The Romance Reader's Guide to Life
Sharon Pywell, 2017
Flatiron Books
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250101754
Summary
As a young girl, Neave was often stuck in a world that didn’t know what to do with her. As her mother not unkindly told her, she was never going to grow up to be a great beauty.
Her glamorous sister, Lilly, moved easily through the world, a parade of handsome men in pursuit. Her brother didn’t want a girl joining his group of friends.
And their small town of Lynn, Massachusetts, didn’t have a place for a girl whose feelings often put her at war with the world — often this meant her mother, her brother, and the town librarian who wanted to keep her away from the Dangerous Books she really wanted to read.
But through an unexpected friendship, Neave finds herself with a forbidden copy of The Pirate Lover, a steamy romance, and Neave discovers a world of passion, love, and betrayal. And it is to this world that as a grown up she retreats to again and again when real life becomes too much.
Neave finds herself rereading The Pirate Lover more than she ever would have expected because as she gets older, life does not follow the romances she gobbled up as a child. When Neave and Lilly are about to realize their professional dream, Lilly suddenly disappears.
Neave must put her beloved books down and take center stage, something she has been running from her entire life. And she must figure out what happened to Lilly — and if she’s next.
Who Neave turns to help her makes Sharon Pywell's The Romance Reader's Guide to Life one of the most original, entertaining, exciting, and chilling novels you will read this year. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Sharon Pywell grew up on the edge of the snow belt in upstate New York. She has published in a number of literary quarterlies and held residencies at the MacDowell Colony. Her previous novels include What Happened to Henry and Everything After. Professionally, she has run dog kennels and dance companies, though she now teaches and writes in Boston. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
A lively blend of suspense, comedy, and paranormal fiction and women’s fiction, Romance Reader’s Guide to Life pulls the reader into the post WW II life of two sisters, one a daring, world wise woman eager to find and exercise her power as an adult, the other a shy bookworm who never quite manages to fit in neatly with what the world expects of a woman. With touching irony, it turns out that the more experienced of the two is not as adept at seeing people for who they are as her less worldly sister. Fans of Hoffman’s Practical Magic will appreciate the touch of whimsy that turns what might have been a heavy handed sermon of a story in the hands of a less adroit writer into a touching portrayal of the bond sisters share. Read more…
Clara Kless - LitLovers
Beautiful and perfectly paced.
People
Haunting yet touching.… Equal parts beautiful and heartbreaking, rippling outward like a pebble in a lake.
Charleston Post and Courier
One of those books that pulls and tugs at you.
Denver Post
[A] tongue-in-cheek commentary on the influence of romances on societal expectations.… This is simultaneously the leisurely coming-of-age of two sisters, a bodice-ripper pastiche, and a psychological thriller that never truly embraces its romantic aspects.
Publishers Weekly
A compelling mix of mystery, love, family dynamics, and growing up. Smart and smartly told.… A pirate romance novel, as unlikely as that seems, plays an important role, revealing to Neave some of the secrets of life.
Library Journal
Equal parts mystery, romance, and family saga, with a dash of dark comedy, this book has something for fans of all genres.
Booklist
[A] zesty fictional stew. The author throws us off balance from the get-go, as older sister Lilly opens the story by revealing that she’s dead.… Smart, funny, and compulsively readable: this one may finally win the under-recognized author the wider audience her talent deserves.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Discuss Mrs. Daniels’s defense of romance novels: "The first thing that might happen to you is that people mock you for reading them. They think that women who read romances are idiots. I assure you, they are not…They are people who trust that love exists and that it is more powerful than bad logic or bad writing." What do you think? Did The Romance Reader’s Guide to Life change your opinion of romance novels?
2. When Electra Gates meets Basil Le Cherche, her mood is that "of a huntress who, at the same moment that she understood herself to be engaged in a blood sport, felt that she was the hunted as well as the hunter." She revels in these new feelings. Discuss the power dynamics within The Pirate Lover and how they compare to those within Neave and Lilly’s stories.
