Kindred
Octavia E. Butler, 1979
Beacon Press
264 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780807083109
Summary
Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband, when she is abruptly snatched from her home in present California and transported back to the antebellum South.
Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning; and Dana has been summoned across the years to save him. After this first summons, Dana is drawn back again and again to the plantation to protect Rufus and ensure that he will grow to manhood and father the daughter who is to become her ancestor. Each time, however, the stays grow longer and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana's life will end, long before it has even begun. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 22, 1947
• Where—Pasadena, California, USA
• Death—February 24, 2006
• Where—Lake Forest Park, Washington (State)
• Education—A.A., Pasadena Community College; attended University of California, Los Angeles
• Awards—Hugo Awards, Nebula Awards (more below)
Octavia Estelle Butler was an American science fiction writer. A multiple recipient of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, Butler was one of the best-known women in the field. In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Fellowship, nicknamed the Genius Grant.
Life and education
Butler was born and raised in a struggling, racially mixed neighborhood of Pasadena, California. Her father Laurice, a shoeshiner, died when she was a baby, and she was raised by her grandmother and mother (Octavia M. Butler) who worked as a maid.
According to the Norton Anthology of African American Literature Butler was "an introspective only child in a strict Baptist household" who was "drawn early to [science fiction] magazines such as Amazing Fantasy and Science Fiction and Galaxy. She soon began reading all the science fiction classics."
Nicknamed Junie, Octavia was paralytically shy and a daydreamer; she was later diagnosed as dyslexic. She began writing at the age of ten "to escape loneliness and boredom" and by twelve began her lifelong interest in science fiction. As she later told the journal Black Scholar,
I was writing my own little stories when I was 12. I was watching a bad science fiction movie called Devil Girl from Mars and decided that I could write a better story than that. And I turned off the TV and proceeded to try, and I've been writing science fiction ever since.
After getting her Associate of Arts degree in 1968 from Pasadena City College, she next enrolled at California State University, Los Angeles. She eventually left UCLA and took writing classes through an extension program.
Butler credited two writing workshops for giving her "the most valuable help" she had received with her writing:
- The Open Door Workshop of the Screenwriters' Guild of America, West, a program designed to mentor Latino and African American writers. It was Through Open Door that she met the noted science fiction writer Harlan Ellison.
- The Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop, (introduced to her by Ellison), where she first met Samuel R. Delany.
Throughout her career, she remained a self-identified science fiction fan, an insider who rose from within the ranks of the field.
In November, 1999, Butler moved to Seattle, Washington, describing herself at that stage in life as
Comfortably asocial—a hermit in the middle of Seattle—a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.
Themes of both racial and sexual ambiguity are apparent throughout her work. Her writing has influenced a number of prominent authors. When asked if he could be any author in the world, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Diaz replied that he would be Octavia Butler, who he claimed has written 9 perfect novels.
Death
Butler died outside of her home in Lake Forest Park, Washington, on February 24, 2006, at the age of 58. Contemporary news accounts were inconsistent as to the cause of her death, whether it was from a fatal stroke or from head injuries caused by a fall during the stroke.
Awards
2012: Solstice Award
2010: Induction into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame
2005: Langston Hughes Medal of The City College
2000: Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing from the PEN American Center
1999: Nebula Award for Best Novel for Parable of the Talents
1995: MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant
1985: Hugo Award for Best Novelette for Bloodchild
1985: Science Fiction Awards Database for Bloodchild
1985: Science Fiction Chronicle Award for Best Novelette for Bloodchild
1984: Nebula Award for Best Novelette for Bloodchild
984: Hugo Award for Best Short Story forSpeech Sounds
980: Creative Arts Award, L.A. YWCA
Scholarship fund
The Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship was established in Butler's memory in 2006 by the Carl Brandon Society. Its goal is to provide an annual scholarship to enable writers of color to attend the Clarion West Writers Workshop and Clarion Writers' Workshop, descendants of the original Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop in Clarion, Pennsylvania, where Butler got her start. The first scholarships were awarded in 2007. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/12/2014.)
Book Reviews
Butler's literary craftsmanship is superb.
Washington Post Book World
A celebrated mainstay of college courses in women's studies and black literature and culture; some colleges require it as mandatory freshman reading.
Linell Smith - Baltimore Sun
One of the most original, thought-provoking works examining race and identity.
Lynell George - Los Angeles Times
Butler's characters are so vivid and the racist milieu in which they struggle to survive so realistically depicted that one cannot finish Kindred without feeling changed. It is a shattering work of art with much to say about love, hate, slavery, and racial dilemmas, then and now.
