The Gin Lovers
Jamie Brenner, 2013
St. Martin's Press
439 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250035936
Summary
What price would you pay for happiness? For Charlotte, freedom from her marriage might be the one thing she can’t afford.
It’s 1925, and the Victorian era with its confining morals is all but dead. Unfortunately, for New York socialite Charlotte Delacorte, the scandalous flapper revolution is little more than a headline in the tabloids. Living with her rigid and controlling husband William, her Fifth Avenue townhouse is a gilded cage.
But when William’s rebellious younger sister, the beautiful and brash Mae, comes to live with them after the death of their mother, Charlotte finds entrée to a world beyond her wildest dreams—and a handsome and mysterious stranger whom she imagines is as confident in the bedroom as he is behind the bar of his forbidden speakeasy.
Soon, Charlotte realizes that nothing is as it seems. Secrets are kept and discovered, loves are lost and found, and Charlotte is finds herself on the brink of losing everything—or having it all. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Aka—Logan Belle
• Birth—March 24, 1971
• Where—Philadelphia, PA, USA
• Education—B.A., George Washington University
• Currently—lives in New York City, New york
Jamie Brenner, also writing as Logan Belle, grew up in Main Line Philadelphia on a steady diet of Judith Krantz, Jackie Collins, and Aaron Spelling. Her novel The Gin Lovers was praised by Fresh Fiction as one of the Top Thirteen Books to read in 2013.
Writing under the pen name Logan Belle, Jamie is the author of the upcoming Miss Chatterley (Pocket Star/Simon & Schuster), a modern day re-telling of D.H. Lawrence’s erotic classic Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Also writing as Logan Belle, she published the erotic romance The Librarian (Pocket Star) which has been translated into a dozen languages, and the burlesque trilogy Blue Angel (Kensington).
Jamie has worked in book publishing as a scout, publicist, and agent. She currently lives in New York City, where she is busy raising two daughters who aren't allowed to read her books. (See the author's website.)
Book Reviews
“13 Books to read in 2013″
FreshFiction.com (seen on Good Morning Texas)
Brimming with passion, romance, flappers, speakeasies, prohibition and love, this story will bring the Manhattan of the 1920’s to life right before your eyes.
Romance Junkies
It almost brought me to tears, and the writing was so well-crafted that for the amount of time it took me to read this, I was living in this world.
Under the Covers
I was hooked on all the drama!
Impressions of a Reader
It truly is a soap opera, it's just on paper and not on the screen.
Heroes and Heartbreakers
Discussion Questions
1. What is your first impression of Charlotte Delacorte? How does your impression of her change over the course of the book? Do you think she is fundamentally the same person at the end of the story? Why or why not?
2. Which characters in the novel represent the old world, and what characters represent the changing times? Is either set of characters all good or all bad? Is there a way to have the best of both worlds?
3. Although Charlotte’s mother-in-law, Geraldine, dies before the book begins, it could be argued that she had as much influence over the course of events as anyone else in the novel. Would William and Charlotte have had a successful marriage if Geraldine had remained in the picture? If so, could Charlotte have been happy in her role as Mrs. William Delacorte?
4. Boom Boom and Amelia are both scheming and ruthless women in their own ways. With whom do you empathize more and why? And do you think they had to scheme to get what they wanted as women at the time? Why?
5. Money plays a big role in this novel – for those who have it, and those who do not. What couples would have worked better with moneyfrom the beginning, and what couples were better off for their struggle?
6. Do you think Fiona really loved Mae? If so, at what point in the story do you start to believe so and why? Do you think they would have still fallen for one another if they were in modern society? Why or why not?
7. Do you think there could have been hope for William and Charlotte if he had brought her in on his schemes from the beginning? Or do you think things would have ultimately come to pass the same way? Why?
8. Do you think Prohibition was a positive thing for our society, or negative? Why? What events or characters in this story, if any, affected your opinion on Prohibition?
9. Charlotte’s father, Black Jack, is only in a few scenes in the book, but his influence looms large over her. What role does Charlotte’s father play in her fate?
10. Who is more of a hero in this story, Jake or Rafferty? And why?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)
Gingerbread
Helen Oyeyemi, 2019
Penguin Publishing
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594634659
Summary
Prize-winning author, Helen Oyeyemi, returns with a bewitching and imaginative novel.
Influenced by the mysterious place gingerbread holds in classic children's stories, beloved novelist Helen Oyeyemi invites readers into a delightful tale of a surprising family legacy, in which the inheritance is a recipe.
Perdita Lee may appear to be your average British schoolgirl; Harriet Lee may seem just a working mother trying to penetrate the school social hierarchy; but there are signs that they might not be as normal as they think they are.
For one thing, they share a gold-painted, seventh-floor walk-up apartment with some surprisingly verbal vegetation. And then there's the gingerbread they make. Londoners may find themselves able to take or leave it, but it's very popular in Druhastrana, the far-away (or, according to many sources, non-existent) land of Harriet Lee's early youth.
The world's truest lover of the Lee family gingerbread, however, is Harriet's charismatic childhood friend Gretel Kercheval—a figure who seems to have had a hand in everything (good or bad) that has happened to Harriet since they met.
Decades later, when teenaged Perdita sets out to find her mother's long-lost friend, it prompts a new telling of Harriet's story.
As the book follows the Lees through encounters with jealousy, ambition, family grudges, work, wealth, and real estate, gingerbread seems to be the one thing that reliably holds a constant value.
Endlessly surprising and satisfying, written with Helen Oyeyemi's inimitable style and imagination, Gingerbread is a true feast for the reader. (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 several 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
Exhilarating.… Gingerbread is jarring, funny, surprising, unsettling, disorienting and rewarding.… This is a wildly imagined, head-spinning, deeply intelligent novel that requires some effort and attention from its reader. And that is just one of its many pleasures.
New York Times Book Review
Gingerbread rises to the level of Mr. Fox and Boy, Snow, Bird, revealing Oyeyemi as a master of literary masquerade, forging a singular art.
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
This is a bold book with a great deal of depth and mischief to it that makes you think how astonishing it would be to have our parents sit up with us for a whole night and tell us in fine detail what they have lived.
Financial Times
[T]he novel's real enchantment is its experimentation with storytelling itself.… [T]his book is not only about childhood, but also what it feels like to be a child.
Time
Charm evident on every page.
Slate
Is there an author working today who is comparable to Helen Oyeyemi? She might be the only contemporary author for whom it’s not hyperbole to claim she’s… a genius, as opposed to talented or newsworthy or relevant or accomplished, each of her novels daring more in storytelling than the one before.… A tale that bears multiple rereadings and is more marvelous the deeper you’re willing to dive into its rearranging of reality, its derangement.
Los Angeles Review of Books
A beautifully, wildly inventive beast. Nobody else writes like this: puncturing the timelessly poetic with harshly contemporary asides, animating plants and dolls with a cool nonchalance. And how is it that this dark, nutty novel exudes cozy warmth above all else?
Entertainment Weekly
Gingerbread isn't just one of the best books of March, it's poised to be one of the best books of the year thanks to the magnificent writing of Helen Oyeyemi.
Cosmopolitan.com
The line between real world and fairy tales in Helen Oyeyemi’s novels is never clear, which means they’re way more fun. Following the plot of Oyeyemi’s latest novel can be a challenge, simply because Gingerbread abides by fairy tale logic, not the conventional structure of a novel. But if you sit back and accept the twists, we guarantee you’ll enjoy your romp.
Refinery29
★ [I]diosyncratically brilliant…. Oyeyemi excels at making the truly astounding believable and turning even the most familiar tales into something strange and new. This fantastic and fantastical romp is a wonderful addition to her formidable canon.
Publishers Weekly
It may require some persistence to keep up with the multiple plot threads, the unusual character names, and the Druhistani lore, but patient readers will be rewarded with a rollicking tale from the wildly inventive Oyeyemi. —Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.
Library Journal
Oyeyemi's latest is a clever subversion of fairy tale tropes to expose the secrets [and] entanglements.… [A] scathing indictment of capitalism and a tribute to the… endurance of family bonds, this enchanting tale will resonate with literary fiction lovers.
Booklist
★ Oyeyemi returns to the land of fairy tales in a novel that riffs on "Hansel and Gretel" without… following its well-worn trail of breadcrumbs.… The effect is heady, surreal, and disarming… [a] strange, shape-shifting novel about the power of making your own family.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers Book Club Resources. They can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(Resources by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Ginny Moon
Benjamin Ludwig, 2017
Park Row Books
368pp.
ISBN-13: 9780778330165
Summary
See the world differently.
Meet Ginny Moon. She’s mostly your average teenager—she plays flute in the high school band, has weekly basketball practice, and reads Robert Frost poems in English class.
But Ginny is autistic. And so what’s important to her might seem a bit…different: starting every day with exactly nine grapes for breakfast, Michael Jackson, her baby doll, and crafting a secret plan of escape.
After being traumatically taken from her abusive birth mother and moved around to different homes, Ginny has finally found her "forever home"—a safe place with parents who will love and nurture her. This is exactly what all foster kids are hoping for, right?
But Ginny has other plans. She’ll steal and lie and exploit the good intentions of those who love her—anything it takes to get back what’s missing in her life. She’ll even try to get herself kidnapped.
Told in an extraordinary and wholly original voice, Ginny Moon is at once quirky, charming, heartbreaking, and poignant. It’s a story about being an outsider trying to find a place to belong and about making sense of a world that just doesn’t seem to add up.
Taking you into the mind of a curious and deeply human character, Benjamin Ludwig’s novel affirms that fiction has the power to change the way we see the world. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—Wallingford, Connecticut, USA
• Education—University of New Hampshire
• Currently—lives in Barrington, New Hampshire
A life-long teacher of English and writing, Benjamin Ludwig lives in New Hampshire with his family. He holds an MAT in English Education and an MFA in Writing. Shortly after he and his wife married they became foster parents and adopted a teenager with autism.
Ginny Moon is his first novel, which was inspired in part by his conversations with other parents at Special Olympics basketball practices. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
(Starred review.) Ludwig’s excellent debut is both a unique coming-of-age tale and a powerful affirmation of the fragility and strength of families.… Ludwig brilliantly depicts the literal-minded and inventive Ginny.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) This stunning debut novel grabs readers by the heart and doesn't let go.… Ludwig's triumphant achievement is borne from his own experience as the adoptive parent of a teen with autism, and his gorgeous, wrenching portrayal of Ginny's ability to communicate what she needs is perfection. —Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor, MI
Library Journal
(Starred review.) [E]nlightening…compelling…remarkably engaging.… A heartwarming and unforgettable page-turner.
Booklist
Ginny Moon, who has autism, needs to get back to her birth mother by any means necessary. That's a problem, because that mother, Gloria, abused her.… By turns heartwarming and heartbreaking, Ginny's quest for a safe home leads her to discover her own strong voice.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Ginny’s lack of emotional attachment to the people in her life makes her seem cold and unfriendly. Do you consider her to be an unfriendly person? How do you think Ginny might define the word “friend”?
2. Ginny appears to be completely uninterested in romance. How do you envision her romantic life as an adult?
3. Do you think the Moons acted reasonably with regard to Ginny before and after Wendy was born? If you had to step into the shoes of Brian and Maura Moon, and perceived your adopted child as a possible threat to your biological child, what would you do?
4. Patrice makes some pointed observations about the Moons, especially Maura. Do you think her observations are accurate? Are her interactions with Ginny appropriate?
5. Do you as a reader become more or less sympathetic toward Maura when she is forced to increase her interaction with Ginny after Brian’s heart attack?
6. What do you think of Gloria’s character? How would you describe Ginny’s feelings toward her? How is Gloria perceived differently through Ginny’s eyes and the other adults’ eyes?
7. Do you think Rick would make a good dad? Why or why not?
8. When the Moons and Patrice finally realized why Ginny was so concerned about her “baby doll,” were you surprised? How did their original dismissal of Ginny’s obsession make you feel?
9. What is Ginny’s greatest personal strength? At what point(s) were you disappointed with her?
10. What stereotypes surround people on the autism spectrum? To what extent does Ginny fulfill or defy such stereotypes?
11. At the end of the book, did you feel that Ginny had evolved? What about Maura? In what ways do you think they both still have progress to make? Were you surprised by the way the story concluded?
(Questions from the author's webpage.)
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Girl at War
Sara Novic, 2015
Random House
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812996340
Summary
A powerful debut novel about a girl’s coming of age—and how her sense of family, friendship, love, and belonging is profoundly shaped by war.
Zagreb, 1991. Ana Juric is a carefree ten-year-old, living with her family in a small apartment in Croatia’s capital. But that year, civil war breaks out across Yugoslavia, splintering Ana’s idyllic childhood.
Daily life is altered by food rations and air raid drills, and soccer matches are replaced by sniper fire. Neighbors grow suspicious of one another, and Ana’s sense of safety starts to fray. When the war arrives at her doorstep, Ana must find her way in a dangerous world.
New York, 2001. Ana is now a college student in Manhattan. Though she’s tried to move on from her past, she can’t escape her memories of war—secrets she keeps even from those closest to her. Haunted by the events that forever changed her family, Ana returns to Croatia after a decade away, hoping to make peace with the place she once called home.
As she faces her ghosts, she must come to terms with her country’s difficult history and the events that interrupted her childhood years before.
Moving back and forth through time, Girl at War is an honest, generous, brilliantly written novel that illuminates how history shapes the individual. Sara Nović fearlessly shows the impact of war on one young girl—and its legacy on all of us.
It’s a debut by a writer who has stared into recent history to find a story that continues to resonate today. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1987
• Where—the State of New Jersey, USA
• Education—M.F.A., Columbia University
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York
Sara Novic was born in 1987 and has lived in the United States and Croatia, where she still has family and friends. She earned her MFA from Columbia University, where she studied fiction and translation.
Novic is the fiction editor at Blunderbuss Magazine and teaches writing at the Fashion Institute of Technology and Columbia University. She lives in Queens, New York. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
From its first sentence, Sara Novic’s debut novel unfolds on both intimate and immense scales....[and] the first section ends with a brilliantly abrupt, devastating event...a scene that haunts the rest of the book.... [Novic is] a writer whose...gravity and talent anchor this novel.
John Williams - New York Times
Sara Novic's outstanding first novel…Girl at War performs the miracle of making the stories of broken lives in a distant country feel as large and universal as myth. It is a brutal novel, but a beautiful one.
Anthony Marra - New York Times Book Review
Remarkable.
Julia Glass - Boston Globe
A shattering debut.... The book begins with what deserves to become one of contemporary literature’s more memorable opening lines. The sentences that follow are equally as lyrical as a folk lament and as taut as metal wire wrapped through an electrified fence.
USA Today
Powerful and vividly wrought.... Novic writes about horrors with an elegant understatement. In cool, accomplished sentences, we are met with the gravity, brutality and even the mundaneness of war and loss as well as the enduring capacity to live.
San Francisco Chronicle
If we looked for and celebrated a ‘book of the summer’ as we do that one song every year (what will it be this year?!), this novel would surely be this summer’s star. This debut work from a rising author examines in painful, tender detail the cost of war on a young woman, many years after her simple life with her family in Croatia was interrupted by war.
Vanity Fair
[A] gripping debut novel.... [Sara] Nović, in tender and eloquent prose, explores the challenge of how to live even after one has survived.
Oprah Magazine
This is a fine, sensitive novel, though the later scenes in Manhattan never reach the soaring heights of the sections set in wartime Croatia. Novic displays her talent, heightening the anticipation of what she will do next.
Publishers Weekly
Croatian-born Nović’s debut novel delivers a finely honed sense of what the [Balkan war's] bloodshed really meant for those who withstood it.... Nović’s heartbreaking book is all the more effective for its use of personal rather than sensational detail and will be embraced by a wide range of readers.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Novic’s important debut brings painfully home the jarring fact that what happens in today’s headlines...is neither new nor even particularly the worst that humankind can commit..... Thanks to Nović’s considerable skill, Ana’s return visit to her homeland and her past is nearly as cathartic for the reader as it is for Ana.
Booklist
Understated, self-assured roman à clef of a young girl's coming of age in war-torn Croatia.... Elegiac, and understandably if unrelievedly so, with a matter-of-factness about death and uprootedness. A promising start.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use these LitLovers talking points to kick off a discussion for Girl at War...then take off on your own:
1. The book begins with the opening line, "The War in Zagreb began over a pack of cigarettes." Why might the author have led with that sentence? What effect does it have on how you came to see the events of the novel?
2. What is the power of telling this story from a child's point of view? What effect does it create for you as a reader rather than telling it from an adult perspective?
3. Talk about the ways in which the war changed the lives of the children. How does the war affect the idea of "normalcy" for them? Consider, for instance, the war games that the children play.
4. The setting of the novel shifts from Croatia to the U.S., and to New York City specifically. How does that change affect the novel—it's writing, plot, and characters? Do you feel this part is as vivid as the earlier Croatian section? Why or why not?
5. When Ana speaks at the UN, she says "there’s no such thing as a child soldier in Croatia.... There is only a child with a gun." What does she mean? Following her testimony, Ana has lunch with Sharon Stanfield. Why does Sharon pique Ana's anger?
6. After 9/11, Ana feels uncomfortable in that she doesn't feel as if she, or Americans, are truly in a "war." How have Americans and Europeans, especially Slavs, experienced being "a nation at war"?
7. In what ways have Ana's and her sister's divergent experiences shaped their lives and how they respond to the world? How does each relate to their American parents?
8. How does the concept of pluralism in the U.S. contrast with Slavic culture's pervasive ethnic identification? How does Ana respond to this difference?
9. Ana is consumed by memories. She and her professor discuss German author W.G. Sebald and his philosophy on memory—that memory is imperfect and rarely the "searing of certain trauma into one's mind." Do you find the quotation ironic in relation to Ana? How does Ana respond?
10. Follow-up to Question 9 on memory: Why does Luca's remark toward the end of the book that "You don’t need to experience something to remember it" What exactly does he mean...and is he right?
11. On her return to Croatia, how does Ana experience Zagreb, her old friends, and Tiska on the Adriatic? What do you think the future holds for Ana and Luka? Will Ana stay in the US or return to Croatia permanently?
12. How much did you know about the Yugoslav war before you read Girl at War? What have you learned after reading the novel? What struck you most, or shocked you most, in the book?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Girl Before
J.P. Delaney, 2017
Random House
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780425285046
Summary
An enthralling psychological thriller that spins one woman’s seemingly good fortune, and another woman’s mysterious fate, through a kaleidoscope of duplicity, death, and deception.
Please make a list of every possession you consider essential to your life.
The request seems odd, even intrusive—and for the two women who answer, the consequences are devastating.
EMMA
Reeling from a traumatic break-in, Emma wants a new place to live. But none of the apartments she sees are affordable or feel safe. Until One Folgate Street.
The house is an architectural masterpiece: a minimalist design of pale stone, plate glass, and soaring ceilings. But there are rules. The enigmatic architect who designed the house retains full control: no books, no throw pillows, no photos or clutter or personal effects of any kind. The space is intended to transform its occupant—and it does.
JANE
After a personal tragedy, Jane needs a fresh start. When she finds One Folgate Street she is instantly drawn to the space—and to its aloof but seductive creator.
Moving in, Jane soon learns about the untimely death of the home’s previous tenant, a woman similar to Jane in age and appearance. As Jane tries to untangle truth from lies, she unwittingly follows the same patterns, makes the same choices, crosses paths with the same people, and experiences the same terror, as the girl before.. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
The Girl Before is the first psychological thriller from JP Delaney, a pseudonym for a writer who has previously written bestselling fiction under other names. It is being published in thirty-five countries. A film version is being brought to the screen by Academy Award–winning director Ron Howard. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
The stars of The Girl Before are an architect, two women and a high-tech house so sadistic that it practically spanks them.... [The novel] generates a fast pace with frequent cuts between chapters labeled “Then: Emma” and “Now: Jane.” And it milks suspense from matching scenes in which Emma and Jane do exactly the same things with Edward, who consciously sets up these parallels. That’s the good news. The downside is the author’s clumsy trickery. No spoilers here, but the novel’s denouement is improbable enough to have flown in from outer space.
Janet Maslin - New York Tims
[A] riveting psychological thriller.... Writing with precision and grace, Delaney strips away the characters’ secrets until the raw truth of each is revealed. That Emma and Jane act in often foolhardy ways hasn’t prevented rights sales in...30 markets and movie rights to...Ron Howard.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) A masterfully crafted spellbinder...guaranteed to astonish.
Booklist
Little...can be said without destroying what little suspense Delaney has managed.... [I]t all seems so obvious. But wait—there's a twist!... [H]opelessly fake characters and...red herrings and reversals, 1 Folgate St. is a house...collapsing under the weight of its own materials.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. As you were reading, did you engage with the survey questions alongside Jane and Emma? How would your answers differ from theirs? Were there any questions in particular that stood out to you? Did you surprise yourself with any of your responses?
2. Emma and Jane have a lot in common, but there are also striking differences between the two women. Compare and contrast these two characters, and discuss some of the ways in which their differences and similarities influenced their relationships.
3. How does living at One Folgate Street impact each of the women? In what ways do our environments shape our experiences? If you could make one change to your current living environment that would have an impact on your behavior, what would it be?
4. Describe your personal style when it comes to home décor and architecture. How does that style shape or reflect your personality? Would you want to live in a minimalist space like One Folgate Street?
5. On page 235, Jane finds Edward’s discarded sketch—the pentimento image with two overlaid versions of her face. What did you make of that moment? What do you think the image meant to Edward?
6. Discuss Emma’s relationship with Saul. What do you think really happened there?
7. Could you forgive Jane’s deceptiveness, as revealed at the end of the novel? Were you surprised by her confession?
8. What do you think of Edward’s dream to create a community of homes like One Folgate Street? Could such a project ever really work successfully? Why or why not?
9. Which character did you relate to the most in this novel? Why?
10. Describe Simon’s relationship with each of the women.
11. Emma inspires passion and obsession in many of the men who fall into her orbit. What quality or qualities make her so compelling? Have you ever known someone like Emma?
12. Make a list of every possession you consider essential to your life.
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Girl from the Garden
Parnaz Foroutan, 2015
HarperCollins
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062388391
Summary
An extraordinary new writer makes her literary debut with this suspenseful novel of desire, obsession, power and vulnerability, in which a crisis of inheritance leads to the downfall of a wealthy family of Persian Jews in early twentieth-century Iran.
For all his wealth and success, Asher Malacouti—the head of a prosperous Jewish family living in the Iranian town of Kermanshah—cannot have the one thing he desires above all: a male son.
His young wife Rakhel, trapped in an oppressive marriage at a time when a woman’s worth is measured by her fertility, is made desperate by her failure to conceive, and grows jealous and vindictive.
Her despair is compounded by her sister-in-law Khorsheed’s pregnancy and her husband’s growing desire for Kokab, his cousin’s wife. Frustrated by his wife’s inability to bear him an heir, Asher makes a fateful choice that will shatter the household and drive Rakhel to dark extremes to save herself and preserve her status within the family.
Witnessed through the memories of the family’s only surviving daughter, Mahboubeh, now an elderly woman living in Los Angeles, The Girl from the Garden unfolds the complex, tragic history of her family in a long-lost Iran of generations past.
Haunting, suspenseful and inspired by events in the author’s own family, it is an evocative and poignant exploration of sacrifice, betrayal, and the indelible legacy of the families that forge us. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Parnaz Foroutan was born in Iran and spent her early childhood there. She received PEN USA's Emerging Voices fellowship for this novel, which was inspired by her own family history. She has been named to the Hedgebrook fellowship and residency, and received funding from the Elizabeth George Foundation, among other institutions. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two daughters. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[Ultimately,] The Girl from the Garden is about how telling stories helps us to hold our past in our hands—and about how a flowering yard "teeming with life"’ in far-off Los Angeles can movingly become, for one wandering storyteller, a home.
Seattle Times
Foroutan’s characters grapple, often vainly, for control against larger forces—a God who doesn’t answer prayers, a state that doesn’t recognize their humanity, and people who cannot be made to bend to their needs, no matter how badly they love them.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Parnaz Foroutan’s scorching debut novel, The Girl From the Garden, takes us to Iran, where a couple’s inability to conceive pits a young wife against her tyrannical husband, who will stop at nothing to secure an heir.
W Magazine (online)
A riveting portrait of family strife in a troubled land—and the fallout when a woman’s fertility determines her worth.
People
A lush debut.... Foroutan is a modern-day Scheherazade, weaving her tale through the entire 20th century, from an aging woman in her L.A. garden to the brothers whose determination to spawn heirs tortured the harem she was raised in.
Willamette Week
(Starred review.) Foroutan's richly layered debut explores...a single household in a Jewish enclave in Iran.... The framework of flashbacks within flashbacks...exhilaratingly propels the plot, and Foroutan's sumptuous prose paints a vivid portrait of a rarely explored...setting.
Publishers Weekly
In this debut novel, Mahboubeh Malacouti, an elderly woman living in Los Angeles, recalls the stories surrounding her family in early 1900s Iran.... Though Foroutan is better at writing about the past than the present,...she clearly has a gift for storytelling. —Shirley Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA
Library Journal
(Starred review.) In this stunning first novel, Foroutan draws on her own family history to integrate the lore and traditions of old Iran. Suspenseful and haunting, this riveting story of jealousy, sacrifice, and betrayal and the intimately drawn characters within will not be easily forgotten (One of Booklist’s Top 10 First Novels of 2015).
Booklist
(Starred review.) [A]n elderly woman pieces together the tragedy of her ancestors' Iranian Jewish household, in which the actions of two brothers "who would sacrifice anything for one another" result in sorrow for three wives.... Deftly structured, this novel traces those complications to their core...while lending grace through the delicacy of its observation.... [The] poetic narration overlays the suffering with surprising beauty.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
These questions were written—and generously offered to LitLovers—by Dulce Campins and Anna Garcia of Houston, Texas. Many thanks to both of you!
1. Mahboubeh says that Paradise is a Farsi word that means "an enclosed space, a garden set aside from the surrounding wilderness." What is the relevance of this and of the title of the book in this story?
2. Mahboubeh’s garden in Los Angeles has the same plants that her family’s garden had in Kermanshah. How does the author use this similarity to develop the story? Can you make a connection with your own life?
3. What happened to Rakhel over the years? Was she always bitter? Do you think that her life circumstances were responsible for her behavior? Are any of her actions justified?
4. What does Kokab get from her relationship with Asher? At some point she seems to enjoy being with him. Then, why do you think she left him if that brought shame to her and her family?
5. Mahboubeh’s memories have been affected by the pass of time. Do you feel that your recollections of events that happened long ago have changed too? Why or why not?
6. Being the first born son is very important in the Malacouti’s culture, as it defines the distribution of power of the present generation and the lineage of the next generation. How is this fact presented in the story and how does it affect the destiny of the characters?
7. There are many cultures where for centuries the order of birth and the sex of a newborn have defined the life of each individual. How is that changing in present times? Do you think that some people or cultures don’t want it to change? Why or why not?
8. Why is Rakhel sobbing when Korsheed is grieving for Yousseff on the snow and has to be dragged inside by Zolehkah and Fatimeh? How do you think she’s feeling and why?
9. Why do you think that Mahboubeh is led to believe that "sorrow is a complication of womanhood"? What happened then to Ibrahim?
10. Mahboubeh is an immigrant living immerse in a totally different culture. Why do you think she left her country? How does her bi-culturalism affect the way she looks at her family’s history later on?
(Questions by Dulce Campins and Anna García. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution to Dulcce, Anna, and LitLovers. Thanks.)
The Girl from the Savoy
Hazel Gaynor, 2016
HarperCollins
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062403476
Summary
Sometimes life gives you cotton stockings. Sometimes it gives you a Chanel gown...
Dolly Lane is a dreamer; a downtrodden maid who longs to dance on the London stage, but her life has been fractured by the Great War. Memories of the soldier she loved, of secret shame and profound loss, by turns pull her back and spur her on to make a better life.
When she finds employment as a chambermaid at London’s grandest hotel, The Savoy, Dolly takes a step closer to the glittering lives of the Bright Young Things who thrive on champagne, jazz and rebellion. Right now, she must exist on the fringes of power, wealth and glamor—she must remain invisible and unimportant.
But her fortunes take an unexpected turn when she responds to a struggling songwriter’s advertisement for a ‘muse’ and finds herself thrust into London’s exhilarating theatre scene and into the lives of celebrated actress, Loretta May, and her brother, Perry. Loretta and Perry may have the life Dolly aspires to, but they too are searching for something.
Now, at the precipice of the life she has and the one she longs for, the girl from The Savoy must make difficult choices: between two men; between two classes, between everything she knows and everything she dreams of. A brighter future is tantalizingly close—but can a girl like Dolly ever truly leave her past behind? (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 16, 1971
• Where—Yorkshire, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Manchester Metropolitan University
• Awards—Cecil Day Lewis Award for Emerging Writers
• Currently—lives in County Kildare, Ireland
Hazel Gaynor is an author and freelance writer in Ireland and the UK and was the recipient of the Cecil Day Lewis Award for Emerging Writers. The Girl Who Came Home: A Novel of the Titanic is her first novel. Her second novel, published in 2015, is A Memory of Violets: A Novel of London's Flower Sellers.
Hazel is a regular guest blogger and features writer for national Irish writing website for which she has interviewed authors such as Philippa Gregory, Sebastian Faulks, Cheryl Strayed, and Mary Beth Keane.
Hazel has appeared on TV and radio and her writing has been featured in the Irish Times and the Sunday Times Magazine. Originally from Yorkshire, England, Hazel now lives in Ireland with her husband, two young children and an accident-prone cat. (From the author.)
Visit the author's webpage.
Follow Hazel on Facebook.
Book Reviews
The Girl from the Savoy is a satisfying, thoughtful novel that delves into the lives of people living in Great Britain during the 1920s. For Downton Abbey followers, the stories of the upstairs workers and the downstairs entitled folks are entertaining and informative. This is a perfect book for a summer read—or an anytime read.
Examiner.com
The echoes of the First World War influence every character of Gaynor's latest novel, set in 1923 London.... Dolly dreams of a life on the stage.... [Her] path toward stardom and the secret that's been haunting her help push this historical novel toward a thoroughly satisfying ending.
Publishers Weekly
The wide-ranging effects of the war lend a realistic atmosphere without diminishing the hopeful mood.... and these details make the 1920s come alive. —Emily Byers, Salem P.L., OR
Library Journal
Gaynor once again brings history to life. With intriguing characters and a deeply absorbing story, her latest is a fascinating examination of one city’s rich history and the often forgotten people who lived in it.
Booklist
A spunky young woman dances her way up from a job as a chambermaid at London's grandest hotel to a chorus girl and beyond during the Roaring '20s.... Though the book more than teases with romance-novel tropes...the only real romance here is between Dolly and the stage.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The novel is set in the years just after the Great War when social boundaries were changing and women, especially, were fighting for greater independence. What did you enjoy about this period? Was there anything that surprised you?
2. Dolly’s position as a chambermaid gives her access to the less well-known side of iconic hotels like The Savoy. What did you enjoy about the chapters where we go "behind thescenes" at the hotel?
3. The novel has a large cast of principal and supporting characters. Who was your favoritecharacter, and why?
4. The working classes were often taken advantage of by their superiors during this period. What was your reaction to the scene between Dolly and her employer’s nephew, and to the incident between Dolly and Larry Snyder?
5. The shame of an unwanted pregnancy and of being an unmarried mother was a very real issue in the 1920s. Were you surprised to learn about Dolly’s pregnancy and her time at the Mothers’ Hospital? What was your reaction when she discovers that Thomas is her child?
6. Perry and Dolly’s relationship crosses the social divide and is unconventional in its nature. What were your thoughts as their relationship develops?
7. Loretta has everything that Dolly longs for and yet they both have secrets and are fighting their own private battles. Who were you rooting for, and why?
8. Loretta is an iconic star of the stage, adored by legions of fans everywhere she goes. How different do you think her experience of fame was from that experienced by female celebrities today?
9. There are many female friendships in the novel: Dolly and Clover, Dolly and the girls at the hotel, Dolly and Loretta, Loretta and Bea. Which was your favorite friendship to see develop? Why do you think female friendships were so important during this era?
10. Teddy returns from the war suffering from a severe form of shell shock, a very misunderstood condition during and after the Great War. What surprised you the most about Teddy’s condition and treatment? How did the discovery that Dolly was Teddy’s "nurse" affect your connection with them both?
11. The final scene at the train station in many ways mirrors the opening prologue. Did you want Teddy to stay at the end? What was your reaction when Dolly finds the book on the bench and reads his letter?
12. Ultimately, Dolly leaves for America without any romantic attachment in order to chase her dreams, and the epilogue offers an insight into her future. What would you like Dolly to have done in the intervening years?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Girl from Venice
Martin Cruz Smith, 2016
Simon & Schuster
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781439140239
Summary
The highly anticipated new standalone novel from Martin Cruz Smith, whom The Washington Post has declared an “uncommon phenomenon: a popular and well-regarded crime novelist who is also a writer of real distinction,” The Girl from Venice is a suspenseful World War II love story set against the beauty, mystery, and danger of occupied Venice.
Venice, 1945. The war may be waning, but the city known as La Serenissima is still occupied, and the people of Italy fear the power of the Third Reich.
One night, under a canopy of stars, a fisherman named Cenzo comes across a young woman’s body floating in the lagoon. He soon discovers she is still alive and in trouble.
Born to a wealthy Jewish family, Giulia is on the run from the Wehrmacht SS. Cenzo chooses to protect Giulia rather than hand her over to the Nazis. This act of kindness leads them into the world of Partisans, random executions, the arts of forgery and high explosives, Mussolini’s broken promises, the black market and gold, and, everywhere, the enigmatic maze of the Venice Lagoon.
The Girl from Venice is a thriller, a mystery, and a retelling of Italian history that will take your breath away. Most of all it is a love story. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—November 3, 1942
• Where—Reading, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Pennsylvania
• Awards—Gold Dagger Award; Dashiell Hammet Award (twice)
• Currently—lives in San Rafael, California
Martin Cruz Smith is an American mystery novelist. He is best known for his eight-novel series on Russian investigator Arkady Renko, who was first introduced in 1981 with Gorky Park.
He originally wrote under the name "Martin Smith," only to discover other writers of the same name. He now inserts Cruz into his name, his paternal grandmother's surname.
Early life and education
Martin William Smith was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, to John Calhoun Smith and Louise Lopez, both jazz muscians. His mother is amerindian—from Pueblo descent—making Smith partly of Pueblo, Spanish, Senecu del Sur, and Yaqui ancestry. His mother has also been an activist in the Amerindian rights movement.
Smith was educated at Germantown Academy, in Germantown Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, then at the University of Pennsylvania, also in Philadelphia. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in creative writing in 1964.
Career
From 1965 to 1969, Smith worked as a journalist and began writing fiction in the early 1970s.
Canto for a Gypsy (1972), his third novel overall and the second to feature Roman Grey, a gypsy art dealer in New York City, was nominated for an Edgar Award.
Nightwing (1977), also an Edgar nominee, was his breakthrough novel, and he adapted it for a feature film of the same name (1979).
Smith is best known for his novels featuring Russian investigator Arkady Renko, whom Smith introduced in Gorky Park (1981). That novel, which was called the "first thriller of the '80s" by Time, became a bestseller and won a Gold Dagger Award from the British Crime Writers' Association. Taken together, Renko has since appeared in eight novels by Smith. Two books of the Arkady series occupied the nos. 1 and 2 spots for several months at a time: Gorky Park and Polar Star (1989).
During the 1990s, Smith twice won the Dashiell Hammett Award from the North American Branch of the International Association of Crime Writers. The first time was for Rose in 1996; the second time was for Havana Bay in 1999. And in 2010, he and Arkady Renko returned to the top of the New York Times bestseller list when Three Stations debuted at No. 7 on the fiction bestsellers list.
Other books/series
Earlier, in the 1970s, Smith wrote under the pen name Jake Logan, publishing two Slocum adult action Western novels. Under his own name, Smith has also written the Inquisitor series, focusing on a James Bond-type agent employed by the Vatican. He also wrote two novels in the Nick Carter series.
Personal life
Smith lives in San Rafael, California, with his family. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/17/2016.)
Book Reviews
“Evocative.... Smith conjures the time and place with a generous dose of what the novelist Evan Connell called ‘luminous details."... The Girl from Venice’s vivid treatments of a timeless trade and certain little-known aspects of World War II make it well worth your time.
Dennis Drabelle - Washington Post
You think you've read every permutation of a World War II novel possible—then along comes a Venetian fisherman and his unlikely first mate, a beautiful Jewish teenaged girl on the run from the last few Nazis occupying Italy.... Suspense, romance, spying, action—this novel has a little bit of everything, and it works. Cruz Smith is a master of quick scene changes . . . [who] has chosen, in The Girl from Venice, to put aside his usual spy stories for a straightforward wartime chase-cum-romance, a slice of La Serenissima life so perfectly researched that details melt into action like the local goby fish into risotto.
Bethanne Patrick - NPR
[A] clever, well-crafted, and exciting blend of WWII romance, suspense, and intrigue.... Capture, escape, a hoard of stolen gold, a forger, and a Swiss movie producer add action and passion to the novel’s unexpected plot twists, and its most satisfying conclusion.
Publishers Weekly
A strong, atmospheric.... However, Cenzo and Giulia's relationship doesn't feel fully fleshed out, making it hard to be invested in the risks he takes to find her. Cenzo is often catching up to the action, not driving it, keeping readers at an arm's length against. —Emily Byers, Salem P.L., OR
Library Journal
[A]n Italian fisherman and the Jewish girl he finds floating in the sea.... How he meets that challenge both illuminates his humanity and entertains the reader. In fact, all the characters come alive.This is a thoughtful and engrossing novel with more than enough action to keep the pages turning.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)
The Girl He Used to Know
Tracey Garvis Graves, 2019
St. Martin's Press
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250200358
Summary
A compelling, hopelessly romantic novel of unconditional love.
Annika (rhymes with Monica) Rose is an English major at the University of Illinois. Anxious in social situations where she finds most people's behavior confusing, she'd rather be surrounded by the order and discipline of books or the quiet solitude of playing chess.
Jonathan Hoffman joined the chess club and lost his first game—and his heart—to the shy and awkward, yet brilliant and beautiful Annika. He admires her ability to be true to herself, quirks and all, and accepts the challenges involved in pursuing a relationship with her.
Jonathan and Annika bring out the best in each other, finding the confidence and courage within themselves to plan a future together.
What follows is a tumultuous yet tender love affair that withstands everything except the unforeseen tragedy that forces them apart, shattering their connection and leaving them to navigate their lives alone.
Now, a decade later, fate reunites Annika and Jonathan in Chicago. She's living the life she wanted as a librarian. He's a Wall Street whiz, recovering from a divorce and seeking a fresh start. The attraction and strong feelings they once shared are instantly rekindled, but until they confront the fears and anxieties that drove them apart, their second chance will end before it truly begins. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Tracey Garvis Graves is the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling author of contemporary fiction.
Her 2011 debut novel, On the Island, spent 9 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, has been translated into thirty-one languages, and is in development with MGM and Temple Hill Productions for a feature film. Her second novel, The Girl He Used to Know came out in 2019.
She is also the author of the e-books, Uncharted, Covet, Every Time I Think of You, Cherish, Heart-Shaped Hack, and White-Hot Hack. She is hard at work on her next book. (From the publisher .)
Book Reviews
An accidental meeting rekindles the romance between former college lovers Annika and Jonathan. Endearing characters will reinforce your faith in people's goodness.
Good Housekeeping
There are a lot of romantic books coming out in April, but none quite like The Girl He Used to Know.
Cosmopolitan
Unputdownable
Refinery29
Graves does a good job of putting readers in Annika’s shoes and setting up the foundation for the book’s ending, though the narrative often gets mired in lengthy lovey-dovey scenes. Readers who don’t mind the over-the-top emotional element will find a solid story here.
Publishers Weekly
[S]eparated by tragedy [Annika and Jonathan] meet again years later. She's a librarian (of course), he's a divorced Wall Street genius, and maybe their love has withstood what they've endured. Big promo, much love; from the New York Times best-selling author of On the Island.
Library Journal
Graves's strong, autistic heroine fights for the love she once lost in this sensitive, affecting romance.
Shelf Awareness
Graves creates a believable love affair in which Annika is not infantilized but rather fully realized as simply different. And her differences become her strengths when catastrophe strikes, compelling Annika to take the lead for the first time in her life. A heartwarming, neurodiverse love story.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for THE GIRL HE USED TO KNOW … then take off on your own:
1. As a high-functioning autistic student, Annika struggled in her first year of college. Talk about her initial experiences in this new environment, particularly her difficulties meeting and relating to people. How does her roommate help her? Might Janice's kindness and friendship been something you would have offered a shy, awkward loner?
2. Janice introduced Annika to the chess club. What is it about the game of chess that so appealed to Annika? Why the powerful pull to the game?
3. The story is told through both Annika's and Jonathan's perspectives. Why might the author have chosen both points-of-view rather than, say, only Annika's?
4. Ten years after college and living in Chicago, how has Annika changed from her younger days? Where does she find solace, and what has she come to accept about her life? After bumping into Jonathan, she thinks "I desire
5. Describe pair's grocery store meeting: how does each feel, what emotions run through them? Have you ever been in a similar situation—bumping into a former love interest after years apart?
6. How well does Tracey Gravis Graves present Annika's autism? Do you consider her a well-rounded character, do you feel you know her, understand her confusions in social situations? Do you sympathize with her—without pitying her?
7. How would you describe Jonathan? Why is he so leery of getting involved with Annika when they meet ten years on?
8. Are you satisfied with the way the book ended?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Girl in Hyacinth Blue
Susan Vreeland, 1999
Penguin Group USA
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780140296280
Summary
Picture this: "A most extraordinary painting in which a young girl wearing a short blue smock over a rust-colored skirt sat in profile at a table by an open window." Susan Vreeland imagined just such a humble domestic scene, suggested it was created in 17th-century Holland, and attributed it to Jan Vermeer. Then she wrote a beguiling novel about this canvas, which so closely resembles the 35 extant works of the Dutch masterthat it might as well be one of his—long, lost, finally found, and as exquisite as ever. The artistic journey Vreeland recounts begins in present-day Pennsylvania, where a schoolteacher claims he owns an authentic Vermeer, a legacy from his late father, who acquired it under heinous circumstances: a Nazi officer, the father had looted it from the home of Dutch Jews.
Moving back in time and across the Atlantic, Vreeland traces the treasured painting from owner to owner. In doing so, she demonstrates the enduring power of art in the face of natural disaster, political upheaval, and personal turmoil. Ultimately, she ends the odyssey in Delft, where the painting's haunting subject is identified and tells her own poignant story about the picture's origins.
Each of the eight linked chapters has an irresistible painterly quality—finely wrought, artfully illuminated, and subtly executed. Together, they constitute a literary masterpiece, one that the New York Times Book Review praised as "intelligent, searching, and unusual... filled with luminous moments; like the painting it describes so well." (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Born—N/A
• Education—San Diego State University
• Awards—Inkwell Grand Prize, Fiction, 1999; San Diego Book
Awards' Theodore Geisel Award; Best Novel of the Year, 2002;
Women's National Book Assn. First Place-Short Fiction; New
Voices First Place-Short Fiction
• Currently—lives in San Diego, California, USA
Susan Vreeland's short fiction has appeared in journals such as the New England Review, the Missouri Review, Confrontation, Calyx, Manoa, and Alaska Quarterly Review. Her first novel, What Love Sees, was broadcast as a CBS Sunday night movie in 1996.
Ms. Vreeland is the recipient of several awards, including a Women's National Book Association First Place Award in Short Fiction (1991) and a First Place in Short Fiction from New Voices (1993). Inkwell magazine for her short story, "Gifts". She teaches English literature, creative writing, and art in San Diego public schools, where she has taught since 1969.
