A Life in Men
Gina Frangello, 2014
Algonquin Books
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781616201630
Summary
The friendship between Mary and Nix had endured since childhood, a seemingly unbreakable bond, until the mid-1980s, when the two young women embarked on a summer vacation in Greece.
It was a trip initiated by Nix, who had just learned that Mary had been diagnosed with a disease that would cut her life short and who was determined that it be the vacation of a lifetime. But by the time their visit to Greece was over, Nix had withdrawn from their friendship, and Mary had no idea why.
Three years later, Nix is dead, and Mary returns to Europe to try to understand what went wrong. In the process she meets the first of many men that she will spend time with as she travels throughout the world. Through them she experiences not only a sexual awakening but a spiritual and emotional awakening that allows her to understand how the past and the future are connected and to appreciate the freedom to live life adventurously. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Gina Frangello is a cofounder of Other Voices Books and the editor of the fiction section at The Nervous Breakdown. She is also the author of one previous novel and a collection of short stories. She lives in Chicago. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Diagnosed with cystic fibrosis at age 17, Mary Grace wants to understand why her lifelong friendship with Nix went awry during an ill-fated Greek vacation before their junior year of college..... Frangello’s novel packs an emotional punch throughout, particularly in its final third.
Publishers Weekly
Mary, is diagnosed with cystic fibrosis.... In a twist of fate, [her best friend] Nicole's life ends prematurely, and Mary tries to outrun her emotional burdens by living hard and reinventing herself in London.... Ambitious in breadth and scope. —Sonia Reppe, Stickney-Forest View P.L., IL
Library Journal
In this bravura performance, a quantum creative leap...Frangello astutely dissects the quandaries of female sexuality, adoption, terminal illness, and compound heartbreak in a torrent of tough-minded observations, audacious candor, and storytelling moxie.
Booklist
A stunning novel—Frangello’s broken characters live in a world of terror and redemption, of magnificent sadness and beauty.
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.)
Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir
Penelope Lively, 2014
Viking Adult
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780670016556
Summary
The beloved and bestselling author takes an intimate look back at a life of reading and writing.
“The memory that we live with...is the moth-eaten version of our own past that each of us carries around, depends on. It is our ID; this is how we know who we are and where we have been.”
Memory and history have been Penelope Lively’s terrain in fiction over a career that has spanned five decades. But she has only rarely given readers a glimpse into her influences and formative years.
Dancing Fish and Ammonites traces the arc of Lively’s life, stretching from her early childhood in Cairo to boarding school in England to the sweeping social changes of Britain’s twentieth century. She reflects on her early love of archeology, the fragments of the ancients that have accompanied her journey—including a sherd of Egyptian ceramic depicting dancing fish and ammonites found years ago on a Dorset beach. She also writes insightfully about aging and what life looks like from where she now stands. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 17, 1933
• Where—Cairo, Egypt
• Education—Oxford University
• Awards—Awards—Man Booker Prize; Carnegie Medal;
Whitbread Children's Book of the Year.
• Currently—lives London, England, UK
Penelope Lively was born in Cairo, Egypt but settled in England after the war and took a degree in history at St Anne's College, Oxford. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a member of PEN and the Society of Authors. She was married to the late Professor Jack Lively, has a daughter, a son and four grandchildren, and lives in Oxfordshire and London.
Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize; once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark. She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger. Her novels include Passing On, City of the Mind, Cleopatra's Sister, and Heat Wave.
Penelope Lively has also written radio and television scripts and has acted as presenter for a BBC Radio 4 program on children's literature. She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Buoyant and propulsive.... Dancing Fish and Ammonites is about growing old, about memory and history, about reading and writing.... Lively communicates ideas and experiences with flashes of narrative color: the tins of water in which the feet of her crib stood in childhood, to spare her from Cairo’s ants; the layout of a beloved garden; the sight of women in felt hats and gloves as they walked past the bombed-out rubble of wartime Britain.”
New York Times Book Review
Lively describes how literature shaped her from the time she was a small girl growing up in Cairo, and gives a deeply thoughtful account of the formative powers of consistent literary engagement.... She moves with agility between a wide range of observations on the personal and social consequences of being old, providing her readers with a perspective from "an unexpected dimension."
