The Long Way Home (Inspector Gamache Series, 10)
Louise Penny, 2014
St. Martin's Press♥
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250022066
Summary
Happily retired in the village of Three Pines, Armand Gamache, former Chief Inspector of Homicide with the Surete du Quebec, has found a peace he’d only imagined possible. On warm summer mornings he sits on a bench holding a small book, The Balm in Gilead, in his large hands. “There is a balm in Gilead,” his neighbor Clara Morrow reads from the dust jacket, “to make the wounded whole.”
While Gamache doesn’t talk about his wounds and his balm, Clara tells him about hers. Peter, her artist husband, has failed to come home. Failed to show up as promised on the first anniversary of their separation. She wants Gamache’s help to find him.
Having finally found sanctuary, Gamache feels a near revulsion at the thought of leaving Three Pines. “There’s power enough in Heaven,” he finishes the quote as he contemplates the quiet village, “to cure a sin-sick soul.” And then he gets up. And joins her.
Together with his former second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, and Myrna Landers, they journey deeper and deeper into Quebec. And deeper and deeper into the soul of Peter Morrow—a man so desperate to recapture his fame as an artist that he would sell that soul. And may have.
The journey takes them further and further from Three Pines, to the very mouth of the great St. Lawrence river. To an area so desolate, so damned, the first mariners called it The land God gave to Cain. And there they discover the terrible damage done by a sin-sick soul. (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
I’m on record suggesting that Penny has become an equal to P.D. James in the psychological depth of her characters and their emotional connection to place, but in The Long Way Home it’s just not enough.... Once again the inner lives of Penny’s characters are at the forefront, attempting to heal their "sin-sick" souls, but this time it’s at the expense of a plot that’s sluggish and lacks suspense.
Carole E. Barrowman - Minneapolis Star Tribune
[P]erceptive, perfectly paced.... Clara turns to Gamache for help in locating Peter.... At times, the prose is remarkably fresh, filled with illuminating and delightful turns of phrase (e.g., Clara notices “her own ego, showing some ankle”), though readers should also be prepared for the breathless sentence fragments that litter virtually every chapter.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) As with all the author’s other titles, Penny wraps her mystery around the history and personality of the people involved. By this point in the series, each inhabitant of Three Pines is a distinct individual, and the humor that lights the dark places of the investigation is firmly rooted in their long friendships, or, in some cases, frenemyships. The heartbreaking conclusion will leave series readers blinking back tears.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Penny dexterously combines suspense with psychological drama, overlaying the whole with an all-powerful sense of landscape as a conduit to meaning.... Another gem from the endlessly astonishing Penny.
Booklist
Armand Gamache...understands better than most that danger never strays far from home..... The emotional depth accessed here is both a wonder and a joy to uncover.... Gamache's 10th outing culminates in one breathless encounter, and readers may feel they weren't prepared for this story to end. The residents of Three Pines will be back, no doubt, as they'll have new wounds to mend.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. When Leo invited Daphne and Claire to come stay for a weekend in Scotland, Daphne decided to go alone to have time to judge herself whether to continue their unorthodox relationship. The visit resulted in a proposal of marriage that Daphne decided to accept. Claire was her one big responsibility. Do you think she was considerate enough of this in accepting Leo’s proposal?
2. When Marcus and Charity decided to return to London directly after Daphne’s funeral, how did you react? Putting yourself in their shoes, and understanding that they had come all the way from London to attend the funeral of their stepmother whom they despised, were they at all justified in their actions?
3. When Claire encounters Jonas in Leo’s office, it is the first time she has spoken to him or even seen him since the day that their friendship came to an end eighteen years before. Outwardly, Claire’s emotions seemed to display anger at Jonas’s involvement with Leo’s affairs, but what else do you feel was going on in her mind?
4. It is quite apparent after the ultrasmart Kerr-Jamieson party in London what really drives Charity. What do you think of her character and her motivations?
5. When Jonas eventually reveals to Claire why he ended their friendship, was he right in keeping it from her for all those years? Discuss the implications on everyone if it had come out into the open.
