The Casual Vacancy
J.K. Rowling, 2012
Little, Brown & Company
512 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316228534
Summary
When Barry Fairweather dies unexpectedly in his early forties, the little town of Pagford is left in shock.
Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war.
Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils.... Pagford is not what it first seems.
And the empty seat left by Barry on the town's council soon becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen. Who will triumph in an election fraught with passion, duplicity and unexpected revelations?
Blackly comic, thought-provoking and constantly surprising, The Casual Vacancy is J.K. Rowling's first novel for adults. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 31, 1965
• Where—Chipping Sodbury near Bristol, England, UK
• Education—Exeter University
• Awards—3 Nestle Smarties Awards; British Book Award-
Children's Book of the Year; British Book Awards- Author of the Year;
British Book Awards- Book of the Year.
• Currently—lives in Perthshire, Scotland and London, England.
Joanne "Jo" Rowling, better known under the pen name J. K. Rowling, is a British author known as the creator of the Harry Potter fantasy series, the idea for which was conceived while on a train trip from Manchester to London in 1990. The Potter books have gained worldwide attention, won multiple awards, sold more than 400 million copies, and been the basis for a popular series of films. Rowling is perhaps equally famous for her "rags to riches" life story, in which she progressed from living on welfare to multi-millionaire status within five years. As of March 2010, when its latest world billionaires list was published, Forbes estimated Rowling's net worth to be $1 billion. The 2008 Sunday Times Rich List estimated Rowling's fortune at £560 million ($798 million), ranking her as the twelfth richest woman in Great Britain. Forbes ranked Rowling as the forty-eighth most powerful celebrity of 2007, and Time magazine named her as a runner-up for its 2007 Person of the Year, noting the social, moral, and political inspiration she has given her fandom. She has become a notable philanthropist, supporting such charities as Comic Relief, One Parent Families, Multiple Sclerosis Society of Great Britain, and the Children's High Level Group.
Early years
Rowling was born to Peter James Rowling and Anne Rowling (nee Volant), on 31 July 1965 in Yate, Gloucestershire, England, 10 miles (16.1 km) northeast of Bristol. The family moved to the nearby village Winterbourne when Rowling was four. She attended St Michael's Primary School, a school founded by abolitionist William Wilberforce. (The school's headmaster has been suggested as the inspiration for Harry Potter's Albus Dumbledore).
As a child, Rowling often wrote fantasy stories, which she would read to her sister. "I can still remember me telling her a story in which she fell down a rabbit hole and was fed strawberries by the rabbit family inside it. Certainly the first story I ever wrote down (when I was five or six) was about a rabbit called "Rabbit." He got the measles and was visited by his friends, including a giant bee called Miss Bee." When she was a young teenager, her great aunt gave her a very old copy of Jessica Mitford's autobiography, Hons and Rebels. Mitford became Rowling's heroine, and Rowling subsequently read all of her books.
She attended secondary school at Wyedean School and College, where her mother, Anne, had worked as a technician in the Science Department. Rowling has said of her adolescence, "Hermione [A bookish, know-it-all Harry Potter character] is loosely based on me. She's a caricature of me when I was eleven, which I'm not particularly proud of." Sean Harris, her best friend in the Upper Sixth owned a turquoise Ford Anglia, which she says inspired the one in her books. "Ron Weasley [Harry Potter's best friend] isn't a living portrait of Sean, but he really is very Sean-ish."
Rowling read for a BA in French and Classics at the University of Exeter. After a year of study in Paris, Rowling moved to London to work as a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International.
In 1990, while she was on a four-hour-delayed train trip from Manchester to London, the idea for a story of a young boy attending a school of wizardry "came fully formed" into her mind. When she had reached her Clapham Junction flat, she began to write immediately. In December of that same year, Rowling’s mother died, after a ten-year battle with multiple sclerosis, a death that heavily affected her writing: she introduced much more detail about Harry's loss in the first book, because she knew about how it felt.
