Dept. of Speculation
Jenny Offill, 2014
Knopf Doubleday
192 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385350815
Summary
Dept. of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage. It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all.
Jenny Offill’s heroine, referred to in these pages as simply “the wife,” once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship.
As they confront an array of common catastrophes—a colicky baby, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions—the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art.
With cool precision, in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce longing, Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through the night at top speed. Exceptionally lean and compact, Dept. of Speculation is a novel to be devoured in a single sitting, though its bracing emotional insights and piercing meditations on despair and love will linger long after the last page. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1968
• Where—Massachusetts, USA
• Education—University of North Carolina-Chapel HIll
• Currently—New York, New York
Jenny Offill is an American author of three novels. Her first, Last Things (1999), was a New York Times Notable book and a finalist for the L.A Times First Book Award. Dept. of Speculation (2014), Ofill's second novel, received highly favorably reviews, as has her third, Weather published in (2020).
Offill is also the co-editor with Elissa Schappell of two anthologies of essays and is the author of several children's books. She has taught in the MFA programs at Brooklyn College, Columbia University and Queens University.[ She currently resides as the Writer-in-Residence at Vassar College. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/24/2020.)
Book Reviews
Offill’s unnamed heroine...is observant and literary minded, given to seeing the odd connections (or lack of connections) among the things that make up her day-to-day life and the more subterranean thoughts that jitter around in her head. She also has a lot in common with Joan Didion’s heroines... A genuinely moving story of love lost and perhaps, provisionally, recovered.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
[C]harts the course of a marriage through curious, often shimmering fragments of prose…Dept. of Speculation moves quickly, but it is also joyously demanding because you will want to keep trying to understand the why of each fragment and how it fits with the others…Offill is a smart writer with a canny sense of pacing; just when you want to abandon the fragmented puzzle pieces of the novel, she reveals a moment of breathtaking tenderness…Dept. of Speculation is especially engaging when it describes new motherhood—the stunned joy and loneliness and fatigue of it, the new orientation of the narrator's world around an impossibly small but demanding creature.
Roxane Gay - New York Times Book Review
Riveting.... Unsentimental.... Combines eclectic minutia with a laser-like narrative of a family on the edge of dissolution.... Paragraphs shatter, surreal details rise up and into the narrative.... A jewel of a book, a novel as funny, honest, and beguiling as any I have read.
Los Angeles Times
Hilarious, poignant.... So beautifully written that it begs multiple reads . . . Soul-bearing fiction at its best.... Dept. of Speculation doesn’t just resign itself to the disappointment of failed dreams that crop up in middle age. Instead, endurance to the end of a crisis generates wisdom, hope, and, perhaps, even art.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Marvelously huge in insight and honesty. Rich with humor, and deep with despair, Dept. of Speculation paints a masterful portrait of the nuts and the bolts and the warts and the silky splendor that defines commitment—the commitment to live in close quarters with other humans.... A quick, beautiful read that will draw out joy just as quickly as sadness, and may even cause one to pause and then wonder, and then to finally embrace both the misery and the magic of marriage.
New York Review of Books
Absorbing and highly readable.... Offill has successfully met the challenge she seems to have given herself: write only what needs to be written, and nothing more. No excess, no flab. And do it in a series of bulletins, fortune-cookie commentary, mordant observations, lyrical phrasing. And through these often disparate and disconnected means, tell the story of the fragile nature of anyone’s domestic life.... Intriguing, beautifully written, sly, and often profound.
Meg Wolitzer - NPR
Audacious.... Hilarious.... Dept. of Speculation reveals a raw marital reality that continues to be expunged from the pervasive narrative of marriage.... Offill moves quickly and poetically over deeply introspective questions about long-term partnerships, parenthood, and aging.... From deep within the interiors of a fictional marriage, Offill has crafted an account of matrimony and motherhood that breaks free of the all-too-limiting traditional stories of wives and mothers. There is a complexity to the central partnership; Offill folds cynicism into genuine moments of love. It may be difficult to truly know what happens between two people, but Offill gets alarmingly close.
Atlantic
Dept. of Speculation is a startling feat of storytelling—an intense and witty meditation on motherhood, infidelity, and identity, each line a dazzling, perfectly chiseled arrowhead aimed at your heart.
