Risking Exposure
Jeanne Moran, 2013
CreateSpace
182 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781492179825
Summary
Munich, Germany, 1938. The Nazis are in power and war is on the horizon. The law makes fourteen-year old Sophie Adler a member of Hitler Youth; her talent makes her an amateur photographer.
Then she contracts polio. During her long hospitalization, her Youth leader supplies her with film. Photographs she takes of fellow polio patients are turned into propaganda, mocking people with disabilities. Sophie’s new disability has changed her status. She’s now an outsider, a target of Nazi scorn and possible persecution. Her only weapon is her camera.
Can she find the courage to separate from the crowd, photograph the full truth, and risk exposure? (From the author.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 9, 1956
• Raised—New York City, New York and environs (USA)
• Education—N/A
• Currently—Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania
In her words:
I am the sister of a person with a disability and have spent my career as a pediatric physical therapist. Risking Exposure is a historical fiction novel in which the protagonist, a young teen who wants to blend in with the Nazi regime in which she lives, contracts polio. As she copes with her new disability, she gains personal strength and decides to stand up for what she feels is right.
I love to read and write stories in which unlikely heroes make a difference in their corner of the world. In my everyday life, I try to be one of them. (From the author.)
Visit the author's website.
Visit Jeanne on Facebook.
Book Reviews
[A]n incredibly powerful novel about WWII. Not many books discuss the treatment of handicapped individuals at the hands of Nazi Germany. This novel is well written and pretty accurate. I think this is a great novel for young adults because so few young adult novels accurately portray the atrocities committed by Nazis. I think the character of Sophie will stick with me for a long time. This is the best young adult novel I have read in a long time and I can't wait until my nieces and nephews are old enough to read it.
Goodreads reviewer
Risking Exposure shines a light on Nazi Germany not often explored: the treatment of the disabled by the Nazis. Sophie Alder is a deeply compelling character and her struggle to find courage within herself was engaging. This book is perfect for young readers and would make an excellent addition to World War II centered curriculum.
Goodreads reviewer
Because the story and characters continue to resonate, Risking Exposure is ideal for book discussions or classrooms. It’s geared for young adults, but could certainly find an audience with readers past their school years.
Amazon customer review
Risking Exposure is an engaging, well written, thought provoking book. It reminds us of the responsibility we have to one another.
Amazon customer review
[W]hat makes a novel extraordinary? That the characters become so real to us that we carry them in our hearts forever. Sophie is one of those characters and this is one of those books.
Amazon customer review
This is a novel that will leave you wanting more. It tackles a moral dilemma from the teenage point of view during one of the worst periods of time in history. It's a great read!!!
Barnes and Noble customer review
Discussion Questions
1. In the beginning of the novel, Sophie is happy to belong to a group of ‘insiders.’ She is reluctant to act in a way that may mark her as different from them, even though she doesn’t always like what they do. In what situations have you noticed people behaving that way? Have you behaved that way yourself?
2. Sophie’s photos are used as propaganda, defined by Webster’s New World Dictionary as “the widespread promotion of particular ideas and doctrines.” Think about the way today’s media promotes certain ideas. How does this promotion influence your thinking? Do you accept commonly held views as your own or do you research answers for yourself?
3. Think about courage and how Sophie showed courage at the end of the novel. Did she ‘learn how’ to show it or was it always there? What factors brought it out? Do you wonder about your ability to be brave when faced with danger or the threat of harm?
4. Some people around Sophie held true to their morals and ideals and others didn’t. Should morals influenced by the people around you, by the school you attend, or the town or country in which you live? Do you think your own morals can or should change during your lifetime, or should they always be the same?
5. The Nazi pogrom called T4 exterminated tens of thousands of residents of hospitals for the mentally ill, nursing homes, and facilities for the developmentally disabled. Were you aware of this pogrom, or similar actions taken against people who were deaf, homosexual, or Jehovah’s Witness? Why do you think pogroms against Jews and political prisoners are more widely known?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)
Dear Life: Stories
Alice Munro, 2013
Knopf Doubleday
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307743725
Summary
In story after story in this brilliant new collection, Alice Munro pinpoints the moment a person is forever altered by a chance encounter, an action not taken, or a simple twist of fate. Her characters are flawed and fully human: a soldier returning from war and avoiding his fiancée, a wealthy woman deciding whether to confront a blackmailer, an adulterous mother and her neglected children, a guilt-ridden father, a young teacher jilted by her employer.
Illumined by Munro’s unflinching insight, these lives draw us in with their quiet depth and surprise us with unexpected turns. And while most are set in her signature territory around Lake Huron, some strike even closer to home: an astonishing suite of four autobiographical tales offers an unprecedented glimpse into Munro’s own childhood. Exalted by her clarity of vision and her unparalleled gift for storytelling, Dear Life shows how strange, perilous, and extraordinary ordinary life can be. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth— Birth—July 10, 1931
• Where—Wingham, Ontario, Canada
• Education—University of Western Ontario
• Awards—Nobel Prize for Literature; Man Booker Prize;
3 Governor General's Literary Awards; Giller Prize;
National Book Critics Circle Award; Trillium Book Award;
Marian Engel Award; Lorne Pierce Medal; Foreign
Honorary Member, American Academy Arts & Letters
• Currently—lives in Clinton, Ontario, and Comox, British
Columbia
Even though Alice Munro is known for her love stories, don't mistake her for just another romance writer. Munro never romanticizes love, but rather presents it in all of its frustrating complexity. She does not feel impelled to tack happy endings onto her tales of heartbreak and healing. As a result, Munro's wholly credible love stories have marked her as a true original who spins stories that are as honest as they are dramatic.
