The Winter Witch
Paula Brackston, 2013
St. Martin's Press
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250001313
Summary
In her small early nineteenth century Welsh town, there is no one quite like Morgana. She is small and quick and pretty enough to attract a suitor, but there are things that set her apart from other girls.
Though her mind is sharp she has not spoken since she was a young girl. Her silence is a mystery, as well as her magic—the household objects that seem to move at her command, the bad luck that visits those who do her ill. Concerned for her safety, her mother is anxious to see Morgana married, and Cai Jenkins, the widowed drover from the far hills who knows nothing of the rumors that swirl around her, seems the best choice.
After her wedding, Morgana is heartbroken at leaving her mother, and wary of this man, whom she does not know, and who will take her away to begin a new life. But she soon falls in love with Cai’s farm and the wild mountains that surround it. Here, where frail humans are at the mercy of the elements, she thrives, her wild nature and her magic blossoming.
Cai works to understand the beautiful, half-tamed creature he has chosen for a bride, and slowly, he begins to win Morgana’s affections. It’s not long, however, before her strangeness begins to be remarked upon in her new village. A dark force is at work there—a person who will stop at nothing to turn the townspeople against Morgana, even at the expense of those closest to her. Forced to defend her home, her man, and herself from all comers, Morgana must learn to harness her power, or she will lose everything in this beautifully written, enchanting novel. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Paula Brackston's first novel Book of Shadows was first published in the UK in 2009. It was issued in the U.S. in 2011 under the title The Witch's Daughter. Her second historical fantasy Lamp Black, Wolf Grey came out in 2010. The Winter Witch, Paula's third novel, came out in 2013.
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From the author's website.
Paula lives in a wild, mountainous part of Wales. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University, and is a Visiting Lecturer for the University of Wales, Newport. Before becoming a writer, Paula tried her hand at various career paths, with mixed success. These included working as a groom on a racing yard, as a travel agent, a secretary, an English teacher, and a goat herd. Everyone involved (particularly the goats) is very relieved that she has now found a job she is actually able to do properly.
When not hunched over her keyboard in her tiny office under the stairs, Paula is dragged outside by her children to play Swedish tennis on the vertiginous slopes which surround them. She also enjoys being walked by the dog, hacking through weeds in the vegetable patch, or sitting by the pond with a glass of wine. Most of the inspiration for her writing comes from stomping about on the mountains being serenaded by skylarks and buzzards.
In 2007 Paula was short listed in the Creme de la Crime search for new writers. In 2010 her book Nutters (writing as PJ Davy) was short listed for the Mind Book Award, and she was selected by the BBC under their New Welsh Writers scheme. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Brackston (The Witch’s Daughter) delivers an intimate paranormal romance that grounds its fantasy in the reality of a 19th-century Welsh farm. Widower Cai Jenkins needs a wife to qualify as a porthmon (head drover) and to help run Ffynnon Las (“Blue Well”) farm. Morgana Pritchard, mute by choice, is no blushing bride, however: she has Romany blood, an affinity for animals, and the growing power of a witch. Already an outsider, Morgana runs afoul of locals who blame her for unusual weather and sickness, as well as one who desires Ffynnon Las for the power of its titular well. Whether on a drive with Cai to take cattle and sheep to London or staying home to learn to be the new Witch of the Well, she is challenged by hostile groups who threaten her freedom and life. Brackston provides clear portraits of her protagonists and their lives on the farm, even if her villain veers a bit to the melodramatic and overweening.
Publishers Weekly
Shortlisted for the Crème de la Crime Search for new writers, Brackston debuted with The Witch's Daughter. She's back with a second work starring a young Welsh witch who has yet to master her magic.
Library Journal
Eighteen-year-old Morgana Pritchard, silent by choice since childhood, doesn't know the extent of her magical powers until new husband Cai's housekeeper, Mrs. Jones, a witch herself, starts to teach her.... What Morgana does know—because she can smell it—is that there is powerful evil in the community, soon identified as Isolda Bowen.... When Isolda curses Cai...the young witch must summon all her knowledge and resolve to fight for both their lives. Love of landscape and lyrical writing lend charm, but it's Brackston's full-blooded storytelling that will hook the reader.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What did you think of the arranged marriage between Cai and Morgana? Which of them did you sympathize with more?
2. How do you feel about Morgana’s speechlessness? How do you think it helped or hindered her developing relationship with Cai. Did it make her harder for you to connect with as a reader?
3. Mrs. Jones became a very important person in Morgana’s life, what did you think of her? How might the story have been different without her?
4. Superstition and the supernatural (arguably!) played a much bigger role in society in 1830 than they do now— how did they impact Morgana’s new life at Ffynnon Las?
5. Did you find the landscape around Ffynnon Las attractive, threatening, or perhaps both?
6. Isolda uses her magic in very different ways from Morgana. Which of them do you think more closely conforms to most people’s idea of a witch? Why?
7. Did you see Reverend Cadwaladr as a victim, or a weak man who should have known the right thing to do?
8. The weather was almost a character in its own right in this book— would you agree with this statement? How much were you affected by it as you read?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Twelve Tribes of Hattie
Ayana Mathis, 2012
Knopf Doubleday
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307949707
Summary
A debut of extraordinary distinction: Ayana Mathis tells the story of the children of the Great Migration through the trials of one unforgettable family.
In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a chance at a better life. Instead, she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins succumb to an illness a few pennies could have prevented. Hattie gives birth to nine more children whom she raises with grit and mettle and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave.
She vows to prepare them for the calamitous difficulty they are sure to face in their later lives, to meet a world that will not love them, a world that will not be kind. Captured here in twelve luminous narrative threads, their lives tell the story of a mother’s monumental courage and the journey of a nation.
