The Rules Do Not Apply
Ariel Levy, 2017
Random House
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812996937
Summary
A gorgeous memoir about a woman overcoming dramatic loss and finding reinvention—for readers of Cheryl Strayed and Joan Didion
When thirty-eight-year-old New Yorker writer Ariel Levy left for a reporting trip to Mongolia in 2012, she was pregnant, married, financially secure, and successful on her own terms. A month later, none of that was true.
Levy picks you up and hurls you through the story of how she built an unconventional life and then watched it fall apart with astonishing speed. Like much of her generation, she was raised to resist traditional rules—about work, about love, and about womanhood.
"I wanted what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can’t have it all."
In this profound and beautiful memoir, Levy chronicles the adventure and heartbreak of being "a woman who is free to do whatever she chooses." Her own story of resilience becomes an unforgettable portrait of the shifting forces in our culture, of what has changed—and of what is eternal. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October 17, 1974
• Raised—Larchmont, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Wesleyan University
• Currently—lives in New York, New York
Ariel Levy is an American staff writer at The New Yorker magazine and the author of the books The Rules do Not Apply (2017) and Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (2005). Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, New Yorker, Vogue, Slate, and New York Times. Levy was named one of the "Forty Under 40" most influential out individuals in the June/July 2009 issue of The Advocate.
Early life and education
Levy was raised in Larchmont, New York, and says she knew from early on that she wanted to become a writer
I always wanted to be a writer, for as long as I can remember. I’ve kept a journal since at least the third grade—writing has always been my method for making sense of the world and my experience. Also, my dad is a writer so it seemed sort of natural.
She graduated from Wesleyan University in 1996 and claims that her experiences at the university, which had "coed showers, on principle," influenced her views regarding modern sexuality. After graduating, she was briefly employed by Planned Parenthood, but claims that she was fired because she is "an extremely poor typist." Not long after, she was hired by New York magazine.
Levy spent 12 years at New York magazine where, as a contributing editor, she wrote about John Waters, Stanley Bosworth, Donatella Versace, the writer George W. S. Trow, the feminist Andrea Dworkin, and the artists Ryan McGinley and Dash Snow.
In 2008, she moved to The New Yorker, becoming staff writer and publishing profiles of Cindy McCain, Silvio Berlusconi, Caster Semenya and Callista Gingrich. Levy has explored issues surrounding American drug use, gender roles, lesbian culture, and the popularity of U.S. pop culture staples such as Sex and the City. Some of these articles allude to Levy's personal thoughts on the status of modern feminism.
Culture critic
Levy criticized the pornographic video series Girls Gone Wild after she followed its camera crew for three days, interviewed both the makers of the series and the women who appeared on the videos, and commented on the series' concept and the debauchery she was witnessing. Many of the young women Levy spoke with believed that bawdy and liberated were synonymous.
Levy's experiences amid Girls Gone Wild appear again in Female Chauvinist Pigs, in which she attempts to explain "why young women today are embracing raunchy aspects of our culture that would likely have caused their feminist foremothers to vomit."
In today's culture, Levy writes, the idea of a woman participating in a wet T-shirt contest or being comfortable watching explicit pornography has become a symbol of strength; she says that she was surprised at how many people, both men and women, working for programs such as Girls Gone Wild told her that this new "raunch" culture marked not the downfall of feminism but its triumph, but Levy is unconvinced.
Levy's work is anthologized in The Best American Essays of 2008, New York Stories, and 30 Ways of Looking at Hillary.
Personal life
In 2013 she wrote about losing her unborn baby at 19 weeks while traveling alone in Mongolia, which became the basis for her 2017 memoir Rules Do Not Apply. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retieved 3/1/2017.)
Book Reviews
[A] dark and absorbing memoir.… Though some of the lessons learned in this memorable story are painful, Levy ultimately finds redemption in her ability to glimpse the light beyond the darkness, and to gain a deepening gratitude for friends, family, and her profession.
Publishers Weekly
With dignity and grace, this former golden girl eloquently acknowledges how the fact that "everybody doesn’t get everything"” in life is "as natural and unavoidable as mortality." Unflinchingly candid and occasionally heartbreaking.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use our LitLovers taking points to start a discussion for The Rules Do Not Apply…then take off on your own:
1. Ariel Levy's memoir begins with this statement: "For the first time I can remember, I cannot locate my competent self." She feels disoriented and confused. Have you ever felt this way, even without the devastating loss Levy has experienced?
2. Levy comes to see herself as the cause of her own collapse: "I knew, as surely as I now knew that I wanted a child, that this change in fortune was my fault," she writes. What do you think? What realization does she eventually come to?