More
"When I was nine, my great-grandfather, a landscape painter, taught me to mix colors," Susan Vreeland recalls in an interview on her publisher's web site. "With his strong hand surrounding my small one, he guided the brush until a calla lily appeared as if by magic on a page of textured watercolor paper. How many girls throughout history would have longed to be taught that, but had to do washing and mending instead?"
As a grown woman, Vreeland found her own magical way of translating her vision of the world into art. While teaching high school English in the 1980s, she began to write, publishing magazine articles, short stories, and her first novel, What Love Sees. In 1996, Vreeland was diagnosed with lymphoma, which forced her to take time off from teaching — time she spent undergoing medical treatment and writing stories about a fictional Vermeer painting.
"Creative endeavor can aid healing because it lifts us out of self-absorption and gives us a goal," she later wrote. In Vreeland's case, her goal "was to live long enough to finish this set of stories that reflected my sensibilities, so that my writing group of twelve dear friends might be given these and know that in my last months I was happy — because I was creating."
Vreeland recovered from her illness and wove her stories into a novel, Girl in Hyacinth Blue. The book was a national bestseller, praised by the New York Times as "intelligent, searching and unusual" and by Kirkus Reviews as "extraordinarily skilled historical fiction: deft, perceptive, full of learning, deeply moving." Its interrelated stories move backward in time, creating what Marion Lignana Rosenberg in Salon called "a kind of Chinese box unfolding from the contemporary hiding-place of a painting attributed to Vermeer all the way back to the moment the work was conceived."
Vreeland's next novel, The Passion of Artemisia, was based on the life of the 17th-century painter Artemisia Gentileschi, often regarded as the first woman to hold a significant place in the history of European art. "Forthright and imaginative, Vreeland's deft recreation ably showcases art and life," noted Publishers Weekly.
Love for the visual arts, especially painting, continues to fire Vreeland's literary imagination. The Forest Lover, published in 2004, is a fictional exploration of the life of the 20th-century Canadian artist Emily Carr. She has also written a series of art-related short stories. For Vreeland, art provides inspiration for living as well as for literature. As she put it in an autobiographical essay, "I hope that by writing art-related fiction, I might bring readers who may not recognize the enriching and uplifting power of art to the realization that it can serve them as it has so richly served me."
Extras
Two other novels relating to Vermeer were published within a year of Girl in Hyacinth Blue: The Music Lesson by Katharine Weber and Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier.
Vreeland taught high school English and ceramics for 30 years before retiring to become a full-time writer. She lived in San Diego, California, and died in 2017. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Vreeland's novel possesses the strength of its subject. Each of the eight chapters focuses on a small painting by Johannes Vermeer, the 17th-century Dutch master, who produced quiet paintings with exquisite color and subtlety... "In the end," the narrator notes, "it's only the moments that we have." But what exquisite moments they are in this thoughtful book.
Ron Charles - The Christian Science Monitor
The eight interlinked stories in this impressive debut collection revolve around a single painting by Vermeer; as one might expect, they contain insightful observations about the worth and the truth of art. Vreeland's skill goes deeper still; these poised and atmospheric tales present a rich variety of characters whose voices convey distinctive personalities, and each offers glimpses of Holland during different historical eras. The chronology is reversed: the first story occurs in the present day, and succeeding narratives go back in time to the 17th century. Set in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation, the moving "A Night Different from All Other Nights" portrays the Jewish family from whom the painting will be stolen after they have been sent to a concentration camp, and re-poses the question (also asked in the opening story) of how killers can revere beauty. Two narratives that treat the same event—the birth of a baby and a turning point in a marriage—take place in neighboring hamlets near Groningen during the St. Nicholas flood of 1717. Each fills in details the other does not have, and each provides indelible images of brutally hard life in a waterlogged land. In the penultimate "Still Life," set in 17th-century Delft, a poverty-hounded Vermeer begins the portrait of his daughter Magalena. "Magdalena Looking," which closes the book, reflects the evanescence of the moments that paintings capture. Unobtrusively, Vreeland builds a picture of the Dutch character, equal parts sober work ethic and faith in a harsh religion. Against these national characteristics she juxtaposes the universal human capacity for love—romantic, familial, parental—and a kind of obsessive love, the quest for beauty that distinguishes otherwise ordinary lives. The historical details that ground each narrative in time and place are obliquely revealed. In the same way, the Vermeer masterpiece achieves fuller dimension in each tale as small details of color, brush stroke, lighting, background, serve to create the picture in the reader's eye. Only the opening story disappoints; it seems staged rather than psychologically compelling. The remaining entries are elegantly executed; the characters have the solidity and the elusive mystery of Vermeer's subjects. There is suspense, as well; one wants to read these tales at one sitting, to discover how the Vermeer influenced everyone who possessed it. Vreeland paints her canvas with the sure strokes of a talented artist.
Publishers Weekly
"Pearls were a favorite item of Vermeer," observes Cornelius Engelbrecht, the secretive and obsessive professor whose conviction that he owns an authentic Vermeer launches Vreeland's lovely first novel. The painting, we soon discover, was taken from its proper (Jewish) owner by Engelbrecht's father, a German soldier during World War II—a fact that Engelbrecht struggles mightily to suppress. The one colleague to whom he shows the painting guesses the truth and derisively recommends that he burn it—"one good burning deserves another"—but we don't learn the fate of the painting. Instead, Vreeland constructs a series of vignettes, not necessarily chronological, that takes us from the rooftops of Amsterdam Jews forced to kill the pigeons they are no longer allowed to keep, to a Dutch merchant whose possession of the painting briefly complicates his marriage, to the boudoir of a French counsel's bored wife and the second story of a farmhouse in flooded Holland, and finally to the home of Vermeer himself, where art does battle with domestic necessity. Though the connections among the vignettes could be made clearer, and the ending feels abrupt—how did that painting get from the artist to the weary professor, and what finally happens to it?—each vignette has the stillness, the polish, and the balanced perfection of a Vermeer. Not quite perfect, but definitely a pearl. —Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
Library Journal
Vreeland's wonderful second outing (What Love Sees, 1996, not seen) is a novel made of stories, each delving farther into the provenance of a Vermeer painting, and each capturing a moment of life, much as the great painter did himself. The only wobble in this elegant little book is at the start, where a stiffness in character may be intended but jars even so: a high-school math teacher confides to a colleague that he owns (and adores) a painting—of a girl sewing at a window—that he knows is a Vermeer. All the evidence—of technique, color, subject—is there, yet the painting lacks documentation to validate its authenticity: nor will the math teacher, one Cornelius Engelbrecht, tell just how it became his. The reader is more privileged, though, and learns quickly enough that Engelbrecht's Nazi father stole it in 1940 from a doomed Jewish family in Amsterdam. Such reader-privilege becomes an overwhelming emotional test when Vreeland goes back to visit that family, in that year, just before the theft ("A Night Different From All Other Nights"). Farther back still, a happily married Dutch couple owns the painting—and when the husband admits that the girl in it reminds him of an earlier lover, the marriage is briefly shaken ("Adagia"). Set when Beethoven's Eroica symphony is "new," "Hyacinth Blues" offers a biting bit of social satire—and lets the reader discover just how the painting's papers did in fact get lost. Still deeper back goes Vreeland, taking up with masterful insight, feeling, and control the life of a small Dutch farm family caught in the great flood of 1717; of a young engineer who loves, loses (pathetically), and hands on the painting; of Vermeer himself as he paints the picture, struggling against debt, father of 11; and, in a wondrous, bittersweet epiphany, of the daughter herself whom Vermeer chose as his model. Extraordinarily skilled historical fiction: deft, perceptive, full of learning, deeply moving.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What does Girl in Hyacinth Blue suggest about the value, both personal and monetary, and the function and purpose of art?
2. Why would the author structure the novel in reverse chronology? What are the advantages or disadvantages of telling the story this way?
3. Discuss the different ways in which the painting—the girl—spoke to her numerous owners. Did the men view her differently than the women? Why do they all adore—need—the girl in the painting so much? Does it provide for them something that is missing from their daily lives? Whose life did the painting affect the most?
4. What does the book have to say about the joys and difficulties of being an artist? On page 204, Vermeer speaks of the "the cost" of his painting to his household. Is it worth it? Why, so often, is an artist's genius recognized only after he or she has died?
5. Is there a piece of art that affects you in a special way? Elaborate.
6. Do you think Magdalena should have introduced herself to the couple who bought the painting? Is it better not to know the subject of a painting too closely?
7. While reading this book, did you imagine your own version of the painting? If so, describe it.
8. What do you think happened to the painting? Is Cornelius capable of destroying the painting or relinquishing it? Is he a failed human being or is he capable of redemption? Is the pictures rightful place in a museum?
9. Discuss the range and significance of the last line of the book.
10. In the end, does it matter whether or not the painting is a Vermeer?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Girl in the Blue Beret
Bobbie Ann Mason, 2011
Random House
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812978872
Summary
Inspired by the wartime experiences of her father-in-law, Bobbie Ann Mason has crafted the haunting and profoundly moving story of an American World War II pilot shot down in Occupied Europe, and his wrenching odyssey of discovery, decades later, as he uncovers the truth about those who helped him escape in 1944.
At twenty-three, Marshall Stone was a confident, cocksure U.S. flyboy stationed in England, with several bombing raids in a B-17 under his belt. But when enemy fighters forced his plane to crash-land in a Belgian field during a mission to Germany, Marshall had to rely solely on the kindness of ordinary Belgian and French citizens to help him hide from and evade the Nazis.
Decades later, restless and at the end of his career as an airline pilot, Marshall returns to the crash site and finds himself drawn back in time, unable to stop thinking about the people who risked their lives to save Allied pilots like him. Most of all, he is obsessed by the girl in the blue beret, a courageous young woman who protected and guided him in occupied Paris.
Framed in spellbinding, luminous prose, Marshall’s search for her gradually unfolds, becoming a voyage of discovery that reveals truths about himself and the people he knew during the war. Deeply beautiful and impossible to put down, The Girl in the Blue Beret is an unforgettable story—intimate, affecting, exquisite—of memories, second chances, and one intrepid girl who risked it all for a stranger. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 1, 1940
• Where—Mayfield, Kentucy, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Kentucky; M.A.,
State University of New York, Binghamton;
Ph.D., University of Connecticut
• Awards—Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award
• Currently—lives in Kentucky
Bobbie Ann Mason is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and literary critic from Kentucky.
With four siblings Mason grew up on her family's dairy farm outside of Mayfield, Kentucky. As a child she loved to read, so her parents, Wilburn and Christina Mason, always made sure she had books. These books were mostly popular fiction about the Bobbsey Twins and the Nancy Drew mysteries. She would later write a book about these books that she loved to read as an adolescent titled The Girl Sleuth: A feminist guide to the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, and Their Sisters.
After high school, Mason went on to major in English at the University of Kentucky. After graduating in 1962, she took several jobs in New York City with various movie magazines, writing articles about various stars who were in the spotlight. She wrote about Annette Funicello, Troy Donahue, Fabian, and other teen stars.
She earned her master’s degree at the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1966. Next she went to graduate school at the University of Connecticut, where she subsequently received her Ph.D. in literature with a dissertation on Vladimir Nabokov's Ada in 1972. Her dissertation was published in paperback form as Nabokov's Garden two years later.
Stories
By the time she was in her later thirties, Bobbie Ann started to write short stories. In 1980 The New Yorker published her first story.
It took me a long time to discover my material. It wasn't a matter of developing writing skills, it was a matter of knowing how to see things. And it took me a very long time to grow up. I'd been writing for a long time, but was never able to see what there was to write about. I always aspired to things away from home, so it took me a long time to look back at home and realize that that's where the center of my thought was.
Mason went on to write a collection, Shiloh and Other Stories, which appeared in 1982 and won the 1983 Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for outstanding first works of fiction. Later story collections include Love and Live (1989), Midnight Magic (1998), Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail (2002), and Nancy Culpepper (2006). Over the years, her stories have appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Mother Jones, New Yorker, and Paris Review.
Mason writes about the working-class people of Western Kentucky, and her short stories have contributed to a renaissance of regional fiction in America creating a literary style that critics have labeled "shopping mall realism."
Novels and memoir
Mason wrote her first novel, In Country, in 1985. It is often cited as one of the seminal literary works of the 1980s with a protagonist who attempts to come to terms with important generational issues, ranging from the Vietnam War to consumer culture. A film version was produced in 1989, starring Emily Lloyd as the protagonist and Bruce Willis as her uncle.
She followed In Country with another novel in 1988, Spence and Lila. She has since published others: Feather Crowns (1993), An Atomic Romance (2005), and The Girl in the Blue Beret (2011).
Mason also published her memoir Clear Springs in 1999.
Mason has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is currently the writer in residence at the University of Kentucky. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/13/2014.)
Book Reviews
Mason has given us a portrait of a man from a generation whose members were uncertain about the protocols of letting oneself feel. And she has lovingly captured the tone of bluff assertion still shared by veterans of that war. Marshall’s banality has the ring of truth; his awkwardness reveals much….The Girl in the Blue Beret is a work of remarkable empathy.
Daniel Swift - New York Times Book Review
Mason has long been considered one of the finest writers of regional fiction—Kentucky is her home and inspiration—but her affecting new novel takes place in France, and she’s just as comfortable and insightful there…once again, Mason has plumbed the moral dimensions of national conflict in the lives of individual participants and produced a deeply moving, relevant novel.
Washington Post
The new novel from best-selling author Bobbie Ann Mason will send you dashing to the shelves to devour everything else she's ever written—it's that good.… Mason weaves a spellbinding tale of war, love and survival. … The Girl in the Blue Beret is not only a remarkable work of historical fiction, it's also storytelling at its best.
Associated Press
Ushering her readers back and forth across the decades, she perfectly weaves history with fiction. In many ways the book is a tribute to these unsung civilians whose heroism often was never acknowledged by those they helped. [A] near-perfect war story.
USA Today
To Curl Up with: A pilot shot down over France returns years later to search for the jeunne fille who rescued him. Mason’s lovely tale, drawn from her [father-in-law’s] wartime experience, will resonate for many.
Good Housekeeping
The Girl in the Blue Beret is an impressive novel. Mason writes with confidence about integrity, memory, love, the war in Europe—and a likeable man.… Recommended for all historical fiction readers.
Historical Novels Review
"[An] impressive, impassioned new novel. The unforgettable story, based on the author’s father-in-law’s wartime experiences, is a gripping tale of redemption." –Miami Herald
[A] touching novel about love, loss, war, and memory. Shot down over France during WWII, Marshall Stone takes the controls and lands the plane, helping as many of his surviving airmen to safety as he can.... [F]ascinating and intensely intimate.
Publishers Weekly
[A] haunting novel [Mason's ] late father-in-law's wartime experiences, and the rich setting, detail, and intimate character nuances ring true. Verdict: Great crossover appeal for fans of the award-winning author, World War II fiction, and novels with French settings. Highly recommended. —Jenn B. Stidham, Houston Community Coll.-Northeast, TX
Library Journal
Mason may surprise fans of her Appalachian stories with this historical novel about a World War II pilot who returns to France to find the families who helped him survive after his plane was shot down 36 years earlier.... Like Marshall himself, the novel maintains a reserved, laconic, even pedantic tone—off-putting at times yet often moving
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the special bond between Allied aviators and their European helpers. Why did it take so long for many of them to reunite after the war?
2. What does flying mean to Marshall? Discuss Marshall’s failed B-17 mission and the effect it had on his life.
3. Re-read and discuss the images of flight throughout the novel. How does the final sentence tie in with these?
4. What is Marshall’s feeling about the young man he remembers as Robert? Does Marshall romanticize him? Why is finding Robert so important to Marshall?
5. Love and war. There are two main love stories in this novel—the younger couple, Annette and Robert, and the mature couple, Annette and Marshall. How are these relationships different from each other? What does war do to love and romance?
6. Why is Marshall so unprepared for what Annette reveals to him? How does he deal with her story? What possibilities lie ahead for him?
7. The name Annette Vallon is inspired by a historical figure, a woman who was William Wordsworth’s lover during the French Revolution and the mother of his illegitimate child. What suggestions are being made by the use of the name here? What else can you learn about Annette Vallon from further research?
8. What do you make of the epigraph by William Wordsworth? Is it appropriate? How does it connect with the use of Annette Vallon’s name?
9. What do mountains mean to Marshall? Trace the importance of mountains at different stages of his life.
10. How does Marshall look back on his war experience? How does his perspective change during the course of the novel?
11. How do the experiences in the book compare with your own experiences of war? Have you ever known anyone captured during wartime?
12. What is meant by second chances in the context of this book?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Girl in the Green Raincoat (Tess Monaghan series #11)
Laura Lippman, 2010
HarperCollins
192 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061938566
Summary
In the third trimester of her pregnancy, Baltimore private investigator Tess Monaghan is under doctor's orders to remain immobile. Bored and restless, reduced to watching the world go by outside her window, she takes small comfort in the mundane events she observes...like the young woman in a green raincoat who walks her dog at the same time every day.
Then one day the dog is running free and its owner is nowhere to be seen. Certain that something is terribly wrong, and incapable of leaving well enough alone, Tess is determined to get to the bottom of the dog walker's abrupt disappearance, even if she must do so from her own bedroom. But her inquisitiveness is about to fling open a dangerous Pandora's box of past crimes and troubling deaths...and she's not only putting her own life in jeopardy but also her unborn child's.
Previously serialized in the New York Times, and now published in book form for the very first time, The Girl in the Green Raincoat is a masterful Hitchcockian thriller from one of the very best in the business: multiple award-winner Laura Lippman. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• 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
Originally serialized in the New York Times Magazine, Lippman's Tess Monaghan novella turns the intrepid Baltimore PI's at-risk late-pregnancy bed rest into a compellingly edgy riff on Hitchcock's Rear Window. Lovingly tucked up on her winterized sun porch, Tess marshals her forces—doting artist boyfriend Crow, best friend Whitney Talbot, middle-aged assistant gumshoe Mrs. Blossom, and researcher Dorie Starnes—to probe the disappearance of a chic blonde green-raincoated dog walker she'd been watching from her comfy prison. Tess also takes in the missing woman's abandoned green-slickered Italian greyhound from hell, a miniature canine terrorist whose anti-housebreaking vendetta offers comic relief from Tess's threatened pre-eclampsia, her obsessive unraveling of a complex scam, and her last-trimester spats with Crow about their future. Though postpartum Tess turns alternately weepy and shrill, that condition won't last, and this entertaining romp leaves plenty of hints of detective-mother exploits to come.
Publishers Weekly
Confined to bed rest for the last 12 weeks of her pregnancy, an immobilized Tess Monaghan (In Big Trouble) watches the world around her through binoculars, à la Hitchcock's classic Rear Window, admiring the girl in the green raincoat who walks her greyhound daily on a color-coordinated leash. But when she sees the dog scampering loose, Tess's investigative genes kick in, and she's intent on finding out what happened to the dog's walker, who turns out to be Carole Epstein, third wife of Don Epstein, a man with two dead wives and a dead girlfriend behind him. Despite Epstein's claims that Carole emptied their joint accounts and took off, Tess is suspicious enough to ask best friend Whitney Talbot to pose as a lure for the man, with unexpected results all around. Verdict: In this novella that first appeared in serial form in the New York Times Magazine, Lippman provides welcome background for many of her cast members as she advances Tess and her boyfriend Crow to a new stage in their lives. Lippman's trademark crisp prose, smart plotting, and appealing protagonist—whose physical limitations here make her no less feisty and resourceful when faced with danger—make this an essential addition to a winning series. —Michele Leber, Arlington VA
Library Journal
It’s always an event when Laura Lippman, who has won every major crime-fiction award going, delivers a new Tess Monaghan storyng.
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. The Girl in the Green Raincoat was originally serialized in the New York Times Magazine. How might a serialization—a work read in timed installments—affect the structure of the story? If you have read them, use other books in the Tess Monaghan series for comparison.
2. In the P.S., Laura Lippman reveals that to hold readers' interest in a single serial installment, she layered smaller stories within the larger narrative. Choose a few chapters from The Girl in the Green Raincoat to explore this layering effect. How are these contained stories interwoven into the larger story arc? How do they deepen your understanding of the characters and the plot?
3. How did Tess being bedridden affect her judgment and how she investigated the case? Think about how she set up the plot. Diagram each plot development, and discuss how together, they formed the story. Were you surprised at the outcome?
4. One of Laura Lippman's inspirations for The Girl in the Green Raincoat was the classic movie Rear Window. Have you seen the movie? If so, how do the two plots mirror each other? How are they different? Another influence is the Josephine Tey novel Daughter of Time. If you've read this book, compare and contrast the two stories as well.
5. If you have read previous Tess Monaghan stories, what did you learn about Tess that you didn't know? What about Crow and Tess's friend Whitney?
6. Tess is nervous about her relationship with Crow and having a baby, feelings brought to the surface with the investigation. Meeting the detective who looked into the death of the suspect's first wife, she asks him, "Did you know your wife was the one, the moment you met her? Or did it creep up on you?" If you are in a committed relationship, how would you answer? Do you believe in love at first sight?
7. When Crow's protege, Lloyd, proposes to his girlfriend May, the adults in their lives are upset and claim the young people are "too young to get married." What do you think? What are the benefits of waiting? But as Lloyd asks, why wait if you know you are sure?
8. Tess's life changes in many ways by the end of the book. How do you think these changes will affect her career as a private investigator?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Girl in the Red Coat
Kate Hamer, 2016
Melville House
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781612195001
Summary
Newly single mom Beth has one constant, gnawing worry: that her dreamy eight-year-old daughter, Carmel, who has a tendency to wander off, will one day go missing.
And then one day, it happens: On a Saturday morning thick with fog, Beth takes Carmel to a local outdoor festival, they get separated in the crowd, and Carmel is gone.
Shattered, Beth sets herself on the grim and lonely mission to find her daughter, keeping on relentlessly even as the authorities tell her that Carmel may be gone for good.
Carmel, meanwhile, is on a strange and harrowing journey of her own—to a totally unexpected place that requires her to live by her wits, while trying desperately to keep in her head, at all times, a vision of her mother …
Alternating between Beth’s story and Carmel’s, and written in gripping prose that won’t let go, The Girl in the Red Coat—like Emma Donoghue’s Room and M. L. Stedman’s The Light Between Oceans—is an utterly immersive story that’s impossible to put down . . . and impossible to forget. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1964-65
• Raised—Pembrokeshire, Wales, UK
• Education—B.A., Manchester University; M.A., Aberystwyth University
• Awards—Rhys Davies Award
• Currently—lives in Cardiff, Wales
Kate Hamer was born in Plymouth, England, but grew up in Pembrokeshire, Wales. Her father was a naval engineer and her mother a public school teacher. When she was 10, the family, including her two older sisters, moved to Wales, where she has spent most of her life and considers home.
Hamer earned her B.A. from Manchester University and pursued a successful 10-year career in television documentaries before turning to fiction. In 2011 she earned her M.A. in Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University. While there, she won a prize for the best beginning of a novel—a piece what would turn into her first book, The Girl in the Red Coat.
Another of her stories won the Rhys Davies Award in 2011 and was read on BBC Radio 4. She was also awarded a Literature Wales bursary.
Hamer lives in Cardiff with her husband Mark, a gardener. The couple has two grown children. (Adapted from the UK publisher, Faber & Faber.)
Book Reviews
[G]ripping…. What kicks The Girl in the Red Coat out of the loop of familiarity is Ms. Hamer's keen understanding of her two central characters: Carmel and her devastated mother, Beth, who narrate alternating chapters…. Both emerge as individuals depicted with sympathy but also with unsparing emotional precision…. By cutting back and forth between Carmel and Beth's perspective, Ms. Hamer not only builds suspense but delineates the complicated bonds of love, dependency and resentment that bind mother and daughter. Their separation underscores their need for each other, while muffling memories of their sometimes tense, even testy relationship.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
Hamer’s book is a moving, voice-driven narrative. As much an examination of loss and anxiety as it is a gripping page-turner, it’ll appeal to anyone captivated by child narrators or analyses of the pains and joys of motherhood.
Huffington Post
(Starred review.) Hamer's spectacular debut skillfully chronicles the nightmare of child abduction. Telling the story in two remarkable voices...the author weaves a page-turning narrative....[which is] believable and nuanced, resulting in a morally complex, haunting read.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Reading this novel is a test of how fast you can turn pages. Hamer...is a natural storyteller who writes with such a sense of drama, compulsion, and sympathy that most readers will devour this work. —Lisa Rohrbaugh, Leetonia Community P.L., OH
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Hamer’s lush use of language easily conjures fairy-tale imagery.... Although a kidnapped child is the central plot point, this is not a mystery but a novel of deep inquiry and intense emotions. Hamer’s dark tale of the lost and found is nearly impossible to put down.
Booklist
[P]oignantly details the loss and loneliness of a mother and daughter separated.... Hamer beautifully renders pain, exactly capturing the evisceration of loss, but she just falls short with the overall cohesion of the story. Exquisite prose..., but the book could have used more attention to less detail.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. In the beginning of the novel, Beth briefly loses Carmel in a maze. What is the significance of this moment? How did it influence your reaction to the scenes at the festival?
2. Beth tells Carmel that, regardless of what happens, Carmel must stay uniquely "Carmel" inside. Are names an important aspect of this story? Can you think of any examples where names play a significant role in the text?
3. Families, or, more importantly, family difficulties, are central to The Girl in the Red Coat. What are the various family dynamics at work? Where are there parallels and where are there inconsistencies?
4. Discuss Beth and her ex-husband’s shifting relationship. Consider how it is strengthened and changed by Carmel’s disappearance. As Beth says, "we were brother and sister united in this strange bond."
5. Early in the book, Carmel’s teacher, Mrs. Buckfast, refers to Beth as "yet another single mother." Think about the friendships Beth has with her female friends and how they support and teach each other. Are those relationships surprising in any way? How do they evolve?
6. Fairy tales play an important role throughout The Girl in the Red Coat. Discuss the fairy tale imagery (the woods, the significance of Carmel’s red coat) and how it elevates the novel into the realm of the supernatural. Did this affect your reading of the story?
7. How does Beth handle the loss of her daughter over the course of the novel? Did you notice examples of "tiny actions" that helped her cope? How do those actions compare to the more major developments in Carmel’s disappearance?
8. Gramps believes Carmel possesses a divine gift. Do you see evidence of this gift throughout the text? Are you convinced by it? Look closely at pages 225–227.
9. Gramps and Dorothy tell Carmel a number of lies in order to keep her with them. These lies escalate as Carmel becomes more and more suspicious. What are some of these lies and how do they affect Carmel? Is there one that feels like the breaking point, or is it more a matter of accumulation?
10. The word "courage" is a refrain throughout the novel. Discuss the ways in which the book’s protagonists—Carmel and Beth—display courage. How do those demonstrations compare to the "courage" we see in Gramps, Dorothy, and Paul?
11. Beth says she feels "better in an environment that says: "normality is paper thin." How does the world move on as Beth struggles with her grief? Did you notice historical or cultural clues that gave you a sense of when the narrative takes place? Did it matter? Look closely at pg. 247.
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
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The Girl in the Spider's Web (Millennium Series 4)
David Lagercrantz, 2015
Knopf Doubleday
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385354288
Summary
Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist return.
She is the girl with the dragon tattoo—a genius hacker and uncompromising misfit. He is a crusading journalist whose championing of the truth often brings him to the brink of prosecution.
Late one night, Blomkvist receives a phone call from a source claiming to have information vital to the United States. The source has been in contact with a young female superhacker—a hacker resembling someone Blomkvist knows all too well.
The implications are staggering. Blomkvist, in desperate need of a scoop for Millennium, turns to Salander for help. She, as usual, has her own agenda. The secret they are both chasing is at the center of a tangled web of spies, cybercriminals, and governments around the world, and someone is prepared to kill to protect it . . .
The duo who captivated millions of readers in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest join forces again in this adrenaline-charged, uniquely of-the-moment thriller. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September 4, 1962
• Rasied—near Stockholm, Sweden
• Education—University of Gothenburg
• Currently—lives in Sodermalm, Stockholm, Sweden
David Lagercrantz is a Swedish journalist and best-selling author, well known in his own country as the ghostwriter for I am Zlatan Ibrahimovic, autobiography of the renowned Swedish footballer (soccer player). With the continuation of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Series (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, et al.), Lagercrantz has gained an international reputation.
Personal
Lagercrantz grew up in Sweden's foremost journalistic and intellectual circles. He is son of Swedish publisher and literary scholar Olof Lagercrantz; his mother is Martina Ruin, daughter of philosopher Hans Ruin. Lagercrantz was raised in Solna and Drottningholm near Stockholm, Sweden, together with his brothers and sisters, among them actress and diplomat Marika Lagercrantz.
The family is descended from a junior line of the untitled Swedish noble family Lagercrantz and, as such, is a member of the Swedish House of Nobility. He is also a descendant through his paternal grandmother of the 19th century historian and poet Erik Gustaf Geijer.
Even though he himself holds leftist political views (and is first cousin to Left Party politician and economist Johan Lonnroth), Lagercrantz has described his upper-class background as a cause of antagonism in a journalistic environment dominated by radical left writers. As a consequence, Lagercrantz has largely withdrawn from the intellectual debate and "culture pages sphere" during his journalist career.
Lagercrantz is married to the journalist and Dagens Eko radio news manager Anne Lagercrantz. They have three children.
Journalist
Lagercrantz studied philosophy and religion at university and subsequently graduated from the Gothenburg journalism school. His first journalist job was at the in-house magazine of carmaker Volvo.
He later moved to the daily tabloid newspaper Expressen where he worked as a crime reporter until 1993. He covered some of the major criminal cases of the late 80s and early 90s in Sweden, notably the Amsele murders.
Early books
His first book, released in 1997, was a biography of the Swedish adventurer and mountaineer Goran Kropp (1966 - 2002).
In 2000 he published a biography on the inventor Hakan Lans, Ett svenskt geni. His breakthrough as a novelist was Syndafall i Wilmslow, a fictionalised novel about the British mathematician Alan Turing.
I am Zlatan Ibrahimovic
In 2011 the best-selling sports biography I am Zlatan Ibrahimovic was published, with Lagercrantz as ghostwriter. According to Lagercrantz, the book is largely based on approximately 100 hours of interviews conducted with Ibrahimovic in Milan.
Lagercrantz chose to approach the project as a novel rather than a conventional ghostwritten autobiography. Although Ibrahimovic was at first was sceptical, the Swedish language edition sold over 500,000 copies before Christmas 2011, which according to his literary agency Bonnier Group Agency is the fastest selling book of all time in Sweden. The rights have been sold to more than 30 countries.
Simon Kuper of the Financial Times compared the biography to Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint and drew parallels between the main character's experience as a minority and outsider struggling for recognition and acceptance in mainstream society. Kupner named the book "the best footballer’s autobiography of recent years."
The Girl in the Spider's Web
In 2013 it was announced that Lagercrantz had been contracted to write the fourth novel in the Millennium series of crime novels, originally by Stieg Larsson (1954–2004). The novel was published at midnight August 26-27, 2015, around the ten-year anniversary of the first Millennium novel.
According to the publisher, the book is a stand-alone sequel based on Larsson's characters, but has not made use of the incomplete book manuscripts and notes he left behind. Lagercrantz, however, stated in an interview with Aftonbladet that he had picked up some of the unfinished plot threads from the published novels.
The book's Swedish title is Det som inte dödar oss, literally translated "That Which Does Not Kill Us"; the English title is The Girl in the Spider's Web. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/23/2014.)
Book Reviews
Fans of Stieg Larsson's captivating odd couple of modern detective fiction…will not be disappointed by the latest installment of their adventures…Salander and Blomkvist have survived the authorship transition intact and are just as compelling as ever…Mr. Lagercrantz demonstrates an instinctive feel for the world Larsson created and for his two unconventional gumshoes…Mr. Lagercrantz captures the weariness, even vulnerability, that lurks beneath these two characters' toughness, and he understands that each is motivated by a craving for justice…Mr. Lagercrantz seems to have set about—quite nimbly, for the most part—channeling Larsson's narrative style, mixing genre clichés with fresh, reportorial details, and plot twists reminiscent of sequences from Larsson's novels with energetically researched descriptions of the wild, wild West that is the dark side of the Internet.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
What of Lisbeth Salander? Given that Lagercrantz knows she’s what readers want, her long and suspenseful introduction is masterful.
Lee Child - New York Times Book Review
Lagercrantz has more than met the challenge. Larsson’s brainchildren are in good hands and may have even come up a bit in the world.
Wall Street Journal
Lagercrantz’s real achievement here is the subtle development of Lisbeth’s character; he allows us access to her complex, alienated world but is careful not to remove her mystery and unknowability. Lisbeth Salander remains, in Lagercrantz’s hands, the most enigmatic and fascinating anti-heroine in fiction.
Financial Times
Lagercrantz deftly blends the spirit of Larsson’s work and characters with his own literary skills and bright imagination. Spider’s Web is an intelligent novel that has Salander entangled in one of the most contentious issues of our times.... Riveting.... Pyrotechnic.
Chicago Tribune
[A] smart, action-packed thriller that is true to the spirit of the characters Larsson created while adding interesting new ones and updating the political backdrop that made the Millennium series so compelling.
Buffalo News
Rest easy, Lisbeth Salander fans—our punk hacker heroine is in good hands.... A twisty, bloody thrill ride...seamlessly woven together by Lagercrantz—in fact, if you hadn’t seen his name on the book jacket, you’d likely assume it was Larsson’s own handiwork.... An instant page-turner.
USA Today
Without ever becoming pastiche, the book is a respectful and affectionate homage to the originals.... Lagercrantz’s continuation, while never formulaic, is a cleaner and tighter read than the originals.
Guardian (UK)
Lagercrantz pulls it off.... One devours Larsson’s books for the plots, the action, the anger, and most of all for Lisbeth Salander, a character who resembles Sherlock Holmes or James Bond . . . Lagercrantz has caught her superbly.
Daily Telegraph (UK)
David Lagercrantz was set an almost impossible task by Stieg Larsson’s estate when they asked him to write a ‘continuation’ novel featuring Lisbeth Salander. He has carried it out with intelligence and vigour. The Girl in the Spider’s Web conveys the essence and atmosphere of Larsson’s Millennium novels. He has captured the spirit of their characters and devised inventive plots.
London Times (UK)
Fans of the original trilogy need not fear.... The novel is well-researched and more intelligent than the average thriller.
Independent (UK)
Lagercrantz makes sensible decisions in this fourth volume.... Blomkvist is given a cleverly and very contemporary storyline.... A worthwhile read for anyone who’s zipped through the trilogy and finished wanting more.
Daily Express (UK)
Lagercrantz does an excellent job.... Anyone craving more Salander bad-assery should get their hands on a copy of Spider’s Web faster than Lisbeth can hack into the NSA.
People
Fans of the original trilogy will be pleased with Lagercrantz’s new installment. The novel is a smart, propulsive thriller and espionage tale with a timely digital age plot (think Snowden and Wikileaks).
Hollywood Reporter
Action-packed and thoroughly enjoyable.... [A] finely-wrought thriller.... I will eagerly devour the next adventure for Salander and Blomkvist, especially now that we know their fate lies in the hands of a writer worthy of their story.
Daily Beast
Lagercrantz stays true to Larsson’s vision.... No doubt about it, Lagercrantz has done a skillful job.
Sydney Morning Herald
(Starred review.) [W]orthy, crowd-pleasing fourth installment in the late Stieg Larsson's Millennium saga.... Lagercrantz, his prose more assured than Larsson's, keeps Salander's fiery rage at the white-hot level her fans will want.
Publishers Weekly
Swedish journalist and best-selling author Lagercrantz hit the jackpot when Stieg Larsson's estate asked him to write this stand-alone sequel to the famed "Millennium" trilogy.
Library Journal
Lisbeth is perhaps getting a little long in the tooth to be called a girl, but no matter: she still has a young person's aching desire to right the wrongs of the world.... Fast-moving, credible, and intelligently told.
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. In the meantime, use our generic mystery questions.)
GENERIC DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Mystery / Crime / Suspense Thrillers
1. Talk about the characters, both good and bad. Describe their personalities and motivations. Are they fully developed and emotionally complex? Or are they more one-dimensional heroes and villains?
2. What do you know...and when do you know it? At what point in the book do you, the reader, begin to piece together what happened?
3. Good crime writers are skillful at hiding clues in plain sight. How well does the author hide the clues in this work?
4. Does the author use red-herrings—false clues—to purposely lead readers astray?
5. Talk about plot's twists & turns—those surprising developments that throw everything you think you've figured out into disarray. Do they enhance the story, add complexity, and build suspense? Are they plausible? Or do the twists & turns feel forced and preposterous—inserted only to extend the story.
6. Does the author ratchet up the story's suspense? Did you find yourself anxious—quickly turning pages to learn what happened? How does the author build suspense?
7. What about the ending—is it satisfying? Is it probable or believable? Does it grow out of clues previously laid out by the author (see Question 2). Or does the ending come out of the blue? Does it feel forced...tacked-on...or a cop-out? Or perhaps it's too predictable. Can you envision a better, or different, ending?
8. Are there certain passages in the book—ideas, descriptions, or dialogue—that you found interesting or revealing...or that somehow struck you? What lines, if any, made you stop and think?
9. Overall, does the book satisfy? Does it live up to the standards of a good crime story or suspense thriller? Why or why not?
(Generic Mystery Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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The Girl in the Tower (Winternight Trilogy 2)
Katherine Arden, 2017
Del Rey
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781101885963
Summary
A remarkable young woman blazes her own trail, from the backwoods of Russia to the court of Moscow, in the exhilarating sequel to Katherine Arden’s bestselling debut novel, The Bear and the Nightingale.
Katherine Arden’s enchanting first novel introduced readers to an irresistible heroine. Vasilisa has grown up at the edge of a Russian wilderness, where snowdrifts reach the eaves of her family’s wooden house and there is truth in the fairy tales told around the fire. Her gift for seeing what others do not won her the attention of Morozko—Frost, the winter demon from the stories—and together they saved her people from destruction.
But Frost’s aid comes at a cost, and her people have condemned her as a witch.
Now Vasilisa faces an impossible choice. Driven from her home by frightened villagers, the only options left for her are marriage or the convent. She cannot bring herself to accept either fate and instead chooses adventure, dressing herself as a boy and setting off astride her magnificent stallion Solovey.
But after Vasilisa prevails in a skirmish with bandits, everything changes.
The Grand Prince of Moscow anoints her a hero for her exploits, and she is reunited with her beloved sister and brother, who are now part of the Grand Prince’s inner circle. She dares not reveal to the court that she is a girl, for if her deception were discovered it would have terrible consequences for herself and her family.
Before she can untangle herself from Moscow’s intrigues — and as Frost provides counsel that may or may not be trustworthy — she will also confront an even graver threat lying in wait for all of Moscow itself. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1987 (?)
• Where—Austin, Texas, USA
• Education—B.A., Middlebury, Vermont, USA
• Currently—lives in Brandon, Vermont
Katherine Arden is a Texas-born author known for her Winternight Trilogy of fantasy novels—The Bear and the Nightingale, The Girl in the Tower, both published in 2017, and The Winter of the Witch in 2019.
Born in Austin, Texas, Katherine Arden spent her junior year of high school in Rennes, France. Following her acceptance to Middlebury College in Vermont, she deferred enrolment for a year in order to live and study in Moscow. At Middlebury, she specialized in French and Russian literature.
After receiving her B.A. in French and Russian literature, she moved to Maui, Hawaii, working every kind of odd job imaginable, from grant writing and making crepes to serving as a personal tour guide. After a year on the island, she moved to Briancon, France, and spent nine months teaching. She then returned to Maui, stayed for nearly a year, then left again to wander. Currently she lives in Vermont, but really, you never know. (Adapted from the publisher.)
Book Reviews
(Starred review) [A] sensual, beautifully written, and emotionally stirring fantasy . . . Fairy tales don’t get better than this.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) Arden’s lush, lyrical writing cultivates an intoxicating, visceral atmosphere, and her marvelous sense of pacing carries the novel along at a propulsive clip. A masterfully told story of folklore, history, and magic with a spellbinding heroine at the heart of it all.
Booklist
[The characters, if painted in broad strokes, are vivid and personable, and the brutal landscape … shapes their destinies. A compelling, fast-moving story that grounds fantasy elements in a fascinating period of Russian history.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Since The Bear and the Nightingale, we have seen Vasya and her siblings grow up and take on new roles as adults in The Girl in the Tower. Many parallels are drawn in this book between Vasya, Sasha, and Olga in their childhood and as they are now. How have they changed? Do you think they have grown closer, or further apart?
2. Again and again, the concept of freedom versus confinement pervades the story: Vasya must choose between freedom alone, life in a convent, or a future tied to marriage; Sasha reflects on his inability to find peace as a secluded monk and his need for adventure; and Olga comments repeatedly on the strict obligations of noblewomen confined to their towers. Discuss this dynamic. What does freedom mean to each of these characters? How much of their freedom should each be expected to sacrifice to their responsibilities?
3. Vasya assumes the role of Sasha’s brother, Vasilii, when she becomes entangled with the Moscow noblemen. Is pretending to be a man a smart move on Vasya’s part? How would the events that unfold have been different if, upon her first encounter with Sasha and the Grand Prince at the walled monastery, she was truthful about her identity?
4. The theme of coming-of-age is prevalent throughout the book, as Vasya reflects on her decision to pursue an adulthood of her own making in contrast to Masha’s very confined choices as a princess. Why do you think it is that with coming-of-age there seems to be a narrowing of choices?
5. Vasya, as she strives to find her place in the world, has to make many difficult decisions, many of which force her to choose between protecting her family and standing up for herself. What obligations does Vasya have to Sasha and Olga? What obligations do they owe to Vasya? How do these family responsibilities interfere with one another, and how do the desires of each sibling interfere with their duties as family?
6. Have you ever felt conflicted about being tied to responsibilities that don’t align with what you want to pursue?
7. Just as Vasya’s revered reputation as Vasilii the Brave has been solidified, all comes crashing down when Kasyan reveals her secret to all of Moscow. Did Vasya make a mistake remaining in Moscow for so long and putting herself and her family at greater risk of her true identity being revealed? Do you think her choice to remain in Moscow for as long as she did was selfish or selfless?
8. Vasya interferes when Morozko arrives to take Olga away, and as a result, he leaves with the life of the newborn child instead. What do you think of Vasya’s decision to intervene?
9. Was Morozko in the right to use Vasya to sustain himself? Do you think his intentions toward Vasya are good, or does he just take advantage of her? Is Vasya right to turn away from him when she learns the truth and rejects his jewel?
10. What do you think will become of Vasya’s tangled relationship with Morozko now that the talisman has been broken?
11. What secrets do you think Morozko still holds?
12. Did you ever begin to distrust Kasyan? At what point did your doubts about him begin? Are there clues that made you suspect that he is not what he appears?
13. What do you think of Konstantin’s role in assisting Kasyan and sacrificing Masha as an act of vengeance against Vasya? What do you think of Vasya’s choice to let him live after he has committed this horrible act?
14. Were you surprised to learn that the ghost of the tower is Vasya’s grandmother, Tamara?
15. By the end of the book, Vasya reveals the truth about herself and her exploits to her siblings. Now that Olga and Sasha know the truth about Vasya’s powers, how do you think this will affect their relationship?
(Questions issued by the publishers.)
Girl in Translation
Jean Kwok, 2010
Penguin Group USA
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594487569
Summary
Introducing a fresh, exciting Chinese-American voice, an inspiring debut about an immigrant girl forced to choose between two worlds and two futures.
When Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to Brooklyn squalor, she quickly begins a secret double life: exceptional schoolgirl during the day, Chinatown sweatshop worker in the evenings. Disguising the more difficult truths of her life-like the staggering degree of her poverty, the weight of her family's future resting on her shoulders, or her secret love for a factory boy who shares none of her talent or ambition—Kimberly learns to constantly translate not just her language but herself back and forth between the worlds she straddles.
Through Kimberly's story, author Jean Kwok, who also emigrated from Hong Kong as a young girl, brings to the page the lives of countless immigrants who are caught between the pressure to succeed in America, their duty to their family, and their own personal desires, exposing a world that we rarely hear about.
Written in an indelible voice that dramatizes the tensions of an immigrant girl growing up between two cultures, surrounded by a language and world only half understood, Girl in Translation is an unforgettable and classic novel of an American immigrant—a moving tale of hardship and triumph, heartbreak and love, and all that gets lost in translation. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Hong Kong, China
• Raised—Brooklyn, New York City, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard University; M.F.A., Columbia
University
• Currently—lives in the Netherlands
Jean Kwok was born in Hong Kong and immigrated to Brooklyn as a young girl. Jean received her bachelor's degree from Harvard and completed an MFA in fiction at Columbia. She worked as an English teacher and Dutch-English translator at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and now writes full-time. She has been published in Story magazine and Prairie Schooner. (From the publisher.)
More
Her own words:
Although Girl in Translation is a work of fiction and not a memoir, the world in which it takes place is real.
The youngest of seven children and a girl at that, I was a dreamy, impractical child who ran wild through the sunlit streets of Hong Kong. No one was more astonished than my family when I turned out to be quite good at school. We moved to New York City when I was five and my only gift was taken from me. I did not understand a word of English
We lost all our money in the move to the United States. My family started working in a sweatshop in Chinatown. My father took me there every day after school and we all emerged many hours later, soaked in sweat and covered in fabric dust. Our apartment swarmed with insects and rats. In the winter, we kept the oven door open day and night because there was no other heat in the apartment.
As I slowly learned English my talent for school re-emerged. When I was about to graduate from elementary school, I was tested by a number of exclusive private schools and won scholarships to all of them. However, I'd also been accepted by Hunter College High School, a public high school for the intellectually gifted, and that was where I wanted to go.
By then, my family had stopped working at the sweatshop and we'd moved to a run-down brownstone in Brooklyn Heights that had been divided into formerly rent-controlled apartments. It was a vast improvement, but there was still no money to spare. If I didn't get into a top school with a full financial aid package, I wouldn't be able to go to college. Although I loved English, I didn't think it was a practical choice and devoted myself to science instead. In my last year in high school, I worked in three laboratories: the Genetic Engineering and Molecular Biology labs at Sloan-Kettering Cancer Research Center and the Biophysics/Interface Lab at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Brooklyn.
I was accepted early to Harvard and I'd done enough college work to take Advanced Standing when I entered, thus skipping a year and starting as a sophomore in Physics. It was in college that I realized that I could follow my true calling, writing, and switched into English and American Literature.
I put myself through Harvard, working up to four jobs at a time to do so: washing dishes in the dining hall, cleaning rooms, reading to the blind, teaching English, and acting as the director of a summer program for Chinese immigrant children. I graduated with honors, then took a job as a professional ballroom dancer in New York City: waltzing in high heels by day and writing by night. After a few years, I left ballroom dance and went to Columbia to do my MFA in fiction. Before I graduated from Columbia, two stories of mine had been published in Story. In my last year at Columbia, I worked fulltime for a major investment bank as a member of a five-person computer team that addressed the multimedia needs of the Board of Directors.
I then moved to Holland for love and went through the process of adjusting to another culture and learning another language again. Since then, my work has also been published in Prairie Schooner and the Nuyorasian Anthology, and I am a Featured Writer in the Holt high school textbook Elements Of Literature (eds. 2007, 2009, 2011), in which my story appears alongside those of authors such as Alice Walker, Pearl S. Buck, and Sandra Cisneros. I taught English at Leiden University in the Netherlands and worked as a Dutch-English translator until I finished Girl in Translation. After it was accepted for publication, I quit to write fulltime. I live in the Netherlands with my husband and two sons. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Jean Kwok takes two well-trod literary conceits - coming of age and coming to America - and renders them surprisingly fresh in her fast-moving, clean-prosed immigrants' tale, Girl in Translation. Along with her widowed mother, 11-year-old Kimberly (Ah-Kim) Chang is transported from the balmy familiarity of her native Hong Kong to the icy, inhospitable projects of 1980s Brooklyn—a girl with little grasp of the language and cultural mores of her newly adopted homeland, and even less financial means. How Kimberly fights through almost obscene marginalization to forge her own version of the American dream is consistently compelling, even if Girl's needlessly soapy conclusion seems unworthy of what came before.
Entertainment Weekly
A resolute yet naïve Chinese girl confronts poverty and culture shock with equal zeal when she and her mother immigrate to Brooklyn in Kwok's affecting coming-of-age debut. Ah-Kim Chang, or Kimberly as she is known in the U.S., had been a promising student in Hong Kong when her father died. Now she and her mother are indebted to Kimberly's Aunt Paula, who funded their trip from Hong Kong, so they dutifully work for her in a Chinatown clothing factory where they earn barely enough to keep them alive. Despite this, and living in a condemned apartment that is without heat and full of roaches, Kimberly excels at school, perfects her English, and is eventually admitted to an elite, private high school. An obvious outsider, without money for new clothes or undergarments, she deals with added social pressures, only to be comforted by an understanding best friend, Annette, who lends her makeup and hands out American advice. A love interest at the factory leads to a surprising plot line, but it is the portrayal of Kimberly's relationship with her mother that makes this more than just another immigrant story.
Publishers Weekly
Living in squalor among rats and roaches in a virtually abandoned unheated apartment building in Brooklyn, NY, 11-year-old Kimberly Chang narrates how, after recently immigrating from Hong Kong, she and her mother strive to eke out a life together working in an illegally run sweat shop. Though she was once the top-ranked pupil in her class in Hong Kong, Kimberly's English skills are so limited that she must struggle to keep up in school while still translating for her mother and attempting to hide the truth of her living situation from her well-to-do classmates and only true friend, Annette. Drawing on her own experiences as an immigrant from Hong Kong (though she herself went to Harvard and Columbia, while Kimberly earns a spot at Yale), Kwok adeptly captures the hardships of the immigrant experience and the strength of the human spirit to survive and even excel despite the odds. Verdict: Reminiscent of An Na's award-winning work for younger readers, A Step from Heaven, this work will appeal to both adults and teens and is appropriate for larger public libraries, especially those serving large Asian American populations. —Shirley N. Quan, Orange Cty. Lib., Santa Ana, CA
Library Journal
An iteration of a quintessential American myth—immigrants come to America and experience economic exploitation and the seamy side of urban life, but education and pluck ultimately lead to success. Twelve-year-old Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong and feel lucky to get out before the transfer to the Chinese. Because Mrs. Chang's older sister owns a garment factory in Brooklyn, she offers Kimberly's mother—and even Kimberly—a "good job" bagging skirts as well as a place to live in a nearby apartment. Of course, both of these "gifts" turn out to be exploitative, for to make ends meet Mrs. Chang winds up working 12-hour-plus days in the factory. Kimberly joins her after school hours in this hot and exhausting labor, and the apartment is teeming with roaches. In addition, the start to Kimberly's sixth-grade year is far from prepossessing, for she's shy and speaks almost no English, but she turns out to be a whiz at math and science. The following year she earns a scholarship to a prestigious private school. Her academic gifts are so far beyond those of her fellow students that eventually she's given a special oral exam to make sure she's not cheating. (She's not.) Playing out against the background of Kimberly's fairly predictable school success (she winds up going to Yale on full scholarship and then to Harvard medical school) are the stages of her development, which include interactions with Matt, her hunky Chinese-American boyfriend, who works at the factory, drops out of school and wants to provide for her; Curt, her hunky Anglo boyfriend, who's dumb but sweet; and Annette, her loyal friend from the time they're in sixth grade. Throughout the stress of adolescence, Kimberly must also negotiate the tension between her mother's embarrassing old-world ways and the allurement of American culture. A straightforward and pleasant, if somewhat predictable narrative, marred in part by an ending that too blatantly tugs at the heartstrings.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Throughout Girl in Translation, the author uses creative spelling to show Kimberly’s mis-hearing and misunderstanding of English words. How does the language of the novel evolve as Kimberly grows and matures? Do you see a change in the respective roles that English and Chinese play in the narrative as it progresses?
2. The word "translation" figures prominently in the title of the novel, and learning to translate between her two languages is key to Kimberly’s ability to thrive in her new life. Does she find herself translating back and forth in anything other than language? Clothing? Priorities? Expectations? Personality or behavior? Can you cite instances where this occurs, and why they are significant to the story as a whole?
3. Kimberly has two love interests in the book. How are the relationships that Matt and Curt offer different? Why do you think she ultimately chooses one boy over the other? What does that choice say about her? Can you see a future for her with the other boy? What would change?
4. In many ways Kimberly takes over the position of head of household after her family moves to New York. Was this change in roles inevitable? How do you imagine Ma feels about it? Embarrassed? Grateful? In which ways does Ma still fulfill the role of mother?
5. Kimberly often refers to her father, and imagines how her life might have been different, easier, if he had lived. Do you think she is right?
6. Kimberly’s friend Annette never seems to grasp the depths of Kimberly’s poverty. What does this say about her? What lesson does this experience teach Kimberly? Is Kimberly right to keep the details of her home life a secret?
7. Kimberly believes that devoting herself to school will allow her to free her family from poverty. Does school always live up to her expectations? Where do you think it fails her? How does it help her succeed? Can you imagine the same character without the academic talent? How would her life be different? What would remain the same? Is Kimberly right to believe that all of her potential lies in her talent for school? Must qualities like ambition, drive, hope, and optimism go hand in hand with book smarts?
8. Think about other immigrant stories. How is Kimberly’s story universal? How is it unique? How does Kimberly’s Chinese-American story compare to other immigrant stories? Would it change if she were from a different country or culture?
9. Kimberly lives in extreme poverty. Was anything about her circumstances surprising to you? How has reading Girl in Translation affected your views of immigration? How can you apply these lessons in your community?
10. The story is set in the 1980s. Do you think immigrant experiences are much different today? What has changed? What has remained the same?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Girl on the Train
Paula Hawkins, 2015
Penguin Group (USA)
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594633669
Summary
A debut psychological thriller that will forever change the way you look at other people's lives.
Rachel takes the same commuter train every morning. Every day she rattles down the track, flashes past a stretch of cozy suburban homes, and stops at the signal that allows her to daily watch the same couple breakfasting on their deck.
She’s even started to feel like she knows them. "Jess and Jason," she calls them. Their life—as she sees it—is perfect. Not unlike the life she recently lost.
And then she sees something shocking. It’s only a minute until the train moves on, but it’s enough. Now everything’s changed. Unable to keep it to herself, Rachel offers what she knows to the police, and becomes inextricably entwined in what happens next, as well as in the lives of everyone involved. Has she done more harm than good?
Compulsively readable, The Girl on the Train is an emotionally immersive, Hitchcockian thriller and an electrifying debut. (From the publisher.)
See the 2016 film version with Emily Blunt.
Listen to our Movies Meet Book Club Podcast as Hollister and O'Toole discuss the movie and book.
Author Bio
• Birth—August 26, 1972
• Where—Harare, Zimbabwe
• Education—Oxford University
• Currently—lives in London, England, UK
Paul Hawkins was born and raised in Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe). Her father was an economics professor and financial journalist. In 1989, when she was 17, she moved to London to study for her A-Levels at Collingham College, an independent college in Kensington, West London. She later read philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford Unviersity. After graduation, she spent 15 years as a journalist — as a business reporter for The Times and later as a freelancer for a number of publications. She also wrote a financial advice book for women, The Money Goddess.
Sometime in 2009, Hawkins began to write romantic comedy under the pen name Amy Silver. She wrote four novels, including Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista, but none ever achieved commercial success. Eventually, she decided to challenge herself by writing in a darker mode. Giving up her freelance work to write full-time on fiction, Hawkins ended up borrowing money from her family to make ends meet.
But after only six months, Hawkins finished her novel, and in 2015 The Girl on the Train was published. A complex thriller, with themes of domestic violence, alcohol, and drug abuse, the book became an instant bestseller. It has sold close to 20 million copies in 15 countries and 40 languages and in 2016 was adapted to film starring Emily Blunt. Hawkin's second novel, Into the Water, was released in 2017. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/28/2017.)
Book Reviews
The Girl on the Train has more fun with unreliable narration than any chiller since Gone Girl…. Paula Hawkins [is] no slouch when it comes to trickery or malice…. Ms. Hawkins scrambles the timing of scenes, with Megan gone in one chapter and then present in the next. She also shifts well among her narrators' points of view to keep the reader on edge, and only as the book progresses do these different perspectives begin to dovetail. Scrambling a story is easy, but it's done here to tight, suspenseful effect.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Paula Hawkins has come up with an ingenious slant on the currently fashionable amnesia thriller.... Hawkins juggles perspectives and timescales with great skill, and considerable suspense builds up along with empathy for an unusual central character.
Guardian (UK)
Like its train, the story blasts through the stagnation of these lives in suburban London and the reader cannot help but turn pages.... The welcome echoes of Rear Window throughout the story and its propulsive narrative make The Girl on the Train an absorbing read.
Boston Globe
Given the number of titles that are declared to be "the next" of a bestseller...book fans have every right to be wary. But Paula Hawkins’ novel The Girl on the Train just might have earned the title of "the next Gone Girl."
Christian Science Monitor
[A] twisty thriller.... It’s being called the next Gone Girl.
USA Today
[The Girl on the Train] pulls off a thriller's toughest trick: carefully assembling everything we think we know, until it reveals the one thing we didn't see coming.
Entertainment Weekly
Gone Girl fans will devour this psychological thriller.... Hawkins’s debut ends with a twist that no one—least of all its victims—could have seen coming.
People
Hawkins’s taut story roars along at the pace of, well, a high-speed train.... Hawkins delivers a smart, searing thriller that offers readers a 360-degree view of lust, love, marriage and divorce.
Good Housekeeping
There’s nothing like a possible murder to take the humdrum out of your daily commute.
Cosmopolitan
Rachel takes the same train into London every day, daydreaming about the lives of the occupants in the homes she passes. But when she sees something unsettling from her window one morning, it sets in motion a chilling series of events that make her question whom she can really trust.
Woman’s Day
(Starred review.) [A] psychologically astute debut.... [Hawkins] deftly shifts between the accounts of the addled Rachel, as she desperately tries to remember what happened, Megan, and, eventually, Anna, for maximum suspense. The surprise-packed narratives hurtle toward a stunning climax, horrifying as a train wreck and just as riveting.
Publishers Weekly
[U]nfortunately, by using [different narrators for each chapter], debut author Hawkins confuses the reader. With only a brief look into backstory, undeveloped characters offer no reason or motivation for their actions, and none of them is likable. [A] disappointing psychological thriller. —Marianne Fitzgerald, Severna Park H.S., MD
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Desperate to find lives more fulfilling than her own, a lonely London commuter imagines the story of a couple she's only glimpsed through the train window in Hawkins' chilling, assured debut.... Even the most astute readers will be in for a shock as Hawkins slowly unspools the facts, exposing the harsh realities of love and obsession's inescapable links to violence.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We have 2 sets of questions: one from the publisher and a second set graciously offered to LitLovers by Jennifer Johnson, ML, MLIS, Reference Librarian, Springdale (Arkansas) Public Library. Thank you, Jennifer.
1. We all do it—actively watch life around us. In this way, with her own voyeuristic curiosity, Rachel Watson is not so unusual. What do you think accounts for this nosy, all-too-human impulse? Is it more extreme in Rachel than in the average person? What is so different about her?
2. How would you have reacted if you’d seen what Rachel did from her train window—a pile of clothes—just before the rumored disappearance of Megan Hipwell? What might you or she have done differently?
3. In both Rachel Watson’s and Megan Hipwell’s marriages, deep secrets are kept from the husbands. Are these marriages unusual or even extreme in this way? Consider how many relationships rely on half-truths? Is it ever necessary or justifiable to lie to someone you love? How much is too much to hide from a partner?
4. What about the lies the characters tell to themselves? In what ways is Rachel lying to herself? Do all people tell themselves lies to some degree in order to move on with their lives? Is what Rachel (or any of the other characters) is doing any different from that? How do her lies ultimately affect her and the people around her?
5. A crucial question in The Girl on the Train is how much Rachel Watson can trust her own memory. How reliable are her observations? Yet since the relationship between truth and memory is often a slippery one, how objective or "true" can a memory, by definition, really be? Can memory lie? If so, what factors might influence it? Consider examples from the book.
6. One of Rachel’s deepest disappointments, it turns out, is that she can’t have children. Her ex-husband Tom’s second wife Anna is the mother to a young child, Evie. How does Rachel’s inability to conceive precipitate her breakdown? How does the topic of motherhood drive the plot of the story? What do you think Paula Hawkins was trying to say about the ways motherhood can define women’s lives or what we expect from women’s domestic lives, whether as wives, mothers, or unmarried women in general?
7. Think about trust in The Girl on the Train. Who trusts whom? Who is deserving of trust? Is Rachel Watson a very trustworthy person? Why or why not? Who appears trustworthy and is actually not? What are the skills we use to make the decision about whether to trust someone we don’t know well?
8. Other characters in the novel make different assumptions about Rachel Watson depending on how or even where they see her. To a certain extent, she understands this and often tries to manipulate their assumptions—by appearing to be a commuter, for instance, going to work every day. Is she successful? To what degree did you make assumptions about Rachel early on based on the facts and appearances you were presented? How did those change over time and why? How did your assumptions about her affect your reading of the central mystery in the book? Did your assumptions about her change over its course? What other characters did you make assumptions about? How did your assumptions affect your interpretation of the plot? Having now finished The Girl on the Train, what surprised you the most?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Jennifer's Questions
1. Discuss the voyeuristic curiosity of Rachel. Through these internal and dialog interactions with three different women throughout the book, the author has forced the reader to become guilty of similar curiosity. What does this reflect about reality and society? How reflective is this book on the current societal situation?
2. What similarities can we identify about Anna, Rachel, and Megan? What differences can we identify and how, as the book progress, do those differences fade away as they become more similar?
3. Paula Hawkins’ book has been identified as a “Hitchcockian thriller.” What characteristics make this statement due? How different is the book from Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Psycho?
4. Paula Hawkins has 15 years’ experience as a journalist. Does Girl on the Train reflect a journalistic style?
5. Born and raised in Zimbabwe and living in London since 1989, what can we identify from the book that shows her diverse cultural background?
6. Which of the below photos represent how you viewed Rachel?
(Questions by Jennifer Johnson. Please feel free to use them, online of off, with attribution to both Jennifer and LitLovers. Thanks.)
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The Girl She Used to Be
David Cristofano, 2009
Grand Central Publishing
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780446582216
Summary
When Melody Grace McCartney was six years old, she and her parents witnessed an act of violence so brutal that it changed their lives forever. The federal government lured them into the Witness Protection Program with the promise of safety, and they went gratefully. But the program took Melody's name, her home, her innocence, and, ultimately, her family. She's been May Adams, Karen Smith, Anne Johnson, and countless others—everyone but the one person she longs to be: herself. So when the feds spirit her off to begin yet another new life in another town, she's stunned when a man confronts her and calls her by her real name.
Jonathan Bovaro, the mafioso sent to hunt her down, knows her, the real her, and it's a dangerous thrill that Melody can't resist. He's insistent that she's just a pawn in the govern-ment's war against the Bovaro family. But can she trust her life and her identity to this vicious stranger whose acts of violence are legendary? (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Education—University of Maryland
• Currently—lives in Washington, DC
David Cristofano has earned degrees in Government & Politics and Computer Science from the University of Maryland at College Park and has worked for different branches of the Federal Government for over a decade.
His short works have been published by Like Water Burning and McSweeneys. He currently works in the Washington, D.C. area where he lives with his wife, son and daughter. The Girl She Used to Be is his first novel. (From Amazon.)
Summary
[R]eaders who like vampire stories should go for this romantic fairy tale. But before he went all goofy on us, Cristofano seemed to be headed somewhere more interesting than the Lifetime network.
Marilyn Stasio - New York Times
Intense...the emotions of a woman caught in Melody's unlikely scenario ring deliciously, scarily true.
People
Cristofano's intense, romantic debut revolves around the Federal Witness Protection Program. When Melody Grace McCartney is six, she and her family witness mobster Tony Bovaro gut Jimmy "the Rat" Fratello at a restaurant in New York's Little Italy. They go into WITSEC in exchange for testifying against Bovaro. Eight years later, due to a foolish slip on Melody's part, a Bovaro goon finds her parents and kills them, but WITSEC whisks Melody to safety. By the time she's an adult, Melody has gone through a numbing parade of eight identities, the latest as a math teacher. She's about to enter yet another new life when she meets John Bovaro (aka Jonathan), who at age 10 also saw his father slicing up Jimmy. Jonathan, who's been tracking Melody's movements ever since and is obsessed with making things right, persuades her to run off with him. Despite Melody's questionable attraction to Jonathan, Cristofano's mad love scenario sizzles like garlic in hot olive oil.
Publishers Weekly
This is a compulsively readable, skillfully constructed first novel with well-drawn characters and a plot that twists and turns to what seems the best possible conclusion, marking Cristofano as a writer to watch. —Michele Leber
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. From the first sentence of the story, the narrator asks you to take part in the action. Why do you suppose David Cristofano decided to tell this story in the first person from the point of view of a woman? Who would have more at stake in witness protection, a man, woman, or child?
2. Early in the novel, Melody appears conflicted in having feelings for both Sean and Jonathan. What is driving her need for affection? When does she realize she has made a decision? What solidifies this decision?
3. At various points in the novel, the reader is given a glimpse into the previous six identities Melody has had. Which identity acts as a turning point? What event occurred that changed the trajectory of her life?
4. The roles of good and evil are repeatedly swapped in Melody’s life. Do both sides—the Feds and the Mafia—possess both good and evil, or are they really polar opposites of one another? How does Melody influence your view of each side?
5. Though romantically inexperienced, Melody longs to be noticed by both Sean and Jonathan, trying different ways to capture their eyes. In what ways has she felt invisible to men her whole life? How has she overcompensated?
6. Due to her constant relocation, lack of parental guidance and inability to form lasting relationships, Melody has the body of a woman but the emotional and experiential psyche of a girl. How is this dangerous? What additional problems does this pose for her, given the life she must lead? How does it influence her interaction with all of the men in her life?
7. Melody’s initial interplay with every authority figure—Farquar, Sean, Donovan, Sanchez—is semi-hostile. What makes Melody react this way? How does Jonathan’s influence have her responding differently by the time she meets his family?
8. Melody and Sean share a few conversations that expose the failings of WITSEC for both the protectors and the protected. From each of their points of view, how is the system not working? How does it work as intended? How is WITSEC more or less vital to the Justice Department today?
9. Jonathan tries to distinguish himself from his Mafia ties in several ways. How has he successfully achieved this? In what ways is he a typical Mafioso?
10. Melody is scarred by the explicit violence she witnesses at age six. Repeatedly, she attempts to rid Jonathan of his reactionary viciousness to seemingly topical problems. Though later in the story, she finds security in his violent behavior. What changes her mind? Would you react the same way? Why or why not?
11. Throughout the entire novel, the importance of identity is explored. How is the life Melody has led different from that of a foster child? Of a prisoner? Of an individual living under communist rule? How are they the same?
12.How do the tangible things in Melody’s story—the food, clothes, cars, hotels—reflect her happiness, security and satisfaction? Are these things metaphorical or incidental? Would her story be different if things were reversed? Why or why not?
13. Being in WITSEC for twenty years has had a negative impact on Melody. In what ways has it made her stronger?
14. What is the significance of the chapter titles? How do they differ? What is the special significance of the final chapter’s title?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Girl Through Glass
Sari Wilson, 2016
HarperCollins
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062326270
Summary
An enthralling literary debut that tells the story of a young girl’s coming-of-age in the cutthroat world of New York City ballet—a story of obsession and perfection, trust and betrayal, beauty and lost innocence.
In the roiling summer of 1977, eleven-year-old Mira is an aspiring ballerina in the romantic, highly competitive world of New York City ballet.
Enduring the mess of her parents’ divorce, she finds escape in dance—the rigorous hours of practice, the exquisite beauty, the precision of movement, the obsessive perfectionism. Ballet offers her control, power, and the promise of glory. It also introduces her to forty-seven-year-old Maurice DuPont, a reclusive, charismatic balletomane who becomes her friend and mentor.
Over the course of three years, Mira is accepted into the prestigious School of American Ballet, run by the legendary George Balanchine, and eventually becomes one of “Mr. B’s girls”—a dancer of rare talent chosen for greatness. As she ascends in the ballet world, her relationship with Maurice intensifies, touching dark places within herself and sparking unexpected desires that will upend both their lives.
In the present day, Kate, a professor of dance at a midwestern college, embarks on a risky affair with a student that threatens to obliterate her career and capsize the new life she has painstakingly created for her reinvented self.
When she receives a letter from a man she’s long thought dead, Kate is hurled back into the dramas of a past she thought she had left behind.
Moving between the past and the present, Girl Through Glass illuminates the costs of ambition, perfection, secrets, and the desire for beauty, and reveals how the sacrifices we make for an ideal can destroy—or save—us. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Oberlin College; Stanford University (Fellowship)
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City
Sari Wilson grew up in a Victorian brownstone in Brooklyn Heights in New York City and has also lived in San Francisco, Chicago, and Prague. She now lives in Brooklyn, again, with her husband, the cartoonist Josh Neufeld, and their daughter.
Wilson's debut novel Girl Through Glass (2016) is, in many ways, a deeply personal book based on her early experiences in the classical dance world. As a child, she studied ballet at Neubert Ballet Theater, a once-storied Carnegie Hall studio.
Later, she studied at Harkness Ballet and as a scholarship student at Eliot Feld’s New Ballet School. She went on to study and perform modern dance with Stephan Koplowitz and at Oberlin College, where she majored in history and minored in dance.
In an NPR interview, Wilson talked about having to leave the world of dance:
It was my life, and I hit puberty and then sort of the dark side of things revealed themselves, and I struggled through for a long time, and then finally left that world after a second career-ending surgery. And then I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what had happened, and [Girl Through Glass] is really my investigation into that.
After college—and after dance—Wilson attended Stanford University (1997-1999) as a Wallace Stegner Fellow, where she was a teaching assistance for Tobias Wolff.
She went on to work for some 10 years as a writer, editor, and curriculum developer. She has had a particular interest in interactive narrative and story design, championing graphic literature as an educational tool. Along with her husband, she started Dojo Graphics, a studio creating comics and motion comics for television, film, and the Internet. Their clients have included Lion Television/PBS, ABC, and Lifetime.
Wilson has also been a Fine Arts Work Center Fellow in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and has received a residency from The Corporation of Yaddo.Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in literary journals such as Agni, Oxford American, and Slice. (Adapted from the author's website. Retrieved 2/22/2016.)
Book Reviews
A tragic depiction of a girl adored far too soon by a grown-up world…. Artfully rendered through the viewpoint of an adolescent dancer who performs with great maturity while remaining fatefully naive.... So visceral, so real.
Washington Post
[T]he story is a uniformly engrossing look into the fabled world of hypercompetitive 1970s ballet. Mira and Maurice’s relationship has the fairy tale feel of Beauty and the Beast, but the pages brim with the realism of the gritty.... Wilson writes lovingly of ballet and elevates the coming-of-age story with a dark undercurrent about the cost of obsession.
Publishers Weekly
[A]n absorbing novel, rich with detail both about ballet and New York. Alongside the unusual setting of Mira's realm of dance are the more familiar emotional struggles of a young woman dealing with adolescence, complicated by precocious talent. —Melanie Kindrachuk, Stratford P.L., Ont.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) A nimble, nuanced psychological drama that leaps through time and place with an appropriate and assured agility.... Wilson speaks with vibrant authority and acute vulnerability as she exposes the conflicted and competitive behind-the-scenes world of professional ballet.
Booklist
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available. In the meantine, use these LitLovers talking points to kick-start a discussion for Girl Through Glass...then take off on your own:
1. Girl Through Glass alternates between two time frames, an adult Kate and young Mira. Describe "both characters—how does the older Kate differ from her younger self?
2. Follow-up to Question 1: How does Kate's past life, as Mira, shape her present life—including her bitterness, her lackluster career, and her current relationship with a student?
3. Talk about the world behind the scenes at the American Ballet Theater and/or the American Ballet School. How does Girl Through Glass portray the life of the dancers, including the competition among them and their physical ordeals?
4. Other stories, both books and film, have explored the obsessive, competitive, and sometimes seamy side of the ballet world—Hans Christian Andersen's The Red Shoes (and film, 1948 ), Turning Point (film, 1977), Center Stage (film, 2000), Black Swan (film, 2010), Breaking Pointe (TV, 2012), Flesh and Bone (TV 2015), and Maggie Shipstead's Astonish Me (novel, 2014). If you have read or watched any of those, how does Girl Through Glass compare?
5. What does the world of dance offer Mira as she navigates her way through her parents' unraveling marriage? Talk about the ways in which the dance world saves and/or fails her.
6. What drives balletomanes and the character of Maurice? Does he make you feel uneasy, even queasy...or not? What does Mira gain from Maurice...and vice versa? What does Maurice's infatuation with Mira suggest about the power of a young body? Describe the nuances of the relationship between Maurice and Mira? Who is in control? Does the power equation change?
7. Maurice instills in Mira the "understanding of what you have to give up to be beautiful." What does Mira (and any other dancer) have to give up, and is the sacrifice worth it?
8. Where you surprised by what Kate uncovers when she returns to New York? Does the revelation address unanswered questions or tie up loose ends? Does the conclusion feel overly coincidental...or does it work?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Girl Waits with Gun (Kopp Sisters Series, 1)
Amy Stewart, 2015
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780544409910
Summary
An enthralling novel based on the forgotten true story of one of the nation’s first female deputy sheriffs.
Constance Kopp doesn’t quite fit the mold.
She towers over most men, has no interest in marriage or domestic affairs, and has been isolated from the world since a family secret sent her and her sisters into hiding fifteen years ago.
One day a belligerent and powerful silk factory owner runs down their buggy, and a dispute over damages turns into a war of bricks, bullets, and threats as he unleashes his gang on their family farm. When the sheriff enlists her help in convicting the men, Constance is forced to confront her past and defend her family—and she does it in a way that few women of 1914 would have dared. (From the publisher.)
This is the first novel in the series. Lady Cop Makes Trouble (2016) is the second.
Author Bio
• Born—ca. 1968-69
• Where—N/A
• Education—B.S., M.S., University of Texas-Austin
• Awards—(See below)
• Currently—lives in Eureka, California
Amy Stewart is the author of eight books. Her debut novel Girl Waits With Gun, based on a true story, was published to wide acclaim in 2015. Lady Cop Makes Trouble, the second in the Kopp Sisters series, came out in 2016, also to favorable reviews.
She has also written six nonfiction books on the perils and pleasures of the natural world, including four New York Times bestsellers: The Drunken Botanist (2013), Wicked Bugs (2011), Wicked Plants (2009), and Flower Confidential (2009).
She lives in Eureka, California, with her husband Scott Brown, who is a rare book dealer. They own a bookstore called Eureka Books. The store is housed in a classic nineteenth-century Victorian building that Amy very much hopes is haunted.
Media
Since her first book was published in 2001, Stewart has appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition and Fresh Air, she’s been profiled in the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle, and she’s been featured on CBS Sunday Morning, Good Morning America, the PBS documentary The Botany of Desire, and—believe it or not—TLC’s Cake Boss.
Amy has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, and many other newspapers and magazines. She is the co-founder of the popular blog GardenRant.
Honors & Awards
Amy’s books have been translated into twelve languages, and two of them—Wicked Plants and Wicked Bugs—have been adapted into national traveling exhibits that appear at botanical gardens and museums nationwide.
She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the American Horticulture Society’s Book Award, and an International Association of Culinary Professionals Food Writing Award. In 2012, she was invited to be the first Tin House Writer-in-Residence, a partnership with Portland State University, where she taught in the MFA program.
Lectures & Events
Amy travels the country as a highly sought-after public speaker whose spirited lectures have inspired and entertained audiences at college campuses such as Cornell and the University of Minnesota, corporate offices, including Google (where she served tequila and nearly broke the Internet), conferences and trade shows, botanical gardens, bookstores, and garden clubs nationwide. Go here to find out where she’s heading next. (Author bio from the author's website.)
Book Reviews
A fine, historically astute novel…. The sisters' personalities flower under Stewart's pen, contributing happy notes of comedy to a terrifying situation…. Stewart integrates the beliefs and conditions of a vanished way of life into the story, enriching it without playing the intrusive docent. Transportation, domestic arrangements, dress, food, the place of women and the lot of the worker are neatly stitched in, as are the isolation of the country and the public glare of the city, and, most entertainingly, sensational, inaccurate newspaper accounts of events. And then there is Constance: sequestered for years in the country and cowed by life, she develops believably into a woman who comes into herself, discovering powers long smothered under shame and resignation. I, for one, would like to see her return to wield them again in further installments.
New York Times
Constance Kopp, the feisty heroine of Amy Stewart’s charming novel Girl Waits With Gun, sounds like the creation of a master crime writer. At nearly 6 feet tall, Constance is a formidable character who can pack heat, deliver a zinger and catch a criminal without missing a beat. Based on the little-known story of the real Constance Kopp, one of America’s first female deputy sheriffs, the novel is an entertaining and enlightening story of how far one woman will go to protect her family.
Washington Post
The Kopps are the stars of Stewart's new zippy, winsome novel, Girl Waits With Gun. Filled with historical detail without being weighed down by it, the novel is a cinematic story of the women, the siege instigated by their powerful enemy, and their brave efforts in the face of real violence.
Los Angeles Times
Well-written with sharply drawn characters and the occasional plot twist, Girl Waits With Gun is an absorbing throwback to a bygone era.
Associated Press
[A] confident, charming, sure-footed debut—a fresh, winning and delightful mystery with a warm heart, impish humor and a heroine who quietly shatters convention.
Dallas Morning News
Stewart gives us three sisters whose bond—scratchy and well-worn but stronger for it, as can happen with family ties—is unspoken but effortless. Girl Waits With Gun might sometimes be a story in which truth is stranger than fiction, but it also makes for pretty charming fiction.
NPR
This rollicking western about a woman who'll do anything to save her family is based on the true tale of one of the country's first female deputy sheriffs.
People
[A]n unforgettable, not-to-be-messed-with heroine—one of the nation’s first female deputy sheriffs. It all begins circa 1910 when an earnest request entangles a family with the town thug. The rest is kickass history.
Marie Claire
Fans of strong female characters will find their new favorite heroine in Constance Kopp, who takes a bold stand against a gang that is threatening her family. Debut novelist Amy Stewart's Girl Waits With Gun is a historical thrill ride, racing through funny, tragic, and terrifying scenes. Even better, it's based on the true story of one of the United States' first female deputy sheriffs and her brave, amazing sisters.
Cosmopolitan
If fictional accounts of real women are your thing, then settle in with Girl Waits With Gun and you won't be let down. Amy Stewart recreates one of the world's first female deputy sheriffs, set in the early 1900s, and you will be cheering Constance Kopp on through every page. The race to catch a murderer is thrilling in itself, but the powerful woman driving the book is what will really keep readers turning pages!
Bustle
(Starred review.) Hardened criminals are no match for pistol-packing spinster Constance Kopp and her redoubtable sisters in this hilarious and exciting period drama by bestseller Stewart (The Drunken Botanist).... A surprising Kopp family secret, a kidnapped baby, and other twists consistently ratchet up the stakes throughout, resulting in an exhilarating yarn.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [E]ngaging.... Stewart...creates a welcome addition to the genre of the unconventional female sleuth. Colorful, well-drawn characters come to life on the page, and historical details are woven tightly into the narrative. —Sarah Cohn, Manhattan Coll. Lib., Bronx, NY
Library Journal
(Starred review.) A sheer delight...[Girl Waits with Gun] packs the unexpected, the unconventional, and a serendipitous humor into every chapter. Details from the historical record are accurately portrayed by villains and good guys alike, and readers will cross their fingers for the further adventures of Constance and Sheriff Heath.
Booklist
(Starred review.) Stewart crafts a solid, absorbing novel based on real-life events—though they're unusual enough to seem invented.... Stewart deftly tangles and then unwinds a complicated plot with nice period detail.... More adventures involving gutsy Constance...and a lively cast of supporting characters would be most welcome.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. From horse-drawn wagons to carrier pigeons, the norms of 1914 obviously no longer exist today. Talk about the world Constance and her sisters live in, in New Jersey and on their farm. Are there any aspects of life in 1914 you wish had survived?
2. After Henry Kaufman’s first visit to their farm, Constance views her sisters from afar and thinks, "They looked like those fuzzy figures in a picture postcard, frozen in place, staring out from some world that no longer existed" (p. 52). What does Constance mean? What is the world that no longer exists? Why is it gone, and what has replaced it?
3. What is it about Lucy Blake's story that haunts Constance so? Why do you think she helps her when interfering with Henry Kaufman has already brought a threat to her family?
4. It’s clear that Constance is a unique woman for her time. But Sheriff Heath is also unusual in that he takes the Kopp sisters seriously when no one else would. Why do you think he helps them? Discuss their unlikely friendship. Were you surprised at the conditions under which both the Kopp sisters and Sheriff Heath are forced to pursue justice? What would you have done in their shoes? Did you spot the chemistry between Constance and Sheriff Heath?
5. At their Wyckoff farm, both Norma and Constance were encouraged to continue their mother’s "family tradition" of fear and distrust. Constance remembers how she used to struggle with this as a girl in Brooklyn. Identify some of the ways that the Kopp sisters were taught to protect themselves, and from what. How do you feel about Mother Kopp’s instruction? In what ways did the sisters fall in line, and in what ways did they fail to heed her warnings? Do you think they felt justified in ignoring her warnings?
6. Francis reminds Constance of a day in New York when their mother nearly yanked his arm out of its socket to keep him from picking up an errant onion, spilled on the street by another boy. How is this story emblematic of the way the Kopps--and, perhaps, many women of the era—were taught to view the world? Thinking of this story, what does Constance wish differently for Fleurette, and why?
7. On page 384, Fleurette suggests that their year of harassment at the hands of Henry Kaufman was also the most interesting year of their lives, and therefore might not have been such a bad thing in the end. She asks her sisters, "Can you honestly say that you wish Henry Kaufman had never run us down on Market Street?" What do you think Constance's answer is? What if it were you—would you agree with Fleurette?
8. The Kopps’ sister-in-law Bessie brings over a picnic near the end of the book that includes, among other delicacies, aspic. Have you ever tried aspic? Would you? What other foods from the past are you happy to see gone?
9. The author created a signature cocktail for the book called the New Jersey Automobile based on an actual 1910s-era cocktail called the Automobile. What would Norma think about an alcoholic beverage being named after their run-in with Henry Kaufman?
10. There’s a lot of talk these days about characters’ likability. Would you call the Kopp sisters likable? Do you think they even liked each other? Does it matter?
11. Did you suspect the family secret? When did you figure it out?
(Questions issued from the author's website.)
The Girl Who Came Home: A Novel of the Titanic
Hazel Gaynor, 2014
William Morrow
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062316868
Summary
A novel inspired by true events surrounding the Addergoole 14.
Members of a church parish in County Mayo, Ireland, set sail together on RMS Titanic, all hoping to find a brighter future in America. It is believed that the losses suffered by the parish in the Titanic disaster were the largest proportionate loss of life from any locality.
Seventeen year old Maggie Murphy feels bittersweet about her journey across the Atlantic Ocean. While her future lies in an unknown new place, her heart remains in the country with Seamus, the sweetheart she is leaving behind. Maggie is one of the fortunate few passengers in steerage who survives on April 15th, 1912. Waking up alone in a New York hospital, she vows never to speak of the terror and panic of that night again.
Weaving in and out of Maggie’s voyage and Chicago, 1982, Gaynor introduces the reader to twenty-one year old Grace Butler. When her Great Nana Maggie shares the painful secret she harbored for almost a lifetime about Titanic, the revelation gives Grace new direction—and leads her and Maggie to unexpected reunions with those thought to be lost long ago.
Gaynor’s poignant tale seamlessly blends fact and fiction, exploring the tragedy’s impact and its lasting repercussions on survivors and their descendants. With snippets of actual Marconigrams—telegrams sent through the Marconi Company between Titanic and Carpathia and between Carpathia and the White Star Line office—The Girl Who Came Home is a story of enduring love and forgiveness, spanning seventy years, and a real source of fascination for history buffs and Titanic enthusiasts. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 16, 1971
• Where—Yorkshire, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Manchester Metropolitan University
• Award—Cecil Day Lewis Award for Emerging Writers
• Currently—lives in County Kildare, Ireland
Hazel Gaynor is an author and freelance writer in Ireland and the UK and was the recipient of the Cecil Day Lewis Award for Emerging Writers. The Girl Who Came Home: A Novel of the Titanic is her first novel. Her second novel, published in 2015, is A Memory of Violets: A Novel of London's Flower Sellers.
Hazel is a regular guest blogger and features writer for national Irish writing website for which she has interviewed authors such as Philippa Gregory, Sebastian Faulks, Cheryl Strayed, and Mary Beth Keane.
Hazel has appeared on TV and radio and her writing has been featured in the Irish Times and the Sunday Times Magazine. Originally from Yorkshire, England, Hazel now lives in Ireland with her husband, two young children and an accident-prone cat. (From the author.)
Visit the author's webpage.
Follow Hazel on Facebook.
Book Reviews
A beautifully imagined novel rich in historic detail and with authentic, engaging characters—I loved this book. Hazel Gaynor is an exciting new voice in historical fiction.
Kate Kerrigan, author of Ellis Island and City of Hope
Discussion Questions
1. We all know the fate of Titanic. What impact does this knowledge have on you as you read the book? How do you feel about the Ballysheen group as they leave their homes and as they board Titanic at Queenstown?
2. Kathleen Dolan is single-minded in her decision to take her niece back to America with her. Discuss Kathleen’s role in Maggie’s life and also her role in influencing the others in the Ballysheen group to travel to America.
3. Grace makes a brave decision to drop out of her college course to stay at home with her mom. Does Grace have a choice in this? How does her decision and the sacrifices she makes for her family contrast with the decisions forced upon Maggie in 1912.
4. Who are you rooting for as the drama of the events of April 14th unfold?
5. Many of the warnings and predictions of disaster which the Ballysheen group experience i.e. the reading of the tea leaves, the warning from the stranger at Queenstown, the dropped "lucky" sovereign, the "belly up" fish in the Holy Well are all based in recorded facts. The "near miss" with the moored boat in Southampton docks at the very start of Titanic’s journey is also an event which really happened. Discuss the many aspects of superstition and myth which surround Titanic.
6. Maggie and the other survivors were in their lifeboat for eight hours before they were picked up by The Carpathia and they were then on board The Carpathia for several days. Had you considered the experience of the survivors before reading the book? Are you surprised at the extent of their ordeal, after getting safely off Titanic?
7. There are several key relationships in the novel. Discuss your thoughts on the relationship between any of these: Grace and Maggie; Maggie and Seamus; Maggie and her Aunt Kathleen; Catherine Kenny and her sister Katie; Maggie, Peggy and Katie; Harry and Peggy.
8. Emigration was very common in Ireland in 1912 with many families separated by the belief and hope that there was a better standard of living to be found in America. The "American wakes" were a common occurrence across the country, marking the departure of loved ones. Have you experienced emigration in your own family? How would you feel if you had to make a similar decision to that made by the Irish emigrants who set sail on Titanic?