6. Only Leo knew the truth, almost from the moment it happened. His own children carried out a premeditated course of action to irrevocably damage his stepdaughter’s friendship with Jonas, and as a result, she left his house and never returned. What emotions would this have evoked in Leo over the years?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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In the Light of What We Know
Zia Haider Rahman, 2014
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
512 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374175627
Summary
A bold, epic debut novel set during the war and financial crisis that defined the beginning of our century . . .
One September morning in 2008, an investment banker approaching forty, his career in collapse and his marriage unraveling, receives a surprise visitor at his West London townhouse.
In the disheveled figure of a South Asian male carrying a backpack, the banker recognizes a long-lost friend, a mathematics prodigy who disappeared years earlier under mysterious circumstances. The friend has resurfaced to make a confession of unsettling power.
In the Light of What We Know takes us on a journey of exhilarating scope—from Kabul to London, New York, Islamabad, Oxford, and Princeton—and explores the great questions of love, belonging, science, and war. It is an age-old story: the friendship of two men and the betrayal of one by the other. The visitor, a man desperate to climb clear of his wrong beginnings, seeks atonement; and the narrator sets out to tell his friend's story but finds himself at the limits of what he can know about the world—and, ultimately, himself.
Set against the breaking of nations and beneath the clouds of economic crisis, this surprisingly tender novel chronicles the lives of people carrying unshakable legacies of class and culture as they struggle to tame their futures. In an extraordinary feat of imagination, Zia Haider Rahman has telescoped the great upheavals of our young century into a novel of rare intimacy and power. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Born in rural Bangladesh, Zia Haider Rahman was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and at Cambridge, Munich, and Yale Universities. He has worked as an investment banker on Wall Street and as an international human rights lawyer. In the Light of What We Know is his first novel. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Zafar of Rahman's strange and brilliant novel is at ease drawing sharp lessons from subjects as varied as derivatives trading and the role of metaphor in determining the fate of pigeons…Zafar can often find distance from his pain when, with uncommon precision and lucidity, he discusses theorems and analogies. And so one might conclude that his intelligence is what gives this book its edge. But that would be a mistake. The demonstration of his intelligence is only a ruse, a cover, hiding the anger in Zafar's heart. The book is long, but that length is justified by the effort expended to conceal his rage, to deflect the guilt Zafar feels at the violence of his emotion. I was surprised it didn't explode in my hands.
Amitava Kumar - New York Times Book Review
[B]ristling with ideas about mathematics and politics, history and religion, Rahman's novel also wrestles with the intricacies of the 2008 financial crash. It is encyclopedic in its reach and depth, dazzling in its erudition... In the Light of What We Know is an extraordinary meditation on the limits and uses of human knowledge, a heartbreaking love story and a gripping account of one man's psychological disintegration. This is the novel I'd hoped Jonathan Franzen's Freedom would be (but wasn't)—an exploration of the post-9/11 world that is both personal and political, epic and intensely moving.
Alex Preston - Guardian (UK)
[A] a sprawling and thrillingly ambitious debut novel…A cross between Herman Melville and David Foster Wallace as refracted through Graham Greene, In the Light of What We Know offers 500 pages of self-described "digressions" and "tangents" involving bracing, sometimes mind-blowing discussions of high math, theoretical physics, cognitive science, Central Asian politics, the English class system, the bloody birth of Bangladesh, Bach, literature, epistemology, collateralized debt obligations and the 2008 collapse of world markets... Rahman drives home that every story is a lie. But stories like this one can teach us great truths about the ways we see—and how much we therefore miss.
Mike Fischer - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Rahman’s novel [is] astonishingly achieved for a first book…Rahman proves himself a deep and subtle storyteller, with a very good eye for dramatic detail—the wounding stray comment, the surge of shame, the livid parable... In the Light of What We Know is what Salman Rushdie once called an "everything novel." It is wide-armed, hospitable, disputatious, worldly, cerebral. Ideas and provocations abound on every page.
