Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
Salman Rushdie, 2015
Random House
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812998917
Summary
From Salman Rushdie, one of the great writers of our time, comes a spellbinding work of fiction that blends history, mythology, and a timeless love story. A lush, richly layered novel in which our world has been plunged into an age of unreason, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is a breathtaking achievement and an enduring testament to the power of storytelling.
In the near future, after a storm strikes New York City, the strangenesses begin. A down-to-earth gardener finds that his feet no longer touch the ground. A graphic novelist awakens in his bedroom to a mysterious entity that resembles his own sub–Stan Lee creation.
Abandoned at the mayor’s office, a baby identifies corruption with her mere presence, marking the guilty with blemishes and boils. A seductive gold digger is soon tapped to combat forces beyond imagining.
Unbeknownst to them, they are all descended from the whimsical, capricious, wanton creatures known as the jinn, who live in a world separated from ours by a veil.
Centuries ago, Dunia, a princess of the jinn, fell in love with a mortal man of reason. Together they produced an astonishing number of children, unaware of their fantastical powers, who spread across generations in the human world.
Once the line between worlds is breached on a grand scale, Dunia’s children and others will play a role in an epic war between light and dark spanning a thousand and one nights—or two years, eight months, and twenty-eight nights.
It is a time of enormous upheaval, in which beliefs are challenged, words act like poison, silence is a disease, and a noise may contain a hidden curse.
Inspired by the traditional "wonder tales" of the East, Salman Rushdie’s novel is a masterpiece about the age-old conflicts that remain in today’s world. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is satirical and bawdy, full of cunning and folly, rivalries and betrayals, kismet and karma, rapture and redemption. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 19, 1947
• Where—Bombay, Maharashtra, India
• Education—M.A., King's College, Cambridge, UK
• Awards—Booker Prize, 1981; Best of the Bookers, 1993 (the best novel to win the Booker
Prize in its first twenty-five years); Whitbread Prize, 1988 and 1995
• Currently—lives in New York, New York
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is a British Indian novelist and essayist. His second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. He is said to combine magical realism with historical fiction; his work is concerned with the many connections, disruptions and migrations between East and West.
His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), was the centre of a major controversy, provoking protests from Muslims in several countries, some violent. Death threats were made against him, including a fatwa issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, on February 14, 1989.
Rushdie was appointed Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France in January 1999. In June 2007, Queen Elizabeth II knighted him for his services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked him thirteenth on its list of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945.
Since 2000, Rushdie has lived in the United States, where he has worked at the Emory University and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent book is Joseph Anton: A Memoir, an account of his life in the wake of the Satanic Verses controversy.
Career
Rushdie's first career was as a copywriter, working for the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather, where he came up with "irresistibubble" for Aero and "Naughty but Nice" for cream cakes, and for the agency Ayer Barker, for whom he wrote the memorable line "That'll do nicely" for American Express. It was while he was at Ogilvy that he wrote Midnight's Children, before becoming a full-time writer. John Hegarty of Bartle Bogle Hegarty has criticised Rushdie for not referring to his copywriting past frequently enough, although conceding: "He did write crap ads...admittedly."
His first novel, Grimus, a part-science fiction tale, was generally ignored by the public and literary critics. His next novel, Midnight's Children, catapulted him to literary notability. This work won the 1981 Booker Prize and, in 1993 and 2008, was awarded the Best of the Bookers as the best novel to have received the prize during its first 25 and 40 years. Midnight's Children follows the life of a child, born at the stroke of midnight as India gained its independence, who is endowed with special powers and a connection to other children born at the dawn of a new and tumultuous age in the history of the Indian sub-continent and the birth of the modern nation of India. The character of Saleem Sinai has been compared to Rushdie. However, the author has refuted the idea of having written any of his characters as autobiographical, stating...
People assume that because certain things in the character are drawn from your own experience, it just becomes you. In that sense, I’ve never felt that I’ve written an autobiographical character.
After Midnight's Children, Rushdie wrote Shame, in which he depicts the political turmoil in Pakistan, basing his characters on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Shame won France's Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book) and was a close runner-up for the Booker Prize. Both these works of postcolonial literature are characterised by a style of magic realism and the immigrant outlook that Rushdie is very conscious of as a member of the Indian diaspora.
Rushdie wrote a non-fiction book about Nicaragua in 1987 called The Jaguar Smile. This book has a political focus and is based on his first-hand experiences and research at the scene of Sandinista political experiments.
His most controversial work, The Satanic Verses, was published in 1988 (see below). Rushdie has published many short stories, including those collected in East, West (1994). The Moor's Last Sigh, a family epic ranging over some 100 years of India's history was published in 1995. The Ground Beneath Her Feet presents an alternative history of modern rock music. The song of the same name by U2 is one of many song lyrics included in the book, hence Rushdie is credited as the lyricist. He also wrote Haroun and the Sea of Stories in 1990.
