Land of Love and Drowning
Tiphanie Yanique, 2014
Penguin Group (USA)
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594488337
Summary
A major debut from an award-winning writer—an epic family saga set against the magic and the rhythms of the Virgin Islands.
In the early 1900s, the Virgin Islands are transferred from Danish to American rule, and an important ship sinks into the Caribbean Sea. Orphaned by the shipwreck are two sisters and their half brother, now faced with an uncertain identity and future. Each of them is unusually beautiful, and each is in possession of a particular magic that will either sink or save them.
Chronicling three generations of an island family from 1916 to the 1970s, Land of Love and Drowning is a novel of love and magic, set against the emergence of Saint Thomas into the modern world. Uniquely imagined, with echoes of Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, and the author’s own Caribbean family history, the story is told in a language and rhythm that evoke an entire world and way of life and love.
Following the Bradshaw family through sixty years of fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, love affairs, curses, magical gifts, loyalties, births, deaths, and triumphs, Land of Love and Drowning is a gorgeous, vibrant debut by an exciting, prizewinning young writer. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September 20, 1978
• Where—St. Thomas, Virgin Islands
• Education—B.A., Tufts University; M.F.A. University of Houston
• Awards—Rona Jaffe Writers' Award; Pushcart Prize (more below)
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York, and St. Thomas, Virgin Islands
Tiphanie Yanique is a Caribbean fiction writer, poet and essayist, whose debut novel Land of Love and Drowning was published in 2014.
Yanique's maternal roots are in the Virgin Islands and her paternal roots in Dominica. She was raised in the Hospital Ground neighborhood of St. Thomas by her grandmother, Beulah Smith Harrigan, a former children’s librarian. Her biological grandfather was Dr. Andre Galiber of St. Croix. All her grandparents are now deceased.
Education and teaching
In 2000, Yanique earned her undergraduate degree from Tufts University in Massachusetts. Shortly after graduating, she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in Literature in English and Creative Writing at The University of the West Indies for which she conducted research on Caribbean women writers, such as Merle Hodge and Erna Brodber in Trinidad and Tobago.
She went on to receive her Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing at the University of Houston in 2006, where she held a Cambor Fellowship. Later that year she served as the 2006-2007 Writer-in Residence/Parks Fellow at Rice University, teaching creative writing, fiction and nonfiction, and working as the faculty editor of The Rice Review literary magazine.
From 2007-2011, she taught undergraduate and graduate writing and teaching courses as an assistant professor of creative writing and Caribbean literature at Drew University in New Jersey—during which time she also worked as an assistant editor at Narrative Magazine (2007–08) and an associate editor of Post No Ills Magazine (2008–11), as well as the director of writing and curriculum at the Virgin Islands Summer Writers Program (2008-2011).
She is currently an assistant professor of writing at The New School in New York City, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate students.
Writing
Yanique’s debut collection How to Escape a Leper Colony: A Novella and Stories (2010) received praise from the Caribbean Review of Books, Boston Globe, and O, The Oprah Magazine, among other journals. Her children’s picture book I am the Virgin Islands (2012) was commissioned by the First Lady of the Virgin Islands as a gift to the children of the Virgin Islands. Yanique’s husband, photographer Moses Djeli, created the images for the book.
Her short fiction, essays and poetry have appeared in Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing, Best African American Fiction, Transition Magazine, American Short Fiction, London Magazine, Prism International, Callaloo, Boston Review, and other journals and anthologies.
Accolades
In 2011, Yanique won the BOCAS Fiction Prize for Caribbean Literature, and the National Book Foundation recognized her as one of their 5 under 35 honorees, an award that celebrates five young fiction writers selected by past National Book Award Winners and Finalists. She was one of the three writers awarded the 2010 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award for fiction, along with Helen Phillips and Lori Ostlund.
She is also the winner of a 2008 Pushcart Prize for her short story the “The Bridge Stories” and the Kore Press Short Fiction Award for her short story “The Saving Work. She has also been awarded the 2006 Boston Review Fiction Prize for her short story “How to Escape from a Leper Colony.” She received The Academy of American Poets Prize in 2000 and has had residencies with Bread Loaf, Callaloo, Squaw Valley, and the Cropper Foundation for Caribbean Writers.
Personal
Tiphanie currently lives between Brooklyn, NY, and St. Thomas, VI, with her husband, son and daughter. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
A debut novel about three generations of a Caribbean family. It reads lush and is graced with rotating narrators, each of whom has a distinct and powerful voice.
USA Today
The novel provides readers with beautiful, imaginative prose via a story set in the Virgin Islands.
