We Were the Lucky Ones
Georgia Hunter, 2017
Penguin Publishing
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780399563089
Summary
An extraordinary, propulsive novel based on the true story of a family of Polish Jews who are separated at the start of the Second World War, determined to survive—and to reunite.
It is the spring of 1939 and three generations of the Kurc family are doing their best to live normal lives, even as the shadow of war grows closer.
The talk around the family Seder table is of new babies and budding romance, not of the increasing hardships threatening Jews in their hometown of Radom, Poland. But soon the horrors overtaking Europe will become inescapable and the Kurcs will be flung to the far corners of the world, each desperately trying to navigate his or her own path to safety.
As one sibling is forced into exile, another attempts to flee the continent, while others struggle to escape certain death, either by working grueling hours on empty stomachs in the factories of the ghetto or by hiding as gentiles in plain sight. Driven by an unwavering will to survive and by the fear that they may never see one another again, the Kurcs must rely on hope, ingenuity, and inner strength to persevere.
A novel of breathtaking sweep and scope that spans five continents and six years and transports readers from the jazz clubs of Paris to Kraków’s most brutal prison to the ports of Northern Africa and the farthest reaches of the Siberian gulag, We Were the Lucky Ones demonstrates how in the face of the twentieth century’s darkest moment, the human spirit can find a way to survive, and even triumph. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1978 (?)
• Raised—Attelboro, Massachusetts; Providence, Rhode Island, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Virginia
• Currently—lives in Rowayton, Connecticut
Georgia Hunter was born in Massachusetts and raised in Providence, Rhode Island. She turned to writing at a rather early age when she penned her first book at the age of four: Charlie Walks the Beast (named after her father's recently published sci-fic novel, Softly Goes the Beast). Seven years later she submitted an article to her local paper on how she would spend her last day if all life on earth were about to end.
Years later, in 2000, Hunter received her Bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Virginia and settled on a career in marketing and branding. After seven years in Seattle, Washington, she and her husband, Robert Farinhold, decided to head back east. Currently, Hunter freelances as a copywriter for adventure travel outfitters, including Austin Adventures and The Explorer’s Passage.
We Were the Lucky Ones
Hunter was 15 when she first learned from her grandmother of her Jewish heritage—and that her family had survived the Holocaust. Six years later, a family reunion lit the spark for her 2017 debut novel. Hosted at her parents' home, the family gathering drew 30 relatives from North America, South America, Europe, and Israel. Speaking in Portuguese, French and English, they told their family stories. As Hunter described the experience in an interview with the Gordon School alumni magazine:
A baby born in a Siberian gulag. An escape from the Radom ghetto. A secret wedding in Lvov. A romance aboard a ship full of refugees bound for Brazil. Little by little, I began to piece together a part of my family’s past which, until that day, I had no idea existed.
It took Hunter nearly a decade to begin the saga of her grandfather and his four Kurc siblings whose descendants span the globe. After creaing a color-coded timeline to keep track of the many family branches, she turned to researching archives and museums and contacting ministries and magistrates. As she tells it, she "plotted an outline and chapter summaries and from there [and] began the terrifying task of putting my story to paper!"
Hunter now lives in Connecticut with her husband and young son. (Adapted from various online sources.)
Book Reviews
The story that so grippingly comes across in the pages of We Were the Lucky Ones isn't strictly fiction—the characters and events that inhabit this Holocaust survival story are based on her family's own history.
Newsweek
Turning history into fiction can be tricky, especially when using real names and details. Hunter finesses the challenge. Her novel brings the Kurcs to life in heart-pounding detail, from passionate young love and beloved traditions to narrow escapes, heartbreaking choices, starvation, imprisonment and torture. We come to care deeply about the fate of each of these resourceful, determined characters.
Jewish Voice
[Georgia Hunter is] just as courageous as the characters her writing will never let us forget.
Harper’s Bazaar
Love in the face of global adversity? It couldn't be more timely (Best Books to Read in 2017).