Vanity Fair
Offill somehow manages to pack the sprawling story of an ordinary marriage, both the good bits and the bad, into a small, poetic book. Rendered entirely in a series of staccato vignettes, Dept. of Speculation is told from the point of view of the bookish, funny wife.... Yes, there’s joylessness here, but there’s also real joy. (Grade: A-)
Entertainment Weekly
(Starred review.) Popping prose and touching vignettes of marriage and motherhood.... Clever, subtle, and rife with strokes of beauty, this book is both readable in a single sitting and far ranging in the emotions it raises. The 46 short chapters are told mostly in brief fragments and fly through the life of the nameless heroine.
Publishers Weekly
Offill's lean prose and the addition of astute quotations prevent the text from becoming just one more story of an infidelity. The author's debut, Last Things, was a Los Angeles Times First Book Award finalist, noted by the New York Times; here, her writing is exquisitely honed and vibrant. This would be an enlightened choice for a reading group. —Lisa Rohrbaugh, Leetonia Community P.L., OH
Library Journal
A magnetic novel about a marriage of giddy bliss and stratospheric anxiety, bedrock alliance and wrenching tectonic shifts.... So precisely articulate that [Offill's] perfect, simple sentences vibrate like violin strings. And she is mordantly funny, a wry taxonomist of emotions and relationships.... She has sliced life thin enough for a microscope and magnified it until it fills the mind's eye and the heart.
Booklist
Scenes from a marriage, sometimes lyrical, sometimes philosophically rich, sometimes just puzzling.... The fragmented story...is sometimes hard to follow, and at times, the writing...is precious.There are moments of literary experimentation worthy of Virginia Woolf here, but in the end, this reads more like notes for a novel than a novel itself.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. This novel is written in a fragmentary, elliptical style. Why do you think it is structured this way? 2. How would the story change if it were told in a more straightforward fashion?
3. The epigraph for the novel is a quote from Socrates: “Speculators on the universe are... no better than madmen.” Where else in the book does the narrator talk about madness?
4. Is this a book about loneliness?
5. Have you ever known an art monster? Have you ever been one?
6. On pages 43 and 44, the narrator includes a “Personality Questionnaire.” What phobias or fears would you include if you wrote your own?
7. The narrator says, “I would give it up for her . . . but only if she would consent to lie quietly with me until she was eighteen.” What do you make of this passage?
8. What does it mean to throw off ambition “like an expensive coat that no longer fits?”
9. When the narrator’s sister tells her, “You have a kid-glove marriage” (page 81), does the narrator agree?
10. Why does the POV change midway through the book? Why does she become “the wife” and he, “the husband”?
11. What reaction did you have to the soscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscared chapter?
12. If someone asked you, “When were you the happiest?” what would you say? Would you say the same thing no matter who asked you?
13. The narrator says at one point, “The truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.” Does this seem true to you?
14. Why does the narrator want to meet the girl? Why is this section framed as if it is a student paper she is grading?
15. The wife says “(So ask the birds at least. Ask the fucking birds.)” Who is she speaking to? Why is this placed in parentheses as if it is an offhand comment?
16. Chapter 46—the last chapter in the novel—switches the point of view of first person plural, “We.” Why do you think this change is made?
17. Is this a happy ending? Do you want it to be?
18. Discuss what matters most to you.
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Thirty Girls
Susan Minot, 2014
Knopf Doubleday
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307266385
Summary
Esther is a Ugandan teenager abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army and forced to witness and commit unspeakable atrocities. She is struggling to survive, to escape, and to find a way to live with what she has seen and done.
Jane is an American journalist who has traveled to Africa, hoping to give a voice to children like Esther and to find her center after a series of failed relationships. In unflinching prose, Minot interweaves their stories, giving us razor-sharp portraits of two extraordinary young women confronting displacement, heartbreak, and the struggle to wrest meaning from events that test them both in unimaginable ways.
With mesmerizing emotional intensity and stunning evocations of Africa's beauty and its horror, Minot gives us her most brilliant and ambitious novel yet. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 7, 1956
• Where—Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Brown University; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Awards—Prix Femina Etranger; O. Henry Prize; Pushcart Prize
• Currently—lives in New York, New York
Susan Mino is an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, poet, and screenwriter. Her first novel, Monkeys (1986), was published in a dozen countries and won the Prix Femina Etranger in France. Her novel Evening was a worldwide best seller and became a major motion picture. She received her MFA from Columbia University and lives with her daughter in New York City and on an island off the coast of Maine. (From the publisher.)