Ebony
Spellbinding.
Elle
This hypnotic tale tracks a Virgin Islands family through three generations of blessings and curses. It starts in 1900, with a shipwreck that orphans two sisters and the half-brother they've just met, and then spinso out magic, mayhem, and passion.
Good Housekeeping
Sink or swim is the guiding theme in this fantastical, generational novel.
Marie Claire
A feat of tropical magical realism.
Vanity Fair
(Starred review.) [A]n epic multigenerational tale set in the U.S. Virgin Islands that traces the ambivalent history of its inhabitants during the course of the 20th century.... Through the voices and lives of its native people, Yanique offers an affecting narrative of the Virgin Islands that pulses with life, vitality, and a haunting evocation of place.
Publishers Weekly
In the early 1900s, a ship sinks off the Virgin Islands just as they are being transferred from Danish to American rule, and two sisters and their half-brother are orphaned. Fortunately, each has a distinctive magical gift. A three-generation saga from an author born on St. Thomas, VI.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) A debut novel traces the history of the U.S. Virgin Islands through the fate of a family marked by lust, magic and social change.... Bubbling with talent and ambition, this novel is a head-spinning Caribbean cocktail.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Land of Love and Drowning opens in 1917 on the cusp of St. Thomas’s transfer from Danish rule to American. Why do you think Tiphanie Yanique has chosen to open her novel with this event? What is the significance of the transfer of power? What does “Americanness” mean to the characters? How does it change who they are? Does it also change how they relate to one another or how they relate to the Virgin Islands in general?
2. Think about the meaning of land and property in Land of Love and Drowning. Who owns land? Who owns property? What does ownership mean to the different characters? Does the idea of ownership change over the course of the book?
3. Anette and Eeona Bradshaw present two different ways of being a woman. Where Anette gives in to her desires, Eeona represses hers. Is there a reason they are so different in this way? How do you see these differences affecting the course of their lives?
4. While in the Army, Jacob Esau McKenzie has a jarring encounter with institutionalized racism, something that is somewhat unfamiliar to him. How is the awareness of race connected with the idea of becoming American? Are there other lines of demarcation on St. Thomas besides race? A form of prejudice that Jacob would have found more familiar? Which of these perceived divisions are imposed by outsiders and which come from the Virgin Islanders themselves?
5. Think of the other islands mentioned in Land of Love and Drowning. How are they different places from St. Thomas? What is the importance of St. John and Anegada in the novel?
6. Beaches and access to them figures prominently throughout Land of Love and Drowning. Think of the scenes that are set on the beach. What does the beach represent in these moments? The action of the last third of the focuses on public access to beaches. Why is the privatization of the beaches so important? What is lost when beaches are no longer accessible to everyone?
7. Imagine you are going to visit the Virgin Islands as a tourist. Would reading Land of Love and Drowning influence your opinion of the resorts there?
8. How is magic employed throughout Land of Love and Drowning? Who has access to magic and who doesn’t? How do the characters use it? Is there a changing relationship with magic over time? What does it mean to be a witch? Does the term mean something different in the culture of these islands than it does in the United States or Europe? Who is considered a witch in the book?
9. The Bradshaw family curse is passed down through the generations. What do you think Tiphanie Yanique intends to suggest in Land of Love and Drowning with this curse? How does it relate to the secrets that these family members keep from one another? From the Virgin Islands as a whole?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
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We Are Not Ourselves
Matthew Thomas, 2014
Simon & Schuster
640 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781476756660
Summary
Born in 1941, Eileen Tumulty is raised by her Irish immigrant parents in Woodside, Queens, in an apartment where the mood swings between heartbreak and hilarity, depending on whether guests are over and how much alcohol has been consumed.
When Eileen meets Ed Leary, a scientist whose bearing is nothing like those of the men she grew up with, she thinks she’s found the perfect partner to deliver her to the cosmopolitan world she longs to inhabit. They marry, and Eileen quickly discovers Ed doesn’t aspire to the same, ever bigger, stakes in the American Dream.
Eileen encourages her husband to want more: a better job, better friends, a better house, but as years pass it becomes clear that his growing reluctance is part of a deeper psychological shift. An inescapable darkness enters their lives, and Eileen and Ed and their son Connell try desperately to hold together a semblance of the reality they have known, and to preserve, against long odds, an idea they have cherished of the future.
Through the Learys, novelist Matthew Thomas charts the story of the American Century, particularly the promise of domestic bliss and economic prosperity that captured hearts and minds after WWII. The result is a riveting and affecting work of art; one that reminds us that life is more than a tally of victories and defeats, that we live to love and be loved, and that we should tell each other so before the moment slips away.