Rowling then moved to Porto, Portugal to teach English as a foreign language. While there she married Portuguese television journalist Jorge Arantes in 1992. Their child, Jessica Isabel Rowling Arantes (named after Jessica Mitford), was born in 1993 in Portugal. The couple separated in November 1993. In December 1993, Rowling and her daughter moved to be near her sister in Edinburgh, Scotland. During this period Rowling was diagnosed with clinical depression, which brought her the idea of Dementors, soul-sucking creatures introduced in the third book.
After Jessica's birth and the separation from her husband, Rowling had left her teaching job in Portugal. In order to teach in Scotland she would need a postgraduate certificate of education (PGCE), requiring a full-time, year-long course of study. She began this course in August 1995, after completing her first novel while having survived on state welfare support.
She wrote in many cafes, especially Nicolson's Cafe, whenever she could get Jessica to fall asleep. As she stated on the American TV program A&E Biography, one of the reasons she wrote in cafes was not because her flat had no heat, but because taking her baby out for a walk was the best way to make her fall asleep.
Harry Potter books
In 1995, Rowling finished her manuscript for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone on an old manual typewriter. The book was submitted to twelve publishing houses, all of which rejected the manuscript. A year later she was finally given the green light (and a £1500 advance) by Bloomsbury, a small British publishing house in London, England. The decision to publish Rowling's book apparently owes much to Alice Newton, the eight-year-old daughter of Bloomsbury’s chairman, who was given the first chapter to review by her father and immediately demanded the next.
Although Bloomsbury agreed to publish the book, her editor Barry Cunningham says that he advised Rowling to get a day job, since she had little chance of making money in children’s books. Soon after, in 1997, Rowling received an £8000 grant from the Scottish Arts Council to enable her to continue writing. The following spring, an auction was held in the United States for the rights to publish the novel, and was won by Scholastic Inc., for $105,000. Rowling has said she “nearly died” when she heard the news.
In June 1997, Bloomsbury published Philosopher’s Stone with an initial print-run of 1000 copies, five hundred of which were distributed to libraries. Today, such copies are valued between £16,000 and £25,000. Five months later, the book won its first award, a Nestle Smarties Book Prize. In February, the novel won the prestigious British Book Award for Children’s Book of the Year, and later, the Children’s Book Award. Its sequel, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, was published in July, 1998.
In December 1999, the third novel, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, won the Smarties Prize, making Rowling the first person to win the award three times running. She later withdrew the fourth Harry Potter novel from contention to allow other books a fair chance. In January 2000, Prisoner of Azkaban won the inaugural Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year award, though it lost the Book of the Year prize to Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf.
The fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, was released simultaneously in the UK and the US on 8 July 2000, and broke sales records in both countries. Some 372,775 copies of the book were sold in its first day in the UK, almost equalling the number Prisoner of Azkaban sold during its first year. In the US, the book sold three million copies in its first 48 hours, smashing all literary sales records. Rowling admitted that she had had a moment of crisis while writing the novel; "Halfway through writing Four, I realised there was a serious fault with the plot....I've had some of my blackest moments with this book..... One chapter I rewrote 13 times, though no-one who has read it can spot which one or know the pain it caused me." Rowling was named author of the year in the 2000 British Book Awards.
A wait of three years occurred between the release of Goblet of Fire and the fifth Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. This gap led to press speculation that Rowling had developed writer's block, speculations she fervently denied. Rowling later admitted that writing the book was a chore. "I think Phoenix could have been shorter", she told Lev Grossman, "I knew that, and I ran out of time and energy toward the end."
The sixth book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, was released on 16 July 2005. It too broke all sales records, selling nine million copies in its first 24 hours of release. While writing, she told a fan online, "Book six has been planned for years, but before I started writing seriously I spend two months re-visiting the plan and making absolutely sure I knew what I was doing." She noted on her website that the opening chapter of book six, which features a conversation between the Minister of Magic and the British Prime Minister, had been intended as the first chapter first for Philosopher's Stone, then Chamber of Secrets then Prisoner of Azkaban. In 2006, Half-Blood Prince received the Book of the Year prize at the British Book Awards.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released in July, 2007, (0:00 BST) and broke its predecessor's record as the fastest-selling book of all time. It sold 11 million copies in the first day of release in the United Kingdom and United States. She has said that the last chapter of the book was written "in something like 1990", as part of her earliest work on the entire series. During a year period when Rowling was completing the last book, she allowed herself to be filmed for a documentary which aired in Britain on ITV on 30 December 2007. It was entitled J K Rowling... A Year In The Life and showed her returning to her old Edinburgh tenement flat where she lived, and completed the first Harry Potter book. Re-visiting the flat for the first time reduced her to tears, saying it was "really where I turned my life around completely."