Glamour
[A] gripping and moving story (15 New Authors You’re Going To Be Obsessed With This Year).
Bustle
[A] remarkable history…of a Polish Jewish family during the Holocaust.… Hunter sidesteps hollow sentimentality and nihilism, revealing instead the beautiful complexity and ambiguity of life in this extraordinarily moving tale.
Publishers Weekly
First-time novelist Hunter got the idea for this book in conversations with her grandmother .… Despite the wide-ranging encounters, we learn nothing new about the Holocaustt.… [N]onetheless [an] engrossing read. —Edward Cone, New York
Library Journal
[C]haracters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictablet.… Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)
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Age of Anger: A History of the Present
Pankaj Mishra, 2017
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374274788
Summary
One of our most important public intellectuals reveals the hidden history of our current global crisis.
How can we explain the origins of the great wave of paranoid hatreds that seem inescapable in our close-knit world—from American shooters and ISIS to Donald Trump, from a rise in vengeful nationalism across the world to racism and misogyny on social media?
In Age of Anger, Pankaj Mishra answers our bewilderment by casting his gaze back to the eighteenth century before leading us to the present.
He shows that as the world became modern, those who were unable to enjoy its promises—of freedom, stability, and prosperity—were increasingly susceptible to demagogues.
The many who came late to this new world—or were left, or pushed, behind—reacted in horrifyingly similar ways: with intense hatred of invented enemies, attempts to re-create an imaginary golden age, and self-empowerment through spectacular violence.
It was from among the ranks of the disaffected that the militants of the nineteenth century arose—angry young men who became cultural nationalists in Germany, messianic revolutionaries in Russia, bellicose chauvinists in Italy, and anarchist terrorists internationally.
Today, just as then, the wide embrace of mass politics and technology and the pursuit of wealth and individualism have cast many more billions adrift in a demoralized world, uprooted from tradition but still far from modernity—with the same terrible results.
Making startling connections and comparisons, Age of Anger is a book of immense urgency and profound argument. It is a history of our present predicament unlike any other. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1969
• Where—Jhansi, Uttar Pradesh, India
• Education—B.S., Allahabad University; M.A., Jawaharlal Nehru University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in London, England, UK
Pankaj Mishra is an Indian novelist and nonfiction writer. He is the author of some 10 books, most well-know of which are Age of Anger: A History of the Present (2017) and From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia (2012).
Background
Mishra graduated with a bachelor's degree in commerce from Allahabad University before earning his Master of Arts degree in English literature at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.
In 1992, he moved to Mashobra, a Himalayan village, where he began to contribute literary essays and reviews to The Indian Review of Books, India Magazine, and the newspaper The Pioneer.
Books
His first book, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India (1995), is a travelogue describing the social and cultural changes in India in the context of globalization. His novel The Romantics (2000), an ironic tale of people longing for fulfilment in cultures other than their own, was published in 11 European languages and won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum award for first fiction.
His book, An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World (2004), mixes memoir, history, and philosophy while attempting to explore the Buddha's relevance to contemporary times. Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond (2006), describes the author's travels through Kashmir, Bollywood, Afghanistan, Tibet, Nepal, and other parts of South and Central Asia.
From the Ruins of Empire (2012) examines the question of "how to find a place of dignity for oneself in this world created by the West, in which the West and its allies in the non-West had reserved the best positions for themselves." Age of Anger (2016) traces the history of the current era's political and social divisiveness.
Other writing
In addition to his books, Mishra has written literary and political essays for the New York Times, New York Review of Books, Guardian, London Review of Books, and New Yorker, among other American, British, and Indian publications. He is a columnist for Bloomberg View and the New York Times Book Review.
His work has also appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Boston Globe, Common Knowledge, Financial Times, Granta, Independent, New Republic, New Statesman, Wall Street Journal, n+1, Nation, Outlook, Poetry, Time, Times Literary Supplement, Travel + Leisure, and Washington Post.
From 2007-2008, Mishra was the Visiting Fellow in the Department of English at University College, London. Today, he divides his time between London and India.