9. There have been many other shipping tragedies since Titanic. Cunard’s passenger liner, RMS Lusitania (travelling from New York to Liverpool), sank off the coast of Ireland in 1915 when the liner was struck by a torpedo fired from a German submarine. 1,198 civilians lost their lives in the event. In the light of many tragedies with great loss of life, why do you think people continue to be so fascinated by Titanic, a hundred years on?
10. Australian businessman, Clive Palmer, is currently starting construction on a replica of Titanic—Titanic II—which is scheduled to re-create Titanic’s maiden voyage in 2016? There have been very mixed reactions to this among relatives and descendants of Titanic’s passengers and Titanic enthusiasts. What are your thoughts on the project?
(Questions provided by publisher.)
The Girl Who Chased the Moon
Sarah Addison Allen, 2010
Random House
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780553385595
Summary
In her latest enchanting novel, New York Times bestselling author Sarah Addison Allen invites you to a quirky little Southern town with more magic than a full Carolina moon. Here two very different women discover how to find their place in the world—no matter how out of place they feel.
Emily Benedict came to Mullaby, North Carolina, hoping to solve at least some of the riddles surrounding her mother’s life. Such as, why did Dulcie Shelby leave her hometown so suddenly? And why did she vow never to return? But the moment Emily enters the house where her mother grew up and meets the grandfather she never knew—a reclusive, real-life gentle giant—she realizes that mysteries aren’t solved in Mullaby, they’re a way of life: Here are rooms where the wallpaper changes to suit your mood. Unexplained lights skip across the yard at midnight. And a neighbor bakes hope in the form of cakes.
Everyone in Mullaby adores Julia Winterson’s cakes—which is a good thing, because Julia can’t seem to stop baking them. She offers them to satisfy the town’s sweet tooth but also in the hope of rekindling the love she fears might be lost forever. Flour, eggs, milk, and sugar.... Baking is the only language the proud but vulnerable Julia has to communicate what is truly in her heart. But is it enough to call back to her those she’s hurt in the past?
Can a hummingbird cake really bring back a lost love? Is there really a ghost dancing in Emily’s backyard? The answers are never what you expect. But in this town of lovable misfits, the unexpected fits right in. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Aka—Katie Gallagher
• Birth—ca. 1972
• Where—Ashville, North Carolina, USA
• Education—B.A., University of North Carolina, Asheville
• Currently—lives in Asheville, North Carolina
Garden Spells didn't start out as a magical novel," writes Sarah Addison Allen. "It was supposed to be a simple story about two sisters reconnecting after many years. But then the apple tree started throwing apples and the story took on a life of its own... and my life hasn't been the same since."
North Carolina novelist Sarah Addison Allen brings the full flavor of her southern upbringing to bear on her fiction—a captivating blend of fairy tale magic, heartwarming romance, and small-town sensibility.
Born and raised in Asheville, in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Allen grew up with a love of books and an appreciation of good food (she credits her journalist father for the former and her mother, a fabulous cook, for the latter). In college, she majored in literature—because, as she puts it, "I thought it was amazing that I could get a diploma just for reading fiction. It was like being able to major in eating chocolate."
After graduation in 1994, Allen began writing seriously. She sold a few stories and penned romances for Harlequin under the pen name Katie Gallagher; but her big break occurred in 2007 with the publication of her first mainstream novel, Garden Spells, a modern-day fairy tale about an enchanted apple tree and the family of North Carolina women who tend it. Booklist called Allen's accomplished debut "spellbindingly charming," and the novel became a BookSense pick and a Barnes & Noble Recommends selection.
The Sugar Queen followed in 2008, The Girl Who Chased the Moon in 2009, The Peach Keeper in 2011; and Lost Lake in 2014. Allen's 2015 novel First Frost returned to some of her charaters in Garden Spells.
Since then, Allen has continued to serve heaping helpings of the fantastic and the familiar in fiction she describes as "Southern-fried magic realism." Clearly, it's a recipe readers are happy to eat up as fast as she can dish it out.
Extras
From a 2007 Barnes and Noble interview:
• I love food. The comforting and sensual nature of food always seems to find its way into what I write. Garden Spells involves edible flowers. My book out in 2008 involves southern and rural candies. Book three, barbeque. But, you know what? I'm a horrible cook.
• In college I worked for a catalog company, taking orders over the phone. Occasionally celebrities would call in their own orders. My brush with celebrity? I took Bob Barker's order.
• I was a Star Wars fanatic when I was a kid. I have the closet full of memorabilia to prove it — action figures, trading cards, comic books, notebooks with ‘Mrs. Mark Hamill' written all over the pages. I can't believe I just admitted that.
• While I was writing this, a hummingbird came to check out the trumpet vine outside my open window. I stopped typing and sat very still, mesmerized, my hands frozen on the keys, until it flew away. I looked back to my computer and ten minutes had passed in a flash.
• I love being a writer.
• When asked what book most influenced her career as a writer, here is her response:
Every book I've ever read has influenced me in some way. Paddington Bear books and Beverly Cleary in elementary school. Nancy Drew and Judy Blume in middle school. The sci-fi fantasy of my teens. The endless stream of paperback romances I devoured as I got older. Studying world literature and major movements in college. Who I am, what I am, is the culmination of a lifetime of reading, a lifetime of stories. And there are still so many more books to read. I'm a work in progress. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Allen's latest (after The Sugar Queen) takes the familiar setup of a young protagonist returning to the small town where her elusive mother was raised, and subverts it by sprinkling just enough magic into the narrative to keep things lively but short of saccharine. Seventeen-year-old Emily Benedict, intent on learning more about her mother, Dulcie, moves in with her grandfather, but is disappointed to find that her grandfather doesn't want to talk much about Dulcie. She soon discovers, though, that many still hold a grudge against Dulcie for the way she treated an old sweetheart before dumping him and disappearing. Luckily, Dulcie's high school adversary, Julia Winterson, back in town to pay down her deceased father's debt, takes a shine to Emily. She's working another quest as well: baking cakes every day with the hope that they'll somehow attract the daughter she gave up for adoption years ago. There are love interests, big family secrets, and magical happenings (color-changing wallpaper, mysterious lights) aplenty as Allen charts the spiraling inter-generational stories, bringing everything together in an unexpected way.
Publishers Weekly
After the death of her mother, Dulcie, Emily moves in with her grandfather in Mullaby, NC, and learns of her mother's part in the Coffey family tragedy. Fortunately, not everyone holds Dulcie's past against Emily—Julia welcomes Emily with a cake and offers a shoulder to lean on, but Julia has troubles, too. She's working off the debt on her father's restaurant so she can sell it and open a bakery far from the town that dismissed her so easily as a teen. Things may change if the romantic Sawyer can persuade Julia to trust him with her heart or if Win Coffey can help Emily expose the truth of her mother's deepest secret. Wallpaper that changes with mood, a sweet scent to call one home, and boys who glow in the moonlight will make readers jealous they can't live in a magical world like Allen's. Verdict: That it is never too late to change the future and that high school sins can be forgiven—these are wonderful messages, but Allen's warm characters and quirky setting are what will completely open readers' hearts to this story. Nothing in it disappoints. Fans of Allen's Garden Spells will snap this up. —Stacey Hayman, Rocky River P.L., OH
Library Journal
In Allen's newest sugar-and-spice Southern fantasy (The Sugar Queen, 2008, etc.), a teenage girl comes to live with her grandfather in a small town where oddity is a way of life. Raised by her selfless, politically active mother Dulcie in Boston, Emily has never met or heard about her grandfather until she comes to live with him in Mullaby, N.C., after Dulcie's sudden death. Emily immediately confronts unexplainable peculiarities: Grandfather Vance turns out to be a shy giant over eight feet tall; the wallpaper in Emily's room changes at will; strange white lights materialize at night in the woods outside her window; objects appear and disappear without reason. And then there are the locals' less-than-warm memories of Dulcie. Emily makes friends with Win, a teenage boy whose family secret requires him to stay inside at night. Win tells Emily that his uncle committed suicide because Dulcie cruelly exposed his secret to the town. Grandfather Vance's neighbor Julia, who has also befriended Emily, was Dulcie's classmate and acknowledges that in high school Dulcie-spoiled, rich and popular-mercilessly teased Julia, then a troubled teen who dyed her hair pink and cut herself. Julia left Mullaby when she was 16 and has come back for a temporary stay only because her father died. Until she pays off his debts, she is running his barbecue restaurant, where she has added cakes and pastries to the menu. What Julia doesn't tell Emily is that the night before she left Mullaby to attend a school for troubled girls in Baltimore, she made love with handsome preppy Sawyer and ended up pregnant. Sawyer, who assumed she had an abortion, is now pursuing Julia again, but there is a secret she has not told him. As the parallel romances of Emily and Win and Julia and Sawyer evolve, the secrets of Mullaby become sources of happiness rather than pain. Fans of Allen's brand of romantic whimsy won't mind the inconsistencies and lapses of logic, but others may cringe at the implausibility.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The legend of the Mullaby lights is front and center in this story. How do legends come to pass? What do they say about a culture or community? Can you imagine something like this happening in your town? Have you ever had a haunting or whimsical experience that led you to a valuable discovery?
2. In Mullaby, barbecue is a celebratory food, meant to be shared. It brings people together. On the other hand, for Julia, cake-baking is a solitary activity, a ceremony she performs alone to feel connected to someone she has lost. Why do you think food is so central to this story? What kind of meaning can cooking, baking, and food take on? What do they mean to you? What kind of food is your city/state known for?
3. Julia finds that baking cakes is the only way she can comfortably express what is truly going on in her heart. What hobby or talent allows you to reveal yourself more clearly to others? Is there something specific about you or something you are good at that you feel draws others to you?
4. From the moment they meet, Win and Emily seem unavoidably drawn to one another. What do you think is the cause of this connection and why does the bond between them grow so quickly? Do you think that this kind or romance would be possible if they were older?
5. Julia takes an immediate liking to Emily, assuming a motherly role. What do you think drews Julia to Emily? Could it be that Julia needed Emily just as much as Emily needed Julia? Have you ever taken a nurturing stance in someone else's life only to find that they were truly the ones rehabilitating you? Furthermore, do you think the relationship between Emily and Julia helped open Julia up to Sawyer? If so, how?
6. Despite the fact that Sawyer mistreated Julia in a painful way, she ultimately forgives him. Do you think that Sawyer deserved Julia’s forgiveness? Do you think that you would forgive someone who had abandoned you in the same way? Do you think that there are limits on what a person can forgive?
7. In the story, we see different characters mourning the loss of loved ones (Emily with her mother, Vance with his wife and daughter, and Julia with her daughter and father). What are the different ways these characters cope with their losses? What do you think their coping mechanisms say about who they are?
8. Julia only moves back to Mullaby under the self-enforced condition that she will leave in two years. Why do you think she returned to Mullaby to save her father’s restaurant when their relationship had been so tenuous? Other than Sawyer, what persuades her to stay in her hometown?
9. Emily has one view of her mother, while the town has a very different view. And Grandpa Vance has yet another understanding. Who is/was the real Dulcie? Do you believe a person can truly change? How might Emily's life have been different if she had known the truth of her mother's past before coming to Mullaby?
10. Many people in Mullaby could be considered misfits. From the most prominent family in town to Julia and Vance, there are a multitude of characters who have the experience of not fitting in. How does this affect their lives? How do some manage to use this to their advantage while others seem to suffer for it? What does this say about the power of belonging? Why do many people, particularly young people, feel the need to belong while others are determined to stand out? Which kind of person are you?
11. Emily's grandfather is a loveable giant. She is completely taken aback when she first sees him. Have you ever met someone who did not meet your expectations at all? How so? Much the same, Julia and Stella's friendship seems like an unlikely pairing. What do you think they gain from their differences? What do you gain from the opposites in your life?
12. At the end of the story, when Vance reveals the truth behind Dulcie’s motivations for the midnight show in the park, Emily is at first incredulous that he has kept this secret for so long. Why do you think he took so long to reveal this? Do you think it was right of him to allow the town to think of her negatively? What would you have done if Dulcie were your daughter?
13. At the beginning of the novel, Emily discovers the grandfather she didn’t know she had, and at the very end, Maddie embarks on a relationship with Julia. What does this story tell us about our blood connections? Do you think that being related to someone binds you to them whether you know them personally or not? What do you think Julia and Maddie’s relationship will look like five or ten years down the road?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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The Girl Who Fell From the Sky
Heidi W. Durrow, 2010
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781616200152
Summary
Rachel, the daughter of a danish mother and a black G.I., becomes the sole survivor of a family tragedy after a fateful morning on their Chicago rooftop.
Forced to move to a new city, with her strict African American grandmother as her guardian, Rachel is thrust for the first time into a mostly black community, where her light brown skin, blue eyes, and beauty bring a constant stream of attention her way. It’s there, as she grows up and tries to swallow her grief, that she comes to understand how the mystery and tragedy of her mother might be connected to her own uncertain identity.
This searing and heartwrenching portrait of a young biracial girl dealing with society’s ideas of race and class is the winner of the Bellwether Prize for best fiction manuscript addressing issues of social justice. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 21, 1969
• Where—N/A
• Raised—Turkey; Germany; Denmark; and
Portland, Oregon, USA
• Education—B.A., Stanford University; M.S.,
Columbia University; J.D., Yale Law School
• Awards—Bellwether Prize
• Currently—N/A
Heidi W. Durrow is an American writer, author of The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, and the winner of the 2008 Bellwether Prize for Fiction.
Early Life and Education
Durrow, the daughter of a white Danish immigrant and an African-American Air Force man, grew up in part overseas in Turkey, Germany, and Denmark. In 1980 her family settled in Portland, Oregon, where she attended Jefferson High School. She majored in English at Stanford University and wrote a weekly column for the Stanford Daily graduating in 1991 with Honors. Durrow continued her education at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and received a M.S. in 1992. She then attended Yale Law School and received her J.D. in 1995.
Career
Durrow’s career began at Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York City where she worked as a corporate litigator on antitrust, commercial contracts, and employment discrimination cases. She left Cravath in 1997 to pursue a literary career.
Durrow worked as a consultant to the National Basketball Association and National Football League as a Life Skills trainer from 2000-2006.
Durrow’s first literary publication, “Light-skinned-ed Girl,” appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review Spring/Summer 2005. The story was shortlisted as one of the Top 100 Stories in Best American Short Stories 2006 ed. Ann Patchett. Her writing has also appeared in The Literary Review, Smokelong Quarterly, and Poem/Memoir/Story.
Durrow is a host of the award-winning weekly podcast Mixed Chicks Chat focused on issues of being racially and culturally mixed.
In 2008 Durrow became a founder of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival. An annual free public event, the Festival celebrates stories of the Mixed experience including stories about biracial identity, transracially adopted families, and interracial and intercultural relationships and friendships. The Festival, a fiscally sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts, presents films, readings, workshops, a family event, and the largest West Coast "Loving Day celebration". The Festival also presents the annual Loving Prize for storytellers and community leaders who have shown exceptional dedication to sharing and illuminating the Mixed experience. Past Loving Prize recipients include: writer James McBride, Hapa artist Kip Fulbeck, TV producer and writer Angela Nissel, and scholar Maria P. P. Root. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Although there's a plot twist at the end, the novel isn't driven by suspense. Instead, its energy comes from its vividly realized characters, from how they perceive one another. Durrow has a terrific ear for dialogue, an ability to summon a wealth of hopes and fears in a single line.
Louisa Thomas - New York Times
The Girl Who Fell from the Sky can actually fly.... Its energy comes from its vividly realized characters, from how they perceive one another. Durrow has a terrific ear for dialogue, an ability to summon a wealth of hopes and fears in a single line.
New York Times Book Review
A heartbreaking debut.... Keeps the reader in thrall.
Boston Globe
Death, disappointment and loss are constants. The characters all struggle to make sense of a world they can't seem to belong in, racially or economically. And the structure of the novel, with each chapter told from a different character's viewpoint, has a sort of "Rashomon" quality that builds tension around the rooftop mystery. Durrow's novel is an auspicious debut, winner of the Bellwether Prize for socially conscious fiction. She has crafted a modern story about identity and survival, although some of the elements come together a little too neatly. Still, this is a fresh approach to an old idea. The Girl Who Fell From the Sky is not just a tale of racial ambiguity but a human tragedy.
Lisa Page - Washington Post
[An] affecting, exquisite debut novel.... Durrow's powerful novel is poised to find a place among classic stories of the American experience.
Miami Herald
Like Catcher in the Rye or To Kill a Mocking Bird.... A captivating tale that shouldn't be missed.
Denver Post
Hauntingly beautiful prose.... Exquisitely told.... Rachel's tale has the potential of becoming seared in your memory.
Dallas Morning News
Durrow fashions a classic fish-out-of-water tale in her brilliant debut, which some compare to Toni Morison's The Bluest Eye in its exploration of race and identity. It comes as no surprise that The Girl Who Fell from the Sky was awarded the 2008 Bellwether Prize, the award founded by author Barbara Kingsolver to support literature of social responsibility. This is certainly not an easy read, with each chapter told from a different character's viewpoint with a "Rashomon quality that builds tension around the ... mystery," and readers may have to schedule some time for emotional recovery (Washington Post). However, Durrow's novel is ultimately a powerful and ultimately uplifting work of fiction.
Bookmarks Magazine
Stunning.... What makes Durrow’s novel soar is her masterful sense of voice, her assured, nuanced handling of complex racial issues—and her heart.
Christian Science Monitor
Durrow has written a story that is quite literally breathtaking. There were times when I found myself gasping out loud.... I was pulled along each step of the way, wanting to know more.
Elle
The Girl Who Fell from the Sky is that rare thing: a post-postmodern novel with heart that weaves a circle of stories about race and self-discovery into a tense and sometimes terrifying whole.
Ms. Magazine
Rachel’s voice resonated in my reading mind in much the same way as did that of the young protagonist of The House on Mango Street. there’s an achingly honest quality to it; both wise and naive, it makes you want to step between the pages to lend comfort.
NPR's Morning Addition
Rachel survived. At age eleven, she lived through a family tragedy and started life over with her paternal grandmother in Portland, Oregon. Set in the 1980s, this debut novel tells of community, family, and self, as blue-eyed, brown-skinned Rachel is forced to examine who she is, and "what" she is, as defined by the people around her and by herself. Told through frequent shifts of time and perspective, the interwoven stories of Rachel, Brick, Laronne, Roger, and Nella offer readers different pieces of the whole, each perspective showing another piece of Rachel's story, as well as the other characters'. This is a tale of self-discovery and coming of age, of honoring the good of the past and letting go. Rachel's story is moving and unsettling—it is also hopeful and healing. The themes addressed are not new, but they raise questions and issues that are relevant and timely. There is no lack of conflict in this novel, but Durrow is not heavy handed with the messages. The characters and their stories are compelling and flawed, but full of strength, intelligence, grace, and beauty. Feelings of love, desperation, and the need to belong are almost palpable. Readers will appreciate the complexity of relationships and perhaps take a closer look at their own beliefs and prejudices. Thoughtful and thought provoking, the book may be challenging for some, both in its nonlinear storytelling and its topic, but it is written with simple eloquence.
VOYA
Durrow's debut draws from her own upbringing as the brown-skinned, blue-eyed daughter of a Danish woman and a black G.I. to create Rachel Morse, a young girl with an identical heritage growing up in the early 1980s. After a devastating family tragedy in Chicago with Rachel the only survivor, she goes to live with the paternal grandmother she's never met, in a decidedly black neighborhood in Portland, Ore. Suddenly, at 11, Rachel is in a world that demands her to be either white or black. As she struggles with her grief and the haunting, yet-to-be-revealed truth of the tragedy, her appearance and intelligence place her under constant scrutiny. Laronne, Rachel's deceased mother's employer, and Brick, a young boy who witnessed the tragedy and because of his personal misfortunes is drawn into Rachel's world, help piece together the puzzle of Rachel's family. Taut prose, a controversial conclusion and the thoughtful reflection on racism and racial identity resonate without treading into political or even overtly specific agenda waters, as the story succeeds as both a modern coming-of-age and relevant social commentary.
Publishers Weekly
Durrow's first novel, inspired by a real event, won the 2008 Bellwether Prize for best fiction manuscript addressing issues of social justice. The young protagonist, Rachel, is the only survivor after her mother apparently threw her and her two siblings from a roof and then jumped to her own death. Like a good mystery, this book builds to the startling revelation of what really happened and why a loving mother would kill her children. But there's much more, and if the novel has a weakness, it's that it oozes conflict. Rachel, who is biracial, is abandoned by her father; a boy who witnesses the rooftop incident has his own difficulties, including a neglectful mother who's also a prostitute. But one can't help but be drawn in by these characters and by the novel's exploration of race and identity. Verdict: With similar themes to Zadie Smith's White Teeth and a tone of desolation and dislocation like Graham Swift's Waterland and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, this is also recommended for readers intrigued by the psychology behind shocking headlines.—Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC
Library Journal
(Starred review.) [An] insightful family saga of the toxicity of racism and the forging of the self.... Durrow brings piercing authenticity to this provocative tale, winner of the Bellwether Prize for Fiction.
Booklist
The grim, penetratingly observed story of a half-black teen and her struggles with racial identity in 1980s America.... Nothing especially groundbreaking here, but the author examines familiar issues of racial identity and racism with a subtle and unflinching eye.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What is Rachel's central dilemma?
2. What prevented Nella from returning to her family in Denmark?
3. Why does Brick become fascinated with Rachel? What does he ultimately hope for his relationship with her?
4. How do you make sense of Roger's absence from his daughter's life?
5. Why does Rachel develop such a strong bond with Aunt Loretta?
6. Grandma is a church-going woman. But what is most important to her about her religion? What does she want Rachel to value about religion?
7. What does Rachel make of being told she's beautiful?
8. "Grandma's dreams come from hearing about Up North when she was growing up in Texas on a farm, on a road that had no name. Grandma's dream is bigger than her life. I guess at Mor's dreams; having a husband, a family, love. That's the way I would list them. But then I think about it again—her dream maybe was feeling the way she felt with Doug—the way she would smile easy; she would laugh easy; she would play. At least at first. Then the sky in her dream got low too." How would you describe Grandma's dreams? Nella's? Rachel's?
9. If Rachel had a theme song, what would it be?
10. What difference, if any, does it make knowing that the book is inspired by a real event?
11. Do you think that in the age of Obama, biracial/bicultural people will continue to experience the same kinds of stereotypes and stigma that Rachel did?
(Questions from the author's website.)
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Millenium Trilogy , 3)
Stieg Larsson, 2007 (Eng. trans., 2009)
Random House
576 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307454560
Summary
The third and final novel in Stieg Larsson’s internationally best-selling Millennium trilogy.
Lisbeth Salander—the heart of Larsson’s two previous novels—lies in critical condition, a bullet wound to her head, in the intensive care unit of a Swedish city hospital. She’s fighting for her life in more ways than one: if and when she recovers, she’ll be taken back to Stockholm to stand trial for three murders.
With the help of her friend, journalist Mikael Blomkvist, she will not only have to prove her innocence, but also identify and denounce those in authority who have allowed the vulnerable, like herself, to suffer abuse and violence. And, on her own, she will plot revenge—against the man who tried to kill her, and the corrupt government institutions that very nearly destroyed her life. (From the publisher.)
Larsson's Millennium trilogy includes The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.
Author Bio
• Birth—August 15, 1954
• Where—Vasterbotton, Sweden
• Death—November 9, 2004
• Where—Stockholm Sweden
Born in Västerbotten in northern Sweden in 1954, Stieg Larsson had a professional career that bears a striking resemblance to that of the protagonist of his Millennium thrillers, Mikael Blomkvist. Beginning as a graphic designer for the news agency Tidningarnas Telegrambyra (TT), Larsson went on to become the chief editor of Expo, the magazine published by the Expo Foundation, an organization he helped establish in 1995 to combat racism and the Swedish right-wing extremist movement.
Inspired by an old joke shared with a colleague at TT, Larsson admitted he started writing the Millennium novels—The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest—just for fun. Describing them as "pension insurance," Larsson said he enjoyed the process of fiction writing so much that he didn't make contact with a publisher until he had completed the first two and had a third under way.
Though Larsson died of a heart attack in 2004 and never saw any of his books in print, all three were subsequently published in Scandinavia and continental Europe to great acclaim. He left behind the unfinished manuscript for a fourth book in the series. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
A thoroughly gripping read that shows off the maturation of the author's storytelling talents…Larsson effortlessly constructs an immensely complicated story line that owes less to the Silence of the Lambs horror genre than to something by John le Carre.... Cutting nimbly from one story line to another, Larsson does an expert job of pumping up suspense while credibly evoking the disparate worlds his characters inhabit.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
Salander is a magnificent creation: a feminist avenging angel.... I cannot think of another modern writer who so successfully turns his politics away from a preachy manifesto and into a dynamic narrative device. Larsson's hatred of injustice will drive readers across the world through a three-volume novel and leave them regretting the final page; and regretting, even more, the early death of a mastery storyteller just as he was entering his prime.
Observer (UK)
[These are] extraordinary novels [with] astonishing impact... breakneck plotting, sympathetic characterization and the kind of startling denouements that occur more frequently than is conventionally considered possible. There is a comparison with that other great work of contemporary entertainment, The Wire, in the rage and clarity with which injustice becomes the driver of a novel way of looking at a society. Be warned: the trilogy...is seriously addictive.
Guardian (UK)
Fans will not be disappointed: this is another roller-coaster ride that keeps you reading far too late into the night. Intricate but flawlessly plotted, it has complex characters as well as a satisfying, clear moral thrust.
Evening Standard (UK)
The exhilarating conclusion to bestseller Larsson's Millennium trilogy (after The Girl Who Played with Fire) finds Lisbeth Salander, the brilliant computer hacker who was shot in the head in the final pages of Fire, alive, though still the prime suspect in three murders in Stockholm. While she convalesces under armed guard, journalist Mikael Blomkvist works to unravel the decades-old coverup surrounding the man who shot Salander: her father, Alexander Zalachenko, a Soviet intelligence defector and longtime secret asset to Säpo, Sweden's security police. Estranged throughout The Girl Who Played with Fire, Blomkvist and Salander communicate primarily online, but their lack of physical interaction in no way diminishes the intensity of their unconventional relationship. Though Larsson (1954–2004) tends toward narrative excess, his was an undeniably powerful voice in crime fiction that will be sorely missed.
Publishers Weekly
[Larsson] is remarkably agile at keeping multiple balls in the air. But it wouldn’t really matter if he weren’t a skilled craftsman because Salander is such a bravura heroine—steel will and piercing intelligence veiling a heartbreaking vulnerability—that we’d willingly follow her through any bramble bush of a plot.... There are few characters as formidable as Lisbeth Salander in contemporary fiction of any kind. She will be sorely missed. —Bill Ot
Booklist
Lisbeth Salander is in big trouble. Again. In the third installment of the late journalist Larsson's unpretty expose of all that is rotten in Sweden, Lisbeth meets her father, who, we learned a couple of books back, is not just her sire but also her mortal enemy. Pater shares her sentiments, so much so that, at the beginning of this trilogy-closer—though there's talk that a fourth Salander novel has been found on Larsson's laptop and is being squabbled over in lawyers' offices—he's apparently tried to exterminate the fruit of his loins. Being the resourceful lass that she is, Lisbeth rises from the grave to take her vengeance. Or, as longtime Larsson hero/alter ego Mikael Blomkvist tells us, she somehow managed to "get back to the farm and swung an axe into Zalachenko's skull." Adds Blomkvist, helpfully, "She can be a moody bitch." So she can, but that's the manner of avenging angels, and Lisbeth has lots of avenging to do. She also has lots of help. Blomkvist, a little mystified as always, runs on the sidelines along with girlfriend and publisher Erika Berger, while some favorite figures from the first installment, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, return to do their bit, among them fellow uberhacker Plague, who still hasn't taken a shower nearly 1,000 pages later. There are some new or hitherto minor players along for the ride, including another Zalachenko creation, a German very-bad-guy named Niedermann, who covers his tracks pretty well. Writes Larsson, "The problem with Niedermann was that he had no friends, no girlfriend and no listed cell phone, and he had never been in prison," which makes life difficult even for a master tracker-downer such as Lisbeth—whom, unhappily, Niedermann is trying to do in as well. It's a delicious mayhem, where no man is quite good and no rich person has the slightest chance of entering the kingdom of heaven. Oh, there are lots of very bad bikers, too. Patented Larsson, meaning fast-paced enough to make those Jason Bourne films seem like Regency dramas.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Have you read the two previous novels in the trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire? Which of the three did you find the most compelling, and why?
2. What is the “hornet’s nest” of the title?
3. Each part of Hornet’s Nest begins with a brief history lesson about women warriors. What was Larsson trying to say? Is Salander a modern-day equivalent of these women? Is Berger?
4. What are some of the major themes of this novel? Of the trilogy?
5. How does Larsson’s background as an expert in right-wing extremist organizations inform this novel, and the trilogy as a whole?
6. Many characters in Larsson’s trilogy have some good and some bad in them. Can you name a few? What makes them different from the clear heroes or villains in the books?
7. After everything that happened in the first two novels, why does Salander still distrust Blomkvist? How would you describe their relationship?
8. On page 134, Clinton describes the Section: “What you have to understand is that the Section functions as the spearhead for the total defence of the nation. We’re Sweden’s last line of defence. Our job is to watch over the security of our country. Everything else is unimportant.” Aside from Clinton, who else believes this? Why are they so convinced?
9. Can you imagine a group like the Section operating in this country? Why, or why not?
10. On Berger’s first day at her new job, the departing editor in chief offers his theory about why she was hired (page 152). Do you agree with his assessment? How does this notion play out?
11. Armansky tells Blomkvist, “For once you’re not an objective reporter, but a participant in unfolding events. And as such, you need help. You’re not going to win on your own” (page 159). Why is this situation different from those in the previous two novels? How does becoming a participant change Blomkvist’s behavior? Does Blomkvist cross any ethical lines?
12. On page 168, Larsson writes about Salander, “She wondered what she thought of herself, and came to the realization that she felt mostly indifference towards her entire life.” What has made her feel this way? Do her feelings change by the end of the novel?
13. Again and again, men underestimate Salander because of her size. Why do they make these assumptions? How does she turn this into an advantage?
14. What is the significance of Borgsjö’s involvement with a company that uses child labor? How does this tie in to Larsson’s overall themes?
15. On page 295, Salander discovers a gruesome fact about Teleborian. “She should have dealt with Teleborian years ago. But she had repressed the memory of him. She had chosen to ignore his existence.” How does this jibe with Salander’s behavior in the present day? When did she decide to stop letting people get away with things?
16. Discuss the notion of revenge in this novel, and throughout the trilogy. Who, besides Salander, exacts revenge? What motivates them?
17. What role does Annika play in the novel? And Ekström?
18. On page 359, Salander reaches out to Berger and offers to help. Why?
19. What is the significance of the subplot about Berger’s stalker?
20. During his interview with She, Blomkvist agrees with the host’s suggestion that the Section’s behavior is akin to mental illness. Do you agree with that idea? How are accusations of mental illness wielded elsewhere in the trilogy?
21. “When it comes down to it, this story is not primarily about spies and secret government agencies; it’s about violence against women, and the men who enable it.” So says Blomkvist on page 514. What else is it about?
22. If she’s not in love with Miriam, why does Salander go to Paris?
23. When deciding what to do about Niedermann, Salander thinks of Harriet Vanger. Where do their stories diverge?
24. The very last sentence of the trilogy is, “She opened the door wide and let him into her life again.” How do you imagine things proceed from here for Salander? For Blomvkist?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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The Girl Who Played with Fire (Millenium Trilogy, 2)
Stieg Larsson, 2006 (Eng. trans., 2009)
Knopf Doubleday
512 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307476159
Summary
The second novel in Stieg Larsson’s internationally best-selling Millennium trilogy.
Mikael Blomkvist, crusading journalist and publisher of the magazine Millennium, has decided to run a story that will expose an extensive sex trafficking operation between eastern Europe and Sweden, implicating well-known and highly placed members of Swedish society, business, and government.
But he has no idea just how explosive the story will be until, on the eve of publication, the two investigating reporters are murdered. And even more shocking for Blomkvist: the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to Lisbeth Salander—the troubled, wise-beyond-her-years genius hacker who came to his aid in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and who now becomes the focus and fierce heart of The Girl Who Played with Fire.
As Blomkvist, alone in his belief in Salander's innocence, plunges into an investigation of the slayings, Salander herself is drawn into a murderous hunt in which she is the prey, and which compels her to revisit her dark past in an effort to settle with it once and for all. (From the publisher.)
Larsson's Millennium trilogy includes The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.
Author Bio
• Birth—August 15, 1954
• Where—Vasterbotton, Sweden
• Death—November 9, 2004
• Where—Stockholm Sweden
Born in Västerbotten in northern Sweden in 1954, Stieg Larsson had a professional career that bears a striking resemblance to that of the protagonist of his Millennium thrillers, Mikael Blomkvist. Beginning as a graphic designer for the news agency Tidningarnas Telegrambyra (TT), Larsson went on to become the chief editor of Expo, the magazine published by the Expo Foundation, an organization he helped establish in 1995 to combat racism and the Swedish right-wing extremist movement.
Inspired by an old joke shared with a colleague at TT, Larsson admitted he started writing the Millennium novels—The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest—just for fun. Describing them as "pension insurance," Larsson said he enjoyed the process of fiction writing so much that he didn't make contact with a publisher until he had completed the first two and had a third under way.
Though Larsson died of a heart attack in 2004 and never saw any of his books in print, all three were subsequently published in Scandinavia and continental Europe to great acclaim. He left behind the unfinished manuscript for a fourth book in the series. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Lisbeth Salander was one of the most original and memorable heroines to surface in a recent thriller: picture Angelina Jolie’s Lara Croft endowed with Mr. Spock’s intense braininess and Scarlett O’Hara’s spunky instinct for survival.... Now Salander is back in an even more central role.... The reason it works is the same reason that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo worked: Salander and Blomkvist transcend their genre and insinuate themselves in the reader’s mind through their oddball individuality, their professional competence and, surprisingly, their emotional vulnerability.”
Michiko Kakutani - The New York Times
The Girl Who Played with Fire confirms the impression left by The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Here is a writer with two skills useful in entertaining readers royally: creating characters who are complex, believable, and appealing even when they act against their own best interest; and parceling out information in a consistently enthralling way.”
Washington Post
These books grabbed me and kept me reading with eyes wide open with the same force as the best of the series on the TV monitor.... Move over, Tony Soprano.... Blomkvist is a wonderfully appealing character. And the girl of the title is one of the most fascinating characters in modern genre fiction.
Alan Cheuse - San Francisco Chronicle
Lisbeth Salander [is] one of the most startling, engaging heroines in recent memory . . . Some of the books’ appeal comes from the Swedish setting, but most of it is a result of the author writing from the heart, not from a formula. Larsson clearly loved his brave misfit Lisbeth. And so will you
USA Today
Fans of intelligent page-turners will be more than satisfied by Larsson's second thriller, even though it falls short of the high standard set by its predecessor, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which introduced crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist and punk hacker savant Lisbeth Salander. A few weeks before Dag Svensson, a freelance journalist, plans to publish a story that exposes important people involved in Sweden's sex trafficking business based on research conducted by his girlfriend, Mia Johansson, a criminologist and gender studies scholar, the couple are shot to death in their Stockholm apartment. Salander, who has a history of violent tendencies, becomes the prime suspect after the police find her fingerprints on the murder weapon. While Blomkvist strives to clear Salander of the crime, some far-fetched twists help ensure her survival. Powerful prose and intriguing lead characters will carry most readers along.
Publishers Weekly
Lisbeth Salander, the antisocial but brilliant computer hacker who helped journalist Mikael Blomkvist uncover a serial killer on a remote Swedish island in Larsson's acclaimed The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, takes center stage in this second volume of his "Millenium" trilogy. Opening 18 months after the events of the first book, the novel finds our heroine lounging by the pool at a Caribbean hotel, reading a math textbook, and watching a woman who may be a victim of domestic abuse, while in Sweden, Blomkvist, bewildered by Salander's abrupt disappearance from his life, is set to publish a magazine exposé on the sex trade. Impatient readers may chafe at this seemingly irrelevant prolog, but like the mathematical puzzles Salander enjoys solving, there is a logic to the clues that Larsson carefully drops—integral to understanding his protagonist as we gradually learn her back story. The main plot takes off with the murders of Salander's legal guardian and the two writers of the article, and her fingerprints are found on the gun used in the killings. Verdict: Although the pace slows when the police investigation takes precedence and Salander briefly disappears from the action, we are well-rewarded in the exciting final section when she finally confronts her dark past. This is complex and compelling storytelling at its best, propelled by one of the most fascinating characters in recent crime fiction.
Wilda Williams - Library Journal
A suspenseful, remarkably moving novel.... This is the best Scandinavian novel to be published in the U.S. since Smilla’s Sense of Snow.... Salander is one of those characters who come along only rarely in fiction: a complete original, larger than life yet firmly grounded in realistic detail, utterly independent yet at her core a wounded and frightened child.... One of the most compelling characters to strut the crime-fiction stage in years.
Booklist
Tangled but worthy follow-up to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008), also starring journo extraordinaire Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, the Lara Crofts of the land of the midnight sun. That's not quite right: Lisbeth is really a Baltic MacGyver with a highly developed sense of outrage, a sociopathic bent and brand-new breast implants, to say nothing of a well-stuffed bankbook. The late Larsson's sequel does not absolutely require knowledge of its predecessor, but it helps, given the convoluted back story and the allusive, sometimes loopy structure of the present book. In all events, Lisbeth bears her trademark dragon tattoo still, but her wasp is gone, for a curious reason: "The wasp was too conspicuous and it made her too easy remember and identify. Salander did not want to be remembered or identified." She cuts a fine figure all the same on the beach at Grenada, where she falls into a sticky skein of intrigue involving the usual suspects: self-righteous crusaders, bored Club Med types and some very nasty characters on both sides of what used to be called the Iron Curtain. So sticky is the plot, in fact, that Lisbeth finds herself accused of committing murder. It's a predicament that the utterly self-reliant but unworldly hacker (when we catch up with her, she's reading a mathematics treatise picked up during one of her frequent visits to university bookshops) needs Blomkvist's help to get out of. Some of the traditional elements of the espionage thriller turn up in Larsson's pages, while others are turned on their head-sometimes literally, at least where the romantic bits come in. Still, while endlessly complex, the plot has the requisite chases, cliffhangers and bloodshed. Not to mention Fermat's theorem. Fans of postmodern mystery will revel in Larsson's latest.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Have you read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? How did your knowledge-or lack of knowledge-about that novel affect your reading of this one?
2. Discuss the prologue. What did you think was going on? At what point did you fully understand it?
3. On page 22, Larsson writes, “Within mathematics, asser-tions must always be proven mathematically and expressed in a valid and scientifically correct formula.” What does this have to do with the plot of the novel? Why is Salander so intrigued by mathematics?
4. Outwardly, Salander is supremely self-assured. Why does she have breast augmentation surgery?
5. Ultimately, does Salander's agreement with Nils Erik Bjurman pay off? In what ways?
6. Revenge is a major theme of the novel. Who seeks it, and what are the results?
7. Discuss gender politics as they affect the plot: the treatment of Salander, Erika Berger, Miriam Wu, and Sonja Modig and the trafficking of Eastern European women. What do you think Larsson was trying to say about the role of women in society?
8. On page 105, Berger thinks about Blomkvist: “He was a man with such shifting traits that he sometimes appeared to have multiple personalities.” Given that the reader is allowed inside Blomkvist's head, does this seem like an accurate description to you? How is Berger right in her assessment, and how is she wrong?
9. Twice in the novel, Salander and Blomkvist refer to his assertion that “friendship is built on two things-respect and trust.” Who is a true friend to Salander? Is she a true friend to anyone? What about Blomkvist? Is he a good friend to Salander, to Berger, and to others?
10. Discuss the arrangement agreed to by Berger, Blomkvist, and Gregor Beckman. How does this benefit each of them? Does it hurt them?
11. When Dag Svensson and Mia Johansson were murdered, what was your first response? Who did you think was the killer? Who did you think was Bjurman's killer?
12. Why does Blomkvist give Salander the benefit of the doubt, when so many others don't?
13. When newspaper articles begin to appear featuring interviews with long-ago acquaintances of Salander, did it change your perception of her character? Discuss the nature of truth in these instances: Is it possible both sides were remembering accurately?
14. Discuss Dr. Peter Teleborian. What role does he play, and why?
15. Why does Berger put off telling Blomkvist about her new job? What will the ramifications of the new job be?
16. On page 323, Salander thinks, “There are no innocents. There are, however, different degrees of responsibility.” What is the significance of this statement? How does Salander use this notion to guide her actions?
17. On page 463, Blomkvist calls Salander “the woman who hated men who hate women.” Is this an accurate assessment? How did she end up this way? How does it affect her behavior?
18. In what ways is Salander like her father and half brother? In what ways is she different?
19. Toward the end of the novel, does Blomkvist do the right thing by having Berger deliver only part of the story to Jan Bublanski and Modig? What do you think he should have done
20. Holger Palmgren tells Dragan Armansky on page 490, “What happens tonight will happen, no matter what you or I think. It has been written in the stars since [Salander] was born.” Why does he feel this way? Is he right? How does his inaction affect the outcome of the story?
21. Discuss the ending. Were you satisfied? What more, if anything, would you like to have had happen?
22. If Stieg Larsson were still alive, what one question would you most like to ask him?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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The Girl Who Stopped Swimming
Joshilyn Jackson, 2008
Grand Central Publishing
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780446697828
Summary
Laurel Gray Hawthorne needs to make things pretty.
Coming from a family with a literal skeleton in their closet, she's developed this talent all her life, whether helping her willful mother to smooth over the reality of her family's ugly past, or elevating humble scraps of unwanted fabric into nationally acclaimed art quilts.
Her sister Thalia, an impoverished "Actress" with a capital A, is her opposite, and prides herself in exposing the lurid truth lurking behind life's everyday niceties. And while Laurel's life was neatly on track, a passionate marriage, a treasured daughter, and a lovely home in lovely suburban Victorianna, everything she holds dear is thrown into question the night she is visited by an apparition in her bedroom.
The ghost appears to be her 14-year-old neighbor Molly Dufresne, and when Laurel follows this ghost, she finds the real Molly floating lifeless in her swimming pool.
While the community writes the tragedy off as a suicide, Laurel can't. Reluctantly enlisting Thalia's aid, Laurel sets out on a life-altering investigation that triggers startling revelations about her own guarded past, the truth about her marriage, and the girl who stopped swimming.
Richer and more rewarding than any story from Joshilyn Jackson, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming is destined both to delight Jackson's loyal fans and capture a whole new audience. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 27, 1968
• Where—Fort Walton Beach, Florida, USA
• Education—B.A., Georgia State University; M.A., University of Illinois
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Decatur, Georgia
Joshilyn Jackson is the author of several novels, all national best sellers. She was born into a military family, moving often in and out of seven states before the age of nine. She graduated from high school in Pensacola, Florida, and after attending a number of different colleges, earned her B.A. from Georgia State University. She went on to earn an M.A. in creative writing from University of Illinois in Chicago.
Having enjoyed stage acting as a student in Chicago, Jackson now does her own voice work for the audio versions of her books. Her dynamic readings have won plaudits from AudioFile Magazine, which selected her for its "Best of the Year" list. She also made the 2012 Audible "All-Star" list for the highest listener ranks/reviews; in addition, she won three "Listen-Up Awards" from Publisher's Weekly. Jackson has also read books by other authors, including Lydia Netzer's Shine Shine Shine.
Novels
All of Jackson's novels take place in the American South, the place she knows best. Her characters are generally women struggling to find their way through troubled lives and relationships. Kirkus Reviews has described her writing as...