James Wood - New Yorker
[A] narrative with an unclear trajectory and stakes that are shadowy and ill-defined for much of the book. Only late does the novel's purpose become clear and Zafar's narrative gain resonance.... Rahman has written a simple human story... though this story is often lost amid Rahman's intellectual pyrotechnics.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) The author's fascination with mathematics and the universe of ideas is contagious, and enriches the complex narrative about how we know the reality around us. Verdict: Despite some obvious plot devices, this ambitious debut novel has considerable depth and scope.... [J]am-packed with insights and observations. —Gwen Vredevoogd, Marymount Univ. Libs., Arlington, VA
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Rahman's narrative quickly takes flight, literally, moving from London and New York to Islamabad and Kabul and points beyond.... Rahman capably mixes a story that threatens to erupt into le Carré–like intrigue with intellectual disquisitions of uncommon breadth.... Rahman's is a quiet, philosophical novel of ideas, a meditation on memory, friendship and trust... Beautifully written.
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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Shank of the Song
Jeffrey Renard Allen, 2014
Graywolf Press
608 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781555976804
Summary
A contemporary American masterpiece about music, race, an unforgettable man, and an unreal America during the Civil War era...
At the heart of this remarkable novel is Thomas Greene Wiggins, a nineteenth-century slave and improbable musical genius who performed under the name Blind Tom.
Song of the Shank opens in 1866 as Tom and his guardian, Eliza Bethune, struggle to adjust to their fashionable apartment in the city in the aftermath of riots that had driven them away a few years before. But soon a stranger arrives from the mysterious island of Edgemere—inhabited solely by African settlers and black refugees from the war and riots—who intends to reunite Tom with his now-liberated mother.
As the novel ranges from Tom’s boyhood to the heights of his performing career, the inscrutable savant is buffeted by opportunistic teachers and crooked managers, crackpot healers and militant prophets. In his symphonic novel, Jeffery Renard Allen blends history and fantastical invention to bring to life a radical cipher, a man who profoundly changes all who encounter him. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1962
• Where—Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., Ph.D., University of Illinois, Chicago
• Awards—PEN Discovery Prize; Whiting Writer’s Award (see more below)
• Currently—New York, New York
Jeffery Renard Allen is the author of the novels Rails Under My Back (2000) and Song of the Shank (2014), and the story collection Holding Pattern (2008), as well as two collections of poetry, Harbors and Spirits (1999) and Stellar Places (2007).
In writing about his fiction, reviewers often note his lyrical use of language and his playful use of form to write about African American life. His poems tend to focus on music, mythology, history, film, and other sources, rather than narrative or autobiographical experiences.
Background
Allen was born in 1962 in Chicago and raised on the Southside of Chicago, a neighborhood that he says informs the setting of his first novel Rails Under My Back and the stories in his collection Holding Pattern. For Allen, the 1980s in Chicago and other black communities across American represented an “apocalyptic moment“ with the introduction of crack cocaine and the violence and other forms of destruction and devastation it brought, experiences that he feels have been underrepresented in literary fiction. (Source: interview with Michael Antonucci)
Allen attended public schools in Chicago, then completed all of his university education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he holds a Ph.D. in English (Creative Writing). He is married to Zawadi Kagoma, who is originally from native Tanzania, and is the father of three children. He resides in Bronx, New York.
Teaching
Allen is currently Professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York and a faculty member in the writing program at the New School and in the low residency MFA writing program at Fairleigh Dickinson University.
In addition, he has taught in the writing program at Columbia University and in many distinguished writers’ conferences and programs around the world including: Cave Canem, the Summer Literary Seminars Program in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Kwani? LitFest in Kenya, the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation, North Country Retreat for Writers of Color, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Farafina Trust Workshop in Lagos, the American Writers Festival in Singapore, and VONA.
He is the fiction director for the Norman Mailer Center’s Writers Colony. He is the co-founder and president of the Pan African Literary Forum, an international, non-profit literary organization that aids to help writers on the African continent.
Africa
In recent years, Allen has worked with developing writers around the African Continent. In 2006, he taught for the Kwani? Literary festival in Nairobi, Kenya. With fellow author Arthur Flowers, he founded the Pan African Literary Forum, which held an international writers’ conference in Accra, Ghana in July 2008 that featured more than one hundred participants. The following fall he became deathly ill with malaria (and resulting complications) he had contracted while in West Africa, and spent more than six weeks in the hospital.
