The Nature of the Beast (Inspector Gamache series, 11)
Louise Penny, 2015
St. Martin's Press
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250022080
Summary
Hardly a day goes by when nine year old Laurent Lepage doesn't cry wolf. From alien invasions, to walking trees, to winged beasts in the woods, to dinosaurs spotted in the village of Three Pines, his tales are so extraordinary no one can possibly believe him.
Including Armand and Reine-Marie Gamache, who now live in the little Quebec village.
But when the boy disappears, the villagers are faced with the possibility that one of his tall tales might have been true.
And so begins a frantic search for the boy and the truth. What they uncover deep in the forest sets off a sequence of events that leads to murder, leads to an old crime, leads to an old betrayal. Leads right to the door of an old poet.
And now it is now, writes Ruth Zardo. And the dark thing is here.
A monster once visited Three Pines. And put down deep roots. And now, Ruth knows, it is back.
Armand Gamache, the former head of homicide for the Surete du Quebec, must face the possibility that, in not believing the boy, he himself played a terrible part in what happens next. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1958
• Where—Toronto, Canada
• Education—B.A, Ryerson University
• Awards—Agatha Award (4 times) "New Blood" Dagger Award;
Arthur Ellis Award; Barry Award, Anthony Award; Dilys Award.
• Currently—lives in Knowlton, Canada (outside of Montreal)
In her words
I live outside a small village south of Montreal, quite close to the American border. I'd like to tell you a little bit about myself. I was born in Toronto in 1958 and became a journalist and radio host with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, specializing in hard news and current affairs. My first job was in Toronto and then moved to Thunder Bay at the far tip of Lake Superior, in Ontario. It was a great place to learn the art and craft of radio and interviewing, and listening. That was the key. A good interviewer rarely speaks, she listens. Closely and carefully. I think the same is true of writers.
From Thunder Bay I moved to Winnipeg to produce documentaries and host the CBC afternoon show. It was a hugely creative time with amazingly creative people. But I decided I needed to host a morning show, and so accepted a job in Quebec City. The advantage of a morning show is that it has the largest audience, the disadvantage is having to rise at 4am.
But Quebec City offered other advantages that far outweighed the ungodly hour. It's staggeringly beautiful and almost totally French and I wanted to learn. Within weeks I'd called Quebecers "good pumpkins", ordered flaming mice in a restaurant, for dessert naturally, and asked a taxi driver to "take me to the war, please." He turned around and asked "Which war exactly, Madame?" Fortunately elegant and venerable Quebec City has a very tolerant and gentle nature and simply smiled at me.
From there the job took me to Montreal, where I ended my career on CBC Radio's noon programme.
In my mid-thirties the most remarkable thing happened. I fell in love with Michael, the head of hematology at the Montreal Children's Hospital. He'd go on to hold the first named chair in pediatric hematology in Canada, something I take full credit for, out of his hearing.
It's an amazing and blessed thing to find love later in life. It was my first marriage and his second. He'd lost his first wife to cancer a few years earlier and that had just about killed him. Sad and grieving we met and began a gentle and tentative courtship, both of us slightly fearful, but overcome with the rightness of it. And overcome with gratitude that this should happen to us and deeply grateful to the family and friends who supported us.
Fifteen years later we live in an old United Empire Loyalist brick home in the country, surrounded by maple woods and mountains and smelly dogs.
Since I was a child I've dreamed of writing and now I am. Beyond my wildest dreams (and I can dream pretty wild) the Chief Inspector Gamache books have found a world-wide audience, won awards and ended up on bestseller lists including the New York Times. Even more satisfying, I have found a group of friends in the writing community. Other authors, booksellers, readers—who have become important parts of our lives. I thought writing might provide me with an income—I had no idea the real riches were more precious but less substantial. Friendships.
There are times when I'm in tears writing. Not because I'm so moved by my own writing, but out of gratitude that I get to do this. In my life as a journalist I covered deaths and accidents and horrible events, as well as the quieter disasters of despair and poverty. Now, every morning I go to my office, put the coffee on, fire up the computer and visit my imaginary friends, Gamache and Beauvoir and Clara and Peter. What a privilege it is to write. I hope you enjoy reading the books as much as I enjoy writing them.