Beautiful and devastating, Ayana Mathis’s The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is wondrous from first to last—glorious, harrowing, unexpectedly uplifting, and blazing with life. An emotionally transfixing novel, a searing portrait of striving in the face of insurmountable adversity, an indelible encounter with the resilience of the human spirit and the driving force of the American dream. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1973
• Raised—Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—New York University, Temple University, and
The New School (no degree); Iowa Writers' Workshop
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York, New York
Ayana Mathis emerged from a low-income background, raised by as single mother in Philadelphia. Growing up with little around her, the thought of a stable career always seemed to beckon in the back of her mind of what she thought her mother would want her to do. Her mother, however, did the opposite—she pushed her to pursue her talent of writing.... In her twenties, Mathis took up poetry, however, her motivation to keep toiling with words didn’t last for long. She had a day job as a waitress and worked as a fact-checker at a magazine, while she continued to write in her spare time. When she felt like she couldn’t write poetry anymore, Mathis gave up on writing and years passed before she would pick up the pen again. (From Ebony.)
She attended New York University, Temple University and the New School without earning an undergraduate degree. “I sort of wandered off,” she said. She took writing courses and mostly wrote poetry, never considering herself a fiction writer. An avid traveler, she even ended up living in Italy for four years, learning the language and acquiring some cooking skills. A year or so after her return to New York she found her way to a private creative writing class taught by Jackson Taylor, a novelist. She was still bouncing around at fact-checking jobs. “She came to the class with the skills of the magazine—deadline, fluidity, structure,” Mr. Taylor said. “But then she blossomed in a forum where she could explore and explode her poetic gifts. (From New York Times.)
In 2009 she attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop and began to work on a fictionalized memoir. But after getting a reality check on a story she wrote—a critique from her instructor, Marilynne Robinson—Ayana decided to work on some short stories instead...not knowing that they would become the beginnings of the The Twelve Tribes of Hattie. (From Huffington Post.)
Book Reviews
In a movement as vast as the Great Migration, there are so many stories buried in the ashes of memory, so much untold and yet to be sung that perhaps no book should bear the burden of telling it all. In the end, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is less about the migration than about a mother's loss and the toll it takes on her and her children, their feeble attempts to escape their lives and the costs borne by every one of them. Hattie's family represents itself and itself alone. This deeply felt novel does not seek to tell the story of all, but of one that perhaps might have been.
Isabel Wilkerson - New York Times Book Review
In a movement as vast as the Great Migration, there are so many stories buried in the ashes of memory, so much untold and yet to be sung that perhaps no book should bear the burden of telling it all. In the end, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is less about the migration than about a mother's loss and the toll it takes on her and her children, their feeble attempts to escape their lives and the costs borne by every one of them. Hattie's family represents itself and itself alone. This deeply felt novel does not seek to tell the story of all, but of one that perhaps might have been.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
Mathis’s prose is lush yet deliberate, with hardly a wasted word, and her touch is elegant and sure.[Mathis's] prose style…is clean and transparent, and though she manipulates time and chronology in sophisticated ways, she never leaves us…in the dense mist of her private vision…Too many writers of literary fiction tend to stage intimate stories in the hermetically sealed worlds of their own clever imaginations, but Mathis never loses touch with the geography and the changing national culture through which her characters move.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Mathis’s prose is lush yet deliberate, with hardly a wasted word, and her touch is elegant and sure.... As certainly as August Wilson did in the plays of his 20th-century cycle, Mathis is chronicling our nation.... Why we read [stories]: because they remind us that every pain that anyone’s ever known is part of the human condition, and so we are not alone.... All of that unhappiness has happened before, and it will happen again. Likewise all of the joy. In the vivid specificity of Mathis’s tale, she is telling a universal story, and it is profoundly consoling.
Laura Collins-Hughes - Boston Globe
(Starred review.) Remarkable…Mathis weaves this story with confidence, proving herself a gifted and powerful writer.
Publishers Weekly
Writing with stunning authority, clarity, and courage, debut novelist Mathis pivots forward in time, spotlighting intensely dramatic episodes in the lives of Hattie's nine subsequent children (and one grandchild to make the ‘twelve tribes’), galvanizing crises that expose the crushed dreams and anguished legacy of the Great Migration…Mathis writes with blazing insight into the complexities of sexuality, marriage, family relationships, backbone, fraudulence, and racism in a molten novel of lives racked with suffering yet suffused with beauty. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
Cutting, emotional…pure heartbreak…though Mathis has inherited some of Toni Morrison’s poetic intonation, her own prose is appealingly earthbound and plainspoken, and the book’s structure is ingenious…an excellent debut.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Hattie is, by any measure, a complicated, difficult woman. Did you love her, hate her, find it difficult to have sympathy for her? Is she a good mother? Why or why not?
2. Why do you suppose the author chose to have Philadelphia and Jubilee die in the novel’s first chapter? The novel moves backward and forward in time. What function is served by showing us this loss at the outset? How does this serve the novel and inform our understanding of Hattie?
3. “In Georgia the preacher had called the North a New Jerusalem. The congregation said he was a traitor to the cause of the southern Negro. He was gone the next day on a train for Chicago. Others, too, were going, disappearing from their shops and their fields. All of those souls, escaped from the South, were at this very moment glowing with promise in the wretched winters of the cities of the North. Hattie knew her babies would survive. Though they were small and struggling, Philadelphia and Jubilee were already among those luminous souls, already the beginning of a new nation.” Discuss this passage in relation to the novel’s themes. In fact, Hattie is mistaken here; her babies do not survive. What does this say about the provenance of the new nation of which she speaks?
4. Six perceives his spiritual gifts as an affliction, entangled with his physical suffering, and likens his moments of communion to seizures and fits. “What was grace if it came on him like a seizure that left him as frail and hurting as he had been before its visit? His experience of God was a violent surge he couldn’t control...if he’d known how to pray, Six would have asked God to take his gift away.” Elsewhere, he describes himself as a “ruined instrument” of God. What is your understanding of Six’s spirituality? Does he have the power to heal? How do you think the author views him, and what do you think happens to him in the future? Does the author provide another glimpse of him in the novel, and if so, what does she suggest about his fate?