Recognition and awards
Mishara was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2008. In 2012, Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the top 100 global thinkers. In 2015, Prospect nominated him to its list of 50 World Thinkers.
2000 - Art Seidenbaum Award for Best First Fiction: Romantics
2013 - Crossword Book Award: From the Ruins of Empire.
2014 - Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding: From the Ruins of Empire
2014 - Windham–Campbell Literature Prize-Nonfiction: From the Ruins of Empire
2014 - Premi Internacional D'assaig Josep Palau i Fabre)
(Author bio adaptd from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/27/2017)
Book Reviews
[I]mportant, erudite.… [Mishra] has a highly developed understanding of the psychic and emotional forces propelling illiberalism's spread across the globe, a movement united by a sense of disappointment, bewilderment and envy—the spiritual condition that Nietzsche diagnosed as ressentiment.… Liberalism has no choice but to sincerely wrestle with its discontents, to become reacquainted with its moral blind spots and political weaknesses. Technocracy—which defines so much of the modern liberal spirit—doesn't have a natural grasp of psychology and emotion. But if it hopes to stave off the dark forces, it needs to grow adept at understanding the less tangible roots of anger, the human experience uncaptured by data, the resentments that understandably fester. A decent liberalism would read sharp critics like Mishra and learn.
Franklin Foer - New York Times Book Review
Columnist and historian Pankaj Mishra has named a moment and an era: His brilliant new book Age of Anger looks at the rising tide of radical nationalism, racism, intolerance, misogyny, xenophobia, and fascism that's sweeping away calmer and more measured opposition all over the world, and he attempts to understand the phenomena before it engulfs everybody on the planet.… Fiercely literate and eloquent.
Steve Donoghue - Christian Science Monitor
In its literacy and literariness, [Age of Anger] has the feel of Edmund Wilson’s extraordinary dramas of modern ideas—books like To the Finland Station—but with a different endpoint and a more global canvas. Mishra reads like a brilliant autodidact, putting to shame the many students who dutifully did the reading for their classes but missed the incandescent fire and penetrating insight in canonical texts.
Samuel Moyn - New Republic
In probing for the wellspring of today’s anger [Pankaj Mishra] hits on something real. He traces our current mood back to the French Enlightenment of the 18th century. We revere its thinkers today for their devotion to reason, science, and the rights of man, but they were disdainful of their fellow citoyens, who clung to their muskets and their religion.… Along with quotations from Voltaire, Rousseau, and other familiar figures of Western Civ, Age of Anger includes observations from Iranian, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and other nations’ scholars; their perspectives complement Mishra’s deep understanding of global tensions.
Peter Coy - Bloomberg Businessweek
Erudite …[In] Age of Anger, which was conceived before Brexit and Trump, the Indian nonfiction writer and novelist Pankaj Mishra argues that our current rage has deep historical roots.
Bryan Walsh - Time
(Starred review.) [A]n impressively probing and timely work.… This exploration of global unrest is dense, but it’s so well-written and informative that it manages to be highly engaging.
Publishers Weekly
How did the world get so fractious?… This complicated analysis of a complicated issue will appeal to readers with a background in political, economic, and philosophical history. —Laurie Unger Skinner, Coll. of Lake Cty., Waukegan, IL
Library Journal
A disturbing but imperatively urgent analysis. — Bryce Christensen
Booklist
(Starred review.) How the failures of capitalism have led to "fear, confusion, loneliness and loss"—and global anger.… A probing, well-informed investigation of global unrest calling for "truly transformative thinking" about humanity's future.