Rushdie has had a string of commercially successful and critically acclaimed novels. His 2005 novel Shalimar the Clown received, in India, the prestigious Hutch Crossword Book Award, and was, in Britain, a finalist for the Whitbread Book Awards. It was shortlisted for the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
In his 2002 non-fiction collection Step Across This Line, he professes his admiration for the Italian writer Italo Calvino and the American writer Thomas Pynchon, among others. His early influences included James Joyce, Günter Grass, Jorge Luis Borges, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Lewis Carroll. Rushdie was a personal friend of Angela Carter and praised her highly in the foreword for her collection Burning your Boats.
Other Activities
Rushdie has quietly mentored younger Indian (and ethnic-Indian) writers, influenced an entire generation of Indo-Anglian writers, and is an influential writer in postcolonial literature in general. He has received many plaudits for his writings, including the European Union's Aristeion Prize for Literature, the Premio Grinzane Cavour (Italy), and the Writer of the Year Award in Germany and many of literature's highest honours. Rushdie was the President of PEN American Center from 2004 to 2006 and founder of the PEN World Voices Festival.
He opposed the British government's introduction of the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, something he writes about in his contribution to Free Expression Is No Offence, a collection of essays by several writers.
In 2007 he began a five-year term as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, where he has also deposited his archives.
In May 2008 he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Though he enjoys writing, Salman Rushdie says that he would have become an actor if his writing career had not been successful. Even from early childhood, he dreamed of appearing in Hollywood movies (which he later realised in his frequent cameo appearances).
Rushdie includes fictional television and movie characters in some of his writings. He had a cameo appearance in the film Bridget Jones's Diary based on the book of the same name, which is itself full of literary in-jokes.
On May 12, 2006, Rushdie was a guest host on The Charlie Rose Show, where he interviewed Indo-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta, whose 2005 film, Water, faced violent protests. He appears in the role of Helen Hunt's obstetrician-gynecologist in the film adaptation of Elinor Lipman's novel Then She Found Me. In September 2008, and again in March 2009, he appeared as a panellist on the HBO program Real Time with Bill Maher.
Rushdie is currently collaborating on the screenplay for the cinematic adaptation of his novel Midnight's Children with director Deepa Mehta. The film will be released in October, 2012.
Rushdie is a member of the advisory board of The Lunchbox Fund, a non-profit organisation which provides daily meals to students of township schools in Soweto of South Africa. He is also a member of the advisory board of the Secular Coalition for America, an advocacy group representing the interests of atheistic and humanistic Americans in Washington, D.C. In November 2010 he became a founding patron of Ralston College, a new liberal arts college that has adopted as its motto a Latin translation of a phrase ("free speech is life itself") from an address he gave at Columbia University in 1991 to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The Satanic Verses and the fatwa
The publication of The Satanic Verses in September 1988 caused immediate controversy in the Islamic world because of what was perceived as an irreverent depiction of the prophet Muhammad. The title refers to a disputed Muslim tradition that is related in the book. According to this tradition, Muhammad (Mahound in the book) added verses (sura) to the Qur'an accepting three goddesses who used to be worshipped in Mecca as divine beings. According to the legend, Muhammad later revoked the verses, saying the devil tempted him to utter these lines to appease the Meccans (hence the "Satanic" verses). However, the narrator reveals to the reader that these disputed verses were actually from the mouth of the Archangel Gibreel. The book was banned in many countries with large Muslim communities.
On February 14, 1989, a fatwa requiring Rushdie's execution was proclaimed on Radio Tehran by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of Iran at the time, calling the book "blasphemous against Islam." A bounty was offered for Rushdie's death, and he was thus forced to live under police protection for several years. On March 7, 1989, the United Kingdom and Iran broke diplomatic relations over the Rushdie controversy.
The publication of the book and the fatwa sparked violence around the world, with bookstores firebombed. Muslim communities in several nations in the West held public rallies, burning copies of the book. Several people associated with translating or publishing the book were attacked and even killed.
On September 24, 1998, as a precondition to the restoration of diplomatic relations with Britain, the Iranian government gave a public commitment that it would "neither support nor hinder assassination operations on Rushdie."
Hardliners in Iran have continued to reaffirm the death sentence. In early 2005, Khomeini's fatwa was reaffirmed by Iran's current spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a message to Muslim pilgrims making the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Additionally, the Revolutionary Guards have declared that the death sentence on him is still valid. Iran has rejected requests to withdraw the fatwa on the basis that only the person who issued it may withdraw it, and the person who issued it – Ayatollah Khomeini – has been dead since 1989.
Rushdie has reported that he still receives a "sort of Valentine's card" from Iran each year on February 14 letting him know the country has not forgotten the vow to kill him. He said, "It's reached the point where it's a piece of rhetoric rather than a real threat."
A memoir of his years of hiding, Joseph Anton, was published in 2012. Joseph Anton was Rushdie's secret alias.