Quirky, Southern-based, character-driven...that combines exquisite writing, vivid personalities, and imaginative storylines while subtly contemplating race, romance, family, and self.
2005 - Gods in Alabama
2006 - Between, Georgia
2008 - The Girl Who Stopped Swimming
2010 - Backseat Saints
2012 - A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty
2013 - Someone Else's Love Story
2005 - Gods in Alabama
2006 - Between, Georgia
2008 - The Girl Who Stopped Swimming
2010 - Backseat Saints
2012 - A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty
2013 - Someone Else's Love Story
2016 - The Opposite of Everyone
2017 - The Almost Sisters
2019 - Never Have I Ever
Awards
Jackson's books have been translated into a dozen languages, won the Southern Indie Booksellers Alliance's SIBA Novel of the Year, have three times been a #1 Book Sense Pick, twice won Georgia Author of the Year, and three times been shortlisted for the Townsend Prize. (Author's bio adapted from the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Buoyant and moving...beautifully balanced between magical and realist fiction...closer in tone and voice to Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones or Richard Ford's "Frank Bascombe trilogy."
Atlanta Journal Constitution
A great tale [that] builds to an exciting and violent ending, one that surprises and yet seems to fit.
USA Today
A ghost story, family psychodrama, and murder mystery all in one. Jackson's latest is a wild, smartly calibrated achievement.
Entertainment Weekly
(Audio version.) [E]motionally taut.... Jackson's honey-sweet tones heat up into panic and confusion as everything Laurel depends on falls away. While set in the languid deep South, the pace is rapid. Jackson's reading keeps things brisk without going too swiftly.
Publishers Weekly
With the appearance of a ghost on the first page, you'll feel compelled to race to the end, but slow down for Jackson's great descriptions—you'll be rewarded for the effort. Jackson illuminates not just the complexities of family love as a source of safety and support but also the complexities of danger and death.
Library Journal
Ghosts, more figurative that literal, haunt Jackson's third novel. Laurel is meant to be the heroine but she's such a dolt, readers may not feel she deserves her happy ending. The tragic figure, Bet, gets short shrift, as if Jackson doesn't quite know what to do with her. An entertaining but shallow spin on a Southern Gothic.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Art, and what constitutes true art, is one of the earliest questions raised in The Girl Who Stopped Swimming. Thalia clearly dismisses Laurel's quilts as handicraft, not art. What, in your opinion, is "true art?" Is there such a thing?
2. Laurel's mother brings canned goods and toys to DeLop, but she has severed all emotional connections. Does this disconnect compromise her good works? Do you think a person's motives and feelings make a difference to how valuable a "charitable act" is? Why or Why not?
3. On p. 65, Thalia explains "Mother is Cowslip." Do you know anyone who is prone to "cowslipping?" Can you think of situations where you yourself have cowslipped?
4. The tension between what is on the surface and what lies beneath is dominant in this book. Can you think of some examples of this dichotomy in the text? What statement do you think the author is trying to make by highlighting these dichotomies?
5. The title clearly refers to the discovery of Molly Dufresne in the first chapter of the book. But is there another interpretation you could offer?
6. Thalia consistently needles, pushes, or blasts Laurel out of her comfort zone, usually for what she considers to be Laurel's own good. Do you have a "Thalia" in your life?
7. One particular bone of contention for Laurel and Thalia is Shelby—Thalia clearly believes Laurel is doing her great harm by overprotecting her and keeping her "safe" at home. How do you feel about Laurel's relationship with her daughter—is it as close as Laurel believes, or as false as Thalia insists? Did your view change throughout the book as events unfolded?
8. Laurel and Thalia do not understand each other' marriages; both would say their marriage is better. Thalia's marriage is certainly untraditional, but it seems to work for her. Do you think Thalia's relationship can be considered a good marriage? Does Laurel have a good marriage at the beginning of the book? In what ways? Has there been significant change in that relationship by the end of the book?
9. Laurel makes decisions using intuition and emotion, David through logic and reason. What does Thalia use to make decisions? Is she closer to David or Laurel, or does she have a system of her own?
10. Laurel is her mother's quietly acknowledged favorite, and Thalia seems to belong to Daddy. Is this a "normal" or healthy family dynamic? How does this divided favoritism shape the sisters? Do you think this causes "sibling rivalry?" Have you seen this dynamic at work in your own family, and do you think it affected the way you interact with your parents or siblings? With your own children?
11. Jackson has said in interviews, "At its heart, this is a book about poverty." Do you agree? If not, what did you think the book was about? Do you think she means only literal poverty? What other kinds of poverty did you notice in the book?
12, Thalia provides a logical explanation for all of Laurel's ghosts, assuming her visions have more to do with psychology and the subconscious than the supernatural.. Do you think there are real ghosts in this book? Do you believe in ghosts, or have there been times in your life when you have been convinced of their presence?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Girl With a Pearl Earring
Tracy Chevalier, 2000
Penguin Group USA
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780452282155
Summary
In mid-career, the renowned 17th century Baroque artist Johannes Vermeer painted "Girl with a Pearl Earring," which has been called the Dutch Mona Lisa. Girl with a Pearl Earring tells the story behind the advent of this famous painting, all the while depicting life in 17th century Delft, a small Dutch city with a burgeoning art community.
The novel centers on Griet, the Protestant daughter of a Delft tile painter who lost his sight in a kiln accident. In order to bring income to her struggling family, Griet must work as a maid for a more financially sound family. When Jan Vermeer and his wife approve of Griet as a maid for their growing Catholic household, she leaves home and quickly enters adult life. The Vermeer household, with its five children, grandmother and long-time servant, is ready to make Griet's working life difficult. Though her help is sorely needed, her beauty and innocence are both coveted and resented. Vermeer's wife Catharina, long banished from her husband's studio for her clumsiness and lack of genuine interest in art, is immediately wary of Griet, a visually talented girl who exhibits signs of artistic promise. Taneke, the faithful servant to the grandmother, proves her protective loyalty by keeping a close eye on Griet's every move.
The artist himself, however, holds another view entirely of the young maid. Recognizing Griet's talents, Vermeer takes her on as his studio assistant and surreptitiously teaches her to grind paints and develop color palettes in the remote attic. Though reluctant to overstep her boundaries in the cagey Vermeer household, Griet is overjoyed both to work with her intriguing master and to lend some breath to her natural inclinations—colors and composition—neither of which she had ever been able to develop. Together, Vermeer and Griet conceal the apprenticeship from the family until Vermeer's most prominent patron demands that the lovely maid be the subject of his next commissioned work. Vermeer must paint Griet—an awkward, charged situation for them both.
Chevalier's account of the artistic process—from the grinding of paints to the inclusion and removal of background objects—lay at the core of the novel. Her inventive portrayal of this tumultuous time, when Protestantism began to dominate Catholicism and the growing bourgeoisie took the place of the Church as patrons of the arts, draws the reader into a lively, if little known, time and place in history. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October 19, 1962
• Where—Washington, D.C., USA
• Education—B.A., Oberlin College (USA); M.A., University of
East Anglia (UK)
• Currently—lives in London, UK
Raised in Washington D.C., Tracy Chevalier moved to England in 1984 after graduating from Oberlin College in Ohio. Initially intending to attend one semester abroad, she studied for a semester and never returned. After working as a literary editor for several years, Chevalier chose to pursue her own writing career and in 1994, she graduated with a degree in creative writing at the University of East Anglia.
The Virgin Blue (her first novel), was chosen by W. H. Smith for its Fresh Talent promotion in 1997. She lives in London with her husband and son and hopes to see all of Vermeer's thirty-five known paintings in her lifetime (thus far, she's seen twenty-eight of them). Tracy Chevalier first gained attention by imagining the answer to one of art history's small but intriguing questions: Who is the subject of Johannes Vermeer's painting "Girl with a Pearl Earring"?
It was a bold move on Chevalier's part to build a story around the somewhat mysterious 17th-century Dutch painter and his unassuming but luminous subject; but the author's purist approach helped set the tone. In an interview with her college's alumni magazine, she commented:
I decided early on that I wanted [Girl] to be a simple story, simply told, and to imitate with words what Vermeer was doing with paint. That may sound unbelievably pretentious, but I didn't mean it as "I can do Vermeer in words." I wanted to write it in a way that Vermeer would have painted: very simple lines, simple compositions, not a lot of clutter, and not a lot of superfluous characters.
Chevalier achieved her objective expertly, helped by the fact that she employed the famous Girl as narrator of the story. Sixteen-year-old Griet becomes a maid in Vermeer's tumultuous household, developing an apprentice relationship with the painter while drawing attention from other men and jealousy from women. Praise for the novel poured in: "Chevalier's exploration into the soul of this complex but naïve young woman is moving, and her depiction of 17th-century Delft is marvelously evocative," wrote the New York Times Book Review. The Wall Street Journal called it "vibrant and sumptuous."
Girl with a Pearl Earring was not Chevalier's first exploration of the past. In The Virgin Blue, her U.K.-published first novel (U.S. edition, 2003), her modern-day character Ella Turner goes back to 16th-century France in order to revisit her family history. As a result, she finds parallels between herself and a troubled ancestor — a woman whose fate had been unknown until Ella discovers it.
With 2001's Falling Angels, Chevalier — a former reference book editor who began her fiction career by enrolling in the graduate writing program at University of East Anglia — continued to tell stories of women in the past. But she has been open about the fact that compared to writing Girl with a Pearl Earring, the "nightmare" creating of her third novel was difficult and fraught with complications, even tears. The pressure of her previous success, coupled with a first draft that wasn't working out, made Chevalier want to abandon the effort altogether. Then, reading Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible led Chevalier to change her approach. "[Kingsolver] did such a fantastic job using different voices and I thought, with Falling Angels, I've told it in the wrong way," Chevalier told Bookpage magazine. "I wanted it to have lots of perspective."
With that, Chevalier began a rewrite of her tale about two families in the first decade of 20th-century London. With more than ten narrators (some more prominent than others), Falling Angels has perspective in spades and lots to maintain interest over its relatively brief span: a marriage in trouble, a girlhood friendship born at Highgate Cemetery, a woman's introduction to the suffragette movement. A spirited, fast-paced story, Falling Angels again earned critical praise. "This moving, bittersweet book flaunts Chevalier's gift for creating complex characters and an engaging plot," Book magazine concluded.
Chevalier continues to pursue her fascination with art and history in her fourth novel, on which she is currently at work. According to Oberlin Alumni Magazine, she is basing the book on the "Lady and the Unicorn" medieval tapestries that hang in Paris's Cluny Museum.
Extras
From a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview:
• Chevalier's interest in Vermeer extends beyond a fascination with one painting. "I have always loved Vermeer's paintings," Chevalier writes on her Web site. "One of my life goals is to view all thirty-five of them in the flesh. I've seen all but one — ‘Young Girl Reading a Letter' — which hangs in Dresden. There is so much mystery in each painting, in the women he depicts, so many stories suggested but not told. I wanted to tell one of them."
• Chevalier moved from the States to London in 1984. "I intended to stay six months," she writes. "I'm still here." She lives near Highgate Cemetery with her husband and son.
• The film version of Girl with a Pearl Earring was released 2003 with Scarlett Johansson in the role of Griet and Colin Firth playing Vermeer.
• When asked what book most influenced her life as a writer, here is her response:
It's impossible to list just one! I would say more generally— books that I read when I was a girl, that showed me how different worlds can be brought to life for a reader. My aunt likes to quote that when I was young I once said I was never alone when I had a book to read. (I don't remember saying that, but my aunt isn't prone to lying.) Those companions would be books like the Laura Ingalls Wilder series; Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery; A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle; The Egypt Game by Zylpha Keatley Snyder; "The Dark Is Rising" series by Susan Cooper; The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken plus subsequent books in that series; and of course The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien.
• Other favorite books include: Pride and Prejudice (Austen), The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner), Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger), Alias Grace (Atwood), and Song of Solomon (Morrison). (Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Thank goodness a picture can be worth more than a thousand words. Tracey Chevalier has written a vibrant, sumptuous novel about the enigmatic subject of a painting. Ms. Chevalier doesn't put a foot wrong in this triumphant work, the latest of several recent novels based on Vermeer paintings. It is a beautifully written tale that mirrors the elegance of the painting that inspired it.
Katie Flatley - Wall Street Journal
Absorbing novel ... as Chevalier's writing skill and her knowledge of seventeenth-century Delft are such that she creates a world reminiscent of a Vermeer interior: suspended in a particular moment, it transcends its time and place.
The New Yorker
Girl With a Pearl Earring is an engaging fictionalization. Fittingly, Chevalier's writing style adopts a painterly approach: The elegant prose evokes contemplation, the pace is slow and cumulative the drama emotional rather than visceral. Looking at the painting after having read the novel. The reader thinks, Yes, Chevalier got it right - that was the story hidden behind those eyes, silent for centuries.
San Francisco Chronicle
It's great strength is its projection of a complex, emotional universe onto an intimate canvas. The details, like the world of colors that Vermeer found in a single fold of white cloth, add up to more than the sum of their parts.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Set in 17th-century Delft, this historical novel intertwines the art of Johannes Vermeer with his life and that of a maiden servant in his household. From the few facts known about the artist, Chevalier creates the reality of the Netherlands. The parallel themes of tradesman/artist, Protestant/Catholic, and master/servant are intricately woven into the fabric of the tale. The painters of the day spent long hours in the studio, devising and painting re-creations of everyday life. The thrust of the story is seen through the eyes of Griet, the daughter of a Delft tile maker who lost his sight and, with it, the ability to support his family. Griet's fate is to be hired out as a servant to the Vermeer household. She has a wonderful sense of color, composition, and orderliness that the painter Vermeer recognizes. And, slowly, Vermeer entrusts much of the labor of creating the colored paints to Griet. Throughout, narrator Ruth Ann Phimister gives a strong performance as the enchanting voice of Griet. Highly recommended. —Kristin M. Jacobi, Eastern Connecticut State Univ., Willimantic
Library Journal
After her father is hurt in an accident, sixteen-year-old Griet helps support her family by working as a maid for the Johannes Vermeer family. Griet's life there is difficult because she is Protestant and the Vermeer family is Catholic, and also because both Vermeer's wife, Catharina, and one of his daughters seem to resent the young maid. As Griet gradually learns more about Vermeer's methods of painting, the artist begins to take an interest in the girl. He even allows her to help grind the colors used in his paints and asks for her thoughts on his work. When Vermeer offers Griet the chance to pose as the model for one of his paintings, the girl makes a decision that changes her life forever as she becomes the girl with a pearl earring. Author Chevalier has woven a lyrical story of art and one girl's coming of age in seventeenth-century Holland. Chevalier's writing glows with the same luminosity that infuses Vermeer's paintings, and she skillfully evokes the book's historical setting and gives readers a fascinating protagonist. Teens, especially those who enjoy historical fiction, are certain to be drawn to Griet's story as she struggles with her responsibilities to her family, deals with the romantic attentions of a local merchant's son, and tries to find her own place in the world.
John Charles - VOYA
Discussion Questions
1. Do you think Griet was typical of other girls her age? In what ways? How did she differ? Did you find her compassionate or selfish? Giving or judgmental?
2. In many ways, the primary relationship in this novel appears to be between Griet and Vermeer. Do you think this is true? How do you feel about Vermeer's relationship with his wife? How does that come into play?
3. Peering into 17th century Delft shows a small, self-sufficient city. Where do you think the many-pointed star at the city's center pointed toward? What was happening elsewhere at that time?
4. Discuss the ways religion affected Griet's relationship with Vermeer. His wife? Maria Thins?
5. Maria Thins obviously understood Vermeer's art more than his wife did. Why do you think this was the case? Do you think she shared Griet's talents?
6. Do you think Griet made the right choice when she married the butcher's son? Did she have other options?
7. How is Delft different to or similar to your town or city? Are the social structures comparable?
7. Though Girl with a Pearl Earring appears to be about one man and woman, there are several relationships at work. Which is the most difficult relationship? Which is the most promising?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Millenium trilogy, 1)
Stieg Larsson, 2005 (Eng. Trans., 2008)
Knopf Doubleday
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307473479
Summary
The first novel in Stieg Larsson’s internationally best-selling Millennium trilogy.
It’s about the disappearance forty years ago of Harriet Vanger, a young scion of one of the wealthiest families in Sweden...and about her octogenarian uncle, determined to know the truth about what he believes was her murder.
It’s about Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently at the wrong end of a libel case, hired to get to the bottom of Harriet’s disappearance...and about Lisbeth Salander, a twenty-four-year-old pierced and tattooed genius hacker possessed of the hard-earned wisdom of someone twice her age—and a terrifying capacity for ruthlessness to go with it—who assists Blomkvist with the investigation.
This unlikely team discovers a vein of nearly unfathomable iniquity running through the Vanger family, astonishing corruption in the highest echelons of Swedish industrialism—and an unexpected connection between themselves.
It’s a contagiously exciting, stunningly intelligent novel about society at its most hidden, and about the intimate lives of a brilliantly realized cast of characters, all of them forced to face the darker aspects of their world and of their own lives. (From the publisher.)
Larsson's Millennium trilogy includes The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.
Author Bio
• Birth—August 15, 1954
• Where—Vasterbotton, Sweden
• Death—November 9, 2004
• Where—Stockholm Sweden
Born in Västerbotten in northern Sweden in 1954, Stieg Larsson had a professional career that bears a striking resemblance to that of the protagonist of his Millennium thrillers, Mikael Blomkvist. Beginning as a graphic designer for the news agency Tidningarnas Telegrambyra (TT), Larsson went on to become the chief editor of Expo, the magazine published by the Expo Foundation, an organization he helped establish in 1995 to combat racism and the Swedish right-wing extremist movement.
Inspired by an old joke shared with a colleague at TT, Larsson admitted he started writing the Millennium novels—The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest—just for fun. Describing them as "pension insurance," Larsson said he enjoyed the process of fiction writing so much that he didn't make contact with a publisher until he had completed the first two and had a third under way.
Though Larsson died of a heart attack in 2004 and never saw any of his books in print, all three were subsequently published in Scandinavia and continental Europe to great acclaim. He left behind the unfinished manuscript for a fourth book in the series. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Review
The ballyhoo is fully justified.... At over 500 pages this hardly sagged.... The novel scores on every front—character, story, atmosphere.
The Times (London)
Combine the chilly Swedish backdrop and moody psycho-drama of a Bergman movie with the grisly pyrotechnics of a serial-killer thriller, then add an angry punk heroine and a down-on-his-luck investigative journalist, and you have the ingredients of Stieg Larsson's first novel.... It's Mr. Larsson's two protagonists—Carl Mikael Blomkvist, a reporter filling the role of detective, and his sidekick, Lisbeth Salander, a k a the girl with the dragon tattoo—who make this novel more than your run-of-the-mill mystery: they're both compelling, conflicted, complicated people, idiosyncratic in the extreme.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
This remarkable first novel by the Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson…has been a huge bestseller in Europe and will be one here if readers are looking for an intelligent, ingeniously plotted, utterly engrossing thriller that is variously a serial-killer saga, a search for a missing person and an informed glimpse into the worlds of journalism and business…It's hard to find fault with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. One must struggle with bewildering Swedish names, but that's a small price to pay. The story starts off at a leisurely pace, but the reader soon surrenders to Larsson's skillful narrative. We care about his characters because we come to know them so well. The central question—what happened to Harriet?—is answered in due course, and other matters involving romance and revenge are wrapped up as well. It's a book that lingers in the mind.
Patrick Anderson - Washington Post
It’s like a blast of cold, fresh air to read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.... What separates Stieg Larsson’s work from [other Swedish crime fiction] is that it features at its center two unique and fascinating characters: a disgraced financial journalist and the absolutely marvelous 24-year-old Lisbeth Salander–a computer-hacking Pippi Longstocking with pierced eyebrows and a survival instinct that should scare anyone who gets in her way.
Chicago Tribune
(Starred review.) Cases rarely come much colder than the decades-old disappearance of teen heiress Harriet Vanger from her family's remote island retreat north of Stockholm, nor do fiction debuts hotter than this European bestseller by muckraking Swedish journalist Larsson. At once a strikingly original thriller and a vivisection of Sweden's dirty not-so-little secrets (as suggested by its original title, Men Who Hate Women), this first of a trilogy introduces a provocatively odd couple: disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist, freshly sentenced to jail for libeling a shady businessman, and the multipierced and tattooed Lisbeth Salander, a feral but vulnerable superhacker. Hired by octogenarian industrialist Henrik Vanger, who wants to find out what happened to his beloved great-niece before he dies, the duo gradually uncover a festering morass of familial corruption—at the same time, Larsson skillfully bares some of the similar horrors that have left Salander such a marked woman. Larsson died in 2004, shortly after handing in the manuscripts for what will be his legacy.
Publishers Weekly
Ever since Knopf editor Sonny Mehta bought the U.S. rights last November, the prepublication buzz on this dark, moody crime thriller by a Swedish journalist has grown steadily. A best seller in Europe (it outsold the Bible in Denmark), this first entry in the "Millennium" trilogy finally lands in America. Is the hype justified? Yes. Despite a sometimes plodding translation and a few implausible details, this complex, multilayered tale, which combines an intricate financial thriller with an Agatha Christie-like locked-room mystery set on an island, grabs the reader from the first page. Convicted of libeling a prominent businessman and awaiting imprisonment, financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist agrees to industrialist Henrik Vanger's request to investigate the 40-year-old disappearance of Vanger's 16-year-old niece, Harriet. In return, Vanger will help Blomkvist dig up dirt on the corrupt businessman. Assisting in Blomkvist's investigation is 24-year-old Lisbeth Salander, a brilliant but enigmatic computer hacker. Punkish, tattooed, sullen, antisocial, and emotionally damaged, she is a compelling character, much like Carol O'Connell's Kathy Mallory, and this reviewer looks forward to learning more of her backstory in the next two books (The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest). Sweden may be the land of blondes, Ikea, and the Midnight Sun, but Larsson, who died in 2004, brilliantly exposes its dark heart: sexual violence against women, a Nazi past, and corporate corruption.
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. Careful observation is the foundation of any successful journalist's or private investigator's career. Discuss how the various characters' outward appearance aligned with their true personality in this novel.
2. Lisbeth Salander's character is enigmatic and antisocial throughout much of the book. What do you see as the catalyst for the slow emergence of her personality?
3. Lisbeth judges everyone harshly, including herself. What do you think of her assessment of Blomkvist?
4. While poverty, social injustice, parental abuse, and difficult childhoods are often cited as explanations for criminal behavior, Lisbeth believes in free will and choice. Do you agree?
5. What propels Blomkvist to lay aside his professional ethics and take on the investigation proposed by Vanger?
6. The relationship between Blomkvist and Cecilia is fraught from the beginning. How does Cecilia come to terms with it? What do you think about her decision?
7. How successfully does Larsson develop Lisbeth's connection to her mother? Is there anything about their relationship that helps shed light on Lisbeth's behavior?
8. Were you surprised by the book's portrayal of right-wing fanaticism and violence against women in a country known for its liberal views?
9. Which character's duplicity -- or innocence -- did you find the most unexpected? Which one emerged as your favorite?
10. Discuss Mikael Blomkvist's role in the investigation. Do you feel that he made as important a contribution as Lisbeth? Why or why not?
11. The narrative contained a number of plot twists. Who did you imagine sent the framed flowers to Vanger each year?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Girl with the Louding Voice
Abi Daré, 2020
Penguin Publishing
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781524746025
Summary
A powerful, emotional debut novel told in the unforgettable voice of a young Nigerian woman who is trapped in a life of servitude but determined to fight for her dreams and choose her own future.
Adunni is a fourteen-year-old Nigerian girl who knows what she wants: an education. This, her mother has told her, is the only way to get a "louding voice"—the ability to speak for herself and decide her own future.
But instead, Adunni's father sells her to be the third wife of a local man who is eager for her to bear him a son and heir.
When Adunni runs away to the city, hoping to make a better life, she finds that the only other option before her is servitude to a wealthy family. As a yielding daughter, a subservient wife, and a powerless slave, Adunni is told, by words and deeds, that she is nothing.
But while misfortunes might muffle her voice for a time, they cannot mute it.
And when she realizes that she must stand up not only for herself, but for other girls, for the ones who came before her and were lost, and for the next girls, who will inevitably follow; she finds the resolve to speak, however she can—in a whisper, in song, in broken English—until she is heard. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Lagos, Nigeria
• Education—J.D., University of Wolverhampton; M.Sc, Glasgow Caledonian University; M.A., University of London
• Currently—lives in Essex, England
Abi Daré grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, and has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years.
She studied law at the University of Wolverhampton and has an MSc in International Project Management from Glasgow Caledonian University, as well as an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London.
The Girl with the Louding Voice won the Bath Novel Award for unpublished manuscripts in 2018 and was also selected as a finalist in the 2018 Literary Consultancy Pen Factor competition.
Abi lives in Essex with her husband and two daughters, who inspired her to write her debut novel. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Desperate for an education, which is the only way to get the "louding" voice that will let her speak for herself, 14-year-old Nigerian Adunni is instead sold by her father to a local man looking for a male heir. Running away to the city, she… never gives up her dream.
Library Journal
Captivating… Daré's arresting prose provides a window into the lives of Nigerians of all socioeconomic levels and shows readers the beauty and humor that may be found even in the midst of harrowing experiences.
Booklist
Adunni's dialect will be unfamiliar to some readers, but the rhythm of her language grows easier to follow the more you read, and her courage and determination to make her own way in life despite terrible setbacks are heartbreaking and inspiring.
Kirkus Reviews
[H]eartwarming, enlightening.… [A] skillful examination of the causes and effects of corruption, child labor and child marriage…. The story is told in a distinctive, grammatically imperfect style by an innocent but perceptive main character… [who] brings deep, significant issues into focus.
BookPage
The narrator's attempts to make the unknown familiar often come across like metaphors in poetry. Readers leave Adunni knowing that she has the intellectual resources and the guts to face whatever challenges she must in order to attain her goals.
Shelf Awareness
Discussion Questions
1. What do you think Adunni’s comparison of her mother to a rose flower ("a yellow and red and purple rose with shining leafs") symbolizes? She also remembers her mother having a sweet smell like a rosebush. Why do you think she compares her mother to this particular type of flower? And how do you think our five senses play into our memories?
2. Adunni dreads her upcoming marriage to Morufu, but her friend Enitan is genuinely excited for Adunni, believing that her life will be improved after the wedding. Why do you think there is a disconnect between Adunni’s and Enitan’s points of view? Can you draw any comparisons between cultural attitudes toward marriage in America and Nigeria?
3. Compare and contrast Khadija with the glimpses we get of Adunni’s mother. How were their lives similar or different from one another?
4. Why do you think Bamidele doesn’t return for Khadija? What do you think he whispers in her ear before leaving her for the last time?
5. Why do you think Adunni is closer with Kayus than Born-boy? What is it that makes their sibling bond so deep?
6. Why do you think bathing is such an important symbol in Nigerian folklore and in the novel? Discuss the similarities and differences between the bath that Kadija believes will save her and her baby’s life, and the bath that Ms. Tia’s mother-in-law believes will help her get pregnant.
7. Adunni has dreamed of leaving Ikati and seeing "the big, shining city" of Lagos since she was young, though when she actually arrives it’s not under the circumstances she envisioned. How do you think her perception of the city changes once she is there? And how does her experience of Lagos relate to Big Madam’s or Ms. Tia’s? Compare and contrast the ways all three women view the city and experience the opportunities it offers.
8. Though they have dissimilar personalities, are not close in age, and have lived very different lives by the time they meet, Adunni and Ms. Tia have an instant connection that deepens over time. What do you think it is that drew each of them to the other? How do you think their friendship will evolve after the book is over? Will they continue to be friends even though their worlds seem incompatible?
9. What is the significance of the moment when Ms. Tia turns to look at Adunni right after the bath ceremony is over? Why do you think it affects Adunni so strongly?
10. After Ms. Tia’s bath, Adunni wants "to ask, to scream, why are the women in Nigeria seem to be suffering for everything more than the men?" What specific moments have brought her to this question? What do the events of the book reveal about cultural attitudes toward women?
11. Adunni remembers her mother saying, "Adunni, you must do good for other peoples, even if you are not well, even if the whole world around you is not well." How do you think this factors into the choices she makes and her dreams for the future?
12. The first time Big Madam hears Adunni singing she slaps her and says, "This is not your village. Here we behave like sane people." Later, when Adunni is comforting Big Madam after she has forced Big Daddy out of her house, Big Madam wants Adunni to sing to her. Discuss the significance of that moment. Why do you think Big Madam’s attitude toward Adunni’s singing has changed?
13. At first, knowing and reading English is a source of pride for Adunni. But later, she says, "English is only a language, like Yoruba and Igbo and Hausa. Nothing about it is so special, nothing about it makes anybody have sense." What do you think she means by this?
14. How do you feel about the ending? Do you think it is a happy ending for Adunni? Despite the fact that she gets to follow her dream of returning to school, there are bittersweet moments, too—she must contend with the fact that she’s left her family behind, her husband might have stopped supporting her family, and the mystery of what happened to Rebecca remains partially unsolved. How do you think these loose ends will affect Adunni as she grows into adulthood?
15. After embarking on this journey with Adunni, what does a "louding voice" mean to you and how does one achieve it? What sort of future do you imagine for Adunni
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Girl You Left Behind
Jojo Moyes, 2013
Pamela Dorman Books
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780670026616
Summary
A spellbinding love story of two women separated by a century but united in their determination to fight for what they love most
Jojo Moyes’s bestseller, Me Before You, catapulted her to wide critical acclaim and has struck a chord with readers everywhere. Moyes returns with another irresistible heartbreaker that asks, “Whatever happened to the girl you left behind?”
France, 1916: Artist Edouard Lefevre leaves his young wife, Sophie, to fight at the front. When their small town falls to the Germans in the midst of World War I, Edouard’s portrait of Sophie draws the eye of the new Kommandant. As the officer’s dangerous obsession deepens, Sophie will risk everything—her family, her reputation, and her life—to see her husband again.
Almost a century later, Sophie’s portrait is given to Liv Halston by her young husband shortly before his sudden death. A chance encounter reveals the painting’s true worth, and a battle begins for who its legitimate owner is—putting Liv’s belief in what is right to the ultimate test.
Like Sarah Blake’s The Postmistress and Tatiana de Rosnay’s Sarah’s Key, The Girl You Left Behind is a breathtaking story of love, loss, and sacrifice told with Moyes’s signature ability to capture our hearts with every turn of the page. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1969
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—B.A., London University
• Awards—Romantic Novel of the year (twice)
• Currently—lives in Essex, England
Jojo Moyes is a British journalist and the author of 10 novels published from 2002 to the present. She studied at Royal Holloway, University of London and Bedford New College, London University.
In 1992 she won a bursary financed by The Independent newspaper to attend the postgraduate newspaper journalism course at City University, London. She subsequently worked for The Independent for the next 10 years (except for one year, when she worked in Hong Kong for the Sunday Morning Post) in various roles, becoming Assistant News Editor in 1988. In 2002 she became the newspaper's Arts and Media Correspondent.
Moyes became a full-time novelist in 2002, when her first book Sheltering Rain was published. She is most well known for her later novels, The Last Letter From Your Lover (2010), Me Before You (2012), and The Girl You Left Behind ( 2013), all of which were received with wide critical accalim.
She is one of only a few authors to have won the Romantic Novelists' Association's Romantic Novel of the Year Award twice—in 2004 for Foreign Fruit and in 2011 for The Last Letter From Your Lover. She continues to write articles for The Daily Telegraph.
Moyes lives on a farm in Saffron Walden, Essex with her husband, journalist Charles Arthur, and their three children. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
(Starred review.) [E]nchanting...entwines two love stories set 90 years apart, connected by a painting called The Girl You Left Behind. In 1916, 22-year-old Sophie Lefevre struggles against a new German commandant...in her occupied village in northern France.... Jumping ahead to London in 2006, the story turns to 32-year-old Liv Halston, whose architect husband David bought Sophie’s painting.... An unfortunate coincidence twists the knife deeper, and Liv is forced to fight tooth and nail for what she has come to love most in the world. Lovely and wry, Moyes’s newest is captivating and bittersweet.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Moyes has created a riveting depiction of a wartime occupation that has mostly faded from memory. Liv and Sophie are so real in their faults, passion, and bravery that the reader is swept along right to the end. This one is hard to put down
Library Journal
Moyes’ latest is made heartwarming, thanks to the vibrancy of its main characters, both of whom will keep readers on their toes with their chemistry and witty repartee....humorous and romantic through and through.
Booklist
Moyes’ twisting, turning, heartbreaking novel raises provocative moral questions while developing a truly unique relationship between two people brought together by chance. With shades of David Nicholls’ beloved One Day, Me Before You is the kind of book you simply can’t put down—even when you realize you don’t want to see it end.... A big-hearted, beautifully written story that teaches us it is never too late to truly start living.
BookPage
The newest novel by Moyes (Me Before You, 2012, etc.) shares its title with a fictional painting that serves as catalyst in linking two loves stories, one set in occupied France during World War I, the other in 21st-century London. In a French village in 1916, Sophie is helping the family while her husband, Edouard, an artist who studied with Matisse, is off fighting.... Cut to 2006 and....Edouard's descendants recently hired [Paul] to find the painting.... Moyes is a born storyteller who makes it impossible not to care about her heroines.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. At one point, the Kommandant asks Sophie if they can just “be two people” (p. 72). What did you make of this—did you ever find yourself sympathizing with the Kommandant or any of the German soldiers? Is there room for sympathy on both sides?
2. Does Edouard’s portrait of Sophie capture who she already was or who she had the potential to become?
3. Before you knew the truth about Liliane Bethune, how did you feel about the treatment she received at the hands of the other villagers?
4. Sophie strikes a deal with the Kommandant in hopes that he, in turn, will reunite her with Edouard. Would you be willing to make a similar trade? Would most men appreciate Sophie’s sacrifice?
5. Unlike Helene, Aurelien angrily condemns Sophie’s relationship with the Kommandant. Why do you think Aurelien reacted as he did?
6. Have you ever experienced real hunger? If you were a French villager in St. Peronne, how far might you go in order to feed yourself and your loved ones?
7. How did you think Sophie’s story would end? Were you surprised by what Liv uncovered?
8. When Liv takes a group of underprivileged students on a tour of Conaghy Securities, most of them had never considered architecture as an art form. Why is this type of cultural exposure important for young people of all backgrounds?
9. Liv feels that she cannot go on without the portrait of Sophie—it is that important to her. Do you think a material object should hold such significance? Have you ever loved a piece of art or another object so much that you couldn’t bear to part with it?
10. Do you think the present–day Lefevre family’s interest in the financial worth of The Girl You Left Behind—and their apparent lack of interest in its beauty—made their claim any less worthy?
11. Why does Liv ultimately choose to try to save the painting rather than her home? What would you have done in her position?
12. Is Paul right to fear that Liv would eventually resent him for the loss of the painting?
13. In general, if a stolen artwork is legally acquired by its current owner, whose claim is more legitimate: the new owner or the original owner and his or her descendants? Should there be a statute of limitations? What if the current owner is a museum?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Girlchild
Tupelo Hassman, 2012
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250024060
Summary
Rory Hendrix, the least likely of Girl Scouts, hasn’t got a troop or a badge to call her own. But she still borrows the Handbook from the elementary school library to pore over its advice, looking for tips to get off the Calle—the Reno trailer park where she lives with her mother, Jo, the sweet-faced, hard-luck bartender at the Truck Stop.
Rory’s been told she is one of the “third-generation bastards surely on the road to whoredom,” and she’s determined to break the cycle. As Rory struggles with her mother’s habit of trusting the wrong men, and the mixed blessing of being too smart for her own good, she finds refuge in books and language.
From diary entries, social workers' reports, story problems, arrest records, family lore, and her grandmother’s letters, Tupelo Hassman's Girlchild crafts a devastating collage that shows us Rory's world while she searches for the way out of it. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Tupelo Hassman's first novel, girlchild, was published in 2012 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and released in paperback by Picador in 2013.
Her work has appeared in The Boston Globe, Harper's Bazaar, The Independent, The Portland Review Literary Journal, sPARKLE & bLINK, We Still Like, ZYZZYVA, and by 100WordStory.org, FiveChapters.com, and Invisible City Audio Tours, among others. More is forthcoming from The Arroyo Review Literary Journal, Girls on Fire: Stories of and for Teen Girls, and This Land.
Tupelo was the first American ever to win London's Literary Death Match. She lives in San Francisco's East Bay where she can be found, most days, having a root beer on tap at The Hog's Apothecary. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
A voice as fresh as hers is so rare that at times I caught myself cheering.... I’d go anywhere with this writer.
Susannah Meadows - New York Times
Moments of strange beauty enhance our sense of the Calle community….[Hassman] makes Rory’s milieu feel universal.
Megan Mayhew Bergman - New York Times Book Review
So fresh, original, and funny you’ll be in awe…. Tupelo Hassman has created a character you’ll never forget. Rory Dawn Hendrix of the Calle has as precocious and endearing a voice as Holden Caulfield of Central Park.
Boston Globe
Powerful.... Rory transcends her bleak situation through dark humor and unaccountable smarts.
San Francisco Chronicle
A lyrical and fiercely accomplished first novel...In Hassman’s skilled hands, what could have been an unrelenting chronicle of desolation becomes a lovely tribute to the soaring, defiant spirit of a survivor.
People
Blighted opportunity and bad choices revisit three generations of women in a Reno, Nev., trailer park in these affecting dispatches by debut novelist Hassman. Narrator Rory Dawn Hendrix, “R.D.,” is growing up in the late ’60s on the dusty calle, where families scrape.... Poring over a secondhand copy of The Girl Scout Handbook, with its how-to emphasis on honor and duty, comforts R.D.... Hassman’s characters are hounded by a relentless, recurring poverty and ignorance, and by shame, so that the sins of the mothers keep repeating, and suicide is often the only way out. Despite a few jarring moments of moralizing, this debut possesses powerful writing and unflinching clarity.
Publishers Weekly
Bright young girl must endure family dysfunction and sexual abuse while coming of age in a Reno trailer park during the late 1980s.... Taking inspiration from a battered library copy of The Girl Scout Handbook, Rory does a remarkable job raising herself, while trying to let go of the people (and hurts) that no longer serve her. With a compelling (if harrowing) story and a wise-child narrator, Hassman's debut gives voice—and soul—to a world so often reduced to cliche. A darkly funny and frequently heartbreaking portrait of life as one of America's have-nots.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Girlchild is set in a “town just north of Reno and just south of nowhere.” If the story were set elsewhere, how would the challenges Rory Dawn faces change? Or would they? What direct impact does geography have on Rory’s life? What about where the story is located in time? Could Girlchild be set in the 1970s? In the 2010s?
2. Girlchild is told in short, and sometimes extremely short, chapters. How does this method serve to impact the story? How would it feel to stay with any of these ssenes longer than we do? How would that change the overall impact of the novel?
3. There are many stories about Rory Dawn and the Hendrix family that combine in girlchild, including the social service report on the Hendrix family, Shirley Rose’s hopes for Rory’s future, Jo’s fears for Rory, the government’s position on Rory’s culture, and Roscoe Elementary and Junior High schools’ opinions of Rory’s academic gifts and adventures. Rory Dawn takes each of these for a spin. Why might she do this? What does she gain? Lose?
4. Vivian Buck is, perhaps, Rory Dawn’s only friend. Is Vivian real? Historical? Imaginary? All of the above? Do we have any reason to think that Vivian exists for other Calle residents? What does it say about Rory Dawn if Vivian doesn’t exist for others? Does it matter whether Vivian actually exists in real time on the Calle?
5. Dennis is a regular at the Truck Stop and he is one of the few nonvillainous Calle men whose life we see in detail, in the chapter “The Great Strain of Being.” What is the importance of Dennis for Rory Dawn? How does he reflect the trajectory of many of the Calle men; for example, Timmy, or Rory’s neighbor Marc?
6. Rory Dawn and Timmy have history together on the Calle brought by riding the shifting tide of babysitters. When it is announced that Rory Dawn is advancing to the next level in the spelling bee, she loses her temper with Timmy, throwing his toy truck over the school fence. What other circumstances surround this act of Rory’s, and what part of it leads her to turn against Timmy?
7. Jo, Rory Dawn’s mother, is a bartender, but this career wasn’t always her goal. What do we learn about Jo’s early aspirations and why they changed? Does she deserve a second chance? If she were given one, would she take it?
8. Rory Dawn is academically gifted, but instead of this being a boon, it increases her isolation, both from her peers and her mother. Does she find any refuge in this gift? What is the significance of Rory Dawn’s throwing the final round of the spelling bee? What does her choice in the misspelling of the word “outlier” (she spells it “outliar”) reveal about her feelings with regard to the stratification of her culture? What does it reveal about her place in it?
(Questions issued by Picador, the publisher.)
The Girls at 17 Swann Street
Yara Zgheib, 2019
St. Martin's Press
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250202444
Summary
Yara Zgheib’s poetic and poignant debut novel is a haunting portrait of a young woman’s struggle with anorexia on an intimate journey to reclaim her life.
The chocolate went first, then the cheese, the fries, the ice cream. The bread was more difficult, but if she could just lose a little more weight, perhaps she would make the soloists’ list.
Perhaps if she were lighter, danced better, tried harder, she would be good enough. Perhaps if she just ran for one more mile, lost just one more pound.
Anna Roux was a professional dancer who followed the man of her dreams from Paris to Missouri. There, alone with her biggest fears—imperfection, failure, loneliness—she spirals down anorexia and depression till she weighs a mere eighty-eight pounds.
Forced to seek treatment, she is admitted as a patient at 17 Swann Street, a peach pink house where pale, fragile women with life-threatening eating disorders live. Women like Emm, the veteran; quiet Valerie; Julia, always hungry. Together, they must fight their diseases and face six meals a day.
Every bite causes anxiety. Every flavor induces guilt. And every step Anna takes toward recovery will require strength, endurance, and the support of the girls at 17 Swann Street. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Yara Zgheib is a Fulbright scholar with a Masters degree in Security Studies from Georgetown University and a PhD in International Affairs in Diplomacy from Centre D'etudes Diplomatiques et Strategiques in Paris. She is the author of The Girls at 17 Swann Street (2019) and writes on culture, art, travel, and philosophy on her blog, "Aristotle at Afternoon Tea."
Zgheib is fluent in English, Arabic, French, and Spanish. She is a writer for several US and European magazines, including The Huffington Post, The Four Seasons Magazine, A Woman’s Paris, The Idea List, and Holiday Magazine. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
★ In her powerful debut, Zgheib masterfully chronicles the pain of an anorexic’s distorted thinking and intense fear of food in a riveting diarylike structure.… This is an impressive, deeply moving debut.
Publishers Weekly
Zgheib's lyrical, dream-like style will resonate with fans of Wally Lamb's and Anne Tyler's novels and Augusten Burroughs' memoirs.
Booklist
[T]he novel's greatest strength is its simplicity. There is no unusually dramatic backstory.… Anna is, in all but her Frenchness, unexceptional. It's a story we've read before; it's moving nonetheless. A nuanced portrait of a woman struggling against herself.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points help start a discussion for THE GIRLS AT 17 SWANN STREET … and then take off on your own:
1. Talk about Anorexia Nervosa (AN) as an illness. What preconceptions of AN did you have prior to reading The Girls of 17 Swann Street? What have you learned that surprises you—symptoms, perhaps, which you were unaware of?
2. Anna says, "I am twenty-six years old. My body feels sixty-two." What does she mean? Ever feel that way?
3. What do readers learn about Anna's background that might have led her to become anorexic? What, for instance, does AN have to with the need for control in ones life … or a lack of self-acceptance?