Epic in scope, heroic in character, masterful in prose, We Are Not Ourselves heralds the arrival of a major new talent in contemporary fiction. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1975-76
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Chicago; M.A., Johns Hopkins University
• Currently—lives in the state of New Jersey
Matthew Thomas was born in the Bronx and grew up in Queens (both part of New York City). A graduate of the University of Chicago, he has an MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, where he received the Graduate Essay Award. He lives with his wife and twin children in New Jersey. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[A] devastating debut novel...an honest, intimate family story with the power to rock you to your core... [a] wrenchingly credible main character...rich, sprawling.... Mr. Thomas’s narrow scope (despite a highly eventful story) and bull’s-eye instincts into his Irish characters’ fear, courage and bluster bring to mind the much more compressed style of Alice McDermott.... Part of what makes We Are Not Ourselves so gripping is the credible yet surprising ways in which it reveals the details of any neuroscientist’s worst nightmare.... This is a book in which a hundred fast-moving pages feel like a lifetime and everything looks different in retrospect. As in the real world, the reader’s point of view must change as often as those of the characters.... This is one of the frankest novels ever written about love between a caregiver and a person with a degenerative disease. The great French film Amour conveyed the emotional aspects of such a relationship, but Mr. Thomas spares nothing and still makes it clear how deeply in love these soul mates are.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
[T]he story of three generations of an Irish-American family.... Written in calm, polished prose, following one family as its members journey through the decades in an American landscape that is itself in flux, it’s a long, gorgeous epic, full of love and life and caring. It’s even funny, in places—and it’s one of the best novels you’ll read this year.
Maggie Scarf - New York Times Book Review
Stunning....The novel is a formidable tribute to the resilience of the human spirit, to the restorative and ultimately triumphant supremacy of love over life’s adversities....The joys of this book are the joys of any classic work of literature—for that is what this is destined to become—superbly rendered small moments that capture both an individual life and the universality of that person’s experience.
Alice LaPlante - Washington Post
An ambitious, beautifully written novel about ambition and what it can do and not do [that] deals with the classic American Dream in all its messy complications.
USA Today
Astonishing and powerful.... Thomas’s finely observed tale is riveting. As a reflection of American society in the late 20th century, it’s altogether epic, sweeping the reader along on a journey that’s both inexorable and poignant.
People
A great novel about hope, heartbreak, family, and failure in America.
Esquire
(Starred review.) In his powerful and significant debut novel, Thomas masterfully evokes one woman’s life in the context of a brilliantly observed Irish working-class milieu.... Her life...comes close to a definitive portrait of American social dynamics in the 20th century. Thomas’s emotional truthfulness combines with the novel’s texture and scope to create an unforgettable narrative.
Publishers Weekly
An epic tale.... Eileen Tumulty, raised by her immigrant parents in Woodside, NY, in the 1940s and 1950s, is determined not to settle for some boisterous, glad-handing type.... The portrait of a marriage and of a crucial time in American history; great for book clubs.
Library Journal
Thomas' debut opens promisingly with the outsize character of Big Mike Tumulty, an Irish immigrant and bar-stool sage possessed of "a terrible charisma."... Despite its epic size and aspirations, the novel is underpopulated and often underwritten, a quality that does make its richer moments stand out while stoking the appetite for more of those in fewer pages.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Thomas begins his novel with two epigraphs, one from Stanley Kunitz and one from King Lear. Did the epigraphs inform your reading of the novel? How did they relate to each of the members of the Leary family? Why do you think Thomas chose to use the phrase We Are Not Ourselves, taken from the King Lear epigraph, as the title of his novel?
2. When Eileen is growing up, she’s aware that "men were always quieting down around her father" (pp. 3–4), whom "everybody called…Big Mike" (p. 6). Describe Big Mike. Why does he command so much respect from the outside world? Does this influence Eileen’s behavior? In what ways? How does Big Mike’s legend compare with the reality of what he is like when he is at home with Eileen and her mother?
3. Even after Eileen buys the apartment building from the Orlando family, she’s obsessed with the idea of owning her own house. Why is this so important for Eileen?
4. When Eileen enters nursing school "she knew that even if nursing wasn’t the field she’d have chosen, she’d been training for it without meaning to from an early age" (p. 38). Describe Eileen’s childhood. How have Eileen’s experiences with her mother helped prepare her for the job? Occasionally Eileen feels the instructors are "treating her with something like professional courtesy" (p. 38), and it makes her think of the way men in the neighborhood treat her father. Why? And why does this make her uneasy?