Sam Frank - Los Angeles Herald-Examiner
No other work of fantasy or science fiction writings brings the intimate environment of the antebellum South to life better than Octavia E. Butler's Kindred.
Kevin Weston - San Francisco Chronicle
This powerful novel about a modern black woman transported back in time to a slave plantation in the antebellum South is the perfect introduction to Butler's work and perspectives for those not usually enamored of science fiction.... A harrowing, haunting story.
John Marshall - Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Kindred is as much a novel of psychological horror as it is a novel of science fiction. . .a work of art whose individual accomplishment defies categorization.
Barbara Strickland - Austin Chronicle
Like emotion that uplifts and enriches, like exquisite music or the taste of some special candy remembered from childhood, I never wanted Kindred to end. It overwhelmed me, dominated me, drew me on page after page. To express my total admiration and wonder for the originality of this surpassingly compelling novel, I am driven to a despised cliche: I could not put it down! It is a book that simply will not be denied; its power is hypnotic. Kindred is a story that hurts: I take that to be the surest indicator of genuine Art. It is an important novel, filled with powerful human insight and the shocking impact of the most commonplace experiences viewed in a new way, and it demands that once begun, the reader continue till it has done its work on the heart and mind and soul. Octavia Butler is a writer who will be with us for a long, long time, and Kindred is that rare, magical artifact...the novel one returns to, again and again, through the years, to learn, to be humbled, and to be renewed. Do not, I beg you, deny yourself this singular experience.
Harlan Ellison
Truly terrifying.... A book you'll find hard to put down.
Essence
Butler's books are exceptional.... She is a realist, writing the most detailed social criticism and creating some of the most fascinating female characters in the genre...real women caught in impossible situations.
Dorothy Allison - Village Voice
A startling and engrossing commentary on the complex actuality and continuing heritage of American slavery.
Sherley Anne Williams - Ms Magazine
Her books are disturbing, unsettling… In a field dominated by white male authors, Butler's African-American feminist perspective is unique, and uniquely suited to reshape the boundaries of the sci-fi genre.
Bill Glass - L. A. Style
Discussion Questions
1. Both Kevin and Dana know that they can't change history: "We're in the middle of history. We surely can't change it." (page100); and "It's over.... There's nothing you can do to change any of it now." (page 264). What, then, are the purposes of Dana' s travels back to the antebellum South? Why must you, the reader, experience this journey with Dana?
2. How would the story have been different with a third person narrator?
3. Many of the characters within Kindred resist classification. In what ways does Dana explode the slave stereotypes of the "house-nigger, the handerkchief-head, and the female Uncle Tom" (page 145). In what ways does she transcend them?
4. Despite Dana's conscious effort to refuse the 'mammy' role in the Weylin household, she finds herself caught within it: "I felt like Sarah, cautioning." (page 156), and others see her as the mammy: "You sound just like Sarah" (page 159). How, if at all, does Dana reconcile this behavior? How would you reconcile it?
5. "The ease. Us, the children.... I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery." This is said by Dana to Kevin when they have returned to the present and are discussing their experience in the antebellum South. To what extent, if any, do you believe racial oppression exists today?
6. How do you think Butler confronts us with issues of difference in Kindred? How does she challenge us to consider boundaries of black/white, master/slave, husband/wife, past/present? What other differences does she convolute? Do you think such dichotomies are flexible? Artificial? Useful?
7. Compare Tom Weylin and Rufus Weylin. Is Rufus an improvement or simply an alteration of his father? Where, if any, is there evidence of Dana's influence on the young Rufus in his adult character?
8. Of the slaves' attitude toward Rufus, Dana observes "Strangely, they seemed to like him, hold him in contempt, and fear him at the same time." (page 229) How is it they can feel these contradictory emotions? How would you feel toward Rufus if you were in their situation?
9. Compare Dana's 'professional' life (i.e. her work as temporary help) in the present with her life as a slave.
10. When Dana and Kevin return from the past together, she thinks to herself: "I felt as though I were losing my place here in my own time. Rufus's time was a sharper, stronger reality." (page 191) Why would the twentieth century seem less vivid to Dana than the past?
11. Dana loses her left arm as she emerges—for the last time in the novel—from the past. Why is this significant?
12. Kevin is stranded in the past five years, while Dana is there for almost one. Is there a reason why Butler felt Kevin needed to stay in the past so much longer? How have their experiences affected their relationship to each other and to the world around them?
13. A common trend in the time-travels of science fiction assumes that one should not tamper with the past, lest s/he disrupt the present. Butler's characters obviously ignore this theory and continue to invade each other's lives. How does this influence the movement of the narrative? How does this convolute the idea of "cause and effect"?