In 2012, following uprisings over an anonymously posted YouTube video denigrating Muslims, a semi-official religious foundation in Iran increased the reward it had offered for the killing of Rushdie from $2.8 million to $3.3 million dollars. Their stated reason: "If the [1989] fatwa had been carried out, later insults in the form of caricature, articles and films that have continued would have not happened."
Knighthood
Rushdie was knighted for services to literature in the Queen's Birthday Honours on June 16, 2007. He remarked, "I am thrilled and humbled to receive this great honour, and am very grateful that my work has been recognised in this way." In response to his knighthood, many nations with Muslim majorities protested. Several called publicly for his death. Some non-Muslims expressed disappointment at Rushdie's knighthood, claiming that the writer did not merit such an honour and there were several other writers who deserved the knighthood more than Rushdie.
Al-Qaeda has condemned the Rushdie honour. The Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri is quoted as saying in an audio recording that Britain's award for Indian-born Rushdie was "an insult to Islam", and it was planning "a very precise response."
Religious Beliefs
Rushdie came from a Muslim family though he is an atheist now. In 1990, in the "hope that it would reduce the threat of Muslims acting on the fatwa to kill him," he issued a statement claiming he had renewed his Muslim faith, had repudiated the attacks on Islam in his novel and was committed to working for better understanding of the religion across the world. However, Rushdie later said that he was only "pretending".
Personal Life
Rushdie has been married four times. He was married to his first wife Clarissa Luard from 1976 to 1987 and fathered a son, Zafar (born 1980). His second wife was the American novelist Marianne Wiggins; they were married in 1988 and divorced in 1993. His third wife, from 1997 to 2004, was Elizabeth West; they have a son, Milan (born 1999). In 2004, he married the Indian American actress and model Padma Lakshmi, the host of the American reality-television show Top Chef. The marriage ended on July 2, 2007, with Lakshmi indicating that it was her desire to end the marriage.
In 1999 Rushdie had an operation to correct ptosis, a tendon condition that causes drooping eyelids and that, according to him, was making it increasingly difficult for him to open his eyes. "If I hadn't had an operation, in a couple of years from now I wouldn't have been able to open my eyes at all," he said.
Since 2000, Rushdie has "lived mostly near Union Square" in New York City. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is replete with fantastical creatures, scary monsters, very bad men (or rather, male jinns/genies) and one heroic woman.... While Rushdie has written hyped up sagas of worlds colliding before, and always espouses reason over fanaticism, there is something so loopy, so unleashed, about this tale as to make it particularly thrilling.
New York Daily News
In these nested, swirling tales, Rushdie conjures up a whole universe of jinn slithering across time and space, meddling in human affairs and copulating like they’ve just been released from twenty years in a lamp.... Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights translates the bloody upheavals of our last few decades into the comic-book antics of warring jinn wielding bolts of fire, mystical transmutations and rhyming battle spells.
Washington Post
Splendid and heartfelt.... There’s an abundance of authorial winking here, the unabashed symbolism and double entendres quickly stacking up in a manner that wires Rushdie into an ancient storytelling tradition without preventing him from maintaining his own claim on originality and freshness.... Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights will be welcomed with a pure and generous affection by many, rather than the shock and awe of some of Rushdie’s earlier works.
Boston Globe
This is Rushdie’s first [novel] for adults since 2008, and he seems to be having fun with the adult content. He works in jokes about the sexual appetites of his jinn, brings alive dark corners of Manhattan, explores misplaced love, and creates a good-versus-evil battle that’s firmly grounded in phil;osophy.... Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is erudite without flaunting it, an amusement park of a pulpy disaster novel that resists flying out of control by being grounded by religion, history, culture and love.
Los Angeles Times
[Salman] Rushdie is our Scheherazade, inexhaustibly enfolding story within story and unfolding tale after tale with such irrepressible delight that it comes as a shock to remember that, like her, he has lived the life of a storyteller in immediate peril.... This book is a fantasy, a fairytale—and a brilliant reflection of and serious meditation on the choices and agonies of our life in this world.... I like to think how many readers are going to admire the courage of this book, revel in its fierce colors, its boisterousness, humor and tremendous pizzazz, and take delight in its generosity of spirit.
Ursula K. Le Guin - Guardian (UK)
The title adds up to 1,001 nights, an allusion to the story of Scheherazade, and although there are not 1,001 strands of story here, there are many, and they are colourful and compelling.... Rushdie displays the wry humour that helped make Midnight’s Children such a masterpiece.