Sexuality and the difficulties of romantic relationships are a constant theme in Minot's work. Her second book, Lust and Other Stories, focuses on "the relations between men and women in their twenties and thirties having difficulty coming together and difficulty breaking apart."
Reviewing her novella "Rapture" in The Atlantic Monthly, James Marcus notes that "Sex and the single girl have seldom been absent from Susan Minot's fiction," and Dave Welch at Powells.com identifies one of Minot's themes as "the emotional safeguards within family and romantic relations that hold people apart." About Lust, Jill Franks observes that Minot...
begins with short, simple sentences, building gradually to longer ones to create the inevitable conclusion: men don't love like women do. Her logic appears in simple two-or three-liners that capture a sense of futility...Do not look for a happy, mutual, heterosexual relationship in Minot. You will not find it.
Minot has also co-authored two screenplays that have been made into films: Stealing Beauty (1996) with Bernardo Bertolucci, and Evening (based on her novel of the same name, 2007), written with Michael Cunningham. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
[A] novel of quiet humanity and probing intelligence. Thirty Girls approaches the atrocities wrought by Kony's army with candor yet without sensationalism, a combination that may not initially attract readers. But to ignore Minot's book would be a serious mistake…Susan Minot takes huge questions and examines them with both a delicate touch and a cleareyed, unyielding scrutiny.
New York Times Book Review
Transfixing.... Esther, taken from harsh reality, is an extraordinary character . . . If you keep patient, all [the novel’s] scattered, neurotic strands will wind into a tight cord, and, in the end, you may calm down, stay in this writer’s hands and make sense of the exhilaration and horror.
Washington Post
Clear and searing.... Pulls you in from the first page.... The details are rendered with empathy, and both main characters occupied honorably in their struggles. It forces the reader to consider how much luck fashions the basic architecture of our lives. And how, despite all the vast differences in that architecture, what we strive for is remarkably the same.... A book that looks hard at trauma, love, and humanity, that contemplates the wide potential spectrum of life, concluding perhaps that life is not competition between us, but instead a struggle within each of us for whatever "twigs" of love and happiness we can manage, no matter what the context.
Boston Globe
Gripping.... Sensual.... Immediate.... Minot wants to do more than sound a drumbeat of atrocities.... She wants to use literature to transmute a human horror into something that can be understood and in time healed.
Miami Herald
Skillful and moving.... Esther’s story gives Thirty Girls moral weight, like that offered in Graham Greene’s best novels.... We’re all suffering humans, but our capacity for empathy offers a chance of reducing that suffering. Thirty Girls brings faraway calamity home in the form of Esther, a character so endearing that shutting out her story is not an option.
Dallas Morning News
Poignant.... The true heart of this novel comes from Esther and the children of the LRA. Minot captures their characters so effectively that, throughout the many scenes, one almost forgets that these specific stories and children are fiction. Esther is a stunning character whose strength and bravery is an inspiration to readers.... Thirty Girls conveys an important story that people need to hear.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Extraordinary.... Panoramic.... Poetic.... Minot shows her readers that war zones cannot be contained within one country, or one region. When cruelty and violence reign, we are all at risk.
NPR
Daring.... Minot’s cleanly sculpted prose and capacity to penetrate and open the mind and heart challenge us to step outside our comfort zone. Finally, there comes this realization: Esther and Jane aren’t so different at all. We recognize their stories as ours.... Minot succeeds, through her fictionalized version, in making us care as much as she does.
O Magazine
Africa—described in Minot’s muscular, evocative, and unflinching prose—offers itself up to Jane in all its beguiling beauty, its unremitting violence, and breaks her open like an egg. When she meets Esther Akello, whose time in captivity has left her silent and self-hating, the two recognize in each other something that needs healing, and together they create a transcendent moment (for the reader as well) in a "cracked and sad" world where "everything was lit and love happened."
MORE Magazine
When there is a story the world needs to know, does it matter who tells it, or just that it gets told?.... The nexus of white guilt and privilege is raised in Thirty Girls again and again.... Minot tells both stories with such harsh, lyrical beauty that neither is easy to forget. (Grade: A-)
Entertainment Weekly
Exceptional... Represents a broadening vision for Minot . . . She has earned a trademark on the subject of desire.
Elle
Chapters alternate between the perspectives of Esther and Jane Wood, a self-absorbed, 40-ish American journalist who travels to Africa to interview the abductees, but is also fleeing failed love affairs and a general sense of purposelessness in her life. This is a risky narrative ploy, as Jane’s concerns seem trivial compared to those of the heroically resilient teenagers. It pays off at the end, though....