14. Dana finds herself caught in the middle of the relationship between Rufus and Alice? Why does Rufus use Dana to get to Alice? Does Alice use Dana?
15. The needs and well-being of other residents of the plantation create a web of obligation that is difficult to navigate. Choose a specific incident; and determine who holds power over whom and assess how it affects that situation.
16. Dana states: "It was that destructive single-minded love of his. He loved me. Not the way he loved Alice, thank God. He didn't seem to want to sleep with me. But he wanted me around—someone to talk to, someone who would listen to him and care about what he said, care about it." (page 180) How does the relationship between Dana and Rufus develop? How does it change? What are the different levels of love portrayed in Kindred?
17. Discuss the ways in which the title encapsulates the relationships within the novel. Is it ironic? Literal? Metaphorical? What emphasis do we place on our own kinship? How does it compare with that of the novel?
18. Do you believe that Dana and Kevin's story actually happened to them, or that they simply got caught up in the nostalgia of moving old papers and books?
20. Butler opens the novel with the conclusion of Dana's time travels. The final pages of the book, however, make up an epilogue demonstrating a, once again, linearly progressive movement of time. How does the epilogue serve to disrupt the rhythm of the narrative?
21. After returning from his years in the nineteenth-century, Kevin had attained "a slight accent" (page 190). Is this "slight" alteration symbolic of greater changes to come? How do you imagine Kevin and Dana's relationship will progress following their re-emergence into life in 1976?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Ghost Horse
Thomas H. McNeely, 2014
Gival Press
262 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781928589914
Summary
Set amidst the social tensions of 1970's Houston, Ghost Horse tells the story of eleven-year-old Buddy Turner's shifting alliances within his fragmented family and with two other boys—one Anglo, one Latino—in their quest to make a Super-8 animated movie.
As his father's many secrets begin to unravel, Buddy discovers the real movie: the intersection between life as he sees it and the truth of his own past. In a vivid story of love, friendship, and betrayal, Ghost Horse explores a boy's swiftly changing awareness of himself and the world through the lens of imagination. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Houston, Texas, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Texas, Austin; M.F.A., Emerson College
• Currently—Boston, Massachusetts
Thomas McNeely grew up in Houston, Texas, where he made Super-8 movies as a child. After graduating from The University of Texas at Austin, where he spent too much time reviewing movies for The Daily Texan, he worked for several years as an investigator for The Texas Resource Center, a non-profit law firm that defended death row prisoners. This experience became the basis for his first published story, "Sheep," in The Atlantic Monthly.
After receiving an MFA from Emerson College, he was a Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer in fiction at Stanford University. His short stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Epoch, and have been anthologized in The Best American Mystery Stories; What If?: Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers; and Algonquin Books' Best of the South: From the Second Decade of New Stories from the South.
He has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Dobie Paisano Program at the University of Texas at Austin, and the MacDowell Colony. He currently teaches in the Stanford Online Writers' Studio and the Emerson College Honors Program. Ghost Horse, his first novel, winner of the Gival Press Novel Award, was published in October 2014. (From the author.)
Visit the author's website.
Book Reviews
A Texas boy grapples with his parents’ estrangement in McNeely’s debut novel.... McNeely beautifully portrays the confusion of a boy doing his best to deal with matters that are beyond his understanding but fully capable of doing him harm.... A dark, deeply stirring novel about the quiet tragedy of growing up in a broken family.
Kirkus Reviews
[A] haunting debut novel, which never allows its pop culture references or beautifully rendered sentences to soften the violence that life—his parents’ disintegrating marriage, his classmates’ cruelty, his grandmother’s vindictiveness—visits upon its sensitive protagonist.
Jeff Salamon - Texas Monthly
[A] wonderful under-the-radar book....The writing is sensitive, beautiful, and ominous...as if Cormac McCarthy and Denis Johnson teamed up to write a 1970s Texas YA novel that went off the rails somewhere—in a very, very good way.
Lisa Peet - Library Journal
McNeely explores the heartbreak and confusion of adolescence through the eyes of an 11 year old boy .... It's a shattering portrait, not only of the ways that divorce can unhinge a boy's life, but also in the ways that wayward adults can corrupt childhood innocence.
Charles Ealey - Austin-American Statesman
Ghost Horse by Thomas McNeely is a powerful debut novel; it is both a deeply moving coming-of-age story and an intense psychological portrait of a family in crisis. McNeely weaves an intricate web of a plot against the backdrop of the racial and class tensions of Houston of the 1970s, and explores themes of love, lost innocence, loyalty, and broken families. The tale of eleven-year-old Buddy over one unsettling year of his adolescence makes for a compelling and worthwhile read.