Independent (UK)
A comic novel about Medieval Islamic philosophy, fairies and the near end of the world may sound difficult. Rushdie’s brilliance is in the balance between high art and pop culture.... This is a novel of both intellectual heft and sheer reading pleasure—a rare feat.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
There are monsters who slip through wormholes, or slits between worlds; there are battles and set pieces, in Fairyland and on Earth; there are sometimes ridiculous, sometimes hilarious comic turns; stories within stories; riddles within tales within legends. And there is Salman Rushdie, manic Scheherazade, assuming all the voices, playing all the parts, making a mad kind of sense of it all.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
A boisterous novel of ideas, a spirited manifesto for reason disguised as a tale of a jinn war lasting exactly two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights, or 1,001 nights.... What results is hallmark Rushdie: a composite of magic realism, mythology, science fiction and straight-up fantasy.... Like the best Rushdie novels, Two Years is playful and inventive, and also intellectually bracing.
Toronto Globe and Mail
(Starred review.) In his latest novel, Rushdie (Joseph Anton) invents his own cultural narrative—one that blends elements of One Thousand and One Nights, Homeric epics, and sci-fi and action/adventure comic books.... [A]n intellectual treasure chest cleverly disguised as a comic pop-culture apocalyptic caprice.
Publishers Weekly
Most readers will overlook Rushdie's not-so-subtle scolding in this rollicking magical realist adventure, which is fast paced and accessible. It can be enjoyed as a fairy-tale adventure, literary fiction, or a political allegory for our times. —Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD
Library Journal
(Starred review.) [A] rambunctious, satirical, and bewitching metaphysical fable, perhaps [Rushdie's] most thoroughly enjoyable to date.... Rushdie is having wickedly wise fun here. Every character has a keenly hilarious backstory, and the action...[is] exuberantly madcap, magical, and genuinely emotional.... [A] delectable update of One Thousand and One Nights.
Booklist
(Starred review.) Rushdie turns in a sometimes archly elegant, sometimes slightly goofy fairy tale...for grown-ups: "A fairy king," he writes, and he knows whereof he speaks, "can only be poisoned by the most dreadful and powerful of words." Beguiling and astonishing, wonderful and wondrous. Rushdie at his best.
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 Heart Goes Last
Margaret Atwood, 2015
Knopf Doubleday
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385540353
Summary
Living in their car, surviving on tips, Charmaine and Stan are in a desperate state.
So, when they see an advertisement for Consilience, a "social experiment" offering stable jobs and a home of their own, they sign up immediately. All they have to do in return for suburban paradise is give up their freedom every second month—swapping their home for a prison cell.
At first, all is well. But then, unknown to each other, Stan and Charmaine develop passionate obsessions with their "Alternates," the couple that occupy their house when they are in prison. Soon the pressures of conformity, mistrust, guilt and sexual desire begin to take over. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—November 18, 1939
• Where—Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
• Education—B.A., University of Toronto; M.A. Radcliffe; Ph.D., Harvard University
• Awards—Governor General's Award; Booker Prize; Giller Award
• Currently—lives in Toronto, Canada
Margaret Eleanor Atwood, is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She is among the most-honoured authors of fiction in recent history. She is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, winning once, and has been a finalist for the Governor General's Award several times, winning twice. She is also a founder of the Writers' Trust of Canada, a non-profit literary organization that seeks to encourage Canada's writing community.
Early life
Born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Atwood is the second of three children of Margaret Dorothy (nee Killam), a former dietitian and nutritionist, and Carl Edmund Atwood, an entomologist. Due to her father’s ongoing research in forest entomology, Atwood spent much of her childhood in the backwoods of Northern Quebec and traveling back and forth between Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie, and Toronto. She did not attend school full-time until she was in grade 8. She became a voracious reader of literature, Dell pocketbook mysteries, Grimm's Fairy Tales, Canadian animal stories, and comic books. She attended Leaside High School in Leaside, Toronto, and graduated in 1957.
Atwood began writing at the age of six and realized she wanted to write professionally when she was 16. In 1957, she began studying at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, where she published poems and articles in Acta Victoriana, the college literary journal. Her professors included Jay Macpherson and Northrop Frye. She graduated in 1961 with a Bachelor of Arts in English (honours) and a minor in philosophy and French.
In late 1961, after winning the E.J. Pratt Medal for her privately printed book of poems, Double Persephone, she began graduate studies at Harvard's Radcliffe College with a Woodrow Wilson fellowship. She obtained a master's degree (MA) from Radcliffe in 1962 and pursued further graduate studies at Harvard University for two years but did not finish her dissertation, "The English Metaphysical Romance." She has taught at the University of British Columbia (1965), Sir George Williams University in Montreal (1967–68), the University of Alberta (1969–70), York University in Toronto (1971–72), the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa (1985), where she was visiting M.F.A. Chair, and New York University, where she was Berg Professor of English.
Personal life
In 1968, Atwood married Jim Polk; they were divorced in 1973. She formed a relationship with fellow novelist Graeme Gibson soon after and moved to a farm near Alliston, Ontario, north of Toronto, where their daughter was born in 1976. The family returned to Toronto in 1980.