Alice Munro got her start in writing as a teenager in Ontario, and published her first story while attending Western Ontario University in 1950. Her first book, a collection of short stories titled Dance of the Happy Shades, would not be published until 1968, but when it arrived, Munro rapidly established herself as a unique voice in contemporary literature. Over the course of fifteen short stories, Munro displayed a firmly focused vision, detailing the loves and life-altering moments of the inhabitants of rural Ontario. Munro takes a gradual, methodical approach to unraveling her stories, often developing a character's perspective through several paragraphs, only to demolish it with a single, biting sentence. Yet she also explores those heartbreaking delusions of her characters with humanity, undercutting the bitterness with genuine compassion.
Munro was instantly recognized for her debut collection of stories, winning the prestigious Governor General's Award in Canada. Monroe would then spend the majority of her career writing short stories rather than novels. "I want to tell a story, in the old-fashioned way—what happens to somebody—but I want that 'what happens' to be delivered with quite a bit of interruption, turnarounds, and strangeness," she explained to Random House.com. "I want the reader to feel something is astonishing—not the 'what happens' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me."
Munro would write only one novel, Lives of Girls and Women, a coming-of-age tale about a young girl named Del Jordan, which is actually structured more like a collection of short stories than a typical novel. Throughout the rest of her work, she would continue to explore themes of love and the way memories shape one's life in short story collections such as Friend of My Youth, Open Secrets, the award-winning The Love of a Good Woman, and Runaway
Because her stories are so unencumbered by cliches and speak with such clarity and truthfulness, it is often assumed that Munro's work is largely autobiographical. The fact that she chooses to set so many of her tales in her hometown only fuel these assumptions further. However, Munro says that very little of her material is based on her own life, and takes a more creative approach to inventing her finely developed characters. "Suppose you have—in memory—a young woman stepping off a train in an outfit so elegant her family is compelled to take her down a peg (as happened to me once)," she explains, "and it somehow becomes a wife who's been recovering from a mental breakdown, met by her husband and his mother and the mother's nurse whom the husband doesn't yet know he's in love with. How did that happen? I don't know."
As Munro grows older, her themes are turning more and more toward illness and death, yet she continues to display a startling vitality and youthfulness in her writing. A writer with a long and celebrated career, Alice Munro's work is just as compelling, honest, and insightful as ever.
Extras
• Munro dropped out of college in 1951 to marry fellow student James Munro. The couple opened a bookstore in Victoria, had three children, and divorced in 1972. Munro continues to live in Canada with her second husband, geographer Gerald Fremlin.
• Munro wrote on a typewriter for a good part of her career, calling herself a "late convert to every technological offering" in a publisher's interview. "I still don't own a microwave oven," she says. (From Barnes and Noble.). (From .)
Book Reviews
One of the great short story writers not just of our time but of any time.
New York Times Books Review
Wise and unforgettable. Dear Life is a wondrous gift; a reminder of why Munro’s work endures.
Boston Globe
Unquestionable evidence of her unfaded abilities.... Reading these stories will tell you something about Alice Munro’s life, but it will tell you more about Alice Munro’s mind—and, not entirely surprisingly, this proves to be even more compelling
New Republic
Alice Munro is not only revered, she is cherished.... Dear Life is as rich and astonishing as anything she has done before.
New York Review of Books
There is no writer quite as good at illustrating the foibles of love, the confusions and frustrations of life or the inner cruelty and treachery that can be revealed in the slightest gestures and changes of tone. . . . The stories of Dear Life violate a host of creative writing rules, but they establish yet again Munro’s psychological acuity, clear-eyed acceptance of frailties and mastery of the short story form.
Washington Post
Alice Munro demonstrates once again why she deserves her reputation as a master of short fiction.
O, The Oprah Magazine
Exquisite.... No other author can tell quite so much with quite so little. The modest surfaces of Munro’s lapidary sentences conceal rich veins of ore.
Chicago Tribune
Munro’s wonderfully frank and compassionate stories suggest that perseverance, the determination to keep at the work of living, can invest a life with dignity through the end of one’s days.
San Francisco Chronicle
Absorbing.... Most haunting of all are the four autobiographical sketches that end the book, which display Munro’s gift of observation and ability to trace big emotional arcs in short brushstrokes.
Entertainment Weekly
Munro’s best collection yet.
Philadelphia Inquirer
Remarkable.... Masterfully evokes the relationship between people and the places they inhabit.
Time Out New York
Munro has an uncanny knack of convincing the reader that the characters have real lives before the stories commence and continuing existences after.... This is simply a good writer doing what she loves.