3. Neave tells us: "This was the first time in my life, listening to Mrs. Daniels with The Pirate Lover and Leaves of Grass all tangled up in my head, that I felt the truth of this — everybody died. Such a dark discovery, but also so wild and satisfying. There was a pull toward dark things in the poem and in the romance, both. What did it mean that there was this terrible sweet pull?" How is that "terrible sweet pull" explored in The Romance Reader’s Guide to Life? What is the connection between pleasure and danger for the various characters?
4. Neave’s mother often criticizes her daughter’s outspokenness and lack of femininity: "Happy women aren’t like that, Neave. They understand that others depend on them and they shape themselves to others. You’re just going to make yourself unhappy by insisting on your own way. Smart women don’t do that…You’re going to have to start damping yourself down. You’ll do yourself mischief if you don’t. You’ll end up alone. You’ll be too hard to love." Discuss how this novel explores and subverts traditional gender roles. Would you consider it feminist?
5. Neave is shocked to learn that Snyder read The Pirate Lover, too: "My brother had turned the same pages that I had, but read an entirely different story." Compare and contrast the romance novels and comics that are so important to the siblings growing up. Have you ever experienced men and women interpreting the same thing very differently?
6. From "Where She Is Now," Lilly wryly remarks: "If you’ve never been treated like a goddess, I’ll tell you, it messes with your judgment. You forget, if you ever knew it to begin with, that lots of goddesses end up sacrificed on some altar or other." Do you agree? Can you think of a modern-day "altar" and a modern-day "goddess" who sits upon it?
7. Lilly tells Boppit: "Neave’s so vulnerable…. You know that book she rereads every year? The one with the pirate? She actually thinks that that book is the truth: good triumphing over evil, love triumphing over everything." He responds: "But that is the truth, Lilly." Do you agree? Does The Romance Reader’s Guide to Life argue that good is the more powerful force in the universe, or evil?
8. Boppit argues that "glamour has always required a little touch of tramp. It’s why your ‘Fast Girl’ hot pink and ‘Vampy Red’ flew out the door. Every girl wants a little Pirate Lover in her life." Be Your Best cosmetics is in large part about female empowerment, encouraging women to achieve success in business, but it stands out from its competitors largely because of its "bad girl" line of makeup. Are those contradictory impulses?
9. The Pirate Lover is very much Electra’s coming-of-age story: "That young woman was gone, and here in her place was a creature who could embrace both battle and lovemaking, and the only opinion in the world besides her own that swayed her was his — because he was hers, chosen with the full freedom of her heart and soul, given to him with the surging fullness of her own desires." Discuss how her story’s resolution compares to Neave’s and Lilly’s. What can they teach us about the relationship between being in love and being independent?
10. The Romance Reader’s Guide to Life plays with genre in surprising ways, juxtaposing the romance novel with the more traditional historical narrative, and including a talking, cross-dressing dog and narration from the afterlife. Did this unconventional structure work for you? What does it suggest about the difficulty (or futility) of categorizing books or elevating certain genres above others?
11. In her author’s note, Sharon Pywell writes: "In Romancelandia, sex and power were tangled, even interdependent. But wasn’t that the way it really was? Weren’t they also linked in The Taming of the Shrew, in Wuthering Heights, in the evening news reports of recent domestic murders?" Neave discovers this, too, when she has similar kinds of revelations reading The Pirate Lover and books by Walt Whitman and Charlotte Bronte. Do you agree with the suggestion that romance novels are rooted in the classics, in some universally shared idea of the mating dance?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
top of page (summary)
The Barrowfields
Phillip Lewis, 2017
Crown/Archetype
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780451495648
Summary
A richly textured coming-of-age story about fathers and sons, home and family, recalling classics by Thomas Wolfe and William Styron, by a powerful new voice in fiction.
Just before Henry Aster’s birth, his father—outsized literary ambition and pregnant wife in tow—reluctantly returns to the small Appalachian town in which he was raised and installs his young family in an immense house of iron and glass perched high on the side of a mountain.
There, Henry grows up under the writing desk of this fiercely brilliant man. But when tragedy tips his father toward a fearsome unraveling, what was once a young son’s reverence is poisoned and Henry flees, not to return until years later when he, too, must go home again.
