker-upper"), a person hired by one spouse to seduce the other in order to gain the advantage in divorce proceedings.
When Sato hires Kaitaro, a wakaresaseya agent, to have an affair with his wife, Rina, he assumes it will be an easy case.
But Sato has never truly understood Rina or her desires and Kaitaro's job is to do exactly that—until he does it too well. While Rina remains ignorant of the circumstances that brought them together, she and Kaitaro fall in a desperate, singular love, setting in motion a series of violent acts that will forever haunt her daughter's life.
Told from alternating points of view and across the breathtaking landscapes of Japan, Stephanie Scott exquisitely renders the affair and its intricate repercussions.
As Rina's daughter, Sumiko, fills in the gaps of her mother's story and her own memory, Scott probes the thorny psychological and moral grounds of the actions we take in the name of love, asking where we draw the line between passion and possession. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Stephanie Scott is a Singaporean and British writer who was born and raised in South East Asia. She read English Literature at the Universities of York and Cambridge and holds an M.S in Creative Writing from Oxford University.
Scott was awarded a British Association of Japanese Studies Toshiba Studentship for her anthropological work on What's Left of Me Is Yours and has been made a member of the British Japanese Law Association as a result of her research.
She also won the A.M. Heath Prize, the Jerwood Arvon Prize for Prose Fiction, and was a runner up for the Bridport Prize Peggy Chapman-Andrews Award. What's Left of Me Is Yours is her first novel. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[A]n extraordinary window onto [Japanese] culture.… Each chapter of this enrapturing novel is elegantly brief and charged with barely contained emotion. Yet Scott’s subject remains vast: the idea that the law itself does not protect the innocent, and "that what matters most is knowledge—of ourselves and others,"
New York Times Book Review
Mesmerizing
Los Angeles Times
Fascinating.… [scott] braids her different characters' timelines together with sophistication, her storytelling harmoniously well-constructed. The big questions over whether it's better to lie or to tell a difficult truth, and what might constitute a betrayal, are layered across generations and decades and there is strength in the subtlety with which Scott slowly unpacks them.
Guardian (UK)
Scott deftly spins a web through modern day Tokyo in this captivating dual-perspective rendering of a young woman determined to find out the truth behind her mother's murder.
Newsweek
Sumiko works to resolve the mystery of her mother’s murder… bringing her closer to understanding the blurred line that exists between love and hate. Byzantine subplots, distinctive characters, and atmospheric settings will leave readers spellbound.
Publishers Weekly
Scott poignantly evokes both a mother trapped by the choices made for her and a daughter learning to deal with her own precarious freedom.… [W]ith carefully accumulated details [she] describes a Japan… teetering on the edge of change.
Booklist
The book proceeds slowly… perhaps not adding enough new information to maintain the level of interest set by the sensational details in the first pages. An unusual and stylish story of love and murder—less a mystery than a study of emotions and cultural mores.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Before reading the novel, had you heard of the wakaresaseya or "marriage breakup" industry? What do you think are the risks of this industry being allowed to operate? How does this relate to honey trapping in your own culture?
2. From the beginning, photography plays a large role in the novel. How does photography influence Sumiko’s telling of her mother’s story?
3. Sumiko notes early in the novel that the best lies are close to the truth. How does Kai prove this theory as he tells Rina about himself?
4. Sumiko observes that she struggles to imagine her mother as a young person, an individual separate from her motherhood: "When I think of her, it is as my mother, and I cannot picture her any other way." Have you ever heard a story about a family member and struggled to reconcile this with your own image and experience of him or her?
5. This novel revolves around a murder, but we learn the identity of the alleged murderer relatively early in the story. How does that affect your reading of the events leading up to the crime?
6. Almost every character in the novel struggles to balance multiple roles: parent, lover, child, professional, etc. Who do you think struggles the most?
7. How do physical objects trigger memories and emotions for Sumiko and Yoshi after Rina’s death? Do you have any talismans that remind you of people you’ve lost?
8. How is the Japanese justice system similar to or different from your own? What do you think of Yurie Kagashima’s defense of Kai? Is it a fair defense?
9. What do you think Sumiko means when she says that every member of her family, including her, is guilty of her mother’s death?
10. How do you think knowing the full truth about her mother’s death will affect Sumiko’s life after the action of the novel concludes? What do you think will be the significance of her "choice" at the very end? And is it the right one?
11. Is the law a character in its own right?
12. Are the locations in the novel characters in their own right? How do they affect and shape the narrative?
13. What do you think of the novel’s title? How does it apply to all the characters?
14. What economic and societal constraints are faced by the men and women in the novel? Have any of these issues featured in your own life?
15. How does the novel depict the tension between personal desire and the pressure to conform to social norms?
16. The novel is a mediation of all the different forms of love. What does love mean to you? Who from the book best exemplifies this definition of love?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
When All Is Said
Anne Griffin, 2019
St. Martin's Press
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250200587
Summary
I'm here to remember–all that I have been and all that I will never be again.
- If you had to pick five people to sum up your life, who would they be?
- If you were to raise a glass to each of them, what would you say?
- And what would you learn about yourself, when all is said?
At the bar of a grand hotel in a small Irish town sits 84-year-old Maurice Hannigan. He’s alone, as usual—though tonight is anything but. Pull up a stool and charge your glass, because Maurice is finally ready to tell his story.
Over the course of this evening, he will raise five toasts to the five people who have meant the most to him. Through these stories—of unspoken joy and regret, a secret tragedy kept hidden, a fierce love that never found its voice - the life of one man will be powerful and poignantly laid bare.
Beautifully heart-warming and powerfully felt, the voice of Maurice Hannigan will stay with you long after all is said and done. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1969
• Where—Dublin, Ireland
• Education—B.A., M.A., University College Dublin
• Awards—John McGahern Award for Literature
• Currently—lives in Dublin, Ireland
Anne Griffin is an Irish author, best known for her award-winning short stories. In 2019 she published her first novel, When All Is Said. Griffin was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland. She received her B.A. from University College Dublin (UCD),
After spending eight years working for Waterstones in both Dublin and London, Griffin decided to change career paths. She attended Maynooth University, earning a post-graduate diploma in community and youth work, and dor the next two decades, she worked with charities—Women’s Aid, Youth Work Ireland, and the Dyslexia Association of Ireland
In 2013 Griffin turned to writing fiction, and two years later, in 2015, she returned to UDC to pursue a Master's in Creative Writing.
Griffin's short fiction has gained her recognition: she won the John McGahern Award for Literature and was shortlisted for both the Hennessey New Irish Writing Award and the Sunday Business Post Short Story Competition. Her work has been featured in the Irish Times and Stinging Fly.
Griffin lives in Ireland with her husband and son. (Adapted from the publisher bio and the author's website. Retrieved 3/6/2019.)
Book Reviews
[Anne Griffin] builds a remarkably rich sense of place, while also tracing the wider changes affecting Ireland.… Maurice is a lovingly rendered example of the current vogue for characters who have fallen through the cracks.
SundayTimes (UK)
An impressively confident debut novel.
Guardian (UK)
Griffin is a magical storyteller whose prose is effortless and clear. She conjures an intimate, poignant and ultimately enthralling portrait of a man who has battled loneliness and other demons throughout his life. Maurice is superbly well-realised: a character who tries to make amends and, in so doing, cracked my heart.
Fanny Blake - Daily Mail (UK)
An atmospheric debut.… The most impressive aspects of this first novel are its rich, flowing prose, it’s convincing voice and it’s imaginative and clever structure.… Griffin is a welcome arrival to the literary scene.
Irish Times
While the plot hinges heavily on coincidence, and the device of addressing an absent son feels extraneous, Maurice is a likable and complex character…. [His] humor, his keen observations …create the feeling of a life connected to many others by strands of affection and hatred
Publishers Weekly
Griffin's storytelling, while economical, is rich and evocative…. Most impressive …is her creation of Maurice. His voice is credible, his story absorbing, and his humanity painfully familiar.… this unforgettable first novel introduces Griffin as a writer to watch. —John G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman
Library Journal
Griffin's deeply moving debut novel highlights the power of nostalgia, the pang of regret, and the impact that very special individuals can have on our lives.
Booklist
What becomes of the brokenhearted? That question, asked—and answered equivocally—in the Motown classic, receives a more thorough treatment in Griffin's debut novel.… Griffin's [novel] provides a stage for the exploration of guilt, regret, and loss, all in the course of one memorable night.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. After reading the author’s note about her conversation with Lale Sokolov, the Tattooist of Auschwitz, did knowing that Cilka’s story is based on areal person change your reading experience? Does the author weave fact and realistic fiction into the story effectively? In what ways?
2. What drew you to this time period and novel? What can humanity still learn from this historical space—from the front lines of an infamous concentration camp to the brutal Russian Gulags? How was this story unique in its voice and characters?
3. Is Cilka’s prison sentence in Vorkuta as punishment for "sleeping with the enemy" in the concentration camp cruel? Was she forced into this role in order to survive as a mere sixteen-year-old girl? How might Cilka’s outward behavior compare to her inner intentions?
4. "What you are doing, Cilka, is the only form of resistance you have—staying alive. You are the bravest person I have ever known, I hope you know that." (Chapter 32) Is Lale right? Is Cilka brave, and were her acts of resistance the best course of action she had? What does Cilka feel guilty about or complicit in? How is she suffering because of it?
5. Could you imagine having the fortitude to survive one death sentence and then another? How do these two hells—the camp and the prison—compare? Were your perceptions challenged or expanded on what life in the Gulag was like after reading this book? In what ways?
6. What strategies does Cilka use to survive? Which ones does she teach the others, including Josie? How could her body be her ticket? What does she sacrifice in giving of her body but not her mind?
7. "Another number. Cilka subconsciously rubs her left arm; hidden under her clothing is her identity from that other place. How many times can one person be reduced, erased?" (Chapter 3) How would you answer Cilka here? What inner fire allows Cilka to live? How does she endure with so much death and suffering around her?
8. Does Cilka assume a protective role for the women in her hut? For her block at the camp? In what ways is Cilka a target for their rage and a focus for their hopes for life beyond the fencing? How does she help the women survive the toughest parts of their sentences (the rapes, work, injuries, separation)?
9. How do the women form a sisterhood or join in solidarity? Do you believe there is something universal about what they do? From snowy rescues to smuggled food—even Elena’s self-inflicted burn in order to get a message to Cilka—how do the women look out for one another? How is this essential for their survival?
10. Why do the women invest their time and scarce energies into "beautifying" the hut with their meager resources? What does this tell us about the human spirit?
11. How does Yelena help and advocate for Cilka? What chances and tests is Cilka given because of Yelena’s attentions? How does Cilka repay her faith and kindness? Also, why do you think Yelena would choose to serve in such a brutal place?
12. "She doesn’t dare hope that she has broken her curse. That she could have a role in helping new life come into the world, rather than overseeing death." (Chapter 12) In what ways is Cilka’s time served in the maternity ward a turning point? How does she intervene with her patients and make a difference? How does she put herself at risk?
13. Discuss Josie’s desperation regarding her baby Natia’s fate, and what lies ahead for them both after the two-year mark? How does Cilka ensure her safe transfer? What does Natia’s presence stir up for the others in the hut?
14. How would you describe a mother’s love? How does it manifest in the book?
15. How does Cilka find her calling with her ambulance work? How did she spur others to be their best selves? On the other hand, what sexist abuse did she face while performing such technical and important work?
16. Why does Cilka reject the comfort of the nurses’ quarters at first? In what ways is she seeking forgiveness?
17. How are Cilka and Alexandr joined together? How does she administer to him and what new hope does he offer for her future? What risks? Were you surprised by their reunion on the train platform?
18. The main oppressors in this novel are men—from the commanders and guards to her fellow prisoners—and their sense of menacing entitlement and acts of rape and cruelty shape the novel. Have things changed for women in times of both war and peace when it comes to their bodies and defining their own destinies? What can society do about it?
19. Why does Cilka ultimately tell her hut-mates about her experiences and actions at Auschwitz? How does she know the time is right?
20. Why are women’s voices of wartime so important to unearth and tell? What could be lost when they are unreported or under reported?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
When Crickets Cry
Charles Martin, 2006
Thomas Nelson, Inc.
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781595540546
Summary
A man with a painful past. A child with a doubtful future. And a shared journey toward healing for both their hearts.
It begins on the shaded town square in a sleepy Southern town. A spirited seven-year-old has a brisk business at her lemonade stand. Her latest customer, a bearded stranger, drains his cup and heads to his car, his mind on a boat he's restoring at a nearby lake. But the little girl's pretty yellow dress can't quite hide the ugly scar on her chest. The stranger understands more about it than he wants to admit. And the beat-up bread truck careening around the corner with its radio blaring is about to change the trajectory of both their lives.
Before it's over, they'll both know there are painful reasons why crickets cry...and that miracles lurk around unexpected corners. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—November 3, 1969
• Education—B.A., Florida State University; M.A., Ph.D.,
Regent University
• Currently—Jacksonville, Florida, USA
Charles Martin is the author of Where the River Ends, Chasing Fireflies, Maggie, When Crickets Cry, Wrapped in Rain, The Dead Don't Dance, and The Mountain Between Us.
He earned his B.A. in English from Florida State University, and his M.A. in Journalism and Ph.D. in Communication from Regent University. He served one year at Hampton University as an adjunct professor in the English department and as a doctoral fellow at Regent. In 1999, he left a career in business to pursue his writing.
He and his wife, Christy, live a stone's throw from the St. John's River in Jacksonville, Florida, with their three boys: Charlie, John T. and Rives. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
When Crickets Cry manages to deliver a poetic love story, a heart-pounding medical thriller, and a spiritual epiphany, all while smoothly introducing charming characters and twists that keep the pages turning.
Southern Living
Christian-fiction writer Martin (The Dead Don't Dance, not reviewed) chronicles the personal tragedy of a Georgia heart surgeon. Five years ago in Atlanta, Reese could not save his beloved wife Emma from heart failure, even though the Harvard-trained surgeon became a physician so that he could find a way to fix his childhood sweetheart's congenitally faulty ticker. He renounced practicing medicine after her death and now lives in quiet anonymity as a boat mechanic on Lake Burton. Across the lake is Emma's brother Charlie, who was rendered blind on the same desperate night that Reese fought to revive his wife on their kitchen floor. When Reese helps save the life of a seven-year-old local girl named Annie, who turns out to have irreparable heart damage, he is compassionately drawn into her case. He also grows close to Annie's attractive Aunt Cindy and gradually comes to recognize that the family needs his expertise as a transplant surgeon. Martin displays some impressive knowledge about medical practice and the workings of the heart, but his Christian message is not exactly subtle. "If anything in this universe reflects the fingerprint of God, it is the human heart," Reese notes of his medical studies. Emma's letters (kept in a bank vault) quote Bible verse; Charlie elucidates stories of Jesus' miracles for young Annie; even the napkins at the local bar, The Well, carry passages from the Gospel of John for the benefit of the biker clientele. Moreover, Martin relentlessly hammers home his sentimentality with nature-specific metaphors involving mating cardinals and crying crickets. (Annie sells crickets as well as lemonade to raise money for her heart surgery.) Reese's habitual muttering of worldly slogans from Milton and Shakespeare ("I am ashes where once I was fire") doesn't much cut the cloying piety, and an over-the-top surgical save leaves the reader feeling positively bruised. Deep schmaltz in the Bible Belt.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Titles are always important. Why do you think the author chose this one? In Asian countries, the cricket is a symbol of luck and prosperity. What role do crickets play in this story? What do you think about Annie's comment that "they give their lives for mine"?
2. One of the major themes in When Crickets Cry is love—both the nature of love and how it affects people. What are some of the examples of love from the novel (not just romantic love, but also the love of friendship and of sacrifice)? How did each of the characters grow in his or her understanding of love?
3. An obvious symbol for love is the heart, and the author uses this symbol—doctors who "fix" hearts, people with diseased hearts, characters with "closed" hearts, and don't forget that heart-of-pine house—to draw our attention to the theme. In addition to love, the symbol of the heart can also be used to represent life itself, compassion, or the center of wisdom. How are these different aspects of the heart reflected in Reese's life throughout the story?
4. When we first see Annie, she is wearing a yellow dress and selling lemonade. Considering that yellow is a common symbol of the sun and sunlight, what do you think the author wants us to think about Annie's role in the novel?
5. Another important theme in this novel is the concept of redemption. Who needs a second chance in this story? Who offers one? Does it seem as if each major and minor character falls on both sides of the equation—both needing redemption and yet somehow able to offer it to someone else?
6. As in all of Charles Martin's novels, water is a recurring motif in When Crickets Cry. From the Tallulah River flowing into Lake Burton, to the leaking water pipe, a few rainstorms, and a recurring dream in which Emma pours water from a pitcher, this novel is full of water. Water is often thought of as a symbol of new life—such as when the spring rains bring the landscape to life with new growth and color. Discuss the ways that water represents both life, and new life, in the story.
7. Boats are another powerful and evocative symbol in the novel. Reese spends time on the lake rowing, and he also builds little "toy" boats—it's no accident they call to mind a Viking funeral—to dispose of Emma's letters. Boats can represent a journey, a crossing, adventure, and exploration; discuss how each of these relate to Reese's progression through the story.
8. Several things in this story have bbeen buried, starting with the town that is "buried" under the lake that Reese lives next to. What else is buried in this novel?