Leila Rice - Reader's Oasis
[A] story that will stay with you. A story of racism, and class tension. A story of broken families and lost innocence. McNeely takes you back in time to when you were eleven. As you read, you see everything as Buddy sees it, and understand it (or don’t understand it) as Buddy does. You see the edges of dark, adult truths through the unknowing, innocent eyes of a child. Over time, however, Buddy starts to pick things up. Not everything, but enough to know when something’s wrong.... A dark, beautiful, heartbreaking story, I found myself wanting to both quote everything and turn away in unease. McNeely weaves a tale you won’t soon forget.
Elizabeth O'Brien - Fueled by Fiction
Houston native Thomas H. McNeely explores the heartbreak and confusion of adolescence through the eyes of an 11-year-old boy..... It’s a shattering portrait, not only in the ways that divorce can unhinge a boy’s life, but also in the ways that wayward adults can corrupt childhood innocence.
Charles Ealey - Austin-American Statesman
McNeely writes with eerie precision the feelings of a child .... If you believe that a book should push you off balance and take you somewhere new, then Ghost Horse will deliver.
Ada Fetters - Commonline Journal
Discussion Questions
1. How do the movies that Buddy, Alex, and Simon imagine reflect their views of the adult world? What elements from their lives do you see reflected in their respective imagined "movies"?
2. Buddy views his father as both hero and villain. How does his view of his father change over the course of the novel? How does your view of Jimmy change?
3. How did you understand Jimmy's motivations during the course of the novel? Were you sympathetic toward him? What do you see as the primary struggles that he faces in the course of the novel?
4. How did you understand Margot's motivations, both in distancing herself from Jimmy, and in being unable to break away from him? How did you see her economic situation at play in her decisions?
5. Why does Buddy keep his father's secrets? What is at stake for him, and what is at stake for the adults around him in keeping these secrets? Does he understand this difference?
6. How did you see each of the boys' family lives reflected in their actions in the novel, e.g., in Alex's desire for order and Simon's obsession with other boys' secrets?
7. What roles do you see Buddy's grandmothers playing in shaping his world view? What view of the world do you think that he will develop as an adolescent and an adult?
8. What role do you see that the city of Houston plays in forming the characters of the boys in the novel?
9. All of the boys in Ghost Horse suffer losses in their families—how does each of them deal differently with their losses? Do you think that the book's message is one of despair or hope?
10. How do you think attitudes toward divorce have changed since the seventies? Do you think it is easier or harder for children of divorce now?
11. How do you see children today using media to connect, and sometimes harm each other? Do you think children see themselves and their relationships differently because of their exposure to media today?
12. How do you think attitudes toward race and class have changed in America since the seventies? Do you see a greater or lesser distance between races and classes now or then?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)
South
Lance Charnes, 2014
Wombat Group Media
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780988690332
Summary
Luis Ojeda owes his life to the Pacifico Norte cartel. Literally. Now it’s time to pay.
Luis led escaping Muslims out of the U.S. during the ten years following a 2019 terrorist attack on Chicago. He retired after nearly being killed by a border guard. But now in 2032, the Nortes give Luis a choice: pay back the fortune they spent saving his life, or take on a special job.
The job: Nora Khaled—FBI agent, wife, mother of two, and Muslim. She claims her husband will be exiled to one of the nation’s remote prison camps to rot with over 400,000 other Muslim Americans. Faced with her family’s destruction, she’s forced to turn to Luis—the kind of man she’s spent her career bringing to justice.
But when the FBI publicly accuses Nora of terrorism, Luis learns Nora’s real motive for heading south: she has proof that the nation’s recent history is based on a lie—a lie that reaches to the government’s highest levels.
Torn between self-preservation and the last shreds of his idealism, Luis guides Nora and her family toward refuge in civil war-wracked Mexico. The FBI, a dogged ICE agent, killer drones, bandits, and the fearsome Zeta cartel all plan to stop him. Success might just free Luis from the Nortes...but failure means disappearing into a black-site prison, or a gruesome death for them all.
In a day-after-tomorrow America where government has been downsized and outsourced into irrelevance, and none but the very wealthy few can afford hopes or dreams, Luis and Nora must learn to trust each other to ensure the survival of the truth—and of the people they love. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1960
• Where—Oakland, California, USA
• Education—B.A. University of California, Berkeley; M.S.,California State University, Long Beach
• Currently—lives in Orange County, California
Lance Charnes has been an Air Force intelligence officer, information technology manager, computer-game artist, set designer and Jeopardy! contestant, and is now an emergency management specialist. He’s had training in architectural rendering, terrorist incident response and maritime archaeology, but not all at the same time. His Facebook author page features spies, archaeology and art crime.