Mythic in its sweep and mesmeric in its prose, The Barrowfields is a breathtaking debut about the darker side of devotion, the limits of forgiveness, and the reparative power of shared pasts. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1971 (?)
• Where—the state of North Carolina, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Carolina; J.D., Campbell School of Law
• Currently—lives in Charlotte, North Carolina
Phillip Lewis is an American attorney and author who was born and raised in the mountains of western North Carolina. His debut novel, The Barrowfields, was published in 2017. His law practice focuses primarily on real estate law in his home state.
In addition to writing literary fiction, Phillip plays several musical instruments, collects rare books, and studies language. Phillip also enjoys distance running, kayaking, and riding his mountain bike at the U.S. National Whitewater Center. He is a member of the Thomas Wolfe Society and the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. He lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. (Adapted from Hortak Talley.)
Book Reviews
The Barrowfields, with its almost Victorian title, offers in its own ways the pleasures of older novels, with their coziness and sweep, and their tacit belief that family is destiny. The prose has the beautiful attention to detail that embeds us in place.… At the core of this story is an alcoholic father stuck on notions of his own genius — a figure left over from the last century. My one quibble with the book was that I was waiting for Lewis to suggest a critique of this myth. Assumptions have changed. That said, The Barrowfields is a work of abundant talent.
Joan Silber - New York Times Book Review
In this charming, absorbing, and assured debut novel, a young man tries to make sense of his father’s life and the passions that unite them—namely, a devotion to literature.… [Lewis's] prose is bracingly erudite. This debut has the ability to fully immerse its readers.
Publishers Weekly
[S]mall discrepancies…detract from the novel's credibility. Verdict: The devil is in the details in Lewis's first novel, which is wide in scope yet somewhat uneven in pacing and in the particulars. —Susanne Wells, Indianapolis P.L.
Library Journal
In his evocative debut about disenchantment and identity, Lewis captures the longing of a southerner separated from his home, his family, and his ambition.… Like fellow North Carolinian Thomas Wolfe, Lewis tackles the conflicting choice between accepting one’s roots and rejecting the past, and he does so with grace, wit, and an observant eye.
Booklist
Amid family tragedy, a young man flees the peculiar home of his youth only to return years later.… Promising but unfocused, this finely wrought debut novel would've benefited from more ruthless editing.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the nature of the town of Old Buckram in the mountains of North Carolina. Have you ever been to a town like this? Do you think it is based on a real place in North Carolina or elsewhere?
2. Talk about the decaying gothic mansion in Old Buckram where the Asters lived. Do you think the house served as another character in the story? Was the house haunted? Did Henry, as the narrator, try to dispel the notion that the house was haunted through his descriptions of it over time?
3. Discuss Henry’s relationship with his father, first as a 10-year-old child, and then later as a 16-year-old boy. Did Henry’s view of his father change during this time? What was most responsible for bringing about the change? Did Henry ever see his father as a hero, and if not, should he have?
4. Why did Henry’s father feel so compelled to complete his magnum opus (his novel) before the death of his mother, Maddy? What prevented him from doing so?
5. Why was it important for Henry that his father intercede to prevent Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying from being banned by the county and later burned on a pyre? Discuss the repercussions of this event for both Henry and his father.
6. Did you blame Henry for never returning to his mother or sister after he left for college? Why was he unable to return?
7. Discuss Henry’s relationship with his sister, Threnody. Why were they so close at an early age, and why did Henry allow them to grow apart?
8. Despite a physical attraction, what was it about Story that drew Henry’s attention to her so dramatically? Did he suspect that she had a traumatic event in her past that might link the two of them?
9. Are Henry’s efforts toward helping Story address her issues with her own father a way for him to repent for his abandonment of Threnody? What was it about Story and her relationship with her father that brought about Henry’s reconciliation with Threnody?
10. Does young Henry’s repression of painful memories as a psychological defense mechanism shape the way and order in which he tells his father’s story, as well as the story of his relationship with Threnody?