9. Sometimes it seems as if Reese is hiding behind his literary allusions, holding his emotions at arm's length. From Donne's "No man is an island" and the castaway in Robinson Crusoe, to Shakespeare's "I will wear my heart upon my sleeve…I am not what I am," the author is giving us clues as to Reese's inner feelings, feelings he is often unwilling to give free rein to. The quotations are also used to foreshadow events in the story. Which reference did you find most meaningful? Why?
10. Discuss the meaning of the scripture on Emma's medallion ("Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life; Proverbs 4:23"). What is the significance of Reese's deciding to give the medallion to Annie?
11. Blindness is a symbol that appears in When Crickets Cry. Emma's brother, Charlie, is blind, and Helen Keller is both referred to and quoted frequently. Blindness can represent ignorance, darkness, and error—or a refusal to see reality. It can also represent inner vision (as Hellen Keller said, "the best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched, they must be felt with the heart"). Who is blind in this story, and who can see?
12. Why do you think that Reese avoided reading Emma's last letter? Would you have saved it as he did?
13. What do you think Reese whispered to Annie's heart?
(Questions issued by publishers.)
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When I Married My Mother: A Daughter's Search for What Really Matters—and How She Found It Caring for Mama Jo
Jo Maeder, 2009
Beulahland Press (2013 Paperback)
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780985548216
Summary
Who would think a New Yorker caring for a declining, doll-collecting, hoarder mother in the South would turn into the adventure of a lifetime? Throw in bingo playin' drag queens, long-standing family feuds, and unresolved guilt in every direction—and you've got When I Married My Mother.
Each eldercare situation is different, but the emotions and decisions that need to be made are similar. Through a hard-to-put-down story this book is a helping hand to deal with "the long goodbye." Don't dread it. Embrace it! You might find love blooms, laughter erupts and self-knowledge grows in the most unlikely of situations.
Even those who have already lost a parent have found a cathartic release in the journey of Mama Jo and Jo Jr. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Washington, D.C., USA
• Education—B.S., Syracuse University; M.B.A,
Columbia University
• Currently—lives in North Carolina
Jo Maeder is the author of the memoir When I Married My Mother (hardcover, paperback, and e-book). Maya Angelou said about it: This book is important to every mother and daughter, and to every woman who wants to be one.”
Jo’s essays have appeared in the New York Times, New York Daily News, More magazine, and on AOL. She is a contributor to O. Henry magazine and the News & Record’s weekly arts and entertainment section Go Triad. She also wrote a column on popular culture for Lifetime TV’s website.
In 2011, she started the Triad BookUP, which promotes “long-form reading in a short-form world.” Inspired by Seattle’s Reading Party, the public is invited to show up where food and beverages are served and B.Y.O.B. (Bring Your Own Book) to read to themselves. (See WXII-TV coverage.)
She holds bragging rights to Best Cookie and Best Overall Yummy Treat at the 2008 Oak Ridge Country Fair. She perfected the recipe while caring for Mama Jo. “I call it my ‘Betty Jo Crocker’ recipe. I take a Betty Crocker mix and don’t follow the directions. I do that a lot, not always with such great results.” But using a mix for a baking contest? “The only rule was: You can’t have walked into a store and walked out with your entry.”
As a DJ, Jo is renowned from her years on South Florida’s Y-100 and I-95, and New York’s WKTU, K-ROCK, and Z100. (She also co-hosted a home improvement talk show on WABC). She created VH1.com’s Black Jack channel, spanning the spectrum of R&B music and has interviewed celebrities from Bob Marley to Michael Jackson. Her encounter with James Brown on Z100 is in the Paley Center for Media, as is her former K-ROCK show devoted to Bob Dylan, “Knockin’ on Dylan’s Door.” Her “Rock and Roll Madame” changeovers with Howard Stern are among the many highlights of her radio career.
Maeder earned a B.S. in Communications from Syracuse University and an M.B.A. from Columbia University. For many years she taught a course on radio at N.Y.U. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Takes an honest yet upbeat look at one family’s experience with intergenerational living and dealing with an aging and dying parent. It’s a story designed to evoke both laughter and tears.
Northwest Observer
Maeder brings sharp wit and a reporter’s investigative skills to her own experience of the growing trend of intergenerational households.
St. Petersburg Times
This account of the universally sad experience of slowly losing a parent is touching and often humorous, in no small part because Maeder understands the importance of telling good stories.
Newark Star-Ledger
Maeder is an engaging storyteller who conjures Alix Kates Shulman's A Good Enough Daughter. For caregivers and those in the sandwich generation coming to terms with their parents’ mortality.
Library Journal
A witty and wily reframing of [the] age-old conflict.... Maeder is insightful and sarcastic, humorous and heartfelt.
New Orleans Times-Picayune
Honest and sweetly funny memoir…Maeder’s sharp wit makes it easy to laugh.... Maeder’s candor and humor may comfort readers who’ve cared for an aging parent.... This memoir [is] nearly impossible to put down.
Women’s Voices for Change
With a wildly compassionate—especially to self—voice, Jo Maeder exhibits the sense of humor that makes her a live wire in the quick thinking world of personality radio, but also the better selves we all hope we embody.... Maeder pitches a tent we can all find solace, acceptance and encouragement under. A genius read, but a life-affirming story.
The Yummy List
Everyone has a story to share about their upbringing. But few can tell a story as hilarious and as down-home as Jo Maeder.... This light-hearted memoir captures your heart, along with the complicated, intergenerational mother-daughter dance of life. Maeder proves it’s never too late to make peace with your mother…and yourself.
This Week’s Most Talked About Books
If you’re looking for a different kind of Mother’s Day gift, or just a nice story on the evergreen subject of mothers, you might want to consider [this] new book by Jo Maeder.... It’s not a radio book per se, but it’s clearly coming from a rock ‘n’ roll radio soul, and its told in a classic radio way—close your eyes and you feel like you’re there.
New York Daily News
The book haunted me, but not in a bad way. Instead, long after I closed the cover, I pictured the moments [Maeder] shared so vividly.... I was moved to tears.
Working Mother
Maeder offers touching book about caring for elderly parent.... A wonderful, witty, happy-and-sad, very touching memoir…Read this book if you have an aging parent. Read this book if you’ve cared for an aging parent or other elderly person. Read this book if you’ve lost your parents. It is well-written and insightful. It is funny and thought-provoking. It is delightful and heartbreaking at the same time. Read this book.
Roxboro Courier-Times
[A] heartfelt and humorous memoir…speaks volumes about the relationship between parent and child.... The reader truly gets a sense of who Mama Jo was, who Jo Maeder is, and the ties that bind them.” For many years she taught a course on radio at N.Y.U.
Yes! Weekly
Discussion Questions
1. What struck you as the hardest part for Jo once she’d made the decision to care for her mother?
2. How did Mama Jo’s divorce from Jo’s father impact the two of them and Jo’s brother thirty years later?
3. What was the biggest change in in Jo over the course of the story? How did her caring for Mama Jo change the rest of the family?
4. What observations did Jo make about southern culture after relocating from New York City? If from the South, do you agree with her? If you’re not from the South, did Jo’s book change any opinions you had about southerners? How would you describe New Yorkers?
5. What parts of the story made you laugh, and why? What parts made you tear up?
6. Did the story change your feelings about taking on a similar responsibility if one should arise? Did it cause you to think about making any changes in your life?
7. What did you think about Jo’s changing attitude toward religion in the book? Did any passages from the Bible come to mind as you were reading?
8. Mama Jo was described as a “world-class hoarder.” Do you know someone with this issue? What do you think causes it? What might you do to help someone with this disorder?
9. Why do you think Mama Jo collected dolls? What role did dolls play through the generations of Jo’s family? Has anyone in your family been a collector of something and passed the tradition down?
10. Jo said, “If you’re not right with your mama, you’re probably not going to be right with anyone.” What did she mean? Do you agree or disagree?
(Questions from the author's website, used here with her kind permission.)
When Madeline Was Young
Jane Hamilton, 2006
Knopf Doubleday
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400096992
Summary
Jane Hamilton, award-winning author of The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World, is back in top form with a richly textured novel about a tragic accident and its effects on two generations of a family.
When Aaron Maciver’s beautiful young wife, Madeline, suffers brain damage in a bike accident, she is left with the intellectual powers of a six-year-old. In the years that follow, Aaron and his second wife care for Madeline with deep tenderness and devotion as they raise two children of their own.
Narrated by Aaron's son, Mac, When Madeline Was Young chronicles the Maciver family through the decades, from Mac’s childhood growing up with Madeline and his cousin Buddy in Wisconsin through the Vietnam War, through Mac’s years as a husband with children of his own, and through Buddy’s involvement with the subsequent Gulf Wars.
Jane Hamilton, with her usual humor and keen observations of human relationships, deftly explores the Maciver's unusual situation and examines notions of childhood (through Mac and Buddy’s actual youth as well as Madeline’s infantilization) and a rivalry between Buddy’s and Mac’s families that spans decades and various wars. She captures the pleasures and frustrations of marriage and family, and she exposes the role that past relationships, rivalries, and regrets inevitably play in the lives of adults.
Inspired in part by Elizabeth Spencer’s Light in the Piazza, Hamilton offers an honest and exquisite portrait of how a family tragedy forever shapes and alters the boundaries of love. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 13, 1957
• Reared—Oak Park, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.B., Carleton College
• Awards—Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, 1988
• Currently—lives in Rochester, Wisconsin
Her first published works were short stories, "My Own Earth" and "Aunt Marj's Happy Ending", both published in Harper's Magazine in 1983. "Aunt Marj's Happy Ending" later appeared in The Best American Short Stories 1984.
Her first novel, The Book of Ruth, was published in 1988 and won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award, and the Wisconsin Library Association Banta Book Award in 1989. The Book of Ruth was an Oprah's Book Club selection in 1996, and it was the basis for a 2004 television film of the same title.
In 1994, she published A Map of the World, which was adapted for a film in 1999 and, the same year, was also an Oprah's Book Club selection. Her third novel, The Short History of a Prince, published in 1998, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998. This book was also shortlisted for the 1999 Orange Prize. In 2000, Hamilton was named a Notable Wisconsin Author by the Wisconsin Library Association.
All of her books are set, at least in part, in Wisconsin.
In an interview with the Journal Times in Racine, Wisconsin, in November 2006, Hamilton talked about her early inspiration for writing novels. As a student at Carleton College, she overheard a professor say she would write a novel one day. Hamilton had written only two short stories for the professor's class. Overhearing the conversation gave her confidence. "It had a lot more potency, the fact that I overheard it, rather than his telling me directly," she said. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
An unusual menage poses moral questions in this fifth novel (after Disobedience) from Hamilton, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for The Book of Ruth. Aaron and Julia Maciver are living in a 1950s Chicago suburb with their two children and with Aaron's first wife, Madeline. Aaron has insisted on caring for Madeline after she suffered a brain injury soon after their wedding, leaving her with the mental capacity of a seven-year-old. Refusing to consider this arrangement inconvenient, Julia treats the often-demanding Madeline like a beloved daughter, even letting her snuggle in bed with Aaron and herself when Madeline becomes distraught at night. Decades later, the Macivers' son, Mac, now a middle-aged family practitioner with a wife and teenage daughters, prepares to attend the funeral of his estranged cousin's son, killed in Iraq, and muses about the meaning, and the emotional costs, of the liberal values of his parents. Hamilton brings characteristic empathy to the complex issues at the core of this patiently built novel, but the narrative doesn't take any clear direction. Though Mac suggests there are "gothic possibilities" in his parents' story (partly inspired, Hamilton says, by Elizabeth Spencer's The Light in the Piazza), the Macivers' passions remain tepid and unresolved, and Julia remains an enigma to her son.
Publishers Weekly
As in her previous novels (e.g., A Map of the World), Hamilton sets her latest work in her native Midwest. Pragmatic, smart, and sensitive Timothy "Mac" Maciver, a married physician with three daughters, tells the story of his family and upbringing in suburban Chicago and how a tragedy that disrupted his father's first marriage impacted all their lives. Mac's first-person narrative moves back and forth in time and highlights his parents' relationship as well as his own relationship with Madeline, the woman known as his much older "sister," whose life was derailed at the age of 25. Mac focuses with refreshing candor on his shifting responsibilities concerning Madeline as well as on what it was like to be a young man witnessing the escalating Vietnam War and its triggering of family debates and tension. Hamilton draws a parallel between the Vietnam conflict and the current war in Iraq (Mac's cousin, a career military man, has a son who enlists to fight in Iraq). While Hamilton gives the political climate of the Sixties considerable attention, her story is more about how people, by bonding together, can transcend tragedy and loss with love, tolerance, and humor. Recommended for all fiction collections. —Maureen Neville, Trenton P.L.
Library Journal
The narrator of Jane Hamilton's fifth novel (Disobedience, 2000, etc.) is Timothy "Mac" Maciver, a brilliant, scientifically minded fellow growing up in a big Midwestern family, whom we follow from his boyhood in the 1950s to his middle age in the present day. Mac gradually becomes aware that his beautiful blonde adult "sister" is in fact his father's first wife, Madeline, impaired after a head injury, and lovingly cared for by his father's second wife, Mac's mother, Julia. Mac's dad is a curator at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History; Julia—faintly reminiscent of Eleanor Roosevelt—is homely, principled and awkward, a promoter of social good. One summer her household includes her own brilliant children: Mac, busily dissecting a chimpanzee brought home by his father; his sister Lu, a dedicated cellist; two black teenagers Julia "rescued" from the ghetto, ill-at-ease and bored stiff in the suburbs; and Madeline. Stirred into this mix is Mac's slightly older and much admired cousin Buddy—a catalyst, hero and beloved black sheep. Physically and socially adept in a way that Mac envies, Buddy immediately puts the family's African-American houseguests at ease. And he not only breaks the nose of a neighbor kid who cruelly takes advantage of Madeline and tries to make a sexual show of her, he conceals the reason for the fight to protect her, and takes the blame. The narrative does not progress rapidly or linearly—it radiates in all directions like a spider's web. The web of connection is perhaps strongest at the most painful moments. Hamilton is exquisitely observant and unfailingly generous to the characters she creates: every life has weight and dignity.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What aspects of youth are expressed in the novel’s title? Was it wrong, as Figgy believes, to give Madeline the trappings of a little girl?
2. How did Figgy and Julia each define the ideal mother, the ideal wife, and the ideal life in general?
3. How would you describe the narrator’s tone as he guides us through his unusual family history? How does Mac (Timothy) resolve the knowledge that Madeline’s accident made it possible for him to be born?
4. Mac shares many nostalgic memories of his neighborhood, alongside wry observations about contemporary youth who spout pop psychology. How does Mac’s life as a husband and father compare to the family in which he was raised? What has been gained and lost in his family through these three generations?
5. What accounts for Julia’s tireless patience with Madeline? Would Madeline have done the same for Julia if the circumstances had been reversed? What drew Timothy’s father to two such seemingly different women?
6. We know from the beginning that the Macivers are wealthy (“We were all proud to have an estate...the fruit of our dead grandfather’s labor,” Mac says in the novel’s second paragraph). How does Mac feel about money? What does When Madeline Was Young illustrate about the concept of charity?
7. What does Mac tell us, particularly during his tour of Russia’s world after her husband’s murder, about his opinions regarding poverty and race and class? Is his sister correct in viewing Russia as a slave? Was his mother unrealistic? What did he learn from the summer with Cleveland and his sister?
8. Near the end of chapter six, Mac repeats lines from William Wordsworth while watching Madeline poolside. “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways” ends with these lines: “She lived unknown, and few could know/When Lucy ceased to be;/But she is in her grave, and, oh/The difference to me!” Does this poem capture the essence of Madeline’s interactions with men, or is the poem an ironic choice?
9. Should Mikey and Madeline have been allowed to marry? Which are the most and least genuine relationships described in the novel?
10. The Civil Rights Movement and the war in Vietnam form the historical backdrop for much of the novel. What tone is set as Mac weaves Madeline’s story with his recollections of this turbulent time period? What was different about the undercurrent of war when the family gathered for the funeral of Buddy’s son, Kyle?
11. Mac shares his father’s enthusiasm for natural history. How does Mac’s fascination with the natural world and anatomy shape his understanding of Madeline’s injuries? Is his approach to life clinical?
12. How did your impressions of Buddy shift throughout the novel? Did Buddy “rescue” Madeline from Jerry in chapter ten? Why does Mac not see him as heroic, contrary to Russia’s point of view?
13. In chapter fifteen, why does Mac so badly want Madeline to remember the boy she encountered when she was in Italy years ago?
14. What did Buddy and Mac resolve during their brawl in the novel’s final chapter?
15. Jane Hamilton credits Elizabeth Spencer’s novella The Light in the Piazza for partially inspiring When Madeline Was Young. If you have read the novella, or seen its 1962 film version (starring Olivia de Havilland), or been in the audience for the award-winning musical, share your experience with the other members of your book group. What might Madeline and Clara have thought of each other? What extreme differences exist between the matriarchs? In what way do the authors portray opposite forms of love?
16. The epigraph emphasizes physical beauty as they key to being captivating. Is Madeline empowered by looks that match conventional definitions of beauty, or does her beauty make her a victim? What might her fate have been had she looked more like Julia (without the girdle)?
17. What unusual tales distinguish your family history? Do you have a relative who, as Madeline did for Mac, played an unconventional role in your development?