5. When Ed turns down an offer to be the chairman of his department, he tells Eileen, "It’s all about having the right ambition" (p. 85). What does Ed think the "right" ambitions are? Why is Eileen so upset that he has turned down the job? How does his ambition conflict with Eileen’s?
6. After Ed has lost his temper and "flipped out" on Connell, Eileen tells him that "it had better not [happen again]. I don’t give a damn what your father did to you. That boy’s not him" (p. 186). Why do you think Ed is so reticent to talk about his relationship with his own father? Does Ed’s relationship with his father inform his parenting style with Connell? If so, in what ways?
7. On moving day, when Eileen arrives at her new house, "Her first thought as she took in the house through the window as that it didn’t look the way she’d remembered it" (p. 278). Contrast Eileen’s memory of her new house with the reality of what it looks like. What accounts for the change in the way that Eileen views the house? Why is she so baffled when her movers ask her where they should place her belongings within it?
8. Connell attends one of Ed’s classes in order to complete a school assignment. Describe Connell’s experience in the classroom. Although Connell is unnerved by his time in Ed’s classroom, he keeps his word to Ed and decides not to tell his mother how strange it had been. Why do you think Connell chooses to keep this information to himself? Do you agree with his decision to do so? When Ed apologizes to Connell, Connell tells him, "It’s all right . . . I already know what kind of teacher you are. You teach me every day" (p. 162). How does Ed teach his son?
9. Who is Bethany? Do you think her friendship with Eileen is healthy? Why or why not? Why does Eileen agree to accompany Bethany to the faith healer? Compare and contrast Eileen’s experiences with Vywamus with her experience going to a therapist. Why does Eileen think that going to the faith healer is "better than therapy" (p. 444). Do you think going to the faith healer has helped Eileen? How?
10. Ed is reluctant to attend a party with Eileen at the home of one of her colleagues and tells her, "They’ll never know the real me" (p. 393). What does he mean? Were you surprised by Ed’s diagnosis? Were there any instances of foreshadowing in the novel that led you to anticipate what Ed’s illness was? What were they? Who do you think is "the real" Ed?
11. When Connell tells his friend Farshid that he and his family will be moving and expresses reticence about it, Farshid tells him, "You just need to reinvent yourself" (p. 240). Do you agree with Connell that "I have to invent myself before I can reinvent myself"? (p. 240). Why does Connell tell his mother that he wants to move even though he’s ambivalent about the prospect? What does moving into a new house mean to each member of the Leary family?
12. When it comes to dating, Eileen would "rather be alone than end up with a man who was afraid" (p. 51). What traits is Eileen looking for in a partner? How does Ed measure up to Eileen’s ideal partner? Were you surprised that she ends up marrying him? Eileen sees them as "co-conspirators in a mission of normalcy" (p. 124). What does she mean? Describe their relationship. How does it evolve?
13. After Ed gets sick, Connell avoids going back home. Why is he so afraid of going home? Connell tells Eileen that caring for Ed is "too hard for me. It’s too much" and that "I’m not you.... That’s the problem right there" (p. 466). How does Eileen react? Is she justified? Compare and contrast the way that both Eileen and Connell deal with their sick parents. In what ways, if any, are they alike?
14. After Ed’s diagnosis, Eileen takes "a third path, the pragmatic one. It hadn’t happened for a reason, by they would find something to glean from it anyway" (p. 382). What does Eileen’s reaction tell us about her character? Describe your first impression of Eileen. Did you like her initially? Did your impression of Eileen change as you read on? In what ways and why?
15. Eileen’s mother tells her, "Don’t ever love anyone. All you’ll do is break your own heart" (p. 12). Why does she offer this advice to Eileen? In what ways has Eileen’s mother’s heart been broken? Do any of the other characters in We Are Not Ourselves suffer heartbreaks? What has caused those instances of suffering?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
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California
Edan Lepucki, 2014
Little, Brown & Co.
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316250818
Summary
The world Cal and Frida have always known is gone, and they've left the crumbling city of Los Angeles far behind them.
They now live in a shack in the wilderness, working side-by-side to make their days tolerable in the face of hardship and isolation. Mourning a past they can't reclaim, they seek solace in each other.
But the tentative existence they've built for themselves is thrown into doubt when Frida finds out she's pregnant.