11. Discuss the role of the Barrowfields in the story. Were the Barrowfields intended to be representative of a larger theme in the book (for example, pertaining to Henry’s father)?
12. Discuss the role of “burning” in the story, and the irony of Henry’s father saving Faulkner’s book from destruction while not his own.
13. Given the numerous opportunities in the book for magical realism or surrealism (such as the macabre gothic mansion, the Barrowfields, and the witch horse), why do you think the author opted to resolve each such opportunity with stark realism?
14. Did you discover that many of the place names and character names have some extrinsic significance? For example, “Old Buckram” refers to “buckram,” which is a material that is used to make book covers (such that much of the story takes place within the covers of an old book). “Avernus,” the family cemetery, derives from a word used to refer to the entrance to the underworld. “Harold Specks,” the mountain priest who gave the sermon at Maddy’s funeral, is based on “haruspex.”
15. Did the ultimate fate of Henry’s father surprise you? What were the two events that were most salient in driving him to his eventual fate, and how were they related?
16. Why was Henry incapable of divulging his father’s fate until the end of the book? Had he been intellectually honest with himself about this father until his discussion with Threnody about their father, and would he have shared this information with the reader if not for the discussion he had with Threnody about the day of his father’s departure?
17. Whose fate in the story was ultimately more tragic: Henry’s father or Henry’s mother?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
top of page (summary)
The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley
Hannah Tinti, 2017
Random House
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781472234384
Summary
A coming-of-age novel and a literary thrill ride about the price we pay to protect the people we love most.
Samuel Hawley isn’t like the other fathers in Olympus, Massachusetts. A loner who spent years living on the run, he raised his beloved daughter, Loo, on the road, moving from motel to motel, always watching his back.
Now that Loo’s a teenager, Hawley wants only to give her a normal life. In his late wife’s hometown, he finds work as a fisherman, while Loo struggles to fit in at the local high school.
Growing more and more curious about the mother she never knew, Loo begins to investigate. Soon, everywhere she turns, she encounters the mysteries of her parents’ lives before she was born. This hidden past is made all the more real by the twelve scars her father carries on his body.
Each scar is from a bullet Hawley took over the course of his criminal career. Each is a memory: of another place on the map, another thrilling close call, another moment of love lost and found.
As Loo uncovers a history that’s darker than she could have known, the demons of her father’s past spill over into the present—and together both Hawley and Loo must face a reckoning yet to come.(From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1972
• Raised—Salem, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Connecticut College; M.F.A., New York University
• Awards—PEN/Noral Magid Award, Magazine Editing; Alexa Award
• Currently—lives in in Brooklyn, New York City
Hannah Tinti is an American writer and the co-founder of One Story magazine. Raised in Salem, Massachusetts, she earned her Bachelor's Degree from Connecticut College in 1994 and her Master's from New York University.
In 2002, Tinti co-founder of One Story magazine for which she received the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing in 2009. She now serves as the magazine's executive editor.
Her first novel, The Good Thief, published in 2008, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; it received the American Library Association's Alex Award and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her second novel, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley was released in 2017.
Tinti has also published a short story collection, Animal Crackers, which was among the runners-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award.
In addition to writing and editing, Tinti also teaches creative writing, co-founding the Sirenland Writers Conference in Italy. She has also taught writing at New York University's Graduate Creative Writing Program, Columbia University's MFA program, City University of New York, and the Museum of Natural History in New York City.
Tinti lives in Brooklyn, New York City, where in 2014 she was listed as one of the "100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture." (Adapted from Wikipedia and the author's website. Retrieved 3/25/2017.)
Book Reviews
Game of Throne‘s Arya Stark has found her match (or twin) in Loo Hawley, the young heroine of Hannah Tinti’s new novel. Loo’s father, though, is no Ned Stark; Samuel Hawley is a low-level criminal. Even so, despite his violent past, Samuel achieves a surprising nobility, making him one of the most likeable — dare it be said, "admirable" — murderers in fiction. We root for him every step of the way READ MORE.