18. Each of Jane Hamilton’s novels is unique; this originality is itself her hallmark.
Discuss her previous works in the context of When Madeline Was Young. What are the conflicts and intensities that drive her diverse cast of characters?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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When She Woke
Hillary Jordan, 2012
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781616201937
Summary
Hannah Payne's life has been devoted to church and family. But after she's convicted of murder, she awakens in a new body to a nightmarish new life. She finds herself lying on a table in a bare room, covered only by a paper gown, with cameras broadcasting her every move to millions at home, for whom observing new Chromes—criminals whose skin color has been genetically altered to match the class of their crime—is a sinister form of entertainment. Hannah is a Red for the crime of murder. The victim, says the State of Texas, was her unborn child, and Hannah is determined to protect the identity of the father, a public figure with whom she shared a fierce and forbidden love.
A powerful reimagining of The Scarlet Letter, When She Woke is a timely fable about a stigmatized woman struggling to navigate an America of the not-too-distant future, where the line between church and state has been eradicated, and convicted felons are no longer imprisoned and rehabilitated but chromed and released back into the population to survive as best they can. In seeking a path to safety in an alien and hostile world, Hannah unknowingly embarks on a journey of self-discovery that forces her to question the values she once held true and the righteousness of a country that politicizes faith and love. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—Dallas, Texas, and Muskogee, Oklahoma.
USA
• Education—B.A., Wellseley Collegee; M.F.A.,
Columbia University
• Awards—Bellwether Award; Alex Award (American Library
Assoc.); Fiction of the Year (New Atlantic Independent
Booksellers Assoc.)
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York
Hillary Jordan is the author of two novels: Mudbound, published in March 2008, and When She Woke, published in October 2011, both by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. She received a BA from Wellesley College and an MFA from Columbia University. She grew up in Dallas, TX and Muskogee, OK and now lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Mudbound
Mudbound is a story of betrayal, murder and forbidden love set in on a cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta in 1946, during the height of the Jim Crow era. The story is told in alternating first-person narratives by the members of two families: the McAllans, the white family that owns the farm; and the Jacksons, a black family that works for the McAllans as share tenants. When two sons, Jamie McAllan and Ronsel Jackson, return from fighting World War II, the unlikely friendship of these brothers-in-arms sets in motion a harrowing chain of events that test the faith and courage of both families. As they strive for love and honor in a brutal time and place, they become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale and find redemption where they least expect it.
When She Woke
"When she woke, she was red. Not flushed, not sunburned, but the solid, declarative red of a stop sign." Hannah Payne’s life has been devoted to church and family. But after she’s convicted of murder, she awakens in a new body to a nightmarish new life. She finds herself lying on a table in a bare room, covered only by a paper gown, with cameras broadcasting her every move to millions at home, for whom observing new “chromes”—criminals whose skin color has been genetically altered to match the class of their crime—is a sinister form of entertainment. Hannah is a Red; her crime is murder. The victim, says the state of Texas, was her unborn child, and Hannah is determined to protect the identity of the father, a public figure with whom she shared a fierce and forbidden love.
A powerful reimagining of The Scarlet Letter, When She Woke is a timely fable about a stigmatized woman struggling to navigate an America of the not-too-distant future, where the line between church and state has been eradicated and convicted felons are no longer imprisoned and rehabilitated, but “chromed” and released back into the population to survive as best they can. In seeking a path to safety in an alien and hostile world, Hannah unknowingly embarks on a journey of self-discovery that forces her to question the values she once held true and the righteousness of a country that politicizes faith and love.
Awards
Mudbound won a 2009 Alex Award from the American Library Association as well as the 2006 Bellwether Prize for fiction, founded by author Barbara Kingsolver and awarded biennially to an unpublished work of fiction that addresses issues of social justice. It was the 2008 NAIBA (New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association) Fiction Book of the Year, was long-listed for the 2010 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and named one of the Top Ten Debut Novels of the Decade by Paste Magazine. Mudbound was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, a Borders Original Voices selection, a Book Sense pick, one of twelve New Voices for 2008 chosen by Waterstone's UK, a Richard & Judy New Writers Book Of The Month, and one of Indie Next's top ten reading group suggestions for 2009.
When She Woke was the #1 Indie Next pick for October 2011 and one of Publishers Weekly's Top Ten Literary Fiction picks for the fall. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
[A] chilling futuristic novel.
O, The Oprah Magazine
Though she was raised a good Christian, Hannah Payne often asks uncomfortable questions in Jordan’s second novel (after Mudbound), such as “Why does God let innocent people suffer?” But questioning authority and breaking Texas law are two different things. Involved with her pastor, Hannah finds herself pregnant; to have the baby would mean publicly naming the father, so Hannah has an abortion. But in this alternate America, three years after the “Great Scourge” turned many women sterile, abortion is illegal, and Hannah is arrested. Her sentence: to live for several years as a “chrome,” injected with a virus that turns her skin bright red. Her father finds her refuge in a halfway house for nonviolent chromes of all hues, but Hannah rebels against the abuse she receives in their “enlightenment sessions” and flees into the arms of an underground feminist group whose brutal pragmatism frightens her. But as she falls victim to betrayal after betrayal, Hannah’s occasionally jarring naïvete begins to break down. Comparisons to The Handmaid’s Tale are inevitable; Jordan extrapolates misogynist fundamentalism to a logical endpoint, but she does little else. Characters are political archetypes, the narrative wanders, and even Hannah’s transformation from dutiful daughter to take-charge fugitive feels false.
Publishers Weekly
A young woman's life goes from heavenly to hellish is this dystopian vision of The Scarlet Letter from Jordan, who won the 2006 Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction for Mudbound, a searing portrait of racism. Jordan now proposes a further, more insidious form of discrimination. She imagines a society in which convicted criminals are chromed—their entire bodies dyed to a bright color—and sent into the world to face a sentence of public hatred and abuse. The victim in this story is Hannah Payne, an obedient daughter of a morally righteous family who senses a spark of sexual attraction with Rev. Aidan Dale, pastor of a powerful megachurch. Quickly, Hannah's life takes a turn toward abortion, conviction, incarceration, chroming, and government-sanctioned torture. Summoning up a newfound inner strength, Hannah goes on the run and follows an Underground Railroad-like path, where she learns to live by her wits and to trust no one. Verdict: Jordan offers no middle ground: she insists that readers question their own assumptions regarding freedom, religion, and risk. Christian fundamentalists may shun this novel, but book clubs will devour it, and savvy educators will pair it with Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. Essential.—Susanne Wells, MLS, Indianapolis
Library Journal
Jordan blends hot-button issues such as the separation of church and state, abortion, and criminal justice with an utterly engrossing story, driven by a heroine as layered and magnetic as Hester Prynne herself.
Booklist
A retelling of classic Hawthorne in which the heroine becomes literally a Scarlet Woman.... Jordan manages to open up powerful feminist and political themes without becoming overly preachy—and the parallels with Hawthorne are fun to trace.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Is this futuristic imagining of the direction of reality television believable?
2. What elements within this futuristic society have lead to the acceptability of the cruel treatment of those who've committed crimes?
3. Was Hannah's decision not to reveal the identity of either her baby's father or the abortionist justified? What does this say about her character?
4. How do you feel about the baby's father and his decisions regarding not coming forward?
5. Discuss how the concept of religion is portrayed through the major characters: Hannah, her mother, her father, her sister Becca, the Henleys, Aidan and Cole.
6. Does Hannah change within the course of the novel? How?
7. What are your thoughts on Hannah's friend Kayla? In what ways is she different from Hannah?
8. How would you describe the halfway house run by the Henleys? Did it serve its intended purpose?
9. What aspects of Hannah and Kayla's flight struck you most? What experiences stood out for you?
10. Was the ending believable?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
When the Emperor Was Divine
Julie Otsuka, 2002
Knopf Doubleday
160 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385721813
Summary
On a sunny day in Berkeley, California, in 1942, a woman sees a sign in a post office window, returns to her home, and matter-of-factly begins to pack her family's possessions. Like thousands of other Japanese Americans they have been reclassified, virtually overnight, as enemy aliens and are about to be uprooted from their home and sent to a dusty internment camp in the Utah desert.
In this lean and devastatingly evocative first novel, Julie Otsuka tells their story from five flawlessly realized points of view and conveys the exact emotional texture of their experience: the thin-walled barracks and barbed-wire fences, the omnipresent fear and loneliness, the unheralded feats of heroism.
When the Emperor Was Divine is a work of enormous power that makes a shameful episode of our history as immediate as today's headlines. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 15, 1962
• Where—Palo Alto, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale University; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Awards—Guggenheim Fellowship; Asian|Aerican Literary Award
• Currently—lives in New York, New York
Julie Otsuka was born and raised in California. After studying art as an undergraduate at Yale University she pursued a career as a painter for several years before turning to fiction writing at age 30. She received her MFA from Columbia.
Her first novel, When the Emperor Was Divine (2002), is about the internment of a Japanese-American family during World War II. It was a New York Times Notable Book, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers finalist. The book is based on Otsuka's own family history: her grandfather was arrested by the FBI as a suspected spy for Japan the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, and her mother, uncle and grandmother spent three years in an internment camp in Topaz, Utah. When the Emperor Was Divine has been translated into six languages and sold more than 250,000 copies. The New York Times called it "a resonant and beautifully nuanced achievement" and USA Today described it as "A gem of a book and one of the most vivid history lessons you'll ever learn."
Her second novel, The Buddha in the Attic (2011), is about a group of young Japanese 'picture brides' who sailed to America in the early 1900s to become the wives of men they had never met and knew only by their photographs.
Otsuka's fiction has been published in Granta and Harper's and read aloud on PRI's "Selected Shorts" and BBC Radio 4's "Book at Bedtime." She lives in New York City, where she writes every afternoon in her neighborhood cafe.
Extras
When asked what book most influenced her life or career, here is what she said:
When I first started writing I read all of Hemingway's short stories, beginning with the Nick Adams stories in In Our Time. I remember thinking, 'oh, so that's how you do it.' Now I'm much less convinced, however, that there's a right way to do it. Still, he was the writer I first imprinted myself on, and I go back to his stories often, if only for the pleasure of listening to the sound of his sentences, his cadences. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Spare, incisive.... The mood of the novel tensely reflects the protagonists’ emotional state: calm surfaces above, turmoil just beneath.
Boston Globe
Prose so cool and precise that it’s impossible not to believe what [Otsuka] tells us or to see clearly what she wants us to see.... A gem of a book and one of the most vivid history lessons you’ll ever learn.
USA Today
This exceptional first novel is about a Japanese family in Berkeley, California, during the Second World War.... The implicit questions about culpability resonate with particular power right now, but Otsuka's incantatory, unsentimental prose is the book's greatest strength. It turns our ideas of beauty on their head, as when the boy uneasily remembers a treasured glimpse of the horses he now eats: "They had long black tails and dark flowing manes and he had watched them galloping in the moonlight across the flat dusty plain and then for three nights in a row he had dreamed of them."
New Yorker
The novel’s voice is as hushed as a whisper.... An exquisite debut...potent, spare, crystalline.
Oprah Magazine
This heartbreaking, bracingly unsentimental debut describes in poetic detail the travails of a Japanese family living in an internment camp during World War II, raising the specter of wartime injustice in bone-chilling fashion.... Events are viewed from...different perspectives [which] are defined by distinctive, lyrically simple observations. The novel's honesty and matter-of-fact tone in the face of inconceivable injustice are the source of its power.
Publishers Weekly
Otsuka researched historical sources and her own grandparents' experiences as background for this spare yet poignant first novel about the ordeal of a Japanese family sent to an internment camp during World War II. Its perspective shifts among different family members as the story unfolds.... Otsuka's clear, elegant prose makes [her] themes accessible to a range of reading levels from young adult on. —Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ. Libs., Harrisonburg, VA
Library Journal
Otsuka eloquently chronicles in five chapters, one from each family member, their reactions as they are removed from their friendly neighborhoods and thrust into a strange new world where they are now the enemy.... With precise detail, succinct but sensitive prose, and great emotional restraint, Otsuka's enlightening, deeply stirring, Alex Award-winning book will affect all readers.
VOYA
Otsuka has created an intriguing story about Japanese internment during WW II. This powerful book is characterized by sparse, contained prose detailing the lives of a Japanese American family in California.... Each has invisible but lasting scars from their experience. When the Emperor Was Divine could easily be categorized as psychological fiction as well as historical fiction with its in-depth look at the minds of its characters and how each of them copes with their situation (ages 15 to adult). — Courtney Lewis
KLIATT
A carefully researched little novel...that's perfect down to the tiniest detail but doesn't stir the heart.... [T]he narrative remains stubbornly at the surface, almost like an informational flow, causing the reader duly to acknowledge these many wrongs done to this unjustly uprooted and now appallingly deprived American family—but never finding a way to go deeper....information trumps drama, and the heart is left out.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. When the Emperor Was Divine gives readers an intimate view of the fate of Japanese Americans during World War II. In what ways does the novel deepen our existing knowledge of this historical period? What does it give readers that a straightforward historical investigation cannot?
2. Why does Otsuka choose to reveal the family’s reason for moving—and the father’s arrest—so indirectly and so gradually? What is the effect when the reason becomes apparent?
3. Otsuka skillfully places subtle but significant details in her narrative. When the mother goes to Lundy’s hardware store, she notices a “dark stain” on the register “that would not go away” [p. 5]. The dog she has to kill is called “White Dog” [see pp. 9–12]. Her daughter’s favorite song on the radio is “Don’t Fence Me In.” How do these details, and others like them, point to larger meanings in the novel?
4. Why does Otsuka refer to her characters as “the woman,” “the girl,” “the boy,” and “the father,” rather than giving them names? How does this lack of specific identities affect the reader’s relationship to the characters?
5. When they arrive at the camp in the Utah desert—“a city of tar-paper barracks behind a barbed-wire fence on a dusty alkaline plain”—the boy thinks he sees his father everywhere: “wherever the boy looked he saw him: Daddy, Papa, Father, Oto-san” [p. 49]. Why is the father’s absence such a powerful presence in the novel? How do the mother and daughter think of him? How would their story have been different had the family remained together?
6. When the boy wonders why he’s in the camp, he worries that “he’d done something horribly, terribly wrong.... It could be anything. Something he’d done yesterday—chewing the eraser off his sister’s pencil before putting it back in the pencil jar—or something he’d done a long time ago that was just now catching up with him” [p. 57]. What does this passage reveal about the damaging effects of racism on children? What does it reveal about the way children try to make sense of their experience?
7. In the camp, the prisoners are told they’ve been brought there for their “own protection,” and that “it was all in the interest of national security. It was a matter of military necessity. It was an opportunity for them to prove their loyalty” [p. 70]. Why, and in what ways, are these justifications problematic? What do they reveal about the attitude of the American government toward Japanese Americans? How would these justifications appear to those who were taken from their homes and placed behind fences for the duration of the war?
8. What parallels does the novel reveal between the American treatment of citizens of Japanese descent and the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany?
9. Much of When the Emperor Was Divine is told in short, episodic, loosely connected scenes—images, conversations, memories, dreams, and so on—that move between past and present and alternate points of view between the mother, daughter, and son. Why has Otsuka chosen to structure her narrative in this way? What effects does it allow her to achieve?
10. After the family is released from the camp, what instructions are they given? How do they regard themselves? How does America regard them? In what ways have they been damaged by their internment?
11. When they are at last reunited with their father, the family doesn’t know how to react. “Because the man who stood there before us was not our father. He was somebody else, a stranger who had been sent back in our father’s place” [p. 132]. Why do they regard him as a stranger? How has he been changed by his experience? In what ways does this reunion underscore the tragedy of America’s decision to imprison Japanese Americans during the war?
12. After the father returns home, he never once discusses the years he’d been away, and his children don’t ask. “We didn’t want to know.... All we wanted to do, now that we were back in the world, was forget” [p. 133]. Why do the children feel this way? Why would their father remain silent about such an important experience? In what ways does the novel fight against this desire to forget?
13. The mother is denied work because being a Japanese American might “upset the other employees” or offend the customers. She turns down a job working in a dark back room of a department store because she is afraid she “might accidentally remember who I was and...offend myself” [pp. 128–129]. What does this statement reveal about her character? What strengths does she exhibit throughout her ordeal?
14. Flowers appear throughout the novel. When one of the prisoners is shot by a guard, a witness believes the man had been reaching through the fence to pluck a flower [see p. 101]. And the penultimate chapter ends with the following sentence: “But we never stopped believing that somewhere out there, in some stranger’s backyard, our mother’s rosebush was blossoming madly, wildly, pressing one perfect red flower after another out into the late afternoon light” [p. 139]. What symbolic value do the flowers have in this final passage? What does this open-ended conclusion suggest about the relationship between the family and the “strangers” they live among?
15. When the Emperor Was Divine concludes with a chapter titled “Confession.” Who is speaking in this final chapter? Is the speech ironic? Why has Otsuka chosen to end the novel in this way? What does the confession imply about our ability to separate out the “enemy,” the “other,” in our midst?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
When the English Fall
David Williams, 2017
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781616205225
Summary
A riveting and unexpected novel that questions whether a peaceful and nonviolent community can survive when civilization falls apart.
When a catastrophic solar storm brings about the collapse of modern civilization, an Amish community in Pennsylvania is caught up in the devastating aftermath.
Once-bright skies are now dark. Planes have plummeted to the ground. The systems of modern life have crumbled.
With their stocked larders and stores of supplies, the Amish are unaffected at first. But as the English (the Amish name for all non-Amish people) become more and more desperate, they begin to invade Amish farms, taking whatever they want and unleashing unthinkable violence on the peaceable community.
