Now & Then
Jacqueline Sheehan, 2009
HarperCollins
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061547782
Summary
Living a dog's life...now and then.
Anna O'Shea has failed at marriage, shed her job at a law firm, and she's trying to re-create herself when she and her recalcitrant nephew are summoned to the past in a manner that nearly destroys them.
Her twenty-first-century skills pale as she struggles to find her nephew in nineteenth-century Ireland. For one of them, the past is brutally difficult, filled with hunger and struggle. For the other, the past is filled with privilege, status, and a reprieve from the crushing pain of present-day life. For both Anna and her nephew, the past offers them a chance at love.
Will every choice they make reverberate down through time? And do Irish Wolfhounds carry the soul of the ancient celts?
The past and present wrap around finely wrought characters who reveal the road home. Mystical, charming, and fantastic, New York Times bestselling author Jacqueline Sheehan's Now & Then is a poignant and beautiful tale of a remarkable journey.
It is a miraculous evocation of a breathtaking place in a volatile age filled with rich, unforgettable, deeply human characters and one unforgettable dog named Madigan. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Jacqueline Sheehan, Ph.D., is a fiction writer and essayist. She is a New Englander through and through, but spent twenty years living in the western states of Oregon, California, and New Mexico doing a variety of things, including house painting, freelance photography, newspaper writing, clerking in a health food store, and directing a traveling troupe of high school puppeteers.
Currently on the faculty of Writers in Progress and Grub Street in Massachusetts, she also offers international workshops on the combination of yoga and writing. She writes travel articles about lesser-known destinations and lives in Massachusetts.
Novels
Sheehan's books include Truth (2003), reissued as The Comet's Tale: A Novel About Sojurner Truth (2011); Now & Then (2009); two Peaks Island novels, Lost & Found (2007) and Picture This (2012); and, most recently, The Center of the World (2015). (Adapted from the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[S]pellbinding.... Anna O'Shea becomes a time-traveling ex-wife when she returns from a vacation in Ireland and is enlisted to pick up her brother Patrick's son from jail in Newark.... Throw in loyal Irish wolfhound Madigan, and you've got an altogether enjoyable romantic adventure.
Publishers Weekly
Sheehan basically transforms a contemporary novel into a historical one, with all the period detail and sense of place for which such works are judged and appreciated. She reminds us that those who came before were no less savvy...and that by accepting the past, we might just change the future. —Bette-Lee Fox
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. Anna and Joseph’s time traveling experience is dreamlike, with aquatic and primal overtones. Their journey to the past leaves them barely alive. Did the descriptions of time travel in Now & Then surprise you? What notions of time travel do you have that Now & Then either defied or complied with?
2. Glenis says to Anna, ‘You say yes or no like the English do, as if all the world fits only one way or the other. We don’t think that way. You see, the hope can’t be scratched out of us. There is always a place where a thing is mostly not, or tis, but for a wee bit. We Irish are much more specific about what is and what is not.” How do you think living in the ‘modern world’ has shaped our relationship with language as a society, and for you as an individual?
3. In the past, Anna “had started to adjust to the interminable pauses between sentences that people of this time used. No one talked over the middle of someone else’s sentence. And they were profoundly good listeners… No one was multitasking here.” Do you think, with the role technology plays in our lives today, that we’ve lost a bit of our ability to communicate with each other, or that our quality of communication has changed?
4. Anna and Joseph find themselves in vastly different circumstances upon their ‘rescue’ in Ireland. Anna must quickly conform to a hard-scrabble existence of living off the land, while Joseph falls into the lap of luxury living at the colonel’s estate. What do they learn from their experiences on the end of the quality-of-life spectrum? How do you think the story would have been different if Anna had been rescued by the colonel’s men, and Joseph had to pull his weight on Glenis and Tom’s farm?
5. Anna and Joseph both find love in the past. What do their romances in Ireland teach them about the people they were, and the people they can become?
6. Taleen’s outburst sheds new light onto the O’Shea’s troubled family line, where fathers and sons are incapable of expressing love toward each other. What is revealed about Joseph’s peculiar place in his lineage? Do you believe curses can run through families?
7. It’s mentioned several times that there are severe penalties facing Irish who are caught speaking Gaelic, their native language. What other ways does the English rule try to break the spirit of the Irish people?
8. All of the women Anna and Joseph encounter in Ireland are strong and willful in their own way --- Glenis, Deidre, Taleen, Biddy Early. What do Anna and Joseph --- strangers from another time --- admire most about them, and what are the important lessons they learn from them?
9. What aspects of life in 1844 Ireland struck you as most surprisingly different from how we live today? What would you miss most if the modern amenities we are used to suddenly weren’t at your disposal?
10. What significance do the Irish Wolfhounds and Madigan have in Now & Then? Do you feel the magical and mystical elements in the story seem more believable in the story that takes place in the past versus the present-day plot?
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)