3. How do you see Ariel Levy? Is she too hard on herself? She has led a particularly comfortable existence, one my say a life of privilege. Do you think in some way that comfort shielded her from experiences that the majority of people struggle with and perhaps left her less able to cope with life's vicissitudes?
4. Consider your own life: which circumstances have been, or are, outside of your control? Which ones have been, or are, within your purview? How much control do we have over our lives?
5. Talk about Levy's marriage, her infidelity, and her spouse's alcoholism.
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution.)
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Exit West
Mohsin Hamid, 2017
Penguin Publishing
240 pp.ref
ISBN-13: 9780735212176
Summary
Shortlisted, 2017 Man Booker Prize
An astonishingly visionary love story that imagines the forces that drive ordinary people from their homes into the uncertain embrace of new lands.
In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet—sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city.
When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors—doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through.
Exit West follows these remarkable characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. Profoundly intimate and powerfully inventive, it tells an unforgettable story of love, loyalty, and courage that is both completely of our time and for all time. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1971
• Where—Lahore, Pakistan
• Education—B.A., Princeton University; J.D., Harvard University
• Awards—Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; Asian American Literary Award
• Currently—lives in Lahore, Pakistan; London, England, UK; New York, NY, USA
Mohsin Hamid is a British Pakistani novelist and writer. His novels are Moth Smoke (2000), The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), and Exit West (2017).
Early life and education
Hamid spent part of his childhood in the United States, where he stayed from the age of 3 to 9 while his father, a university professor, was enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Stanford University. He then moved with his family back to Lahore, Pakistan, and attended the Lahore American School.
At the age of 18, Hamid returned to the U.S. to continue his education. He graduated from Princeton University summa cum laude in 1993, having studied under the writers Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison. Hamid wrote the first draft of his first novel for a fiction workshop taught by Morrison. He returned to Pakistan after college to continue working on it.
Hamid then attended Harvard Law School, graduating in 1997. Finding corporate law boring, he repaid his student loans by working for several years as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company in New York City. He was allowed to take three months off each year to write, and he used this time to complete his first novel Moth Smoke.
Works
Hamid moved to London in the summer of 2001, initially intending to stay only one year. Although he frequently returned to Pakistan to write, he continued to live in London for eight years, becoming a dual citizen of the United Kingdom in 2006.
Moth Smoke, tells the story of a marijuana-smoking ex-banker in post-nuclear-test Lahore who falls in love with his best friend's wife and becomes a heroin addict. Published in 2000, it quickly became a cult hit in Pakistan and India. It was also a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award given to the best first novel in the US, and was adapted for television in Pakistan and as an operetta in Italy.
His second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, told the story of a Pakistani man who decides to leave his high-flying life in America after a failed love affair and the terrorist attacks of 9/11. It was published in 2007 and became a million-copy international best seller, reaching No.4 on the New York Times Best Seller list. The novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, won several awards including the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the Asian American Literary Award, and was translated into over 25 languages. The Guardian selected it as one of the books that defined the decade.
Like Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist was formally experimental. The novel used the unusual device of a dramatic monologue in which the Pakistani protagonist continually addresses an American listener who is never heard from directly. (Hamid has said The Fall by Albert Camus served as his model.)
His third novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, was excerpted by The New Yorker in their September 24, 2012 issue and by Granta in their Spring 2013 issue. As with his previous books, it bends conventions of both genre and form. Narrated in the second person, it tells the story of the protagonist's ("your") journey from impoverished rural boy to tycoon in an unnamed contemporary city in "rising Asia," and of his pursuit of the nameless "pretty girl" whose path continually crosses but never quite converges with his. Stealing its shape from the self-help books devoured by ambitious youths all over "rising Asia," the novel is playful but also quite profound in its portrayal of the thirst for ambition and love in a time of shattering economic and social upheaval. In her New York Times review of the novel, Michiko Kakutani called it "deeply moving," writing that How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia "reaffirms [Hamid's] place as one of his generation's most inventive and gifted writers."
Hamid's 2017 novel, Exit West, is about a young couple, Nadia and Saeed, and their relationship in a time where the world is taken by storm by migrants.
Hamid has also written on politics, art, literature, travel, and other topics, most recently on Pakistan's internal division and extremism in an op-ed for the New York Times. His journalism, essays, and stories have appeared in Time, The Guardian, Dawn, New York Times, Washington Post, International Herald Tribune, Paris Review, and other publications. In 2013 he was named one of the world's 100 Leading Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine.