Other genres
While she is best known for her work as a novelist, she has also published fifteen books of poetry. Many of her poems have been inspired by myths and fairy tales, which have been interests of hers from an early age. Atwood has published short stories in Tamarack Review, Alphabet, Harper's, CBC Anthology, Ms., Saturday Night, and many other magazines. She has also published four collections of stories and three collections of unclassifiable short prose works.
Atwood has also produced several children's books, including Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut (1995) and Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes (2003)—delicious alliterative delights that introduce a wealth of new vocabulary to young readers
Speculative fiction vs. sci-fic
The Handmaid's Tale received the first Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987. The award is given for the best science fiction novel that was first published in the United Kingdom during the previous year. It was also nominated for the 1986 Nebula Award, and the 1987 Prometheus Award, both science fiction awards.
Atwood was at one time offended at the suggestion that The Handmaid's Tale or Oryx and Crake were science fiction, insisting to the UK's Guardian that they were speculative fiction instead: "Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen." She told the Book of the Month Club: "Oryx and Crake is a speculative fiction, not a science fiction proper. It contains no intergalactic space travel, no teleportation, no Martians."
She clarified her meaning on the difference between speculative and science fiction, admitting that others use the terms interchangeably: "For me, the science fiction label belongs on books with things in them that we can't yet do.... [S]peculative fiction means a work that employs the means already to hand and that takes place on Planet Earth." She said that science fiction narratives give a writer the ability to explore themes in ways that realistic fiction cannot.
Environmentalism
Although Atwood's politics are commonly described as being left-wing, she has indicated in interviews that she considers herself a Red Tory in the historical sense of the term. Atwood, along with her partner Graeme Gibson, is a member of the Green Party of Canada (GPC) and has strong views on environmental issues. She and Gibson are the joint honorary presidents of the Rare Bird Club within BirdLife International. She has been chair of the Writers' Union of Canada and president of PEN Canada, and is currently a vice president of PEN International. In a Globe and Mail editorial, she urged Canadians to vote for any other party to stop a Conservative majority.
During the debate in 1987 over a free trade agreement between Canada and the United States, Atwood spoke out against the deal, and wrote an essay opposing the agreement.
Atwood celebrated her 70th birthday at a gala dinner at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, marking the final stop of her international tour to promote The Year of the Flood. She stated that she had chosen to attend the event because the city has been home to one of Canada's most ambitious environmental reclamation programs: "When people ask if there's hope (for the environment), I say, if Sudbury can do it, so can you. Having been a symbol of desolation, it's become a symbol of hope." (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/17/2013.)
Book Reviews
As the narrative builds and couples try to regain their freedom, the quest is sometimes thrilling, sometimes comic, often absurd and entirely engaging, spinning sins into the territory of Elvis-themed escorts, stuffed-animal carnality and customizable sexbots.…What keeps The Heart Goes Last fresh, as with the rest of Atwood's recent work, is that while it revisits earlier themes of her oeuvre, it never replicates. Rather, it reads like an exploration continued, with new surprises, both narratively and thematically, to be discovered…Margaret Atwood…has become something nearly as fantastical as one of her storytelling subjects: a living legend who continues to remain fresh and innovative on the page. The Heart Goes Last is a captivating jump into the absurdity of dominance and desire, love and independence—opposing forces that never find resolution.
Mat Johnson - New York Times Book Review
At first a classic Atwood dystopia, rationally imagined and developed, [The Heart Goes Last] relaxes suddenly into a kind of surrealist adventure. The satirical impulse foregrounds itself. Narrative drive ramps up … Atwood allows her sense of the absurd its full elbow room; her cheerfully caustic contempt–bestowed even-handedly on contemporary economics, retro culture, and the social and neurological determination of identity–goes unrestrained … Jubilant comedy of errors, bizarre bedroom farce, SF prison-break thriller, psychedelic 60s crime caper: The Heart Goes Last scampers in and out of all of these genres, pausing only to quote Milton on the loss of Eden or Shakespeare on weddings. Meanwhile, it performs a hard-eyed autopsy on themes of impersonation and self-impersonation, revealing so many layers of contemporary deception and self-deception that we don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Guardian (UK)
[The Heart Goes Last] opens with an evocation of sub-prime poverty so hopeless, so crushing, and yet so engrossing that within 10 pages you don’t know whether to weep or applaud … You never lose the eerie feeling that each feature of this world could rematerialise in our own. It’s what makes her fiction the opposite of the escapism of the geek genres. It’s the lack of an escape route that shapes the predicaments of Atwood’s characters. That and an imagination without equal.
London Evening Standard (UK)
(Starred review.) In the dystopian landscape of the unflappable Atwood’s latest novel, there are "not enough jobs, and too many people.... Atwood is fond of intricate plot work, and the novel takes a long time to set up the action, but once it hits the last third, it gains an unstoppable momentum.