Lance is the author of the international thriller DOHA 12, the near-future thriller SOUTH, and the DEWITT AGENCY FILES series of international art-crime novels. All are available in trade paperback and digital editions. He's also a frequent contributor to Macmillan's Criminal Element website. (From the author.)
Visit the author's website.
Follow Lance on Facebook.
Book Reviews
South is a riveting work of action/adventure suspense that is a real page-turner.... Lance Charnes demonstrates a truly impressive knack for deftly creating a complex and thoroughly engaging story.
Midwest Book Review
South is a compelling futuristic thriller, as convincing a cautionary novel as Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale was in its day...these were real people forced to live in terrible times, and I was only too happy to cheer them on—or cry over their tragedies.
Criminal Element
Charnes creates characters you can understand and care for. The action scenes in South make you feel as though you are a participant.... South is a brilliantly conceived and executed thriller.
William Brooks, author of Black Karma
Discussion Questions
1. Is Luis a criminal? Why or why not? Do you think it’s possible to do the right thing for the wrong reasons, or the wrong thing for the right reasons?
2. Bel says to Ros, “I just can’t fight anymore” (p. 22, paperback edition). Discuss the various ways that Bel finds to continue fighting, despite her words. Why do you think she refuses to help Ros?
3. Discuss Nora’s relationship with Paul. Who do you think is the dominant member of their household, and why? Take into account that in every instance where they disagree during the story, Nora defers to Paul.
4. Place yourself in Nora’s position. If you learned what she had, what would you have done? How much—if anything—would you risk to bring the truth to light? Would you ask a criminal for help if you needed it?
5. Is McGinley a hero, villain, or some of each? Is he a good law-enforcement officer? Do you approve of his methods? Why or why not?
6. Who was your favorite character, and why? Who was your least-favorite character, and why? Who was the strongest character, and what made them seem that way to you?
7. Do you think anything like the Terrorist Detention Program (South’s network of prison camps in the western U.S.) could actually come about? Why or why not? Given the provocation—the terrorist attack on Wrigley Field that killed thousands—would you support or oppose a real-world TDP? Would you do so publicly?
8. South’s America has become a poorer, less healthy, more brutal and less secure place than it is today. However, it has also achieved full employment, has a booming industrial sector and is an energy exporter. Is this a good tradeoff? Would you want to live there?
9. Newport Beach—a wealthy real-world beach community in Orange County, California—has become a walled, gated enclave in South’s world. Do you think similar cities would opt to isolate themselves from their less-well-off neighbors if allowed? What effect do you think that would have on (a) their residents, and (b) their neighbors? Can you think of instances where this has already been done?
10. Small drones are sold today in electronics stores and on the Internet. Do you have any interest in owning a drone? If you had one, what would you do with it? Would you object to your neighbors owning a drone?
11. Do you think the amount of cultural change required to generate the social and economic conditions seen in South could occur in the next twenty years? Why or why not?
12. How strong a role does religion play in this story? Other than the obvious (Nora’s predicament), how does it manifest itself?
13. What other aspects of South’s reality would you have liked to hear about, but weren’t included in the story? Given the conditions of the book’s world, how do you think these bypassed issues would work?
14. Real-world gunfights tend to be messy, confused actions, frightening to both participants and onlookers, in which far more shots miss than hit their targets. Did the author portray this reality effectively in the action sequences? Do you find this preferable to the usual Hollywood depiction of gunfights, and why/why not?
15. Consider the various fates of the principal characters. Which ones ended up the way you expected? Which ones had outcomes different from what you expected? If you could change one main character’s fate, whose would it be, what would you change, and why?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)
The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing
Mira Jacob, 2014
Random House
512 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812994780
Summary
A winning, irreverent debut novel about a family wrestling with its future and its past.
With depth, heart, and agility, debut novelist Mira Jacob takes us on a deftly plotted journey that ranges from 1970s India to suburban 1980s New Mexico to Seattle during the dot.com boom.
The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing is an epic, irreverent testimony to the bonds of love, the pull of hope, and the power of making peace with life’s uncertainties.
Celebrated brain surgeon Thomas Eapen has been sitting on his porch, talking to dead relatives. At least that is the story his wife, Kamala, prone to exaggeration, tells their daughter, Amina, a photographer living in Seattle.