Personal life
Hamid moved to Lahore in 2009 with his wife Zahra and their daughter Dina. He now divides his time between Pakistan and abroad, living between Lahore, New York, London, and Mediterranean countries including Italy and Greece. Hamid has described himself as a "mongrel" and has said of his own writing that "a novel can often be a divided man’s conversation with himself." (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 3/17/2017.)
Book Reviews
In spare, crystalline prose, Hamid conveys the experience of living in a city under siege with sharp, stabbing immediacy. He shows just how swiftly ordinary life — with all its banal rituals and routines — can morph into the defensive crouch of life in a war zone…[and] how insidiously violence alters the calculus of daily life.… By mixing the real and the surreal, and using old fairy-tale magic, Hamid has created a fictional universe that captures the global perils percolating beneath today’s headlines.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
Hamid exploits fiction's capacity to elicit empathy and identification to imagine a better world. It is also a possible world. Exit West does not lead to utopia, but to a near future and the dim shapes of strangers that we can see through a distant doorway. All we have to do is step through it and meet them.
Viet Thanh Nguyen - New York Times Book Review (cover)
No novel is really about the cliche called "the human condition," but good novels expose and interpret the particular condition of the humans in their charge, and this is what Hamid has achieved here. If in its physical and perilous immediacy Nadia and Saeed’s condition is alien to the mass of us, Exit West makes a final, certain declaration of affinity: "We are all migrants through time."
Washington Post
In gossamer-fine sentences, Exit West weaves a pulse-raising tale of menace and romance, a parable of our refugee crisis, and a poignant vignette of love won and lost.… Let the word go forth: Hamid has written his most lyrical and piercing novel yet, destined to be one of this year’s landmark achievements.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Hamid doesn’t avoid or sugarcoat the heartache and hurt accompanying contradiction and change, as people "all over the world were slipping away from where they had been." But he also has the courage to…see change as an opportunity.
Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel
With great empathy, Hamid skillfully chronicles the manic condition of involuntary migration… Exit West rattles our perception of home.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
A dark fable for our turbulent time, Exit West…portrays a world of transience, violence, and insecurity that rhymes with our world of porous borders and rabid tribalists.
Dallas Morning News
Hamid rewrites the world as a place thoroughly, gorgeously, and permanently overrun by refugees and migrants.… But, still, he depicts the world as resolutely beautiful and, at its core, unchanged. The novel feels immediately canonical, so firm and unerring is Hamid’s understanding of our time and its most pressing questions.
NewYorker.com
A remarkable accomplishment…not putting a human face on refugees so much as putting a refugee face on all of humankind.… Hamid’s writing—elegant and fluid…—makes Exit West an absorbing read, but the ideas he expresses and the future he’s bold enough to imagine define it as an unmissable one.
Atlantic
Hamid’s timely and spare new novel confronts the inevitability of mass global immigration, the unbroken cycle of violence and the indomitable human will to connect and love.
Huffington Post
Hamid’s storytelling is stripped down, and the book’s sweeping allegory is timely and resonant. Of particular importance is the contrast between the migrants’ tenuous daily reality and that of the privileged second- or third-generation native population who’d prefer their new alien neighbors to simply disappear.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Both mellifluous and jarring, this novel is a profound meditation on the unpredictable temporality of human existence and the immeasurable cost of widespread enmity. —Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC
Library Journal
(Starred review.) [A] richly imaginative tale of love and loss in the ashes of civil war.… One of the most bittersweet love stories in modern memory and a book to savor even while despairing of its truths.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use our LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for Exit West...then take off on your own:
1. In what way does war distort everyday life for those who live in its midst? How does Mohsin Hamid convey the fear of truck bombs and snipers, armed checkpoints and surveillance drones? What effect does it have on the people who live through it? Have you ever lived in a war zone?
2. Describe Nadia and Saeed, their outward personalities and inner thoughts. Nadia is more driven, perhaps, while Saeed is more introspective. What attracts them to one another?
3. After the two leave home, they end up in a makeshift refugee camp. Talk about what that was like?
4. In the couple's attempts to immigrate to other countries and other continents, Hamid writes, "It was said in those days that the passage was both like dying and like being born." What do you think he means?
5. Why do you think the author uses the device of a magical door, almost as if purposely recalling C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe? In what way is crossing territories, always under threat of thirst, punishing heat and sun, or frigid nights, comparable to stepping through a magic door?
6. Saeed continues to pray. What is he praying for? What does he believe prayer is about?
7. How does the hardship of exile change Saeed? How does it change Nadia, who seems more adaptable? Most of all, how does it test—and ultimately change—their relationship?