Terrified of the unknown and unsure of their ability to raise a child alone, Cal and Frida set out for the nearest settlement, a guarded and paranoid community with dark secrets. These people can offer them security, but Cal and Frida soon realize this community poses dangers of its own. In this unfamiliar world, where everything and everyone can be perceived as a threat, the couple must quickly decide whom to trust.
A gripping and provocative debut novel by a stunning new talent, California imagines a frighteningly realistic near future, in which clashes between mankind's dark nature and deep-seated resilience force us to question how far we will go to protect the ones we love. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1980-81
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Oberlin College; M.F.A., Iowa Writers' Workshop
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California
Edan Lepucki is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a staff writer for The Millions. Her short fiction has been published in McSweeney's and Narrative magazine, among other publications, and she is the founder and director of Writing Workshops Los Angeles. This is her first novel. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[A] propulsive, subtly sinister, post-apocalyptic tale by debut novelist Edan Lepucki.... A careful narrator, Lepucki does a wonderful job maintaining a feeling of suspense throughout her book without ever drawing a full picture of what Cal and Frida are looking at.... [Cal] is kind of a lunkhead: He is that action-movie character whose dumb choices can only be explained as a way to further the plot. The conversations he takes part in are some of the least rewarding parts of this story, clunky and melodramatic.... But those are minor quibbles with a book that, once begun, there's little reason to put down.
Sam Worley - Chicago Tribune
[A] suspenseful debut.... Lepucki focuses on Cal and Frida’s evolving relationship and their divergent approaches to their predicament. As seen in chapters told from their alternating perspectives, the less they trust each other, the more tension mounts, building to an explosive climax that few readers will see coming.
Publishers Weekly
While this debut novel has some potential as a disturbing postapocalyptic thriller, it stumbles in its execution. The characters don't evoke a lot of sympathy and the ambiguous ending leaves readers hanging. [Stephen Colbert promoted the book as a response to the Amazon-Hachette dispute.—Ed.] —Karin Thogersen, Huntley Area P.L., IL
Library Journal
Lepucki’s characters...must weigh every word, expression, and gesture. This results in too much disquisition through conversations, and the plot falters, but the settings are haunting and Lepucki’s inquiry into the psychology of trust, both intimate and communal, is keen and compelling. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
[Lepucki] isn’t above bending the rules, which makes it more difficult to feel real concern for Cal and Frida. They will never be in too much trouble; Lepucki won’t allow it. The chapters...are heavy on flashbacks that bog down an otherwise tense narrative of survival. This has the bones of an excellent book, but, sadly, an untenable amount of flab is covering them.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What meaning do Frida’s artifacts hold for her? How do they serve as a connection to her former life? If you had to abandon your life, what sentimental items might you keep?
2. Do you think Frida and Cal’s interactions with August and the Millers helped to keep them sane in the wilderness? How do you think their experience would have been different had they been totally alone,without other human contact?
3. Have you ever had a relationship, romantic or otherwise, that could have withstood the pressures of isolation that Frida and Cal’s marriage is subject to?
4. Do you think Cal and Frida were unprepared for what they found when they left LA? Why or why not? Do you think there was anything they could have done to prepare themselves better?
5. After four months of being in the wilderness, Frida thinks her husband sees her as “a problem to solve” (14). How do you think Cal would have described this same scene? Do you think he actually felt this way about his wife? Why or why not?
6. What motivates Micah to do what he does? Is he a monster, or is he simply deranged by his radical beliefs? Why does violence attract him so?
7. How realistic does the author’s vision of the future seem? Do you imagine the world devolving in this way? Or do you imagine it will turn out differently?
8. What is so seductive about communities, be it superficial ones, like The Land, or natural ones, like family? What does community mean for each of the characters in California?
9. What role does loss—or the fear of loss—play in the novel?
10. Why do you think the characters are willing to give up so much for safety? Do you think the sacrifices are worth it? Why or why not?
11. What are the characters’ differing views on parenthood, and how do they propel the events in the novel?
12. How does the book’s shifting perspective help you to understand these characters and their relationships?
13. How does the author depict gender roles in the novel? Do you think these roles make sense given the nature of the society? Why or why not?
14. What do you make of Frida and Cal’s marriage at the end of the novel? How do you think it’s changed over the course of the book?
15. Do you think Frida and Cal’s child will live a happy life?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
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Friendship: A Novel
Emily Gould, 2014
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374158613
Summary
A novel about two friends learning the difference between getting older and growing up
Bev Tunney and Amy Schein have been best friends for years; now, at thirty, they’re at a crossroads. Bev is a Midwestern striver still mourning a years-old romantic catastrophe.