Publishers Weekly
In her first stand-alone novel since the Man Booker Prize-winning The Blind Assassin, published in 2000, Atwood draws on the same almost-here dystopia as her online Positron stories. Charmaine and Stan are barely getting by when they answer an ad for Consilience, a social experiment that allows them a comfortable home of their own in suburbia. The one little hitch is that every other month they must spend time in a prison cell. Classic Atwood.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) [A] riotous plot.... This laser-sharp, hilariously campy, and swiftly flowing satire delves deeply into our desires, vices, biases, and contradictions, bringing fresh, incisive comedy to the rising tide of postapocalyptic fiction in which Atwood has long been a clarion voice.
Booklist
Dystopian cliches are played as farce in this nasty tale. Comparisons to Atwood's earlier work...are best avoided here. This slapped-together pastiche...will leave the few who have gotten [to the end] completely bewildered.... Atwood has taught her readers to expect better.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. If you were in Stan and Charmaine’s situation, would you sign up for the Positron Project?
2. What is the significance of Charmaine’s memories of Grandma Win and her cheerful aphorisms?
3. Do you think society could actually break down to the point that it does in the novel? Why or why not?
4. Bright colors figure into many descriptions in the novel, and act as a counterpoint to the drab quality of daily life in Positron. Stan and Charmaine’s lockers are pink and green; the Alternates’ lockers are purple and red; prison uniforms are orange; the knitted bears are blue. Do you think the colors assigned to the various objects are intentional or incidental?
5. How did your attitudes toward Stan and Charmaine change over the course of the novel?
6. The novel’s title has surprising significance. When it was revealed, did you find it a clever twist or macabre and disturbing?
7. Charmaine is placed in an impossible situation when she discovers Stan on the gurney. Did she make the right choice? What would you have done?
8. No one is who he or she seems to be in Consilience. Did the shifting identities of characters make you wonder what their previous lives had been like before they came to Consilience? Would they have been better off "outside the walls"?
9. Could the Positron Project ever be a viable solution to solving societal upheaval?
10. The author is known for embracing emerging technologies, but in this work medical science and robotics are used in sinister and manipulative ways. In this sense is The Heart Goes Last a cautionary tale?
11. "The world is all before you," says Jocelyn at the close of the novel. How do you think Charmaine will adjust to freedom?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
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.)
Gold Fame Citrus
Claire Vaye Watkins, 2015
Penguin
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594634239
Summary
A love story set in a devastatingly imagined near future. Watkin's debut novel harnesses the same sweeping vision and deep heart that made her prize-winning story collection so arresting.
Unrelenting drought has transfigured Southern California into a surreal, phantasmagoric landscape. With the Central Valley barren, underground aquifer drained, and Sierra snowpack entirely depleted, most "Mojavs," prevented by both armed vigilantes and an indifferent bureaucracy from freely crossing borders to lusher regions, have allowed themselves to be evacuated to internment camps.
In Los Angeles' Laurel Canyon, two young Mojavs—Luz, once a poster child for the Bureau of Conservation and its enemies, and Ray, a veteran of the "forever war" turned surfer—squat in a starlet’s abandoned mansion. Holdouts, they subsist on rationed cola and whatever they can loot, scavenge, and improvise.
The couple’s fragile love somehow blooms in this arid place, and for the moment, it seems enough. But when they cross paths with a mysterious child, the thirst for a better future begins.
They head east, a route strewn with danger: sinkholes and patrolling authorities, bandits and the brutal, omnipresent sun. Ghosting after them are rumors of a visionary dowser—a diviner for water—and his followers, who whispers say have formed a colony at the edge of a mysterious sea of dunes.
Immensely moving, profoundly disquieting, and mind-blowingly original, Watkins’s novel explores the myths we believe about others and tell about ourselves, the double-edged power of our most cherished relationships, and the shape of hope in a precarious future that may be our own. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1984
• Where—Bishop, California, USA
• Raised—Mojave Desert (in California and Nevada)
• Education—B.A., University of Nevado-Reno; M.F.A., Ohio State University
• Awards—(below)
• Currently—teaches at the University of Michigan
Claire Vaye Watkins is an American author, whose 2012 story collection, Battleborn, swept nearly every award for short fiction.
Born in Bishop, California, Watkins was raised in the Mojave Desert—first in Tecopa, California, and then across the state line in Pahrump, Nevada. A graduate of the University of Nevada Reno, Claire earned her MFA from the Ohio State University, where she was a Presidential Fellow.
Writing
Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, One Story, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Best of the West 2011, New Stories from the Southwest 2013, New York Times and elsewhere. A recipient of fellowships from the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, Claire was also one of the National Book Foundation’s "5 Under 35."
In 2015 she released her debut novel Gold Fame Citrus to wide accclaim, praised for its originality and masterful writing.
Awards
Her collection of short stories, Battleborn, won the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame.