Guardian (UK)
In acknowledging Alice Munro’s pre-eminence in the world of contemporary short fiction it’s become fashionable to describe her as the ‘Canadian Chekhov,’ but that title barely hints at the scope of her literary influence. Dear Life, her 13th collection, only serves to burnish her reputation for creating intelligent, sophisticated stories out of inarguably humble materials.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Virtuosic.... Encompass a wide variety of always-unpredictable characters—young, old, middle-aged—caught in circumstances that have the bright erratic flow of life itself.
Seattle Times
Munro is who she is, and we are fortunate to have her. No other author can contain so much life, and so many lives, in such few pages.... They can be read over and over, dependably revealing more with each reading
Miami Herald
Alice Munro has long been acknowledged as one of Canada’s literary treasures. This new volume, with its historical slant, its autobiographical material, its impressionistic descriptions of scenery, its occasional nostalgia and pleasing irony, confirms her reputation.
Washington Times
How does Munro manage such great effects on a relatively small canvas? It’s a question that most anyone who has seriously attempted to write a short story in the last 20 years has pondered.... Munro has a genius, no empty word here, for selecting details that keep unfolding in the reader’s mind.
Los Angeles Times
Reading Alice Munro is like drinking water—one hardly notices the words, only the marvel at being quenched.... Behind each sentence is a world, conjured more distinctly than in many an entire novel.
Plain Dealer
Alice Munro...has earned every bit of her reputation as being one of the best living short story writers, in English if not in the entire world.... This collection represents fiction at its finest—captivating, complex, lifelike.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
These stories are perfect.... Dear Life is a collection as rich and surprising as any in Alice Munro’s deep career.
National Post
Alice Munro has always been the poet of the unexpected passion that comes seemingly out nowhere and changes a character’s life.... She is, and has been for decades, one of our most important writers, one whose work represents all the most essential and pleasurable aspects of literature, and which reminds us of what great literature is: You know it when you see it.
Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Munro can depict key moments without obscuring the reality of a life filled with countless other moments—told or untold. in her 13th collection, she....feature[s] the precision of her fiction with the added interest of revealing the development of [her] eye and her distance from her surroundings, both key, one suspects, in making her the writer she is.... [R]ead together, the stories accrete, deepen, and speak to each other.
Publishers Weekly
Every new collection from the incomparable Munro...is cause for celebration. This new volume offers all the more reason to celebrate as it ends with four stories the author claims are the most autobiographical she has written.... In every story, there is a slow revelation that changes everything we thought we understood about the characters. Verdict: Read this collection and cherish it for dear life. —Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., ON
Library Journal
A revelation, from the most accomplished and acclaimed of contemporary short story writers. It's no surprise that every story...is rewarding and that the best are stunning. They leave the reader wondering how the writer manages to invoke the deepest, most difficult truths of human existence in the most plainspoken language.... The author knows what matters, and the stories pay attention to it.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
I. “To Reach Japan”
1. What are Greta’s feelings toward her husband and her marriage as she is leaving for Toronto? What remains unspoken between them? 2. Discuss what Katy understands and experiences on this journey (see especially the description at the bottom of page 26). What does Katy feel about Greg, and then about Harris Bennett? Why does Munro end the story as she does, with Katy pulling away from her mother? Does the story suggest that there is an inevitable cost when a woman attempts to break through the limitations of her life?
3. Discuss the paragraph beginning, “It would become hard to explain, later on in her life, just what was okay in that time and what was not” (6), in light of Greta’s actions. She is a poet: How troubling is the gap between her identities as wife and mother, and as poet and artist?
II. “Pride”
1. What do Oneida and the narrator have in common? How are they very different? The narrator is embarrassed that she has taken care of him when he was ill, and assumes that he is “like a neuter to her” (146–147). Why does he misunderstand Oneida’s willingness to care for him, and her desire to live with him (148)?
2. What does the sight of the baby skunks evoke, at the end of the story? What light does the narrator’s preface (133-34) bring to your sense of what has happened between him and Oneida?
III. “Corrie”
1. As in “Pride,” a man underestimates a woman who is attached to him: discuss what is different about the motivations and desires of the characters in the two stories.
2. How surprising is it when Corrie realizes that Howard has been keeping the money supposedly meant for Lillian’s blackmail payments? How does Corrie figure this out? How do you interpret the final paragraph?
IV. “Train”
1. After the removal of a tumor, Belle is in a strange state of mind and tells Jackson about what happened on the day her father stepped in front of an oncoming train (196-98). She is relieved to have spoken about this memory. What effect does this conversation have on Jackson? What makes Jackson decide not to return to the hospital, or to Belle’s house, which he stands to possibly inherit?
2. Do the story of Jackson’s relationship with Ileane Bishop, and what we learn about his stepmother’s abuse, offer an adequate explanation for Jackson’s transient life? What are the human costs, in this story, of what Belle calls “just the mistakes of humanity” (198)?
V. “In Sight of the Lake”
1. At what point do you understand that the narrator is having a dream? What strange details indicate this? What is dreamlike about the narrator’s efforts to find the doctor’s office?
2. In what ways does the story most accurately represent the disorientation and confusion that come with aging and memory loss?