Amy is an East Coast princess whose luck and charm have too long allowed her to cruise through life. Bev is stuck in circumstances that would have barely passed for bohemian in her mid-twenties: temping, living with roommates, drowning in student-loan debt. Amy is still riding the tailwinds of her early success, but her habit of burning bridges is finally catching up to her. And now Bev is pregnant.
As Bev and Amy are dragged, kicking and screaming, into real adulthood, they have to face the possibility that growing up might mean growing apart.
Friendship, Emily Gould’s debut novel, traces the evolution of a friendship with humor and wry sympathy. Gould examines the relationship between two women who want to help each other but sometimes can’t help themselves; who want to make good decisions but sometimes fall prey to their own worst impulses; whose generous intentions are sometimes overwhelmed by petty concerns.
This is a novel about the way we speak and live today; about the ways we disappoint and betray one another. At once a meditation on the modern meaning of maturity and a timeless portrait of the underexamined bond that exists between friends, this exacting and truthful novel is a revelation. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October 13, 1981
• Raised—Silver Spring, Maryland, USA
• Education—B.A., Eugene Lang College
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York
Emily Gould is an American author. She is the co-owner, with Ruth Curry, of the indie e-bookstore Emily Books, and the former co-editor of Gawker.com.
Gould grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, and attended Kenyon College for two years before transferring to Eugene Lang College in New York City. Gould resides in Brooklyn, New York.
Career
Gould began her blogging career as one-half of The Universal Review before starting her own blog, Emily Magazine, and writing for Gawker on a freelance basis. Before joining the Gawker staff, Gould was an associate editor at Disney's Hyperion imprint.
Gould is the co-author, with Zareen Jaffery, of the young adult novel Hex Education (2007). She is also the author of a memoir, And the Heart Says Whatever (2010) and the novel, Friendship (2014).
Criticism
On April 6, 2007, Emily Gould appeared on an episode of Larry King Live hosted by talk show host Jimmy Kimmel during a panel discussion entitled "Paparazzi: Do they go too far?" During the interview, Kimmel accused Gould of irresponsible journalism resulting from Gould's popular blog, mentioning the possibility of assisting real stalkers and suggesting that Gould and her website could ultimately be responsible for someone's death. Kimmel continued to claim a lack of veracity in Gawker's published stories, and the potential for libel it presents. At the end of the exchange Gould stated that she didn't "think it was ok" for websites to publish false information, after which Kimmel said she should "check your website then."
On May 4, 2007, Gould wrote about the interview in an article for the New York Times. She penned another article for a New York Times Magazine cover story (May 25, 2008) about her experiences with Gawker, in which she described how the negative response to her television appearance led to panic attacks and subsequent psychotherapy. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 7/10/2014.)
Book Reviews
In Ms. Gould’s...often sharply observed first novel, Friendship...Amy and Bev have just crossed a microgenerational line into their 30s, and there’s a self-conscious, faintly melancholy tone to [the novel]: the girls’ sense of looking back on the turmoil (and, in Amy’s case, hubris) of their swiftly receding 20s with both alarm and nostalgia, worried that things are starting to add up, that the clock is ticking more loudly now, that the arithmetic of their lives is changing.... Depicting Amy and Bev in the third person gives Ms. Gould a measure of perspective on—and distance from—her characters, enabling her to depict their follies and foibles with a mixture of sympathy and humor. The novel form...also accentuates Ms. Gould’s strengths as a writer.... Whereas the blogs tended to create a self-portrait of the author as human word processor (automatically slicing, dicing and churning experience into prose), Friendship isn’t the simple spewing (or venting or whining or knee-jerk reacting) of an obsessive oversharer. Rather, at its best, it points to Ms. Gould’s abilities as a keen-eyed noticer and her knack for nailing down her ravenous observations with energy and flair.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
Gould is holding up an ideal. Friendship, a slim, sometimes piercing novel, is a sharply observed chronicle of the inequality inherent in even the most valued friendships.
Alyssa Rosenberg - Washington Post
More than an exploration of friendship, this novel is about what happens when the things we take for granted slip away and we are forced to come up with new ways of being. For Amy and Bev, an unplanned pregnancy opens up a flood of questions that the women must wrestle with together, and, ultimately, individually.... Gould does a fine job capturing the women's frustrations, big and small, and the ways in which their friendship serves both as a hindrance and a means to maturing. But even if the writing is far superior to that commonly associated with commercial fiction, the novel's flippant tone—and the fact that it never really probes very far beneath the surface of what the characters are thinking—makes it read like a more highbrow version of chick lit. Call it literary chick lit.