P.J. Adler - LitLovers
[A] terrific new novel.… [Tinti] knows how to cast the old campfire spell. I was so desperate to find out what happened to these characters that I had to keep bargaining with myself to stop from jumping ahead to the end.… Lovely, richly written.… [Tinti is] a gorgeous writer…[with] a profound sense of the complex affections between a man wrecked by sorrow and the daughter he hoped “would not end up like him.”
Ron Charles - Washington Post
A miraculous accomplishment in genre-bending: Not only a gripping American-on-the-run thriller, it’s also a brilliant coming-of-age tale and a touching exploration of father-daughter relationships. Regardless of what your reading tastes are, there’s something here for absolutely everyone.
Newsweek
(Starred review.) [B]eautifully intricate.… [A] convincingly redemptive and celebratory novel: an affirmation of the way that heroism and human fallibility coexist, of how good parenting comes in unexpected packages.
Publishers Weekly
There is enough action and suspense to satisfy thriller fans, but the core of the story is the character development and exploration of relationships common to literary fiction. —Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis
Library Journal
(Starred review.) [An] atmospheric, complexly suspenseful saga…with life or death struggles in dramatic settings…and starring a fiercely loving, reluctant criminal and a girl of grit and wonder…a breathtaking novel of violence and tenderness.
Booklist
The daughter of a career criminal explores her family's past along with the family business.… The novel is at its strongest when it focuses on Sam and Lily or Loo.… An accomplished if overstuffed merger of coming-of-age tale and literary thriller.
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.)
top of page (summary)
American War
Omar El Akkad, 2017
Knopf Doubleday
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780451493583
Summary
An audacious and powerful debut novel: a second American Civil War, a devastating plague, and one family caught deep in the middle—a story that asks what might happen if America were to turn its most devastating policies and deadly weapons upon itself.
Sarat Chestnut, born in Louisiana, is only six when the Second American Civil War breaks out in 2074.
But even she knows that oil is outlawed, that Louisiana is half underwater, and that unmanned drones fill the sky. When her father is killed and her family is forced into Camp Patience for displaced persons, she begins to grow up shaped by her particular time and place.
But not everyone at Camp Patience is who they claim to be.
Eventually Sarat is befriended by a mysterious functionary, under whose influence she is turned into a deadly instrument of war. The decisions that she makes will have tremendous consequences not just for Sarat but for her family and her country, rippling through generations of strangers and kin alike. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1982
• Where—Cairo, Egypt
• Raised—Doha, Qatar, and Canada
• Education—B.A., Queens University (Kingston, Ontario)
• Awards—National Newspaper Award (see below)
• Currently—lives in Portland, Oregon
Omar El Akkad was born in Cairo, Egypt, and grew up in Doha, Qatar, until he moved to Canada with his family. He is an award-winning journalist and author who has traveled around the world to cover many of the most important news stories of the last decade.
His reporting includes dispatches from the NATO-led war in Afghanistan, the military trials at Guantanamo Bay, the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt and the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson, Missouri. He is a recipient of Canada's National Newspaper Award for investigative reporting and the Goff Penny Memorial Prize for Young Canadian Journalists, as well as three National Magazine Award honorable mentions. He lives in Portland, Oregon. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
A dystopian novel set in the no-longer-United States of America between 2075- 2095 — a time when “the planet turned on the country and the country turned on itself.” Through the life of Sarat Chestnut readers learn that climate change has won, wiping out whole cities and turning once inhabitable places uninhabitable.… The writing is phenomenal; the story is compelling; the premise is terrifying. Let’s hope that while Omar El Akkad can spin a good yarn, he is in no way a psychic. READ MORE …
Abby Fabiaschi, AUTHOR - LitLovers
American War is an unlikely mash-up of unsparing war reporting and plot elements familiar to readers of the recent young-adult dystopian series The Hunger Games and Divergent. From these incongruous ingredients, El Akkad has fashioned a surprisingly powerful novel—one that creates as haunting a postapocalyptic universe as Cormac McCarthy did in The Road, and as devastating a look at the fallout that national events have on an American family as Philip Roth did in The Plot Against America.… El Akkad has…deftly imagined the world his characters inhabit, and writes with…propulsive verve.… He demonstrates cool assurance at using details—many gathered, it seems, during his years as a reporter—to make his fictional future feel alarmingly real. And he writes here with boldness and audacity.… El Akkad has written a novel that not only maps the harrowing effects of violence on one woman and her family, but also becomes a disturbing parable about the ruinous consequences of war on ordinary civilians.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
The novel may be set in the future, and the title may be American War, but there's nothing especially futuristic or, for that matter, distinctly American about it. This is precisely the author's point.… America is not Iraq or Syria, but it's not Denmark, either; it's a large, messy, diverse country glued together by 250-year-old paperwork composed by yeoman farmers, and our citizens seem to understand one another less by the day. Puncture the illusion of a commonwealth, El Akkad asserts, fire a few shots into the crowd and put people in camps for a decade, and watch what happens.… The novel's thriller premise notwithstanding, El Akkad applies a literary writer's care to his depiction of Sarat's psychological unpacking and the sensory details of her life.…Whether read as a cautionary tale of partisanship run amok, an allegory of past conflicts or a study of the psychology of war, American War is a deeply unsettling novel. The only comfort the story offers is that it's a work of fiction. For the time being, anyway.