5. In one of the novel’s most dramatic and revealing chapters, Hattie leaves August with the older children and escapes with baby Ruthie (then called Margaret) and her lover, Lawrence. How did this make you feel? Were you hoping she would stay with Lawrence or go back to August and the children?
6. “Lawrence understood her. It seemed to him that every time he made one choice in his life, he said no to another. All of those things he could not do or be were huddled inside of him; they might spring up at any moment, and he would be hobbled with regret. He pulled to the shoulder of the rode and held her. She was a beating heart in his hand.” What is at stake in this moment, for each of them?
7. What do you learn in the chapter called “Ruthie” about August as a husband? As a father? As a man?
8. Does August change throughout the course of the novel? Do you feel differently about him at the novel’s end than at the beginning?
9. Discuss the disagreement between Hattie and August in the chapter “Ruthie” about Cassie learning to play piano. Cassie’s teacher agrees to teach her for free. Hattie rejects the offer, saying that “it wasn’t practical for a Negro girl to fill her head with music.” August feels it’s a mistake to take away her dreams. Who is right? Look in particular at their disagreement and at the passage on page 88 in which August ponders their predicament and the question of what it means to have “a better life.” What do you think it means, in this context, to have a better life?
10. What kind of marriage do Hattie and August have? Look at the scene in which Hattie returns from Baltimore. Were you surprised that August took her back, with, as he says, “another man’s baby in her arms? Anyone would agree that he ought to do something terrible to her, but she had been gone fifteen hours, and in that fifteen hours his life had crumpled like a lump of dry earth.” What has August learned in Hattie’s absence? Look also at the chapter’s ending, in which Mathis writes: “It was not an invite to embrace but a resignation, as if to say, here we are; this is all we have…There were too many disappointments to name and too much heartbreak. They were beyond punishment or forgiveness, beyond what they had inflicted each other, beyond love.” What does it mean to be beyond love? Consider as well Hattie’s confession in the chapter “Ella,” in which she describes “her body’s insistence on a man who was the greatest mistake of her life.”
11. Discuss the scene in which Pearl and Benny are interrupted during their picnic by a group of white men. How did you feel about Benny’s choices? Does Pearl have a right to be angry? What do you think you would have done in these circumstances?
12. Reread the anguished scene in which Hattie and August give Ella to Marion and Benny. August tells Hattie, “We had that pain…and we’ll have this too.” Did they do the right thing? Was this chapter tragic? Hopeful?
13. Discuss the use of point of view in the chapter “Alice and Billups.” Whose point of view did you initially trust in this chapter? How does this change by the chapter’s end?
14. Why does Franklin throw his letter to Sissy into the bay? Is this an act of cowardice, or could it be read as heroism?
15. In one of the novel’s climactic moments, Hattie and Lawrence bump into each other in a department store, and she discovers that Lawrence is romantically entangled with her daughter Bell. Why does Bell seduce Lawrence? What does she hope to achieve? What, if anything, does she learn about herself after her mother discovers her affair?
16. How is Bell different from her sisters and brothers? How is her relationship with Hattie different? How has her relationship with her mother defined her? Look in particular at the passage on page 212, in which Mathis writes: “Adulthood brought Bell a kind of freedom but no relief. She felt defective in some vital way, incapable of doing the right thing. She was constantly afraid that some force would strike her down for her failings.” Look also at the extraordinary passage on page 217: “Ruthie had said once that Bell and Hattie were just alike. It wasn’t true. Hattie was stronger than Bell could ever be. She didn’t know how to tend to her children’s souls, but she fought to keep them alive and to keep herself alive. That was more than Bell could say. All of them—Hattie and Willie and Evelyln and even crazed, ruined Walter—were like little lights; sparks flying upward in dark places, trying to stay alight though they were compelled toward ash.”
17. Race, poverty, history, class—Ayana Mathis speaks to all of these in The Twelve Tribes of Hattie and subtly complicates our understanding of the forces and conditions that drove political and social reform in the first part of the twentieth century. An argument could be made that the new North was built on the backs of Hattie’s children. Discuss this idea.
18. Why does Hattie refuse to let Sala take the mercy seat?
19. Reread the novel’s final paragraph. Is this a happy ending or a heartbreaking one? Resigned, or hopeful? Did you feel differently about Hattie in the novel’s last lines? Has she changed?
20. How do you imagine Sala’s life might differ from the lives of her aunts and uncles? What do you think the author is suggesting thematically through the character of Sala, who, although a generation removed, is Hattie’s essential twelfth tribe?
The Gods of Gotham
Lyndsay Faye, 2012
Penguin Group USA
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780425261255
Summary
1845. New York City forms its first police force. The great potato famine hits Ireland. These two seemingly disparate events will change New York City. Forever.
Timothy Wilde tends bar near the Exchange, fantasizing about the day he has enough money to win the girl of his dreams. But when his dreams literally incinerate in a fire devastating downtown Manhattan, he finds himself disfigured, unemployed, and homeless. His older brother obtains Timothy a job in the newly minted NYPD, but he is highly skeptical of this new "police force." And he is less than thrilled that his new beat is the notoriously down-and-out Sixth Ward-at the border of Five Points, the world's most notorious slum.
One night while making his rounds, Wilde literally runs into a little slip of a girl-a girl not more than ten years old-dashing through the dark in her nightshift, covered head to toe in blood.
Timothy knows he should take the girl to the House of Refuge, yet he can't bring himself to abandon her. Instead, he takes her home, where she spins wild stories, claiming that dozens of bodies are buried in the forest north of 23rd Street. Timothy isn't sure whether to believe her or not, but, as the truth unfolds, the reluctant copper star finds himself engaged in a battle for justice that nearly costs him his brother, his romantic obsession, and his own life. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1980
• Raised—Pacific Northwest, USA
• Education—B.A., Notre Dame de Namur University
• Currently—lives in Ridgewood, Queens, New York City
Lyndsay Faye is the American author of several crime novels with an historical-fiction bent. She was born in Northern California, raised in the Pacific Northwest, and graduated from Notre Dame de Namur University in the San Francisco Bay Area with a dual degree in English and Performance.