A Guggenheim Fellow, Claire is on the faculty of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. She is also the co-director, with Derek Palacio, of the Mojave School, a free creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada. (Adapted from the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Watkins has never been afraid to take structural risks in her work. Her...novel is interspersed with sections that break abruptly away from the story of Luz and Ray’s flight into sand, expanding the scope of the novel well beyond their lives. These leaps usually pay off—a chapter set in a psychiatric ward saves the latter half of the book from nihilism, for instance, and the section involving the businessman on the plane is spectacular. But not all of the stand-alone chapters connect.... But if this book is sometimes frustrating, it’s also fascinating. A great pleasure of the book is Watkins’s fearlessness, particularly in giving her characters free rein to be themselves.
Emily St. John Mandel - New York Times Book Review
A gripping, provocative debut novel.
Boston Globe
A beautiful debut novel.... Watkins' vision is profoundly terrifying. It's a novel that's effective precisely because it's so realistic—while Watkins' image of the future is undeniably dire, there's nothing about it that sounds implausible.... She also writes with a keen understanding of human nature, both good and bad. She has a genuine compassion for the Angelenos who have chosen to remain in their dying, desiccated city as well as for the ones who have evacuated.... The prose in Gold Fame Citrus is stunningly beautiful, even when—especially when—Watkins is describing the badlands that Southern California has become…. One might think there are only a few ways to portray a landscape that has become, essentially, nothing, but Watkins writes with a brutal kind of beauty, and even in the book's darkest moments, it's impossible to turn away. It's an urgent, frequently merciless book, as unrelenting as it is brilliant. Watkins forces us to confront things we'd probably rather ignore, but because we're human, we can't.
Los Angeles Times
Watkin’s narrative is mythic and speculative, its sediment forming and re-forming in lists, treatises, and reports. The writing, with its tough sentimentality, is reminiscent of Denis Johnson’s, but Watkins has a style of mordant observation all her own.
Harper's
[Gold Fame Citrus] burns with a dizzying, scorching genius.
Vanity Fair
At once beautiful and profoundly unsettling, [Gold Fame Citrus] sears its way into the brain, burning hot through the devastating journey and lingering long after the last page is turned.
Elle
Unsettingly resonant.... Watkins, whose brilliant short-story collection, Battleborn, revealed a deep understanding of the darker American mythologies, finds it’s not simply water we’re thirsty for.
Vogue
Watkins is at her best here, characterizing the easy slide from isolation to the open arms of an accepting, if ultimately wayward, community.... Gold Fame Citrus is a different kind of dystopia; one that illuminates the spiritual coping mechanisms of those living in an apocalyptic wasteland.
Huffington Post
(Starred review.) It's the near future: water is running out and a vast sand dune that covers whole towns is growing.... [Watkin's] book is packed with persuasive detail, luminous writing, and a grasp of the history (popular, political, natural, and imagined) needed to tell a story that is original yet familiar, strange yet all too believable.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Plagued by severe water shortages, the residents of California (already dwindling in number) are subjected to a forced evacuation.... [W]ith its damaged and complicated heroine and multiple voices, shifting perspectives, and unconventional narrative devices, [Gold Fame Citrus] is a wholly original work. —Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., Holbrook, NY
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Spectacular… In Margaret Atwood mode, Watkins spikes this fast-moving, high-tension, sexyecocrisis saga with caustic parodies and resounding allusions that cohere into a knowing and elegiac tale of scrappy adaptation and epic loss.
Booklist
(Starred review.) A tour-de-force first novel.... Watkins writes an unforgettable scene with a carousel; another in a dank tunnel where the couple seeks contraband blueberries. The author freckles her fiction with incantations, odd detours, hallucinations, and jokes.... [M]agnificently original.
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.)
This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance!
Jonathan Evison, 2015
Algonquin Books
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781616206017
Summary
With Bernard, her husband of fifty-five years, now in the grave, seventy-eight-year-old Harriet Chance impulsively sets sail on an ill-conceived Alaskan cruise that her late husband had planned.
But what she hoped would be a voyage leading to a new lease on life becomes a surprising and revelatory journey into Harriet’s past.
There, amid the overwhelming buffets and the incessant lounge singers, between the imagined appearances of her late husband and the very real arrival of her estranged daughter midway through the cruise, Harriet is forced to take a long look back, confronting the truth about pivotal events that changed the course of her life. And in the process she discovers that she’s been living the better part of that life under entirely false assumptions.
In This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! Jonathan Evison has crafted a bighearted novel with an endearing heroine at the helm. Through Harriet, he paints a bittersweet portrait of a postmodern everywoman, her story told with great warmth, humanity, and humor. Part dysfunctional love story, part poignant exploration of the mother-daughter relationship, nothing is what it seems in this tale of acceptance, reexamination, and forgiveness. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1968
• Where—San Jose, California, USA
• Education—High School
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives on Bainbridge, Washington
Jonathan Evison, an American writer, was born in San Jose, California. In his teens, he was the founding member and frontman of the Seattle punk band March of Crimes, which included future members of Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. He has lived in Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Missoula, Montana—and now lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington with his family.