The New Yorker
Funny, smart, and poignant.... Admirers of Penelope Lively's many fine novels will find the same lucid intelligence at work in her elegantly written "view from old age." ... Memory, history, archaeology, paleontology—for Penelope Lively, they are all part of our individual and collective effort to retrieve lost time. She chronicles her personal engagement in that quest with wit and rue.
Los Angeles Times
Witty, gentle-humored, sharp... Throughout Lively is a keen observer and an engaging narrator.... Subjects that may, at first glance, seem random and somewhat scattershot take on the elegant coherence of a deeply satisfying conversation.
NPR—All Things Considered
Lively looks out at the world and then back at herself in it, examining everything through the scrim of a prodigious intelligence and a memory that is ‘the mind's triumph over time.’ . . . Dancing Fish and Ammonites is chock full of anecdote, opinion, insight, lore and the sheer delight of a life lived fully.
Shelf Awareness
Lively’s memoir about age and the pleasures and pains of seniority is informative, instructive, unexpected, and beautifully observed.
Vogue (UK)
Lively remains alive to the world, as any novelist should be (and, for the record, she still writes very fine novels)... Dancing Fish and Ammonites is powerfully consoling. Lively is certainly sagacious, her words careful and freighted. But there is girlishness here, too. Things still catch her eye, her attention. New books. Old stories. Another day for the taking.
Observer (UK)
As tightly coiled as one of the ammonites of the title...Lively’s briskness, expressing valuable insight and masking deep feeling, will delight all those who love her novels.... What she offers is a series of meditations on memory itself and on what still gives her life purpose: reading and history. Her attitude is rueful but accepting—as it must be.... Of course, for most of us, memory starts to fail as we get older, but Dancing Fish and Ammonites is itself a wonderfully optimistic testament to intellectual activity as one way towards, if not eternal youth, then a brightness that defies the encroaching gloom.
Daily Mail (UK)
A reader’s pure delight.... It works as a whistle-stop history of the past 80 years from the perspective of one delightful and bookish woman’s life.... Reading it is like listening to a favorite older relative reminisce, if only older relatives were all well-traveled Oxford graduates with keen humor and a sharp knack for observing human behavior.”
Independent on Sunday (UK)
At 80, Lively, celebrated British novelist and author examines in five essays the many appealing and noteworthy facets of old age with her expert observer’s eye and eloquent touch.... [A] digressive, erudite, witty narrative,...these reflective essays offer a wealth of riches for further study.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) An insightful book of self-reflection from the acclaimed novelis.... The faithful will recognize the author’s love of archaeology, and many will keep a pen handy to record titles and authors, since reading is one activity age has not diminished... [An] unsentimental, occasionally poignant meditation on a long life.
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.)
The Swan Gondola
Timothy Schaffert, 2014
Penguin Group (USA)
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594486098
Summary
A lush and thrilling romantic fable about two lovers set against the scandalous burlesques, midnight séances, and aerial ballets of the 1898 Omaha World’s Fair.
On the eve of the 1898 Omaha World’s Fair, Ferret Skerritt, ventriloquist by trade, con man by birth, isn’t quite sure how it will change him or his city. Omaha still has the marks of a filthy Wild West town, even as it attempts to achieve the grandeur and respectability of nearby Chicago. But when he crosses paths with the beautiful and enigmatic Cecily, his whole purpose shifts and the fair becomes the backdrop to their love affair.
One of a traveling troupe of actors that has descended on the city, Cecily works in the Midway’s Chamber of Horrors, where she loses her head hourly on a guillotine playing Marie Antoinette. And after closing, she rushes off, clinging protectively to a mysterious carpetbag, never giving Ferret a second glance. But a moonlit ride on the swan gondola, a boat on the lagoon of the New White City, changes everything, and the fair’s magic begins to take its effect. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—state of Nebraska, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Nebraska-Lincoln; M.F.A.,
University of Arizona
• Currently—lives in Omaha, Nebraska
Timothy Schaffert grew up on a farm in Nebraska and now lives in Omaha. He is the author of four previous critically acclaimed novels, which have been among Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selections, Indie Next Picks, and New York Times Editor’s Choices. Schaffert teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. (From the publisher.)