4. What has the medical/scientific community learned about the causes of AN?
5. What is the difference between Bulimia and Anorexia?
6. How does Anna's disease affect her relationship with her husband?
7. Readers have talked about the authenticity contained in Yara Zgheib's handling of the story. Do you agree? If so, in what makes the novel feel "authentic"?
8. Anna says, “I have books to read, places to see, babies to make, birthday cakes to taste. I even have unused birthday wishes to spare.”
So what am I doing here?”
If you were a friend, or a counselor, to Anna, what would you say to her?
9. Have you, or people you know, suffered from eating disorders? Can you talk about those experiences? How do Anna's experiences compare?
10. Does the book's structure—told through a series of vignettes from Anna's past, as well as her experiences at the treatment center—enhance or disrupt your reading experience? Would you have preferred a more continuous narrative flow? Why or why not?
11. Talk about the other characters' struggles with their illness? Do you find one character more sympathetic than others?
12. How do the other patients at 17 Swann Street help one each other overcome their illnesses? How do they support and learn from one another?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Girls Burn Brighter
Shobha Roa, 2018
Flatiron Books
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250074256
Summary
An electrifying debut novel about the extraordinary bond between two girls driven apart by circumstance but relentless in their search for one another.
Poornima and Savitha have three strikes against them: they are poor, they are ambitious, and they are girls.
After her mother's death, Poornima has very little kindness in her life. She is left to care for her siblings until her father can find her a suitable match.
So when Savitha enters their household, Poornima is intrigued by the joyful, independent-minded girl. Suddenly their Indian village doesn't feel quite so claustrophobic, and Poornima begins to imagine a life beyond arranged marriage.
But when a devastating act of cruelty drives Savitha away, Poornima leaves behind everything she has ever known to find her friend.
Her journey takes her into the darkest corners of India's underworld, on a harrowing cross-continental journey, and eventually to an apartment complex in Seattle.
Alternating between the girls' perspectives as they face ruthless obstacles, Girls Burn Brighter introduces two heroines who never lose the hope that burns within.a (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Shobha Rao moved to the U.S. from India at the age of seven. She is the winner of the 2014 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction, awarded by Nimrod International Journal. She has been a resident at Hedgebrook and is the recipient of the Elizabeth George Foundation fellowship. Her story "Kavitha and Mustafa" was chosen by T.C. Boyle for inclusion in the Best American Short Stories 2015. She lives in San Francisco. Girls Burn Brighter (2018) is her debut novel. (From the publihser.)
Book Reviews
Shobha Rao writes cleanly and eloquently about women who, without their brightness, might have been left to die in their beds. She writes them into life, into existence, into the light of day.
Los Angeles Times
A confident debut novel set in India and America about the unbreakable bond between two girls. From the menacing nooks of India's underworld to the streets of Seattle, this searing novel traces the nuances of adulthood and the enduring power of childhood bonds.
Chicago Review
Incandescent.… A searing portrait of what feminism looks like in much of the world.
Vogue
A definite must-read for readers who love authors like Nadia Hashimi and Khaled Hosseini.
Bustle
A treat for Ferrante fans, exploring the bonds of friendship and how female ambition beats against the strictures of poverty and patriarchal societies.
Huffington Post
[S]tirring.… [E]motional urgency will pull readers along. Vivid depictions of contemporary Indian culture and harrowing accounts of human trafficking…will leave readers, and book clubs, with much to ponder and discuss.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Incredible storytelling immerses readers in the world of Poornima and Savitha, two poor girls from India.… Without descending into sentimentality, Rao relates this story with real power and humanity.… [N]ot to be missed. —Lisa Rohrbaugh, Leetonia Community P.L., OH
Library Journal
(Starred review.) This powerful, heart-wrenching novel and its two unforgettable heroines offer an extraordinary example of the strength that can be summoned in even the most terrible situations.
Booklist
(Starred review.) Enchanting… The resplendent prose captures the nuances and intensity of two best friends on the brink of an uncertain and precarious adulthood… An incisive study of a friendship's unbreakable bond.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the novel's title. What does it mean to you? How is the experience of being a girl portrayed here? Did you find it eye-opening?
2. Why do you think the author chose to begin with the story about the old woman and the temple doors? What tone does that set for the rest of the novel?
3. How is friendship depicted in these pages? Why do you think Poornima and Savitha are so drawn to each other? What qualities do they share, and what qualities distinguish each of them? Do they change over the course of the novel?
4. Savitha tells Poornima about encountering an owl on the road in Indravalli. The owl tells Savitha,
If two people want to be together, they'll find a way. They'll forge a way. It may seem ludicrous, even stupid, to work so hard at something that is, truly, a matter of chance, completely arbitrary, such as staying with someone—as if "with" and "apart" have meaning in and of themselves … but that's the thing with you humans. You think too much, don't you?
Discuss the owl's words. What does this novel have to say about willpower versus fate or coincidence?
5. Poornima and Savitha have very different relationships with their fathers. How do those relationships shape their childhoods and their worldviews? Do you feel any sympathy or understanding toward Poornima's father?
6. Savitha's last words to Poornima are "I'm the one with wings." What do you think she means by that? How are bird and flight imagery used throughout the novel?
7. On her wedding night, Poornima remembers a story from childhood, when she stole a candy and her mother told her to never take what isn't hers. She reflects, "Don't you see, Amma, if only I had taken the things I wasn't meant to take. If only I'd had the courage." Are there examples after this moment in her story when she does take what she isn't supposed to? How does she exercise control over her own life?
8. In her husband's house, after she has been terribly burned, Poornima imagines the banks of the Krishna river:
When she closed her eyes, there were the saris drying on the opposite shore. Every color, fluttering in the river breeze, fields of wildflowers.
Saris and weaving play an important role throughout the novel. What do they represent for Poornima and Savitha? Why does Savitha guard the fragment of cloth from Poornima's sari so closely?
9. Discuss Savitha's thoughts on bananas:
Yogurt rice with a banana was like life, simple, straightforward, with a beginning and an end, while the other—the banana split—was like death, complex, infused with a kind of mystery that was beyond Savitha's comprehension, and every bite, like every death, dumbfounding.
Do you think her views on life and death make her more resilient and able to face adversity?
10. Savitha tells Poornima a story about a crow and an elephant, which Poornima thinks about often as she is searching for her friend. Savitha says,
Here's what matters. Understand this, Poornima: that it's better to be swallowed whole than in pieces. Only then can you win. No elephant can be too big. Only then no elephant can do you harm.
What do you think she means? Do you think Poornima and Savitha are swallowed whole by their experiences? Why or why not?
11. Savitha and Poornima both have complicated relationships with Mohan. Why do you think they are both drawn to him? Do you find him sympathetic?
12. Poornima finds a collection of poetry in Mohan's coat, and reads the most dog-eared page, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." When she discusses the poem with Mohan, he claims "it's about the struggle to find courage" and that his favorite lines are:
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare," and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair.
Mohan tells Poornima they are both like Prufrock, but Poornima disagrees: "No, she thought, you're wrong. You're wrong. He's nothing like me." Why do you think they have such different reactions to the poem? How is courage portrayed in this novel?
13. Discuss the two stories Savitha hears from the men with whom she hitchhikes: the multi-generational story that ends in the propane gas explosion, and the story about the daughter who is half black and half white. Why do you think the men decided to share those particular stories with Savitha, especially knowing that she can't understand English? What do they add to the novel as a whole?
14. Girls Burn Brighter addresses some of the most difficult issues facing women and girls today: rape, domestic violence, prostitution, sex trafficking, and abuse. Did Poornima's and Savitha's stories change the way you think about these issues? Did you find the novel's ultimate message to be at all optimistic or hopeful? Why or why not?
15. The novel's final scene is left ambiguous: we don't actually see if Poornima and Savitha reunite. How did you feel about the ending? What do you imagine happening to Poornima and Savitha next? Do you think there is the possibility of a new life for them in America?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
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The Girls in the Garden
Lisa Jewell, 2015 (2016, U.S.)
Atria Books
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781476792217
Summary
Imagine that you live on a picturesque communal garden square, an oasis in urban London where your children run free, in and out of other people’s houses. You’ve known your neighbors for years and you trust them. Implicitly.
You think your children are safe. But are they really?
On a midsummer night, as a festive neighborhood party is taking place, preteen Pip discovers her thirteen-year-old sister Grace lying unconscious and bloody in a hidden corner of a lush rose garden.
What really happened to her? And who is responsible?
Dark secrets, a devastating mystery, and the games both children and adults play all swirl together in this gripping novel, packed with utterly believable characters and page-turning suspense. Fans of Liane Moriarty and Jojo Moyes will be captivated by The Girls in the Garden. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 19, 1968
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—Epsom School of Art & Design
• Awards—Melissa Nathan Award For Comedy Romance
• Currently—lives in London, England
Lisa Jewell is a British author of popular fiction. Her books number some 15, including most recently The House We Grew Up In (2013), The Third Wife (2014), The Girls in the Garden (U.S. title of 2016), I found You (2016), and Watching You (2018).
She was educated at St. Michael's Catholic Grammar School in Finchley, north London, leaving school after one day in the sixth form to do an art foundation course at Barnet College followed by a diploma in fashion illustration at Epsom School of Art & Design.
She worked in fashion retail for several years, namely Warehouse and Thomas Pink.
After being made redundant, Jewell accepted a challenge from her friend to write three chapters of a novel in exchange for dinner at her favourite restaurant. Those three chapters were eventually developed into Jewell's debut novel Ralph's Party, which then became the UK's bestselling debut novel in 1999.
Jewell is one of the most popular authors writing in the UK today, and in 2008 was awarded the Melissa Nathan Award For Comedy Romance for her novel 31 Dream Street.
She currently lives in Swiss Cottage, London with her husband Jascha and two daughters. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 6/22/2016.)
Visit the author's website.
Book Reviews
Jewell expertly mines the relationships of her compelling, multilayered characters for a perfect pack-for-vacation read.
Fort-Worth Star Telegram
Another winner. Beautiful writing, believable characters, a pacy narrative and dark secrets combine to make this a gripping read.
London Daily Mail
Jewell expertly builds suspense by piling up domestic misunderstandings and more plot twists than an SVU episode. It’s a page-turner for readers who like beach reads on the dark side.
People
An intoxicating, spellbinding read that will make readers entranced with Lisa Jewell’s wicked and gorgeous prose…raw, intense, gritty, dark and suspenseful. If you are looking for a looking for a psychological thriller that will unfold secrets and truths in a shocking manner, this book is for you.
Manhattan Book Review
Jewell pens a psychological thriller that leaves readers wondering if they really know all the answers. Children can be more frightening than adults, as she demonstrates in her brilliant portrayal of youthful deceit and jealousy. Each individual is vividly described and counterbalanced by their strengths and weaknesses.
Romance Times Magazine
A suspenseful mystery.
Womans Day
(Starred review.) Rich characterization and intricate plot development are combined with mid-chapter cliffhangers...resulting in a riveting pace. Vivid descriptions of the bucolic park contrast with [lurking] evil...a pervasive atmosphere of unease in this well-spun narrative.
Publishers Weekly
[A] page-turner that keeps the suspense flowing.... Jewell sharply evades the truth while bouncing the story among multiple character.... The book's conclusion will leave readers saying, "Of course that's whodunit" after ricocheting about with uncertainty. —Jennifer M. Schlau, Elgin Community Coll., IL
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Full of suspense yet emotionally grounded…Fans of Liane Moriarty, Paula Hawkins, and Carla Buckley will adore this peek inside a gated community that truly takes care of its own, no matter the consequences.
Booklist
Jewell...ultimately fails to develop a climax that would bring together the several dramatic tropes at work.... [The author] offers an intriguing premise and characters but has difficulty maintaining plot momentum and creating depth of character.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Who did you first suspect of attacking Grace? Did your suspicions change over the course of the book? Were there clues that pointed you toward the perpetrator? What were some of the red herrings that misdirected your attention?
2. Adele has a very lenient, alternative parenting style, homeschooling and preferring to let her children make their own choices, whatever they are. She repeatedly suggests that she feels judged by others for her lifestyle. How did you feel about how she is raising her children? Were there points in the book you felt supportive or critical of her maternal choices?
3. The police suggest that Grace is "mature for her age" (page 206). Do you agree that Grace is (or is acting) more mature than her age? If so, how? How do Grace’s or Pip’s experiences compare with your own experience of being twelve and thirteen?
4. A major issue in this book is that of growing up. What growth do you see in Pip from the beginning to the end of The Girls in the Garden? Compare and contrast Pip’s development with the ways in which Grace matures.
5. Do you think Clare made the right decision in keeping Pip and Grace’s father’s release from the hospital a secret? Why or why not?
6. Adele asserts that "with parenting there’s a long game and a short game. The aim of the short game is to make your children bearable to live with. Easy to transport. Well behaved in public place . . . But the aim of the long game is to produce a good human being" (page 150). Do you agree with her belief that you can "skip" the short game? Is there a middle ground between her viewpoint and Gordon’s discipline-focused approach?
7. What draws Clare to Leo? Is her attraction to him based more on her own circumstances or something about him?
8. Why do you think Lisa Jewell wrote primarily from Pip, Clare, and Adele’s perspectives? What do these narrators have in common? What is unique about their different standpoints, and how does this affect the story?
9. Did you relate to any of the girls or parents more than the others? In what ways?
10. Do you think you would enjoy living in a home with a communal garden like the one described? What are some of the benefits and drawbacks?
11. What drives Catkin and Fern to follow Tyler’s lead? What do you think were their motivations for taking the actions they took?
12. Why does Adele ultimately look after Tyler? Are her motives purely selfless?
13. Do you think Adele does the right thing by keeping quiet after she discovers what happened to Grace? What would you have done in her position?
14. All of the girls go through both traumatic and formative experiences during the course of the book. What do you think the various girls will be like when they are grown up?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Girls in the Picture
Melanie Benjamin, 2018
Random House
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781101886809
Summary
A fascinating novel of the friendship and creative partnership between two of Hollywood’s earliest female legends—screenwriter Frances Marion and superstar Mary Pickford
It is 1914, and twenty-five-year-old Frances Marion has left her (second) husband and her Northern California home for the lure of Los Angeles, where she is determined to live independently as an artist.
But the word on everyone’s lips these days is "flickers"—the silent moving pictures enthralling theatergoers. Turn any corner in this burgeoning town and you’ll find made-up actors running around, as a movie camera captures it all.
In this fledgling industry, Frances finds her true calling: writing stories for this wondrous new medium. She also makes the acquaintance of actress Mary Pickford, whose signature golden curls and lively spirit have given her the title of America’s Sweetheart. The two ambitious young women hit it off instantly, their kinship fomented by their mutual fever to create, to move audiences to a frenzy, to start a revolution.
But their ambitions are challenged both by the men around them and the limitations imposed on their gender—and their astronomical success could come at a price.
As Mary, the world’s highest paid and most beloved actress, struggles to live her life under the spotlight, she also wonders if it is possible to find love, even with the dashing actor Douglas Fairbanks. Frances, too, longs to share her life with someone. As in any good Hollywood story, dramas will play out, personalities will clash, and even the deepest friendships might be shattered.
With cameos from such notables as Charlie Chaplin, Louis B. Mayer, Rudolph Valentino, and Lillian Gish, The Girls in the Picture is, at its heart, a story of friendship and forgiveness. Melanie Benjamin perfectly captures the dawn of a glittering new era—its myths and icons, its possibilities and potential, and its seduction and heartbreak. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Aka—Melanie Hauser
• Birth—November 24. 1962
• Where—Indianapolis, Indiana, USA
• Education—Indiana University (Purdue University at Indianapolis)
• Currently—lives near Chicago, Illinois
Melanie Benjamin is the pen name of American writer, Melanie Hauser (nee Miller). Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, Melanie is one of three children. Her brother Michael Miller is a published non-fiction author and musician. Melanie attended Indiana University—Purdue University at Indianapolis then married Dennis Hauser in 1988; they presently reside in the Chicago, Illinois area with their two sons.
Early writing
As Melanie Hauser, she published short stories in the In Posse Review and The Adirondack Review. Her short story "Prodigy on Ice" won the 2001 "Now Hear This" short story competition that was part of a WBEZ (Chicago Public Radio) program called Stories on Stage, where short stories were performed and broadcast.
When Melanie sold her first of two contemporary novels, she had to add Lynne to her name (Melanie Lynne Hauser) to distinguish her from the published sports journalist Melanie Hauser.
The first of Melanie's contemporary novels, Confessions of Super Mom was published in 2005; the sequel Super Mom Saves the World came out in 2007. In addition to her two contemporary novels, Melanie also contributed an essay to the anthology IT'S A BOY and maintained a popular mom blog called The Refrigerator Door.
Fictional biographies
Under the pen name Melanie Benjamin (a combination of her first name and her son's first name), she shifted genres to historical fiction. Her third novel, Alice I Have Been, was inspired by Alice Liddell Hargreaves's life (the real-life Alice of Alice in Wonderland). Published in 2010, Alice I Have Been was a national bestseller and reached the extended list of The New York Times Best Seller list.
In 2011, Benjamin fictionalized another historical female. Her novel The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb focuses on the life of Lavinia Warren Bump, a proportionate dwarf featured in P.T. Barnum's shows.
Her third fictionalized biography, The Aviator's Wife, was released in 2013 and centers on Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife of famed aviator, Charles Lindberg.
The Swans of Manhattan, published in 2016, revolves around the Truman Capot-Babe Paley friendship and the glitterati of Manhattan during the 1950s and '60s. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/14/2016.)
Book Reviews
It is not a spoiler to share that the first scene of THE GIRLS IN THE PICTURE is the beginning of the final chapter—a genius move by author Melanie Benjamin. I flipped through the pages enthralled, needing to understand how the great Mary Pickford, a glamorous 1920s actress, had happened upon such a sad ending personally.… This timely, well-crafted piece of historical fiction is absolutely worth the read. MORE…
Abby Fabiaschi, author - LitLovers
In the era of #MeToo, Girls could not be more timely—or troubling—about the treatment of women in the workplace.… [Melanie] Benjamin portrays the affection and friction between Pickford and Marion with compassion and insight.… As Hollywood preps for an Oscar season riven with the sexual mistreatment scandal, the rest of us can settle in with this rich exploration of two Hollywood friends who shaped the movies.
USA Today
A boffo production.… One of the pleasures of The Girls in the Picture its no-males-necessary alliance of two determined females—#TimesUp before its time.… Inspiration is a rare and unexpected gift in a book filled with the fluff of Hollywood, but Benjamin provides it with The Girls in the Picture.
NPR
Full of Old Hollywood glamour and true details about the pair’s historic careers, The Girls in the Picture is a captivating ode to a legendary bond.
Real Simple
The heady, infectious energy of the fledgling film industry in Los Angeles is convincingly conveyed—and the loving but competitive friendship between these two women on the rise in a man’s world is a powerful source of both tension and relatability.
Publishers Weekly
Benjamin immerses readers in the whirlwind excitement of Mary’s and Frances’ lives while portraying a rarely seen character, an early woman screenwriter, and deftly exploring the complexities of female friendship.
Booklist
A smart, fond backward glance at two trailblazers from an era when being the only woman in the room was not only the norm, but revolutionary.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Frances and Mary, especially in their younger years, feel they have to choose between pursuing careers and fulfilling traditional expectations of marriage. Did these conversations surprise you? Do you think these pressures still exist for women today?
2. How did you react to the sexism Frances and Mary face in the movie industry? How do the women confront their male superiors, and do they ever prove the men who doubted them wrong?
3. Mary’s role as an actress places her in the spotlight while Frances works behind the scenes as her "scenarist." Does Mary’s fame work for or against her? What about Frances’s relative anonymity?
4. Did you identify more with Frances or Mary? Why? Whose chapters were more intriguing to you?
5. Benjamin references many movies produced in the early days of Hollywood, such as The Birth of a Nation, The Poor Little Rich Girl, and The Big House. Have you seen or heard of any of these movies? If not, did the novel make you want to seek them out?
6. Have you ever had a friendship as supportive, productive, and collaborative as Frances and Mary’s? Do you think that kind of friendship can only thrive between the young and ambitious, or can you find it at any age?
7. Are Frances and Mary truly equal creative partners or does one woman hold more power over the other? How do the power dynamics of their partnership change over the course of their lives?
8. Consider the opening line of Mary’s first chapter: "Mama, I made a friend!" How does Mary’s relationship with her mother affect her throughout her career? Does Mary feel as though she needs to prove something to her—and if so, what?
9. Seeing the frontlines of the war—and the war’s brutal ramifications for women—is a turning point for Frances. Why do you think Frances makes the decision to leave her flourishing career and go to war? How did Mary’s decision to stay in Hollywood and work on her movies affect her relationship with Frances?
10. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks were the most celebrated couple of their age. Can you think of a similarly iconic couple alive today?
11. Despite their remarkable success, Frances and Mary experience anxiety in their personal and professional lives. What is Frances most insecure about? What makes Mary feel imprisoned?
12. What do you think causes Frances and Mary’s friendship to fracture? Do you think it was one incident or many over time? Was it inevitable?
13. Throughout the novel, Benjamin sprinkles appearances from well-known celebrities and illuminating details about the time and place of the story. What did you learn about early Hollywood and the naissance of the movie industry?
14. What female screenwriters or directors do you know of? How do sexism, gender bias, and inequality manifest in the film industry today?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Girls in Trucks
Katie Crouch, 2008
Little, Brown & Company
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316002127
Summary
Sarah Walters is a less-than-perfect debutante. She tries hard to follow the time-honored customs of the Charleston Camellia Society, as her mother and grandmother did, standing up straight in cotillion class and attending lectures about all the things that Camellias don't do. (Like ride with boys in pickup trucks.)
But Sarah can't quite ignore the barbarism just beneath all that propriety, and as soon as she can she decamps South Carolina for a life in New York City. There, she and her fellow displaced Southern friends try to make sense of city sophistication, to understand how much of their training applies to real life, and how much to the strange and rarefied world they've left behind.
When life's complications become overwhelming, Sarah returns home to confront with matured eyes the motto "Once a Camellia, always a Camellia"—and to see how much fuller life can be, for good and for ill, among those who know you best.
Girls in Trucks introduces an irresistable, sweet, and wise voice that heralds the arrival of an exciting new talent. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Reared—Charleston, South Carolina, USA
• Education—Brown University; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Awards—Sewanee Walter Dakin and MacDowell Fellowships
• Currently—lives in San Francisco, California
Katie Crouch is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Girls in Trucks and Men and Dogs (2010)
Her writing has also appeared in the New York Observer, Tin House, Glamour, and McSweeney's. She received her M.F.A. at Columbia University, and was awarded a Sewanee Walter Dakin Fellowship and a MacDowell Fellowship. She currently lives in San Francisco. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
In the book's final scene, she leaves her characters in a shared moment of new joy, one that may or may not last, no guarantees, just like in life and in good literature.
San Francisco Chronicle
Lucky for her readers, Crouch put to use all her cotillion-girl knowledge when she wrote her debut novel, Girls in Trucks.... In her acknowledgements, Crouch thanks her fifth-grade teacher, Dorothy Rhett, who told Crouch she was a writer. Rhett is surely proud. Maybe her cotillion teacher will be, too.
Charlotte Observer
Sarah's voice is a funny, slim stiletto to the heart of friendship, desire and love. Her spare prose and sharp dialogue flay open a universal need to belong, whether to a place, a person or your own true self.
The Oregonian
An unenthusiastic Southern debutante copes with the cruelties of postcollege New York life in Crouch's amusing debut. Sarah Walters is neither a misfit nor the queen of the Camellia Society cotillion scene growing up in Charleston, S.C. But when she and her fellow Camellias try to make a life in New York City, they find themselves coping in unexpectedly dangerous ways—from standard substance addictions to Sarah's fixation on preppy ex-boyfriend Max, a smooth and sadistic child of wealth. While the formula of young women in the big city seems destined for cliché, Crouch subverts most expectations; Sarah almost purposely misses an opportunity for happiness and stability with the gentle lover she met in Europe, and her ploy to ignite sparks with a college friend goes painfully awry. When Sarah goes back to Charleston and faces a perhaps too over-the-top family crisis (it involves suicide and lesbianism), the reader's left with the hope that the worst is over. Though this feels almost like a collection—each chapter its own story with its own narrative technique—Crouch's portrayal of a young woman's self-sabotage and the pitfalls facing young women in a cold world is wise, wry and heartbreaking.
Publishers Weekly
Crouch's debut novel-in-linked-stories chronicles the life of Charleston debutante Sarah Walters from her learning the fox trot in grade school to her finding out family secrets in her mid-thirties. The narrative is as raw, frank, and underdeveloped as the characters within, each of whom makes decisions that are difficult to understand. For example, when Sarah's relationship with an abusive man ends and he starts dating someone else months later, she stalks him. She also plunges into excessive alcohol and drug use, which only further clouds her judgment. Unfortunately, Sarah does not have any Southern "sisters" in whom she can confide, as she and her "Camellias" talk more out of Camellia Society obligation than from any actual affinity; they, too, struggle with unhealthy relationships and addictions. In the end, Crouch's portrait of a lady lacks a distinct Southern charm and does not show contemporary women in a positive light. Stylistically, the book resembles Melissa Bank's The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, but the unexpectedly abrupt ending may confuse readers and leave them wanting more.
Library Journal
Wry, rueful tales of a Southern debutante's mostly disappointing love life. The unifying motif of Crouch's debut is the Charleston Cotillion Training School, where South Carolina girls and boys of a certain class are taught ballroom dance in preparation for the girls' coming out parties. Prominent among the debutantes are the Camellias, a sorority of women whose mission is to "prepare their daughters for marriage to a decent man." For Sarah Walters and her friends Bitsy, Charlotte and Annie, Camellia membership will mark their most permanent attachment; it seems that for latter-day debutantes there's a shortage of decent men. The novel is comprised of linked short stories, some veering off into the equally problematic amours of peripheral characters including Sarah's brilliant older sister Eloise and their mother. After college, Sarah moves to New York City seeking a writer's life. While working lowly editorial positions, she rooms with Charlotte, a fledgling fashion designer who's in and out of rehab. Sarah's man-that-got-away is blue-blooded Max, who "made money with money." His casual cruelty is not tempered by any redeeming appeal, and Sarah's intractable obsession with him beggars belief. She attempts, vainly, to settle for guys from home, or guys she thought of as just friends but was holding in reserve as fallback lovers. Annie, who never leaves Charleston, survives a relationship with a feckless artist to find love and financial stability. Bitsy marries money, which is scant consolation for her husband's callousness—his infidelities persist as she dies of cancer. Charlotte chooses first drugs, then entrepreneurial success, over relationships. Sarah, finding at 31 that she's"missed [her] window" of opportunity with the fallback guys, has a child by an extremely casual acquaintance. By age 35 she's accepted the fact that neither she nor the men in her life will ever measure up to debutante standards. Gentle humor and sharp observation couched in straightforward prose with none of the preening preciosity so often seen in Southern fiction.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. To be a member of the Camellia Society, one has to be born into it. How do the themes of “membership” and exclusivity play out in Girls in Trucks? What would you say the “dues” are for being a Camellia?
2. One of the implicit goals of the Camellia Society—as is particularly evident in the Cotillion dances—is to prepare its young ladies for marriage. Over the course of the novel, how does her Camellia upbringing prepare Sarah Walters for dating, courtship, and love?
3. Love is manifested in many different ways in the book, sometimes tragically. Which examples surprised you? Why do you think Sarah seems to have such bad luck with men?
4. Sarah’s older sister, Eloise, is the black sheep of the family. How does she differ from Sarah and how is she similar? How does Sarah see Eloise as a model—either to follow or not to follow?
5. Later on in the novel, Sarah is invited to a party at her friend Bitsy’s. Even though she didn’t always get along with Bitsy, she attends because Camellias are “friends for life.” What do you think of this die-hard loyalty? How do Sarah’s attitudes toward Bitsy and Charlotte change?
6. There is a distinction made by some of the Camellia matrons between what is decorous and “civilized” and what is “common.” When in the novel does this distinction begin to break down—or become subverted entirely?
7. One of the sayings from Sarah’s youth is “Once a Camellia, always a Camellia.” To what extent does this mantra hold true for Sarah
8. Sarah heads North for college, in part to escape the Camellia Society. Does she succeed?
9. In many ways, this is a novel about home. When she’s living in New York, how is Sarah pulled toward home and toward the past?
10. One of the curveballs that life throws at Sarah is the baby she has by a man she hardly knows. How does having this child change her? Were you surprised by this turn of events?
11. Another surprise of the book is Sarah’s mother’s relationship with her lifelong friend, Georgia. How would you reconcile Sarah’s mother’s staunch Southern gentility with this unconventional romance?
12. Toward the end of the book we meet J.T., a classic Southern man from Sarah’s youth, with the truck to prove it. How does J.T. differ from the other men in the novel, and why is Sarah drawn to him—is it just nostalgia or something deeper?
13. What other books did Girls in Trucks remind you of? What was similar or different about them?
14. If you had to write an epilogue to the book, how would you imagine Sarah’s life five years from now?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Girls in White Dresses
Jennifer Close, 2011
Knopf Doubleday
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307596857
Summary
Wickedly hilarious and utterly recognizable, Girls in White Dresses tells the story of three women grappling with heartbreak and career change, family pressure and new love—all while suffering through an endless round of weddings and bridal showers.
Isabella, Mary, and Lauren feel like everyone they know is getting married. On Sunday after Sunday, at bridal shower after bridal shower, they coo over toasters, collect ribbons and wrapping paper, eat minuscule sandwiches and doll-sized cakes.
They wear pastel dresses and drink champagne by the case, but amid the celebration these women have their own lives to contend with: Isabella is working at a mailing-list company, dizzy with the mixed signals of a boss who claims she’s on a diet but has Isabella file all morning if she forgets to bring her a chocolate muffin.
Mary thinks she might cry with happiness when she finally meets a nice guy who loves his mother, only to realize he’ll never love Mary quite as much. And Lauren, a waitress at a Midtown bar, swears up and down she won’t fall for the sleazy bartender—a promise that his dirty blond curls and perfect vodka sodas make hard to keep.
With a wry sense of humor, Jennifer Close brings us through those thrilling, bewildering, what-on-earth-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life years of early adulthood. These are the years when everyone else seems to have a plan, a great job, and an appropriate boyfriend, while Isabella has a blind date with a gay man, Mary has a crush on her boss, and Lauren has a goldfish named Willard.
Through boozy family holidays and disastrous ski vacations, relationships lost to politics and relationships found in pet stores, Girls in White Dresses pulls us deep inside the circle of these friends, perfectly capturing the wild frustrations and soaring joys of modern life. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1979
• Where—Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., Boston College; M.F.A., The New School
• Currently—lives in Washington, DC
Jennifer Close is the American author of four novels, including her well known 2011 debut, Girls in White Dresses.
Close was raised in Chicago, Illinois, and attended Boston College. After earning her B.A., she headed to New York to get her M.F.A. at The New School where, according to an interview in the Washington Post, she wrote in a male voice to "avoid being too revelatory."
After an internship at The New Yorker, she spent another year at Vogue, then landed a job with a startup magazine called Portfolio. She rose to become the assistant managing editor before the magazine closed in 2009. It was at Portfolio, while waiting for proofs to be delivered late at night, that she began typing stories about her life and the lives of her friends who found themselves on an endless cycle of weddings, showers, and bachelorette parties—events which left them exhausted and broke. Those stories eventually became the 2011 novel, Girls in White Dresses.
When her boyfriend and now husband, Tim Hartz, joined the Obama White House, Close moved to D.C. to be with him. That life has also proven a rich lode to mine—this time for her fourth book, The Hopefuls.
Novels
2011 - Girls in White Dresses
2013 - The Smart One
2013 - The Things We Need
2016 - The Hopefuls
Book Reviews
Close’s witty voice...charts the romantic shenanigans of a bevy of New York women in their 20s, before career success or Botoxed foreheads. Dating is a phenomenon to be analyzed in improvised group therapy over cocktails.
New York Times
Follows three women and peripheral friends as they alternately flounder and flourish through their 20s. Weddings provide the backdrop as the women feel their way in and out of inert relationships and crappy jobs, trying to figure out who they want to be.
Washington Post
Anyone who has seen The Sound of Music—that is, everyone—will likely recognize the title of Jennifer Close’s Girls in White Dresses as a certain Oscar Hammerstein lyric. But given the tone and tenor of this debut novel, it shouldn’t surprise that the reference isn’t particularly affectionate.... Close, who is 32, captures the extended post-collegiate ennui associated with her generation.... Quite endearing.
Elysa Gardner - USA Today
Close straddles the line between melancholy and breeziness as she chronicles the exploits of recent college grads trying to make it in New York City . . . Hints at something deeper and truer: not just the adventure of being young, but the unmooring of it, too.
Leah Greenblatt - Entertainment Weekly
Jennifer Close’s debut, Girls in White Dresses, follows a group of young women doing all the things they know they shouldn’t—falling for one’s boss, dating gay men—all while drinking far too many mimosas at other people’s weddings.
Vogue
Artfully spare prose adds a literary tinge to the chick lit staples—navigating relationships, bridesmaid duties, disappointing first jobs—explored in Close's debut collection. At their weakest, the stories owe too much to their predecessors: "The Showers," in which the recurring characters travel to a suburban bridal shower, is essentially a retelling of a snappier Sex and the City episode, and Isabella's boss in "Blind" has the dark shades of The Devil Wears Prada. The standout moments come in "The Peahens," when Abby reveals her unusual family and her struggle to fit in (she "studied hard, taking notes on the silver link bracelets all the girls wore"), and the sharp "Hope," when Shannon takes a backseat to her boyfriend's naïve political passion for "the Candidate" of a presidential campaign. Occasionally funny (as when Isabella refers to her dinner dates as "parallel eating"), but without the risk taking of The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing or the deeply explored emotion of Prep, these stories will resonate with readers in the throes of the quarter-life churn who can see themselves in the cast.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Isabella, Mary, and Lauren are three friends in New York City navigating relationships, careers, early adulthood, and other people's weddings. Lauren is a real-estate agent who meets a man who could be Mr. Right—or a sociopath. Isabella is an assistant at a publishing house who suffers through a bad relationship, then meets a man who seems perfect until he asks her to move to Boston with him. Mary is a serious lawyer, married with two kids, whose husband is a perennial mama's boy incapable of grocery shopping on his own. Mixed in with the trials and tribulations of the protagonists are humorous vignettes from the lives of some of their other friends and acquaintances—many of whom are on their way to the altar or trying to find a way to get there. Verdict: This series of linked short stories is reminiscent of Melissa Bank's The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing. It is modern and funny, with original, wry observations. Close's debut novel will appeal to both fans of contemporary women's fiction with a hip vibe and readers who enjoy old-school chick lit.
Library Journal
With a light touch and utterly believable characters, Close’s...appealing debut manages to capture the humor, heartache and cautious optimism of her protagonists.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Which character did you relate to most closely, and why?
2. How does Close use humor to convey character? Are the women themselves funny, or the situations they find themselves in?
3. Ambivalence—toward jobs, men, apartments, and children—is a recurring theme in Girls in White Dresses. Why do you think that is?
4. What did Isabella learn from JonBenét?
5. Several of the characters keep some pretty big secrets, such as the way Abby keeps her friends away from her hippy parents. How does this affect Abby’s life? How do the book’s other secrets affect the characters?
6. What is the metaphor of the peahen?
7. On page 98, Isabella thinks about her young nephew, Connor, “All he wanted was to know what to expect. His world didn’t look like he’d thought it would, and she understood. How could he keep calm if he couldn’t see?” Who else does this describe?
8. Why does “the ham” become so significant for Lauren?
9. Mary wonders why nobody warned her that during her first year as a lawyer, “You will be constantly afraid.” (page 120) What role does fear play in the women’s lives?
10. “Kristi and Todd stood with their shoulders touching, wrapped in the cloth. It reminded Isabella of the way that Lauren and Kristi used to huddle together, whispering and laughing at jokes that only they understood.” (page 174) Why does Isabella get so emotional during the “chuppah within a chuppah” wedding scene?
11. Connect the dots between Shannon, Dan, Barack Obama, and the contestants on “The Biggest Loser.” Why is hope so important?
12. Throughout the book, questions of identity pop up. For example, when a friend gets divorced and decides to keep her married name, Isabella thinks it may be because, “She’s afraid no one will remember who she is.” (page 249) How do these characters determine who they are? By the end, who seems to have created the strongest sense of self?
13. What is the turning point for Isabella in her relationship with Harrison?
14. Why is Lauren ready to call the turtle Mark gives her Rudy, when she wouldn’t use that name for the goldfish?
15. Discuss the last scene. How have the women changed over the course of the book? Who is the most satisfied with her life?
16. Where do you imagine Isabella, Mary, and Lauren will be in five years?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Girls on Fire
Robin Wasserman, 2016
HarperCollins
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062415486
Summary
On Halloween, 1991, a popular high school basketball star ventures into the woods near Battle Creek, Pennsylvania, and disappears.
Three days later, he’s found with a bullet in his head and a gun in his hand—a discovery that sends tremors through this conservative community, already unnerved by growing rumors of Satanic worship in the region.
In the wake of this incident, bright but lonely Hannah Dexter is befriended by Lacey Champlain, a dark-eyed, Cobain-worshiping bad influence in lip gloss and Doc Martens. The charismatic, seductive Lacey forges a fast, intimate bond with the impressionable Dex, making her over in her own image and unleashing a fierce defiance that neither girl expected.
But as Lacey gradually lures Dex away from her safe life into a feverish spiral of obsession, rebellion, and ever greater risk, an unwelcome figure appears on the horizon—and Lacey’s secret history collides with Dex’s worst nightmare.
By turns a shocking story of love and violence and an addictive portrait of the intoxication of female friendship, set against the unsettled backdrop of a town gripped by moral panic, Girls on Fire is an unflinching and unforgettable snapshot of girlhood: girls lost and found, girls strong and weak, girls who burn bright and brighter—and some who flicker away. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 31, 1978
• Where—near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—Bachelor's, Harvard University; Master's, University of California, LA
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City, New York
Robin Wasserman is an American young adult novelist. Her first adult book, Girls on Fire, was published in 2016.
Wasserman grew up outside of Philadelphia and graduated from Harvard University and UCLA. Before she was an author she was an associate editor at a children's book publisher. She is currently living in Brooklyn, New York. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/11/2016.)
Visit the author's website.
Book Reviews
Part murder mystery, part love story, this page-turner explores the dark side of the all-consuming friendship between a wide-eyed good girl and a grunge-worshipping rebel.
Cosmopolitan
An intense whirlwind of love, violence, and obsession in a small town.
Redbook
Robin Wasserman may be known for her YA novels, but her foray into the adult genre is well worth your time
InStyle
Girls on Fire is an enthralling, gritty, and altogether unpredictable read that holds nothing back.... You will be utterly riveted.
BuzzFeed
With its narrative witchcraft, conjures up the ghost of the decade [the 90s] to full effect.
Flavorwire
A chilling mix-tape of love, girl crushes, secrets, and revenge… Read it on vacation; read it on the train; read it at the beach; read it at a campfire just about to burn out—but don’t miss it.
Ploughshares
[O]verwrought if intermittently powerful.... Wasserman attempts to imbue her keenly observed junior Thelma and Louise with broader social resonance about girlhood and empowerment, but for many readers the take-home message may instead be that not all unhappy lives prove compelling
Publishers Weekly
[E]xplores the fraught relationship between two teenage girls.... Although her subject matter is bleak, Wasserman writes with knowing clarity about teenage friendship and the emotional land mines of high school. Recommended for fans of Megan Abbott. —Amy Hoseth, Colorado State Univ. Lib., Fort Collins
Library Journal
The story unfolds as a maddening tease, with shocking events waiting around every corner-and an ending that will leave readers stunned.
Booklist
Successful YA novelist Wasserman makes her adult debut with this edgy portrayal of a passionate, obsessive female friendship set in the grunge era ("9 Women to Watch in 2016").
BookPage
Girls behaving very, very badly.... Reading this overstuffed and overwrought book is, more often than not, as tiresome as paging through a high school diary. The fact that it's set in the 1990s doesn't help.... Simultaneously overwhelming and underwhelming.
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. In the meantime, use our generic mystery questions.)
GENERIC DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Mystery / Crime / Suspense Thrillers
1. Talk about the characters, both good and bad. Describe their personalities and motivations. Are they fully developed and emotionally complex? Or are they flat, one-dimensional heroes and villains?
2. What do you know...and when do you know it? At what point in the book do you begin to piece together what happened?
3. Good crime writers embed hidden clues in plain sight, slipping them in casually, almost in passing. Did you pick them out, or were you...clueless? Once you've finished the book, go back to locate the clues hidden in plain sight. How skillful was the author in burying them?
4. Good crime writers also tease us with red-herrings—false clues—to purposely lead readers astray? Does your author try to throw you off track? If so, were you tripped up?
5. Talk about the twists & turns—those surprising plot developments that throw everything you think you've figured out into disarray.
- Do they enhance the story, add complexity, and build suspense?
- Are they plausible or implausible?
- Do they feel forced and gratuitous—inserted merely to extend the story?
6. Does the author ratchet up the suspense? Did you find yourself anxious—quickly turning pages to learn what happened? A what point does the suspense start to build? Where does it climax...then perhaps start rising again?
7. A good ending is essential in any mystery or crime thriller: it should ease up on tension, answer questions, and tidy up loose ends. Does the ending accomplish those goals?
- Is the conclusion probable or believable?
- Is it organic, growing out of clues previously laid out by the author (see Question 3)?
- Or does the ending come out of the blue, feeling forced or tacked-on?
- Perhaps it's too predictable.
- Can you envision a different or better ending?
8. Are there certain passages in the book—ideas, descriptions, or dialogue—that you found interesting or revealing...or that somehow struck you? What lines, if any, made you stop and think?
9. Overall, does the book satisfy? Does it live up to the standards of a good crime story or suspense thriller? Why or why not?
(Generic Mystery Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Give Me Your Hand
Megan Abbott, 2018
Little, Brown &Company
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316547208
Summary
You told each other everything. Then she told you too much.
Kit has risen to the top of her profession and is on the brink of achieving everything she wanted. She hasn't let anything stop her.
But now someone else is standing in her way: Diane. Best friends at seventeen, their shared ambition made them inseparable. Until the day Diane told Kit her secret—the worst thing she'd ever done, the worst thing Kit could imagine—and it blew their friendship apart.
Kit is still the only person who knows what Diane did. And now Diane knows something about Kit that could destroy everything she's worked so hard for.
How far would Kit go to make the hard work, the sacrifice, worth it in the end? What wouldn't she give up? Diane thinks Kit is just like her. Maybe she's right. Ambition: it's in the blood. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1971
• Where—near Detroit, Michigan, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Michigan; Ph.D., New York University
• Awards—Edgar Award for Outstanding Fiction
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York
Megan Abbott is an American author of crime fiction and a non-fiction analyst of hardboiled crime fiction. Her novels and short stories have drawn from and re-worked classic subgenres of crime writing, with a female twist.
Abbott grew up in suburban Detroit and graduated from the University of Michigan. She is married to Joshua Gaylord, a New School professor who writes fiction under his own name and the pseudonym "Alden Bell."
Abbott was influenced by film noir, classic noir fiction, and Jeffrey Eugenides's novel The Virgin Suicides. Two of her novels reference notorious crimes. The Song is You (2007) is based around the disappearance of Jean Spangler in 1949, and Bury Me Deep (2009) is based on the 1931 case of Winnie Ruth Judd, who was dubbed the "Trunk Murderess."
Abbott has won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for outstanding fiction. Time named her one of the "23 Authors That We Admire" in 2011.