8. The primary story of Nadia and Saeed is interrupted with stories of threats and travails in other corners of the world. For what purpose might Hamid have interjected those brief scenarios?
9. How does each new home they settle in receive the couple? How are they made to feel? How well do they blend in to the existing cultures and population?
10. What does one of the book's final declarations mean: "We are all migrants through time."
(Questions issued by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online of off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane
Lisa See, 2017
Scribner
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781501154829
Summary
A thrilling new novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa See explores the lives of a Chinese mother and her daughter who has been adopted by an American couple.
Li-yan and her family align their lives around the seasons and the farming of tea. There is ritual and routine, and it has been ever thus for generations.
Then one day a jeep appears at the village gate—the first automobile any of them have seen—and a stranger arrives. In this remote Yunnan village, the stranger finds the rare tea he has been seeking and a reticent Akha people.
In her biggest seller, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, See introduced the Yao people to her readers. Here she shares the customs of another Chinese ethnic minority, the Akha, whose world will soon change.
Li-yan, one of the few educated girls on her mountain, translates for the stranger and is among the first to reject the rules that have shaped her existence. When she has a baby outside of wedlock, rather than stand by tradition, she wraps her daughter in a blanket, with a tea cake hidden in her swaddling, and abandons her in the nearest city.
After mother and daughter have gone their separate ways, Li-yan slowly emerges from the security and insularity of her village to encounter modern life while Haley grows up a privileged and well-loved California girl. Despite Haley’s happy home life, she wonders about her origins; and Li-yan longs for her lost daughter. They both search for and find answers in the tea that has shaped their family’s destiny for generations.
A powerful story about a family, separated by circumstances, culture, and distance, Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane paints an unforgettable portrait of a little known region and its people and celebrates the bond that connects mothers and daughters. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 18, 1955
• Where—Paris, France
• Education—B.A., Loyola Marymount University
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California
Lisa See is an American writer and novelist. Her Chinese-American family (See has one Chinese great-grandparent) has had a great impact on her life and work. Her books include On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family (1995) and the novels Flower Net (1997), The Interior (1999), Dragon Bones (2003), Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005), Peony in Love (2007), Shanghai Girls (2009), which made it to the 2010 New York Times bestseller list, and China Dolls (2014).
Flower Net, The Interior, and Dragon Bones make up the Red Princess mystery series. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and Peony in Love focus on the lives of Chinese women in the 19th and 17th centuries respectively. Shanghai Girls chronicles the lives of two sisters who come to Los Angeles in arranged marriages and face, among other things, the pressures put on Chinese-Americans during the anti-Communist mania of the 1950s. See published a sequel titled Dreams of Joy.
Writing under the pen name Monica Highland, See, her mother Carolyn See, and John Espey, published three novels: Lotus Land (1983), 110 Shanghai Road (1986), and Greetings from Southern California (1988).
Biography
Lisa See was born in Paris but has spent many years in Los Angeles, especially Los Angeles Chinatown. Her mother, Carolyn See, is also a writer and novelist. Her autobiography provides insight into her daughter's life. Lisa See graduated with a B.A. from Loyola Marymount University in 1979.
See was West Coast correspondent for Publishers Weekly (1983–1996); has written articles for Vogue, Self, and More; has written the libretto for the opera based on On Gold Mountain, and has helped develop the Family Discovery Gallery for the Autry Museum, which depicts 1930s Los Angeles from the perspective of her father as a seven-year-old boy. Her exhibition On Gold Mountain: A Chinese American Experience was featured in the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, and the Smithsonian. See is also a public speaker.
She has written for and led in many cultural events emphasizing the importance of Los Angeles and Chinatown. Among her awards and recognitions are the Organization of Chinese Americans Women's 2001 award as National Woman of the Year and the 2003 History Makers Award presented by the Chinese American Museum. See has served as a Los Angeles City Commissioner. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/21/2014.)
Book Reviews
Everything about this book drew me in. As an adoptive mother, I sopped up See’s observations surrounding adoption with hungry interest. As a tea lover, I drank up the fascinating history of this industry. As a book lover, I cared deeply about the characters and outcome. Li-Yan does not blindly fall in line with practices and beliefs that go against her heart, but she preserves this truth from her village: "Every story, every dream, every waking minute of our lives is filled with one fateful coincidence after another." With The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, Lisa See preserves her place as a master of historical fiction. My book club agreed. READ MORE …
Abby Fabiaschi, AUTHOR - LitLovers
With vivid and precise details about tea and life in rural China, Li-Yan’s gripping journey to find her daughter comes alive.