Seen through the diary of an Amish farmer named Jacob as he tries to protect his family and his way of life, When the English Fall examines the idea of peace in the face of deadly chaos: Should members of a nonviolent society defy their beliefs and take up arms to defend themselves? And if they don’t, can they survive?
David Williams’s debut novel is a thoroughly engrossing look into the closed world of the Amish, as well as a thought-provoking examination of “civilization” and what remains if the center cannot hold. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1969-70
• Raised—Falls Church, Virginia, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Virginia; M.Div., D.Min., Wesley Theological Seminary
• Currently—lives in Annandale, Virginia
David Williams is an American Presbyterian minister and author. His debut novel, When the English Fall, an apocolyptic story told from the perspective of an Amish farmer, was published in 2017.
Willams graduated from Falls Church High School, in Virginia, and received his B.A. from the University of Virginia. He went on to earn both a Master's and Doctoral degree (2003 and 2015 respectively) from Wesley Theological Seminary and is currently pastor of a small church in Poolesville, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C.
When not speaking from the pulpit, Williams likes to drive things: motocycles, forklifts, vans filled with Salvation Army bell-ringers, and cars with his two sons shuttling back and forth between school and activities. He and his family live in Annandale, Virginia.
For 10 years, from 1992-2002, he served as Grant Manager at the Aspen Institute, where he oversaw a peer-reviewed grant writing process to support social science research into nonprofits, nongovermental organizations, philanthropy, and voluntarism. He has also published articles in OMNI, The Christian Century, and Wired. He blogs at belovedspear.com. (Adapted from the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Apocalyptic stories are popping up everywhere these days, but David Williams’s beautiful, contemplative novel takes an unusual approach. He follows the only survivors who are immune to the devastation — the Amish — and they’re getting along just fine.… Moral people placed in impossible situations forms the crux of most good fiction, and When the English Fall is no exception …a stand-out. It is thoughtful and thought-provoking — worthy of fine discussions for any book club. Highly recommended. READ MORE …
P.J. Adler - LitLovers
Entrancing [and] deceptively simple, lulling, holding, at times, the power of prayer.
Boston Globe
An unusually good post-apocalyptic novel.… When the English Fall is thoughtful and the events are believable—even if the members of the Order are a little too saintly to be so. (The hypocritical, unhappy, or judgmental members of the community remain firmly off-screen.) And Williams lets his characters avoid truly wrenching ethical dilemmas, which might have deepened the novel. But Jacob is written as a witness, not a man of action—and he is so likable Williams just about gets away with it.
Christian Science Monitor
I never realized I wanted a postapocalyptic Amish novel, but the premise is so perfect I can’t believe that it’s never been done before—or that someone did it so well on the first try.
Adam Morgan - Minneapolis Star-Tribune
[S]atisfying.The diary format means the scientific details of the storm’s effects are vague and the most horrifying events are only rumored; this increases tension and keeps the narrative from becoming as dehumanizing or shockingly violent as other tales of the end of the world.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [The diary] perspective provides more introspective focus.… [A] quiet, ideas-focused dystopian novel that will stay with readers long after they have turned the final page. —Laura Hiatt, Fort Collins, CO
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Williams' novel is the lyrical and weirdly believable diary of an Amish farmer…[after] some sort of atmospheric event knocks out the power grid everywhere.… A standout among post-apocalyptic novels, as simply and perfectly crafted as an Amish quilt.
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 … then take off on your own:
1. Talk about the catastrophe: the solar storm itself and the disaster it causes in the post-industrialized "English" world. What do you see as the worst, or perhaps most horrific, part of the fallout?
2. How far fetched is such a catastrophe? David Williams based his novel on a massive solar storm that took place in 1859, which came to be known as the Carrington Event. See his essay in the Algonquin Reader. If such a disaster were actually to occur in our lives, how do you think we would all fare as a civilization?
3. How are the Amish portrayed in The Fall of the English—do they come across as saintly … naive … pragmatic? In what ways do they remain both untouched yet also affected by the calamity?
4. What role does 14-year-old Sadie play? How are her visions put to use? Does the use of magical realism (the visions) feel out of place to you in this work? Or do you think it enriches the story?
5. Jacob writes, "For us, life is much the same. But we are not the only people." How do the Amish respond to the suffering in nearby Lancaster? How do you see their responsibility, religiously and morally, to their English neighbors? How do the Amish themselves see their responsibility?
6. Follow-up to Question 5: Jacob writes: "Jesus taught that we should never allow the world's hate to move our hands against others among God's children." Yet as lawlessness moves closer to the their farms, what options are open to the Amish?
7. What is Jacob's relationship with Mike, and why does the bishop disapprove? Mike, for instance, listens to radio talk shows, warning about the global warming "hoax." Jacob wonders "why Mike bothers to listen …if all he receives is anger." In what way is Mike emblematic of the differences between the Amish and English cultures? Finally, how did you feel about Bishop Schrock's decision regarding Michael on October 20?
8. Follow-up to Question 7: Jacob writes of Mike's problems: "The sorrows are planted, and they grow strong in the earth of his life, and they rise up, and there is harvest." What does Jacob mean, and in what way is the comment prophetic?
9. In his Algonquin Reader essay, Williams says he hopes When the English Fall sheds light upon how connected we humans are despite our different beliefs. Does he succeed in his goal? How so?
10. Much of the horror takes place "off stage," out of sight of the reader. In what way does this distancing technique, heighten the novel's overall tension?
11. Jacob rides with a National Guard into Lancaster to see for himself the conditions of the English. Talk about what he observes there (Oct. 6: p. 133). He writes that he would not want to "choose their life":
[S]o much of my growing up was in a place where [the English] were not viewed as neighbors, but as dark and terrible and spiritually dangerous. In my heart and through my faith, I do not feel this to be true, but it is difficult to entirely lose that fear once it is planted.
What does Jacob's attitude about the outside world reveal, either about him or about the English? Is there any truth to what he fears (though wishes he didn't fear)?
12. Jacob owns a Smith & Wesson revolver. How does he see the differences between the Amish use of guns and the way the English use them?
13. Two competing versions of providence are considered in Jacob's diary. After the hurricane, some houses were unscathed while others were left damaged. Jacob's view holds that "It is just the way of creation." He believes that a damaged house is not God's punishment for its owner's sin. "It is just that we are humble, small creatures, and that the vastness of God's creation can break us so easily" (Oct. 15, p.139).
A different view was held by Jacob's uncle who blamed Jacob and Hannah for their inability to have more children. Jacob writes of his uncle:
He said I needed to examine my heart for sin. I needed to consider why God had inflicted this punishment on my family, and to repent of it (Oct. 17, p.154.).
Those divergent views exist today among a variety of denominations. 1) Bad things happen as a form of punishment for our sins. 2) Or bad things happen as part of the "vastness of God's creation." And if the latter is true, does that mean that we are not under God's protection? How do you conceive of providence?
14. What are your feelings about the book's ending?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
When the Killing's Done
T. C. Boyle, 2011
Penguin Group USA
369 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780670022328
Summary
Principally set on the wild Channel Islands off the coast of California, T.C. Boyle's new novel is a gripping adventure with a timely theme. Alma Boyd Takesue is a National Park Service biologist spearheading the efforts to save the islands' native creatures from invasive species.
Her antagonist, Dave LaJoy, is a local businessman who is fiercely opposed to the killing of any animals whatsoever and will go to any lengths to subvert her plans. As their confrontation plays out in a series of scenes escalating in violence, drama, and danger, When the Killing's Done relates a richly humane tale about the dominion we attempt to exert, for better or worse, over the natural world. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 2, 1948
• Where—Peekskill, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., State University of New York at Potsdam; Ph.D., Iowa University
• Awards—PEN/Faulkner Award, 1998
• Currently—lives near Santa Barbara, California
T. Coraghessan Boyle (kuh-RAGG-issun) received his doctorate in nineteenth-century English literature from the University of Iowa in 1977. Since 1977, Boyle has taught creative writing at the University of Southern California. While in college, Boyle exchanged his middle name, John, for the unusual Coraghessan (kuh-RAGG-issun), the name of one of his Irish ancestors.
Boyle is the author of Descent of Man (1979), Water Music (1982), Budding Prospects (1984), Greasy Lake (1985), World's End (1987, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction), If the River Was Whiskey (1989), East Is East (1990), The Road to Wellville (1993), which was made into a movie starring Anthony Hopkins, and Without a Hero (1994). His work has appeared in major American magazines, including The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, Paris Review, and Atlantic Monthly. Boyle lives with his wife, Karen, and their three children near Santa Barbara, California, in a house designed in 1909 by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
More
In the interest of time and space, it might be easier to note the writers that T. C. Boyle isn't compared to. But let's give the reverse a try: Donald Barthelme, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Evelyn Waugh, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Kingsley Amis, Thomas Berger, Robert Coover, Lorrie Moore, Stanley Elkin, Tom Robbins, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Don DeLillo, Flannery O'Connor. Oh, let's not forget F. Lee Bailey. And Dr. Seuss.
Boyle, widely admired for his acrobatic verbal skill, wild narratives and quirky characters (in one short story, he imagines a love affair between Dwight Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev's wife), has dazzled critics since his first novel in 1981.
Consider this example, from Larry McCaffery in a 1985 article for the New York Times:
Beneath its surface play, erudition and sheer storytelling power, his fiction also presents a disturbing and convincing critique of an American society so jaded with sensationalized images and plasticized excess that nothing stirs its spirit anymore.... It is into this world that Mr. Boyle projects his heroes, who are typically lusty, exuberant dreamers whose wildly inflated ambitions lead them into a series of hilarious, often disastrous adventures.
But as much as critics will bow at his linguistic gifts, some also knock him for resting on them a bit too heavily, hinting that the impressive showmanship attempts to hide a shortage of depth and substance. Craig Seligman, writing in the New Republic in 1993, pointed out that...
Boyle loves a mess. He loves chaos. He loves marshes and jungles, and he loves the jungle of language: luxuriant sentences overgrown with lianas of lists, sesquipedalian words hanging down like rare fruits. For all its exoticism, though, his prose is lucid to the point of transparency. It doesn't require much deeper concentration than a good newspaper (though it does require a dictionary).
Reviewing The Tortilla Curtain in 1995, New York Times critic Scott Spencer scratched his head over why Boyle had invited readers along for this particular ride:
Mr. Boyle's fictional strategy is puzzling. Why are we being asked to follow the fates of characters for whom he clearly feels such contempt? Not surprisingly, this is ultimately off-putting. Perhaps Mr. Boyle has received too much praise for his zany sense of humor; in this book, that wit often seems merely a maddening volley of cheap shots. It's like living next door to a gun nut who spends all day and half the night shooting at beer bottles.
Growing up, Boyle had no aspirations to be a writer. It wasn't until his studies at State University of New York, where he as a music student, that he bumped into his muse. "I went there to be a music major but found I really couldn't hack that at the age of 17," he told The Writer in 1999. "I just started to read outside my classes—literature and history. I wound up being a history and English major; when I wandered into a creative writing class as a junior, I realized that writing was what I could do."
He then started teaching, in part to avoid getting drafted into the Vietnam War, and later applied to the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop.
After a collection of short stories in 1979, he released his first novel, Water Music, called "pitiless and brilliant" by the New Republic, and has shuttled back and forth between novels and short stories, all known for their explosions of character imagination. Mr. Boyle's literary sensibility...thrives on excess, profusion, pushing past the limits of good taste to comic extremes," McCaffery wrote in his 1985 New York Times piece. "He is a master of rendering the grotesque details of the rot, decay and sleaze of a society up to its ears in K Mart oil cans, Kitty Litter and the rusted skeletons of abandoned cars and refrigerators."
In his review of Drop City, the 2003 novel set in California commune that won Boyle a National Book Award nomination, Dwight Garner joins the chorus of critical acclaim over the years—"Boyle has always been a fiendishly talented writer"—but he also acknowledges some of the criticism that Boyle has faced in these same years:
The rap against Boyle's work has long been that he's a sort of madcap predator drone, raining down hard nuggets of contempt, sarcasm and bitter humor on the poor men and women in his books while rarely giving us characters we're actually persuaded to feel anything about. This is partly a bum rap—and I'd hate to knock contempt, sarcasm and bitter humor—but there's enough truth in it that it's a joy to find, in Drop City that Boyle gives us a lot more than simply a line of bong-addled innocents led to slaughter.
But perhaps the neatest summary of Boyle's work would be from Lorrie Moore, one of the novelists to which he has been compared. In a 1994 New York Times review of Boyle's short story collection Without a Hero, she praised Boyle's "astonishing and characteristic verve, his unaverted gaze, his fascination with everything lunatic and queasy." She continues...
God knows, Mr. Boyle can write like an angel, if at times a caustic, gum-chewing one. And in this strong, varied collection maybe we have what we'd hope to find in heaven itself (by the time we begged our way there): no lessening of brilliance, plus a couple of laughs to mitigate all that high and distant sighing over what goes on below."
Extras
• Boyle changed his middle name from John to Coraghessan ( "kuh-RAGG-issun") when he was 17.
• He is known almost as much for his ego as his writing. "Each book I put out, I think, 'Goodbye, Updike and Mailer, forget it," the New Republic quoted him as saying. "I joke at Viking that I'm going to make them forget the name of Stephen King forever, I'm going to sell so many copies.
• Boyle's philosophy on reading and writing, as told to The Writer: "Good literature is a living, brilliant, great thing that speaks to you on an individual and personal level. You're the reader. I think the essence of it is telling a story. It's entertainment. It's not something to be taught in a classroom, necessarily. To be alive and be good, it has to be a good story that grabs you by the nose and doesn't let you go till The End." (From Barnes and Noble)
Book Reviews
Boyle's terrifically exciting and unapologetically relevant When the Killing's Done...demonstrates that it's possible to write an environmental novel that provokes discussion instead of merely thumping away on conventional wisdom.... When the Killing's Done presents a smarter, sharper vision of our environmental challenges than [Boyle's] doomsday novel, A Friend of the Earth. By corralling all these pigs, rats, dwarf foxes, golden eagles and human beings into one stormy tale, he's created a raucous exploration of the clumsy role that even the best-intentioned people play in these fragile environs.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
(Starred review.) Boyle (The Women) spins a grand environmental and family drama revolving around the Channel Islands off Santa Barbara in his fiery latest. Alma Boyd Takesue is an unassuming National Park Service biologist and the public face of a project to eradicate invasive species, such as rats and pigs, from the islands. Antagonizing her is Dave LaJoy, a short-tempered local business owner and founder of an organization called For the Protection of Animals. What begins as the disruption of public meetings and protests outside Alma's office escalates as Dave realizes he must take matters into his own hands to stop what he considers to be an unconscionable slaughter. Dave and Alma are at the center of a web of characters—among them Alma's grandmother, who lost her husband and nearly drowned herself in the channel, and Dave's girlfriend's mother, who lived on a sheep ranch on one of the islands—who provide a perspective that man's history on the islands is a flash compared to nature's evolution there. Boyle's animating conflict is tense and nuanced, and his sleek prose yields a tale that is complex, thought-provoking, and darkly funny—everything we have come to expect from him.
Publishers Weekly
Boyle is no stranger to environmental fiction. His 2000 novel, A Friend of the Earth, chronicles the exploits of Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tierwater, an ecological martyr. Here, Boyle delves deep into environmental philosophy by creating two characters passionate about saving animals but in diametrically opposed ways. The tension is centered on the population of rats on the Channel Islands off the coast of California. Alma, a biologist, is attempting to exterminate the rats to prevent further damage to the fragile ecosystem on the island. Dave, an animal rights activist, is equally passionate about all the inhabitants of the island, including the rats. Boyle's characters are challenging, to say the least, for they are complicated and often inconsistent. While the desire to preserve and protect nature does not defuse many of the conflicts between the two, their ethical similarities invite the reader to question where these two ideologies ultimately clash. Boyle uses the conflicts between his characters to explore the changing philosophy of human and animal relationships. Verdict: Whether we regard this work as environmental fiction or a philosophical treatise on land ethics, Boyle has delivered yet another quandary to ponder. —Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Boyle’s great subject is humankind’s blundering relationship with the rest of the living world.... Incisive and caustically witty, Boyle is fluent in evolutionary biology and island biogeography, cognizant of the shared emotions of all sentient beings, in awe over nature’s crushing power, and, by turns, bemused and appalled by human perversity. Boyle brings all these powers and concerns to bear as he creates magnetic characters and high suspense, culminating in a piercing vision of our needy, confused, and destructive species thrashing about in the great web of life. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
In one of his richest and most engaging novels, Boyle (The Women, 2009, etc.) characteristically combines a dark sense of humor and a subversive streak as he illuminates the dark underbelly of all-American idealism. The focus is California environmentalism, the idealization of the natural world, which is more often dangerous, even deadly, than idyllic.... The novel never reduces its narrative to polemics—there are no heroes here—while underscoring the difficult decisions that those who consider themselves on the side of the angels must face.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The book opens with the dramatic story of Alma's grandmother's boat accident. What is Anise's family history? Does your family have any great stories that have been passed down through the generations?
2. What does the title of the novel refer to?
3. Alma muses that "if she had enough money—say, five hundred billion or so—she'd buy up all the property in town, raze the buildings, tear out the roads and reintroduce the grizzly bear" (p. 41). Do you think Dave might say something similar? If you had nearly limitless funds, what good work would you do?