Chief Inspector Gamache was inspired by a number of people, and one main inspiration was this man holding a copy of En plein coeur. Jean Gamache, a tailor in Granby. He looks slightly as I picture Gamache, but mostly it was his courtesy and dignity and kind eyes that really caught my imagination. What a pleasure to be able to give him a copy of En plein coeur! (From the author's website with permission.)
Book Reviews
Penny sustains her high-wire act, creating characters of remarkable depth in an exhilarating whodunit.
People
Louise Penny is unsurpassed at building a sense of heart-stopping urgency. Sometimes the stakes are personal: a marriage, a character's sanity. Sometimes the threat is to the village, a culture or even to the province of Quebec. This time Penny manages to create a threat that could truly be worldwide, and to place its future in the hands of our friends in Three Pines.
Salem Macknee - Raleigh News & Observer
(Starred review.) Three Pines again proves no refuge in Penny's stellar [The Nature of the Beast]...fans will delight in [her] continued complex fleshing out of characters they have come to love.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) A strong sense of place, a multilayered plot, and well-crafted (and for Penny's fans, familiar) characters combine for a thoughtful, intriguing tale. More than a simple mystery, Penny's novel peels away the emotional and psychological layers of the inhabitants of Three Pines.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) [A] compelling mystery that leads to an exciting but tantalizingly open-ended finale.
Booklist
(Starred review.) [M]agical....[T]he perfect reminder of the dark side of human nature, but that side does not always win out. Penny is an expert at pulling away the surface of her characters to expose their deeper-and often ugly-layers, always doing so with a direct but compassionate hand.
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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Among the Ten Thousand Things
Julia Pierpont, 2015
Random House
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812995220
Summary
A portrait of an American family on the cusp of irrevocable change, and a startlingly original story of love and time lost.
Jack Shanley is a well-known New York artist, charming and vain, who doesn’t mean to plunge his family into crisis. His wife, Deb, gladly left behind a difficult career as a dancer to raise the two children she adores. In the ensuing years, she has mostly avoided coming face-to-face with the weaknesses of the man she married.
But then an anonymously sent package arrives in the mail: a cardboard box containing sheaves of printed emails chronicling Jack’s secret life. The package is addressed to Deb, but it’s delivered into the wrong hands: her children’s.
With this vertiginous opening begins a debut that is by turns funny, wise, and indescribably moving. As the Shanleys spin apart into separate orbits, leaving New York in an attempt to regain their bearings, fifteen-year-old Simon feels the allure of adult freedoms for the first time, while eleven-year-old Kay wanders precariously into a grown-up world she can’t possibly understand.
Writing with extraordinary precision, humor, and beauty, Julia Pierpont has crafted a timeless, hugely enjoyable novel about the bonds of family life—their brittleness, and their resilience. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1986-87 (?)
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Barnard College; M.F.A., New York University
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City
Julia Pierpont is a graduate of the NYU Creative Writing Program, where she received the Rona Jaffe Foundation Graduate Fellowship, as well as the Stein Fellowship. She lives in New York City. (From the publisher.)
See Vanity Fair's article about the author.
Book Reviews
[A] sharp, knowing dissection of an unraveling marriage…it shows a remarkably mature understanding of the delicate emotional balances in families—how feelings can flow back and forth like electricity in some kind of zero-sum game—and the subtle, irrational vicissitudes of people's psyches. We follow first one character and then another as each tries to manage what has happened. It is an old story, a crumbling marriage, but Ms. Pierpont gives it fresh insights, making the particular unhappiness (and occasional happiness) of the Shanleys by turns poignant, funny and very sad.
Sarah Lyall - New York Times
[L]uscious, smart summer novel...about a family blown apart and yet still painfully tethered together, written by a blazingly talented young author whose prose is so assured and whose observations are so precise and deeply felt that it's almost an insult to bring up her age. At 28, Pierpont has a preternatural understanding of the vulnerabilities of middle age and the vicissitudes of a long marriage…In truth, the writing and the storytelling make the twists and turns of a marriage between such shallow characters more interesting than they have any right to be…Among the Ten Thousand Things is…an impressive debut.