Her early career kept her in the Bay Area working as a professional actress, "nearly always," she says, "in a corset, and if not a corset then… heels and lined stockings." In 2005 she made the move to Manhattan to audition for acting jobs, working in a restaurant as her day job...until it was bulldozed to the ground by developers.
Novels
Sans restaurant job, and with more time on her hands, an initial foray into writing payed off. In 2009 Faye published her first novel, Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson. The book pays tribute to Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick Watson, the duo whose adventures first captivated Faye as a child.
Faye's innate curiosity next spurred her to delve into the history of the New York Police Department, by which she learned that the department's founding coincided with the Irish Potato Famine in 1845. That research inspired her three Timothy Wilde novels—The Gods of Gotham (2012), Seven for a Secret (2013), and The Fatal Flame (2015). The novels follow ex-bartender Timothy Wilde as he learns the perils of police work in a violent and racially divided city during the pre-Civil War era.
Her next novel Jane Steele, released in 2016, re-imagines Jane Eyre as a gutsy, heroic serial killer who battles for justice with methods inspired by Darkly Dreaming Dexter.
Faye has been nominated for an Edgar Award, a Dilys Winn Award, and is honored to have been selected by the American Library Association's RUSA Reader's List for Best Historical. She is an international bestseller and her Timothy Wilde Trilogy has been translated into 14 languages.
Lyndsay and her husband Gabriel live in Ridgewood, Queens, a borough of New York. They have two cats, Grendel and Prufrock. She is a member of Actor’s Equity Association, the Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes, the Baker Street Babes, the Baker Street Irregulars, Mystery Writers of America, and Girls Write Now. And always, she is hard at work on her next novel. (Adapted from the author's website.)
Book Reviews
rollicking…juicy…Faye's canvas is a crowded one, with vibrant characters jumping out of the plot to contribute local color.
Marilyn Stasio - New York Times
[Faye's] newly minted investigators in 19th-century Gotham will bring to mind works such as Caleb Carr's The Alienist and E.L. Doctorow's The Waterworks. Faye thrillingly evokes the full range of megalopolitan horrors…She artfully weaves history and politics, particularly the age's ugly sectarianism, adding literary heft without weighing the novel down…there's enough excitement here to cause anyone's veins to quiver, and the plot hurtles along like…stampeding cattle
Ross King - Washington Post
It's been almost twenty years since Caleb Carr's bestselling Olde New York crime novel, The Alienist, was published, and I cant count the number of times since then that someone has asked me if I can recommend a suspense story anything "like it." Well, New York has inspired lots of terrific thrillers, but I've just stumbled on one of the worthiest successors yet—Lyndsay Faye's novel, The Gods of Gotham.
Maureen Corrigan - NPR's Fresh Air
Set in 1845 New York City, Faye’s knockout first in a new series improves on her impressive debut, Dust and Shadow (2009), which pitted Sherlock Holmes against Jack the Ripper. As Irish immigrants pour into the city, fleeing the potato famine in their homeland, Timothy Wilde, a 27-year-old former bartender, adjusts to life as a policeman in New York’s newly formed police force. As one of the first to wear the copper star, Wilde soon discovers more than one unwelcome surprise. In short order on his lower Manhattan beat, he runs across an infanticide and the body of a 12-year-old Irish boy whose spleen has been removed. The investigation the novice detective launches into the boy’s murder brings him deep into the heart of human darkness. Vivid period details, fully formed characters, and a blockbuster of a twisty plot put Faye in a class with Caleb Carr. Readers will look forward to the sequel.
Publishers Weekly
Faye's new novel, after the Sherlockian thriller Dust and Shadow, focuses on the growing distrust toward Irish Catholic immigrants in 1840s New York. Badly scarred and rendered destitute after a city fire, barman Timothy Wilde takes a job on the newly formed police force at the urging of his politically connected older brother, Valentine. As a "Copper Star," Tim is well suited to investigation, and he stumbles on a mystery involving murdered children and one of New York's most infamous brothels. Mercy Underhill, a devoted social worker and the object of Tim's unspoken affection, is drawn into the case as she tries to protect her wards. Tim searches for answers amid political scheming, nativist sentiments, and anti-Catholic riots. Verdict: The Wilde brothers are a valiantly flawed pair (commiting illegal acts for good reason) whose adventures dramatically light up this turbulent era. Faye's use of flash, an underground language akin to thieves' cant (British criminal jargon), further enriches this engrossing historical thriller, the first in a new series. —Catherine Lantz, Morton Coll. Lib., Cicero, IL
Library Journal
[A] top-notch historical thriller.... In July 1845, Timothy Wilde is a successful bartender who's accumulated $400 in silver—just about enough, he figures, to ask minister's daughter Mercy Underhill to marry him. But the conflagration that sweeps through Manhattan that night consumes Timothy's savings and disfigures his face.... Timothy [destitute, joins the police force and] stumbles across a young girl covered with blood, who leads him to the mass grave of 20 kinchin horribly disfigured.... No one is precisely what they seem in Faye's richly imagined, superbly plotted narrative, which delivers not one, not two, but three bravura twists as Timothy tracks the killer.... Faye's damaged but appealing hero seems likely to have more adventures ahead, and they'll be welcomed by anyone who appreciates strong, atmospheric storytelling.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1.Timothy Wilde’s understanding is deeply hampered by his own misconceptions about his loved ones—in particular, Mercy Underhill and his brother Valentine. How unreliable a narrator is Tim? In what ways is he careful to present the whole story, and in what ways does he fail to do so?