In August 2012, Allen taught for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Farafina Trust Workshop in Lagos, Nigeria. That same year, he also served as the Program Director for Literature for the Jahazi Literary and Jazz Festival in Zanzibar. And in his work with the Norman Mailer Center’s Writers’ Colony, he has worked with a number of emerging writers from the African continent, including A. Igoni Barrett, Yewande Omotoso, Samuel Kolawole, and Victor Ehikhmamenor.
Under the auspices of the Pan African Literary Forum, in 2012 Allen organized a national reading tour for South African Poet Laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile. The Pan African Literary Forum has also collaborated on readings and panel discussions at the New School and for the National Black Writers Conference at Medgar Evers College.
In the essay “Water Brought Us“ published in Callaloo in 2007, Allen examines how his travels on the African continent were reshaping his thoughts about race, slavery, and place. In subsequent interviews, he has talked about how the time he spent on the Swahili islands of Lamu (off the Kenyan coast) and Zanzibar in East Africa helped shape his creation of the fictional island called Edgemere in his 2014 novel Song of the Shank.
Writings
His essays, reviews, fiction, and poetry have appeared in numerous publications, including the Chicago Tribune, Poets & Writers, Triquarterly, Ploughshares, Bomb, Hambone, The Antioch Review, StoryQuarterly, African Voices, St. Petersburg Review, African American Review, Callaloo, Arkansas Review, Other Voices, Black Renaissance Noire, Writer's Digest, and XCP:Cross Cultural Poetics. His work has also appeared in several anthologies, including 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11, Rainbow Darkness: An Anthology of African American Poetry, Chicago Noir, Homeground: Language for an American Landscape, and Best African American Fiction 2010. He is presently at work on a collection of stories and novellas called Radar Country that in part uses his travels on the African continent to frame an exploration of subjects such as place, race, religion and faith, music and culture, identity, and family.
Editing
Allen is an advisory editor for the journal Black Renaissance Noire, which is published under the auspices of New York University’s Institute of African American Affairs. He was the guest editor for the Spring 2014 issue of Kweli Literary Magazine, as well as the Winter 2009 issue of Literary Review, which focused on emerging writers from the African continent. He was also the guest poetry editor for the Spring 2014 issue of Fifth Wednesday, a special section honoring the work of blues poet Sterling Plumpp.
Awards and fellowships
Allen was awarded The P.E.N. Discovery Prize in 1989. His widely celebrated novel, Rails Under My Back won Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for Fiction. His story collection Holding Pattern won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. He has also been awarded a Whiting Writer’s Award, a support grant in Innovative Literature from Creative Capital, Chicago Public Library’s Twenty First Century Award, Recognition for Pioneering Achievements in Fiction from the African American Literature and Culture Association, the 2003 Charles Angoff Award for Fiction from The Literary Review, and special citations from the Society for Midlands Authors and the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation. He has been a fellow at The Dorothy L. and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library, a John Farrar Fellow in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and a Walter E Dakins Fellow in Fiction at the Sewanee Writer’s Conference. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 6/21/2014 .)
Book Reviews
The novel...sagely explores themes of religion, class, art and genius, and introduces elements of magic realism (mermaids and mermen appear, as does a man who is inexplicably healed of short leg syndrome), resulting in the kind of imaginative work only a prodigiously gifted risk-taker could produce.... Song of the Shank brilliantly portrays the story of Blind Tom while providing keen insight into the history of Reconstruction. But at its heart, it also reminds us denizens of never-will-be postracial America of one simple but everlasting essential truth: “Them chains is hard on a man. Hard.“
Mitchell S. Jackson - New York Times Book Review
[A]mbitious but unwieldy.... Both the conception and the underlying history behind this story will leave readers with a profound understanding of the inhumanity of slavery and 19th century racial attitudes. This is a dense and admirable book that invites an important excavation of the past, yet ultimately provides neither intimacy nor perspective.