Novels
2014 - The Swan Gondola
2011 - The Coffins of Little Hope
2007 - Devils in the Sugar Shop
2005 - The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God
2002 - The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters
Book Reviews
[H]ighly atmospheric entertainment, full of plot twists, historical flavor and paranormal romance.... Beneath the intrigue, mystery and historical window dressings of The Swan Gondola beats the heart of a complicated love story.... As a prose stylist, Schaffert leans toward the extravagant without crossing the line into purple. The jaunty Victorian temperament of the prose rings true to the era, as do its thoroughness and attention to detail.
Washington Post
A ventriloquist in a hot air balloon lifts off from Omaha, Neb., crashes in a strange land, and presides over an emerald cathedral. Yes, it’s The Wizard of Oz. But it’s also the loose construct of Timothy Schaffert’s new novel, The Swan Gondola, which pays tribute to the L. Frank Baum’s classic, yet veers off on its own path of magic and deception. It’s an entertaining and thoroughly researched book, particularly suitable for Americana buffs who want a taste of life in a western frontier town struggling to become a modern city at the turn of the century.
St. Louis Post Dispatch
The Swan Gondola is loud and colorful and larger-than-life. But throughout, Schaffert proves he knows how to find the quiet heart of a scene, of which none are better than the tender moments between August and Ferret, full of the love of friendship and the pain of one-sided romance.
Kansas City Star
I am a hopeless romantic. And if you’re like me, Timothy Schaffert’s The Swan Gondola may just be the perfect book for you.... [It is] a believable, touching and occasionally maddening tale of love, loss, and life afterward.... Schaffert’s characters come across as so vivid that I found myself wishing, almost to the point of believing, that Ferret Skerritt were real, if for no other reason than to prove that magic was at one time genuine.
Wichita Eagle
Set during the 1898 Omaha World's Fair, this novel recreates the few months that Nebraska served as an international capital, complete with lavish temporary palaces and a cast of cynical hucksters, pickpockets and performers who earn their living on the midway. Though the historical details about the fair's construction delight...it's the love story of a certain ventriloquist named Ferret Skerritt and an actress named Cecily that captivates, most especially when a wealthy rival to Ferret threatens to separate the two. Be prepared for a romantic finish—and some unexpected twists in the plot that prove magic is possible, even for magicians.
Oprah.com
A ventriloquist falls for a Marie Antoinette impersonator at the 1898 Omaha World's Fair. The backdrop for his pursuit—aerialist acts, midnight séances—only adds charm to this mythical slice of Americana.
Good Housekeeping
[A] love story set during the 1898 Omaha World’s Fair. “Ferret” Skerritt is a ventriloquist who becomes smitten with Cecily, a beauty who comes to town with the fair’s Chamber of Horrors.... As the two lovers become embroiled with Wakefield, however, the novel loses some of its magic. Additionally, the frequent Wizard of Oz allusions build to nothing. But there are many romantic and historical delights here.
Publishers Weekly
With allusions to the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz, Schaffert has magically transformed a stretch of field near Omaha into a white, shimmering vision of rotundas, columns, and pillars. His magical tale is steeped in late 19th-century history. The stately pace might be too slow for some readers, but fans of historical fiction will not be disappointed. —Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Palisade, CO
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Schaffert’s whimsical epic of illusion and reality at the 1898 Omaha World’s Fair promises and delivers grand entertainment.... Audiences will be lured in by the offbeat personalities and carried along by the unexpected plot developments, but the real showstopper is the exuberant Gilded Age setting.... [T]his finely spun world feels almost dreamlike, yet Schaffert also takes a sharp look at what’s most important in life.
Booklist
The Swan Gondola will no doubt garner comparisons to Water for Elephants and The Night Circus, and fans of such historical romances will not be disappointed. There’s plenty of magic to go around in this good, old-fashioned love story.
Bookpage
[T]he central love story is thin and upended so quickly the reader is challenged to feel invested in Ferrett's and Cecily's fates. And though Schaffert uses fakery as an intriguing theme..., the closing chapters' would-be ghost story has too much stage makeup to achieve its intended Oz-like effect. A rambunctious and well-researched but ungainly historical romance.
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.)
Marshlands
Matthew Olshan, 2014
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
176 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374199395
Summary
After years alone in a cell, an aging prisoner is released without explanation, expelled into a great city now utterly unfamiliar to him.