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 Age of Anger...then take off on your own:
m. Discuss the overall premise of Pankaj Mishra's book, Age of Anger. To what does he attribute the current divisiveness in our political and social arenas—what does he see as the psychic and emotional forces propelling nationalism?
m. Talk about the history Mishra traces—to where and in what historical figure he finds the roots of our current age of anger. Where else in history does he point to as similarly divisive?
m. What refers to ISIS "a broader and more apocalyptic mood that we have witnessed before." What else does Mishra have to say about ISIS?
m. The book was written before Brexit and before the election of Donald Trump. In what way, if at all, might that timing lend credibility to this work?
m. Mishra argues that the West is self-righteous in that it obscures its "own bloody extraordinarily brutal initiation into political and economic modernity" while, at the same time, it urges the rest of the world to undertake the same progression. What does he mean?
m. Consider Jean Jacques Rousseau and the ideas he championed? What does Mishra think of him? What do you think of him? How does Rousseau—and Mishra—view Voltaire? According to our author, what was Voltaire's influence on the development of Western thought?
m. The author finds few, if any, redeeming qualities in liberal democracy? Overall, do you agree with his anger about the economics and politics of the "Western model"? Does he offer a replacement?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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The Chilbury Ladies' Choir
Jennifer Ryan, 2017
Crown/Archetype
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781101906750
Summary
Just because the men have gone to war, why do we have to close the choir? And precisely when we need it most!
As England enters World War II's dark early days, spirited music professor Primrose Trent, recently arrived to the village of Chilbury, emboldens the women of the town to defy the Vicar's stuffy edict to shutter the church's choir in the absence of men and instead "carry on singing."
Resurrecting themselves as "The Chilbury Ladies' Choir," the women of this small village soon use their joint song to lift up themselves, and the community, as the war tears through their lives.
Told through letters and journals, The Chilbury Ladies' Choir moves seamlessly from budding romances to village intrigues to heartbreaking matters of life and death.
As we come to know the struggles of the charismatic members of this unforgettable outfit...
♦ a timid widow worried over her son at the front
♦ the town beauty drawn to a rakish artist
♦ her younger sister nursing an impossible crush and dabbling in politics she doesn't understand
♦ a young Jewish refugee hiding secrets about her family
♦ a conniving midwife plotting to outrun her seedy past.
...we come to see how the strength each finds in the choir's collective voice reverberates in her individual life.
In turns funny, charming and heart-wrenching, this lovingly executed ensemble novel will charm and inspire, illuminating the true spirit of the women on the homefront, in a village of indomitable spirit, at the dawn of a most terrible conflict. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Jennifer Ryan is a novelist and nonfiction editor. Her debut novel, The Chilbury Ladies' Choir was released in 2017.
Ryan, was born in a small village in Kent in the UK, which afforded her a near idyllic childhood. As she writes on her website, those early years were spent…
gallivanting around the countryside, often on bikes, climbing tress...and eating cheese and tomato rolls in red telephone boxes to shelter from the rain.
She writes of the scent of lavender and roses and freshly mown grass, memories that permeate settings for her stories.
Ryan attended college, and afterward became an editor for nonfiction books in London. As she gained more experience editing and writing, she eventually found the courage to try fiction. Once she married and took off time to have children, she was able to carve out time to develop her first novel, The Chilbury Ladies' Choir.
That novel is based on stories from her grandmother, who was 20 when World War II began. She recalls bumping into people during the blackouts, singing in air raid shelters, and the relishing the freedom many women felt with the men absent in the war. And, of course, her grandmother belonged to a choir.
Ryan has moved to the Washington, DC, area with her husband and children. (Adapted from the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Though their vicar thinks it is quite preposterous, the womenfolk of Chilbury band together to form a Ladies’ Choir as World War II begins. Most of the men have departed from their coastal village to fight the Nazis. The ladies still long to lift their voices in song and so the choir is born.… [T]hat was the beauty of this book — the music. I felt like I was singing alongside the ladies, nervous at first, but then soothed and rewarded by the collective harmonies and applause from the grateful audiences.… Readers who enjoyed The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society …should also feel right at home. READ MORE …
Keddy Ann Outlaw - LitLovers
Told in the form of diaries and letters in the voices of the female characters, Ryan’s novel, reminiscent of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, captures the experience of the war from a woman’s perspective.… [The] format works well and the plot elements satisfyingly come together.