Helen Schulman - New York Times Book Review
[A] tender, delicately perceptive account of one family torn apart by infidelity.... Pierpont’s voice is wry and confident, and she is a fine anthropologist of New York life, especially for those creative types who never quite manage to fit in with cultural expectations.
Washington Post
[An] excellent, insightful first novel...[and] gripping portrait of the disintegration of the Shanley family.... Pierpont brings this family of four to life in sharply observed detail.... An acute observer of social comedy, Ms. Pierpont has a keen eye for the absurd.
Moira Hodgson - Wall Street Journal
Pierpont displays a precocious gift for language and observation.... She captures the minutiae of loneliness that pushes us away from each other and sometimes brings us back.... It’s an impressive insight from such a young writer and a reminder that none of us can know for certain what we would put up with in light of this truth.
San Francisco Chronicle
Pierpont orchestrates the narrative with verve, telling her story from the perspective of each family member. There are moments of wry hilarity, and of wisdom. . . . Pierpont leaps into the future in two brief sections titled That Year and Those That Followed, then back into the ongoing crisis, making the details of how this family unravels ever more touching.
BBC
What sets Pierpont apart...is her storytelling chops. The chapters that follow that dramatic opening make it clear that there are going to be as many ingenious twists and turns in this literary novel as there are in a top-notch work of suspense like Gone Girl. The effect is dizzying: as a reader you feel, as the Shanleys do, that the earth keeps shifting beneath your feet.
Maureen Corrigan - NPR
Pierpont’s language is heart-stopping. In one scene, with her characters suspended in emotional turmoil, she pauses to describe their empty house. There’s even a sparse, poetic interlude in the middle of the book that skips across the family’s lives for decades. . . . Then she rewinds the decades and picks up where she left off. It’s the kind of structural risk that shouldn’t work, but in her skilled hands it lands beautifully. Technically, of course, this is a domestic drama. But between Pierpont’s literary finesse and her captivating characters, it reads like a page-turner. (Grade A)
Entertainment Weekly
Bracing.... Pierpont’s killer ending reveals the long reach of the affair’s consequences (sorry, no plot spoilers). Consider this a twisty, gripping story—that packs an emotional wallop.
O Magazine
Fans of [Virginia] Woolf’s insight into the human consciousness...will savor Pierpont’s acute observation of a family in crisis, her deft pacing and deeply human characterization of each member of the family. Among the Ten Thousand Things speaks to what makes a person, and a family, tick, even when it can so easily seem utterly inexplicable.
Huffington Post
An emotionally sophisticated, nuanced examination of a splintering Upper West Side New York City family.... Among the Ten Thousand Things rises above for its imagined structure, sentence-by-sentence punch, and pure humanity. Weaving readers through the New York streets with the Shanleys, and in and out of each of their minds as they try to survive the infidelity that’s torn them from the life they’ve built, Pierpont has written a debut so honest and mature that it will resonate with even the most action-hungry readers—perhaps against reason. Her story is the one we’ll be talking about this summer, and well beyond.
Meredith Turits - Vanity Fair
(Starred review.) The perennial theme of marital infidelity is given a brisk, insightful, and sophisticated turn in Pierpont’s impressive debut.... Pierpont throws an audacious twist midway through the book, giving the slow, painful denouement a heartbreaking inevitability. This novel leaves an indelible portrait.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [A]n expertly crafted story of a family in crisis.... Pierpont wields words like beautiful weapons. This short novel is a treat for fans of Jonathan Franzen, Jami Attenberg, and Emma Straub, and shows off an exciting new voice on the literary landscape. —Kate Gray, Worcester P.L., MA
Library Journal
Long-simmering tensions boil over in the Shanley household to devastating effect.... [F]or all the book's sadness, much of its lingering force comes from Pierpont's sharp-witted detailing of human absurdity. A quietly wrenching family portrait.
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.)