Publishers Weekly
Coincidences abound in this illuminating novel that contributes historical and social insight into the Akhas.… With strong female characters, See deftly confronts the changing role of minority women, majority-minority relations, East-West adoption, and the economy of tea in modern China. —Suzanne Im, Los Angeles P.L.
Library Journal
Although representing exhaustive research on See's part, and certainly engrossing, the extensive elucidation of international adoption, tea arcana, and Akha lore threatens to overwhelm the human drama. Still, a riveting exercise in fictional anthropology.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the significance of the epigraph. The Book of Songs is the oldest extant collection of Chinese poetry, written between the seventh and eleventh centuries B.C. What kind of resonance does it have today?
2. The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane begins with the Akha aphorism, "No coincidence, no story." What are the major coincidences in the story? Are they believable? How important are they in influencing your reaction to the novel as a whole?
3. Perhaps the most shocking moment in the novel comes with the birth of the twins and what happens to them. A-ma explains that "only animals, demons, and spirits give birth to litters. If a sow gives birth to one piglet, then both must be killed at once. If a dog gives birth to one puppy, then they too must be killed immediately" (pages 27–28). The traditions surrounding twins are very harsh, to say the least, but were you able to understand what happens to them within the context of Akha culture? How does this moment change Li-yan’s view of Akha Law, and what are the consequences? Are there any aspects of the Akha culture that you admire?
4. What is Li-yan’s first reaction when she sees her land? Why does A-ma believe the tea garden is so important? Why does A-ma believe that the trees are sacred? What is the significance of the mother tree?
5. San-pa and Li-yan’s relationship ends tragically and causes them both great pain. Is what happens between them fate, or is it bad luck? In your opinion, does their community’s negativity about their union shape the outcome of their marriage? Does his death change your feelings about him?
6. Can the experience Li-yan’s village has with selling Pu’er be thought of as a microcosm for globalization? Why or why not? Are all the changes to the village positive? Given all we hear about China being a global economic superpower, were you surprised that the novel starts in 1988?
7. As a midwife, A-ma occupies a position of relative power on the mountain, although as "first among women" (page 4), she still comes after every man. Can such a traditional role for women be truly empowering? In the context of their society, what are the limits and expanse of A-ma’s power?
8. This novel uses a number of devices to tell Haley’s story, including letters, a transcript of a therapy session, and homework assignments. It isn’t until the final chapter, however, that you hear Haley in her own pure voice and see the world entirely from her point of view. Did this style of storytelling enrich your experience of the narrative? Did it make you more curious about Haley?
9. In the chapter transcribing a group therapy session for Chinese American adoptees that Haley attends, many of the patients have mixed feelings about their adoptive and birth parents. Were you surprised by their anger? Did reading this novel affect your feelings about transnational adoption?
10. The three most significant mother-daughter relationships in the novel are those between A-ma and Li-yan, Constance and Haley, and Li-yan and Haley. The connection between Li-yan and Haley, although arguably the emotional center of the novel, exists despite the absence of a relationship: though the two women think a great deal about each other, they do not meet until the very end of the story. How does this relationship in absence compare to the real-life relationships between A-ma and Li-yan and Constance and Haley?
11. What are the formal and informal ways in which Li-yan is educated? How are they different from the ways other members of her family were educated? What role does Teacher Zhang play in Li-yan’s life and how does it change over the years? How important is education in Haley’s life?
12. Li-yan is much older and more experienced when she meets Jin than she was when she fell in love with San-pa. How are the two men different? What do you think Li-yan learns from her first marriage?
13. Almost everyone in the novel has a secret: Li-yan, A-ma, San-pa, Mr. Huang, Deh-ja, Ci-teh, Teacher Zhang, Mrs. Chang, and Jin. How do those secrets impact each character? How are those secrets revealed and what are the results, particularly for Li-yan and Ci-teh’s relationship? The only person who doesn’t have a secret of major significance is Haley. What does that say about her?
14. When Li-yan returns to her village to confront Ci-teh, the ruma tells the women that Li-yan is still Akha even though she has a new home and lifestyle. How do questions of identity, especially as they relate to Li-yan’s status as an ethnic minority, play into the events of the novel? How does Li-yan’s identity shift? Do her nicknames, especially her American nickname, inform this shift?
15. By the time Li-yan and Haley meet, each has been searching for the other for many years. However, Haley already has a family and an adoptive mother. Is there room for Haley to have two mothers? How do you think Li-yan and Haley will relate to each other—as mother and child, or will their roles be something slightly different? What do you suppose Haley and Li-yan will talk about first?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
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The Roanoke Girls
Amy Engle, 2017
Crown/Archetype
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781101906668
Summary
Roanoke girls never last long around here. In the end, we either run or we die.