Justin Cronin - New York Times Book Review
Follow the tributaries of today’s political combat a few decades into the future and you might arrive at something as terrifying as Omar El Akkad’s debut novel, American War. Across these scarred pages rages the clash that many of us are anxiously speculating about in the Trump era: a nation riven by irreconcilable ideologies, alienated by entrenched suspicions…both poignant and horrifying.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Striking.… A most unusual novel, one featuring a gripping plot and an elegiac narrative tone.
Rayyan Al-Shawaf - Boston Globe
Astounding, gripping and eerily believable…masterful.… Both the story and the writing are lucid, succinct, powerful and persuasive.
Lawrence Hill - Toronto Globe and Mail
Sarat is a fascinating character.… Thought-provoking [and] earnest.… El Akkad’s formidable talent is to offer up a stinging rebuke of the distance with which the United States sometimes views current disasters, which are always happening somewhere else. Not this time.
Jeff VanderMeer - Los Angeles Times
Depicting a world uncomfortably close to the one we live in, American War is as captivating as it is deeply frightening.
Jarry Lee - Buzzfeed.com
American War is terrifying in its prescient vision of the future.
Maris Kreizman - New York / Vulture
(Starred review.) Part family chronicle, part apocalyptic fable, American War is a vivid narrative of a country collapsing in on itself, where political loyalties hardly matter given the ferocity of both sides and…[violence that] erodes any capacity for mercy or reason. This is a very dark read.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [G]ripping and frightening debut novel takes off from current American political and environmental issues to imagine a bleak and savage not-too-distant future.… Well written, inventive, and engaging. —James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) El Akkad has created a brilliantly well-crafted, profoundly shattering saga of one family’s suffering in a world of brutal power struggles, terrorism, ignorance, and vengeance. American War is a gripping, unsparing, and essential novel for dangerously contentious times. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
A dystopian vision of a future United States undone by civil war and plague.… El Akkad's novel is an allegory about present-day military occupation, from drone strikes to suicide bombers to camps full of refugees.… A well-imagined if somber window into social collapse.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The novel’s epigraphs are taken from two classic texts, an ancient Arabic book of poems and the Bible. What do the quotes and their sources suggest about the conflict that will follow in the novel?
2. Were you surprised by the way the map of the United States has been altered—the states’ borders and the landmasses themselves—in the projections for 2075? What do you think caused those changes; was it solely politics or other forces as well?
3. What does the first-person narrator we meet in the prologue explain—and not explain—about how the country has changed, the timeline of the Second American Civil War itself, and the unnamed “she” who has stayed in his memory since his youth?
4. What is the significance of Sarat’s changing of her own name when she’s a girl? How does that sense of agency and identity develop as she gets older? How does her having a twin sister fit into your understanding of her independence and actions?
5. The novel presents many different laws, agencies, and other government entities for the future America. Which did you find to be most plausible, including as sources for political conflict that would escalate into war? Are any similar to real-life policies as you’re reading about them today?