2. The city of New York itself is a significant character in The Gods of Gotham. How would you characterize Timothy’s uneasy relationship with New York? How is it affected by the fact that he was born there? How do you feel about New York City, either as a native, a transplant, a visitor, or a complete stranger, and did that feeling change your perception of the novel?
3. In reference to an Irish laborer being taunted by an American in Chapter Seven, Tim says, “It’s always someone in these parts, being made small, being made to wear that look.” Does this idea reflect you or your family’s immigration experience? In what ways were the hardships endured by the Irish immigrants comparable to or different from later groups like Hispanics, Asians, and Middle Easterners? Have we overcome xenophobia, or does it still plague immigrant Americans?
4. Timothy watches the unfolding battle between the Catholic and the Protestant Gods with a certain detachment, but he is constantly making moral judgment calls. How spiritual a man is Timothy? What role do you think religion plays in his life? How has it affected him to grow up in two worlds, one Protestant and one highly secular?
5. Mercy Underhill and Silkie Marsh are very different women, but each is immensely affected by the narrow role relegated to females in the 19th century. How does each make her own bid for independence? How closely are economics tied to autonomy for Mercy and for Silkie, and in what ways?
6. Valentine Wilde’s list of “dubious pastimes,” according to Timothy, includes narcotics, alcohol, bribery, violence, whoring, gambling, theft, cheating, extortion, and sodomy. Despite this, Timothy often defines himself in direct comparison to Valentine’s attributes. Do you find Val a sympathetic character? What is the true north of Valentine’s moral compass, and how does he adhere to it? Which of his “dubious pastimes” are ethically defensible?
7. Did the ambitious and semi–lawless world of the thuggish Democratic Party seem foreign to you, or familiar? How do religion and politics intersect in The Gods of Gotham, and how do they intersect in our current political system?
8. In what ways is flash language a dialect? A code? A lifestyle? A community? Are people defined by their language in The Gods of Gotham, and are they still defined by language today?
9. In the 19th century, children were often required to earn their own livelihoods, both on the streets and in other settings. In what ways do characters like Bird, Neill, Ninepin, and the other newsboys and child prostitutes act like adults? Would their behavior seem strange to the modern observer? Many types of class warfare are delineated in The Gods of Gotham; is the struggle of children vs. adult predators another example?
10. During the 1830’s into the 1840’s, child prostitution was considered a vice that strongly weighed upon the public face of New York City. Upwards of 380 “juvenile harlots,” according to historian Timothy Gilfoyle in City of Eros, could be found plying their wares in a single police district. He also reports that reformer and ex-mayor Stephen Allen, when addressing the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents, argued that most children had entered prostitution by way of “poverty, neglect, ignorance, and bad company, rather than because of individual or moral depravity.” What do you make of Allen’s opinion? Does it surprise you that many imagined children entered prostitution willingly?
11. The Reverend Underhill is a mentor of sorts to Timothy, and yet he proves to be Tim’s adversary. To what extent are Tim’s feelings about Mercy mixed up with his final treatment of the Reverend? Is the Reverend ever a positive force? To what extent are Thomas Underhill’s actions motivated by love? To what extent are Timothy’s, and how do his actions differ from the Reverend’s?
12. George Washington Matsell was a very divisive figure during his era. Were you surprised to find that so many were against the formation of a police force? Matsell was also a student of popular civics and family planning, which were both scandalous reading material at the time. How do you feel about the first NYC Chief of Police endorsing birth control? Do you think Matsell was socially or politically ahead of his time?
13. In the 19th century, people looked upon the possibility of being dissected after death with the greatest aversion, setting guards over new graves until the body had begun decomposition and inventing unbreakable locks for coffins. Dr. Palsgrave wants more than anything to cure children, and thus buys corpses from an utterly ruthless woman. Do his ends justify his means? Do you think Timothy’s idealism caused him to let Dr. Palsgrave off too easily? Dr. Palsgrave is unaware that Silkie’s children know about him, and equally unaware that she speeds their deaths. Do you find the doctor an intelligent character, or a naïve one? Were you surprised to learn that alchemy and science were once closely tied?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Gods Without Men
Hari Kunzru, 2011
Knopf Doubleday
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307946973
Summary
Jaz and Lisa Matharu are plunged into a public hell after their son, Raj, vanishes during a family vacation in the California desert. However, the Mojave is a place of strange power. Before Raj reappears—inexplicably unharmed, but not unchanged—the fate of this young family will intersect with that of many others, both past and present, who have traveled through this odd, remote town in the shadow of a mysterious rock formation known as the Pinnacles.
Among them are an 18th-century Spanish missionary, a former WWII aviation engineer turned desert-cult messiah, and an incognito rock star on the run. As their stories collide and build upon one another, Gods Without Men becomes a heartfelt exploration of the search for meaning in a chaotic universe. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1969
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Oxford University; M.A., University
of Warwick
• Awards—John Llewellyn Rhys (refused); Betty Trask
Award; Somerset Maugham Award; Granta, Best of
Young British Novelists Award
• Currently—lives in New York, New York, USA
Hari Mohan Nath Kunzru is a British Indian novelist and journalist of Kashmiri Pandit origin, author of the novels The Impressionist, Transmission, My Revolutions and Gods Without Men. His work has been translated into twenty languages.
Kunzru was born in London and grew up in Essex to a Kashmiri Pandit father and a British Anglican Christian mother. He was educated at Bancroft's School, Essex. He studied English at Wadham College, Oxford, then gained an MA in Philosophy and Literature from University of Warwick.
During his teens, Hari decided that he did not believe in formal religion or God, saying he was "opposed to how religion is used to police people." Kunzru is fascinated with UFOs and as a youngster often imagined a close-encounter type experience with them.
Career
From 1995 to 1997 he worked on Wired UK. Since 1998, he has worked as a travel journalist, writing for such newspapers as The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, was travel correspondent for Time Out magazine, and worked as a TV presenter interviewing artists for the Sky TV electronic arts programme The Lounge. From 1999–2004 he was also music editor of Wallpaper magazine and since 1995 he has been a contributing editor to Mute, the culture and technology magazine.