Days of Awe
Lauren Fox, 2015
Knopf Doubleday
262 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307268129
Summary
Days of Awe is the story of a woman who, in the wake of her best friend’s sudden death, must face the crisis in her marriage, the fury of her almost-teenage daughter, and the possibility of opening her cantankerous heart to someone new.
Only a year ago Isabel Moore was married, was the object of adoration for her ten-year-old daughter, and thought she knew everything about her wild, extravagant, beloved best friend, Josie.
But in that one short year her husband moved out and rented his own apartment; her daughter grew into a moody insomniac; and Josie—impulsive, funny, secretive Josie—was killed behind the wheel in a single-car accident. As the relationships that long defined Isabel—wife, mother, daughter, best friend—change before her eyes, Isabel must try to understand who she really is.
Teeming with longing, grief, and occasional moments of wild, unexpected joy, Days of Awe is a daring, dazzling book—a luminous exploration of marriage, motherhood, and the often surprising shape of new love. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1976
• Where—Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
• Education—M.F.A., University of Minnesota
• Currently—lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Lauren Fox is the author of Days of Awe (2015), Friends Like Us (2012), and Still Life with Husband (2007). She earned her MFA from the University of Minnesota in 1998, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Marie Claire, Seventeen, Glamour, and Salon. She lives in Milwaukee with her husband and two daughters. (From the publisher.)
Visit the author's website.
Book Reviews
What's wonderful about reading a novelist's books in back-to-back sequence is that you witness the writer grow not gradually, but seemingly overnight.... Fox's latest novel, Days of Awe...treads on new territory: parenthood, loss and death.... Fox paints touching portraits of the bonds between mothers and daughters. Helene has a wonderful verve.... Iz wins the reader's sympathy by continually putting herself out there.... Careful and nuanced.
Patricia Park - New York Times Book Review
Darkly hilarious…. Fox is a master of emotional misdirection, and what she presents here tastes like carbonated grief, an elixir of sorrow gassed up with her nervous humor… With Days of Awe, Fox has created a winding internal monologue as Isabel tries to catch her bearings in a world that suddenly seems out of kilter…. Leavened with wry silliness that fans will remember from Fox’s previous novels, Friends Like Us and Still Life with Husband… [Isabel is] an extremely endearing narrator, the kind of woman who makes straight-faced jokes that her uptight colleagues don’t get, and then feels both superior and mortified…. There are veins of Anne Lamott running through these pages, a sweet blend of sentimentality and wit… And Fox is a great comic on the subject of aging, too. Her narrator wears sweatpants that are "a blend of cotton and self-loathing." She could be channeling Nora Ephron…. Surprisingly buoyant.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
The hands of time stop for no one, not even Lauren Fox. With each new novel, the characters of this irrepressibly comedic chronicler of friendship, marriage and romantic foibles among white Milwaukeean Generation X-ers advance and mature in concert with their author. And yet her prose remains as fresh as if it spritzed from the wordsmith’s fountain of youth. With Days of Awe, however, Fox’s insouciance is tempered by an omnipresent awareness of "that cold lick of mortality...." The fearlessness with which Fox frees her women to behave badly heightens both the credibility and the pleasure of her fiction.
Jan Stuart - Boston Globe
As Fox deconstructs the myth of perfect womanhood, her humor and humanity remind us that love’s the only lifeboat through grief. (Book of the Week)
People
Days of Awe will keep you reading… Fox's previous novels, Still Life With Husband and Friends Like Us, were celebrated for witty and intelligent examinations of friendship and marriage. Days of Awe is no exception.
Mary Ann Grossman - St. Paul Pioneer Press
Her latest work explores the ever-shifting landscape of a woman in her 40s with the same sly humor and snappy dialogue that has made Fox one of my favorite novelists to recommend… Days of Awe is an examination of grief and how one can move past it, or at least make it through each day without succumbing to its persistent demands.
Meganne Fabrega - Minneapolis Star Tribune
Lauren Fox ... takes women who are falling apart and pulls wit, snark, pith, and occasional insight out of them. No contemporary novelist makes me stop as often to mark or admire one of her sentences. Plenty of people can write limpid or fancy prose, but Fox ladles out one flavorful reduction ... after another.... Days of Awe draws its title from the period of the solemn introspection urged upon Jews between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, though Fox's narrator, Isabel Applebaum Moore, also experiences gentler moments of wonder and appreciation.... Were Days of Awe the pilot script for a TV series, elderly actresses would throw elbows to audition for Helene... Poignant.