6. Describe the dynamic of the Chestnut family, parents and children. What’s similar and what’s different about domestic life in their world versus today’s and during the time of the first Civil War?
7. How pervasive is the allegiance to the Free Southern State where the Chestnuts live and throughout the cordoned region? What threats do those who disagree with the cause face?
8. How closely do the events and details of the Second American Civil War follow those of the first and/or other historical events in American history? After you finished the novel, were you more or less likely to think another such conflict could happen again in this way, on a national or global scale?
9. How do the interludes of primary source texts—textbook excerpts, government reports, notebooks, letters, etc.—enhance the personal story of Sarat and her family, in terms of the motives for and timeline of the war on a micro and macro level?
10. What gender stereotypes persist in the future between the young girls and boys, especially once the family reaches Camp Patience? How does Sarat push back against expectations of what she can and cannot do, including in contrast to her sister and brother?
11. How does the novel complicate the meaning of “home,” in a personal and national level? Does where and how a character lives at any given point determine his or her sense of security or belonging, or does this feeling come from somewhere else?
12. Sarat sees on Albert Gaines’s, a northerner’s, map different kinds of borders and observes, “To the north the land looked the same but she knew there existed some invisible fissure in the earth where her people’s country ended and the enemy’s began.” (133) How did such fissures form, and what does the outcome of the war and novel suggest about their ability to be healed?
13. How does Sarat’s plight speak to Gaines’s statement that “the first thing they try to take from you is your history”? (122)
14. What defines one’s sense of “belief” in the novel? Are people more motivated by personal beliefs, or by more institutional ones like religion or politics?
15. How are certain characters in the novel mythologized? What does this do to their day-to-day existence and their legacy? How do the mythic characters in the book parallel historical figures in what they’re remembered for and how?
16. Discuss the sequence of events and outcomes of the plague. How does that kind of warfare reflect advancements in society as well as the sense of humanity’s worth?
17. What is the role of love in the novel? By the story’s conclusion, does the idea of love conquering all still apply, or does revenge supersede it?
18. Many historians consider the first Civil War to have been a battle of the past (the South) versus the future (the North). Do those distinctions apply to the Second American Civil War, and what does this say about the future—and present—of the country and those running it?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
top of page (summary)
Into the Water
Paula Hawkins, 2017
Penguin Publishing
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780735211209
Summary
Paula Hawkin's addictive new novel of psychological suspense.
A single mother turns up dead at the bottom of the river that runs through town. Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate.
They are not the first women lost to these dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history, dredging up secrets long submerged.
Left behind is a lonely fifteen-year-old girl. Parentless and friendless, she now finds herself in the care of her mother's sister, a fearful stranger who has been dragged back to the place she deliberately ran from—a place to which she vowed she'd never return.
With the same propulsive writing and acute understanding of human instincts that captivated millions of readers around the world in her explosive debut thriller, The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins delivers an urgent, twisting, deeply satisfying read that hinges on the deceptiveness of emotion and memory, as well as the devastating ways that the past can reach a long arm into the present.
Beware a calm surface—you never know what lies beneath. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 26, 1972
• Where—Harare, Zimbabwe
• Education—Oxford University
• Currently—lives in London, England, UK
Paul Hawkins was born and raised in Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe). Her father was an economics professor and financial journalist. In 1989, when she was 17, she moved to London to study for her A-Levels at Collingham College, an independent college in Kensington, West London. She later read philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford Unviersity. After graduation, she spent 15 years as a journalist — as a business reporter for The Times and later as a freelancer for a number of publications. She also wrote a financial advice book for women, The Money Goddess.
Sometime in 2009, Hawkins began to write romantic comedy under the pen name Amy Silver. She wrote four novels, including Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista, but none ever achieved commercial success. Eventually, she decided to challenge herself by writing in a darker mode. Giving up her freelance work to write full-time on fiction, Hawkins ended up borrowing money from her family to make ends meet.