Publishers Weekly
This long and obscure novel by the PEN Discovery Prize winner of Rails Under My Back.... Verdict: There is no reason to doubt this highly regarded author's seriousness of purpose, but this remains a challenging work: long, dense, uncompromising, and mysterious. For sophisticated readers. —James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) In the extraordinarily talented hands of Allen, Tom is a mysterious and compelling figure.... Amid the larger drama of slavery and its injustices, Allen offers the more intimate drama of one young boy’s life and the financial and emotional investments involved in the question of what’s to be done with his exceptional talent. A brilliant book, with echoes of Ralph Ellison and William Faulkner. —Vanessa Bush
Booklist
(Starred review.) One of America’s most gifted novelists projects dark and daring speculations upon the incredible-but-true 19th-century story of a child piano prodigy who was blind, autistic and a slave.... Allen’s psychological insight and evocative language vividly bring to life all the black and white people in Tom’s life.... Allen’s visionary work...should propel him to the front rank of American novelists.
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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The Quick
Lauren Owen, 2014
Random House
544 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812993271
Summary
A novel of epic scope and suspense that conjures up all the magic and menace of Victorian London . . .
1892: James Norbury, a shy would-be poet newly down from Oxford, finds lodging with a charming young aristocrat. Through this new friendship, he is introduced to the drawing-rooms of high society and finds love in an unexpected quarter.
Then, suddenly, he vanishes without a trace. Alarmed, his sister, Charlotte, sets out from their crumbling country estate determined to find him. In the sinister, labyrinthine London that greets her, she uncovers a hidden, supernatural city populated by unforgettable characters: a female rope walker turned vigilante, a street urchin with a deadly secret, and the chilling “Doctor Knife.”
But the answer to her brother’s disappearance ultimately lies within the doors of the exclusive, secretive Aegolius Club, whose predatory members include the most ambitious, and most bloodthirsty, men in England.
In her first novel, Lauren Owen has created a fantastical world that is both beguiling and terrifying. The Quick will establish her as one of fiction’s most dazzling talents. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1985
• Rasied—Yorkshire, England, UK
• Education—Oxford University; University of East Anglia
• Awards—Curtis Brown Prize
• Currently—lives in Northern England
Lauren Owen grew up in the grounds of a boarding school in Yorkshire. Her first attempts at writing as a teenager were Harry Potter fan fiction. She is a graduate of St Hilda's, Oxford, holds an MA in Victorian Literature, and is completing a PhD on Gothic writing and fan culture. She is the recipient of the University of East Anglia creative-writing programme's prestigious Curtis Brown Prize. The Quick is her first novel. (From the UK publisher.)
Book Reviews
[R]eaders might think they’re about to embark on a highhanded version of the Gothic novel, full of metafictions and literary allusions. These do appear, along with some beautiful language, but by Page 100, when the first neck is about to be bitten, The Quick drops its cloak and becomes a good old-fashioned vampire novel.... To cover such well-worn narrative ground, a novelist has to either invent new possibilities or invent new storytelling devices. Owen has chosen the latter, and the novel proceeds by looping back over the previous episodes, each time from a different character’s perspective. This has the pleasant effect of plunging us into invention and then, slowly, into recognition.
Andrew Sean Greer - New York Times Book Review
[A] creepy debut...a thrilling tale.... This book will give you chills even on a hot day
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Forget Jack the Ripper—it’s the curiously pale aristocratic types you need to beware of in this supernatural Gothic nightmare.... Owen’s stylishly sinister world of betrayal and Lovecraftian monsters will have you sleeping with the lights on.
Oprah Magazine
The first quarter of this debut novel is a lovely, poetic tale.... The last half is entirely bonkers and totally unexpected. Read it with the lights on.
New Republic
The book’s energy, its wide reach and rich detail make it a confident example of the "unputdownable" novel.
Economist
(Starred review.) Owen sets her seductive book in 1892, in a late-Victorian London with a serious vampire problem..... [A]n old-fashioned, leisurely pace,...Owen's sentence-by-sentence prose is extraordinarily polished—a noteworthy feat for a 500-page debut—and she packs many surprises into her tale, making it a book for readers to lose themselves in.
Publishers Weekly
An intriguing blend of historical, gothic, and supernatural fiction.... [The Quick features] wonderful atmospheric writing.