Broken by years of brutality at the hands of the prison guards, he scrounges for scraps, sleeping wild, until a museum curator rescues him from an assault. The museum has just opened its most controversial exhibit: a perfect replica of the marshes, an expansive wilderness still wracked by conflict. There the man had spent years as a doctor among the hated and feared marshmen, who have been colonized but never conquered.
Then Marshland reveals one of its many surprises: it is written in reverse. The novel leaps backward once, twice, returning to the marshes and unraveling time to reveal the doctor’s ambiguous relationship to the austerely beautiful land and its people. As the pieces of his past come together, a great crime and its consequences begin to take shape. The true nature of the crime and who committed it will be saved for the breathtaking ending—or, rather, for the beginning.
In the tradition of Wilfred Thesiger’s The Marsh Arabs and J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, Marshlands explores a culture virtually snuffed out under Saddam Hussein, and how we cement our identities by pointing at someone to call “other.” Elegant, brief, and searing, Matthew Olshan’s Marshlands shivers with the life of a fragile, lost world. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Matthew Olshan is the author of several books for young readers, including Finn, The Flown Sky, and The Mighty Lalouche. Marshlands is his first novel for adults. He studied at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Oxford universties, and currently lives in Baltimore, Maryland. (Adapted from the publisher and author's website.)
Book Reviews
The first literary novel from Olshan, the author of several books for young readers (including The Flown Sky), covers a contentious 30-year period (leading up to the present day) in the Iraqi marshes. This broad scope is compressed into fewer than 200 pages, beginning when an unnamed prisoner is released without explanation from a long sentence. He finds himself wandering until he’s taken in by the curator of a museum—which has recently opened a large-scale replica of the marshes. The encounter provides the springboard for the story, which skips around chronologically: first, the reader sees the crime in the marshes that put the man in prison; then, in a section that jumps even further back in time, the reader sees how the man’s connection to the marshlands was first forged. The man, it turns out, used to be a doctor who treated residents of the marshes, and it’s largely because of his devotion to them that he finds trouble from the government, which is trying to seize their land. Written sparsely and almost mechanically, the narrative is particularly attuned to the region’s customs and culture, and what happens when they are disturbed. Despite the novel’s ability to capture its place and time, its characters and story (including the revelations) never really take off. (Feb.)
Publishers Weekly
Whether recrafting Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn into a modernized suburban tale in Finn or dreaming up a French postman-turned-boxer in the children's picture book The Mighty LaLouche, Olshan has a penchant for whimsy. This novel contains traces of the fantastical but is set within the harsh reality of an entire civilization on the brink of extinction: the Iraqi marshlands. Written in reverse chronological order, the story opens with an unnamed prisoner with no memory of being released back into society. Struggling to survive on the streets, the prisoner is rescued by a museum administrator who is also curating an exhibit on the vanishing marshlands culture. However, this encounter is no chance occurrence. Through the museum administrator, the prisoner uncovers his own identity, the reason he was in prison, and the role he played in the demise of the marshlands. VERDICT Olshan has written a mystery within a broader genre of postcolonial literature, sans historicity. Readers who appreciate the work of Amitav Ghosh (The Glass Palace) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Purple Hibiscus) will find similar themes running through this enjoyable debut.—Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Readers familiar with Sir Wilfred Thesiger’s classic travel narrative The Marsh Arabs (1964) will eventually recognize the protagonist of Olshan’s novel as a fictionalized modern version of Thesiger, the military doctor and adventurer who sloughed off his Britishness in favor of a tribal life amid the Arabs of northern Iraq, whose trust he patiently earned through his skill in performing circumcisions. The connection is not immediately obvious. When we first meet Gus, as he is called here, he is a broken and disfigured man, all but unrecognizable after many years in (presumably American) captivity following the occupation of his adopted homeland and the draining of the marshes that housed his people. As the story unfolds in reverse, we come to understand the circumstances that led to his imprisonment, and his complicated relationship with the violent marshmen to whom he has devoted his life. Although it is easy and appropriate to take this novel as stark commentary on U.S. involvement in Iraq, its most powerful moments explore a much deeper and more abstract ambivalence about tribalism and its allure. —Brendan Driscoll