His first novel, The Impressionist (2003), had a £1 million-plus advance and was well received critically with excellent sales. His second novel, Transmission, was published in 2004. In 2005 he published the short story collection Noise. His third novel, My Revolutions, was published in 2007, and his fourth, Gods Without Men, in 2011. Set in the American south-west, it is a fractured story about multiple characters across time. It has been compared to David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas.
Among other awards, he was also awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys prize for writers under 35, the second oldest literary prize in the UK. He turned it down, however, on the grounds that it was backed by the Mail on Sunday whose "hostility towards black and Asian people" he felt was unacceptable. A statement, read on his behalf, said, "As the child of an immigrant, I am only too aware of the poisonous effect of the Mail's editorial line... The atmosphere of prejudice it fosters translates into violence, and I have no wish to profit from it." He further went on to recommend that the award money be donated to the charity Refugee Council (UK).
He is Deputy President of English PEN.
In 2009, he donated the short story "Kaltes klares Wasser" to Oxfam's Ox-Tales project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Kunzru's story was published in the Water collection.
In 2012 at the Jaipur Literature Festival, he, along with three other authors, Ruchir Joshi, Jeet Thayil and Amitava Kumar, risked arrest by reading excerpts from Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, which remains unpublished in India due to fear of controversy. Kunzru later wrote, "Our intention was not to offend anyone's religious sensibilities, but to give a voice to a writer who had been silenced by a death threat." The reading drew sharp criticism from Muslim groups as being a deliberately provocative move to gain publicity for the four authors. Kunzru himself admitted in an interview that he was asked to leave by the festival organizers as his presence was likely to "inflame an already volatile situation." (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Mr. Kunzru uses his extraordinary gifts as a storyteller — his brightly textured prose, his empathetic understanding of his characters, his narrative flair—to turn a tabloidy tale into a genuinely moving portrait of a marriage and the difficulties of parenthood.... Unfortunately for the reader, Mr. Kunzru has awkwardly tried to inflate the importance of the story of Jaz, Lisa and Raj with parallel tales about other visitors to the desert.... In the end, all the philosophizing and subplots are never persuasively integrated here: they attest to this immensely gifted writer’s ambitions but end up doing a disservice to his talents.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
This is Kunzru’s fourth novel. It is many things, and it is certainly a reflection and an embodiment of our new world of flattened time and space. Its multiple substories span the years 1775 to 2009, and geographically cut between Manhattan, Southern California and Iraq—or rather, a simulation of Iraq. Reading this book is not unlike watching a TV show that’s simultaneously happening on multiple channels, a story filmed in different eras using differing technologies, but which taken together tell the same single story, echoing and reinfecting itself.
Douglas Coupland - New York Times Book Review
Quite a ride: This is a book in which monks of the 18th century trudge the Mojave with drug-sodden hippies from the Summer of Love. A book in which Native Americans poised at the twilight of a dying culture try valiantly to guard their myths from relentlessly literal-minded anthropologists.... Here are cynical veterans from World War II, hard-bitten GIs fresh from Iraq, randy communards, washed-up bankers, wasted groupies whose only thought is their next roach or a place to park their sleeping bag. Here is death, sex, and rock-and-roll. And all of it, as random as it may sound, is a fitting paean to this jittery world.
Washington Post
[Kunzru’s] deft descriptions of contemporary life capture attention, but what impresses at the end of this novel is its sense of history as a mosaic of endless variations on the human effort to make sense of the world.
Washington Times
A powerful excavation of the frayed nerves of New Age America. Whether dealing in UFOs, Indian legends or derivative trading systems, Gods Without Men is a novel about the need for faith in a fragmented, postmodern world shorn of grand narratives and credible belief systems.
New York Observer
Simultaneously simple and complex, clear and ambiguous.
Philadelphia Inquirer
Ambitious and wonderfu.... Rather than looking for easy answers, Kunzru suggests, we should read instead for the questions—remembering that when you travel in the desert, what looks like an oasis is usually just a mirage.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Mind-blowing.... One of the most original novels I have read in years, daringly imaginative, funny and troublesome, and above all a commentary on certain kinds of lunacy that helps define the American character.... The ride the writer takes us on up until the final page is one hell of a hair-raising experience, almost every scene demonstrating Kunzru’s extraordinary virtuosity.
Counterpunch
As characters in acclaimed British novelist Kunzru’s pitch-perfect masterwork tinker with machines for communicating with an interplanetary craft circling the Earth, their desperate quest for meaning is interrupted by a nonlinear mélange of other strange endeavors that span centuries and cross the Mojave Desert: British rocker Nicky Capaldi’s escape from L.A. in a convertible with a gold-plated Israeli handgun stowed in the glove box; beleaguered parents Jaz and Lisa Matharu’s disastrous vacation with their autistic four-year-old, Raj; former hippie commune “Guide” Judy’s return to the desert, strung out on meth; and traumatized Iraqi teen Laila’s participation as an actor in U.S. army war game facsimiles of Iraq. Presiding over it all are the Pinnacles, three fingers of rock that bear mute witness to Raj’s disappearance and the ensuing frantic search. Also on board are Fray Francisco Hermenegildo Tomás Garcés, a half-mad Jesuit missionary intent on converting Native Americans at the close of the 18th century; Deighton, a disfigured ethnologist, annoyed by the young, “half-educated” Eliza’s failure to recognize “the distinction he’d conferred on her by asking her to be his wife”; an aircraft mechanic named Schmidt working in the ’40s who feels betrayed by what the Enola Gay unleashed over Hiroshima; a working-class mother seduced by the possibility of fellowship with benevolent otherworldly beings; and a local girl who once lived with the hippies and who—even though she returns years later to run the motel where Nicky, Jaz, Lisa, and Raj briefly stay—suspects she has never quite returned. Kunzru’s (My Revolutions) ear for colloquial speech creates a cacophony that overlays his affectionate descriptions of the desolate landscape, creating a powerful effect akin to the distant cry of urgent voices crackling up and down the dial on a lonely drive through an American wasteland.