Publishers Weekly
A novel as raw, beautiful, and seemingly serendipitous as the politics, landscape, and culture of the sub-Saharan Africa it describes.... Minot has an uncanny feel for the emotional hit-or-miss connections between people.
Shelf Awareness
(Starred review.) Dreamlike.... Though the shifting narratives start out highlighting the stark contrasts between the two worlds, they eventually collide as violence enters the privileged white enclave.... A deeply affecting title that manages to express weighty sentiments and horrific events with subtlety and poetry. —Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., Holbrook, NY
Library Journal
Spellbinding Minot, a writer of exquisite perception and nuance, contrasts Esther’s and Jane’s radically different, yet profoundly transforming journeys in a perfectly choreographed, slow-motion, devastatingly revealing collision of realities. So sure yet light is Minot’s touch in this master work, so piercing yet respectful her insights into suffering and strength, that she dramatizes horrific truths, obdurate mysteries, and painful recognition with both bone-deep understanding and breathtaking beauty.
Booklist
Minot tries to combine a fictionalized but mostly journalistic account of the abduction of Ugandan children by Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army with a sexual drama about the doomed romance of an American writer and a much younger white Kenyan.... Despite hauntingly beautiful prose, there is a secondhand feel to Esther's story, which plays fiddle to Jane's navel-gazing.
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.)
Mercy Snow
Tiffany Baker, 2014
Grand Central Publishing
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781455512737
Summary
In the tiny town of Titan Falls, New Hampshire, the paper mill dictates a quiet, steady rhythm of life. But one day a tragic bus accident sets two families on a course toward destruction, irrevocably altering the lives of everyone in their wake.
June McAllister is the wife of the local mill owner and undisputed first lady in town. But the Snow family, a group of itinerant ne'er-do-wells who live on a decrepit and cursed property, have brought her—and the town—nothing but grief.
June will do anything to cover up a dark secret she discovers after the crash, one that threatens to upend her picture-perfect life, even if it means driving the Snow family out of town. But she has never gone up against a force as fierce as the young Mercy Snow.
Mercy is determined to protect her rebellious brother, whom the town blames for the accident, despite his innocence. And she has a secret of her own. When an old skeleton is discovered not far from the crash, it beckons Mercy to solve a mystery buried deep within the town's past. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Tiffany Baker is the author of The Gilly Salt Sisters and The Little Giant of Aberdeen County, which was a New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle bestseller. She holds an MFA (creative writing) and a PhD (Victorian Literature) from UC Irvine, and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and three children. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Strength and quiet beauty mark Baker's writing.... Her style perfectly suits the mood, time and place of this tale. Though it tells an old story that extends back at least to Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," Mercy Snow provides an authentic universe of damaged souls and a fantastical heroine.
Anita Shreve - Washington Post
As the families' secrets come pouring out, Baker deftly balances personal grievances with broader concerns about pollution, economic justice and corporate responsibility in small-town America.
San Jose Mercury News
Baker is masterful at creating elegantly flawed characters who are both believably ordinary and extraordinary.
Family Circle
New York Times bestselling author Baker (The Little Giant of Aberdeen County) shines once again in her third novel, like its predecessors set in smalltown America. This time, the scene is Titan Falls, N.H., in the mid-1990s—a paper mill town on the brink of economic collapse. Nineteen-year-old Mercy Snow has returned to her family’s plot of land in Titan Falls with her older brother, Zeke, and younger sister, Hannah. The Snow siblings have nothing but a rusted-out RV and a reputation for trouble that they owe to their parents and grandparents. One night, a bus returning from a high school trip is run off the road, killing a local girl. Locals blame Zeke, whose crashed car was found not far from the bus. But Mercy knows it wasn’t Zeke’s fault and is determined to clear her brother’s name. The McAllisters, who own the paper mill and therefore run the town, are just as determined to stop Mercy before her quest uncovers the family’s long-buried secrets. Baker slowly but confidently unravels a gripping tale of love, justice, and redemption, set in a town where all three seem just a little out of reach.