Reluctantly Amina returns home and finds a situation that is far more complicated than her mother let on, with roots in a trip the family, including Amina’s rebellious brother Akhil, took to India twenty years earlier. Confronted by Thomas’s unwillingness to explain himself, strange looks from the hospital staff, and a series of puzzling items buried in her mother’s garden, Amina soon realizes that the only way she can help her father is by coming to terms with her family’s painful past. In doing so, she must reckon with the ghosts that haunt all of the Eapens. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—New Mexico, USA
• Education—M.F.A., New School of Social Research
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City
Mira Jacob is the founder of Pete’s Reading Series in New York City and has an MFA from the New School for Social Research. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son. The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing is her first novel. (From the publisher.)
Read about Mira and her parents in Vogue.
Book Reviews
Beautifully wrought, frequently funny, gently heartbreaking.... Moving forward and back in time, Jacob balances comedy and romance with indelible sorrow, and she is remarkably adept at tonal shifts. When her plot springs surprises, she lets them happen just as they do in life: blindsidingly right in the middle of things.
Boston Globe
Jacob’s novel is light and optimistic, unpretentious and refreshingly witty. Jacob has created characters with evident care and treats them with gentleness even as they fight viciously with each other. Her prose is sharp and true and deeply funny.... This is the literary fiction I will be recommending to everyone this summer, especially those who love multigenerational, multicultural family sagas.
Associated Press
[A]lways engrossing and often feels so true to life that it’s a surprise that it’s not.
Austin Chronicle
The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing is a rich, engrossing debut told with lightness and care, as smart about grief as it is about the humor required to transcend it.
Kansas City Star
[A] sprawling, poignant, often humorous novel that’s worth missing cocktails on the deck in order to finish a chapter.... Told with humor and sympathy for its characters, the book serves as a bittersweet lesson in the binding power of family, even when we seek to break out from it.
Oprah Magazine
With wit and a rich understanding of human foibles, [Mira] Jacob unspools a story that will touch your heart.
People
This debut novel so fully envelops the reader in the soul of an Indian-American immigrant family that it's heart-wrenching to part with them.... Thanks to Jacob’s captivating voice, which is by turns hilarious and tender and always attuned to shifts of emotion, her characters shimmer with life.
Entertainment Weekly
[E]motionally bountiful debut.... The author has a wonderful flair for recreating the messy sprawl of family life, with all its joy, sadness, frustration, and anger. Although overlong, the novel, through its lovingly created and keenly observed characters, makes something new of the Indian immigrant experience in America.
Publishers Weekly
Jacob’s writing is refreshing, and she excels at creating a powerful bond between the reader and her characters, all wonderfully drawn and with idiosyncratic natures—the mother, Kamala, for instance, is a born-again Christian—that make them enchanting. Recommended for those who like engaging fiction that succeeds in addressing serious issues with some humor.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Jacob's darkly comic debut—about a photographer's visit to her parents' New Mexico home during a family crisis—is grounded in the specifics of the middle-class Indian immigrant experience while uncovering the universality of family dysfunction and endurance.... [Written] with naked honesty about the uneasy generational divide among Indians in America and about family in all its permutations.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The book starts in India, but doesn’t go back. Why do you think the author chose to open the book there? 2. Why do you think Amina was unhinged by taking the picture of Bobby McCloud? Do you believe her own explanation?
3. What do you think compelled Amina to photograph the worst moments at the wedding?
4. Sanji is presented as different than the rest of the adults in the Albuquerque “family.” What might make her different and why?
5. Kamala is a very polarizing character in the book. Were you drawn to or repelled by her? How do you think the author feels about her?
6. Kamala and Amina seem at odds most of the time, but what traits do they have in common?
7. Amina uses the camera to express herself. Kamala uses her cooking. Is there anything that you use (cooking, art, music, work) to connect to your world and the people in your life?
8. Akhil is angry with America in a way that Amina isn’t. What is the source of his anger?
9. If Akhil had lived longer, who else would he have painted on his ceiling?
10. Do you think Sunil was really sleepwalking when he set fire to the house?
11. All of the Eapens go through tremendous change, though Amina’s are more subtle than most. What is the biggest change in Amina’s personality?
12. If Jamie and Amina hadn’t shared their past, do you think she would have been able to trust him?
13. When Thomas sees Akhil, he believes it’s a genuine visit, not a side effect of his tumor. When Amina sees Akhil, she thinks it’s a symptom of her depression. Which explanation are you more inclined to believe?
14. What invention do you imagine Thomas was last working on?
15. Why do you think the author titled her novel The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Lost Lake
Sarah Addison Allen, 2014
St. Martin's Press
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250019820
Summary
The first time Eby Pim saw Lost Lake, it was on a picture postcard. Just an old photo and a few words on a small square of heavy stock, but when she saw it, she knew she was seeing her future.