Publishers Weekly
Unfortunately, debut author Ryan miscalculates the credibility of her novel's structure and her narrators.… The stalwart ladies of the choir deserve better. —Bette-Lee Fox
Library Journal
All are borderline stock characters, and little that happens in the book is unexpected—though the brutality of Brig. Winthrop… does come as a bit of a shock. The author also tends to tell rather than show.… Mildly entertaining, Ryan's debut novel seems overfamiliar and too intent on warming the heart.
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 The Chilbury Ladies' Choir...then take off on your own:
m. What are the consequences on village life of the war and the absence of so many men?
m. In the fairly large cast of characters, who are your favorites—whom do you find most engaging or most admirable, generous, or helpful, and why? Which characters do you find less so? Mrs. Brampton-Boyd, perhaps? Or Miss paltry?
m. Then there is the Brigadier. Does he surprise you?
m. What tests do the many women in this novel face? In what manner does each rise to the occasion in order to meet (or not) those challenges?
m. The book, like The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, is made up of letters and diary entries, documents, and notices. Do you enjoy the insertion of these extra-textual narratives, or do you prefer straightforward storytelling with a narrator?
m. When asked if music will help strengthen the spirit of the women during the war, Prim responds:
Music takes us out of ourselves, away from our worries and tragedies…. All those cadences and beautiful chord changes, every one of them makes you feel a different splendor of life.
Do you agree? Do you, personally, find that music offers consolation? What other forms of art might do so, as well?
Discuss, also, how being part of the choir affects each of the characters. What do the members gain, individually and together?
m. Consider the symbolic and/or spiritual significance of the Chilbury choir in this story—the gathering together of people, the blending of a multiplicity of voices, and fact that many voices are more powerful than one. Think of chords and harmony. How might all that relate to the thematic concerns of the novel?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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The Orphan's Tale
Pam Jenoff, 2017
MIRA
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780778319818
Summary
A powerful novel of friendship and sacrifice, set in a traveling circus during World War II, by international bestselling author Pam Jenoff.
Seventeen-year-old Noa has been cast out in disgrace after becoming pregnant by a Nazi soldier during the occupation of her native Holland.
Heartbroken over the loss of the baby she was forced to give up for adoption, she lives above a small German rail station, which she cleans in order to earn her keep.
When Noa discovers a boxcar containing dozens of Jewish infants, unknown children ripped from their parents and headed for a concentration camp, she is reminded of the baby that was taken from her. In a moment that will change the course of her life, she steals one of the babies and flees into the snowy night, where she is rescued by a German circus.
The circus owner offers to teach Noa the flying trapeze act so she can blend in undetected, spurning the resentment of the lead aerialist, Astrid. At first rivals, Noa and Astrid soon forge a powerful bond.
But as the facade that protects them proves increasingly tenuous, Noa and Astrid must decide whether their unlikely friendship is enough to save one another—or if the secrets that burn between them will destroy everything. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Silver Spring, Maryland, USA
• Education—B.A., George Washington University; M.A., Cambridge University; J.D., University of Pennsylvania
• Currently—lives in Cherry Hill, New Jersey
Pam Jenoff was born in Maryland and raised outside Philadelphia. She attended George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and Cambridge University in England.
Upon receiving her master's in history from Cambridge, she accepted an appointment as Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Army. The position provided a unique opportunity to witness and participate in operations at the most senior levels of government, including helping the families of the Pan Am Flight 103 victims secure their memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, observing recovery efforts at the site of the Oklahoma City bombing and attending ceremonies to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of World War II at sites such as Bastogne and Corregidor.
Following her work at the Pentagon, Pam moved to the State Department. In 1996 she was assigned to the U.S. Consulate in Krakow, Poland. It was during this period that Pam developed her expertise in Polish-Jewish relations and the Holocaust. Working on matters such as preservation of Auschwitz and the restitution of Jewish property in Poland, Pam developed close relations with the surviving Jewish community.