4. On pp. 64 – 65, we see Dave's response to Alma's presentation and his vandalizing of her car. Do you believe his personal relationship with Alma influenced his actions? In what ways are Alma's opinion of and interactions with him colored by their former relationship?
5. There are numerous example of Dave's inability to deal with his anger, usually targeted at other people. On p. 69, Dave questions whether his behavior exhibits "a fundamental inconsistency: pro-animal, antihuman." Does it?
6. Alma considers her footprint in the global ecology and feels "guilt over being alive, needing things, consuming things, turning the tap or lighting the flame under the gas burner" (p. 191). Do you feel the same way? Is it possible to exist without imposing on some other creature or resource?
7. Do Alma and Dave conform to your expectations of dedicated environmentalists? Are you similarly committed to any strong beliefs or principles? Have you ever been in a situation where you were pressured to compromise them?
8. As Dave sabotages the rat poison, he feels a "giddiness rising in him, the surge of power and triumph that rides up out of nowhere to replace the bafflement and rage and depression Dr. Reiser and his pharmaceuticals can't begin to touch. This is who he is. This" (p. 82). Does Dave do his animal rights work for himself or for his cause, or are the two completely intertwined? Does it matter?
9. Have you ever found yourself in battle with nature, either as victim or as aggressor? What was the result?
10. In what ways are Dave and Alma similar? How does each character's perspective shift by the end of the novel?
11. Which character did you feel was more sympathetic than the others? Who was least appealing? Which character best approximated your own feelings toward animals and the environment?
(Question from author's website.)
When the Moon Is Low
Nadia Hashimi, 2015
HarperCollins
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062369574
Summary
Nominee, 2015 Goodreads Best Book of 2015
Mahmoud's passion for his wife Fereiba, a schoolteacher, is greater than any love she's ever known. But their happy, middle-class world—a life of education, work, and comfort—implodes when their country is engulfed in war, and the Taliban rises to power.
Mahmoud, a civil engineer, becomes a target of the new fundamentalist regime and is murdered. Forced to flee Kabul with her three children, Fereiba has one hope to survive: she must find a way to cross Europe and reach her sister's family in England.
With forged papers and help from kind strangers they meet along the way, Fereiba make a dangerous crossing into Iran under cover of darkness. Exhausted and brokenhearted but undefeated, Fereiba manages to smuggle them as far as Greece. But in a busy market square, their fate takes a frightening turn when her teenage son, Saleem, becomes separated from the rest of the family.
Faced with an impossible choice, Fereiba pushes on with her daughter and baby, while Saleem falls into the shadowy underground network of undocumented Afghans who haunt the streets of Europe's capitals. Across the continent Fereiba and Saleem struggle to reunite, and ultimately find a place where they can begin to reconstruct their lives. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1978
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Raised—New Jersey
• Education—B.As., Brandeis University; M.D., State University of New York, Brooklyn
• Currently—lives in the state of Maryland, USA
Nadia Hashimi was born and raised in New York and New Jersey. Both her parents were born in Afghanistan and left in the early 1970s, before the Soviet invasion. Her mother, granddaughter of a notable Afghan poet, traveled to Europe to obtain a Master’s degree in civil engineering and her father came to the United States, where he worked hard to fulfill his American dream and build a new, brighter life for his immediate and extended family.
Nadia was fortunate to be surrounded by a large family of aunts, uncles and cousins, keeping the Afghan culture an integral part of their daily lives.
Nadia attended Brandeis University where she obtained degrees in Middle Eastern Studies and Biology. In 2002, she made her first trip to Afghanistan with her parents who had not returned to their homeland since leaving in the 1970s. It was a bittersweet experience for everyone, finding relics of childhood homes and reuniting with loved ones.
Nadia enrolled in medical school in Brooklyn and became active with an Afghan-American community organization that promoted cultural events and awareness, especially in the dark days after 9/11. She graduated from medical school and went on to complete her pediatric training at NYU/Bellevue hospitals in New York City. On completing her training, Nadia moved to Maryland with her husband where she works as a pediatrician. She’s also a part of the “Lady Docs,” a group of local female physicians who exercise, eat and blog together.
With her rigorous medical training completed, Nadia turned to a passion that had gone unexplored. Her upbringing, experiences and love for reading came together in the form of stories based in the country of her parents and grandparents (some even make guest appearances in her tales!).
Her debut novel, The Pearl That Broke Its Shell was released in 2014. Her second novel, When The Moon Is Low, followed in 2015 and chronicled the perilous journey of an Afghan family as they fled Taliban-controlled Kabul and fell into the dark world of Europe's undocumented.
She and her husband are the beaming parents of four curious, rock star children, two goldfish and a territorial African Grey parrot. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
A must-read saga about borders, barriers, and the resolve of one courageous mother fighting to cross over.
Oprah Magazine
[T]he Taliban has on daily life in Kabul.... Hashimi masterfully captures Saleem's moving story as he squats in refugee camps, stealthily makes his way to Italy, and unexpectedly finds transport to France, all while haunted by loving memories of Mahmood. Verdict: Expertly depict[s] the anxiety and excitement that accompanies a new life. —Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. Fereiba describes herself as “an outsider in my father’s home” as a child, and then becomes a literal outsider as a refugee. What do you think the author is trying to say about being an outsider? Is there anythingpositive to be gained from having an outsider’s perspective and experience? Who are the outsiders in your family or society?
2. What do you make of KokoGul? Is she the classic “wicked stepmother”, or are there more layers to her? What do you think she was like at Fereiba’s age? What motivates her most as a wife and mother?
3. In hindsight, knowing what happened, did Fereiba make the right decision to leave Kabul? Was she right to press on towards London without Saleem? What would you have done in her situation?
4. Fereiba’s family frequently gets by thanks to the kindness of strangers, particularly Hakan and Hayal, the Turkish couple who take in the family and generously help support them. Why do you think Hakan and Hayal do this? Should Fereiba’s family have stayed in Turkey with them? What compels them to leave a seeming safe harbor and continue to Europe?
5. When Saleem is talking with Roksana about why she works to help refugees he
...wondered what kind of person he would be if he were in her shoes. Would he take up the cause of srangers? Would he care enough about how people were being treated that he would spend his time handing out food and filling out applications on their behalf? He hoped he would. But it was very possible he wouldn’t.
Would you do what Saleem wonders about?
6. Saleem’s journey is dramatically affected by three girls his own age: Ekin, the Turkish farmer’s daughter, Roksana, the Greek aid worker, and Mimi, the Albanian prostitute. What does he owe to each of them? Why do you think they helped him, even when it was risky for them?
7. Who is the man Saleem encounters in the refugee camp in Calais? Is he really, as he claims, a friend of Fereiba’s beloved grandfather?
8. There is water imagery throughout the novel. As the old man stares out over the English Channel that divides Saleem from his family, we read that...
From here is was easy to see the currents, linear streams of water a shade different from the rest of the ocean, like secret passages within the depths.
As Saleem gets closer, Fereiba dreams of him
...swimming across a brilliant, blue ocean...There was water all around him, and he glided through, swimming in smooth, strong strkes as if he’d been raised by the ocean.
What is the significance of the water imagery? What message does it carry about the family’s journey?
9. What do you think happens to Saleem? Is he ultimately reunited with his family? What will happen to Samira and Aziz? How will their lives be different than their older brother’s?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
When the Spirits Dance mambo: Growing Up Nuyorican in El Barrio
Marta Moreno Vega, 2003
Crown Publishing
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400049240
Summary
When rock and roll was transforming American culture in the 1950s and ’60s, East Harlem pulsed with the sounds of mambo and merengue.
Instead of Elvis and the Beatles, Marta Moreno Vega grew up worshipping Celia Cruz, Mario Bauza, and Arsenio Rodriguez. Their music could be heard on every radio in El Barrio and from the main stage at the legendary Palladium, where every weekend working-class kids dressed in their sharpest suits and highest heels and became mambo kings and queens.
Spanish Harlem was a vibrant and dynamic world, but it was also a place of constant change, where the traditions of Puerto Rican parents clashed with their children’s American ideals.
A precocious little girl with wildly curly hair, Marta was the baby of the family and the favorite of her elderly abuela, who lived in the apartment down the hall. Abuela Luisa was the spiritual center of the family, an espiritista who smoked cigars and honored the Afro-Caribbean deities who had always protected their family. But it was Marta’s brother, Chachito, who taught her the latest dance steps and called her from the pay phone at the Palladium at night so she could listen, huddled beneath the bedcovers, to the seductive rhythms of Tito Puente and his orchestra.
In this luminous and lively memoir, Marta Moreno Vega calls forth the spirit of Puerto Rican New York and the music, mysticism, and traditions of a remarkable and quintessentially American childhood. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1942
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., M.A., New York University; Ph.D., Temple University
• Currently—lives in New York, New York
Marta Moreno Vega, Ph.D., has served as an assistant professor at the City University of New York's Baruch College. She is founder of the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute and Amigos del Museo del Barrio. She has curated major visual arts exhibitions, including "Santeria and Vodun in the Americas," and organized three international conferences on "Orisha Tradition and Culture. (From the publisher and Encyclopedia.com.)
Follow Dr. Vega on Facebook.
Book Reviews
In this vivid work..., two tales flawlessly merge: one recalls an Afro–Puerto Rican girl's upbringing in 1950s Spanish Harlem; the other explains the background for the author's eventual status as a priestess of the Santeria/Lucumi religion.... The spiritual and musical journey Vega takes readers on is informative and inspiring, even for the uninitiated
Publishers Weekly
(Adult/High School) Smart and perceptive, [Cotito] became a strong young woman, and worked steadily toward her goal of becoming a teacher..... While rejecting the negative, she embraced the many positive aspects of her heritage and the love of her family.... A vibrant, honest coming-of-age memoir that celebrates culture and community. —Sandy Freund, Richard Byrd Library, Fairfax County, VA
School Library Journal
Vega's passionate memoir of growing up in 1950s Spanish Harlem expresses both the burdens and joys of her Puerto Rican heritage.... [S]ome clunky phrasings ("Memories are the musical notes that form the composition of our souls") suggest that Vega's training in writing has been secondary to her work as a scholar and priestess of Santeria. Still, readers...will find the experiences limned here affecting. —Jennifer Mattson
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. Abuela tells Cotito the heartbreaking story of being rejected by her own mother because of her skin color. How has this tragedy, and the experience of being raised by her grandmother, Maria de la O, affected Abuela’s life and attitudes as an adult?
2. Cotito is fascinated by the photograph of her grandmother as a young woman, sailing alone to New York. In the photo, Abuela wears a borrowed dress, carries a borrowed suitcase, and watches her gorgeous country slide away from the hold of a ship built "like an enormous metal coffin." She describes this young Abuela as "the woman at the crossroads." In what ways is Cotito herself a young "woman at a crossroads"? What borrowed burdens does she carry, and which ones does she shed in the course of the memoir? What is her "coffin"?
3. What does the drama with Alma in the botanica teach Cotito about male/female relationships? How do the neighbors’ attitudes toward Alma contrast with Abuela’s approach? Why doesn’t Cotito question the strange events she witnesses that day?
4. When Papi decides to take the family to Rockaway Beach instead of their usual destination, Orchard Beach—nicknamed "the Puerto Rican Riviera"—Cotito suffers her first bout of self-hatred and embarrassment about her family’s ethnic ways. She is acutely aware of the spectacle they create by cooking on the beach while other families quietly enjoy "sandwiches neatly packed in plastic bags and picnic baskets with fruit." What defining moment does her meltdown lead to back at the apartment? How does it polarize the family?
5. What conflicting advice do Mami and Chachita give Cotito when she gets her first period? Do you agree with Chachita’s assessment that by keeping information at a minimum, Mami "just wants us to stay her babies. She’s trying to stop us from growing up"? Is it that simple?
6. Cotito receives mixed messages about love from her neighbors in El Barrio. When one man stalks his wife in a jealous rage, paranoid that she is cheating on him, Cotito concludes, "this, I supposed, was love." When Mami enrages Papi by taking driving lessons against his wishes, Cotito overhears her mother’s nervous telephone conversation with a friend: "‘He just loves me too much. That’s why he doesn’t want me to work or go out.’ The thrill in her voice suggested that somehow my father’s anger was an expression of his love." How does Cotito interpret these jarring lessons as she moves into young adulthood?
7. Cotito is repeatedly warned not to talk to Teresa, the neighborhood prostitute. Yet Teresa is summoned by all the neighborhood women when they require help with gowns, makeup, hairdressing, or anything uniquely feminine and presentational. How does this paradox reflect the conflicted way in which the women of El Barrio deal with their sexuality? Why does Teresa’s power over her own body frighten them? Why does Papi allow a prostitute to prepare his daughter for her wedding day?
8. How does the influx of drugs into El Barrio contribute to Abuela’s decline?
9. While Chachita struggles desperately against her parents’ attempt to determine her future for her, and ultimately caves in to their pressure, Cotito strikes out on her own with little resistance other than mild verbal sparring. Why are their experiences so different?
10. Chapter ten opens with: "There is a point in every life when a confluence of forces sets your destiny in motion." What are these events? How does Cotito’s acceptance to the Music and Art High School open her eyes to her mother’s repressed dreams? What gives her the strength to defy her mother’s wishes?
11. As Cotito approaches school for the very first time as a child, she is eager for everyone in El Barrio "to bear witness to how special I looked on my first day of school." How is her sense of pride challenged immediately upon arriving? How does this episode foreshadow her experience at the Music and Art High School years later?
12. Cotito is repeatedly struck by the contrasting ways in which her siblings’ budding sexuality is greeted by their parents. Mami and Papi "encouraged Chachito’s philandering," in part because it banishes any fear of homosexuality and in part because his robust manhood is a continual source of pride. Chachita, on the other hand, is violently castigated for her interest in the opposite sex: "It was as if, just in becoming a woman, she had wounded [Papi] with a knife." Do these conflicting attitudes toward young men and women still exist in the Puerto Rican community today?
13. Immersed in the power of music, Cotito experiences an epiphany about her future while attending a concert of Palladium greats at the Apollo along with her brother. What is this revelation? How does her experience of music differ from her brother’s? From Abuela’s? Are their three distinct experiences equally spiritual?
14. As a girl, Cotito’s ideal of womanhood is a composite of the seductive sensuality of Saint Marta la Dominadora, the powerful legs of Katherine Dunham, the enticing smile of Dorothy Dandridge, the piercing eyes of Abuela, and the sexy hauteur of her brother’s many girlfriends. What features of her own do you imagine the adult Marta Moreno Vega has added to this intoxicating mix?
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)
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When We Danced on Water
Evan Fallenberg, 2011
HarperCollins
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062033321
Summary
At eighty-five, Teo is ready to retire from the bombast and romance of life as one of the world's most influential choreographers. But when he meets Vivi, a fortyish waitress at a Tel Aviv cafe, the fires of his youth flare back to life—his passion for a woman's touch, his long-buried anguish at his wartime experiences, and his complex engagement with dance.
Vivi's life will change, too, as the warmth of Teo's affection counterbalances her harrowing time as an Israeli soldier in an illicit relationship. For both, their investment in art, and indeed in life itself, will reawaken as the ghosts of their suppressed pasts—from Warsaw to Copenhagen, Berlin to Tel Aviv—cry out for forgiveness and healing.
With lustrous prose capturing the grit and fury of history and the breathtaking power of passion, When We Danced on Water is a compelling novel of intimacy and identity, art and ambition, and how love can truly transcend tragedy. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Cleveland, Ohio, USA
• Education—B.A., Georgetown University; M.F.A.,
Vermont College
• Awards—see below
• Currently—lives in Israel
Evan Fallenberg the author or two books: Light Fell (2008) and When We Danced on Water (2011).
Fallenberg's recent translations include Ron Leshem's Beaufort, Batya Gur's Murder in Jerusalem, Alon Hilu's Death of a Monk and The House of Dajani, and Meir Shalev's A Pigeon and a Boy, winner of the 2007 National Jewish Book Award for fiction and a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize. Fallenberg is an instructor in the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University and heads his own Studio for Writers (and Readers) of English in the garden of his home. The recipient of a MacDowell Colony fellowship, Fallenberg is the father of two sons.
Fallenberg is a native of Cleveland, Ohio, a graduate of Georgetown University and the MFA program in creative writing at Vermont College. He has lived in Israel since 1985, where he writes, translates and teaches. His first novel, Light Fell, won the American Library Association's Barbara Gittings Stonewall Book Award for Literature and the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, and was shortlisted for the National Jewish Book Award in fiction and a Lambda Literary Award for Debut Fiction. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Quietly spectacular and emotionally satisfying...Fallenberg achieves the near-impossible, superbly crafting an altogether unique Holocaust story made plausible through utterly gripping realism.
Miami Herald
Lyrical...an enjoyable read...[Fallenberg is] sensitively attuned to the power of individual words. His fluid prose is carefully composed.
Jewish Post
Fallenberg's (Light Fell) precise prose moves fluidly between the delicate and the bold, much like the aging dancer whose story he tells with such elegance. At 84, Teo Levin commands the dancers performing his choreography in the Tel Aviv Ballet with an authority and vigor that belies his age. He looks forward to his daily arguments about devotion and passion with 42-year-old artist Vivi, the waitress at a cafe he frequents. Vivi, aimless in the years since she fled preunified Berlin, finds her focus with Teo, at last. In turn, she forces him to share the secrets he's locked away about a shocking six-year period he endured as a young man in Nazi Germany. Fallenberg gives voice to the miasma of grief that overwhelms Teo and Vivi and achieves resonance in his exploration of music as a visual and physical experience. The author also manages to spin mundane discussions of passion and obsession into a rich narrative, skirting sentimentality. His spare style sneaks up on the reader, enhancing the emotionality inherent in his subject.