After her mother's suicide, fifteen year-old Lane Roanoke came to live with her grandparents and fireball cousin, Allegra, on their vast estate in rural Kansas.
Lane knew little of her mother's mysterious family, but she quickly embraced life as one of the rich and beautiful Roanoke girls. But when she discovered the dark truth at the heart of the family, she ran…fast and far away.
Eleven years later, Lane is adrift in Los Angeles when her grandfather calls to tell her Allegra has gone missing. Did she run too? Or something worse?
Unable to resist his pleas, Lane returns to help search, and to ease her guilt at having left Allegra behind. Her homecoming may mean a second chance with the boyfriend whose heart she broke that long ago summer. But it also means facing the devastating secret that made her flee, one she may not be strong enough to run from again.
As it weaves between Lane’s first Roanoke summer and her return, The Roanoke Girls shocks and tantalizes, twisting its way through revelation after mesmerizing revelation, exploring the secrets families keep and the fierce and terrible love that both binds them together and rips them apart. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Kansas
• Raised—Iran; Taiwan; Kansas City, Missouri, USA
• Education—University of Kansas; J.D. Georgetown University
• Currently—lives near Kansas City, Missouri
Amy Engle is best known as a young adult writer, but in 2017 she made her first foray into adult books with the gothic thriller The Roanoke Girls.
Born in Kansas, Amy's family moved to Iran when she was three. After her parents' divorced, she returned to the States, to Kansas City, Missouri. When her mother remarried, she moved with her mother and stepfather to Taiwan. The family eventually returned to Kansas City, Missouri, where Amy graduated from high school. She received her B.A. in English from the University of Kansas and then headed to Washington, D.C., where she earned a law degree from Georgetown University.
With her law degree in hand, Amy returned to Kansas City. During the next 10 years, she worked as a criminal defense attorney, married a another attorney, and started a family. Once her children were born, Amy decided to leave law and stay at home. However, she set a 10-year goal for herself: to write and publish a book.
The results of her efforts, after some procrastination and a false start or two, were her popular 2014 The Book of Ivy, and its sequel, The Revolution of Ivy, in 2015. Both are young adult novels. Between the two Ivy novels, Amy began work on her first adult novel, which became The Roanoke Girls, released in 2017. Amy said she enjoyed "exploring the shadowy side of the human experience." (Adapted from the author's website.)
Book Reviews
With more twists than a bag of pretzels, this compelling family saga may make you question what you think you know about your own relatives.
Cosmopolitan
A page-turning thriller that will allow you to escape into another world…filled with family secrets and a legacy of death and disappearance for the infamous “Roanoke Girls” — a privileged Kansas matriarchy with more than its fair share of tragic drama.
Bustle
A crime must-read to devour.… The Roanoke Girls has nothing to do with Virginia but everything to do with missing girls, as the females in the Roanoke family, who live in a tiny town in rural Kansas not worth naming, are rich, beautiful, and generally short-lived…The farmhouse, which is "equal parts horrifying and mesmerizing," is a perfect setting for a gothic mystery full of small-town secrets, lies, and guilt.
Literary Hub
Engel drops a wicked twist in the first 35 pages—in the middle of a paragraph on the middle of the page—and lets it sit like a coiled snake…from that point on, The Roanoke Girls becomes a thrilling mystery and a satisfyingly gothic portrait of Middle America…a dark fable of trauma and acceptance about damaged people accepting their crooked parts and using them to move forward.
Bookpage
Engel hits a homerun with this “gothic suspense novel” that tells the story of the Roanoke family, a prominent and very private Kansas family…a rollercoaster ride through a dark family history and the one devastating family secret.
Pulse Magazine
[A] gripping if creepy thriller set on the Kansas prairie.… Skipping lightly between past and present…this gothic page-turner speeds inexorably toward the kinds of devastating revelations readers won’t soon forget.
Publishers Weekly
[D]ark family secrets…bring the ugly past to light. Engel… memorable cast of characters and a twisting, tangled plot that attracts readers from the first page.… [An] atmospheric and unsettling tale of the secrets and bonds of family. —Amy Hoseth, Colorado State Univ. Lib., Fort Collins
Library Journal
An emotionally captivating story.
Booklist
Whole lotta dead girls in this rural Kansas family.… In her acknowledgments, the author thanks her grandparents for showing her the joys of small-town life, but, unfortunately, the book traffics in the most vicious stereotypes.… Sordid, unrealistic, and unredeemed.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher. In the meantime, use our generic mystery questions.)