Jim Higgins - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
[A] tale about a woman’s attempt to piece her life together following the death of her best friend.... Isabel’s nuanced character is relatable—her struggles are universal and the reader will root for her to succeed. Raw and darkly humorous at times, Fox’s novel is a winner.
Publishers Weekly
An insightful novel by Lauren Fox that explores how grief can make every arena of life feel suddenly disorienting… Humor brings levity to Fox's frank, thought-provoking story that adds surprising depth and meaning, layer upon layer, page by page… Fox once again explores, with a smart and refreshing perspective, the underside of friendships, marriage, love and loss—and the range of emotions that can plague and liberate the human heart.
Kathleen Gerard - Shelf Awareness
[Fox] has such an offbeat way of looking at things that you'll eagerly keep reading just to see what she's going to say next. Read it for the magnetic voice and Fox's ever interesting perspective on work, love, friendship, and parenthood—because, really, what else is there?
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. This novel touches on multiple themes—friendship, marriage, loyalty and betrayal, parenting, responsibility, and blame. Which emerges as the most important? What larger points is the author making?
2. What does the title mean?
3. Before Josie’s funeral, Mark tells Isabel that his wife’s death is his fault. She thinks, "Of course it was his fault. And it was my fault, and possibly Chris’s, and most definitely Josie’s, and some other people’s faults, too: we were all guilty, to varying degrees..." (page 4) Why does Isabel believe this? How were they responsible?
4. Josie’s death ripples through the relationships of her friends and family, whose lives change dramatically in the following year. How does one event set so much in motion?
5. Discuss the episode at the Lake Kass Wetlands Preserve. Why does Isabel think, "Some darkness descended on Josie that weekend, and it never quite lifted"? (page 63)
6. Josie’s theory of art: "...when you see a work of art flipped on its side, you ask questions of it that wouldn’t have occurred to you otherwise." (page 77) How does this figure into what happens after her death?
7. When Mark tells Isabel he’s dating one of the Andes, why does she take it as such a betrayal?
8. Discuss Isabel’s relationship with Hannah. Why doesn’t she notice that Hannah isn’t sleeping?
9. The concept of loss weaves through the novel—Josie’s death, Isabel’s miscarriages, Helene’s family in the Holocaust. Helene would say, "The worst has already happened to us." (page 103) How do these losses influence Isabel?
10. What do we learn about Cal when he takes Isabel on a visit to his mother? What do we learn about Isabel?
11. When Josie confesses her relationship with Alex, Isabel immediately takes Mark’s side. Why? How does this affect her friendship with Josie?
12. During a session of couple’s therapy, Chris says to Isabel, "You’re not who I thought you were." (page 157) What does he mean? What has Josie’s death revealed?
13. After Isabel suggests that Cal take her back to his place, why does she change her mind? What is she afraid of?
14. Mark and Andi’s holiday party marks a turning point in several relationships. How might things have gone differently if Isabel had subdued her discomfort?
15. Why does Isabel meet with Alex? What does she learn from his story about Josie threatening to tell his wife?
16. In retrospect, Isabel recognizes several signs that Josie was unraveling: calling a student a bitch, stealing a coat, bringing a rum-laced soda to school. If she had put the pieces together sooner, what might she have done?
17. When Hannah asks to move in with Chris for a while, why does Isabel say no? Why does Hannah accept that decision so readily?
18. Does the idea that Josie committed suicide make sense to you? Why does it suddenly occur to Isabel?
19. Is Cal "the kind of person who would hide us in an attic"? (page 45)
20. The novel closes: "It’s a shock of nerves, embarrassed thrill, and it is also the saddest story I’ve ever heard. It sounds like this: goodbye, goodbye, goodbye." (page 256) What does this mean?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Infinite Home
Katlhleen Alcott, 2015
Penguin
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594633638
Summary
A beautifully wrought story of an ad hoc family and the crisis they must overcome together.