Pam left the Foreign Service in 1998 to attend law school and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. She worked for several years as a labor and employment attorney both at a firm and in-house in Philadelphia and now teaches law school at Rutgers.
Pam is the author of The Kommandant's Girl, which was an international bestseller and nominated for a Quill award, as well as The Diplomat's Wife, The Ambassador's Daughter, Almost Home, A Hidden Affair and The Things We Cherished.
She lives outside Philadelphia with her husband and three children. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
In prose that is beautiful, ethereal, and poignant, The Orphan's Tale is a novel you won't be able to put down.
Bustle
Against the backdrop of circus life during the war, the author captures the very real terrors faced by both women as they navigate their working and personal relationships and their complicated love lives while striving for normalcy and keeping their secrets safe.
Publishers Weekly
Noa becomes pregnant by a soldier and is compelled to give up both baby and home. Living above a railway station she cleans to pay her bills, she discovers a boxcar full of Jewish infants bound for a concentration camp and steals one, joining a traveling circus to cover her tracks. Over-the-top imagination.
Library Journal
A Jewish trapeze artist and a Dutch unwed mother bond, after much aerial practice, as the circus comes to Nazi-occupied France.… The diction seems too contemporary for the period, and the degree of danger the characters are in is more often summarized than demonstrated. An interesting premise imperfectly executed.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add the author's questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for The Orphan's Tale...then take off on your own:
1. Noa gives her newborn away but remains bereft by the loss and tormented by visions of the child. What do you make of her decision?
2. In her own voice, Noa tells us...
I am unfamiliar with infants and I hold him at arm's length now, like a dangerous animal. But he moves closer, nuzzling against my neck.
Talk about the horror of that scene in the "nursery car" (which is historically accurate). What prompts Noa to save a half-dead?
3.What do you make of Astrid, whose voice alternates with Noa's? How has her tumultuous past shaped her character, especially in terms of her ability to trust others?
4. Talk about the development of the Noa and Astrid's relationship, on the ropes and off.
5. Author Pam Jenoff conducted considerable research into Jewish circus dynasties, which has enabled her to provide the grainy details of circus life. What do you find interesting or what, in particular, strikes you about life under the tent?
6. Talk about the symbolic use of the circus with its twinkling lights as a foil to the darkness and terror of the Nazi era.
7. What do you make of the novel's other characters—Herr Neuhoff, or Peter, for instance. In what way do they demonstrate courage in the face of danger, brutality, and evil?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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A Piece of the World
Christina Baker Kline, 2017
HarperCollins
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062356260
Summary
Later he told me that he’d been afraid to show me the painting. He thought I wouldn’t like the way he portrayed me: dragging myself across the field, fingers clutching dirt, my legs twisted behind. The arid moonscape of wheatgrass and timothy. That dilapidated house in the distance, looming up like a secret that won’t stay hidden.
To Christina Olson, the entire world was her family’s remote farm in the small coastal town of Cushing, Maine. Born in the home her family had lived in for generations, and increasingly incapacitated by illness, Christina seemed destined for a small life.
Instead, for more than twenty years, she was host and inspiration for the artist Andrew Wyeth, and became the subject of one of the best known American paintings of the twentieth century.
As she did in her beloved smash bestseller Orphan Train, Christina Baker Kline interweaves fact and fiction in a powerful novel that illuminates a little-known part of America’s history. Bringing into focus the flesh-and-blood woman behind the portrait, she vividly imagines the life of a woman with a complicated relationship to her family and her past, and a special bond with one of our greatest modern artists.
Told in evocative and lucid prose, A Piece of the World is a story about the burdens and blessings of family history, and how artist and muse can come together to forge a new and timeless legacy.
This edition includes a four-color reproduction of Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1964
• Raised—in Maine and Tennessee, USA, and the UK
• Education—B.A., Yale University; M.B., Cambridge University; M.F.A., University of Virginia
• Currently—lives in Montclair, New Jersey
Christina Baker Kline is a novelist, nonfiction writer, and editor. She is perhaps best known for her most recent novels, The Exiles (2020) A Piece of the World (2017) and Orphan Train (2013).