Harry Potter is now a global brand worth an estimated £7 billion ($15 billion), and the last four Harry Potter books have consecutively set records as the fastest-selling books in history. The series, totalling 4,195 pages, has been translated, in whole or in part, into 65 languages.
The Harry Potter books have also gained recognition for sparking an interest in reading among the young at a time when children were thought to be abandoning books for computers and television, although the series' overall impact on children's reading habits has been questioned.
Life after Harry Potter
Forbes has named Rowling as the first person to become a U.S.-dollar billionaire by writing books, the second-richest female entertainer and the 1,062nd richest person in the world. When first listed as a billionaire by Forbes in 2004, Rowling disputed the calculations and said she had plenty of money, but was not a billionaire. In addition, the 2008 Sunday Times Rich List named Rowling the 144th richest person in Britain. In 2001, Rowling purchased a luxurious nineteenth-century estate house, Killiechassie House, on the banks of the River Tay, near Aberfeldy, in Perth and Kinross, Scotland. Rowling also owns a home in Merchiston, Edinburgh, and a £4.5 million ($9 million) Georgian house in Kensington, West London, (on a street with 24-hour security).
On 26 December 2001, Rowling married Neil Michael Murray (born 30 June 1971), an anaesthetist, in a private ceremony at her Aberfeldy home. Their son was born in 2003 and a daughter in 2005.
In the UK, Rowling has received honorary degrees from St Andrews University, the University of Edinburgh, Napier University, the University of Exeter and the University of Aberdeen; and in the US, from Harvard. She has been awarded the Légion d'honneur by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. (During the Elysée Palace ceremony, she revealed that her maternal French grandfather had also received the Légion d'honneur for his bravery during World War I.) According to Matt Latimer, a former White House administrator for President George W. Bush, Rowling was turned down for the Presidential Medal of Freedom because administration officials believed that the Harry Potter series promoted witchcraft.
Subsequent writing
Rowling has stated that she plans to continue writing, preferably under a pseudonym. In 2012, however, under her own name, she published her first novels for adults, The Casual Vacancy. Although she "thinks it's unlikely" that she will write another Harry Potter, an "encyclopedia" of wizarding along with unpublished notes may be published sometime in the future.
Using the pen name "Robert Galbraith," Rowling published The Cuckoo's Calling in 2013. It reached the top of the New York Times Best Sellers list within weeks. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
The Casual Vacancy, Rowling’s much-anticipated departure from the genre of children’s fantasy, is a sprawling homage to the Victorian protest novel.... Rowling has clearly thought long and felt deeply about the ills of modern society. Her success has given her a platform, and she intends to use it.... At times, though, it feels as if everything Rowling ever wanted to say about anything has been thrown together here, without taking care to determine whether all these ideas detract from or complement one another. Editing occasionally involves saving a novelist from him- or herself.... A thoughtful edit might have removed many of the stylistic slippages. Rowling is at the height of her creative powers: there might have been a good, possibly even great, 300-page social novel inside the 500-page tear-jerker we have instead.
New York Times Book Review
A positively propulsive read.
Wall Street Journal
This book represents a truckload of shrewdness.... There were sentences I underlined for the sheer purpose of figuring out how English words could be combined so delightfully.... Genuinely moving.
Washington Post
An insanely compelling page-turner.... The Casual Vacancy is a comedy, but a comedy of the blackest sort, etched with acid and drawn with pitch.... Rowling proves ever dexterous at launching multiple plot lines that roar along simultaneously, never entangling them except when she means to. She did not become the world's bestselling author by accident. She knows down in her bones how to make you keep turning the pages.
The Daily Beast
Rowling knows how to write a twisty, involving plot.... She is clearly a skilled writer.