That was half a life ago. Now Lost Lake is about to slip into Eby’s past. Her husband, George, is long passed. Most of her demanding extended family are gone. All that’s left is a once-charming collection of lakeside cabins succumbing to the Southern Georgia heat and damp, and an assortment of faithful misfits drawn back to Lost Lake year after year by their own unspoken dreams and desires. It’s not quite enough to keep Eby from calling this her final summer at the lake, and relinquishing Lost Lake to a developer with cash in hand.
Until one last chance at family knocks on her door.
Lost Lake is where Kate Pheris spent her last best summer at the age of twelve, before she learned of loneliness and heartbreak and loss. Now she’s all too familiar with those things, but she knows about hope, too, thanks to her resilient daughter, Devin, and her own willingness to start moving forward. Perhaps at Lost Lake her little girl can cling to her own childhood for just a little longer… and maybe Kate herself can rediscover something that slipped through her fingers so long ago.
One after another, people find their way to Lost Lake, looking for something that they weren’t sure they needed in the first place: love, closure, a second chance, peace, a mystery solved, a heart mended. Can they find what they need before it’s too late?
At once atmospheric and enchanting, Lost Lake shows Sarah Addison Allen at her finest, illuminating the secret longings and the everyday magic that wait to be discovered in the unlikeliest of places. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Aka—Katie Gallagher
• Birth—ca. 1972
• Where—Ashville, North Carolina, USA
• Education—B.A., University of North Carolina, Asheville
• Currently—lives in Asheville, North Carolina
Garden Spells didn't start out as a magical novel," writes Sarah Addison Allen. "It was supposed to be a simple story about two sisters reconnecting after many years. But then the apple tree started throwing apples and the story took on a life of its own... and my life hasn't been the same since."
North Carolina novelist Sarah Addison Allen brings the full flavor of her southern upbringing to bear on her fiction—a captivating blend of fairy tale magic, heartwarming romance, and small-town sensibility.
Born and raised in Asheville, in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Allen grew up with a love of books and an appreciation of good food (she credits her journalist father for the former and her mother, a fabulous cook, for the latter). In college, she majored in literature—because, as she puts it, "I thought it was amazing that I could get a diploma just for reading fiction. It was like being able to major in eating chocolate."
After graduation in 1994, Allen began writing seriously. She sold a few stories and penned romances for Harlequin under the pen name Katie Gallagher; but her big break occurred in 2007 with the publication of her first mainstream novel, Garden Spells, a modern-day fairy tale about an enchanted apple tree and the family of North Carolina women who tend it. Booklist called Allen's accomplished debut "spellbindingly charming," and the novel became a BookSense pick and a Barnes & Noble Recommends selection.
The Sugar Queen followed in 2008, The Girl Who Chased the Moon in 2009, The Peach Keeper in 2011; and Lost Lake in 2014. Allen's 2015 novel First Frost returned to some of her charaters in Garden Spells.
Since then, Allen has continued to serve heaping helpings of the fantastic and the familiar in fiction she describes as "Southern-fried magic realism." Clearly, it's a recipe readers are happy to eat up as fast as she can dish it out.
Extras
From a 2007 Barnes and Noble interview:
• I love food. The comforting and sensual nature of food always seems to find its way into what I write. Garden Spells involves edible flowers. My book out in 2008 involves southern and rural candies. Book three, barbeque. But, you know what? I'm a horrible cook.
• In college I worked for a catalog company, taking orders over the phone. Occasionally celebrities would call in their own orders. My brush with celebrity? I took Bob Barker's order.
• I was a Star Wars fanatic when I was a kid. I have the closet full of memorabilia to prove it — action figures, trading cards, comic books, notebooks with ‘Mrs. Mark Hamill' written all over the pages. I can't believe I just admitted that.
• While I was writing this, a hummingbird came to check out the trumpet vine outside my open window. I stopped typing and sat very still, mesmerized, my hands frozen on the keys, until it flew away. I looked back to my computer and ten minutes had passed in a flash.
• I love being a writer.
• When asked what book most influenced her career as a writer, here is her response:
Every book I've ever read has influenced me in some way. Paddington Bear books and Beverly Cleary in elementary school. Nancy Drew and Judy Blume in middle school. The sci-fi fantasy of my teens. The endless stream of paperback romances I devoured as I got older. Studying world literature and major movements in college. Who I am, what I am, is the culmination of a lifetime of reading, a lifetime of stories. And there are still so many more books to read. I'm a work in progress. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Allen is the master of magical details and plots that combine a fairy-tale sensibility with character-driven pathos. This imaginative, lyrical novel is an intricate web of magical misfits, Southern gothic charm and the power of new possibilities, both romantic and redemptive.