VI. “Dolly”
1. Franklin wrote a poem about his passionate affair with Dolly just before the war, and now, when he is eighty-three, Dolly turns up selling cosmetics. Is the narrator’s reaction overblown?
2. What is comical or incongruous about this story? What does it say about the intersection of aging, memory, and passion?
VII. “The Eye”
1. What aspects of the mother’s behavior are troubling to her daughter and make her welcome an alliance with Sadie? What is admirable about Sadie, especially given the time period?
2. What is strange or uncanny about the idea that Sadie, in death, might have moved her eyelid? The narrator thinks, “this sight fell into everything I knew about Sadie and somehow, as well, into whatever special experience was owing to myself” (269). How do you interpret this moment and its meaning?
VIII. “Night”
1. The narrator attributes the strangeness of her thoughts that particular summer to a special status, “all inward,” conferred on her by learning that during a routine appendectomy, the doctor had removed a tumor “the size of a turkey’s egg” (275, 272). She says, “I was not myself” (276). What do you make of the narrator’s efforts to explain the reasons for her state of mind and the worry that she could strangle her little sister (277)?
2. How does the encounter with her father help the narrator to deal with her fear about her thoughts? Why is it significant to the impact of this encounter that in this family, emotional troubles or worries usually go unexpressed?
IX. “Voices”
1. How is the mother’s character revealed in her reaction to the presence of a prostitute at the dance, as channeled through the daughter’s observations? Why does the narrator find the voices of the soldiers so intriguing and so comforting?
2. What does the story express about the difficult relationship between mothers and daughters, especially regarding the mother’s supposed role as model and mentor in her daughter’s adolescence?
X. “Dear Life”
1. The title of this story comes from the account the mother gives the narrator of hiding her, when she was an infant, from a strange and threatening woman who used to live in the family’s house (318). This and other salient memories combine to create a picture of an often difficult family life: the mother’s physical decline, the failure of the father’s fox farm and his later work in a foundry, the failure of the narrator to return home for her mother’s funeral. Does this story seem to embrace the idea that a significant task for the writer is to extend understanding, imagination, and empathy into one’s own past, and to make amends for errors, cruelties, and misjudgments there? See question 4 below.
XI. Questions about Dear Life
1. What is the effect of the collection as a whole, given the order, pacing, and content of the stories? What view of life does it project?
2. Compare the treatment of women by men in “Train,” “Amundsen,” “Haven,” and “Corrie.” Why do these women allow themselves to be lied to or taken advantage of? What is the dynamic that permits an uneven power relationship?
3. Compare the endings of several stories. Do they end in a state of suspension or resolution? Think about how the endings invite questioning, reflection, and interpretation.
4. Discuss the last four stories in light of Munro’s brief introduction of them as “not quite stories,” as “autobiographical in feeling, though not . . . entirely so in fact,” and as “the first and last—and the closest—things I have to say about my own life” (255). Should they be read as if they were fictional stories, or somehow differently? If you were to tell four important stories from your own life, what would they be?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Hild
Nicola Griffith, 2013
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
560 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250056092
Summary
A brilliant, lush, sweeping historical novel about the rise of the most powerful woman of the Middle Ages: Hild
In seventh-century Britain, small kingdoms are merging, frequently and violently. A new religion is coming ashore; the old gods are struggling, their priests worrying. Hild is the king’s youngest niece, and she has a glimmering mind and a natural, noble authority. She will become a fascinating woman and one of the pivotal figures of the Middle Ages: Saint Hilda of Whitby.
But now she has only the powerful curiosity of a bright child, a will of adamant, and a way of seeing the world—of studying nature, of matching cause with effect, of observing her surroundings closely and predicting what will happen next—that can seem uncanny, even supernatural, to those around her.
Her uncle, Edwin of Northumbria, plots to become overking of the Angles, ruthlessly using every tool at his disposal: blood, bribery, belief. Hild establishes a place for herself at his side as the king’s seer. And she is indispensable—unless she should ever lead the king astray. The stakes are life and death: for Hild, for her family, for her loved ones, and for the increasing numbers who seek the protection of the strange girl who can read the world and see the future.
Hild is a young woman at the heart of the violence, subtlety, and mysticism of the early Middle Ages—all of it brilliantly and accurately evoked by Nicola Griffith’s luminous prose. Working from what little historical record is extant, Griffith has brought a beautiful, brutal world to vivid, absorbing life. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September 30, 1960
• Where—Yorkshire, England, UK
• Education—Michigan State University Writing Workshop
• Awards—Nebula Award; World Fantasy Award; 6 Lambda Awards;
James Tiptree, Jr. Award;
• Currently—Seattle, Washington, USA
Nicola Griffith is a British science fiction author, editor and essayist. Griffith is a 1988 alumnus of the Michigan State University-Clarion science fiction writing workshop and has won a Nebula Award, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, the World Fantasy Award and six Lambda Literary Awards.
Personal life
Nicola Griffith was born in Yorkshire, England, the fourth of five sisters. The youngest, Helena, died in a police-chase in Australia in 1988, and one of her older sisters, Carolyn, died in 2001. Griffith has stated in interviews that grief and rage over her sisters' deaths have played a large part in the writing process for her novels. In March 1993, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
Griffith lives with her partner, writer Kelley Eskridge, in Seattle, Washington (in the US).