But after only six months, Hawkins finished her novel, and in 2015 The Girl on the Train was published. A complex thriller, with themes of domestic violence, alcohol, and drug abuse, the book became an instant bestseller. It has sold close to 20 million copies in 15 countries and 40 languages and in 2016 was adapted to film starring Emily Blunt. Hawkin's second novel, Into the Water, was released in 2017. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/28/2017.)
Book Reviews
It’s a set-up that is redolent with possibility. But that promising start fails to deliver, and the main reason is structural. The story of Into the Water is carried by 11 narrative voices. To differentiate 11 separate voices within a single story is a fiendishly difficult thing. And these characters are so similar in tone and register – even when some are in first person and others in third – that they are almost impossible to tell apart, which ends up being both monotonous and confusing.
Val McDermid - Guardian (UK)
Hawkins is back with a second thriller, Into the Water. Many of the elements that helped propel The Girl on the Train are present here…[but] something’s amiss in this second novel: It’s stagnant rather than suspenseful.… The revelations about her sister’s life and death produce but a ripple in Jules’s day-to-day life.… [A] dull disappointment.
Maureen Corrigan - Washington Post
Hawkins is at the forefront of a group of female authors—think Gillian Flynn and Megan Abbott—who have reinvigorated the literary suspense novel by tapping a rich vein of psychological menace and social unease.… [T]here’s a certain solace to a dark escape, in the promise of submerged truths coming to light.
Vogue
Addicting… this novel has a little something for anyone looking for their next binge-read.
Marie Claire
Hawkins keeps you guessing until the final page.
Real Simple
Paula Hawkins is back with a brand-new thriller about a string of mysterious deaths. You’ll burn through this one!
People Style Watch
Beckford history is dripping with women who’ve thrown themselves—or been pushed?—off the cliffs into the Drowning Pool, and everyone…knows more than they’re letting on. Hawkins may be juggling a few too many story lines for comfort, but the payoff packs a satisfying punch.
Publishers Weekly
Hawkins guides readers through a muddled labyrinth of twists and turns, secrets and lies, and misdirections that will ultimately reveal the sordid details of three deaths before its surprising conclusion.… [For] fans of twisty thrillers. —Mary Todd Chesnut, Northern Kentucky Univ. Lib., Highland Heights
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Hawkins returns to the rotating-narration style of her breakout debut, giving voice to an even broader cast this time.
Booklist
[E]ven after you've managed to untangle all the willfully misleading information, half-baked subplots, and myriad characters, you're going to have a tough time keeping it straight.… Let's call it sophomore slump and hope for better things.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Family relationships, particularly the bond between sisters, feature heavily in Into the Water. How do you think Lena is affected by Nel and Jules’s estrangement? How does it influence her friendship with Katie?
2. Jules and Nel’s estrangement hinges on a misremembering of an event in their past. Are there any childhood or teenage memories you have that are no longer as clear when you look back now? How has this novel made you view your past, and the way it reflects upon your present?
3. Within the novel there are several inappropriate relationships — for example, Katie and Mark; Sean and Nel; Helen and Patrick. How does the depiction of the relationships between these characters affect your interpretation of their behavior and actions?
4. "Beckford is not a suicide spot. Beckford is a place to get rid of troublesome women." Discuss the gender dynamic in Into the Water. How much power does each of the women in the novel hold? What are the different types of power they hold?
5. Into the Water contains several different voices and perspectives. How did this structure affect your reading of the novel?
6. How do the epigraphs relate to the novel? Does one speak to you more than another? If so, why?
7. The structure of the novel means that we get tremendous insight into our suspects throughout. Who did you originally think was responsible for Nel’s death? Did your opinion change as the plot developed?
8. Was there a particular character you identified with? Was there a particular moment you found moving, surprising, or terrifying?
9. Many of the characters in the novel are grieving — some from more recent, raw losses and others from historic ones. How sympathetic were you to these characters? Was there a character you felt more sympathy for than another? Does their grief excuse their behavior?
10. Nickie Sage represents the legacy of witches that haunts the novel. Do you believe she sees things others cannot? Do you agree with the way she behaves?
(Questions from the author's website.)
top of page (summary)