Edith is a widowed landlady who rents apartments in her Brooklyn brownstone to an unlikely collection of humans, all deeply in need of shelter.
Crippled in various ways—in spirit, in mind, in body, in heart—the renters struggle to navigate daily existence, and soon come to realize that Edith’s deteriorating mind, and the menacing presence of her estranged, unscrupulous son, Owen, is the greatest challenge they must confront together.
Faced with eviction by Owen and his designs on the building, the tenants—Paulie, an unusually disabled man and his burdened sister, Claudia; Edward, a misanthropic stand-up comic; Adeleine, a beautiful agoraphobe; Thomas, a young artist recovering from a stroke—must find in one another what the world has not yet offered or has taken from them: family, respite, security, worth, love.
The threat to their home scatters them far from where they’ve begun, to an ascetic commune in Northern California, the motel rooms of depressed middle America, and a stunning natural phenomenon in Tennessee, endangering their lives and their visions of themselves along the way.
With humanity, humor, grace, and striking prose, Kathleen Alcott portrays these unforgettable characters in their search for connection, for a life worth living, for home. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1988-89
• Where—Petaluma, California, USA
• Education—Chapman University
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York, New York
Kathleen Alcott is the author of the 2012 novel The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets, which was translated into several languages. Her second novel Infinite Home was released in 2015.
Alcott's fiction, criticism, and essays appear in publications including the Los Angeles Review of Books, Coffin Factory, Rumpus, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. Born in Northern California, she currently resides in Brooklyn. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Kathleen Alcott's second novel takes on a big question—what makes a "home" a "home"?—and answers with stunning originality.... Beyond this compelling story, Alcott's incredibly accomplished prose is good reason to put Infinite Home at the very top of your to-read list.
Bustle.com
Alcott’s new novel takes place in a sprawling Brooklyn brownstone, offering a peek into the complicated lives of the tenants who have come to live in it.... The writing is dreamy and easy to inhabit, but is occasionally undermined by its tendency toward abstraction, when it would benefit more from precise plot development. Nevertheless, Alcott’s writing is generous, and her peculiar cast of characters memorable.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) In her quietly wonderful second book, Alcott displays a deft hand with every one of her odd and startlingly real characters.... Their situation may not be enviable, but Alcott's handling of it is. The voices in this book speak volumes. A luminous second novel from a first-class storyteller.
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.)
Last Bus to Wisdom
Ivan Doig, 2015
Penguin
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594632020
Summary
The final novel from a great American storyteller.
Donal Cameron is being raised by his grandmother, the cook at the legendary Double W ranch in Ivan Doig’s beloved Two Medicine Country of the Montana Rockies, a landscape that gives full rein to an eleven-year-old’s imagination.
But when Gram has to have surgery for “female trouble” in the summer of 1951, all she can think to do is to ship Donal off to her sister in faraway Manitowoc, Wisconsin. There Donal is in for a rude surprise: Aunt Kate–bossy, opinionated, argumentative, and tyrannical—is nothing like her sister. She henpecks her good-natured husband, Herman the German, and Donal can’t seem to get on her good side either.
After one contretemps too many, Kate packs him back to the authorities in Montana on the next Greyhound. But as it turns out, Donal isn’t traveling solo: Herman the German has decided to fly the coop with him. In the immortal American tradition, the pair light out for the territory together, meeting a classic Doigian ensemble of characters and having rollicking misadventures along the way.
Charming, wise, and slyly funny, Last Bus to Wisdom is a last sweet gift from a writer whose books have bestowed untold pleasure on countless readers. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 27, 1939
• Where—White Sulphur Springs, Montana, USA
• Death—April 9, 2015
• Where—Seattle, Washington
• Education—B.A., M.A., Northwestern University; Ph.D., University of Washington
Ivan Doig was born in Montana to a family of home-steaders and ranch hands. After the death of his mother Berneta, on his sixth birthday, he was raised by his father Charles "Charlie" Doig and his grandmother Elizabeth "Bessie" Ringer. After several stints on ranches, they moved to Dupuyer, Pondera County, Montana in the north to herd sheep close to the Rocky Mountain front.