Publishers Weekly
At first somewhat slow as the various stories are laid out, this extraordinary novel by the estimable Kunzru (My Revolutions) gathers momentum, power, and a fierce clarity to deliver a rich panorama while detailing our mutual antagonisms and deepest spiritual needs (met, perhaps, with "a vast emptiness, an absence"). Highly recommended. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal
Hopscotching across time, looking quizzically at space, Kunzru's marvelous novel uses diverse cultures (Native American, Catholic, Mormon, Wall Street, hippie UFO believers) to speculate on the nature of reality and religion, magic and mystery. The novel is anchored by a time, a place and a relationship. The core year is 2008; we visit several other time periods. The place is the Three Pinnacles rock formation in the Mojave Desert. The relationship involves Jaz, an assimilated American Sikh, and his Jewish-American wife Lisa. Instead of a linear narrative, we have the energizing cross-currents of history.... Ironies abound; mysteries multiply; there's a cliffhanger ending for Jaz and Lisa. Kunzru (My Revolutions, 2007, etc.) just gets better and better. This fourth novel is an astonishing tour de force.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Gods Without Men brings us into the consciousness of nine fictional characters, among them a hedge fund executive; a UFO cult leader; a dissolute British rock star; a homesick Iraqi teenage girl; one historical character, the eighteenth-century Spanish missionary Fray Francisco Hermenegildo Tomás Garcés; and one deity, Coyote, the trickster in many Native American traditional stories. Why does Hari Kunzru embrace such a wide and diverse cast of characters?
2. Do these characters from different historical eras and different echelons of society share any of the same aspirations? What draws them to the Pinnacle Rocks?
3. Which character or characters do you most identify with? Why?
4. Why do you think Kunzru set this novel in the desert? Could he have told the same story in a different landscape?
5. After reading Gods Without Men do you agree with Honoré de Balzac’s description of the desert: “In the desert, you see, there is everything and nothing.... It is God without men,” one of the epigraphs of this novel? Has your conception of the desert changed? Do you think “wasteland” is an appropriate synonym for “desert”?
6. Dawn joins the Ashtar Galactic Command in 1970 when she is a teenager because she wants “to be part of something bigger than herself” (page 155). Does she achieve that goal? Thirty-eight years later, teenage Laila draws comfort from the Ashtar record she buys at a thrift shop. Why?
7. Several characters in the novel possess arcane knowledge of mathematics, alchemy, aerodynamics, electrical engineering, or entertainment marketing that enables them to manipulate the material world in their favor, yet they don’t seem satisfied with their achievements. What are the sources and consequences of their dissatisfaction?
8. The character Coyote appears intermittently throughout the novel as an animal, a man, and a deity. What do his appearances herald? Are other characters comparably skilled at transforming themselves?
9. Kunzru references three international conflicts in this novel—World War I, World War II, and the second Iraq War. What do the characters Deighton, Schmidt, and Laila, who had firsthand experiences of those wars, have in common?
10. Lisa views Raj’s disappearance as her punishment for her wild night in town. Dawn thinks she was responsible because by taking Lisa to Judy’s place “she’d got her family involved. They were mixed up with Coyote, mixed up in the paths and flows” (page 343). Do you believe that either character is responsible for Raj’s disappearance?
11. Does the little glowing boy Laila finds in the desert at night (page 297) bear any relation to the “glow boy” (page 64) Joanie’s daughter, Judy, was seen playing with before she disappeared in 1958?
12. Why do you think Lisa is able to gratefully accept her son’s seemingly miraculous return and his recovery from autism, whereas Jaz cannot bear not knowing what happened to his son and is frightened by Raj’s changed behavior, believing the boy who was returned to them is not Raj; “It’s as if—as if something is wearing his skin” (page 357)?
13. Toward the end of the novel, Lisa believes she has learned a lesson: “true knowledge is the knowledge of limits, the understanding that at the heart of the world . . . is a mystery into which we are not meant to penetrate.... Now she could call it God...confident that though the world was unknowable, it had a meaning, and that meaning would keep her safe and set her free” (page 345). Does Jaz experience his own epiphany at the end of the novel when he stands holding hands with Lisa and Raj looking out over the desert?
14. Why does the novel begin and end with an explosion? At the end of the novel, do you gain a clearer understanding of what Coyote was up to in the first chapter?
15. Do you think Kunzru’s postmodernist storytelling technique of presenting the reader with pieces of a puzzle without providing explicit explanations of how the pieces fit together is appropriate for a novel that explores the search for pattern and meaning? Would the story be more or less realistic if he had limited himself to traditional forms of storytelling?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Love Is a Canoe
Ben Schrank, 2013
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374192495
Summary
Peter Herman is something of a folk hero. Marriage Is a Canoe, his legendary, decades-old book on love and relationships, has won the hearts of hopeful romantics and desperate cynics alike. He and his beloved wife lived a relatively peaceful life in upstate New York. But now it’s 2010, and Peter’s wife has just died. Completely lost, he passes the time with a woman he admires but doesn’t love—and he begins to look back through the pages of his book and question homilies such as: A good marriage is a canoe—it needs care and isn’t meant to hold too much—no more than two adults and a few kids.
It’s advice he has famously doled out for decades. But what is it worth?
Then Peter receives a call from Stella Petrovic, an ambitious young editor who wants to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Marriage Is a Canoe with a contest for struggling couples. The prize? An afternoon with Peter and a chance to save their relationship.