Library Journal
An intricate, sinister epic....an impressive feat....Owen proves a master at anticipating readers’ thoughts about future happenings and then crumbling them into dust. Her world building is exceptional, and readers will simultaneously embrace and shrink from the atmosphere’s elegant ghastliness.
Booklist
An elegantly written gothic epic that begins with children isolated in a lonely manor house.... A book that seems to begin as a children's story ends in blood-soaked mayhem; the journey from one genre to another is satisfying and surprisingly fresh considering that it's set in a familiar version of gothic London among equally familiar monsters.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What genre (or genres) would you say The Quick falls into? How does it embrace or subvert the conventions of those genres?
2. What literary influences do you see in The Quick?
3. Emily Richter figures into many of the book’s most pivotal early scenes. How much do you think she knows or doesn’t know about James and Christopher’s relationship, and about Eustace’s change? Why do you think she tells James to “be careful”?
4. Discuss the figure of the owl throughout the book.
5. Characters agree to the Exchange for different reasons. Why reasons do you think Adeline’s fiancé, John had? Are there any reasons that would tempt you to join the Aegolius Club?
6. Why do you think Mrs. Price turns children? How does their group compare to other family units in the book?
7. Why do the Club members refer to the living as the “Quick”?
8. How does Mould change over the course of the book? Do you think he remains a man of science to the end? Why might Edmund have delayed so long in giving Mould what he wanted?
9. Charlotte’s quiet life is altered drastically by the book’s events. In what ways does it change for the better? When in the book do you think she is happiest?
10. Had you heard of a priest hole before reading The Quick? Why do you think Owen chose to begin and end the book there?
11. The ending of The Quick seems to beg for a sequel. What do you think happened to James? What directions could you imagine a sequel going in? Whose stories might it follow? When and where might it take place?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
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We are Called to Rise
Laura McBride, 2014
Simon & Schuster
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781476738963
Summary
Three lives are bound together by a split-second mistake, and a child’s fate hangs in the balance. What happens next will test—and restore—your faith in humanity.
Far from the neon lights of the Vegas strip, three lives are about to collide. A middle aged woman attempting to revive her marriage. A returning soldier waking up in a hospital with no memory of how he got there. A very brave eight-year-old immigrant boy.
This is a story about families—the ones we have and the ones we make. It’s a story about America today, where so many cultures and points of view collide and coexist. We Are Called to Rise challenges us to think about our responsibilities to each other and reminds us that no matter how cruel life can be in a given moment, it is ultimately beautiful to live, and live fully. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1960-61
• Where—Spokane, Washington, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale University
• Currently—Las Vegas, Nevada
Laura McBride teaches at the College of Southern Nevada and lives with her husband and two children in Las Vegas. She graduated with a degree in American Studies from Yale University. She wrote part of We Are Called to Rise, her first novel, published in 2014, while in residency at Yaddo. Her second novel, 'Round Midnight, came out in 2017. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
The lives of four Las Vegas families collide, reminding us all that every act—no matter how insignificant it might seem—matters. You'll be thinking about these characters long after you finish this haunting, heart-wrenching and hopeful book.
Houston Chronicle
Rarely does a novel reach into my soul and leave me sobbing, but We Are Called to Rise did just that with its beautifully drawn characters, true-to-life plot, and such exquisite writing that it's hard to believe that this is Laura McBride's first book....a graceful portrait of our time.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
McBride’s characters are warm with pulsing vitality, their interior struggles as dramatic as the painful events that will alter each of their paths. The narrative is compelling enough to draw the reader along, even as it skips from one character’s point of view to another. And it is a testament to the author’s mature voice and storytelling talent that we are willing to take to heart the lessons her story offers.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) How might children in crisis be helped if everyone—teachers, social workers, troubled parents, and the courts—worked together for their best interests? This is the big question at the heart of this well-written first novel by McBride.... [A]n urgent morality tale for our times in the form of this poignant and gripping debut. —Leslie Patterson, Rehoboth, MA
Library Journal
The theme of tragedy, specifically why bad things happen to good people and why good people can do bad things, is heavy-handed, though the novel is stocked with kind, professional, intuitive secondary characters who go a small way toward balancing out the horror.... Though ardently told, this novel takes on more issues than it can reasonably handle.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We Are Called to Rise is told in four distinct voices—an immigrant boy whose family is struggling to assimilate, a middle-aged housewife coping with an imploding marriage and a troubled son, a social worker at home in the darker corners of Las Vegas, and a wounded soldier recovering from an injury he can’t remember getting—voices that come together around a tragedy changing those four lives forever. Each of the four struggles with ramifications of the choices that have led to this event, and all four discover that our lives are connected and we are responsible for one another.