Career
Nicola Griffith published her first novel Ammonite in 1993. It won both the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and the Lambda Award. Her second novel, Slow River (1994), won the Nebula Award, for best novel, and another Lambda.
Together with Stephen Pagel, Griffith has edited a series of three anthologies, Bending the Landscape: Fantasy (1997), Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction (1998) and Bending the Landscape: Horror (2001). These explore gay and lesbian issues in fantastic settings.
The Blue Place (1998), Stay (2002), and Always (2007) are crime novels. Her collection of stories, With Her Body (2004) is science fiction and fantasy. Her memoir And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer's Early Life (2007) won the Lambda Literary Award in the Women's Memoir/Biography category. It is a multi-media memoir, a "do-it-yourself Nicola Griffith home assembly kit."
Griffith's historical novel Hild (2013) is set in seventh-century England and based on the real life of St. Hilda of St. Whitsby. It takes place at the time of the Synod of Whitby in CE 642, in which Oswiu of Northumbria decided whether or not to adopt Celtic or Roman Catholic Christianity. In 2013, Griffith was also awarded the Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists' Prize from the Lambda Literary Foundation in 2013. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 12/18/13.)
Book Reviews
[A] fictional coming-of-age story about real-life Saint Hilda of Whitby, who grew up pagan in seventh-century Britain.... Griffith goes boldly into the territory, lingering over landscape, wallowing in language, indulging the senses, mixing historical fact with feminist fiction in a sweeping panorama...: the Dark Ages transformed into a fantasy world of skirt and sword.
Publishers Weekly
Based on the real-life St. Hilda of Whitby (614-80 CE), Griffith's Hild may be too remarkable to be true, but the novel provides a fascinating view of women's lives in the early Middle Ages, from their vital roles in textile production and keepers of the household to sleeping arrangements and sexuality. Recommend to readers of historical fiction. —Reba Leiding, formerly with James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA
Library Journal
Griffith realistically represents the brutality of everyday life in this milieu. She is interested in exploring the costs of slavery...the ramifications of illness or injury...and the effects of political change...on the lives of individual people.… In its ambition and intelligence, Hild might best be compared to Hilary Mantel's novels about Thomas Cromwell—Jenny Davidson.
Bookforum
(Starred review.) In her first foray into historical fiction, Griffith explores the young life of Hild, the future St. Hilda of Whitby.... Griffith expertly blends an exploration of seventh-century court life and a detailed character study of Hild as she balances a need for acceptance, love, and friendship and a desire to escape the strict gender roles of her time ... Griffith triumphs with this intelligent, beautifully written, and meticulously researched novel. —Kerri Price
Booklist
[B]ased on the real life of the "Anglisc" girl who would become Saint Hilda of Whitby. Of Hilda's...life not much is known, save that she was an adept administrator and intellectually tough-minded champion of Christianity in the first years of its arrival in Britain. The lacuna affords Griffith the opportunity to put her well-informed imagination to work while staying true to the historical details.... Elegantly written.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. As you watched the young Hild serve as cupbearer, what intelligent decisions, what connections, did you see her make? It takes physical strength to lift the cup, but what other strengths make this possible?
2. What does Hild’s mother, Breguswith, teach her about survival? Do you think Breguswith is on Hild’s side? How is Hild’s sense of security affected by the memories of her sister, Hereswith?
3. What qualities does Hild possess that make her a good seer? Do those skills help her in other ways?
4. Hild has a lifelong relationship with Cian, from their early childhood to the book’s closing scenes. How do they manage their power imbalance and their kinship? Ultimately, what do they need from each other?
5. Do you admire Edwin as a leader? Would you want him to be your king?
6. In Hild’s world, what roles do of the conquerors and the defeated wealh (strangers) play? Do you think the Angles are really that different from the native British?
7. How is Hild affected by her sexual awakening? Does it make her stronger or more vulnerable?
8. What did you discover about the early kingdoms of Britain by reading the novel? Which aspects of medieval life were startling to you? Which aspects were timeless, echoed in modern culture and twenty-first-century politics? How would you have fared in this society?
9. How does mysticism shape Hild’s perception of life and death, before and after her conversion?
10. As their lives unfold, the people of Hild’s community seek to know their wyrd, or fate. What do they believe about their ability to shape their destiny? What do they expect from religion?
11. Discuss the significance of the scene in which Gwladus’s collar is removed. What does freedom mean under those circumstances? How does that moment change the way Gwladus sees herself and her role in Hild’s life?
12. Discuss Hild’s relationship to the land and to the unpredictable natural elements. How does her love for Menewood compare to her love of humanity?
13. Do you believe in Hild’s fighting prowess and her ability to lead?
14. What gives Hild the ability to counsel Angeth with clarity, although Hild hasn’t experienced motherhood? How does Angeth’s role in Cian’s life compare to Hild’s?
15. How are Hild’s rites of passage as a woman distinct from those of the other women in her life? What advantages does her gender provide?