Kline also commissioned and edited two widely praised collections of original essays on the first year of parenthood and raising young children, Child of Mine and Room to Grow. She coauthored a book on feminist mothers and daughters, The Conversation Begins, with her mother, Christina L. Baker, and she coedited About Face: Women Write About What They See When They Look in the Mirror with Anne Burt.
Kline grew up in Maine, England, and Tennessee, and has spent a lot of time in Minnesota and North Dakota, where here husband grew up. She is a graduate of Yale, Cambridge, and the University of Virginia, where she was a Hoyns Fellow in Fiction Writing.
She has taught creative writing and literature at Fordham and Yale, among other places, and is a recent recipient of a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation fellowship. She lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with her family. (From the pubisher.)
Book Reviews
[I]n expanding on Christina’s story, Kline defies what some might see as the strength of Wyeth’s work, its undercurrent of mystery.… Despite the naturalism of his style, Wyeth asks viewers to exercise their own imaginations. In contrast, Kline sometimes over-explains.… This approach serves readers who want to fill in the blanks, to experience the daily grind of a way of life that often has been burnished by the passage of time, to honor the rectitude of people who stoically shoulder their burdens and get on with their chores. A Piece of the World is a story for those who want the mysterious made real.
Becky Aikman - New York Times Book Review
Like Wyeth’s paintings, this is a vivid novel about hardscrabble lives and prairie grit and the seemingly small but significant beauties found there.
Christine Brunkhorst - Minneapolis Star Tribune
Kline’s gift is to dispense with the fustiness and fact-clogged drama that can weigh down some historical novels to tell a pure, powerful story of suffering met with a fight. In fiction, in her quiet way, Christina triumphs—and so does this novel.
Oprah Magazine
A gorgeous read.
Real Simple
Artfully (pun intended) inspired by the Andrew Wyeth painting Christina’s World.
Marie Claire
[I]ntriguing.… The story is told from Christina’s point of view, from the moment she reflects on the painting; it then goes back and forth through her history.… Through it all, the author’s insightful, evocative prose brings Christina’s singular perspective and indomitable spirit to life.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [A] finely drawn novel.… Kline expertly captures the essence of Wyeth's iconic masterpiece and its real-life subject, crafting a moving work of historical fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 8/15/16.]—Christine Perkins, Whatcom Cty. Lib. Syst., Bellingham, WA
Library Journal
f
Readers will savor the quotidian details that compose Christina’s "quiet country life." Orphan Train was a best-seller and popular book-discussion choice, so expect demand.
Booklist
The real-life subject of an iconic work of art is given her own version of a canvas—space in which to reveal her tough personality, bruised heart, and "artist's soul."… It's thin on plot, but Kline's reading group-friendly novel delivers a character portrait that is painterly, sensuous, and sympathetic.
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 A Piece of the World...then take off on your own:
1. A good place to start a discussion of A Piece of the World is by considering Wyeth's painting, Christina's World. What does the painting exude, how would you describe its mood? Why might Wyeth have chosen not to reveal Christina's face? Observing the painting how does Christine strike you?
2. Now consider the novel. Do you think Christina Baker Kline captures the essence of Wyeth's painting? Is her own "drawing" of Christine what you might expect from the painting? More...or less than? Different?
3. Follow-up to Question 2: Describe Christine and the hardships she faces in her life. Talk about her debilitating disease. No one seems to pity her; is she deserving of pity in your eyes? Is she deserving of pity in her own eyes?
4. What was life like in Maine for Christine and her family in Cushing, Maine? Does Kline's portrayal detract at all from the nostalgic sheen which bygone eras sometimes create in us? Was there once an idyllic rural past?
5. In what way does Andrew Wyeth open up Christine's life? What does he show her about her surroundings? How does Kline portray Christine and Andy's attachment to one another?
6. Emily Dickinson's poetry and life seem to loom large in Christine's imagination. What does Christine find in the poet's work that inspires her?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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