1. Which of the three main narrators—Bashkim, Avis, Luis, was the most effective?
2. The setting, Las Vegas, is so pervasive it is almost a character in its own right. Talk about how the author uses the dry desert town as a backdrop and as an integral piece of the story. Discuss the juxtaposition of glamorous casinos with the ordinary suburban lives so many of the characters lead. How does the backdrop of the world of gambling, sex, and money impact the characters in their everyday lives? Do you think this story could have taken place anywhere else?
3. The landscape of Nevada is compared several times to that of Iraq and Afghanistan. What other connections do you see between the Western state and the war zones of the East that affect so many of the characters?
4. Throughout the story Avis struggles with how much responsibility she has for her son’s actions. How does her own childhood impact the parenting decisions she makes? What about the loss of Emily? How much blame does Avis bear for what has happened to Nate throughout his life? When are parents accountable for the actions of their children?
5. Luis carries guilt for not protecting his partner, Sam, and also for accidentally shooting a boy in Iraq; when we first meet him, he is recovering from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He suffers both mentally and physically, but which bothers him more? Is his recovery more about healing his body or his soul? How does the act of writing to Bashkim help him with both?
6. How does seeing events through Bashkim’s eyes influence our understanding of the story? Do you find Bashkim’s narrative of the novel’s more serious events to be reliable? Why or why not?
7. Roberta is, in many ways, the narrator we know the least about. She has the fewest sections, and the parts of the story she narrates are almost entirely focused on other people. How is seeing this story through the eyes of a largely unknown character different from a character’s life story that is more fleshed out?
8. Avis is heartbroken over her husband’s infidelity and desire for divorce. But we find out that she, too, has been tempted, and that she even secretly kissed another man. When Jim says that Darcy was somebody he could talk to, somebody who “helped him think about things,” Avis wonders, What does that have to do with ending our marriage? Is she questioning why Jim thought he couldn’t just have a woman friend? Or is she saying that she’d prefer to go on not knowing that Darcy and Jim are now lovers? What do you think she means by this question? (Would you want to know if your partner were cheating?)
9. We’re more than halfway through the book before we begin to see how each of the characters’ stories intersects with the others. What is the narrative impact of seeing each story unfold individually? What are the benefits of this story structure? What are the drawbacks? Do you think the way the stories come together is effective?
10. At the final court proceeding the judge says, “If, sometimes, an unspeakable horror arises from the smallest error, I choose to believe that it’s possible for an equally unimaginable grandeur to grow from the tiniest gesture of love.... Great terror is the result of a thousand small but evil choices, and great good is the outcome of another thousand tiny acts of care.” Do you agree with this?
11. “Things happen to us that are more than we can take. And we break. We break for a moment, for a while. But the break is not who we are.” These words are spoken to Luis by Dr. Ghosh. Do you agree that the break is not who we are? Or do you believe that what we do when we break shows who we truly are? How do you see each of the main characters reflected in this statement?
12. The title of this novel is quoted from an Emily Dickinson poem—the epigraph at the beginning of the book. What do you make of the poem? How do you see each of the characters in this story rising? Do you see the title as ultimately optimistic? Do you see the book the same way?
13. Anton Chekhov famously said that if a gun appears in the first act of a play, that gun must go off before the end of the story. This book opens with the discovery of a gun, but that gun is tossed away partway through the book. Guns, however, are an integral part of the plot. Discuss the role of guns in this story, both in actuality and as metaphor.
14. What do you make of the judge’s decision to place Bashkim and Tirana with Graciela and Luis? Does that seem realistic to you? Why or why not? Do you think they would have been better off with their father? What solution would you have chosen for these children?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
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