Publishers Weekly
As their pasts are revealed, an unexpected blessing bears testament to the beauty and the sustainability of their unconventional relationship.
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. Discuss Teo's arc as an artist, and Vivi's. Where do they intersect? In what way are their artistic paths similar/dissimilar?
2. The line between passion and obsession is an issue with which When We Danced on Water grapples on several levels. Discuss.
3. Teo is characterized as someone who delves deeply into one art, while Vivi opts for breadth. Do you identify with one of these characteristics more than the other?
4. Time and place are very nearly characters in this book: 1920s Warsaw; pre-war Copenhagen and the Royal Danish Ballet; Berlin during World War II and in the 1980s; modern Tel Aviv. How did these settings affect your experience of reading When We Danced on Water?
5. In an early version of the novel, the scenes with Teo and Vivi together were written as a play (HE:, SHE:, stage directions instead of narration). Can you still feel something of that in the novel?
6. Did you find the writing about dance enriching or offputting?
7. Of all the main characters in this book (Teo, Vivi, Freddy, Margo, Nelly, Pincho) only Freddy is involved in a traditional family relationship. Discuss.
8. Do you consider Teo a victim of the Holocaust? Why/Why not?
9. In your opinion, who got more out of their relationship—Teo or Vivi?
10. On love: do you think that Freddy loved Teo? That Teo loved Freddy? That Teo loved Vivi? That Vivi loved Teo?
11. About Freddy, the writer Cynthia Ozick wrote that “together with all his ceaseless predatory impulses, many of them graphically and nightmarishly frightening, there is something rounded and human in Freddy: he is a complex villain.” Discuss.
12. Novels, like life, do not provide the ending to every aspect of every story and sub-plot. Of all the characters in When We Danced on Water, whose story-after-the-story most intrigues you?
13. Do you think this book has a happy ending? Why/Why not?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
When We Were Orphans
Kazuo Ishiguro, 2000
Knopf Doubleday
335 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375724404
Summary
2017: Nobel Prize for Literature
The maze of human memory—the ways in which we accommodate and alter it, deceive and deliver ourselves with it—is territory that Kazuo Ishiguro has made his own. In his previous novels, he has explored this inner world and its manifestations in the lives of his characters with rare inventiveness and subtlety, shrewd humor and insight.
In When We Were Orphans, his first novel in five years, he returns to this terrain in a brilliantly realized story that illuminates the power of one's past to determine the present.
Christopher Banks, an English boy born in early-twentieth-century Shanghai, is orphaned at age nine when his mother and father both vanish under suspicious circumstances. Sent to live in England, he grows up to become a renowned detective and, more than twenty years later, returns to Shanghai, where the Sino-Japanese War is raging, to solve the mystery of the disappearances.
The story is straightforward. Its telling is remarkable. Christopher's voice is controlled, detailed, and detached, its precision unsurprising in someone who has devoted his life to the examination of details and the rigors of objective thought. But within the layers of his narrative is slowly revealed what he can't, or won't, see: that his memory, despite what he wants to believe, is not unaffected by his childhood tragedies; that his powers of perception, the heralded clarity of his vision, can be blinding as well as enlightening; and that the simplest desires—a child's for his parents, a man's for understanding—may give rise to the most complicated truths.
A masterful combination of narrative control and soaring imagination, When We Were Orphans isKazuo Ishiguro at his best. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—November 8, 1954
• Where—Nagasaki, Japan
• Raised—England, UK
• Education—B.A., University of Kent (UK); M.A., University of East Anglia
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in London, England
Kazuo Ishiguro is a British novelist. Born in Nagasaki, Japan, his family moved to England in 1960 when he was five. Ishiguro obtained his Bachelor's degree from the University of Kent in 1978 and his Master's from the University of East Anglia's creative-writing course in 1980.
Ishiguro is one of the most celebrated contemporary fiction authors in the English-speaking world, having received four Man Booker Prize nominations, and winning the 1989 award for his novel The Remains of the Day. In 2008, The Times ranked Ishiguro 32nd on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945."
Early life and career
Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki on 8 November 1954, the son of Shizuo Ishiguro, a physical oceanographer, and his wife Shizuko. In 1960 his family, including his two sisters, moved to Guildford, Surrey so that his father could begin research at the National Institute of Oceanography. He attended Stoughton Primary School and then Woking County Grammar School in Surrey. After finishing school he took a gap year and traveled through the United States and Canada, while writing a journal and sending demo tapes to record companies.
In 1974 he began at the University of Kent, Canterbury, and he graduated in 1978 with a Bachelor of Arts (honours) in English and Philosophy. After spending a year writing fiction, he resumed his studies at the University of East Anglia where he studied with Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter, and gained a Master of Arts in Creative Writing in 1980. He became a British citizen in 1982.
He co-wrote four of the songs on jazz singer Stacey Kent's 2009 Breakfast on the Morning Tram. He also wrote the liner notes to Kent's 2003 album, In Love Again.
Literary characteristics
A number of his novels are set in the past. His 2005 novel, Never Let Me Go, has science fiction qualities and a futuristic tone; however, it is set in the 1980s and 1990s, and thus takes place in a very similar yet alternate world. His fourth novel, The Unconsoled (1995), takes place in an unnamed Central European city. The Remains of the Day (1989)is set in the large country house of an English lord in the period surrounding World War II.
An Artist of the Floating World (1986) is set in an unnamed Japanese city during the period of reconstruction following Japan's surrender in 1945. The narrator is forced to come to terms with his part in World War II. He finds himself blamed by the new generation who accuse him of being part of Japan's misguided foreign policy and is forced to confront the ideals of the modern times as represented by his grandson. Ishiguro said of his choice of time period, "I tend to be attracted to pre-war and postwar settings because I’m interested in this business of values and ideals being tested, and people having to face up to the notion that their ideals weren’t quite what they thought they were before the test came."
HIs novels are usually written in the first-person narrative style and the narrators often exhibit human failings. Ishiguro's technique is to allow these characters to reveal their flaws implicitly during the narrative. The author thus creates a sense of pathos by allowing the reader to see the narrator's flaws while being drawn to sympathize with the narrator as well. This pathos is often derived from the narrator's actions, or, more often, inaction. In The Remains of the Day, the butler Stevens fails to act on his romantic feelings toward housekeeper Miss Kenton because he cannot reconcile his sense of service with his personal life.
Ishiguro's novels often end without any sense of resolution. The issues his characters confront are buried in the past and remain unresolved. Thus Ishiguro ends many of his novels on a note of melancholic resignation. His characters accept their past and who they have become, typically discovering that this realization brings comfort and an ending to mental anguish. This can be seen as a literary reflection on the Japanese idea of mono no aware.
Japan
Ishiguro was born in Japan and has a Japanese name (the characters in the surname Ishiguro mean 'stone' and 'black' respectively). He set his first two novels in Japan; however, in several interviews he has had to clarify to the reading audience that he has little familiarity with Japanese writing and that his works bear little resemblance to Japanese fiction. In a 1990 interview he said, "If I wrote under a pseudonym and got somebody else to pose for my jacket photographs, I'm sure nobody would think of saying, 'This guy reminds me of that Japanese writer.'"
Although some Japanese writers have had a distant influence on his writing— un'ichirō Tanizaki is the one he most frequently cites—Ishiguro has said that Japanese films, especially those of Yasujirō Ozu and Mikio Naruse, have been a more significant influence.
Ishiguro left Japan in 1960 at the age of 5 and did not return to visit until 1989, nearly 30 years later, as a participant in the Japan Foundation Short-Term Visitors Program. In an interview with Kenzaburo Oe, Ishiguro acknowledged that the Japanese settings of his first two novels were imaginary:
I grew up with a very strong image in my head of this other country, a very important other country to which I had a strong emotional tie[...]. In England I was all the time building up this picture in my head, an imaginary Japan.
When discussing his Japanese heritage and its influence on his upbringing, the author has stated
I’m not entirely like English people because I’ve been brought up by Japanese parents in a Japanese-speaking home. My parents didn’t realize that we were going to stay in this country for so long, they felt responsible for keeping me in touch with Japanese values. I do have a distinct background. I think differently, my perspectives are slightly different.
When asked to what extent he identifies as either Japanese or English the author insists
People are not two-thirds one thing and the remainder something else. Temperament, personality, or outlook don’t divide quite like that. The bits don’t separate clearly. You end up a funny homogeneous mixture. This is something that will become more common in the latter part of the century—people with mixed cultural backgrounds, and mixed racial backgrounds. That’s the way the world is going.
Personal
Ishiguro has been married to Lorna MacDougall, a social worker, since 1986. They met at the West London Cyrenians homelessness charity in Notting Hill, where Ishiguro was working as a residential resettlement worker. They have a daughter and live in London.
Awards and recognition
1982: Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize (A Pale View of Hills)
1983: Named a Granta Best Young British Novelist
1986: Whitbread Prize (An Artist of the Floating World)
1989: Booker Priz (The Remains of the Day)
1993: Named a Granta Best Young British Novelist
1995: Order of the British Empire (OBE)
1998: Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
2005: Never Let Me Go: listed in "100 greatest English language novels since 1923 the magazine formed in 1923"—Time magazine.
2008: Listed in "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945"—The Times (London)
2017: Nobel Prize for Literature
Except for A Pale View of Hills, all of Ishiguro's novels and his short story collection have been shortlisted for major awards. Most significantly, An Artist of the Floating World, When We Were Orphans, and Never Let Me Go, were all short-listed for the Booker Prize. A leaked account of a judging committee's meeting revealed that the committee found itself deciding between Never Let Me Go and John Banville's The Sea before awarding the prize to Banville.
Books
1982 - A Pale View of Hills
1986 - An Artist of the Floating World
1989 - The Remains of the Day
1995 - The Unconsoled
2000 - When We Were Orphans
2005 - Never Let Me Go
2009 - Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall
2015 - The Buried Giant
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/17/2015.)
Book Reviews
When We Were Orphans is [Ishiguro's] fullest achievement yet... with [this novel], Ishiguro appears to have found his synthesis, not only in its expansive yet finely modulated narrative but also in the way it bends the hallucinatory world of its immediate predecessor [The Unconsoled] toward the surface verisimilitude of the butler's story [in The Remains of the Day].
New York Times Book Review
Ishiguro shows immense tenderness for his characters. [The novel] confirms Ishiguro as one of Britain's mist formally daring and challenging novelists.
The Guardian (UK)
You seldom read a novel that so convinces you it is extending the possibilities of fiction. Ishiguro's abandonment of realism is not a defection from reality, but the contrary.
Sunday Times (London)
Set in Shanghai on the eve of World War II, Ishiguro's Booker-nominated novel follows the surreal predicament of Christopher Banks, an English expatriate whose overwrought state is perfectly rendered by narrator John Lee. After his parents are mysteriously kidnapped, nine-year-old Christopher is shipped off to England, where he grows up to become the Sherlock Holmes of his times—a man able to right wrongs, restore order. After 18 years, Banks returns to Shanghai with the bizarre notion that if he can find his parents, he can prevent the world war. Banks's search drags him through the era's Chinese-Japanese war in a masterful sequence where past and present, reality and imagination, good and evil become indistinguishable. Lee seamlessly renders Banks's complex psychology, but he employs an exaggerated nasal voice for the characters of several pompous Brits, and his Chinese and Japanese accents are often off-putting. But listeners probably won't let these small blemishes keep them from Ishiguro's much-acclaimed tale of abandonment, nostalgia and self-delusion.
Publishers Weekly
Atmosphere, historical detail, suspense: Ishiguro's new book has it all, and if the parts finally don't add up, the author should still be credited with providing another great read. He should also be credited with originality, for though he investigates the polarities of insider-outsider, English-foreign, as he has done before (e.g., The Remains of the Day; The Unconsoled), he is hardly writing the same book again and again. Here, Christopher Banks is an Englishman born in early 20th-century Shanghai whose parents disappear mysteriously when he is nine. He is escorted to England, grows up to be a famed detective, and returns to Shanghai, convinced that his parents are still alive and that he must find them. The reader is less convinced that Banks is a real detective and wonder how he can entertain the romantic notion that his parents have been held hostage in Shanghai for decades, but the truth behind their disappearance comes as a satisfying surprise. And the writing is just wonderful, at once rich and taut. More writers should take style lessons from Ishiguro. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal
An eerie, oddly beautiful tale from the internationally acclaimed author revolves around an enigmatic ordeal essentially similar to that undergone in Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (1995). This narrator, Christopher Banks, is a prominent English detective whose ratiocinative skills are severely tested by mysteries lodged in his own haunted past. Born in Shanghai, where his father was employed in the early 1900s by a powerful global trading company, Christopher spent most of his first decade sheltered in that otherwise turbulent city's secure International Settlement, only dimly aware of his mother's outspoken criticism of the ruinous opium trade (in which her husband's employer was heavily invested): a courageous stance that presumably led to the separate "disappearances" of both Banks parents, and their son's return to live with relatives in England. Twenty-some years later (in 1937), the eminent detective, now the beneficiary of a family legacy and the adoptive father of an(other) orphan, returns to Shanghai determined to rediscover the personal history taken from him long ago. But China is now imperiled by an increasingly violent Japanese military presence; old acquaintances assume inexplicably "foreign" shapes; every step taken toward recapturing his past confirms the indigenous axiom that "our childhood becomes like a foreign land once we have grown." The disturbing climax, set in an unsettled urban hell far from the placid environs of the International Settlement, leads to a bitterly ironic revelation of what was sacrificed in order that Christopher Banks might live, and the chastened realization that he is one of those(unconsoled?)"whose fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents." Elegiac, meditative, ultimately emotionally devastating, and the purest expression yet of the author's obsessive theme: the buried life unearthed by its contingent interconnection with the passions, secrets, and priorities of unignorable other lives.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The function of memory is already a major component of the narrative in the opening pages of the book: Christopher is writing in 1930 about something that happened in 1923, and within that memory are the memories of even earlier events. And throughout the book, what Christopher does and does not recollect, is of great concern for him. How has Ishiguro used the vagaries of Christopher's memory to shape the novel? How does the narrative itself mimic the ways in which memory functions?
2. What role does Sarah Hemmings play in this early part of the novel as it relates to Christopher? What is behind her urgent need to meet Sir Cecil? What is it about Sarah that moves Christopher to tell her about his past when he had told no one else in all the years he'd been in England? Why is he "surprised and slightly alarmed" [p. 72] to have opened up to her?
3. Before Christopher returns to Shanghai, the narrative hints at what we don't yet know, and at the complexity of what we will learn in the course of the novel. For instance, Christopher, speaking about his uncle Philip, says, "It is perfectly possible that at that stage [before the disappearance of Christopher's father] he wished nothing but good for me, that he had no more inkling than I did of the course of things to come" [p. 85]. What is Ishiguro's intention in using anticipatory passages such as this one? How does this narrative tool affect your reading of the novel?
4. There are hints of things to come for Christopher as an adult in his childhood detective games with Akira [p. 115], and in his staunch belief, just after his parents' disappearances, that detectives will find them [p. 27]. Where else do you see the man in the child? And conversely, the child in the man? Do these "hints" illuminate or confuse the narrative? How?
5. Christopher's return to Shanghai [pp. 165-67] is filled with unfamiliarity: the strange milling crowd at the Palace Hotel, the way his sight-lines are constantly being blocked, the custom of shoving. Why does Ishiguro shift the narrative here into a kind of subtle unreality where something is slightly off-kilter wherever Christopher goes? Is it a reflection of Christopher's disorientation or something else? Why is he surprised to find himself feeling disoriented in a place he hasn't been for some twenty years?
6. What do the people of the International Settlement expect of Christopher ("Mr. Banks, do you have any idea at all how relieved we all feel now that you're finally with us?" [p. 171])? What is their expectation based on? For his part, does Christopher imagine that everyone equates his case--the disappearance of his parents--with staving off an escalation of war? Does he come to believe it as well, or does he imagine that the people who express relief at his arrival are as concerned as he is with finding his parents? Or is it something else altogether? Is it clear what is at the root of this particular confusion?
7. What is Sir Cecil's role in the book? What is the significance of his candor, skepticism, world-weariness, and, finally, his physical and moral collapse in Shanghai?
8. When Sarah proposes to Christopher that he leave Shanghai with her, he acquiesces virtually without emotion [p. 230]. How do you explain his decision and the way it's made? What might he be answering to in himself when he agrees to go with her? And what causes him to change his mind at the last moment?
9. Christopher encounters many kinds of mazes in Shanghai: the streets he must navigate as a boy when his uncle Philip deserts him in the middle of the city; the crowds he negotiates at the Palace Hotel upon his return to the city; the rooms at the Lucky Chance house; the rooms at his old house; the streets he's driven through before he arrives at "the warren"; and, of course, the warren itself. What is the significance and function of the mazes in this novel?
10. The detective game that Christopher played with Akira just after Christopher's father disappears [pp. 118-120] presages, almost exactly, what happens in the warren. What is the implication of this?
11. Is the man whom Christopher recognizes as Akira [p. 268] really Akira? If not, why does Christopher need to believe he is?