Huffington Post
The Casual Vacancy is a complete joy to read.... A stunning, brilliant, outrageously gripping and entertaining evocation of British society today.
The Mirror (UK)
A study of provincial life, with a large cast and multiple, interlocking plots, drawing inspiration from Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot.... The Casual Vacancy immerses the reader in a richly peopled, densely imagined world.... Intelligent, workmanlike, and often funny.
The Guardian (UK)
A vivid read with great, memorable characters and a truly emotional payoff.... Rowling captures the humanity in everyone, even if that humanity is not always a pretty sight.
People
On the face of it, Rowling’s first adult book is very different from the Harry Potter books that made her rich and famous. It’s resolutely unmagical: the closest thing to wizardry is the ability to hack into the amateurish Pagford Parish Council Web site. Instead of a battle for worldwide domination, there’s a fight over a suddenly empty seat on that Council, the vacancy of the title. Yet despite the lack of invisibility cloaks and pensieves, Pagford isn’t so different from Harry’s world. There’s a massive divide between the haves and the have-nots—the residents of the Fields, the council flats that some want to push off onto a neighboring county council. When Councilor Barry Fairbrother—born in Fields but now a middle-class Pagforder—dies suddenly, the fight gets uglier. In tiny Pagford, and at its school, which caters to rich and poor alike, everyone is connected: obstreperous teenager Krystal Weedon, the sole functioning member of her working-class family, hooks up with the middle-class son of her guidance counselor; the social worker watching over Krystal’s drug-addled mother dates the law partner of the son of the dead man’s fiercest Council rival; Krystal’s great-grandmother’s doctor was Fairbrother’s closest ally; the daughters of the doctor and the social worker work together, along with the best friend of Krystal’s hookup; and so on. Rowling is relentlessly competent: all these people and their hatreds and hopes are established and mixed together. Secrets are revealed, relationships twist and break, and the book rolls toward its awful, logical climax with aplomb. As in the Harry Potter books, children make mistakes and join together with a common cause, accompanied here by adults, some malicious, some trying yet failing. Minus the magic, though, good and evil are depressingly human, and while the characters are all well drawn and believable, they aren’t much fun.
Publishers Weekly
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)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Casual Vacancy:
1. Before reading, did you have certain expectations for this book based on the Harry Potter series? If so, does The Casual Vacancy meet these expectations?
2. The book has more than 30 main characters. Did you have trouble keeping them and storylines in order?
3. Do you think the profanity, violence and sex is excessive and sensational? Is Rowling trying to prove that she can write for adults or does it enhance the plot?
4. Which storyline with which characters is your favorite and why? Least favorite?
5. Rowling describes the book as a "comic tragedy". What does that mean? Some have talked about the wit, others described the lack of it. Do you find her wit on display in the book?
6. Many reviewers and readers complain that the plot takes is slow to get off the ground and drags in some parts. What do you think? Is The Casual Vacancy too long at 500+ pages?
7. Before the success of Harry Potter, Rowling had experiences with poverty. Does knowing this increase the creditability of the Krystal character?
8. In many interviews, Rowling states that she felt she "had to write" this book and that it's very personal to her. Several characters and experiences can be paralled to her life. For example, Howard Mollinson and Simon Price are her estranged real-life father; Gavin is her first husband; Kay Bawden is a young, single J.K. Do you see any of your own relationships in the book? Does the story cause you to examine any of your relationships?
9. Is the ending satisfying? Does Rowling tie up loose ends or does she leave some things unanswered?
(Questions by Katherine O'Connor of LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
No One Is Here Except All of Us
Ramona Ausubel, 2012
Penguin Group USA
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594486494
Summary
In 1939, the families in a remote Jewish village in Romania feel the war close in on them. Their tribe has moved and escaped for thousands of years—across oceans, deserts, and mountains—but now, it seems, there is nowhere else to go.
Danger is imminent in every direction, yet the territory of imagination and belief is limitless.
At the suggestion of an eleven-year-old girl and a mysterious stranger who has washed up on the riverbank, the villagers decide to reinvent the world: deny any relationship with the known and start over from scratch. Destiny is unwritten. Time and history are forgotten. Jobs, husbands, a child, are reassigned. And for years, there is boundless hope.