GENERIC DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Mystery / Crime / Suspense Thrillers
1. Talk about the characters, both good and bad. Describe their personalities and motivations. Are they fully developed and emotionally complex? Or are they flat, one-dimensional heroes and villains?
2. What do you know...and when do you know it? At what point in the book do you begin to piece together what happened?
3. Good crime writers embed hidden clues in plain sight, slipping them in casually, almost in passing. Did you pick them out, or were you...clueless? Once you've finished the book, go back to locate the clues hidden in plain sight. How skillful was the author in burying them?
4. Good crime writers also tease us with red-herrings—false clues—to purposely lead readers astray? Does your author try to throw you off track? If so, were you tripped up?
5. Talk about the twists & turns—those surprising plot developments that throw everything you think you've figured out into disarray.
- Do they enhance the story, add complexity, and build suspense?
- Are they plausible or implausible?
- Do they feel forced and gratuitous—inserted merely to extend the story?
6. Does the author ratchet up the suspense? Did you find yourself anxious—quickly turning pages to learn what happened? A what point does the suspense start to build? Where does it climax...then perhaps start rising again?
7. A good ending is essential in any mystery or crime thriller: it should ease up on tension, answer questions, and tidy up loose ends. Does the ending accomplish those goals?
- Is the conclusion probable or believable?
- Is it organic, growing out of clues previously laid out by the author (see Question 3)?
- Or does the ending come out of the blue, feeling forced or tacked-on?
- Perhaps it's too predictable.
- Can you envision a different or better ending?
8. Are there certain passages in the book—ideas, descriptions, or dialogue—that you found interesting or revealing...or that somehow struck you? What lines, if any, made you stop and think?
9. Overall, does the book satisfy? Does it live up to the standards of a good crime story or suspense thriller? Why or why not?
(Generic Mystery Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness
Sy Montogmery, 2015
Atria Books
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781451697728
Summary
In this astonishing book from the author of the bestselling memoir The Good Good Pig, Sy Montgomery explores the emotional and physical world of the octopus—a surprisingly complex, intelligent, and spirited creature—and the remarkable connections it makes with humans.
Sy Montgomery’s popular 2011 Orion magazine piece, "Deep Intellect," about her friendship with a sensitive, sweet-natured octopus named Athena and the grief she felt at her death, went viral, indicating the widespread fascination with these mysterious, almost alien-like creatures.
Since then Sy has practiced true immersion journalism, from New England aquarium tanks to the reefs of French Polynesia and the Gulf of Mexico, pursuing these wild, solitary shape-shifters.
Octopuses have varied personalities and intelligence they show in myriad ways: endless trickery to escape enclosures and get food; jetting water playfully to bounce objects like balls; and evading caretakers by using a scoop net as a trampoline and running around the floor on eight arms.
But with a beak like a parrot, venom like a snake, and a tongue covered with teeth, how can such a being know anything? And what sort of thoughts could it think?
The intelligence of dogs, birds, and chimpanzees was only recently accepted by scientists, who now are establishing the intelligence of the octopus, watching them solve problems and deciphering the meaning of their color-changing camouflage techniques. Montgomery chronicles this growing appreciation of the octopus, but also tells a love story.
By turns funny, entertaining, touching, and profound, The Soul of an Octopus reveals what octopuses can teach us about consciousness and the meeting of two very different minds. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 7, 1958
• Where—Frankfurt, Germany
• Education—3 B.A. degrees, Syracuse University (USA)
• Currently—lives in Hancock, New Hampshire, USA
Sy Montgomery is a naturalist, author and scriptwriter who writes for children as well as adults. She is author of more than 20 books, including The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness (2015), which was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a New York Times Bestseller. Her most popular book is The Good Good Pig (2007), the bestselling memoir of life with her pig, Christopher Hogwood.
Her other notable titles include Journey of the Pink Dolphins, Spell of the Tiger, and Search for the Golden Moon Bear. She has been described as "part Indiana Jones, part Emily Dickinson".[1] Her book for children, Quest for the Tree Kangaroo: An Expedition to the Cloud Forest of New Guinea was the recipient of the 2007 Orbis Pictus Award and was selected as an Honor book for the ALA Sibert Award.[2]
For a half-hour National Geographic TV segment, she scripted and appeared in Spell of the Tiger, based on her book of that title. Also for National Geographic TV she developed and scripted Mother Bear Man based on the work of Ben Kilham, who raises and released orphaned black bears, which won a Chris Award. [3]
Author Vicki Croke asked Sy what she has learned, not just about an animal’s natural history, but lessons about life. Sy answered: “How to be a good creature. How do you be compassionate?… I think that animals teach compassion better than anything else and compassion doesn’t necessarily just mean a little mouse with a sore foot and you try to fix it. It means getting yourself inside the mind and heart of someone else. Seeing someone’s soul, looking for their truth. Animals teach you all of that and that’s how you get compassion and heart.”