12. "I'm beginning to see now, many things aren't as I supposed, " Christopher says [p. 299] after he is safely out of the warren. Why now? What other revelations are contained for Christopher in his failure to find his parents? He goes on to say: "[childhood] is hardly a foreign land to me. In many ways, it's where I've continued to live all my life." Has "living" in his childhood prevented Christopher from perceiving the circumstances of his own adult life with the same clarity he brings to his examinations of others' lives? What triggers the beginning of his "journey" toward that clarity?
13. What is Christopher's reaction when he learns that his mother finally cared nothing about the campaign against opium, and only about his well being? Does he have mixed feelings about it? Why? How do Christopher's own actions after he learns the truth about his parents, reflect his mother's shift from larger to more personal concerns years earlier?
14. How is Christopher's reaction to the news that Wang Ku was his benefactor characteristic or uncharacteristic of his behavior throughout the rest of the novel?
15. When Christopher finds his mother in Hong Kong and she fails to recognize him, he asks her if she can forgive her son for not finding her [p. 331]? Why do you think he feels he has never found her even though he has? What else might he think he needs to ask forgiveness for?
16. On page 49, we learn that Sarah Hemmings is also an orphan. Are Christopher and Sarah the "we" the title refers to? Or is there a more abstract significance to the title? What do you make of the suggestion in the title that it is possible that being an orphan is not a permanent condition?
17. On the last page of the novel, referring to himself and Sarah, Christopher writes: "But for those like us, our fate is to face the world as orphans chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents. There is nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can, for until we do so, we will be permitted no calm." How do these sentiments reflect back on the book? Do they clarify, or otherwise alter the understanding of it?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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When We Were Vikings
Andrew David MacDonald, 2020
Gallery/Scout Press
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781982126773
Summary
For Zelda, a twenty-one-year-old Viking enthusiast who lives with her older brother, Gert, life is best lived with some basic rules:
1. A smile means "thank you for doing something small that I liked."
2. Fist bumps and dabs = respect.
3. Strange people are not appreciated in her home.
4. Tomatoes in the middle of the sandwich do not get the bread wet.
5. Sometimes the most important things don’t fit on lists.
But when Zelda finds out that Gert has resorted to some questionable—and dangerous—methods to make enough money to keep them afloat, Zelda decides to launch her own quest.
Her mission: to be legendary. It isn’t long before Zelda finds herself in a battle that tests the reach of her heroism, her love for her brother, and the depth of her Viking strength. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Andrew David MacDonald grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He won a Western Magazine Award for Fiction, was shortlisted for the Canadian National Magazine Award for Fiction, and his work has been anthologized in four volumes of The Journey Prize Stories, collecting the year’s best Canadian stories from emerging writers.
MacDonald has an MFA from the Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Zelda is a marvel, a living, breathing three-dimensional character with a voice so distinctive she leaps off the page.… When We Were Vikings is the tale of Zelda’s quest for autonomy, and MacDonald charts her course admirably.
New York Times
Heartwarming and unforgettable.
People
In this engaging debut novel, MacDonald skillfully balances drama and violence with humor, highlighting how an unorthodox family unit is still a family.… With Zelda, he's created an unforgettable character, one whose distinctive voice is entertaining and inspiring.
Publishers Weekly
To give structure to her life, Zelda follows rules and makes lists, but she discovers that life can be chaotic and complicated.… In this well-written and compelling novel, MacDonald conveys Zelda's particular challenges and succeeds in bringing her to life. —Jacqueline Snider, Toronto
Library Journal
MacDonald's first novel is a truly original story filled with love, tragedy, heartache, and triumph, and his heroine is sure to inspire readers to be legendary themselves.
Booklist
In this engaging debut novel, MacDonald skillfully balances drama and violence with humor, highlighting how an unorthodox family unit is still a family…. With Zelda, he's created an unforgettable character, one whose distinctive voice is entertaining and inspiring.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. On page 13, Zelda says, "Deeds and actions are what will make a person great and legendary." Do you think Zelda’s deeds and actions throughout the book have given her legendary status? What about Gert’s or AK47’s? Discuss with your group.
2. In the beginning of the book, Zelda tells a woman, "Hurting children causes emotional unstability as adults." Discuss Zelda’s and Gert’s childhood. Do you think they were able to overcome the instability of their own childhoods and form meaningful relationships with others? Why or why not? Do you think it is possible for people to come out of a traumatic childhood unharmed?
3. Zelda frequently repeats wisdom she has learned from others, such as "we do not lie to people in our tribe." Share with your group something you learned from Zelda or your favorite Zelda quote. Have you applied any of Zelda’s wisdom to your own life?
4. Zelda often refers to the famous Viking skeleton that was recently discovered to be a woman and not a man. She also finds out that this Viking woman was a high-ranking warrior. How does this change Zelda’s outlook on life? What does this mean for her? Discuss her reaction in the context of gender representation in pop culture.
5. Gert can be categorized as both a villain and a hero. Discuss with the group his role as both archetypes. Do you think Gert is a good brother? Why or why not? Did you ever empathize with him? Why or why not? Discuss how the same actions can cause someone to be seen as a villain by some but as a hero by others.
6. One of Zelda’s driving forces throughout the novel is to be taken seriously and be seen as an adult. Where does Zelda’s need to be seen as a grown-up lead her, and how does this drive impact her life? How does Zelda defy others’ expectations of her?
7. Kepple’s Guide to the Vikings is an important tool for Zelda as she navigates the world. Discuss the value of books and libraries in your life. Was there a book such as Kepple’s Guide in your life that changed the way you viewed the world?
8. AK47 tells Zelda that "the world is too complicated to have rules for everything.
And when it comes to things like love and sex—you need to kind of figure them out on your own." Why do you think Zelda struggles when she doesn’t have a set of rules to follow?
9. Dr. Kepple tells Zelda that "sometimes life finds us, and when it does we have to rise to the occasion and have courage." How does Zelda demonstrate this at different points throughout the novel?
10. Zelda says she forgot Toucan was a villain when he was dying. How does Toucan’s death affect Zelda, AK47, and Gert?
11. In terms of Zelda’s Viking moral code, does Zelda’s killing of Toucan make her a villain or a hero? What do you think would have happened if Zelda never confronted him?
12. Dr. Kepple also says that "we make lists, rules, and try to order things, trying to control them, when actually the most important parts of life, the parts really worth cherishing, are the things that we don’t expect." Do you agree or disagree? Discuss with the group your most cherished moments and whether or not they were moments you expected.
13. On page 138, AK47 tells Zelda, "I love him, I do. And I want things to work. But it’s not so simple." Discuss the romantic relationship between Gert and AK47 versus between Zelda and Marxy.
14. By the end of the novel, Zelda has displayed constant bravery and heroism in the face of challenges and obstacles. Discuss with your group whether you know of anyone with a disability who has triumphed in a similar way, and how society at large can better help people like Zelda flourish.
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
When Will There Be Good News?
Kate Atkinson, 2008
Little, Brown & Co.
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316154857
Summary
Thirty years ago, six-year-old Joanna witnessed the brutal murders of her mother, brother and sister, before escaping into a field, and running for her life. Now, the man convicted of the crime is being released from prison, meaning Dr. Joanna Hunter has one more reason to dwell on the pain of that day, especially with her own infant son to protect.
Sixteen-year-old Reggie, recently orphaned and wise beyond her years, works as a nanny for Joanna Hunter, but has no idea of the woman’s horrific past. All Reggie knows is that Dr. Hunter cares more about her baby than life itself, and that the two of them make up just the sort of family Reggie wished she had: that unbreakable bond, that safe port in the storm. When Dr. Hunter goes missing, Reggie seems to be the only person who is worried, despite the decidedly shifty business interests of Joanna’s husband, Neil, and the unknown whereabouts of the newly freed murderer, Andrew Decker.
Across town, Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe is looking for a missing person of her own, murderer David Needler, whose family lives in terror that he will return to finish the job he started. So it’s not surprising that she listens to Reggie’s outrageous thoughts on Dr. Hunter’s disappearance with only mild attention. But when ex-police officer and Private Investigator, Jackson Brodie arrives on the scene, with connections to Reggie and Joanna Hunter of his own, the details begin tosnap into place. And, as Louise knows, once Jackson is involved there’s no telling how many criminal threads he will be able to pull together — or how many could potentially end up wrapped around his own neck.
In an extraordinary virtuoso display, Kate Atkinson has produced one of the most engrossing, masterful, and piercingly insightful novels of this or any year. It is also as hilarious as it is heartbreaking, as Atkinson weaves in and out of the lives of her eccentric, grief-plagued, and often all-too-human cast. Yet out of the excesses of her characters and extreme events that shake their worlds comes a relatively simple message, about being good, loyal, and true. When Will There Be Good News? shows us what it means to survive the past and the present, and to have the strength to just keep on keeping on. (From the publisher.)
This is the third in the Jackson Brodie series, following Case Histories and One Good Turn.
Author Bio
• Birth—1951
• Where—York, England, UK
• Education—M.A., Dundee University
• Awards—Whitbread Award; Woman's Own Short Story Award; Ian St. James Award;
Saltire Book of the Year Award; Prix Westminster
• Currently—lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
Kate Atkinson was born in York, and studied English Literature at the University of Dundee, gaining her Masters Degree in 1974. She subsequently studied for a doctorate in American Literature which she failed at the viva stage. During her final year of this course, she was married for the first time, although the marriage lasted only two years.
After leaving the university, she took on a variety of miscellaneous jobs from home help to legal secretary and teacher. She lived in Whitby, Yorkshire for a time, before moving to Edinburgh, where she taught at Dundee University and began writing short stories. She now lives in Edinburgh.
Writing
She initially wrote for women's magazines after winning the 1986 Woman's Own Short Story Competition. She was runner-up for the Bridport Short Story Prize in 1990 and won an Ian St James Award in 1993 for her short-story "Karmic Mothers," which she later adapted for BBC2 television as part of its Tartan Shorts series.
Atkinson's breakthrough was with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, which won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year award, ahead of Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh and Roy Jenkins biography of William Ewart Gladstone. The book has been adapted for radio, theatre and television. She has since written several more novels, short stories and a play. Case Histories (2004) was described by Stephen King as "the best mystery of the decade." The book won the Saltire Book of the Year Award and the Prix Westminster.
Her work is often celebrated for its wit, wisdom and subtle characterisation, and the surprising twists and plot turns. Four of her novels have featured the popular former detective Jackson Brodie—Case Histories (2004), One Good Turn (2006), When Will There Be Good News (2008), and Started Early, Took My Dog (2010). She has shown that, stylistically, she is also a comic novelist who often juxtaposes mundane everyday life with fantastic magical events, a technique that contributes to her work's pervasive magic realism.
Life After Life (2013) revolves around Ursula Todd's continual birth and rebirth. Janet Maslin of the New York Times called it "a big book that defies logic, chronology and even history in ways that underscore its author's fully untethered imagination."
A God in Ruins (2015), the companion book to Life After Life, follows Ursula's brother Todd who survived the war, only to succumb to disillusionment and guilt at having survived.
Atkinson was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2011 Birthday Honours for services to literature. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
A deliciously underhanded, echo-filled novel…Although When Will There Be Good News? has been expertly rendered by Ms. Atkinson, it is a reminder that she is too versatile a writer to stick with any one incarnation. It is very much to be hoped that she keeps this gratifying series going. But she has already shown herself capable of creating a varied body of work, starting with her debut novel, the Whitbread prizewinner Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Good as it is, this latest Brodie book nearly bursts at the seams. It shows off an imagination so active that When Will There Be Good News? can barely contain it.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Thank God, in these hard times, for a cheerful, ghoulish, gory book like this....This is a grand mystery, with plenty of misdeeds and overwrought coincidences, as well as quotes from Scots ballads, old nursery rhymes and the classics, so you can feel edified while being creeped out—as you wait for that happy ending we all long for, and think we deserve.
Carolyn See - Washington Post
(Starred review.) In Atkinson's stellar third novel to feature ex-cop turned PI Jackson Brodie (after Case Histories and One Good Turn), unrelated characters and plot lines collide with momentous results. On a country road, six-year-old Joanna Mason is the only survivor of a knife attack that leaves her mother and two siblings dead. Thirty years later, after boarding the wrong train in Yorkshire, Brodie is almost killed when the train crashes. He's saved by 16-year-old Regina Reggie Chase, the nanny of Dr. Joanna Hunter, nee Mason. In the chaos following the crash, Brodie ends up with the wallet of Andrew Decker, the recently released man convicted of murdering the Mason family. Enter DCI Louise Monroe, Brodie's former love interest, who's tracking Decker because of a recent case involving a similar family and crime. When Dr. Hunter disappears, Reggie is convinced she's been kidnapped and enlists the reluctant Brodie to track her down. A lesser author would buckle under so many story lines, but Atkinson juggles them brilliantly, simultaneously tying up loose ends from Turn and opening new doors for further Brodie misadventures.
Publishers Weekly
Evocative, smart, literary, and funny, Atkinson's third novel featuring one-time police detective Jackson Brodie (after Case Histories and One Good Turn) is both complicated and a page-turner. Set mostly around Edinburgh, Scotland, the tale begins with a six-year-old girl escaping an attacker who kills her mother, eight-year-old sister, and baby brother. Atkinson then weaves a plot that connects Brodie to the girl, now an adult, through coincidence and more tragedy, this time a train wreck. Detective Chief Inspector Louise Morse, who has a thing for Brodie, returns to his life, and a new character appears: Reggie, an orphaned 16-year-old girl with a criminal for a brother and a desire to study for her A-levels even though she has dropped out of school. The characters quote literature (sometimes in Latin), and fabulous turns of phrase abound, but the narrative remains buoyant; it is sprinkled liberally with humorous observations (particularly from Reggie), making each wild turn of events seem like just another bump in the road. A book that will easily stand up to more than one reading; highly recommended for all fiction collections.
Nancy Fontaine - Library Journal
A third appearance for former police investigator and private detective Jackson Brodie in this psychologically astute thriller from Atkinson (Case Histories and One Good Turn). In the emotional opening, six-year-old Joanna witnesses the brutal killing of her mother and siblings by a knife-wielding madman in the British countryside. Thirty years later, Joanna, now a doctor in Edinburgh, has become a mother herself. Her baby's nanny is 16-year-old Reggie. To Reggie, whose own mother recently died in a freak accident, Joanna and her baby represent an ideal family (Joanna's husband, a struggling businessman, seems only a vaguely irritating irrelevance to fatherless Reggie). When prickly, self-loathing policewoman Louise Monroe comes to call on lovely, warm-hearted Joanna, watchful Reggie (think Ellen Page from Juno with a Scottish brogue) is struck by the similarities between the two well-dressed professional women. Actually Louise has come to warn Joanna that her family's murderer is being released from prison. Louise chooses not to mention her other reason for visiting, a suspicion that Joanna's husband torched one of his failing businesses for the insurance. Jackson's connection to the others is revealed gradually: Jackson and Louise were once almost lovers although they since married others; as a youth Jackson joined the search party that found Joanna hiding in a field following the murders. Rattled after visiting a child he suspects he fathered despite the mother's denials, Jackson mistakenly takes the train to Edinburgh instead of London. When the train crashes near the house where Reggie happens to be watching TV, she gives him CPR. Soon afterward, Joanna's husband tells Reggie that Joanna has gone away unexpectedly. Suspecting foul play, Reggie involves Louise and Jackson in individual searches for the missing woman and baby. While Louise and Jackson face truths about themselves and their relationships, Joanna's survival instincts are once more put to the ultimate test. Like the most riveting BBC mystery, in which understated, deadpan intelligence illuminates characters' inner lives within a convoluted plot.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Kate Atkinson is an author formerly known as a prize-winning literary writer, but with the three Jackson Brodie novels, she has introduced elements of the traditional crime novel. What do you think turns a novel into a "crime" novel? Don’t all good novels that catch the public imagination have elements of the crime novel: a sense of suspense, a mystery, a violent death or two? What crime novel conventions can you discern in this book?
2. Kate Atkinson always creates very strong female characters. What do you think about the women in this novel – Dr Hunter, Reggie, Louise? And what about the men: are they generally weaker than the women, and does this make it a feminist novel?
3. The initial tragedy that opens the books is reminiscent of familiar high-profile news stories. What is it about those cases of random violence that make them so very haunting? Does it have something to do with the fact that when mothers are attacked they can’t run, because they feel the need to stay and protect their children?
4. Similarly, it would appear that Kate Atkinson used the Selby train crash as the inspiration for the train crash in the novel. Discuss the impact of these tragedies on the nation’s morale. Do you think Kate speaks for us all when she asks When Will There Be Good News?
5. Jackson Brodie believes that "there are no rules. There isn’t a template we’re supposed to follow. We make it up as we go along." Do you feel this statement also applies to Kate Atkinson’s writing – and to real life itself?
6. "How ironic that both Julia and Louise, the two women he’d felt closest to in his recent past, had both unexpectedly got married, and neither of them to him." Do you think Kate Atkinson should ever allow Jackson Brodie to have a successful romantic relationship? Why do you think he is such an appealing character?
7. Jackson Brodie believes that "a coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen." Discuss the coincidences in the novel. Do they make the story seem more or less real? If Kate Atkinson had written a conventional crime novel, would it be as appropriate to use coincidence to move the plot forward?
8. There are "good" characters and "evil" characters in the novel, but Kate Atkinson is rarely black and white in her portrayal of either. Louise, Reggie and Jackson Brodie are essentially good, but will break the law to achieve the right result. What is the moral code at work in the novel?