But the real world continues to unfold alongside the imagined one, eventually overtaking it, and soon our narrator—the girl, grown into a young mother—must flee her village, move from one world to the next, to find her husband and save her children, and propel them toward a real and hopeful future.
A beguiling, imaginative, inspiring story about the bigness of being alive as an individual, as a member of a tribe, and as a participant in history, No One Is Here Except All of Us explores how we use storytelling to survive and shape our own truths. It marks the arrival of a major new literary talent. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Ramona Ausubel has been published in The New Yorker, One Story, The Paris Review Daily, The Best American Fantasty and elsewhere and has received special mentions in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and was a finalist for the Puschcart Prize. She is a recipient of the Glenn Schaeffer Award in Fiction and a graduate of the MFA program at the University of California, Irvine. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Fantastical and ambitious.... Infused with faith in the power of storytelling.... Light and tenderness persevere—in a shining moon, in a candle still aglow, in a mother’s embrace of her child.
New York Times Book Review
Ramona Ausubel's first novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us, is a poetic fable about a part of history after which some people say poetry is an obscenity.... Ausubel's fable-like tone is effective in creating a sensation of tale and dream. For conveying the full horror of the events surrounding the Holocaust, it is less so, but this isn't what she's trying to do. Instead, she is comfortable reshaping, in a safe time and place, stories that were handed to her, using her rhetorical and narrative skill to create something that can be carried without cutting the one who carries it.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
No One Is Here Except All of Us contains so many achingly beautiful passages, it's as if language itself is continually striving to be a refuge.... If a book can be said to have a consciousness, the consciousness here is infinitely tender and soulful, magical and true. It's the kind of God we wish for.
San Francisco Chronicle
Debut novelist Ausubel casts a vibrant, dreamlike spell in this tale of a remote Romanian Village whose citizens try to save themselves from the Holocaust by reinventing their own history.
Marie Claire
Romanian Jews in 1939 reinvent their own reality in this inspiring novel about the power of community and imagination.
O, the Oprah Magazine
Ramona Ausubel’s debut, No One Is Here Except All of Us captures the magical group-think of a Romanian village that retreats into an imaginary reality at the outbreak of war.
Vogue
When danger threatens, would that we could simply change reality's rules. That's what one little Romanian village tries to do in 1939, as war thunders on the horizon.... A wonderfully fresh and inventive premise replicating exactly what literature can do.... Ausubel repeatedly writes with warmth and flare.
Library Journal
A bittersweet fable of war and survival set in a Romanian shtetl.... Ausubel's sustained, idiosyncratic take on the Holocaust is double-edged, alternating affecting heartache with sentimental poetic overkill. Opinion may be divided, but there's an undeniable element of talent here.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. In the opening of the novel, Lena tells Chaya in her letter, "Maybe, when the world began, everything had been clean and pure." When the villagers start their world over, does the world begin "clean and pure," or are the seeds of its destruction built into its founding?
2. When the villagers start their world over, they begin with storytelling. What importance does storytelling have for the novel? What is its power? How does each of the characters employ storytelling? What do these uses tell you about each character
3. One of the bonds that is the most transient in the novel is that between parent and child. How does the author depict this bond? Consider the situations in which children are transferred in the novel: were the parents right to let their children be adopted by others? What do you think about the motivations of the adoptive parents?
4. What is the stranger’s role in the re-creation of the world? Could the villagers have done it without her? Why does she decide to help protect the village from the outside world? What eventually makes her allow it back in?
5. Igor is the only character who is captured, yet his imprisonment ends up ensuring his safety, while the characters who remain "free" must fight for their own survival. What does this say about the concept of freedom? In this novel, is personal choice a gift or a burden, or both?
6. With the reinvention of the world , time is upended. Lena is made to grow up at an unusual rate. Does she really age faster? Do you think she and the other villagers realize the truth but allow Hersh and Kayla to believe their own story? What about when Lena gets married and bears a child—has the story about her aging process had a real and actual effect?
7. How does Lena know what happens to the other characters? Given the role that imagination and storytelling play in the novel , does it matter whether Lena has outside information? Would that make her version any more or less true?