Book Reviews
Charming and moving...with extraordinary scientific research.
Guardian (UK)
Sy Montgomery's The Soul of an Octopus does for the creature what Helen Macdonald 's H Is for Hawk did for raptors.
New Statesman (UK)
An engaging work of natural science... There is clearly something about the octopus’s weird beauty that fires the imaginations of explorers, scientists, writers.
Daily Mail (UK)
Fascinating…touching… informative.… Entertaining books like The Soul of an Octopus remind us of just how much we not only have to learn from fellow creatures, but that they can have a positive impact on our lives.
Daily Beast
Journalistic immersion…allows Montgomery to deliver a deeper understanding of the "other," thereby adding to our understanding of ourselves. A good book might illuminate something you knew little about, transform your world view, or move you in ways you didn't think possible. The Soul of an Octopus delivers on all three.
New Scientist
Informative and entertaining, part memoir and part scientific exploration, reminds us that if we are the best creatures on the planet at thinking, we can benefit by thinking about the creatures that may be doing it in some other way.
Columbus Dispatch
Sweet moments are at the heart of Montgomery's compassionate, wise and tender new book.… Only a writer of her talent could make readers care about octopuses as individuals.… Joins a growing body of literature that asks us to rethink our connection to nonhumans who may be more like us than we had supposed.
St. Paul Pioneer Press
Montgomery's deep love of these creatures often causes her to excessively anthropomorphize them, but her depictions of her intimate experiences with her cephalopod friends ring true, allowing readers to see them in an entirely new light.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Naturalist Montgomery admirably demonstrates the complexity, intellect, and personalities of the octopuses…without ever resorting to easy anthropomorphism. Her science is accessible but not overly simple, and the details she offers about these creatures bring them into sharp focus. —Lisa Peet
Library Journal
(Starred review.) In prose as gripping and entwining as her subjects’ many arms, Montgomery chronicles the octopus’ phenomenal strength, dexterity, speed.… She also tells funny and moving stories…[and] profoundly recalibrates our perception of consciousness.
Booklist
Naturalist Montgomery chronicles her extraordinary experience bonding with three octopuses.… With apparent delight, Montgomery puts readers inside the world of these amazing creatures. A fascinating glimpse into an alien consciousness.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Sy Montgomery writes about her scientific and emotional attraction to octopuses. Did anything surprise you in her poetic, sensuous language about the octopuses? Does she make clear what science cannot explain about octopuses?
2. How does Montgomery describe the different personalities that the octopuses have? Do you agree with her assessments of their attributes? Can you relate to the emotions that she interprets them to have?
3. Otherness is a central issue in the book—the otherness of the octopus with its nature so dramatically different from that of other mollusks as well as the differences between cephalopods and people. How does Montgomery use the otherness of the octopus to show the ways the human characters in the story can feel that they don’t fit in or belong? How do the human characters with their varied backgrounds find ways of coming together and belonging?
4. The similarities between octopuses and humans are another theme. What are the similarities that Montgomery sees? Would you share her point of view or do you see the differences more than the similarities?
5. What does Montgomery reveal about what constitutes consciousness, in humans and animals? Does she show that octopuses have consciousness?
6. Does Montgomery address and answer the question of whether an octopus can have a soul? If so, how does she show the animal has a soul? If not, does she explain that the animal does not have a soul?
7. What is anthropomorphism? Given what science knows now about the consciousness of animals, is anthropomorphism a problem? If so, why?
8. What are the issues involved in collecting wild octopuses from the oceans and studying them in an aquarium?
9. Many cultures consume octopuses as food. Do you see any issues regarding eating octopuses?
10. For a book that imparts a wealth of scientific information about octopuses, Montgomery uses humor and also a deep sense of feeling and respect for the octopus and all of nature. How does Montgomery convey the major conservation issues, such as global warming and the health of the oceans, in the stories she tells in this book about people and animals?
11. Has your view of human consciousness changed after reading this account? Has your view of animal consciousness changed? What information specifically influenced you?
12. Has your perspective on nature and on octopuses been influenced by this book? What views has the book reinforced and what views has it changed your mind about?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
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