9. "As in the best crime fiction, dramatic events and unexpected twists abound, but Atkinson subverts the genre by refusing to neatly tie up every thread." (From the UK's Independent). Did you notice any loose threads in the plot?
10. The British pride themselves on their dry wit in the face of adversity. Despite the bleakness of the subject matter and the streak of sadness running through the novel, Kate Atkinson’s writing is often very funny. What did you find humorous about the book, and do you think that it’s a particularly British sort of humour?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Where Angels Fear to Tread
E.M. Forster, 1905
160-200 pp. (varies by publisher)
Summary
"Let her go to Italy!" he cried. "Let her meddle with what she doesn't understand! Look at this letter! The man who wrote it will marry her, or murder her, or do for her somehow. He's a bounder, but he's not an English bounder. He's mysterious and terrible. He's got a country behind him that's upset people from the beginning of the world."
When a young English widow takes off on the grand tour and along the way marries a penniless Italian, her in-laws are not amused. That the marriage should fail and poor Lilia die tragically are only to be expected. But that Lilia should have had a baby—and that the baby should be raised as an Italian! —are matters requiring immediate correction by Philip Herriton, his dour sister Harriet, and their well-meaning friend Miss Abbott.
In his first novel, E. M. Forster anticipated the themes of cultural collision and the sterility of the English middle class that he would develop in A Room with a View and A Passage to India.
Where Angels Fear to Tread is an accomplished, harrowing, and malevolently funny book, in which familiar notions of vice and virtue collapse underfoot and the best intentions go mortally awry. (Summary from Random House.)
The novel was adapted to film in 1991, starring Rupert Graves, Helena Bonham Carter, Giovanni Guidelli, Judy Davis, and Helen Mirren.
Author Bio
• Birth—January 1, 1879
• Where—London, UK
• Death—June 7, 1970
• Where—Coventry, UK
• Education—B. A., (two: in classics and in history); M.A.,
Cambridge
Edward Morgan Forster was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. Forster's humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect." His 1908 novel, A Room with a View, is his most optimistic work, while A Passage to India (1924) brought him his greatest success.
Early years
Forster was born into an Anglo-Irish and Welsh middle-class family at 6 Melcombe Place, Dorset Square, London NW1, in a building that no longer exists. He was the only child of Alice Clara "Lily" (nee Whichelo) and Edward Morgan Llewellyn Forster, an architect. His name was officially registered as Henry Morgan Forster, but at his baptism he was accidentally named Edward Morgan Forster. To distinguish him from his father, he was always called Morgan. His father died of tuberculosis in 1880, before Morgan's second birthday.
He inherited £8,000 (£659,300 as of 2013) from his paternal great-aunt Marianne Thornton (daughter of the abolitionist Henry Thornton), who died in 1887. The money was enough to live on and enabled him to become a writer. He attended the notable public school Tonbridge School in Kent as a day boy. The theatre at the school has been named in his honour.
At King's College, Cambridge, between 1897 and 1901, he became a member of a discussion society known as the Apostles (formally named the Cambridge Conversazione Society). Many of its members went on to constitute what came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group, of which Forster was a peripheral member in the 1910s and 1920s. There is a famous recreation of Forster's Cambridge at the beginning of The Longest Journey.
After leaving university, he travelled in continental Europe with his mother. In 1914, he visited Egypt, Germany and India with the classicist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, by which time he had written all but one of his novels. In the First World War, as a conscientious objector, Forster volunteered for the International Red Cross, and served in Alexandria, Egypt.
Forster spent a second spell in India in the early 1920s as the private secretary to Tukojirao III, the Maharajah of Dewas. The Hill of Devi is his non-fictional account of this period. After returning to London from India, he completed his last novel, A Passage to India (1924), for which he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.
After A Passage to India
In the 1930s and 1940s Forster became a successful broadcaster on BBC Radio and a public figure associated with the Union of Ethical Societies. He was awarded a Benson Medal in 1937.
Forster was a closeted homosexual and lifelong bachelor. He developed a long-term, loving relationship with Bob Buckingham, a married policeman. Forster included Buckingham and his wife May in his circle, which included J. R. Ackerley, a writer and literary editor of The Listener, the psychologist W. J. H. Sprott and, for a time, the composer Benjamin Britten. Other writers with whom Forster associated included the poet Siegfried Sassoon and the Belfast-based novelist Forrest Reid.
From 1925 until his mother's death at age 90 in 1945, Forster lived with her at West Hackhurst, Abinger Hammer, finally leaving in 1946. His London base was 26 Brunswick Square from 1930 to 1939, after which he rented 9 Arlington Park Mansions in Chiswick until at least 1961.
Forster was elected an honorary fellow of King's College, Cambridge in 1946 and lived for the most part in the college, doing relatively little. He declined a knighthood in 1949 and was made a Companion of Honour in 1953. In 1969 he was made a member of the Order of Merit. Forster died of a stroke at the Buckinghams' home in Coventry on June 7, 1970. He was 91.
Novels
Forster had five novels published in his lifetime. Although Maurice was published shortly after his death, it had been written nearly sixty years earlier. He never finished a seventh novel Arctic Summer.
His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), is the story of Lilia, a young English widow who falls in love with an Italian man, and of the efforts of her bourgeois relatives to get her back from Monteriano (based on San Gimignano). Philip Herriton's mission to retrieve her from Italy has features in common with that of Lambert Strether in Henry James's The Ambassadors. Forster discussed that work ironically and somewhat disapprovingly in his book Aspects of the Novel (1927). Where Angels Fear to Tread was adapted to film in 1991.
Next, Forster published The Longest Journey (1907), an inverted bildungsroman following the lame Rickie Elliott from Cambridge to a career as a struggling writer and then to a post as a schoolmaster, married to the unappealing Agnes Pembroke. In a series of scenes on the hills of Wiltshire, which introduce Rickie's wild half-brother Stephen Wonham, Forster attempts a kind of sublime related to those of Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence.
Forster's third novel, A Room with a View (1908), is his lightest and most optimistic. It was started as early as 1901, before any of his others; its earliest versions are entitled "Lucy." The book explores the young Lucy Honeychurch's trip to Italy with her cousin, and the choice she must make between the free-thinking George Emerson and the repressed aesthete Cecil Vyse. George's father Mr Emerson quotes thinkers who influenced Forster, including Samuel Butler. A Room with a View was adapted as a film in 1985 by the Merchant-Ivory team.
Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room with a View can be seen collectively as Forster's Italian novels. Both include references to the famous Baedeker guidebooks and concern narrow-minded middle-class English tourists abroad. The books share many themes with his short stories collected in The Celestial Omnibus and The Eternal Moment.
Howards End (1910) is an ambitious "condition-of-England" novel concerned with different groups within the Edwardian middle classes, represented by the Schlegels (bohemian intellectuals), the Wilcoxes (thoughtless plutocrats) and the Basts (struggling lower-middle-class aspirants). Critics have observed that numerous characters in Forster's novels die suddenly. This is true of Where Angels Fear to Tread, Howards End and, most particularly, The Longest Journey.
Forster achieved his greatest success with A Passage to India (1924). The novel takes as its subject the relationship between East and West, seen through the lens of India in the later days of the British Raj. Forster connects personal relationships with the politics of colonialism through the story of the Englishwoman Adela Quested, the Indian Dr. Aziz, and the question of what did or did not happen between them in the Marabar Caves. Forster makes special mention of the author Ahmed Ali and his Twilight in Delhi in his Preface to its Everyman's Library Edition.
Maurice (1971) was published posthumously. It is a homosexual love story which also returns to matters familiar from Forster's first three novels, such as the suburbs of London in the English home counties, the experience of attending Cambridge, and the wild landscape of Wiltshire. The novel was controversial, given that Forster's homosexuality had not been previously known or widely acknowledged. Today's critics continue to argue over the extent to which Forster's sexuality and personal activities influenced his writing.
Critical reception
In the United States, interest in, and appreciation for, Forster was spurred by Lionel Trilling's E. M. Forster: A Study, which began:
E. M. Forster is for me the only living novelist who can be read again and again and who, after each reading, gives me what few writers can give us after our first days of novel-reading, the sensation of having learned something. (Trilling 1943).
Key themes
Forster was President of the Cambridge Humanists from 1959 until his death and a member of the Advisory Council of the British Humanist Association from 1963 until his death. His views as a humanist are at the heart of his work, which often depicts the pursuit of personal connections in spite of the restrictions of contemporary society.
His humanist attitude is expressed in the non-fictional essay "What I Believe." When Forster’s cousin, Philip Whichelo, donated a portrait of Forster to the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association (GLHA), Jim Herrick, the founder, quoted Forster's words: "The humanist has four leading characteristics—curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race."
Two of Forster's best-known works, A Passage to India and Howards End, explore the irreconcilability of class differences. A Room with a View also shows how questions of propriety and class can make human connection difficult. The novel is his most widely read and accessible work, remaining popular long after its original publication. His posthumous novel Maurice explores the possibility of class reconciliation as one facet of a homosexual relationship.
Sexuality is another key theme in Forster's works. Some critics have argued that a general shift from heterosexual to homosexual love can be observed through the course of his writing career. The foreword to Maurice describes his struggle with his homosexuality, while he explored similar issues in several volumes of short stories. Forster's explicitly homosexual writings, the novel Maurice and the short story collection The Life to Come, were published shortly after his death.
Forster is noted for his use of symbolism as a technique in his novels, and he has been criticised (as by his friend Roger Fry) for his attachment to mysticism. One example of his symbolism is the wych elm tree in Howards End. The characters of Mrs. Wilcox in that novel and Mrs. Moore in A Passage to India have a mystical link with the past, and a striking ability to connect with people from beyond their own circles. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/25/2013.)
Book Reviews
(Older works have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
The...contest over the possession of a child between the parent who survives and the relatives of a parent who is dead, is familiar and ordinary enough, but the setting and treatment of this motive are almost startlingly original.... It is a protest against the worship of conventionalities, and especially against the conventionalities of "refinement" and "respectability"; it takes the form of a sordid comedy culminating, unexpectedly and with a real dramatic force, in a grotesque tragedy.
Guardian (UK - 8/30/1905)
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 Where Angels Fear to Tread:
1. At what is Forster taking aim in this book? To whom or what is his satire directed?
2. What kind of woman is Lilia Herriton? Why have her in-laws decided to send her to Italy—and why is Carolyn Abbot chosen as her companion (chaperone?), a woman more than 10 years Lilia's junior?
3. Talk about the quotation from the opening lines of Dante's Inferno, which Lilia includes in a letter back to England: "one does really feel in the heart of things, and off the beaten path." What does Lilia mean...and what does it portend?
4. Describe each of the Herritons—Mrs. Herriton, Harriet and Philip? How are they alike...and how do they differ? Why are they opposed to Lilia's marriage to Gino Carella?
5. Why does Gino marry Lilia? Is he honorable? Does he love her? Does Gino change by the end of the novel...or does your view of him change?
6. Philip is sent to Italy to try to stop the marriage. He says to Gino: She is English, you are Italian; she are accustomed to one thing, you to another." How does that dichotomy play itself out, over and over, in the novel?
7. Why does Carolyn Abbot take it upon herself to bring the Lilia and Gino's baby back to England? She becomes a spy in Italy because she suspects that the Herritons' desire to recover the baby is insincere. Is she correct?
8. What are Mrs. Herriton and Harriet primarily concerned about? Why do they want the baby? What right—legally or morally—do they have to the child?
9. Why is Philip attracted to Italy? What is it meant to suggest about him...and his commitment to English gentility?
10. What is the symbolic significance of Lucia de Lammermoor—why might Forster have selected that particular opera as part of the story? (You might want to do a little research.)
11.. Why do Philip and Carolyn soften toward Gino?
12. Carolyn puts the dilemma of the baby succinctly when she asks Philip...
Do you want the child to stop with his father, who loves him and will bring him up badly, or do you want him to come to Sawston, where no one loves him, but where he will be brought up well?
Is Carolyn's assessment of the situation correct—e.g., would Gino bring the baby up badly? Where do you think the solution lies?
13. What do you make of Philip's remark to Carolyn:
Miss Abbott, don’t worry over me. Some people are born not to do things. I’m one of them.... I never expect anything to happen now, and so I am never disappointed.... I seem fated to pass through the world without colliding with it or moving it.
14. Twice in the novel mirrors are mentioned in connection with Philip—once as a school boy, and again on the train returning to Sawston. What is the symbolic significance of Philip and the mirrors?
15. In what way is Philip at the center of the novel? Is he the story's hero? Or is Carolyn?
16. Philip says to Carolyn:
Society is invincible—to a certain degree. But your real life is your own, and nothing can touch it. There is no power on earth that can prevent your criticizing and despising mediocrity—nothing that can stop you retreating into splendour and beauty—into the thoughts and beliefs that make the real life—the real you.
Does Philip, himself, have a "real you"? Does he live up to his own pronouncements? Does Philip have a future as an independent, deliberate being?
17. Do Carolyn and Philip have a future together as a couple?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Where the Crawdads Sing
Delia Owens, 2018
Penguin Publishing
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780735219090
Summary
How long can you protect your heart?
For years, rumors of the "Marsh Girl" have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl.
But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand.
Then the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. When two young men from town become intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new life--until the unthinkable happens.
Perfect for fans of Barbara Kingsolver and Karen Russell, Where the Crawdads Sing is at once an exquisite ode to the natural world, a heartbreaking coming-of-age story, and a surprising tale of possible murder.
Owens reminds us that we are forever shaped by the children we once were, and that we are all subject to the beautiful and violent secrets that nature keeps. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Delia Owens is the co-author of three internationally bestselling nonfiction books about her life as a wildlife scientist in Africa—Cry of the Kalahari, The Eye of the Elephant, and Secrets of the Savanna.
She has won the John Burroughs Award for Nature Writing and has been published in Nature, The African Journal of Ecology, and International Wildlife, among many others. She currently lives in Idaho, where she continues her support for the people and wildlife of Zambia. Where the Crawdads Sing is her first novel. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
A painfully beautiful first novel that is at once a murder mystery, a coming-of-age narrative and a celebration of nature…. Owens here surveys the desolate marshlands of the North Carolina coast through the eyes of an abandoned child. And in her isolation that child makes us open our own eyes to the secret wonders—and dangers—of her private world.
New York Times Book Review
In Owens’s evocative debut…Kya makes for an unforgettable heroine. Owens memorably depicts the small-town drama and courtroom theatrics, but perhaps best of all is her vivid portrayal of the singular North Carolina setting.
Publishers Weekly
Lyrical.… Its appeal ris[es] from Kya’s deep connection to the place where makes her home, and to all of its creatures.
Booklist
A wild child's isolated, dirt-poor upbringing in a Southern coastal wilderness fails to shield her from heartbreak or an accusation of murder.… Despite some distractions, there's an irresistible charm to Owens' first foray into nature-infused romantic fiction.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The North Carolina marsh where Kya lives has long been a sanctuary for outsiders. How does this setting shape the novel? How does growing up in this isolation affect Kya? In what ways does her status as an "outsider" change how others see her?
2. Why does Kya choose not to go back to school? Do you think she makes the wrong decision? How does Kya’s lack of formal education shape her vision of the world? Would her character be different if she had gone to school?
3. After Jodie and Pa leave Kya alone, she becomes close to Jumpin’ and Mabel. Why are these two adults drawn to Kya? What do they teach her about the world? Do you agree with Jumpin’s decision to protect Kya from social services (p. 110) and to encourage her to live alone in the marsh? Why or why not?
4. Why do you think Kya’s mother leaves in the beginning? Do you agree with her decision?
5. Kya often watches the other young people from town—she even nicknames them "Tallskinnyblonde, Ponytailfreckleface, Shortblackhair, Alwayswearspearls, and Roundchubbycheeks" (p. 80). What does Kya learn from observing these girls? Why do you think she keeps her watching secret? Do you agree with Kya’s secrecy?
6. How is womanhood explored throughout the novel? What does being a woman mean to Kya? How does she relate to the other women in Barkley Cove?
7. Discuss Kya’s relationship with Tate. How does Tate’s understanding of Kya change over time? Is Tate a good partner for Kya? Why or why not?
8. Tate’s father tells him that poems are important because "they make ya feel something" (p. 48). What does poetry mean to Tate? What does it mean to Kya? How does poetry help Kya throughout the novel?
9. On page 142, Kya watches the fireflies near her shack, and notices that the females can change their flashes to signal different things. What does this realization mean to Kya? What does it teach her about relationships? How does this lesson influence Kya’s decisions in the second half of the novel?
10. Discuss how Kya’s observations of nature shape her vision of the world. Do you think these lessons adequately prepare her for life in Barkley Cove? Do you think human society follows the same rules as the natural world? Should it? Why or why not?
11. Is Chase a different kind of man than Tate? How are they different? Is one man better? Do you think that their differences are biological or learned? How does Kya see each man?
12. By the end of the novel, Kya has come to realize…
Most of what she knew, she’d learned from the wild. Nature had nurtured, tutored, and protected her when no one else would. If consequences resulted from her behaving differently, then they too were functions of life’s fundamental core (p. 363).
What does she mean? Do you agree with her philosophy? What do you think it means to be a good person? Do you think Kya is a good person? Why or why not?
13. Were you surprised by the verdict in the Chase’s murder trial? What about by the ending of the novel? Do you agree with Tate’s final decision? Why or why not?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
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