Publishers Weekly
In her captivating third novel (after The Gilly Salt Sisters, 2012), Baker vividly renders the small town of Titan Falls, New Hampshire, and its denizens. The tiny burg has long been dominated by the fortunes of the paper mill that is its only industry and inundated by the stink of the Androscoggin River, which carries the factory runoff. At one end of the spectrum lies June McAllister, the well-off mill owner’s wife, who doggedly devotes herself to charitable causes, seeking to make her mark on the town for the sake of appearances. On the other end of town is orphan Mercy Snow and her two siblings. They have recently inherited the run-down property of their uncle and are grateful for it. When the locals, led by June, attempt to pin the blame for a school-bus accident on Mercy’s brother, she proves herself an adept advocate for his innocence and for their need to finally be able to call someplace home. Melding a rich atmosphere with vulnerable characters and an engrossing plot, Baker once again proves herself to be a first-rate storyteller. --Joanne Wilkinson
Booklist
A tiny New Hampshire river town, whose main industry is a paper mill, is rocked by a tragic accident. By the mid-1990s, small American manufacturing operations are already losing ground, and jobs, to foreign competitors. However, Titan Falls, teetering on the steep banks of the polluted Androscoggin River, is still dependent on the Titan Mill, which converts lumber into paper and has been owned since time immemorial by the McAllister family. The mill employs most of the men, and June, spouse of the mill's current scion, Cal McAllister, rules the wives--membership in her knitting circle is de rigueur. The orphaned, nomadic Snow children, Zeke and his fey sisters, Mercy and Hannah, have arrived in a rickety RV to claim the plot of land vacated by their late father, Pruitt. Hannah senses that the ghost of ancestor Gert Snow, a recluse who died under suspicious circumstances, hovers nearby, making mischief. Gert's worst intervention is the event that launches the main plot--on the night before Thanksgiving, a church youth-group bus skids off a cliff while rounding an icy hairpin turn. Nate, June and Cal's teenage son, and other passengers sustain only minor injuries, but Nate's childhood best friend and secret love, Suzie, is killed. The bus driver, Fergus, husband of local sheepherder Hazel, hovers, comatose, on life support. (The skeletal remains of Gert are ominously recovered during the crash investigation.) The accident is pinned on Zeke, whose battered pickup is found nearby, crumpled against a tree. But what was one of Suzie's bright red mittens, knitted from Hazel's artisanal dyed yarn, doing in Cal's pocket, June wonders. From such minutiae, Baker crafts her appealing, occasionally cloying mélange of magic realism, mystery and social commentary. Baker (The Gilly Salt Sisters, 2012, etc.) has managed to carve out her own niche in this rocky North Woods terrain, largely due to her deeply flawed but likable characters.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)
In the Blood
Lisa Unger, 2014
Simon & Schuster
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781451691177
Summary
Someone knows Lana's secret—and he's dying to tell.
Lana Granger lives a life of lies. She has told so many lies about where she comes from and who she is that the truth is like a cloudy nightmare she can’t quite recall. About to graduate from college and with her trust fund almost tapped out, she takes a job babysitting a troubled boy named Luke. Expelled from schools all over the country, the manipulative young Luke is accustomed to controlling the people in his life. But, in Lana, he may have met his match. Or has Lana met hers?
When Lana’s closest friend, Beck, mysteriously disappears, Lana resumes her lying ways—to friends, to the police, to herself. The police have a lot of questions for Lana when the story about her whereabouts the night Beck disappeared doesn’t jibe with eyewitness accounts. Lana will do anything to hide the truth, but it might not be enough to keep her ominous secrets buried: someone else knows about Lana’s lies. And he’s dying to tell.
Lisa Unger’s writing has been hailed as "sensational" (Publishers Weekly) and "sophisticated" (New York Daily News), with "gripping narrative and evocative, muscular prose" (Associated Press). Masterfully suspenseful, finely crafted, and written with a no-holds-barred raw power, In the Blood is Unger at her best. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—April 26, 1970
• Where—New Haven, Connecticut, USA
• Raised—The Netherlands, UK, and New Jersey, USA
• Education—New School for Social Research
• Currently—lives in Florida
Lisa Unger is an award winning New York Times, USA Today and international bestselling author. Her novels have been published in over 26 countries around the world.
She was born in New Haven, Connecticut (1970) but grew up in the Netherlands, England and New Jersey. A graduate of the New School for Social Research, Lisa spent many years living and working in New York City. She then left a career in publicity to pursue her dream of becoming a full-time author. She now lives in Florida with her husband and daughter.
Her writing has been hailed as "masterful" (St. Petersburg Times), "sensational" (Publishers Weekly) and "sophisticated" (New York Daily News) with "gripping narrative and evocative, muscular prose" (Associated Press).