16. If you have done a bit of online research on Saint Hilda of Whitby, the historical figure who inspired this novel, what parallels do you see between the fictional Hild and Saint Hilda? In Saint Hilda, do you find a woman who was empowered or disempowered by the church?
17. What is unique about the female characters Griffith creates, in Hild and in any of her previous novels that you have read? What traits do her most memorable characters possess, transcending the diverse settings Griffith has designed for them?
18. What books does this novel remind you of?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Flamethrowers
Rachel Kushner, 2013
Scribner
416pp.
ISBN-13: 9781439142011
Summary
The year is 1975 and Reno—so-called because of the place of her birth—has come to New York intent on turning her fascination with motorcycles and speed into art. Her arrival coincides with an explosion of activity in that world—artists have colonized a deserted and industrial SoHo and are blurring the line between life and art.
Reno meets a group of dreamers and raconteurs who submit her to a sentimental education of sorts. Ardent, vulnerable, and bold, she begins an affair with an artist named Sandro Valera, the estranged scion of an Italian tire and motorcycle empire. When they visit Sandro’s family home in Italy, betrayal sends her reeling into a clandestine undertow.
The Flamethrowers is an intensely engaging exploration of the mystique of the feminine, the fake, the terrorist. At its center is author Rachel Kushner’s superbly realized protagonist, a young woman on the verge. Thrilling and fearless, this is a major American novel from a writer of spectacular talent and imagination. It “unfolds on a bigger, brighter screen than nearly any recent American novel I can remember” (Dwight Garner, The New York Times).
One of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2013. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1968
• Where—Eugene, Oregon, USA
• Education—B.A., University of California, Berkeley; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Awards—Finalist, National Book Award
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California
Rachel Kushner a writer who lives in Los Angeles. She was born in Eugene, Oregon, and moved to San Francisco in 1979. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and earned her MFA in creative writing from Columbia University in 2000.
Kushner lived in New York City for 8 years, where she was an editor at Grand Street (magazine) and BOMB (magazine). She has written widely on contemporary art, including numerous features in Artforum. She is currently an editor of Soft Targets, praised by the New York Times as an "excellent, Brooklyn-based journal of art, fiction and poetry."
Her first novel, Telex from Cuba, was published in July 2008. It was the cover review of the July 6, 2008 issue of the New York Times Book Review, where it was described as a "multi-layered and absorbing" novel whose "sharp observations about human nature and colonialist bias provide a deep understanding of the revolution's causes." It was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award. (From Wikipedia.)
Kuskner's second novel, The Flamethrowers, issued in 2013, also received extraordinary praise. James Wood of The New Yorker extolled: "the first twenty pages could make any writer's career," while Dwight Garner of The New York Times said, the book "unfolds on a bigger, brighter screen than nearly any recent American novel I can remember. Jonathan Franzen in his NY Times review called Kushner "a thrilling and prodigious novelist."
Book Reviews
The Flamethrowers unfolds on a bigger, brighter screen than nearly any recent American novel I can remember. It plays out as if on Imax, or simply higher-grade film stock…Ms. Kushner can really write. Her prose has a poise and wariness and moral graininess that puts you in mind of ….Robert Stone and Joan Didion…[Kushner has] a sensibility that’s on constant alert for crazy, sensual, often ravaged beauty…persuasive and moving…provocative.
Dwight Garner - New York Times
Rachel Kushner’s new novel, The Flamethrowers, is a high-wire performance worthy of Philippe Petit. On lines stretched tight between satire and eulogy, she strolls above the self-absorbed terrain of the New York art scene in the 1970s, providing a vision alternately intimate and elevated…[Kushner is] a superb recent-historical novelist…20 brilliant pages could make any writer’s career: a set piece of New York night life that’s a daze of comedy, poignancy and violence…What really dazzles…is her ability to steer this zigzag plot so expertly that she can let it spin out of control now and then…The Flamethrowers concludes with two astonishing scenes: one all black, one all white, as striking as any of the desert photographs Reno aspires to shoot, but infinitely richer and more evocative. Hang on: This is a trip you don’t want to miss.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Rachel Kushner so deftly interweaves the story of an Italian industrialist with that of a young woman insinuating herself into the 1970s New York art scene that The Flamethrowers slowly and seductively becomes a novel you just can’t quit.
Sherryl Connelly - New York Daily News
Brilliant and exhilarating…Kushner fearlessly tackles art, death, and social unrest. In so doing, she has written the sort of relentless and immersive novel that forces the reader to look up and make sure the room hasn’t disappeared around her.
Eugenia Williamson - Boston Globe
[A] big, rich wonder of a novel… [Kushner’s] polychrome sentences…are shot through with all the longing and regret you find in those of Thomas Pynchon, whose influence is all over this novel… a glittering, grave, brutally unsentimental book that’s spectacularly written enough to touch greatness.