NPR
It is always a pleasure to read Allen’s work. Her signature magical touches are something readers anticipate. They will not be disappointed with this story…There’s nothing like a little "Allen magic" sprinkled on a book to make it a fascinating reading experience to be savored.
Wichita Falls Times Record News
Allen's work is such a treat…Like a cook who seasons just so, she adds flavor but not too much, and serves a satisfying literary meal without making you overstuffed…Lost Lake is a delightful way to spend some time this winter.
Durham Herald-Sun
A romantic and dreamy story of love and second chances.
Asheville Citizen-Times
Sarah Addison Allen delivers a feel-good story with touches of magic.
Entertainment Weekly
All of the magic of Allen's previous books is present in this latest treasure, a feast of words. The author has the ability to capture the soul of her characters and make them relatable to every reader. This is a story of love, loss, grief, and starting over—it is truly a treat to be savored.
Romantic Times Book Reviews
Charming, bittersweet and ultimately hopeful, Lost Lake is a treat for fans of Addison's previous novels or those who simply love a good Southern story.
Shelf Awareness
[A] widow and her daughter find healing at a quirky summer resort.... The overused family business–versus-developers trope doesn’t particularly add to the story, and Allen’s trademark mystical touches are not as effective as usual, but her eccentric cast of characters and charming Southern setting will win readers over.
Publishers Weekly
A year after her husband's death...Kate and her eight-year-old daughter Devin leave the confines of Atlanta to explore Lost Lake in Suley, GA, and oh the adventures they have! A collection of quirky characters, all with wisdom to share, bring this story to life, and none shy away from the chance for even greater personal growth —Stacey Hayman, Rocky River P.L., OH
Library Journal
(Starred review.) A surefire star of feel-good fiction, Allen always manages to nimbly mask her potent messages of inspiration and romance beneath her trademark touches of mirth and magic, but this endearing tale of surprising second chances may just be her wisest work yet. —Carol Haggas
Booklist
Old wrongs are righted for a motley community of Southerners in this latest, semienchanted novel.... Tragic pasts abound...and each lakegoer is haunted to a different extent. It's clear from the beginning that healing is on the horizon for everyone. Light, sweet and sparkly.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The title of this book is Lost Lake, and the theme of loss runs throughout the entire narrative.
What did you think the titular lake’s name meant when you started reading the book, and did
that idea change for you over the course of the book?
2. Storytelling plays a large role in the lives of many of the characters in this story—and Kate, a
born storyteller, has the power to alter Wes’s perspective about his sad and troubled past just
through one powerful retelling. Who else tells themselves stories about their history, and do
you think all their stories are true?
3. Eby’s falling-down resort attracts misfits of all kinds, some more likable than others. Which
characters did you find the most endearing? And which, inversely, alienated you? Were there
others who won you over by the novel’s end?
4. Sarah Addison Allen writes a sort of everyday magic into her stories that sets her apart, and it
seems to touch every character in a different way. Lisette experiences a heartbreaking sort of
magic, in the haunting companion who shares her kitchen and her silence. Devin, meanwhile,
experiences a haunting of sorts too—but one that feels far more innocent and hopeful. Why do
you think these two characters are the ones to experience ghosts firsthand? What sets them
apart from their compatriots at the lake?
5. Other characters, like Kate and Eby, experience their life’s magic as a sort of enchantment,
unpredictable and yet not unpleasant. Did that carry over to you as you were reading it? Did
the characters’ easy acceptance of day-to-day magical happenings make it easier for you to
believe in them too?
6. The art from the postcards of Lost Lake hold great meaning to those who see them. Would any
of them make you want to visit Eby’s home? What did you think of the last one that shows a
young and in love Eby and George? Were they pictured the way you’d visualized them?
7. What was your view of Wes before you read the letter he finally shared with Kate? How did that
change when you learned what he had done all those years ago?
8. The women in Kate’s extended family are all too experienced with widowhood. Eby calls it the
"Morris curse." But all of the widows react very differently to their tragedies. What is it about
some of the Morris women that makes them especially vulnerable to losing themselves in grief?
What, do you think, would have happened to Kate and Devin had Kate never ‘woken up’ from
her own sorrow?
9. Eby says that if "we measured life in the things that almost happened, we wouldn’t get
anywhere." Do you agree? You may wish to talk about your own fateful "almosts" as well.
10. At the end of the book, Eby is bound for Europe again, traveling for the first time since her
honeymoon. What do you think draws her back there, and what do you imagine she might send
or bring home from her travels?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)