More
Her own words:
I have always most naturally expressed myself through writing and I have always dwelled in the land of my imagination more comfortably than in reality. There’s a jolt I get from a good story that I’m not sure can be duplicated in the real world. Perhaps this condition came about because of all the traveling my family did when I was younger. I was born in Connecticut but we moved often. By the time my family settled for once and all in New Jersey, I had already lived in Holland and in England (not to mention Brooklyn and other brief New Jersey stays) for most of my childhood. I don’t recall ever minding moving about; even then I had a sense that it was cool and unusual. But I think it was one of many things that kept me feeling separate from the things and people around me, this sense of myself as transient and on the outside, looking in. I don’t recall ever exactly fitting in anywhere. Writers are first and foremost observers … and one can’t truly observe unless she stands apart.
For a long time, I didn’t really believe that it was possible to make a living as a writer … mainly because that’s what people always told me. So, I made it a hobby. All through high school, I won awards and eventually, a partial scholarship because of my writing. In college, I was advised by teachers to pursue my talent, to get an agent, to really go for it. But there was a little voice that told me (quietly but insistently) that it wasn’t possible. I didn’t see it as a viable career option as I graduated from the New School for Social Research (I transferred there from NYU for smaller, more dynamic classes). I needed a “real job.” A real job delivers a regular pay check, right? So I entered a profession that brought me as close to my dream as possible … and paid, if not well, then at least every two weeks. I went into publishing.
When I left for Florida, I think I was at a critical level of burnout. I think that as a New Yorker, especially after a number of years, one starts to lose sight of how truly special, how textured and unique it is. The day-to-day can be brutal: the odors, the noise, the homeless, the trains, the expense. Once I had some distance though, New York City started to leak into my work and I found myself rediscovering many of the things I had always treasured about it. It came very naturally as the setting for Beautiful Lies. It is the place I know best. I know it as one can only know a place she has loved desperately and hated passionately and then come to miss terribly once she has left it behind.
But it is true that we can’t go home again. I live in Florida now with my wonderful husband, and I’m a full-time writer. There’s a lot of beauty and texture and darkness to be mined in this strange place, as well. I’m sure I’d miss it as much in different ways if I returned to New York. I guess that’s my thing … no matter where I am I wonder if I belong somewhere else. I’m always outside, observing. It’s only when I’m writing that I know I’m truly home. (Author bio from the author's website.)
Book Reviews
[A] brisk, crafty and fascinating psychological thriller.... Offers plenty of good, scary fun — scenes that will make readers jump... [and] a reveal that will surely elicit a satisfied gasp from the reader.... In the Blood is a complex mosaic as well, one that’s tricky, arresting and meaningful.
Washington Post
Always scary…Unger neatly distorts our perceptions, so there’s no telling what is what. Well done.
New York Daily News
In The Blood may be [Unger's] best one yet.... Keeps the shocks and twists coming at a breakneck pace.
Tampa Bay Tribune
A riveting chess match of twists will keep you guessing—and keep you up at night.
Family Circle
Nothing is what it seems as Unger pulls off some beautiful surprises in this intriguing thriller.... Masterfully told.
Associated Press
A fantastic novel full of suspense and intrigue. Massively recommended.
The Sun (UK)
Unger is a compelling storyteller whose tales rest on human frailty.... She makes it impossible to stop reading.
Charlotte Observer
(Starred review.) Bestseller Unger returns to the Hollows, the secluded upstate New York town that served as the setting for Fragile and Darkness, My Old Friend, for this gripping novel of psychological suspense.... [A] tense, surprise-laden plot.
Publishers Weekly
This fast-moving book is a rollercoaster thrill ride, withholding crucial facts and then pounding you with them as the chapters wind down. It’s a quick, adrenaline-filled read with a slam-bang climax. Unger’s skill with words, combined with a pace that never lets up, is guaranteed to keep the pages turning long past the midnight hour.
BookPage
We're asked to believe that one dangerously unstable child can grow up and learn to love with the help of therapy and lots of meds, while another with virtually identical issues will always be a monster. Few readers will dwell on this inconsistency as they savor the pleasure of being guided by Unger's sure hand along a deliciously twisted narrative path. Another scary winner from an accomplished pro.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. In The Blood opens with an excerpt "The Tiger," a poem by the British poet William Blake. Why do you think the author chose this poem to open the story? What connections do you see between the subject matter of the poem and that of the novel?