Craig Seligman - Bloomsburg
Rachel Kushner’s second novel, The Flamethrowers, is scintillatingly alive, and also alive to artifice. It ripples with stories, anecdotes, set-piece monologues, crafty egotistical tall tales, and hapless adventures: Kushner is never not telling a story… it manifests itself as a pure explosion of now: it catches us in its mobile, flashing present, which is the living reality it conjures on the page at the moment we are reading… Kushner employs a[n]…eerie confidence throughout her novel, which constantly entwines the invented with the real, and she often uses the power of invention to give her fiction the authenticity of the reportorial, the solidity of the historical…Kushner watches the New York art world of the late seventies with sardonic precision and lancing humor, using Reno’s reportorial hospitality to fill her pages with lively portraits and outrageous cameos…[Kushner’s] novel is an achievement precisely because it resists either paranoid connectedness or knowing universalism. On the contrary, it succeeds because it is so full of vibrantly different stories and histories, all of them particular, all of them brilliantly alive.
James Wood - The New Yorker
Life, gazed at with exemplary intensity over hundreds of pages and thousands of sentences precision-etched with detail—that’s what The Flamethrowers feels like. That’s what it is. And it could scarcely be better.The Flamethrowersis a political novel, a feminist novel, a sexy novel, and a kind of thriller…Virtually every page contains a paragraph that merits—and rewards—rereading.
James Bissell - Harper's
[A] brilliant lightning bolt of a novel…The Flamethrowers is an entire world, intimately and convincingly observed, filled with characters whose desires feel true. It is also an uncannily perceptive portrait of our culture—psychologically and philosophically astute, candid about class, art, sex and the position of women—with a deadly accuracy that recalls the young Joan Didion, and that, despite the precisely rendered historical backdrop, gives the story a timeless urgency.
Maude Newton - NPR
Exhilarating…it’s impossible not to be pulled in by the author’s sense of the period’s vitality…the novel’s brilliance is in its understanding of art’s relationship to risk, and in its portrait of Reno’s—and New York’s—age of innocence.
Megan O'Grady - Vogue
(Starred review.) This rich second novel from Kushner takes place in late-‘70s New York City and Italy…Kushner’s psychological explorations of her characters are incisive, the novel is peppered with subtle ‘70s details, and it bursts with you-are-there depictions of its time and places.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Kushner, with searing insights, contrasts the obliteration of the line between life and art in hothouse New York with life-or-death street battles in Rome. Adroitly balancing astringent social critique with deep soundings of the complex psyches of her intriguing characters, Kushner has forged an incandescently detailed, cosmopolitan, and propulsively dramatic tale of creativity and destruction.
Booklist
(Starred review.) novel of art and politics but also of bikes and speed…exhilarating.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Reno wants to create Land Art in the manner of iconic artists like Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer. Why does she leave the West, where both of those famous figures chose to make their work, for New York City? Is the contemporary art world accessible to most people? Or is it somewhat elitist?
2. In her trip back West for the speed trials at the Bonneville salt flats, Reno watches a couple literally playing with fire at a gas station. A man flicks matches at spilled gasoline on his girlfriend’s legs. In another scene, a truck driver tells Reno she won’t look nearly as good in a body bag. What do these interactions imply about the world Reno inhabits?
3. Reno reflects that Stretch, the maintenance man at the motel near the salt flats, had said her name “like he believed he knew her.” And yet readers never learn her actual name. Why do you think the author chose to leave her nameless? Would we know her better if we knew the name that Stretch uttered?
4. Were you surprised Reno wiped out on the salt flats? Why or why not?
5. What first got Sandro’s father into motorcycles? To what extent was his lustful desire for Marie a factor?
6. As a young person, Sandro’s father encounters a gang of subversives in Rome. What are these rabble-rousers rejecting about the “old” Italy? What is exciting to them about machines, and the future? About going to fight in World War One? Are their expectations about the war met, or not?
7. Giddle, who claims to work at a coffee shop as a kind of conceptual performance, tells Reno the most cowardly acts are to exhibit ambition, to become famous, and to kill yourself. Is this yet one more performance, or is there some honesty in what she says? Do you have the sense that Giddle is more naïve than Reno, or less? More or less wise to the ways of the art world? To the ways of men?
8. Reno is a “China girl” on film stock leader, which her boss Marvin says is “as much a part of the film as its narrative,” despite her being unseen and in the margin. Is there any thematic echo of this in Reno’s presence in the novel? She is the narrator, but often others (mostly men) with stronger personalities drown her out. Perhaps find an image of a China girl online and talk about these mysterious film lab secretaries who posed in the now gone era of celluloid film.
9. How would you describe the relationship between Stanley Kastle and his wife Gloria? Do you think their behavior and antagonism is a kind of game, or something darker?
10. Is it simply bad luck to be hit with a meteorite while sitting in the kitchen? If so, why does Reno imagine the scenario of a bored housewife regarding it as something special, a kind of destiny?
11. Reno says that the smell of gasoline on the crowd of people in Rome—and the disconnect between that world and the one she grew up in—made her “sad for Scott and Andy in a way [she] could not explain” (284). If you had to explain it for her, what would you say?
12. The theme of time seems to crop up in various ways. Reno says that “curler time was about living the now with a belief that a future, an occasion for set hair, existed.” What do you think she means? Is Reno herself in “curler time”? Meanwhile, Sandro’s father says that unlike men, women “are trapped in time.” What makes him say this? Do you agree with him?