Book Reviews
Abbott excels in evoking the strange mix of camaraderie and rivalry that exists in academic research…. Female friendship and ambition are threaded throughout her work, and here they form a rich tapestry…. Ultimately, though, the reason to read this compelling and hypnotic novel is… Abbott’s expert dissection of women’s friendships and rivalries. She is…one of the most intelligent and daring novelists working in the crime genre today.
Ruth Ware - New Times Book Review
Give Me Your Hand steadily intensifies its atmosphere of claustrophobia to the point of constriction.… Abbott deliciously draws out tension by hopping back and forth in time, slowly disclosing Diane’s skeleton-in-the-closet while divulging Kit’s moral failings that will inadvertently add to the body count.… Give Me Your Hand, like so many of Abbott’s disturbing tales, dramatizes the adage, "Be careful what you wish for."
Maureen Corrigan - Washington Post
Abbott strongly dissects obsessions that easily morph into destruction and aspirations that spiral into blind ambition. The personalities of Diane and Kit are manifested through their work.… Abbott again shows why she’s one of our best story tellers.
Associated Press
Abbott isn’t just any crime writer. She earned a Ph.D. from New York University studying noir literature and has built a blockbuster caree.… Abbott couldn’t resist the idea of a condition that could be both an explanation for bad behavior and an excuse that ignores the complexity of female killers. She masterfully mines that gray area to build tension.… Abbott’s talent lies in dissecting the complicated tension between women at any age.
Time
(Starred review) When Diane’s secret pulses to the surface, lives are lost and futures are put in doubt in a mad rush to keep the past in its place. No writer can touch Abbott in the realm of twisted desire and relationships between women, both intimate and feral.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) [A] vividly realized world of intense competition and creates life-or-death stakes where we wouldn’t have known to look for them…. Procedural fans may have a few nitpicks, but this is a brilliant riff on… the ultimate unknowability of the human brain.
Booklist
(Starred review) In Abbott’s deft hands, friendship is fused to rivalry, and ambition to fear, with an unsettling level of believability. It will take more than a cold shower to still the blood thumping in your ears when you finish this.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use our GENERIC MYSTERY QUESTIONS to start a discussion for GIVE ME YOUR HAND … then take off on your own:
GENERIC DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Mystery / Crime / Suspense Thrillers
1. Talk about the characters, both good and bad. Describe their personalities and motivations. Are they fully developed and emotionally complex? Or are they flat, one-dimensional heroes and villains?
2. What do you know...and when do you know it? At what point in the book do you begin to piece together what happened?
3. Good crime writers embed hidden clues in plain sight, slipping them in casually, almost in passing. Did you pick them out, or were you...clueless? Once you've finished the book, go back to locate the clues hidden in plain sight. How skillful was the author in burying them?
4. Good crime writers also tease us with red-herrings—false clues—to purposely lead readers astray? Does your author try to throw you off track? If so, were you tripped up?
5. Talk about the twists & turns—those surprising plot developments that throw everything you think you've figured out into disarray.
- Do they enhance the story, add complexity, and build suspense?
- Are they plausible or implausible?
- Do they feel forced and gratuitous—inserted merely to extend the story?
6. Does the author ratchet up the suspense? Did you find yourself anxious—quickly turning pages to learn what happened? A what point does the suspense start to build? Where does it climax...then perhaps start rising again?
7. A good ending is essential in any mystery or crime thriller: it should ease up on tension, answer questions, and tidy up loose ends. Does the ending accomplish those goals?
- Is the conclusion probable or believable?
- Is it organic, growing out of clues previously laid out by the author (see Question 3)?
- Or does the ending come out of the blue, feeling forced or tacked-on?
- Perhaps it's too predictable.
- Can you envision a different or better ending?
8. Are there certain passages in the book—ideas, descriptions, or dialogue—that you found interesting or revealing...or that somehow struck you? What lines, if any, made you stop and think?
9. Overall, does the book satisfy? Does it live up to the standards of a good crime story or suspense thriller? Why or why not?
(Generic Mystery Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Given Day
Dennis Lehane, 2008
HarperCollins
720 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780380731879
Summary
Set in Boston at the end of the First World War, Dennis Lehane's eighth novel unflinchingly captures the political and social unrest of a nation caught at the cross-roads between past and future.
The Given Day tells the story of two families— one black, one white—swept up in a maelstrom of revolutionaries and anarchists, immigrants and ward bosses, Brahmins and ordinary citizens, all engaged in a battle for survival and power. Beat cop Danny Coughlin, the son of one of the city's most beloved and powerful police captains, joins a burgeoning union movement and the hunt for violent radicals. Luther Laurence, on the run after a deadly confrontation with a crime boss in Tulsa, works for the Coughlin family and tries desperately to find his way home to his pregnant wife.
Here, too, are some of the most influential figures of the era—Babe Ruth; Eugene O'Neill; leftist activist Jack Reed; NAACP founder W. E. B. DuBois; Mitchell Palmer, Woodrow Wilson's rudthless Red-chasing attorney general; cunning Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge; and an ambitious young Department of Justice lawyer named John Hoover.
Coursing through some of the pivotal events of the time—including the Spanish Influenza pandemic—and culminating in the Boston Police Strike of 1919, The Given Day explores the crippling violence and irrepressible exuberance of a country at war with, and in the thrall of, itself. As Danny, Luther, and those around them struggle to define themselves in increasingly turbulent times, they gradually find family in one another and, together, ride a rising storm of hardship, deprivation, and hope that will change all their lives. (From the publisher
Author Bio
• Birth—August 4, 1965
• Where—Dorchester, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Eckerd College; M.F.A., Florida International University
• Awards—Shamus Award, Best First Novel; Anthony Award; Dilys Award
• Currently—lives in Boston, Massachusetts
Dennis Lehane is an American author. He has written several award-winning novels, including A Drink Before the War and the New York Times bestseller Mystic River, which was later made into an Academy Award-winning film.
Another novel, Gone, Baby, Gone, was also adapted into an Academy Award-nominated film. His novel Shutter Island was adapted into a film by Martin Scorsese in 2010. Lehane is a graduate of Florida International University in Miami, Florida.
Personal Life
Lehane was born and reared in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, and continues to live in the Boston area, which provides the setting for most of his books. He spent summers on Fieldston Beach in Marshfield. Lehane is the youngest of five children. His father was a foreman for Sears & Roebuck, and his mother worked in a Boston public school cafeteria. Both of his parents emigrated from Ireland. His brother, Gerry Lehane, who is two and a half years older than Dennis, is a veteran actor who trained at the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence before heading to New York in 1990. Gerry is currently a member of the Invisible City Theatre Company.
He was previously married to Sheila Lawn, formerly an advocate for the elderly for the city of Boston but now working with the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office as an Assistant District Attorney. Currently, he is married to Dr. Angela Bernardo, with whom he has one daughter.
He is a graduate of Boston College High School (a Boston Jesuit prep school), Eckerd College (where he found his passion for writing), and the graduate program in creative writing at Florida International University in Miami, Florida. He occasionally makes guest appearances as himself in the ABC comedy/drama TV series Castle.
Literary Career
His first book, A Drink Before the War, which introduced the recurring characters Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, won the 1995 Shamus Award for Best First P.I. Novel. The fourth book in the series, Gone, Baby, Gone, was adapted to a film of the same title in 2007; it was directed by Ben Affleck and starred Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan as Kenzie and Gennaro. Reportedly, Lehane "has never wanted to write the screenplays for the films [based on his own books], because he says he has 'no desire to operate on my own child.'"
Lehane's Mystic River was made into a film in 2003; directed by Clint Eastwood, it starred Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, and Kevin Bacon. The novel itself was a finalist for the PEN/Winship Award and won the Anthony Award and the Barry Award for Best Novel, the Massachusetts Book Award in Fiction, and France's Prix Mystère de la Critique.
Lehane's first play, Coronado, debuted in New York in December 2005. Coronado is based on his acclaimed short story "Until Gwen," which was originally published in The Atlantic Monthly and was selected for both The Best American Short Stories and The Best Mystery Short Stories of 2005.
Lehane described working on his historical novel, The Given Day, as "a five- or six-year project" with the novel beginning in 1918 and encompassing the 1919 Boston Police Strike and its aftermath. The novel was published in October, 2008.
On October 22, 2007 Paramount Pictures announced that they had optioned Shutter Island with Martin Scorsese attached as director. The Laeta Kalogridis-scripted adaptation has Leonardo DiCaprio playing U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels, "who is investigating the disappearance of a murderess who escaped from a hospital for the criminally insane and is presumed to be hiding on the remote Shutter Island." Mark Ruffalo played opposite DiCaprio as U.S. Marshal Chuck Aule. Shutter Island was released on February 19, 2010.
Teaching Career
Since becoming a literary success after the broad appeal of his Kenzie and Gennaro novels, as well as the success of Mystic River, Lehane has taught at several colleges. He taught fiction writing and serves as a member of the board of directors for a low-residency MFA program sponsored by Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. He has also been involved with the Solstice Summer Writers' Conference at Boston's Pine Manor College and taught advanced fiction writing at Harvard University, where his classes quickly filled up.
In May 2005, Lehane was presented with an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Eckerd College and was appointed to Eckerd's Board of Trustees later that year. In Spring 2009, Lehane became a Joseph E. Connor Award recipient and honorary brother of Phi Alpha Tau professional fraternity at Emerson College in Boston, MA. Other brothers and Connor Award recipients include Robert Frost, Elia Kazan, Jack Lemmon, Red Skelton, Edward R. Murrow, Yul Brynner, and Walter Cronkite. Also in Spring 2009, Lehane presented the commencement speech at Emmanuel College in Boston, Massachusetts, and was awarded an honorary degree.
Film Career
Lehane wrote and directed an independent film called Neighborhoods in the mid 1990s. He joined the writing staff of the HBO drama series The Wire in 2004. Lehane returned as a writer for the fourth season in 2006 Lehane and the writing staff won the Writers Guild of America (WGA) Award for Best Dramatic Series at the February 2008 ceremony and the 2007 Edgar Award for Best Television Feature/Mini-Series Teleplay for their work on the fourth season. Lehane remained a writer for the fifth and final season in 2008. Lehane and the writing staff were nominated for the WGA Award award for Best Dramatic Series again at the February 2009 ceremony.He served as an executive producer for Shutter Island. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Bibliography
The Kenzie-Gennaro Novels
1994 - A Drink Before the War
1996 - Darkness, Take My Hand
1997 - Sacred
1998 - Gone, Baby, Gone
1999 - Prayers for Rain
2010 - Moonlight Mile
Joe Coughlin Novels
2008 - The Given Day
2012 - Live by Night
2015 - World Gone By
Stand-alones
2001 - Mystic River
2003 - Shutter Island
2006 - Coronado
Book Reviews
No more thinking of Mr. Lehane as an author of detective novels that make good movies (Gone, Baby, Gone) and tell devastatingly bleak Boston stories (Mystic River). He has written a majestic, fiery epic that moves him far beyond the confines of the crime genre…The Given Day is a huge, impassioned, intensively researched book that brings history alive by grounding the present in the lessons of the past.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Not only is Lehane working on a larger historical scale, he has turned up the volume on his prose, setting a tone of epic exaggeration…Lehane has created a novel of such momentum we cannot help cheering Danny on in his impossible fight. On this front and others The Given Day, like John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy, is a human meat-grinder of a book. Throughout men, women and children are burned, blown up, shot, punched, head-butted, run over by police cruisers, even vaporized by a tidal wave of hot molasses when an industrial tank explodes. "All you'd need would be a general strike," says one character in Dos Passos' great work. "If people only realized how…easy it would be." Here are some people who would tell you otherwise.
John Freeman - New York Times Book Review
Lehane has done something brave and ambitious: He has written a historical novel that unquestionably is his grab for the brass ring, an effort to establish his credentials in literary as well as commercial terms. Immense in length and scope, it is set at the end of World War I, a time when "people were angry, people were shouting, people were dying in trenches and marching outside factories," and it culminates in one of the most traumatic events in Boston's history, the policemen's strike of 1919…It's a powerful moment in history, and Lehane makes the most of it.
Jonathan Yardley - Washington Post
The Given Day serves up the historical novel's signature pleasures: sweeping narrative, period detail, entertaining cameos by real-life figures and the thrill of not knowing what's going to happen even when you know what's going to happen.
Chicago Tribune
Steeped in history but wearing its research lightly, The Given Day is a meaty, rich, old-fashioned and satisfying tale. I'd call it Lehane's masterpiece, but he's still young and, it is devoutly to be wished, ready to give us much more.
Seattle Times
(Starred review.) In a splendid flowering of the talent previously demonstrated in his crime fiction (Gone, Baby, Gone; Mystic River), Lehane combines 20th-century American history, a gripping story of a family torn by pride and the strictures of the Catholic Church, and the plot of a multifaceted thriller. Set in Boston during and after WWI, this engrossing epic brings alive a pivotal period in our cultural maturation through a pulsing narrative that exposes social turmoil, political chicanery and racial prejudice, and encompasses the Spanish flu pandemic, the Boston police strike of 1919 and red-baiting and anti-union violence.Danny Coughlin, son of police captain Thomas Coughlin, is a devoted young beat cop in Boston's teeming North End. Anxious to prove himself worthy of his legendary father, he agrees to go undercover to infiltrate the Bolsheviks and anarchists who are recruiting the city's poverty-stricken immigrants. He gradually finds himself sympathetic to those living in similar conditions to his fellow policemen, who earn wages well below the poverty line, work in filthy, rat-infested headquarters, are made to pay for their own uniforms and are not compensated for overtime. Danny also rebels by falling in love with the family's spunky Irish immigrant maid, a woman with a past. Danny's counterpart in alienation is Luther Laurence, a spirited black man first encountered in the prologue when Babe Ruth sees him playing softball in Ohio. After Luther kills a man in Tulsa, he flees to Boston, where he becomes intertwined with Danny's family. This story of fathers and sons, love and betrayal, idealism and injustice, prejudice and brotherly feeling is a dark vision of the brutality inherent in human nature and the dire fate of some who try to live by ethical standards. It's also a vision of redemption and a triumph of the human spirit. In short, this nail-biter carries serious moral gravity.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Shamus Award winner Lehane's first historical novel is a clear winner, displaying all the virtues the author (Mystic River) has shown in his exceptional series of crime novels: narrative verve, sensitivity to setting, the interweaving of complicated story lines, an apt and emotionally satisfying denouement-and, above all, the author's abiding love for his characters and the human condition. In 1917, the Great War in Europe is still being waged, but with America's entry into the conflict, people expect it to end soon. Boston's policemen have a grievance. With their wages scaled to the cost of living in 1905, earnings lie well below the poverty level, and working conditions are appalling. The city government has reneged on its promise to readjust wages after the war. With anarchists planting bombs and social unrest in the air, there is little sympathy in Boston for the policemen's threat to strike. When the strike finally breaks in 1919, the strikers receive an object lesson in the bitter truth that "different sets of rules [apply] for different classes of people." Against this background of turmoil, an unexpected friendship develops between Irish American policeman Danny Coughlin and African American Luther Laurence, on the run from gangsters and police. Lehane's long-awaited eighth novel is as good as it gets. Enthusiastically recommended for all fiction collections.
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. The Given Day transports readers to 1918 Boston and touches on the lives of two families—one black, one white—as they are swept up in the maelstrom of history. How are their experiences similar? How are they different?
2. Dennis Lehane writes The Given Day from the perspectives of two very different men. What brings Luther Laurence and Danny Coughlin together? Does their friendship ring true?
3. One of the themes of the book is the notion of family—both the blood kind and the kind a person willingly creates on his own. How are these ideas of family manifested? Do you see one as being more important than the other? Can a person belong to two kinds of family at the same time?
4. The Given Day centers on the Boston Police Strike of 1919 at a time when fiercely held convictions about work and freedom underwent enormous change at great cost to human life and relationships. Nearly a century later, what is the role of unions in America today? How do the working conditions for Luther and Danny compare to contemporary conditions? Do you think unions are necessary today?
5. How do the themes in the book—race, politics, class, family, immigration, nepotism, corruption—reflect issues facing America today?
6. Injustice is another theme that Lehane explores in the novel. How does injustice manifest itself in democratic societies? Can it be redressed? If so, how?
7. What role does Babe Ruth play in the narrative? What did the introduction of his character add to your understanding of the novel's main themes?
8. Who do you think is the most sympathetic character in the story? Why?
9. What is the relationship between Danny Coughlin and his brothers Connor and Joe? What role does Danny play in each character's development? How do they, in turn, influence him?
10. Talk about the relationship of Danny and his father. How are they alike? How are they different? How do their similarities and differences shape their relationship?
11. What role do women play in the novel? How do they impact the men?
12. How are anarchists and immigrants portrayed in the novel? Do you see any echoes of the government's response to events then in the America in which we live today?
13. Consider your own life experiences. How would you have fared in the America of a century ago? If Danny and Luther were transported to 21st-century America, what might they think of our world?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Giver (The Giver Quartet, 1)
Lois Lowry, 1993
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
192 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780440237686
Summary
December is the time of the annual Ceremony at which each twelve-year-old receives a life assignment determined by the Elders. Jonas watches his friend Fiona named Caretaker of the Old and his cheerful pal Asher labeled the Assistant Director of Recreation. But Jonas has been chosen for somthing special. When his selection leads him to an unnamed man—the man called only the Giver—he begins to sense the dark secrets taht underlie the fragile perfection of his world.
Given his lifetime assignment at the Ceremony of Twelve, Jonas becomes the receiver of memories shared by only one other in his community and discovers the terrible truth about the society in which he lives. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 20, 1937
• Where—Hawaii, USA
• Education—B.A., M.F.A., University of
Southern Maine
• Awards—Newbery Medal (2)
• Currently—lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Lois Lowry is an American author of children's literature. She began her career as a photographer and a freelance journalist during the early 1970s. Her work as a journalist drew the attention of Houghton Mifflin and they encouraged her to write her first children's book, A Summer to Die, which was published in 1977 (when Lowry was 40 years old). She has since written more than 30 books for children and published an autobiography. Two of her works have been awarded the prestigious Newbery Medal: Number the Stars in 1990, and The Giver in 1993.
As an author, Lowry is known for writing about difficult subject matters within her works for children. She has explored such complex issues as racism, terminal illness, murder, and the Holocaust among other challenging topics. She has also explored very controversial issues of questioning authority such as in The Giver quartet. Her writing on such matters has brought her both praise and criticism. In particular, her work The Giver has been met with a diversity of reactions from schools in America, some of which have adopted her book as a part of the mandatory curriculum, while others have prohibited the book's inclusion in classroom studies. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
A powerful and provocative novel
New York Times
Jonas lives in a perfect society. There is no pain, poverty, divorce, delinquency, etc. One's life's work is chosen by the Elders. At the Ceremony of 12, Jonas is shocked to learn that he has been awarded the most prestigious honor. His assignment will be that of Receiver of Memories. He studies with "the Giver," a man he comes to love. Within time he learns the horrifying secrets of his community and must make a decision that will test his courage, intelligence, and stamina. This is a stunning, provocative science fiction story that will inspire discussion.
Children's Literature
Winner of the 1994 Newbery Medal, Lowry's thought-provoking fantasy challenges adolescents to explore important social and political issues. The Giver trains twelve-year-old Jonas as the next Receiver of Memory, the community's receptacle of past memories. This seemingly utopian society (without pain, poverty, unemployment, or disorder) is actually a body- and mind-controlling dystopia (without love, colors, sexual feelings, or memories of the past). In an exciting plot twist, Jonas courageously resolves his moral dilemma and affirms the human spirit's power to prevail, to celebrate love, and to transmit memories. From the book jacket's evocative photographic images—The Giver in black and white; trees in blazing color—to the suspenseful conclusion, this book is first-rate. Just as Lowry's Number the Stars (which received the 1990 Newbery Medal) portrays the Danish people's triumph over Nazi persecution, The Giver engages the reader in an equally inspiring victory over totalitarian inhumanity.
The ALAN Review
Winner of the 1994 Newbery Medal, this thought-provoking novel centers on a 12-year-old boy's gradual disillusionment with an outwardly utopian futuristic society.... Lowry is once again in top form...unwinding a tale fit for the most adventurous readers.
Publishers Weekly
In a complete departure from her other novels, Lowry has written an intriguing story set in a society that is uniformly run by a Committee of Elders. Twelve-year-old Jonas's confidence in his comfortable "normal" existence as a member of this well-ordered community is shaken when he is assigned his life's work as the Receiver. The Giver, who passes on to Jonas the burden of being the holder for the community of all memory "back and back and back,'' teaches him the cost of living in an environment that is "without color, pain, or past.'' The tension leading up to the Ceremony, in which children are promoted not to another grade but to another stage in their life, and the drama and responsibility of the sessions with The Giver are gripping. The final flight for survival is as riveting as it is inevitable. The author makes real abstract concepts, such as the meaning of a life in which there are virtually no choices to be made and no experiences with deep feelings. This tightly plotted story and its believable characters will stay with readers for a long time. —Amy Kellman, The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
School Library Journal
The simplicity and directness of Lowry's writing force readers to grapple with their own thoughts.
Booklist
In a radical departure from her realistic fiction and comic chronicles of Anastasia, Lowry creates a chilling, tightly controlled future society where all controversy, pain, and choice have been expunged, each childhood year has its privileges and responsibilities, and family members are selected for compatibility.... Wrought with admirable skill—the emptiness and menace underlying this Utopia emerge step by inexorable step: a richly provocative novel.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. In The Giver, each family has two parents, a son, and a daughter. The relationships are not biological but are developed through observation and a careful handling of personality. In our own society, the makeup of family is under discussion. How are families defined? Are families the foundations of a society, or are they continually open for new definitions?
2. In Jonas’s community, every person and his or her experience are precisely the same. The climate is controlled, and competition has been eliminated in favor of a community in which everyone works only for the common good. What advantages might “Sameness” yield for contemporary communities? Is the loss of diversity worthwhile?
3. Underneath the placid calm of Jonas’s society lies a very orderly and inexorable system of euthanasia, practiced on the very young who do not conform, the elderly, and those whose errors threaten the stability of the community. What are the disadvantages and benefits of a community that accepts such a vision of euthanasia?
4. Why is the relationship between Jonas and The Giver dangerous, and what does this danger suggest about the nature of love?
5. The ending of The Giver may be interpreted in two very different ways. Perhaps Jonas is remembering his Christmas memory—one of the most beautiful that The Giver transmitted to him—as he and Gabriel are freezing to death, falling into a dreamlike coma in the snow. Or perhaps Jonas does hear music and, with his special vision, is able to perceive the warm house where people are waiting to greet him. In her acceptance speech for the Newbery Medal, Lois Lowry mentioned both possibilities but would not choose one as correct. What evidence supports each interpretation?
6. There are groups in the United States today that actively seek to maintain an identity outside the mainstream culture: the Amish, the Mennonites, Native American tribes, and the Hasidic Jewish community. What benefits do these groups expect from defining themselves as “other”? What are the disadvantages? How does the mainstream culture put pressure on such groups?
7. Lois Lowry helps create an alternate world by having the community use words in a special way. Though that world stresses what it calls "precision of language," in fact it is built upon language that is not precise but deliberately clouds meaning. What is the danger of such misleading language?
8. Examine the ways in which Jonas’s community uses euphemism to distance itself from the reality of "Release." How does our own society use euphemism to distance us from such realities as aging and death, bodily functions, and political activities? What are the benefits and disadvantages of such uses of language?
(Questions courtesy of Gary D. Schmidt, Calvin College, author and 2-time Newbery Honor winner.)
The Giver of Stars
Jojo Moyes, 2019
Penguin Publishing
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780399562488
Summary
From the author of Me Before You, set in Depression-era America, a breathtaking story of five extraordinary women and their remarkable journey through the mountains of Kentucky and beyond.
Alice Wright marries handsome American Bennett Van Cleve hoping to escape her stifling life in England.
But small-town Kentucky quickly proves equally claustrophobic, especially living alongside her overbearing father-in-law. So when a call goes out for a team of women to deliver books as part of Eleanor Roosevelt’s new traveling library, Alice signs on enthusiastically.
The leader, and soon Alice's greatest ally, is Margery, a smart-talking, self-sufficient woman who's never asked a man's permission for anything. They will be joined by three other singular women who become known as the Packhorse Librarians of Kentucky.
What happens to them—and to the men they love—becomes an unforgettable drama of loyalty, justice, humanity and passion.
These heroic women refuse to be cowed by men or by convention. And though they face all kinds of dangers in a landscape that is at times breathtakingly beautiful, at others brutal, they’re committed to their job: bringing books to people who have never had any, arming them with facts that will change their lives.
Based on a true story rooted in America’s past, The Giver of Stars is unparalleled in its scope and epic in its storytelling. Funny, heartbreaking, enthralling, it is destined to become a modern classic—a richly rewarding novel of women’s friendship, of true love, and of what happens when we reach beyond our grasp for the great beyond. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1969
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—B.A., London University
• Awards—Romantic Novel of the year (twice)
• Currently—lives in Essex, England
Jojo Moyes is a British journalist and the author of 10 novels published from 2002 to the present. She studied at Royal Holloway, University of London and Bedford New College, London University.
In 1992 she won a bursary financed by The Independent newspaper to attend the postgraduate newspaper journalism course at City University, London. She subsequently worked for The Independent for the next 10 years (except for one year, when she worked in Hong Kong for the Sunday Morning Post) in various roles, becoming Assistant News Editor in 1988. In 2002 she became the newspaper's Arts and Media Correspondent.
Moyes became a full-time novelist in 2002, when her first book Sheltering Rain was published. She is most well known for her later novels, The Last Letter From Your Lover (2010), Me Before You (2012), and The Girl You Left Behind ( 2013), all of which were received with wide critical accalim.
She is one of only a few authors to have won the Romantic Novelists' Association's Romantic Novel of the Year Award twice—in 2004 for Foreign Fruit and in 2011 for The Last Letter From Your Lover. She continues to write articles for The Daily Telegraph.
Moyes lives on a farm in Saffron Walden, Essex with her husband, journalist Charles Arthur, and their three children. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Moyes paints an engrossing picture of life in rural America, and it's easy to root for the enterprising librarians.
New York Times Book Review
Though she made her mark writing contemporary romance, Moyes proves just as adept at historical fiction…. The Giver of Stars is a celebration of love, but also of reading, of knowledge, of female friendship, of the beauty of our most rural corners and our enduring American grit: the kind of true grit that can be found in the hills of Kentucky and on the pages of this inspiring book.
Washington Post
The Giver of Stars is a richly rewarding exploration of the depths of friendship, good men willing to stand up to bad and adult love. Moyes celebrates the power of reading in a terrific book that only reinforces that message.
USA Today
Moyes stays true to her narrative and takes full advantage of the sense of place she gained from repeated trips to the area…. riveting. A stirring novel sure to please Moyes’ many fans.
Minnesota Star Tribune
A captivating tale of love, friendship, and self-actualization.
People
Bestselling author Jojo Moyes has a unique way of using her prose to make her readers feel great emotions—love, passion, sadness, and grief—and her latest novel, The Giver of Stars, does not disappoint in that respect.
Parade
An adventure story grounded in female competence and mutual support, and an obvious affection for the popular literature of the early 20th century, give this Depression-era novel plenty of appeal.… There’s plenty of drama, but the reader’s lasting impression is one of love.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) Rich in history, with well-developed characters and a strong sense of place, this book will fit well in any library’s fiction collection. For fans of Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants or Catherine Marshall’s Christy. —Terry Lucas, Shelter Island P.L., NY
Library Journal
(Starred review) [A] homage to the power of reading and the strength of community.… A must-read for women's fiction.
Booklist
Moyes brings an often forgotten slice of history to life.… the true power of the story is in the bonds between the women of the library…. A love letter to the power of books and friendship.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. While writing and researching The Giver of Stars, author Jojo Moyes visited Kentucky several times, stayed in a tiny cabin on the side of a mountain, rode horses along the trails, and met the people of Kentucky. Did the characters and sense of place feel authentic to you?
2. Alice, a Brit, is an outsider, but eventually acclimates to her new home in Appalachia, and even falls in love with her new home. She grew up in a rarefied world in England, so the change to "unremarkable" Baileyville proved quite the shock to her system. Have you ever moved to a distinctly different location? What was that transition like? How did you adapt?
3. Literacy and censorship are significant issues in The Giver of Stars, issues that affect the women of the novel very differently from the men. Why do you think Moyes chose to focus on these topics?
4. Moyes has said she wanted to write a book about women who had agency and who actually did something worthwhile, rather than simply existing in a romantic or domestic plotline. Margery is the unofficial leader of the librarians and Alice eventually inherits that role when Margery is jailed. Yet throughout the book, most of the women do have their moments of agency. Which of these moments struck you most intensely? Did you ever wish a character had taken action when she hadn’t? If so, when, and what could she have done different?
5. The novel features families from vastly different backgrounds, and one of the central issues in the book is that of class inequality. In which scenarios did you see these dynamics play out, and between which characters?
6. There are numerous ways in the book in which the acquisition of knowledge changes characters’ lives: protecting their homes, educating their families, liberating themselves from marriages. Have you ever experienced such a shift—after gaining new knowledge—in your own life? How did it happen? If not, what held you back from making a change?
7. The relationships between men and women in this book vary greatly—from Margery and Sven’s loving, mutual respect and passion, to Bennett and Alice’s bewildered lack of understanding to the true love affair that blossoms between Alice and Fred. How did you come to understand the differences among these relationships? Did you relate to any of them in particular or to any of the problems these women faced in their romantic relationships?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Glass Hotel
Emily St. John Mandel, 2020
Knopf Doubleday
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525521143
Summary
From the award-winning author of Station Eleven, an exhilarating novel set at the glittering intersection of two seemingly disparate events—a massive Ponzi scheme collapse and the mysterious disappearance of a woman from a ship at sea.
Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby's glass wall: "Why don't you swallow broken glass."
High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis is running an international Ponzi scheme, moving imaginary sums of money through clients' accounts. When the financial empire collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives.
Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan's wife, walks away into the night. Years later, a victim of the fraud is hired to investigate a strange occurrence: a woman has seemingly vanished from the deck of a container ship between ports of call.
In this captivating story of crisis and survival, Emily St. John Mandel takes readers through often hidden landscapes: campgrounds for the near-homeless, underground electronica clubs, the business of international shipping, service in luxury hotels, and life in a federal prison.
Rife with unexpected beauty, The Glass Hotel is a captivating portrait of greed and guilt, love and delusion, ghosts and unintended consequences, and the infinite ways we search for meaning in our lives. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1979-80
• Where—Comox, British Columbia, Canada
• Education—Toronto Dance Theater.
• Awards—Prix Mystere de la Critique (France)
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York, USA
"St. John's my middle name. The books go under M."
Emily St. John Mandel was born and raised on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada. She studied contemporary dance at the School of Toronto Dance Theatre and lived briefly in Montreal before relocating to New York.
Mandel's latest novel, The Glass Hotel, was released in 2020 to high praise and numerousf starred reviews. Her fourth novel, Station Eleven, published in 2014 was long listed for the National Book Award. All three of her previous novels—Last Night in Montreal, The Singer's Gun, and The Lola Quartet—were Indie Next Picks, and The Singer's Gun was the 2014 winner of the Prix Mystere de la Critique in France.
Mandel's short fiction and essays have been anthologized in numerous collections, including Best American Mystery Stories 2013. She lives in New York City with her husband. (Adapted from the author's website.)
Book Reviews
The question of what is real—be it love, money, place or memory—has always been at the heart of Ms. Mandel’s fiction... her narratives snake their way across treacherous, shifting terrain. Certainties are blurred, truth becomes malleable, and in The Glass Hotel the con man thrives…. Ms. Mandel invites us to observe her characters from a distance even as we enter their lives, a feat she achieves with remarkable skill. And if the result is a sense not only of detachment but also of desolation, then maybe that’s the point.
Anna Mundow - Wall Street Journal
The Glass Hotel may be the perfect novel for your survival bunker…. Freshly mysterious…. Mandel is a consummate, almost profligate world builder. One superbly developed setting gives way to the next, as her attention winds from character to character, resting long enough to explore the peculiar mechanics of each life before slipping over to the next…. That Mandel manages to cover so much, so deeply is the abiding mystery of this book. The 300 pages of The Glass Hotel work harder than most 600-page novels…. The disappointment of leaving one story is immediately quelled by our fascination in the next…. The complex, troubled people who inhabit Mandel’s novel are vexed and haunted by their failings, driven to create ever more pleasant reflections of themselves in the glass.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
[E]erie, compelling…. The ghosts in The Glass Hotel are directly connected to its secrets and scandals, which mirror those of our time…. Like all Mandel’s novels, The Glass Hotel is flawlessly constructed…. The Glass Hotel declares the world to be as bleak as it is beautiful, just like this novel.
Rebecca Steinitz - Boston Globe
Mandel’s prose is such a pleasure to read… [I] gave way to real delight in the skill with which Mandel brings together themes that have occupied previous sections of the novel, revisiting earlier characters and incidents from surprising new perspectives in a narrative sleight of hand…. Mandel’s conclusion is dazzling.
Chris Hewitt - Minneapolis Star Tribune
An ephemeral quality permeates the novel…. It’s a thrill when the puzzle pieces start to fit together…. The final chapter is haunting, taking readers full circle…. It’s a sense readers will enjoy as well when they lose themselves in Mandel’s novel.
Associated Press
[S]triking… and timely…. In Vincent and Paul, Mandel has created two of the most memorable characters in recent American fiction…. Mandel's writing shines throughout the book, just as it did in Station Eleven. She's not a showy writer, but an unerringly graceful one, and she treats her characters with compassion but not pity. The Glass Hotel is a masterpiece… a stunning look at how people react to disasters, both small and large, and the temptation that some have to give up when faced with tragedy.
Michael Shaub - NPR
One effect of Mandel’s book is to underscore the seemingly infinite paths a person might travel…. There is a suggestion, toward the end of The Glass Hotel, that frequent commerce with the dead (or the imaginary) might reconnect us to the living…. Perhaps it is with this in mind that Mandel has constructed a fantasy for our temporary habitation. Her story offers escape, but the kind that depends on and is inseparable from the world beyond it.
Katy Waldman - New Yorker
Mandel... specializes in fiction that weaves together seemingly unrelated people, places and things. The Glass Hotel... is no exception... Kaleidoscopic... Mandel dissects the surreal division between those who are conscious of ongoing crimes, and those who are unwittingly brought into them... The Glass Hotel... examine[s] how we respond to chaos after catastrophe.
Annabel Gutterman - Time
Deeply imagined, philosophically profound…. The Glass Hotel moves forward propulsively, its characters continually on the run…. Richly satisfying… [and] ultimately as immersive a reading experience as its predecessor [Station Eleven], finding all the necessary imaginative depth within the more realistic confines of its world…. Revolutionary.
Ruth Franklin - Atlantic
(Starred review) [W]onderful…. [A] brother and sister… navigate heartache, loneliness, wealth, corruption, drugs, ghosts, and guilt.… This ingenious, enthralling novel probes the tenuous yet unbreakable bonds between people and the lasting effects of momentary carelessness.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) Highly recommended; with superb writing and an intricately connected plot that ticks along like clockwork, Mandel offers an unnerving critique of the twinned modern plagues of income inequality and cynical opportunism
Library Journal
(Starred review) Another tale of wanderers whose fates are interconnected.… [With] nail-biting tension… Mandel weaves an intricate spider web of a story.… A gorgeously rendered tragedy.
Booklist
(Starred review) Long-anticipated.… [A] ghost story in which every boundary is blurred, from the moral to the physical.… In luminous prose, Mandel shows how easy it is to become caught in a web of unintended consequences… . A strange, subtle, and haunting novel.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers Book Club Resources. They can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(Resources by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
A Glass of Blessings
Barbara Pym, 1958
Moyer Bell
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781559213530
Summary
Well dressed and looked after, Wilmet, the novel's heroine, is married to Rodney, a handsome army major, who works nine thirty to six at the Ministry. Wilmet's interest wanders to the nearby Anglo-Catholic church, where at last she can neglect her comfortable household in the company of a cast of characters, including three priests.
Set in 1950s London, this witty novel is told through the narration of the shallow and self-absorbed protagonist who, despite her flaws, begins to learn something about love and about herself. Through Wilmet's superficial monologues readers are exposed to Barbara Pym's clever commentary on class, the church, and her engaging characterizations. Readers will become captivated, as is Wilmet, with the lives and personalities of characters such as the kleptomaniac Wilf Bason, the priests Keith, and Piers Longridge.
She fancies herself in love with Piers, the brother of a close friend, and imagines he is her secret admirer (the admirer is in fact her friend's husband). Wilmet fails to realise that Piers is gay until she becomes aware of his relationship with Keith, a young man she regards as rather common. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Full name—Barbara Mary Crampton Pym
• Birth—June 2, 1913
• Where—Shropshire, England, UK
• Death—January 11, 1980
• Where—Finstock, Oxfordshire, England
• Education—Oxford University
Pym was born in Oswestry, Shropshire. She was privately educated at Queen’s Park School, a girls school in Oswestry and from the age of twelve attended Huyton College, near Liverpool. After studying English at St Hilda's College, Oxford, she served in the Women's Royal Naval Service during World War II. Her literary career is noteworthy because of the long hiatus between 1963 and 1977, when, despite early success and continuing popularity, she was unable to find a publisher for her richly comic novels.
The turning point for Pym came with an influential article in the (London) Times Literary Supplement in which two prominent names, Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin, nominated her as the most underrated writer of the century. Pym and Larkin had kept up a private correspondence over a period of many years. Her comeback novel, Quartet in Autumn, was nominated for the Booker Prize. Another novel, The Sweet Dove Died, previously rejected by many publishers, was subsequently published to critical acclaim, and several of her previously unpublished novels were published after her death.
Pym worked at the International African Institute in London for some years, and played a large part in the editing of its scholarly journal, Africa, hence the frequency with which anthropologists crop up in her novels. She never married, despite several close relationships with men, notably Henry Harvey, a fellow Oxford student, and the future politician, Julian Amery.
After her retirement, she moved into Barn Cottage at Finstock in Oxfordshire with her younger sister, Hilary. In 1980, Barbara Pym died of breast cancer, aged 66. Following her death, her sister Hilary continued to champion her work, and the Barbara Pym Society was set up in 1993. Hilary remained at Barn Cottage until her own death in February 2005. A blue plaque was placed on the cottage in 2006. The sisters played an active role in the social life of the village, and are both buried in Finstock churchyard.
All told, Barbara Pym published 12 novels:
Crampton Hodnet (circa 1940) *
Some Tame Gazelle (1950)
Excellent Women (1952)
Jane and Prudence (1953)
Less than Angels (1955)
A Glass of Blessings (1958)
No Fond Return Of Love (1961)
An Unsuitable Attachment (1963) *
An Academic Question (1970-72) *
Quartet in Autumn (1977)
The Sweet Dove Died (1978)
A Few Green Leaves (1980) *
* Published posthumously (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
(Older books have few if any online reviews from mainstream press. See customer reviews at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.)
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 A Glass of Blessings:
1. How would you describe Wilmet Forsyth...and the kind of life she leads? Does she make an interesting heroine? A likeable one? What are her views on love and marriage, including her own marriage to Rodney?
2. What makes Wilmet believe that Piers Longridge might be in love with her? Is there evidence to suggest that either Piers or Rowan is pursuing her?
3. Pym is described, like Jane Austen, as an astute observer of British life. How does Pym present her small slice of life in A Glass of Blessings? How would you describe her Britain? Is it a time and place in which you would enjoy living?
4. Much is made of Pym's gentle but pointed humor. What or whom did you find particularly funny in this novel? Where does Pym direct her satirical eye?
5. Wilment attends the Christmas Eve service alone? Why don't Sybil and Rodney accompany her? What are their religious views? Do you find those views unusual? How does Wilmet experience the service?
6. Were you satisfied by the ending, especially the way in which the couples come together?
7. How (or why) does Pym treat the subject of homosexuality, a subject not openly dealt with in the mid-20th century? Were you surprised by Pier's and Keith's relationship?
8. Pym's Wilmet has been compared to Austen's Emma Woodhouse (in her masterpiece, Emma). If you've read that work, what parallels do you see between the two heroines... or perhaps the two plots?
9. What does our heroine come to learn at the end of the novel? Have her views on love and marriage altered. Has she changed...or matured?
10. The book's title comes from "The Pulley," a poem by 17th-century poet, George Herbert:
When God at first made man,
Having a glasse of blessings standing by;
Let us (said he) poure on him all we can:
Let the worlds riches, which dispersed lie,
Contract into a span.
That is only the first stanza. What is the significance of Herbert's "glasse of blessings standing by" to Pym's book?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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The Glass of Time
Michael Cox, 2008
W.W. Norton & Co.
544 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393337167
Summary
Like The Meaning of Night, its "beguiling" and "intelligent" (New York Times Book Review) predecessor, The Glass of Time is a page turning period mystery about identity, the nature of secrets, and what happens when past obsessions impose themselves on an unwilling present.
In the autumn of 1876, nineteen year-old orphan Esperanza Gorst arrives at the great country house of Evenwood to become a lady's maid to the twenty-sixth Baroness Tansor. But Esperanza is no ordinary servant. She has been sent by her guardian, the mysterious Madame de l'Orme, to uncover the secrets that her new mistress has sought to conceal, and to set right a past injustice in which Esperanza's own life is bound up. At Evenwood she meets Lady Tansor's two dashing sons, Perseus and Randolph, and finds herself enmeshed in a complicated web of seduction, intrigue, deceit, betrayal, and murder.
Few writers are as gifted at evoking the sensibility of the nineteenth century as Michael Cox, who has made the world of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins his own. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Aka—Matthew Ellis; Obie Clayton
• Birth—1948
• Where—Northamptshire, England, UK
• Education—Cambridge University
• Currently—lives in Northamptonshire, England
Michael Cox was born in Northamptonshire in 1948. After graduating from Cambridge in 1971, he went into the music business as a songwriter and recording artist, releasing two albums and a number of singles for EMI under the name Matthew Ellis and a further album, as Obie Clayton, for the DJM label. In 1977, he took a job in publishing, with the Thorsons Publishing Group (now part of HarperCollins). In 1989, he joined Oxford University Press, where he became Senior Commissioning Editor, Reference Books.
His first book, a widely praised biography of the scholar and ghost-story writer M.R. James, was published by Oxford University Press (OUP) in 1983. This was followed by a number of Oxford anthologies of short fiction, including The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories (1986) and The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories (1991), both co-edited with R.A. Gilbert, The Oxford Book of Victorian Detective Stories (1992) and The Oxford Book of Spy Stories (1997). In 1991 he compiled A Dictionary of Writers and their Works for OUP and in 2002 The Oxford Chronology of English Literature, a major scholarly resource containing bibliographical information on 30,000 titles from 4,000 authors, 1474–2000.
In April 2004, he began to lose his sight as a result of cancer. In preparation for surgery he was prescribed a steroidal drug, one of the effects of which was to initiate a temporary burst of mental and physical energy. This, combined with the stark realization that his blindness might return if the treatment wasn't successful, spurred Michael finally to begin writing in earnest the novel that he had been contemplating for over thirty years, and which up to then had only existed as a random collection of notes, drafts, and discarded first chapters. Following surgery, work continued on what is now his debut novel, The Meaning of Night. His second novel, The Glass of Time, was published in 2008.
Michael Cox still lives in his native Northamptonshire with his wife Dizzy. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reivews
An entirely wonderful mock Victorian novel, written in something like the style of...Wilkie Collins, author of The Moonstone and The Woman in White. It's a melodrama, of course, chock-full of revenge, romance, duplicity, concealed identities and murder most frequent—but melodrama on a grand scale. By any sensible standard, Englishman Michael Cox's convoluted plot is somewhere between outrageous and preposterous. Few characters are who or what they seem, and one key figure has five distinct identities. And yet the novel's fierce suspense and endless surprises, burnished by Cox's gorgeous prose, make it irresistible.