2. One of the primary themes of In The Blood is the debate of "nature vs. nurture" and the relative importance of upbringing and genetics in determining individuals' personality. Why does this debate have such significance for the characters in the novel? What do you think the author’s point of view is in this debate? What do you think is more important in determining someone’s personality—their genes or their upbringing?
3. On page 25, we discover that the motto of Lana’s college is "Come with a purpose and find your path." What does this mean for Lana? What significance does the motto have for Lana’s life in general?
4. Lana’s urge to help others springs largely from her mother’s request that she use her intelligence and other gifts to help people. Why do you think this is so important to Lana? What does her mother’s request mean to her? What are some other reasons Lana might be motivated to help others?
5. One of the powerful themes of In The Blood is the thin line between "normal" and "abnormal." What do you think separates normal from abnormal in terms of psychology? Is this the difference between Lana and Luke? Why is it so difficult to diagnose someone who is “abnormal”?
6. Lana’s character is markedly ambiguous, androgynous, and evolves constantly throughout the book—both in her own person and in our understanding of her. How did your perception of Lana change throughout the novel? Did you like her as a person? How did your trust in her account of things, her reliability as a narrator, shift as certain facts were revealed?
7. Early in Lana’s job as Luke’s babysitter, she says, "In the light, he looked exactly what he was—a little boy, troubled maybe but just a kid. I felt an unwanted tug of empathy (p. 45)." Why doesn’t Lana want to empathize with Luke? How does this desire change throughout the course of the novel? Do you think Lana’s later empathy towards Luke is due to his manipulations, or is it something else?
8. Lana believes that the idea of the "bad seed" is a pervasive “acceptable bigotry (p.55)” in our society. Do you agree with her about this? How are people that are perceived to be “bad seeds” judged, or misjudged?
9. The diary that is woven throughout the story of Lana spends much of its time meditating on the stresses that having a child puts on a relationship. As the diary’s author says, "Maybe parenthood is a crucible; the intensity of its environment breaks you down to your most essential elements as a couple (p.129)." What do you think of this assessment? How does a so-called “problem child” complicate the situation?
10. Lana is immensely competitive with Luke, something he uses to his great advantage. Why do you think Lana is so easily sucked into competing with a young boy? Why is she compelled to keep participating in his games when she knows the dangers?
11. Lana has a unique perspective on forgiveness. As she puts it, "In real life, that doesn’t happen. People don’t forgive things like that. They don’t find peace. It’s pure bullshit. When something unspeakable happens, or when you do something unspeakable, it changes you. It takes you apart and reassembles you (p.122)." Do you agree with this perspective? Are some things unforgivable? Is forgiveness something you do for yourself, or for the person being forgiven?
12. On pages 142-143, Lana meditates on why people are so obsessed with violent, horrible crimes. She says, "People love a mystery, a tragedy, a shooting, a disappearance, a gruesome murder." Why do you think this is? Do you think Lana is right to condemn people’s interest in these kinds of crimes? What does Lana’s perspective as an insider tell you about this kind of interest or obsession that you may not have known, or known as well, before reading In The Blood?
13. Early in the novel, Lana says, "We count so much on politeness, those of us who are hiding things. We count on people not staring too long, or asking too many questions (p. 26)." Do you think this shows a downside to politeness? Are we are too polite, as a society? How does Lana’s urge to keep her secrets complicate the lives of other people in her life?
14. In The Blood poses a lot of complicated questions about the treatment of mental illness, and the possibility of "redeeming" sociopaths and genuine psychopaths. What do you think the right course of action is with these kinds of individuals? Using Luke as an example, what do you think was the right thing to do with him at the end of the book? Do you think Lana does the right thing in her actions towards Luke?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Worthy Brown's Daughter
Phillip Margolin, 2014
HarperCollins
452 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062195357
Summary
Known for his contemporary thrillers, Phillip Margolin explores intriguing new territory in Worthy Brown's Daughter, a compelling historical drama, set in nineteenth-century Oregon, that combines a heartbreaking story of slavery and murder with classic Margolin plot twists.
One of a handful of lawyers in the new state of Oregon, recently widowed Matthew Penny agrees to help Worthy Brown, a newly freed slave, rescue his fifteen year old daughter, Roxanne, from their former master, a powerful Portland lawyer. Worthy's lawsuit sets in motion events that lead to Worthy's arrest for murder and create an agonizing moral dilemma that could send either Worthy or Matthew to the hangman.