Shoshana Olidort - Chicago Tribune
Gould’s strengths as a writer lie in her ability to portray contemporary women. Both main characters, who moved to Manhattan—well, Brooklyn—in order to conquer it often end up defeated.... Though Gould’s book is called Friendship it’s about much more than, as the main characters might say, BFFs. It’s about transitioning from idealistic youth to realistic adulthood, sacrificing freedom for stability, and abandoning creative lifestyles in order to craft sustainable lives.... Amy and Bev can be impulsive and oblivious. However, they’re recognizable to anyone who was ever told, as a child, that she could grow up to be anyone she wanted to be—and later struggled to figure out who that was.... Though Friendship is a modern tale astutely told, it offers the class-consciousness reminiscent of a Victorian novel.... Gould is a master of the telling detail or the ironic turn of phrase.... With Friendship, Gould establishes herself as a distinctively contemporary literary voice. Her dialogue resounds, and her dark humor gives texture to the prose. And though Friendship focuses on young women, readers need be neither young nor female in order to enjoy it.... This is a very human story for any of us who have ever been jealous of a friend or wished our friends were more jealous of us.
Christian Science Monitor
Work—sustained creativity, the problems of receiving too much attention, too fast and too young, paycheques, temp gigs, what it all might add up to and protect from—is as much a theme of the book as friendship is. The novel has a disarmingly for-real sense of these kinds of women’s lives, and features high-def, immersive verisimilitude about roommates, instant messages, storage units, job applications, buses, shirts, drinks and, largely, money; these are, of course, also the quotidian but hugely meaningful circumstances that create, maintain and end friendships, especially between women, especially in cities.... Adult female friendships act as load-bearing walls, but they’re also precarious: jealousy and judgments can rip them open in a day; errors in the careful balance sheet of neediness and interest in the other one’s day undo years of emotional work. ‘Sharply observed’ is a gross cliché, but Friendship is Gould seeing and understanding the small and mounting details of what women like her want, what they have to do to get it, and what they do to ruin everything. Gould’s first, best talent...is to see things as they are, like a craftsperson, like a writer of novels has to see them.
Kate Carraway - The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
There is a sentimental delight in reading Friendship and its roller coaster ride of urban highs and lows.... In the end, Gould draws a vivid and convincing portrait of a friendship—in all of its human misunderstandings, disappointments, and brokenness.... It is no small feat to animate and chart the emotional fluctuations and subtle contours of female friendships on the page.... [Gould] illuminate[s] what it means to grow up together and then sometimes apart.
S. Kirk Walsh - Virginia Quarterly Review
Gould’s novel is admirably, readably realistic—she knows these girls and the world they live in (including the omnipresence of technology and the way that it pervades relationships).... Gould nails the complex blend of love, loyalty, and resentment that binds female friends. It is worth reading for the richness of its details (at one point, Amy is overwhelmed by the desire to put an engaged coworker’s wedding ring in her mouth), and it offers new insight into the experience of young women.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Plot takes a back seat to Gould’s razor-sharp humor and observations about life in New York among a class of young people who know more about how they’d like to live than how to pay for it. It’s also a delight to read a novel that places female friendship at its center; we watch Bev and Amy manage their fluctuating feelings of love, jealousy and sometimes disdain for each other...[as] Gould brilliantly charts their ups and downs.
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.)
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Everything I Never Told You
Celeste Ng, 2014
Penguin Group (USA)
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143127550
Summary
Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet . . .
So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother’s bright blue eyes and her father’s jet-black hair.
Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue—in Marilyn’s case that her daughter become a doctor rather than a homemaker, in James’s case that Lydia be popular at school, a girl with a busy social life and the center of every party.
When Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together tumbles into chaos, forcing them to confront the long-kept secrets that have been slowly pulling them apart. James, consumed by guilt, sets out on a reckless path that may destroy his marriage.
Marilyn, devastated and vengeful, is determined to find a responsible party, no matter what the cost. Lydia’s older brother, Nathan, is certain that the neighborhood bad boy Jack is somehow involved. But it’s the youngest of the family—Hannah—who observes far more than anyone realizes and who may be the only one who knows the truth about what happened.
A profoundly moving story of family, history, and the meaning of home, Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, exploring the divisions between cultures and the rifts within a family, and uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one anothera. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1980-81
• Raised—Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Shaker Heights, Ohio, USA
• Education—Harvard University; M.F.A., Michigan University
• Awards—Hopwood Award; Pushcart Prize
• Currently—lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Celeste Ng [pronounced "ing"] grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio, in a family of scientists. She attended Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan (now the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan), where she won the Hopwood Award.