8. Many unfair things happen to Lena during the course of the book-her parents’ giving her away, her losing her sons, and so on. How does she cope? Does she forgive the other characters? What role does forgiveness play in the novel?
9. What do you think the title No One is Here Except All of Us means?
10. At the end of the book , Lena writes to Chaya, "Someday, your children will ask what happened, and you will tell a new version, and in this way, the story will keep living. Truth is not in facts. The truth is in the telling." What does Lena mean by this? Is there a difference between truth and accuracy?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Equal of the Sun
Anita Amirrezvani, 2012
Simon & Schuster
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781451660470
Summary
Legendary women—from Anne Boleyn to Queen Elizabeth I to Mary, Queen of Scots—changed the course of history in the royal courts of sixteenth-century England. They are celebrated in history books and novels, but few people know of the powerful women in the Muslim world, who formed alliances, served as key advisers to rulers, lobbied for power on behalf of their sons, and ruled in their own right. In Equal of the Sun, Anita Amirrezvani’s gorgeously crafted tale of power, loyalty, and love in the royal court of Iran, she brings one such woman to life, Princess Pari Khan Khanoom Safavi.
Iran in 1576 is a place of wealth and dazzling beauty. But when the Shah dies without having named an heir, the court is thrown into tumult. Princess Pari, the Shah’s daughter and protÉgÉ, knows more about the inner workings of the state than almost anyone, but the princess’s maneuvers to instill order after her father’s sudden death incite resentment and dissent. Pari and her closest adviser, Javaher, a eunuch able to navigate the harem as well as the world beyond the palace walls, are in possession of an incredible tapestry of secrets and information that reveals a power struggle of epic proportions.
Based loosely on the life of Princess Pari Khan Khanoom, Equal of the Sun is a riveting story of political intrigue and a moving portrait of the unlikely bond between a princess and a eunuch. Anita Amirrezvani is a master storyteller, and in her lustrous prose this rich and labyrinthine world comes to vivid life with a stunning cast of characters, passionate and brave men and women who defy or embrace their destiny in a Machiavellian game played by those who lust for power and will do anything to attain it. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—November 13, 1961
• Where—Tehran, Iran
• Raised—San Francisco, California, USA
• Education—B.A., University of California-Berkeley;
M.F.A., San Francisco State University
• Currently—lives in San Francisco
Born in Tehran, Anita Amirrezvani was raised by her mother in San Francisco following her parent's divorce. By the time she was 13, she was visiting Iran to spend time with her father and his side of her family—complete with 11 cousins and two young half-brothers.
While visiting Tehran in 1979, the country became embroiled in the Islamic Revolution; her father, deciding the country was too dangerous, packed up his family, including Anita, and left the country, for what they hoped would be a short time. After two years at Vassar, Amirrezvani transferred to Berkeley in California, attaining her B.A. in English. After college, Amirrezvani worked as a journalist, spending 10 years as a dance critics and arts writer for two newspapers in the San Francisco Bay Area. (From the publishers.)
More
Her own words:
It took me about five years to get to the end of the first draft, and I didn’t tell anyone I was working on a novel until then. As part of my research, I spent a lot of time reading about Iranian history and literature in university library stacks. I also asked my father and stepmother to take me to Isfahan on two separate occasions in order to be able to describe the settings in my novel. One of my fondest memories is sharing hot tea and cookies with them at a teahouse on one of Isfahan’s historic bridges while watching the river rush by. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Equal of the Sun is a page turner, with plenty of gripping moments. Here’s hoping Amirrezvani will write many more tales illuminating the incredible history of the Iranians.
Washington Post
Equal of the Sun is a fine political novel, full of rich detail and intrigue, but it’s also a thought-provoking study of the intersection between gender and power.
Historical Novel Society
Expertly woven.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. In the opening pages of Equal of the Sun, Javaher notes: “People say that one’s future is inscribed on the forehead at birth—Pari’s forehead announced a future that was rich and storied.” Does Pari fulfill her prophecy? What about Javaher?