After his graduation from Valier high school, Doig attended Northwestern University, where he received a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in journalism. He later earned a Ph.D. in American history at the University of Washington, writing his dissertation about John J. McGilvra (1827-1903). He now lives with his wife Carol Doig, nee Muller, a university professor of English, in Seattle, Washington.
Before he became a novelist, Doig wrote for newspapers and magazines as a free-lancer and worked for the United States Forest Service. He has also published two memoirs—This House of Sky (1979) and Heart Earth (1993).
Much of his fiction (more than 10 novels) is set in the Montana country of his youth. His major theme is family life in the past, mixing personal memory and regional history. As the western landscape and people play an important role in his fiction, he has been hailed as the new dean of western literature, a worthy successor to Wallace Stegner. (From Wikipedia.)
Extras
His own words:
• Taking apart a career in such summary sentences always seems to me like dissecting a frog—some of the life inevitably goes out of it—and so I think the more pertinent Ivan Doig for you, Reader, is the red-headed only child, son of ranch hand Charlie Doig and ranch cook Berneta Ringer Doig (who died of her lifelong asthma on my sixth birthday), who in his junior year of high school (Valier, Montana; my class of 1957 had 21 members) made up his mind to be a writer of some kind.
• No one is likely to confuse my writing style with that of Charlotte Bronte, but when that impassioned parson’s daughter lifted her pen from Jane Eyre and bequeathed us the most intriguing of plot summaries—"Reader, I married him"—she also was subliminally saying what any novelist ... must croon to those of you with your eyes on our pages: "Reader, my story is flirting with you; please love it back."
• One last word about the setting of my work, the American West. I don’t think of myself as a "Western" writer. To me, language—the substance on the page, that poetry under the prose—is the ultimate "region," the true home, for a writer. Specific geographies, but galaxies of imaginative expression —we’ve seen them both exist in William Faulkner’s postage stamp-size Yoknapatawpha County, and in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s nowhere village of Macondo, dreaming in its hundred years of solitude. If I have any creed that I wish you as readers, necessary accomplices in this flirtatious ceremony of writing and reading, will take with you from my pages, it’d be this belief of mine that writers of caliber can ground their work in specific land and lingo and yet be writing of that larger country: life. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
[O]ne of Doig's best novels, an enchanting 1950s road-trip tale that swaps Kerouac's Sal Paradise for a plucky 11-year-old named Donal Cameron…Doig has always written with a keen ear for Western vernacular, but in Last Bus to Wisdom he kicks subtlety to the curb and adopts the sort of exaggerated patter that the Coen brothers put to use in O Brother, Where Art Thou?…In less experienced hands this might come off as a cheap trick, but Doig handles the device with the loving care of a literary curator, inviting his readers to take pleasure in the language…There's a full-circle feel to the book. Donal's early circumstances—Montana ranch, grandmother's care—match those of the author's own, and it's warming to think that in his final months Doig shared the writing hours with one of his greatest characters: a version of his younger self wound up and set spinning on the long zigzag adventure called life in the American West.
Bruce Barcot - New York Times Book Review
The pleasures of reading Doig’s final novel (he died in April 2015) are bittersweet.... Though this book lacks the deeper resonance of Doig’s previous novels, such as Dancing at the Rascal Fair and his classic nonfiction memoir, This House of Sky, it’s nonetheless a heartwarming, memorable story.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Doig's superb storytelling does not disappoint. The dialog is snappy, funny, and true to the charming characters. With the author's passing in April, this is the last journey into familiar Doig territory we've come to admire. —Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Palisade, CO
Library Journal
(Starred review.) An utterly charming, goodhearted romp...this posthumous publication will be greeted enthusiastically as a fitting tribute to a memorable body of work.
Booklist
Two long-distance bus trips give an 11-year-old new horizons and run a lively gamut through mid-20th-century American life.... A marvelous picaresque showing off the late Doig's ready empathy for all kinds of people and his perennial gift for spinning a great yarn. He will be missed.
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.)