The contest ensnares its creator in the largely opaque politics of her publishing house while it introduces the reader to couples in various states of distress, including a shy thirtysomething Brooklynite and her charismatic and entrepreneurial husband, who may just be a bit too charismatic for the good of their marriage. There’s the middle-aged publisher whose imposing manner has managed to impose loneliness on her for longer than she cares to admit. And then there is Peter, who must discover what he meant when he wrote Marriage Is a Canoe if he is going to help the contest’s winners and find a way to love again.
In Love Is a Canoe, Ben Schrank delivers a smart, funny, romantic, and hugely satisfying novel about the fragility of marriage and the difficulty of repairing the damage when well-intentioned people forget how to be good to each other. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1969-1970
• Raised—Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Brown University; M.A., New York
University
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City
Ben Schrank published his first novel, Miracle Man, in 1999. The New Yorker selected it as one of six debut novels in that year’s fiction issue, saying “As the ethical lines blur, Schrank makes New York seem sharp and new.” Time magazine called it a “brilliantly observed story about the desire to live in an egalitarian world.”
In 2002 Schrank published his second novel, Consent. Leonard Michaels wrote of Consent: “It is a very serious story, and, in places, it is hilarious. As for the woman at the center, she is unforgettable.”
Schrank has taught at the MFA program at Brooklyn college. He was for some years the voice of "Ben’s Life," a fictional column for Seventeen magazine. He is currently publisher of Razorbill, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers. He grew up in Brooklyn where he now lives with his wife, Lauren Mechling, and son. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Despite a softly cynical underside, Love Is a Canoe is an affirmation that secrets, fantasies and wrong turns are part of both publishing careers and love. Schrank has done something here that may sound impossible: He’s written a funny novel about publishing that is not caustic but optimistic, not biting but bighearted—a story about the delusions with which self-aware, smart people are all too willing to live in order to avoid the painful (yet entertaining) upheaval that comes with truth.
Dean Bakopoulos - New York Times Book Review
(Starred review.) Three stories of personal and literary authenticity weave through this novel of love and books that gets sharper and smarter as it progresses. Forty years ago, Peter Herman penned Love Is a Canoe, a memoir and meditation on marriage that retains a devoted following. Canoe’s homilies from Peter’s adolescent summer spent in upstate New York with his grandparents as his own parents’ marriage crumbled contain a certain enduring quality: “A good marriage is a canoe—it needs care and isn’t meant to hold too much—no more than two adults and a couple of kids.” But as the recently widowed author ponders the course of his marriage and current relationship, straining against late-middle age, there’s a danger that his personal and literary fictions will unravel. The danger grows acute when Stella, a young book editor trying to spur sales on Canoe’s 40th anniversary, creates a contest for a couple in trouble; winners will spend an afternoon with the somewhat reclusive author in the hopes that their troubled relationship will be rescued. But as Emily and Eli Corelli, a young Brooklyn couple with a rocky marriage, enter Peter’s orbit, they, Peter, and Stella confront the underlying truths of their lives. The honesty doled out as events unspool is bracing and frank, and give these characters added depth and wisdom.
Publishers Weekly
The revival of a classic self-help book reveals some raw emotions in this canny novel by Schrank (Consent, 2002, etc.). Published in 1971, Peter Herman's Marriage Is a Canoe became the kind of '70s self-help book that everybody seemed to own yet nobody seemed to take seriously.... [I]n 2011, it's inspired Stella, a young editor at the book's publisher, to find a way to boost sales: A contest in which a couple with marriage troubles wins a weekend with Peter to talk out their issues.... Schrank has firm command of the story, never letting the plot turns descend into farce, and the closing pages are a convincing portrait of how relationships shift in ways no self-help book can anticipate. A wise imagining of modern-day love, unromantic but never cynical.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. How did your impressions of Eli and Emily shift throughout the novel? How does their marriage compare with Peter and Lisa’s?
2. What does the novel say about love in the twenty-first century? Have expectations for relationships changed very much since the 1960s and ’70s?
3. How were Emily and her sister, Sherry, affected by their mother’s experience as a wife?
4. Discuss Marriage Is a Canoe as if you had chosen it for your book group. Is Peter’s advice relevant to your situation? What inspiration can you take from his grandparents Hank and Bess? What metaphors, besides a canoe, would you use for marriage?
5. Peter and Helena talk candidly about the illusions and untested advice contained in Marriage Is a Canoe. Do self-help books have to be steeped in facts and reality in order to be helpful? Was Emily harmed by the fantasy of a watertight marriage?
6. In “Stolen Bases,” Peter tells the story of his friend Johnny, whose parents had a rough marriage but whose problems were easily sorted out by Hank. Why did Peter’s parents struggle so much in their relationship, despite the great role models of Hank and Bess?
7. What are the essential differences between Jenny and Emily? What does Eli need from each of them? Would you have stayed with Eli for as long as Emily did? Are he and Peter evidence that monogamy is unnatural, especially for men?
8. How did the success of the book help and harm Peter and Lisa’s marriage? How does Peter’s enterprise compare with Eli’s ambition for Roman Street Bicycles? How involved do spouses need to be in each other’s professional lives?
9. What kept Peter and Lisa together for so many years, despite severe disappointments, especially financial ones? How would the story of their marriage unfold if it were described from her point of view?
10. How does Belinda figure in Peter’s life? How does he see his role as a parent? When Eli andEmily considered becoming parents, what were their motivations?
11. During the contest award dinner, Peter prefers harmony and reconciliation, quashing any unpleasant topics that Eli and Emily try to raise. Does he prove to be good counselor? Wha would you have discussed with him if you had won the contest?
12. Why is it hard for Peter to commit to moving west with Maddie? What was he ultimately looking for in a relationship?
13. Why is Stella so intent on pleasing Helena? What does the Canoe project teach Stella about business and about love? What do you predict for her future with Ivan?
14. Reread the novel’s conclusion (the introduction to the revised, annotated, and retitled edition of Peter’s book). What do you make of the statement that “love is not so fickle and mean—not as tough as marriage can be,” and the idea that love is distinct from marriage?
(Questions issued by publisher.)