Her debut novel, Everything I Never Told You (2014) was a New York Times bestseller and was also included as one of the paper's Notable Books of the Year. It was named a best book of the year by more than a dozen other publications, won several awards, and was a finalist for a number of others.
Little Fires Everywhere (2017), Ng's second novel, was also published to rave and starred reviews.
Her fiction and essays have appeared in One Story, TriQuarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere, and she is the recipient of the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and son. (Adapted from the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Wonderfully moving…Emotionally precise…A beautifully crafted study of dysfunction and grief…[The book] will resonate with anyone who has ever had a family drama
Boston Globe
When Lydia Lee, the favored daughter in a mixed-race family in '70s Ohio, turns up dead, the Lees' delicate ecosystem is destroyed. Her parents' marriage unravels, her brother is consumed by vengeance, and her sister—always an afterthought—hovers nervously, knowing more than anyone realizes. Ng skillfully gathers each thread of the tragedy, uncovering secrets and revealing poignant answers.
Entertainment Weekly
With the skill of a veteran heart surgeon…Ng writes of maternal expectations, ingrained prejudice and sibling conflict in a culture that has just begun to grapple with interracial marriage and shifting gender roles
MORE Magazine
(Starred review.) This emotionally involving debut novel explores themes of belonging using the story of the death of a teenage girl, Lydia, from a mixed-race family in 1970s Ohio.... Lydia is remarkably imagined, her unhappy teenage life crafted without an ounce of cliche. Ng’s prose is precise and sensitive, her characters richly drawn.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Ng's debut is one of those aching stories about which the reader knows so much more than any of the characters, even as each yearns for the unknowable truth.... [A] mesmerizing narrative...[and] breathtaking triumph, reminiscent of prophetic debuts by Ha Jin, Chang-rae Lee, and Chimamanda Adichie, whose first titles matured into spectacular, continuing literary legacies. —Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC
Library Journal
(Starred review.) The cracks in Lydia’s perfect-daughter foundation grow slowly but erupt suddenly and tragically, and her death threatens to destroy her parents and deeply scar her siblings. Tantalizingly thrilling, Ng’s emotionally complex debut novel captures the tension between cultures and generations with the deft touch of a seasoned writer. Ng will be one to watch. —Carol Haggas
Booklist
[L]ong-hidden, quietly explosive truths, weighted by issues of race and gender, slowly bubble to the surface of Ng's sensitive, absorbing novel and reverberate long after its final page. Ng's emotionally complex debut novel sucks you in like a strong current and holds you fast until its final secrets surface.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the relationships between Nath, Lydia, and Hannah. How do the siblings both understand and mystify one another?
2. Why do you think Lydia is the favorite child of James and Marilyn? How does this pressure affect Lydia, and what kind of impact do you think it has on Nath and Hannah? Do you think it is more difficult for Lydia to be the favorite, or for Nath and Hannah, who are often overlooked by their parents?
3. “So part of him wanted to tell Nath that he knew: what it was like to be teased, what it was like to never fit in. The other part of him wanted to shake his son, to slap him. To shape him into something different.... When Marilyn asked what happened, James said merely, with a wave of the hand, 'Some kids teased him at the pool yesterday. He needs to learn to take a joke.’”
4. How did you react to the “Marco Polo” pool scene with James and Nath? What do you think of James’s decision?
5. Discuss a situation in which you’ve felt like an outsider. How do the members of the Lee family deal with being measured against stereotypes and others’ perceptions?
6. What is the meaning of the novel’s title? To whom do the “I” and “you” refer?
7. What would have happened if Lydia had reached the dock? Do you think she would have been able to change her parents’ views and expectations of her?
8. This novel says a great deal about the influence our parents can have on us. Do you think the same issues will affect the next generation of Lees? How did your parents influence your childhood?
9. “It struck her then, as if someone had said it aloud: her mother was dead, and the only thing worth remembering about her, in the end, was that she cooked. Marilyn thought uneasily of her own life, of hours spent making breakfasts, serving dinners, packing lunches into neat paper bags.”
10. Discuss the relationship Marilyn and her mother have to cooking and their roles as stay-at-home mothers. Do you think one is happier or more satisfied?
11. The footprint on the ceiling brings Nath and Lydia closer when they are young, and later, Hannah and James discover it together and laugh. What other objects bring the characters closer together or drive them further apart?
12. There’s so much that the characters keep to themselves. What do you wish they had shared with one another? Do you think an ability to better express themselves would have changed the outcome of the book?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
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