An eerie, dreamlike atmosphere pervades this novel of struggle and oppression. Olshan divides the novel into three parts and moves backward chronologically, so the second part is set 21 years before the first and the third, 11 years before the second. This narrative strategy makes events and characters somewhat clearer the more readers progress into the story, though the ambience remains decidedly murky. At the center is Gus, a physician who, at the beginning of the novel, has been released from prison, a broken man after years in his cell. He wanders aimlessly to a park and to a mall in a nameless city and then is picked up by a museum worker who takes him home, sees that he gets medical care and provides a change of clothes. Shortly thereafter, he finds himself at a clinic treating "marshmen," social pariahs who inhabit all three sections of the novel. The role of the marshmen is essentially to serve as "the other," objects of hatred persecuted by the military establishment. The museum worker who takes Gus in turns out to be Thali, daughter of the Magheed, a local potentate who had befriended Gus earlier. Part two shifts to Gus' point of view, and readers learn there of his relationship to Betty, a "tent girl" who, for a while, stayed with Gus while he was working as a surgeon at a field hospital. Readers also meet the arrogant and ruthless Gen. Curtis, who's determined to wipe up the marshmen's habitat by creating levees and hence changing the prevailing ecosystem. In the final section, readers meet the earlier versions of both Gus and Curtis, now merely a major, and also get acquainted with the early stages of the relationship among Gus, Thali and her father, the Magheed. Strange, otherworldly and somewhat sinister.
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.)
Why Are You So Sad?
Jason Porter, 2014
Penguin Group (USA)
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780142180587
Summary
Have we all sunken into a species-wide bout of clinical depression?
Porter’s uproarious, intelligent debut centers on Raymond Champs, an illustrator of assembly manuals for a home furnishings corporation, who is charged with a huge task: To determine whether or not the world needs saving.
It comes to him in the midst of a losing battle with insomnia—everybody he knows, and maybe everybody on the planet, is suffering from severe clinical depression. He’s nearly certain something has gone wrong. A virus perhaps. It’s in the water, or it’s in the mosquitoes, or maybe in the ranch flavored snack foods. And what if we are all too sad and dispirited to do anything about it?
Obsessed as he becomes, Raymond composes an anonymous survey to submit to his unsuspecting coworkers—"Are you who you want to be?", "Do you believe in life after death?", "Is today better than yesterday?"—because what Raymond needs is data.
He needs to know if it can be proven. It’s a big responsibility. People might not believe him. People, like his wife and his boss, might think he is losing his mind. But only because they are also losing their minds. Or are they?
Reminiscent of Gary Shteyngart, George Saunders, Douglas Coupland and Jennifer Egan, Porter’s debut is an acutely perceptive and sharply funny meditation on what makes people tick. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1972
• Rasied—Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
• Education—M.F.A., Hunter College
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City, New York
Jason Porter was born and raised in Michigan. He is a graduate of the Hunter College MFA program. He has been an English teacher, customer support representative, landlord, traveling musician, and the overnight editor for Yahoo! News and New York Times. Currently, he writes fiction. Why Are You So Sad? (2014), his first novel, was shortlisted for the Paris Literary Prize. He lives in Brooklyn, with his girlfriend and their two dogs. (Adapted from the publisher and author's website.)
Book Reviews
Porter is a gleefully odd stylist. It's hard to think of a young writer who captures disassociation so well.
John Freeman -Toronto Star
Porter's humorous insight into the human condition is a highbrow/lowbrow tightrope walk between philosophical quandary and human desire.
NPR
(Starred review.) The book toggles deftly between its narrator's bummer of a worldview and his riotous, biting snark, peppered throughout with dashes of surprisingly transcendent philosophies. Porter's is a smart, compact debut that, despite sometimes hitting a nerve when it's aiming for the funny bone, resonates on both tragic and comic levels.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) The only people who will be depressed are those who find themselves on the last page of Porter's novel and realize there's nothing more to read.
Shelf Awareness
An office drone uses absurdist surveys to measure the happiness of himself and his co-workers.... This exercise in satirizing the cookie-cutter lives of First-World suburbanites may prove taxing to many readers, especially those who crave a satisfying conclusion. The author pulls out a few tricks at the end,...[but] the finale falls flat, failing to lend our hero the sympathy he's intended to inspire.
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.)