At the same time, hanging judge Jed Tyler, a powerful politician with a barren personal life, becomes infatuated with a beautiful gold-digger who is scheming to murder Benjamin Gillette, Oregon's wealthiest businessman. When Gillette appears to die from natural causes, Sharon Hill produces a forged contract of marriage and Tyler must decide if he will sacrifice his reputation to defend that of the woman who inspired his irrational obsession.
At Worthy's trial, Matthew reveals a stunning courtroom surprise and his attempt to stop the deadly fortune hunter ends in a violent climax. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1944
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., American University; J.D., New York
University
• Currently—lives in Portland, Oregon
Phillip Margolin is a writer of legal thrillers. After receiving a B.A. in Government in 1965, from American University in Washington, D.C., he worked for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Liberia. In 1970 he graduated from the New York University School of Law, spending 25 years as a criminal defense attorney in the Oregon Court of Appeals. It was an occupation, he said, inspired by his love of Perry Mason books.
In 1974 he published his first short story, "The Girl in the Yellow Bikini," and by 1996 became a full-time writer, penning 20 books, including a collection of short stories. He lists as his favourite writer Joseph Conrad, and Tolstoy's War and Peace among his favorite books, along with Mitchell Smith's Stone City.
Margolin was married to Doreen Stamm in 1968. They had two children, Ami and Daniel. Doreen, also a defense attorney, died from cancer in January 2007.
Margolin is also the president of Chess for Success, a non-profit organisation "dedicated to helping children develop skills necessary for success in school and life by learning chess." (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Worthy Brown’s Daughter is a fast and absorbing read, and Margolin’s law expertise makes the book’s climax…an exciting moment indeed.
Seattle Times
It is rare that we get a good western adventure but Margolin has the right stuff to make this one a classic. He takes us back to that time in our country's history when men were quick to fight for the dreams of wealth, a woman's love, or a matter of honor. If you like westerns or legal thrillers you will get both in Worthy Brown's Daughter.
Huffington Post
He captures both the haphazard legal theater—when judges ride the circuit, Portland’s "courthouse" is a loft on the third floor of the Coleman Barrel Company—and the daunting racism of the times.
Oregonian (Portland)
The author has done some homework when it comes to recreating 19th century scenes, from the informal courtrooms to the makeshift jail to the streets of Portland and San Francisco. Still, Margolin apparently has never met an adjective he didn't love and want to bring home. One of the most striking examples from this book is his description of Matthew as—"gaunt," "unwell," "always exhausted" and "morose"—all in one sentence! [Despite a] careless use of language...this energetic tale does cover interesting regional history.
Bellingham Herald
Worthy Brown’s Daughter reads something like Deadwood meets Twelve Years a Slave. The finale in the courtroom is as brilliant and exciting as any great legal drama…. [A] beautifully written story rooted in America’s brutal history of slavery and racism.
Iron Mountain News
Phillip Margolin explores intriguing new territory in Worthy Brown’s Daughter, a compelling historical drama, set in nineteenth-century Oregon, that combines a heartbreaking story of slavery and murder with classic Margolin plot twists.
Bookreporter.com
Portland, Ore., in the 1860s...a black man on trial expects a racist jury. Here, the innocent is Worthy Brown, a freed black man who asks Matthew to rescue his daughter, Roxanne, from Caleb Barbour, a crooked lawyer who illegally holds her in servitude.... On the courtroom floor...the stock characters adopt roles, albeit briefly, in a satisfying, white-knuckle climax.
Publishers Weekly
[I]nspired by a case from the 1800s in which Col. Nathaniel Ford brought a slave family from Missouri to Oregon to help him start up his farm on the condition they would be freed after it was up and running. Colonel Ford freed the parents but kept the children as indentured servants.... With plenty of action and short chapters, this historical legal thriller is a quick read. Some...plotlines are too easily and quickly tied up. ...but the lively narrative will keep readers engrossed. —Brooke Bolton, North Manchester P.L., IN
Library Journal
Legal thriller writer Margolin turns back the clock to confront murder, deceit and slavery in frontier Oregon. It's 1860... [T]here's legal wrangling, murder and romance, set against the backdrop of race and frontier life. Margolin's dialogue is sometimes affected, sometimes faintly anachronistic, but his scene-setting, knowledge of the frontier and relating of the hard task of the law make for an appealing read that, the author says, took 30 years to write.
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.)