Patrick Anderson - Washington Post
Those who have not yet encountered the author's erudite and intricate fictions have a treat in store.... This is a mystery worthy of Wilkie Collins, combining all the ingredients of a Gothic romance—disinherited heroines, dissolute heroes, revenge and remorse—with a very modern sense of pace.
London Times
Brilliant storyteller.... He crafts an intelligent page-turner with the sorts of dark, dirty secrets that modern readers have come to expect of the supposedly virtuous Victorians.... [No one] manages to better his exquisite period detail, scope and sheer readability.
Independent (UK)
A terrific modern-day Victorian novel, and a true page-turner in the manner of the great works of that era.... The author has woven an enormous and intricate tapestry.... Take a chance and dive into Cox's delightful and deep sea of words.
Edmonton Journal (Canada)
(Starred review.) Set in 1876, Cox's gripping second gothic thriller (after The Meaning of Night) follows the fortunes of 19-year-old orphan Esperanza Gorst, whose guardian charges her to go undercover as a lady's maid. Without knowing precisely why she's doing so, Gorst insinuates herself into the inner circle of Baroness Tansor, the fiancée of the preceding volume's villain, Phoebus Daunt. The fake maid soon learns that her mistress has many secrets, and may, in fact, have been complicit in the death of a former servant. Cox excels at conveying his heroine's conflict over deceiving her employer, especially after learning the role the lady played in her own difficult personal history. While readers unfamiliar with the first book will find themselves deeply engaged by the elegant descriptive prose, those with the benefit of the full context and nuances of The Meaning of Night will better appreciate this sequel.
Publishers Weekly
When orphaned 19-year-old Esperanza Gorst is hired as a lady's maid by Baroness Tansor of Evenwood in 1876, she does not understand her role in a complex plan to restore the Duport family succession. Lady Tansor, the former Emily Carteret, still mourns for her fiancé, Phoebus Daunt, murdered two decades earlier. Through clever spying, Esperanza uncovers information about the murders of Emily's father and Daunt and about Emily's marriage and children. Letters and documents from Esperanza's guardian and others reveal the stories of her own parents and how she had been cheated of her inheritance. Yet, despite realizing that she cannot trust Emily or her unscrupulous associates, Esperanza feels affection and sympathy for the beleaguered Lady. Jealousies among Emily's sons and Esperanza fuel more misunderstandings. Speculations and explanations fill the pages of this novel, which is depicted as Esperanza's secret notebook discovered and annotated by the same editor who presented The Meaning of Night, Cox's debut, which was written from the perspective of Daunt's killer. Cox neatly incorporates the discovery of that manuscript into Esperanza's account, one of myriad connections of plot and characters that make this book an essential read for fans of the first novel. But this atmospheric and engrossing work also can stand alone as a treat for anyone who enjoys Victorian thrillers. Strongly recommended.
Kathy Piehl - Library Journal
(Starred review.) Cox so cleverly incorporates the plot of his first novel that his new one can be read by both those who are familiar with The Meaning of Night and those who have never read it. Great period atmosphere, a cunning plot, and an intelligent narrator make this one a special treat for those who like some history with their mystery. —Joanne Wilkinson.
Booklist
Cox's second pastiche of Victorian sensational fiction is doubly remarkable for its sure grasp of the genre's idiom and its strange relationship to his first (The Meaning of Night, 2006). Nineteen-year-old Esperanza Gorst arrives at Evenwood on September 4, 1876, to interview for the position of personal maid to Emily Duport, the widowed Baroness Tansor. The advertisement in which Esperanza announced her search for such a post constitutes the first of many deceptions Cox's characters practice on each other, for it was placed not by her, but by her Parisian guardian, Madame de l'Orme, and her old friend Basil Thornhaugh, Esperanza's tutor. Their successful attempt to insinuate Esperanza into Lady Tansor's service is only the first step in what they call "the Great Task," a plot so deep-laid that they can disclose its terms to her only over a period of months. Esperanza, whom everyone recognizes as far too cultured and perceptive to be a lady's maid, soon catches the eyes of both Tansor sons, the Byronic heir Perseus and his more easygoing brother Randolph, and cultivates an ever more intimate relationship with Lady Tansor, still mourning her fiance Phoebus Daunt, a bombastic poet who was murdered by his estranged Eton friend Edward Glyver more than 20 years ago. All the while Esperanza burns with curiosity to know the reason her protectors have sent her into this haunted household. But readers who recognize Daunt, Glyver et al. will be far ahead of Esperanza, who doesn't realize that her author has pressed the plot of The Meaning of Night into service as the backstory of what would otherwise be a mystery in the mold of Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. A sequel that will provide utterly different but equally rewarding experiences for readers who have and haven't read its equally leisurely predecessor.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Meaning of Night:
1. On his website, Michael Cox says that The Glass of Time is concerned with the nature of identity. How does Esperanza discover her own identity and its connection with Lady Tansor? Did you figure it out before she does? Actually, though, what is even meant by "the nature" of identity? Is identity provisional, i.e., temporary, open to change? Is it fluid, changing with circumstances or knowledge? Is it definitive—we are who we are?
2. What is "The Great Task" which Esperanza is sent to Evenwood to complete? Talk about her divided loyalties, her moral dilemma at the heart of the story.
3. Another theme Cox says he explores in the novel is the "enduring power of the past." How does that theme play out in The Glass of Time? In other words, how does the past continually interrupt and affect the present? Notice, too, how the narrative jumps between time periods. Did that enhance the story for you...or did you find it distracting? And, of course, talk about the significance of the book's title.
4. The novel also explores, as Cox puts it, "the corrosive effects of concealing guilty secrets." What does he mean by that statement as it relates to The Glass of Time?
5. The novel's characters are rich and memorable. Which ones did you sympathize with, dislike, distrust, find fascinating?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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The Glass Palace
Amitav Ghosh, 2000
Random House
486 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375758775
Summary
Set in Burma during the British invasion of 1885, this masterly novel by Amitav Ghosh tells the story of Rajkumar, a poor boy lifted on the tides of political and social chaos, who goes on to create an empire in the Burmese teak forest.
When soldiers force the royal family out of the Glass Palace and into exile, Rajkumar befriends Dolly, a young woman in the court of the Burmese Queen, whose love will shape his life. He cannot forget her, and years later, as a rich man, he goes in search of her.
The struggles that have made Burma, India, and Malaya the places they are today are illuminated in this wonderful novel by the writer Chitra Divakaruni calls “a master storyteller.” (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1956
• Where—Kolkata, India
• Education—St. Stephen's College, Deli; Delhi University;
Ph.D., Oxford University.
• Awards—see below
• Currently—lives in New York City; Kolkata and Goa, India
Amitv Ghosh is the internationally bestselling author of many works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Glass Palace, and is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes. Ghosh divides his time between Kolkata and Goa, India, and Brooklyn, New York. (From the publisher.)
More
Ghosh was born in Kolkata (Calcutta) and was educated at The Doon School; St. Stephen's College, Delhi; Delhi University; and St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where he was awarded a Ph.D. in social anthropology.
Ghosh lives in New York with his wife, Deborah Baker, author of the Laura Riding biography In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding (1993) and a senior editor at Little, Brown and Company. They have two children, Lila and Nayan.
He has been a Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. In 1999, Ghosh joined the faculty at Queens College, City University of New York as Distinguished Professor in Comparative Literature. He has also been a visiting professor to the English department of Harvard University since 2005. Ghosh has recently purchased a property in Goa and is returning to India.
Sea of Poppies (2008), the first installment of a planned trilogy, is an epic saga, set just before the Opium Wars, which encapsulates the colonial history of the East. The second in the trilogy, River of Smoke was published in 2011.
His previous novels are The Circle of Reason (1986), The Shadow Lines (1990), In an Antique Land (1992), The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma (1998), Countdown (1999), The Glass Palace (2000) and The Hungry Tide (2004). Ghosh's fiction is characterised by strong themes that may be somewhat identified with postcolonialism but could be labelled as historical novels. His topics are unique and personal; some of his appeal lies in his ability to weave "Indo-nostalgic" elements into more serious themes.
In addition to his novels, Ghosh has written The Imam and the Indian (2002), a large collection of essays on different themes such as fundamentalism, history of the novel, Egyptian culture, and literature).
In 2007, he was awarded the Padma Shri by the Indian government.
Amitav Ghosh's literary awards include:
• Prix Medicis Etranger (French; for Circle of Reason)
• Sahitya Akademic and Ananda Pursaskar Awards (Indian;
for The Shadow Lines)
• Arthur C. Clarke Award (UK; for The Calcutta Chromosome)
• Grand Prize-Fiction, Frankfurt International e-Book Awards
(for The Glass Palace)
• Hutch Crossword Book Prize (Indian; for The Hungry Tide)
• Grinzane Cavour Prize (Italian)
• Shortlisted for Man Booker (UK; for Sea of Poppies)
(Author bio from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Amitav Ghosh is one of the many Indian writers to have emerged in the 1980's, after the publication of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children; but he is among the very few to have expressed in his work a developing awareness of the aspirations, defeats and disappointments of colonized peoples as they figure out their place in the world. There isn't much easy politics or sermonizing in his work; there is, instead, a concern for the individual, a curiosity about the workings of alien societies and, often, an honest examination of colonial neuroses. In this, as in his preference for a plain ungimmicky prose, Ghosh follows the example of V. S. Naipaul, although his instinct for storytelling on a grand scale owes much more to Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Pankaj Mishra - New York Times
A rich, layered epic that probes the meaning of identity and homeland—a literary territory that is as resonant now, in our globalized culture, as it was when the sun never set on the British Empire.
Los Angeles Times
This sprawling narrative, inspired by stories passed down in the author's family, stretches from the British invasion of Burma, in 1885, through the country's independence, to the uneasy military rule of the present day. The novel is presided over by the Indian-born Rajkumar, a poor orphan, who falls for Dolly, a servant of the exiled queen. Ghosh renders the polite imprisonment of the Burmese royal family in India and the lush, dangerous atmosphere of teak camps in the Burmese forest with fine detail—a perfect balance for the broad strokes of romance and serendipity that drive the story forward. The book's memorial power is so strong that, near the end, when Rajkumar, an old man, reflects, "Ah, Burma—now Burma was a golden land," the reader catches himself nodding in recognition of what was lost.
The New Yorker
Ghosh's epic novel of Burma and Malaya over a span of 115 years is the kind of "sweep of history" that readers can appreciate—even love—despite its demands. There is almost too much here for one book, as over the years the lives and deaths of principal characters go flying by. Yet Ghosh (The Calcutta Chromosome; Shadow Lines) is a beguiling and endlessly resourceful storyteller, and he boasts one of the most arresting openings in recent fiction: in the marketplace of Mandalay, only the 11-year-old Indian boy Rajkumar recognizes the booming sounds beyond the curve of the river as English cannon fire. The year is 1885, and the British have used a trade dispute to justify the invasion and seizure of Burma's capital. As a crowd of looters pours into the fabled Glass Palace, the dazzling throne room of the nine-roofed golden spire that was the great hti of Burma's kings, Rajkumar catches sight of Dolly, then only 10, nursemaid to the Second Princess. Rajkumar carries the memory of their brief meeting through the years to come, while he rises to fame and riches in the teak trade and Dolly travels into exile to India with King Thebaw, Burma's last king; Queen Supayalat; and their three daughters. The story of the exiled king and his family in Ratnagiri, a sleepy port town south of Bombay, is worth a novel in itself, and the first two of the story's seven parts, which relate that history and Rajkumar's rise to wealth in Burma's teak forests, are marvelously told. Inspired by tales handed down to him by his father and uncle, Ghosh vividly brings to life the history of Burma and Malaya over a century of momentous change in this teeming, multigenerational saga. Novels by Indian authors continue to surge in popularity here, and this title not only ranks among the best but differs from the pack for its setting of Burma rather than India.... [T]his book should be read widely and with enthusiasm stateside.
Publishers Weekly
In an industry not known for risk-taking, the publisher is to be congratulated for offering Ghosh (The Calcutta Chromosome) a contract on his as-yet-unwritten novel. Set primarily in Burma, Malaya, and India, this work spans from 1885, when the British sent the King of Burma into exile, to the present. While it does offer brief glimpses into the history of the region, it is more the tale of a family and how historical events influenced real lives. As a young boy, Rajkumar, an Indian temporarily stranded in Mandalay, finds himself caught up in the British invasion that led to the exile of Burma's last king. In the chaos, he spies Dolly, a household maid in the royal palace, for whom he develops a consuming passion and whom years later he tracks down in India and marries. As their family grows and their lives intersect with others, the tangled web of local and international politics is brought to bear, changing lives as well as nations. Ghosh ranges from the condescension of the British colonialists to the repression of the current Myanmar (Burmese) regime in a style that suggests E.M. Forster as well as James Michener. Highly recommended, especially for public libraries. —David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, FL
Library Journal
Starting with the threads of his own family memories, Indian author Ghosh has created a rich tapestry of a novel, set in the Indian subcontinent and spanning more than a century.... Although events in the lives of characters and countries must be compressed to bring the story nearly to the present, this does not interrupt the narrative flow. This illuminating saga should find an appreciative audience. —Michele Leber
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. In an interview, Amitav Ghosh said of his work, The Glass Palace, “one can examine the truths of individuals in history definitely more completely in fiction than one can in history.” Discuss this statement as it pertains to the novel. Which truths do his characters reveal?
2. Look closely at the characters whom Ghosh envisions in the most detail, Rajkumar, Dolly, Uma, Arjun, to name a few. They become extraordinary in our minds of the reader, as we travel with them through a century of social upheaval and political turmoil. But according to the social structure, they are all, or once were, relatively ordinary individuals. What is the effect of focusing a novel of such grand, epic sweep, on members of common society? How does this very subtle choice affect the story’s shape? What does it tell us about history, and how we have always been taught to remember it?
3. Memory could almost be considered a character unto itself in Ghosh’s novel. For instance, Rajkumar’s life is utterly driven and shaped by his one, striking, boyhood memory of Dolly in the plundered Glass Palace during the invasion of Burma. How does memory play into the lives of Ghosh’s other characters? Can you think of examples where memory compelled a character to action, or impeded him from recognizing a particular truth? To what extent does Ghosh suggest the existence of collective memory?
4. Ghosh raises several debates over the course of the novel, one central to the political subtext being that of Imperialism vs. Fascism. Why does society not look upon Imperial soldiers with the same scorn it holds for those soldiers committing atrocities under fascistregimes? Should these Imperial mercenaries be considered willing and conscious henchmen, or were they merely following orders? What stance does Ghosh take on this issue, if any? What other debates were you able to extract from the book? What techniques does Ghosh use to bring these issues and their various arguments to light?
5. Ghosh constructs several unique, remarkable, and strong female characters: Dolly, Uma, Queen Supayalat, even the First Princess, who becomes pregnant out of wedlock. Each of these women tells us something different and important about the time and place in which she was living. What strengths do these women express, and at what points are they identified and illuminated in the novel? In examining the range and evolution of Ghosh’s female characters, what could we conclude about the relationship between feminine domesticity and empire? Where and how do the two intersect? What role do women play under colonialism, and how do Ghosh’s characters either reflect or reject it?
6. Uma is a particularly interesting character, as she illuminates one of the ideas central to Ghosh's novel. When we first encounter her, she is constantly worried about being the proper memsahib, following traditional domestic etiquette, and living up to the standards of her husband, the Collector. She soon realized, however, that her husband’s dream was not in accordance with the rules of Indian custom, he longed “to live with a woman as an equal in spirit and intellect, ” and she could never, according to custom, fulfill those expectations. We see a monumental change in her disposition when she returns to India from New York. How has she transformed, and by what force? What does Uma’s character tell us about the nature of history and the power of social forces as factors in everyday life?
7. Over the course of the novel, the division between conquerors and conquered becomes increasingly hard to distinguish. The inevitable ethical dilemma faced by Indian soldiers in the British army comes to the foreground of the novel, as one member of the INA challenges Indian soldiers in the British army, “Do you really wish to sacrifice your lives for an Empire that has kept your country in slavery for two hundred years?” Can you think of any other episodes in which Ghosh highlights this argument? How does this debate affect the course and scope of the story?
8. In several episodes, Ghosh asks the question, both of his readers and of his characters; can submission to an oppressor, in certain instances, be a sign of strength, rather than weakness? For example, at the very outset of the novel, Rajkumar is heartbroken when he sees Dolly marching out of Burma in the royal procession, offering the sweets he gave her as a token of his affection to one of the British guards. Was this a sign of strength on Dolly’s part? How does this foreshadow other events in the novel? What do such episodes tell us about the effect of colonialism, both on the individual and the collective?
9. In The Glass Palace Ghosh examines the individual, psychological dilemmas posed by colonialism. At one point, an Indian officer in the British army during World War II exclaims, “What are we? We’ve learned to dance the tango and we know how to eat roast beef with a knife and fork. The truth is that except for the color of our skin, most people in India wouldn’t even recognize us as Indians.” This quest for and recognition of personal identity, both lost and found, figures prominently in the novel. Where do we see this pursuit played out? How does Ghosh reconcile the notions of personal identity and national identity? Is one derivative of the other?
10. Exile and return are themes that lie at the core of The Glass Palace. We see King Thebaw and Queen Supayalat living out their exiles in Ratnagiri, we also experience Dolly’s flight from and return to Burma. Even Rajkumar appears in a constant state of escape and return, from his early abandonment at age 11. What other stories of exile and return play out over the course of the book? How do these individual cycles contribute to the overall structure of the novel?
11. At various points in the book, Ghosh invokes the art of photography. We are encounter photographers throughout the novel, and find ourselves in a photography shop at the story’s close. Where else does photography enter the story, and how does it serve as a thematic thread? How does Ghosh weave the theme of photography into the overarching ideas about history and memory that permeate his novel? How does the photographer’s art relate to Ghosh’s conception of the human heart and mind?
12. The style of The Glass Palace is elliptical, and at times, uneven. Ghosh dedicates an entire paragraph to describing the camera with which Mrs. Khambatta photographed Dolly and Rajkumar’s wedding, yet the actual ceremony takes place, elliptically, when Ghosh writes, “At the end of the civil ceremony, in the Collector’s ‘camp office’, Dolly and Rajkumar garlanded each other, smiling like children.” Other such major life events occur in only sentences, the births of children, the deaths of loved ones, wars, and other national catastrophes. Do you think this was an intentional literary choice on Ghosh’s part? What effect does it have on the book as a whole, on your perception of the characters and their stories?
13. As much defeat as there is present in The Glass Palace, there are also extraordinary tales of survival and hope. Can you think of some examples by which devastating defeat is countered by enormous hope? What claims does Ghosh make about the human spirit in this novel?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Glass Room
Simon Mawer, 2009
Little, Brown & Co.
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781590513965
Summary
Honeymooners Viktor and Liesel Landauer are filled with the optimism and cultural vibrancy of central Europe of the 1920s when they meet modernist architect Rainer von Abt. He builds for them a home to embody their exuberant faith in the future, and the Landauer House becomes an instant masterpiece.
Viktor and Liesel, a rich Jewish mogul married to a thoughtful, modern gentile, pour all of their hopes for their marriage and budding family into their stunning new home, filling it with children, friends, and a generation of artists and thinkers eager to abandon old-world European style in favor of the new and the avant-garde.
But as life intervenes, their new home also brings out their most passionate desires and darkest secrets. As Viktor searches for a warmer, less challenging comfort in the arms of another woman, and Liesel turns to her wild, mischievous friend Hana for excitement, the marriage begins to show signs of strain. The radiant honesty and idealism of 1930 quickly evaporate beneath the storm clouds of World War II. As Nazi troops enter the country, the family must leave their old life behind and attempt to escape to America before Viktor's Jewish roots draw Nazi attention, and before the family itself dissolves.
As the Landauers struggle for survival abroad, their home slips from hand to hand, from Czech to Nazi to Soviet possession and finally back to the Czechoslovak state, with new inhabitants always falling under the fervent and unrelenting influence of the Glass Room. Its crystalline perfection exerts a gravitational pull on those who know it, inspiring them, freeing them, calling them back, until the Landauers themselves are finally drawn home to where their story began.
Brimming with barely contained passion and cruelty, the precision of science, the wild variance of lust, the catharsis of confession, and the fear of failure—The Glass Room contains it all. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1948
• Where—England (UK)
• Education—Oxford University
• Awards—McKitterick Prize for First Novels; Boardman Tasker
Prize for Mountain Literature
• Currently—lives and teaches in Rome, Italy
Simon Mawer is a British author who currently lives in Italy.
Educated at Millfield School in Somerset and at Brasenose College, Oxford, Mawer took a degree in Zoology and has worked as a biology teacher for most of his life.
He published his first novel, Chimera, (1989) at the comparatively late age of thirty-nine. It won the McKitterick Prize for first novels. Mendel's Dwarf followed three works of modest success and established him as a writer of note on both sides of the Atlantic. The New York Times judged it one of the "books to remember" of 1998.
The Gospel of Judas and The Fall followed, with the latter winning the 2003 Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature. More recently, he published Swimming to Ithaca, a novel partially inspired by his childhood on the island of Cyprus. A book called A Place in Italy (1992), written in the wake of A Year in Provence, recounts the first two years in the village in Italy he went to live in.
He has mounted one other foray into the field of non-fiction, Gregor Mendel: Planting the Seeds of Genetics, which was published in conjunction with the Field Museum of Chicago as a companion volume to the museum's current exhibition of the same name.
In 2009, Mawer published The Glass Room, a novel about a modernist villa built in a Czech city in 1928. Mawer has acknowledged that the book was primarily inspired by the Villa Tugendhat which was designed by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and built in Brno in the Czech Republic in 1928-30. The novel was nominated for the 2009 Man Booker Prize.
Mawer has lived in Italy since 1977, teaching biology at St. George's British International School in Rome. He is married and has two children. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
[A] stirring new novel...The Glass Room works so effectively because Mawer embeds…provocative aesthetic and moral issues in a war-torn adventure story that's eerily erotic and tremendously exciting.... Mawer, an Englishman living in Italy, has written this novel as though it were a translation, endowing his prose with a patina of Old World formality that sounds all the more romantic. He claims he doesn't know Czech or German, but his characters speak both fluently, and his attention to foreign languages enriches every episode.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
[The Glass Room is] a thing of extraordinary beauty and symmetry... a novel of ideas, yet strongly propelled by plot and characterised by an almost dreamlike simplicity of telling. Comparisons with the work of Michael Frayn would not be misplaced, and there are occasional moments of illuminating brilliance.
The Guardian (UK)
In Mawer's hands [The Glass Room] becomes a means for exploring the way people's hopes for the future become part of their history. This he does beautifully.
Times Literary Supplement (UK)
The Jewish fates of Viktor, Kata and others are lightly handled, which seems just right in this optimistic, joyful but never facile vision of human achievement. Mawer's perfect pacing clinches a wholly enjoyable and moving read.
The Independent (UK)
The Glass Room['s] poetic success is to remind us of two great gilt-edged ironies: that whatever is held to be the height of modernity is already en route to the museum, and that even 'cold' art is the embodiment of its maker's passion—one that can prove contagious.
Financial Times (UK)
Simon Mawer's grasp of period and place achieves what all great novels must: the creation of an utterly absorbing world the reader can scarcely bear to leave. Exciting, profoundly affecting and altogether wonderful.
Daily Mail (UK)
Engrossing.... Mawer explores his themes with a subtle intelligence. A novel of ideas, but one driven by character and story.
Literary Review
The writing, as sensual and sophisticated as its subjects, keeps us firmly within the house's elegant parameters, caught up in the touch and taste and roiling emotions of the characters living through these events. Seeing clearly, Mawer shows us, is never an option, no matter how large and expensive your windows. Every era thinks it has achieved transparency, complete with modern fixtures and sundry decorations. But we can't ever actually see out, because our damned humanity keeps misting up the glass.
Time Out London
The latest from novelist Mawer (The Fall) begins with great promise, as Jewish newlyweds Viktor and Liesel Landauer meet with architect Rainier von Abt, not just an architect but "a poet...of light and space and form," who builds their dream home, a "modern house...adapted to the future rather than the past, to the openness of modern living." World events, however, are about to overtake 1930s Czechoslovakia. Viktor, like most in the community, dismisses rumors of impending pogroms-"The only people who hold the German economy together are the Jews"—but once the signs of Nazi occupation become impossible to ignore, the Landauers must abandon their beloved home. In a bizarre twist of fate, however, Liesel insists on rescuing single mother Katra, unaware that Katra is Viktor's new mistress. As the world spins into chaos, the highly symbolic Landauer house is the only constant; though it shifts identities more than once, the house remains "ageless," a place "that defines the very existence of time." Mawer's writing and characters are rich, but his twisty plot depends too often on unbelievable coincidences, especially in the conclusion.
Publishers Weekly
Discussion Questions
1. Why are the Landauers so devoted to modernity? What makes them so intent on shedding the past, and how is this tied to their country's history or future?
2. What was your first impression of Rainer von Abt? What did you think of his minimalist approach? Why do you think it appealed to Liesel and Viktor?
3. The characters are constantly fluctuating between languages-specifically German and Czech. How do these characters use or manipulate language to express themselves?
4. During the housewarming party at the Glass Room, von Abt speaks of his masterpiece, saying, "A work of art like this demands that the life lived in it be a work of art as well." Do you think this prophecy comes to fruition?
5. Why does Viktor initially approach Kata in Vienna? What is he looking for in her? How is she different from Liesel?
6. The Glass Room takes on many personas throughout the book, moving from a home to a laboratory to a gymnasium to a museum. Does the original concept of the house remain intact through all of its internal transformations? Does the house ever become part of the past?
7. Do you believe that Viktor is in love with both Liesel and Kata? Does he fall for Kata before or after she comes to live with the family? What does the scene at the train station reveal about both him and Liesel?
8. Coincidence plays an important role in the novel. Does the Glass Room encourage it? If so, how?
9. Why do you think Hana agrees to be examined by Stahl and his crew? Why do you think the house is seen as an ideal place for a scientific laboratory?
10. What image or scene within the novel haunted or stayed with you the most?
11. Tomas, much like Viktor, is always looking toward the future. But with yet another love triangle in the Glass Room—this time between Zdenka, Tomas, and Eve—do things really change in this society obsessed with the future? Can history be erased if it is constantly being repeated?
12. What is Hana searching for in all of her love affairs? Do you think she is truly in love with Zdenka? Is it the Glass Room's influence or is Zdenka just a replacement for Liesel?
13. When Hana and Liesel are reunited at the novel's end, both women gloss over the tragedies in their past. Why do you think they hold back?
14. Does The Glass Room tell the story of a house or a family? What story do you think Mawer set out to tell?
15. Mawer constantly shifts the perspective from character to character, often leaving the reader wanting more. Which character's outcome or emotions did you wish you knew more about by the novel's end-Katalin's? Von Abt's? Viktor's? Stahl's? Oskar's?
16. Why do you think Mawer chose to conclude the book with Ottilie and Maria reuniting? What, if anything, does this new generation represent?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Glimpses of the Moon
Edith Wharton, 1922
200-300 pp. (varies by publisher)
Summary
Nick Lansing and Susy Branch are young, attractive, but impoverished New Yorkers. They are in love and decide to marry, but realize their chances of happiness are slim without the wealth and society that their more privileged friends take for granted.
The two agree to separate when either encounters a more eligible proposition. However, as they honeymoon in friends' lavish houses, from a villa on Lake Como to a Venetian palace, jealous passions and troubled consciences cause the idyll to crumble.
Edith Wharton has perceptively described the choices faced by Nick and Susy; the same dilemma still facing those seduced by the pleasures of society. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 24, 1862
• Where—New York, NY
• Death—August 11, 1937
• Where—Paris, France
• Education: Educated privately in New York and Europe
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence, 1921,
French Legion of Honor, 1916
One of America's most important novelists, Edith Wharton was a refined, relentless chronicler of the Gilded Age and its social mores. Along with close friend Henry James, she helped define literature at the turn of the 20th century, even as she wrote classic nonfiction on travel, decorating and her own life.
More
Edith Newbold Jones was born January 24, 1862, into such wealth and privilege that her family inspired the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses." The youngest of three children, Edith spent her early years touring Europe with her parents and, upon the family's return to the United States, enjoyed a privileged childhood in New York and Newport, Rhode Island. Edith's creativity and talent soon became obvious: By the age of eighteen she had written a novella (as well as witty reviews of it) and published poetry in the Atlantic Monthly.
After a failed engagement, Edith married a wealthy sportsman, Edward Wharton. Despite similar backgrounds and a shared taste for travel, the marriage was not a success. Many of Wharton's novels chronicle unhappy marriages, in which the demands of love and vocation often conflict with the expectations of society.
Wharton's first major novel, The House of Mirth, published in 1905, enjoyed considerable literary success. Ethan Frome appeared six years later, solidifying Wharton's reputation as an important novelist. Often in the company of her close friend, Henry James, Wharton mingled with some of the most famous writers and artists of the day, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, André Gide, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Cocteau, and Jack London
In 1913 Edith divorced Edward. She lived mostly in France for the remainder of her life. When World War I broke out, she organized hostels for refugees, worked as a fund-raiser, and wrote for American publications from battlefield frontlines. She was awarded the French Legion of Honor for her courage and distinguished work.
The Age of Innocence, a novel about New York in the 1870s, earned Wharton the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1921 — the first time the award had been bestowed upon a woman.
Wharton traveled throughout Europe to encourage young authors. She also continued to write, lying in her bed every morning, as she had always done, dropping each newly penned page on the floor to be collected and arranged when she was finished. Wharton suffered a stroke and died on August 11, 1937. She is buried in the American Cemetery in Versailles, France.
Extras
• Surprisingly, in addition to her career as a fiction writer, Wharton was also a well-known interior designer. Her book, The Decoration of Houses was widely read and is today considered the first modern manual of interior design.
• Upon the publication of The House of Mirth in 1905, Wharton became an instant celebrity, and the the book was an instant bestseller, with 80,000 copies ordered from Scribner's six weeks after its release.
• Wharton had a great fondness for dogs, and owned several throughout her life. (From Barnes and Noble.)
Book Reviews
(Older works have few online reviews by mainstream press. See customer reviews at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.)
(Audio version.) Anna Fields reads this edition with precision. The novel's premise is simple: a man and a woman who are financially strapped decide to marry to remain in the high society circles to which they have become accustomed. They will use their wedding gifts to better position one another's opportunity to remarry for money. The dilemma, of course, comes when they discover separately that their love for each other is far greater than the false, pretentious, and self-indulgent lives they are seeking. Wharton strikes a balance between the superficial and the genuine, and between dependency and freedom that allows the reader to observe the foibles and follies of life and learn from them.
Library Journal
Wharton's novel opens with a sentence that seems to have been written for the opening voice-over of a movie: "It rose for them—their honeymoon—over the waters of a lake so famed as the scene of romantic raptures that they were rather proud of not having been afraid to choose it as the setting of their own." But Nick and Susy Lansing, each suffering from a genteel lack of money, have married out of convenience rather than romantic rapture. Intending to live off the generosity of wealthy acquaintances, they have also agreed that each shall be free to pursue a more socially desirable mate. What they didn't anticipate is that they would fall genuinely in love with each other. As Wharton tells their story, the sharp irony of both her prose and her characters bleeds into pools of true feeling.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Glimpses of the Moon:
1. Do you find Susy and Nick sympathetic characters? Do your attitudes toward them change during the course of the novel?
2. Talk about the reason the two marry and the bargain they strike with one another. Do you consider their plan morally bankrupt...or not? If Susy and Nick exist in a social strata that privileges material wealth above all else, are they dishonest ...cynical... opportunistic...simply besting their social "betters" at their own game...or what?
3. Susy says to Nick that "we're both rather unusually popular." What is it about the two that makes them so appealing to others?
4. Nick and Susy seem to occupy two ends of a spectrum in terms of character values. How would you define the difference between them?
5. Ellie Vanderlyn asks Susy to help her deceive Nelson Vanderlyn, her husband. Was Ellie right to agree to help, given that she and Nick are dependent on Ellie's hospitality? What are her options? What would you have done?
6. In what way does Susy's participation in Ellie's scheme undermine her relationship with Nick?
7. How does Wharton portray those of the moneyed class, their values and lifestyle? Does she draw them affectionately...satirically...scornfully? How do you feel about the fact that Wharton, herself, is part of that social milieu?
8. Both Susy and Nick undertake a personal journey. Trace the journey they both make—where they start from and where they end up? How does each change...what does each come to learn about him/herself and about the world in which they live?
9. What is the significance of the book's title? What does the moon represent symbolically?
10. What "lesson" is learned by the book's end? Are you satisfied with how The Glimpses of the Moon ended? Is the conclusion "earned" — in other words, does it flow naturally from what precedes it, or does it feel forced and tacked on?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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The Global War on Morris
Steve Israel, 2014
Simon & Schuster
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781476772233
Summary
A witty political satire ripped from the headlines and written by Congressman Steve Israel, who’s met the characters, heard the conversations, and seen the plot twists firsthand.
Meet Morris Feldstein, a pharmaceutical salesman living and working in western Long Island who loves the Mets, loves his wife Rona, and loves things just the way they are. He doesn’t enjoy the news; he doesn’t like to argue. Rona may want to change the world; Morris wants the world to leave him alone. Morris does not make waves.
But one day Morris is seduced by a lonely, lovesick receptionist at one of the doctors’ offices along his sales route, and in a moment of weakness charges a non-business expense to his company credit card. No big deal, you might think. Easy mistake. But the government’s top-secret surveillance program, anchored by a giant, complex supercomputer known as NICK, thinks differently. Eventually NICK begins to thread together the largely disparate and tenuously connected strands of Morris’s life—his friends, family, friends’ friends, his traffic violations, his daughter’s political leanings, his wife’s new patients, and even his failed romantic endeavors—and Morris becomes the US government’s new public enemy number one.
A hilarious, debut novel from a charismatic author, The Global War on Morris toes the line between recent breaking headlines and a future that is not that difficult to imagine. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 30, 1958
• Where—Brooklyn, New York, New York, USA
• Raised—Wantagh, Long Island, New York
• Education—B.A., George Washington University
• Currently—lives on Long Island, New York, and Washington, D.C.
Steven Israel is the United States Representative for New York's 3rd congressional district, serving in the United States Congress since 2001. The district, numbered as the 2nd district from 2001 to 2013, includes portions of northern Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island, as well as a tiny portion of Queens in New York City. He is a member of the Democratic Party and was head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee until November 2014. Before serving in Congress, he served on the Huntington, New York town board. He is a native of New York.
Early life, education, and career
Israel was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Wantagh, on Long Island. He graduated from Nassau Community College and George Washington University. At George Washington University, he worked as an aide for Robert Matsui and then Richard Ottinger. Israel went on to become Suffok County director of the American Jewish Congress. In 1987 he unsuccessfully ran for a seat in the county legislature. After this defeat, he spent three years working as an aide to the Suffolk County executive and founded a PR and marketing firm.[2]
He was elected to the town council in Huntington, New York, in 1993. While there, he reportedly convinced the Republican supervisor to switch parties. A town official said that he persuaded colleagues to move for pay raises while opposing them himself, which was seen as a politically safer move.
U.S. House of Representatives
After Rick Lazio left his House seat to run for the United States Senate in 2001, Israel was elected to his seat, receiving 48% of the vote, defeating Republican Joan Jonhson, who received 34%, and four independent candidates. He has been reelected six times with relatively little difficulty, despite representing a district that is a swing district on paper.
—Committee on Appropriations
Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development
Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs
Subcommittee on Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies
—Caucus membership
Co-chair and founder of Congressional Center Aisle Caucus
House Cancer Caucus (Co-chair)
Long Island Sound Caucus (Co-chair)
—Party leadership
Assistant Democratic Whip
House Democratic Caucus Task Force On Defense and the Military (Chair)
House Democratic Study Group on National Security Policy (Co-chair)
(From Wikipedia. Retrieved 12/29/14.)
Book Reviews
[I]t’s an unexpected delight to find The Global War on Morris, a political satire by Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), so spirited and funny.... [A]t the center of a network of sycophants, [Vice President] Cheney stirs the cauldron of our nation’s anxieties about “terrorists, jihadists, liberals.” He whines about how soft Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has gone, snickers at constitutional rights and calculates how best to manipulate the terror alert system before the Republican convention.... a perfect storm of ineptitude, fervency and technophilia.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
[A] laugh-out-loud funny book. I don’t mean a chuckle here or there. This yarn by Congressman Steve Israel is downright hilarious....a race between laughter and absurdity with you as the referee.
Chris Matthews - Hardball
When he's not debuting as a novelist, Israel represents New York's third Congressional District. Naturally, his book has a political bent. After unassuming pharmaceutical salesman Morris Feldstein makes a hasty decision to charge a nonbusiness expense to his company credit card, he's tracked by the government's top-secret surveillance program, which manages to turn him into the new public enemy number one.
Library Journal
When he's not debuting as a novelist, Israel represents New York's third Congressional District. Naturally, his book has a political bent. After unassuming pharmaceutical salesman Morris Feldstein makes a hasty decision to charge a nonbusiness expense to his company credit card, he's tracked by the government's top-secret surveillance program, which manages to turn him into the new public enemy number one.
Booklist
Israel has fun with the bureaucratic side of national security but offers few surprises, while his political jabs are rather flat and facile, and, after all, a decade late....[and] at a time when refugees, casualties and decapitations can make it hard to see the lighter side of any aspect of the war on terror.
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.)
Glorious
Bernice L. McFadden, 2010
Akashic Books
250 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781936070114
Summary
Glorious is set against the backdrops of the Jim Crow South, the Harlem Renaissance, and the civil rights era. Blending the truth of American history with the fruits of Bernice McFadden’s rich imagination, this is the story of Easter Venetta Bartlett, a fictional Harlem Renaissance writer whose tumultuous path to success, ruin, and revival offers a candid portrait of the American experience in all its beauty and cruelty.
Glorious is ultimately an audacious exploration into the nature of self-hatred, love, possession, ego, betrayal, and, finally, redemption. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA
• Education—NYC Fashion College - Laboratory Institute of
Merchandising; Marymount College, Fordham University
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York
Bernice L. McFadden is the author of seven critically acclaimed novels, including the classic Sugar, Nowhere Is a Place, (a 2006 Washington Post Best Fiction title), and Gathering of Waters in 2012.
She is a two time Hurston/Wright award fiction finalist as well as the recipient of two fiction honor awards from the BCALA. McFadden lives in Brooklyn, New York. (From the publisher.)
More
Bernice L. McFadden was born, raised and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is the eldest of four children and the mother of one daughter, R'yane Azsa. Ms. McFadden attended grade school at P.S. 161 in Brooklyn and Middle School at Holy Spirit, also in Brooklyn. She attended high school at St. Cyril Academy an all-girls boarding school in Danville, Pa.
In the Fall of 1983 she enrolled in the noted NYC fashion college: Laboratory Institute of Merchandising, with dreams of becoming an international clothing buyer.
She attended LIM for two semesters and then took a position at Bloomingdale's and later with Itokin, a Japanese owned retail company.
Disillusioned and frustrated with her job, she signed up for a Travel & Tourism course at Marymount College where she received a certificate of completion. After the birth of her daughter in 1988, Bernice McFadden obtained a job with Rockresorts a company then owned by the Rockefeller family.
The company was later sold and Ms. McFadden was laid off and unemployed for one year. She sights that year as the turning point in her life because during those twelve months Ms. McFadden began to dedicate herself to the art of writing. During the next nine years she held three jobs, always looking for something exciting and satisfying. Forever frustrated with corporate America and the requirements they put on their employees, Ms. McFadden enrolled at Fordham University. Her intention was to obtain a degree that would enable her to move up another rung on the corporate ladder.
She signed up for courses that concentrated on Afro-American history and literature, as well as creative writing, poetry and journalism. She credits the two years spent under the guidance of her professors as well as the years spent lost in the words of her favorite author's, to the caliber of writer she has become.
During those years, Ms. McFadden made a conscious effort to write as much as possible and began to send out hundreds of query letters to agents and publisher's attempting to sell one of her short stories or the novel she was working on.
In 1997, Ms. McFadden quit her job and dedicated seven months to re-writing the novel that would become, Sugar. In May of 1998, after depleting her savings, she took her last and final position within corporate America.
On Feb 9th, 1999, her daughter's eleventh birthday (and Alice Walker's birthday—one of Ms. McFadden's favorite author's) she sent a query letter to an agent who signed her two weeks later and the rest is literary history!
Bernice L. McFadden also writes racy, humorous fiction under the pseudonym, Geneva Holliday. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
McFadden's lively and loving rendering of New York hews closely to the jazz-inflected city of myth.... [She] has a wonderful ear for dialogue, and her entertaining prose equally accommodates humor and pathos.
Gregory Beyer - New York Times
McFadden, in her powerful seventh novel, tells the story of Easter Bartlett as she journeys from the violent Jim Crow South to the promise of the Harlem Renaissance and the civil rights movement. Along the way, Easter forms relationships with both products of McFadden's imagination and actual historical figures: Rain, the sensuous and passionate dancer in Slocum's Traveling Brigade, a troupe that traveled the backwoods “entertaining negroes”; Colin, Easter's husband, who is provoked by a duplicitous friend into assassinating the Universal Negro Improvement Association leader, Marcus Garvey; Meredith, Easter's untrustworthy benefactor; and many more, including poet Langston Hughes, pianist Fats Waller, and shipping heiress Nancy Cunard. McFadden (Sugar) weaves rich historical detail with Easter's struggle to find peace in a racially polarized country, and she brings Harlem to astounding life: “The air up there, up south, up in Harlem, was sticky sweet and peppered with perfume, sweat, sex, curry, salt meat, sautéed chicken livers, and fresh baked breads.” Easter's hope for love to overthrow hate—and her intense exposure to both—cogently stands for America's potential, and McFadden's novel is a triumphant portrayal of the ongoing quest.
Publishers Weekly
After her sister's rape and her mother's death of a broken heart, Easter walked away from Waycross, Georgia, and spent most of the rest of her life trying to walk away from pain and hate..... McFadden interweaves fiction with the historic period of the Harlem Renaissance in this novel about a woman's struggle against hate and disappointment. —Vanessa Bush
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. Why did the author choose to name the protagonist Easter? How does her name relate to the story?
2. Describe the setting of Glorious. Why might the author have chosen to write about this time period and these places and events?
3. Why do you think Easter continuously chooses to walk away from people, places and situations instead of confronting them head-on?
4. McFadden chooses to incorporate historical figures in a fictional context. Who does she include? Does her portrayal of them match historical accounts?
5. What does the historical narrative of Glorious reveal about contemporary society?
6. The quest for love and acceptance is a key theme of Glorious. How does the author use the cast of characters to highlight the complexity of this quest?
7. The characters in Glorious are from different classes, backgrounds, and ethnic groups but they share may commonalities. What are some of those shared characteristics?
8. What imagery does the author use in the prologue to set the scene? Does this imagery appear again in the story?
9. Why is Easter attracted to Mama Rain and then later, Getty Wisdom? Do the two have common qualities that draw Easter to them? Did her husband Colin Gibbs have any of those same qualities?
10. In Harlem, Easter tells Rain that she was writing to "Keep a grip on life." At the end of the book though, when Easter has given up writing, does this mean that she has also given up on life?
11. The author presents many representations of friendship and relationships. Describe some. Which are most successful? Why do you think these relationships are able to endure?
12. The story begins and ends in Waycross, Georgia. Why did the author choose to close the story in a place that held so many bad memories for Easter? Is there symbolism in this?
13. Does Easter Bartlett obtain justice? What does she sacrifice in the process?
14. Why do you think that the author chose the quotations by T.S. Eliot and Zora Neale Hurston as the novel's epigraphs? What do they signify?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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