Over the years, Evison worked as a laborer, a caregiver, a bartender, a telemarketer, a car salesman and a syndicated radio host. In this latter incarnation, he was the writer, producer, and host of the award winning comedy show, Shaken, Not Stirred.
Novels
Evison has published several novels—This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! (2015), The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving (2012), West of Here (2011), and All About Lulu (2008). A fifth novel, Mike Munoz Saves the World! The Great American Landscaping Novel, is not yet scheduled for release.
His work, often distinguished by its emotional resonance and offbeat humor; critics have compated him to a variety of authors, most notably J.D. Salinger, Charles Dickens, T.C. Boyle, nd John Irving.
Recognition
His debut novel, All About Lulu won critical acclaim, including the Washington State Book Award, and landed on many year-end "Best of" lists, including Hudson Booksellers, where it enjoyed the added distinction of being the only independent title selected in 2008. L Magazine included All About Lulu in its "Best Books of the Decade."
Evison's second novel, West of Here, became a New York Times bestseller. It won the 2012 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award and the Booklist Editor's Choice Award, and it was named "Book of the Year" by Hudson Booksellers. Editor Chuck Adams (Water for Elephants, A Reliable Wife) called West of Here the best novel he's worked on in over four decades of publishing.
Evison's third novel, The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, also received wide acclaim, earning him his second Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. Janet Maslin of the New York Times called it his "most stealthily powerful novel." A film version, scheduled for release in 2016, stars Paul Rudd.
Extras
He is one of the contributors to the literary website Three Guys One Book and is the executive editor of The Nervous Breakdown, where among other duties, he curates the national book club. He was the first guest on author and podcaster Brad Listi's podcast Other People.
Evison allegedly wrote six unpublished novels before the 2008 publication of All About Lulu, physically burying three of them and purportedly burning all of his rejection letters. He is renowned for his extensive and colorful book touring, and his love of beer.
In 2009 and 2011 he was nominated by the American Book Association as Most Engaging Author. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/29/2015.)
Book Reviews
The one constant in This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! is Evison's brutal honesty…. Evison resists every neat resolution, every unearned epiphany. As fanciful as his prose can be…he's not afraid to depict the dark side of aging as it is, and not as we wish it were…. [This] is a book that speaks to all of us, whether we're young enough to check Facebook 50 times a day, or old enough to have only a vague idea what the Internet is. The themes Evison presents—disappointment, delusion, redemption—are universal, and he deals with them beautifully in this wonderful novel…. The truth is sometimes hard to accept, but we have no choice but to do so. This is your life, Harriet Chance, but it's ours, too.
Michael Schaub - New York Times Book Review
Evison’s open-hearted, effervescent fourth novel...is structured as “an unsentimental accounting” of Harriet’s highs and lows.... This reader personally overdosed on adorable spirits after “It’s a Wonderful Life,”..., but Evison handles the jaunty tone with aplomb.
That lightness of touch is both a strength and a weakness.
Lisa Zeidner - Washington Post
Evison’s rollicking novel is a close-up up of the life of 78-year-old Harriet Chance, whose Alaskan cruise highlights include indulging in endless seafood buffets, acquiring touristy tribal knickknackery, and discovering the secret of her deceased husband’s decades-long affair with her best friend.
Oprah Magazine
Slowly, and with admirable, dark precision, Evison lays Harriet bare. The lies, the dodges, the secrets and frustrated desires. This is where the voice serves him. With a touch of snark and a lashing of perfectly affected irony, he flenses her to the bone and, somehow, seems kind in doing it. Comforting, even. That huckster's sing-song dripping with love, forgiveness and understanding—all of which have been in short supply during Harriet’s life.... It is Evison’s timing—the slow burn and perfect pacing of the reveals—that makes This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! hang together. He understands that, ultimately, every game show host stands as straight man to the goofy humanity of the regular folk sharing his stage. And with Harriet Chance—poor, frustrated, flummoxed Harriet—Evison has found his ideal foil.
NPR Books
Evison’s voice is buoyant and cheeky as he unveils the deep traumas that form Harriet’s sense of herself, but there are missteps.... Still, Evison succeeds in crafting a believable and gut-wrenching story, particularly Harriet’s relationship with her daughter.
Publishers Weekly
[S]mart readers will want to take this Alaskan cruise [Evison has] booked for widowed 79-year-old Harriet Chance, who suddenly realizes that her whole life has been based on a lie.
Library Journal
Both uplifting and melancholy, funny and thought-provoking, this entertaining read speaks directly to the importance of acceptance and healing.
Booklist
(Starred review.) Insightful, richly entertaining look at a woman who, very late in the game, finds that life remains full of surprises.... Evison writes humanely and with good humor of his characters, who, like the rest of us, muddle through, too often without giving ourselves much of a break. A lovely, forgiving character study that's a pleasure to read.
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.)