13. Do you think Ronnie is being unfair when he “demonstrates” for Reno “the uselessness of the truth”? Or do you think she had it coming? Is Ronnie a sympathetic character despite being incapable of sincerity?
14. Why do you think we suddenly hear from Sandro directly, near the close of the novel? Does he sufficiently account for his choices, when he shares with the reader his “side” of things?
15. After waiting all day for Gianni to ski down into France, Reno gives up in order to move on “to the next question.” (383) How has Reno changed by the end of the novel, and why do you think the author chose to end on this melancholy and ambiguous note? Would it have been more satisfying if Reno had triumphed by the end, found her way to love and success? Or would you have felt manipulated?
16. Take a look at the spring 2013 issue of the Paris Review, whose art Kushner curated—a suite of images that inspired her as she wrote the novel (you can also access it online, at http://www.theparisreview.org/art-photography/6197/the-flamethrowers-rachel-kushner) (Questions issued by publisher.)
Morning Glory
Sarah Jio, 2013
Penguin Group (USA)
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780142196991
Summary
Sarah Jio imagines life on Boat Street, a floating community on Seattle’s Lake Union, home to people of artistic spirit who for decades protect the dark secret of one startling night in 1959
Fleeing an East Coast life marred by tragedy, Ada Santorini takes up residence on houseboat number seven on Boat Street. She discovers a trunk left behind by Penny Wentworth, a young newlywed who lived on the boat half a century earlier.
Ada longs to know her predecessor’s fate, but little suspects that Penny’s mysterious past and her own clouded future are destined to converge. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1978
• Where—Washington State, USA
• Education—B.A., Western Washington University
• Currently—lives in Seattle, Washington
Sarah Jio is a veteran magazine writer and the health and fitness blogger for Glamour magazine. She has written hundreds of articles for national magazines and top newspapers including Redbook, O, The Oprah Magazine, Cooking Light, Glamour, SELF, Real Simple, Fitness, Marie Claire, Hallmark magazine, Seventeen, The Nest, Health, Bon Appetit, Gourmet, The Seattle Times, Parents, Woman’s Day, American Baby, Parenting, and Kiwi. She has also appeared as a commentator on NPR’s Morning Edition.
Sarah has a degree in journalism and writes about topics that include food, nutrition, health, entertaining, travel, diet/weight loss, beauty, fitness, shopping, psychology, parenting and beyond. She frequently tests and develops recipes for major magazines.
Her first novel The Violets of March, published in April, 2011, was chosen as a Best Book of 2011 by Library Journal. Her second novel, The Bungalow, was published in December of the same year. Blackberry Winter came out in 2012. The Last Camellia and Morning Glory were both issued in 2013.
Sarah lives in Seattle with her husband, Jason, and three young sons. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Ada Santorini...rents a houseboat on Seattle’s Lake Union.... Yet her new home has its own tragedy—the disappearance in 1959 of a local woman.... [F]lashbacks to 1959 are so strong that readers may lose patience with the present-day narrative....[yet] the depth of feeling in her writing overcomes the drawbacks
Publishers Weekly
[Ada Santorini] discovers that [her] houseboat was once the home of a woman [whose]....disappearance back in 1959...the neighbors won't discuss. Ada asks a friend back home who works for the NYPD to help her investigate....The author maintains a steady succession of questions...to create suspense. [A] treat for fans.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Why does Ada feel like she needs to leave New York? Is she going to Seattle for the “right reasons,” as Dr. Evinson puts it?
2. When Jim meets Ada for the first time he says, “No matter what, home is home. It’s where you belong.” How is this concept played out over the course of the book? What is “home” for Ada?
3. How does their mutual loneliness draw Jimmy and Penny together? What do the two have to offer to each other?
4. Collin tells Penny that he lives by a certain Mark Twain quote: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” Do any of the other characters live this way? What prevents people from “throwing off the bowlines?”
5. The details of both Ada and Alex’s pasts are revealed slowly over the course of the novel. How does this parallel Ada’s discoveries about Penny? Why do you think the author chose to structure the novel this way?
6. What kind of kinship does Ada feel with Penny? Does trying to solve the mystery of her disappearance help Ada heal from the loss of James and Ella? Why does Ada blame herself for their deaths?
7. What role does faith play in the novel? Does Ada’s relationship with Alex alter her faith at all? Why are “the signs” she asks for so necessary for her to move on?
8. What do you make of Dexter? Did your opinion of him change as you read? How so? Why did he treat Penny so poorly? Did Penny truly understand how he felt about her?
9. How does the notion that “some of life’s most beautiful things grow out of the darkest moments” become a theme of the novel? Do you agree?
10. Do Penny’s suspicions about Dexter’s “indiscretions” in some way free her to fall in love with Collin? Is she reluctant to leave Dexter in some ways? Why? Why does Collin sail away from Penny on the dock that night?
11. Were you surprised to discover who Penny’s attacker was? Did you understand his motivations?
12. Water is often a symbol of rebirth and new beginnings. Is that the case in Morning Glory? How so?
13. Discuss the epilogue. Were you surprised by its revelations? What kind of a future do you imagine for Alex and Ada?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
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