2. Why do you think Pari opposes Haydar and supports Isma’il, even though she hasn’t seen Isma’il since she was a girl?
3. How much did you know about Iranian history before reading Equal of the Sun? What was the most striking or interesting thing you learned while reading?
4. Balamani calls information a “jewel” and it is from this proclamation that Javaher derives his name. How does information act as a currency in Equal of the Sun? Does Javaher live up to his name?
5. There are many different, competing tribes in Qazveen, including the Ostajlu, the Takkalu, and the Circassians. Javaher himself has both Tajik and Turkic blood. How do these tribal conflicts influence Pari’s attempt at power?
6. What do you think is the significance of the novel’s title, Equal of the Sun?
7. Why do you think Javaher agrees to become a eunuch at such a late stage in life? Is it his only option?
8. Excerpts from the epic poem the Shahnameh appear before each chapter. How do these passages influence your understanding of the novel? What role does poetry play in Pari and Javaher’s world?
9. Javaher attempts to avenge his father by discovering who ordered him killed. Does he find closure when he uncovers the truth? Discuss your response.
10. How does Javaher feel about Pari? Romantic? Paternal? Worshipful? How do these feelings change and evolve throughout the course of the novel?
11. Javaher says, “God demanded that his leaders rule with justice, but what if they did not? Must we simply endure tyranny?” Do you think Javaher and Pari come to a moral solution when dealing with Isma’il? Why or why not?
12. Pari describes Javaher as a “third sex.” Do you see aspects of both masculinity and femininity in Javaher’s character? What about Pari?
13. Javaher says, “Just because we have gotten rid of a Zahhak doesn’t mean we have to become one.” Are Javaher and Pari ever in danger of using their power too ruthlessly? Do they ever step over the line?
14. Why is Pari so stubborn in her treatment of Mirza Salman and Mohammed after Mohammed is chosen shah, even when Javaher and Shamkhal warn her against it? What are the ramifications of her actions?
15. From his relationships with his sister, Mahmood, and Massoud Ali, it’s clear that Javaher would have liked to be a father. Do you think he regrets his decision to become a eunuch? How do his feelings change over the course of the novel?
16. Do you think Amirrezvani’s observations about power and gender have resonance today? Discuss.
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Darlings
Cristina Alger, 2012
Penguin Group USA
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143122753
Summary
Since he married Merrill Darling, daughter of billionaire financier Carter Darling, attorney Paul Ross has grown accustomed to all the luxuries of Park Avenue. But a tragic event is about to catapult the Darling family into the middle of a massive financial investigation and a red-hot scandal. Suddenly, Paul must decide where his loyalties really lie.
Debut novelist Cristina Alger is a former analyst at Goldman Sachs, an attorney, and the daughter of a Wall Street financier. Drawing on her unique insider's perspective, Alger gives us an irresistible glimpse into the highest echelons of New York society—and a fast-paced thriller of epic proportions that powerfully echoes Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children and reads like a fictional Too Big to Fail. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1980
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard University; J.S., New York University
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York
Cristina Alger witnessed the 2008 financial collapse up close and personal. Although she had left a job at Goldman Sachs to become a lawyer, she watched as many of her friends, still on Wall Street, lost their jobs.
There was a period of time right after Lehman Brothers collapsed. There was a string of bankruptcies and the market was crashing. New York City was changing very rapidly.... I remember thinking that someone should write about this in a fictional way and how it was affecting people in New York City.
That germ of an idea gave way to Alger's debut novel, The Darlings (2012), about a well-off New York family caught up in a financial scandal. The novel was set in a social milieu the author knows well.
Alger was born and raised in New York City, summering in the Hamptons and attending a private girl's school on Manhattan's posh Upper East Side. From there she went on to Harvard, landing a job after graduation as an investment analyst at Goldman Sachs. She spent two at Sachs before leaving for New York University to study law. Alger remained in New York after law school, working for a corporate law firm in mergers and acquisitions, a sought after area of law. But like many lawyers, after the crash she ended up in the then-hot legal field—bankruptcy.
It was while she worked as an attorney that Alger turned to writing fiction.
I started writing for fun in 2008. My work was really intense at that point so it was a fun side project. Now I write full time. There was a period where I was working and writing, which is very hard to do. My hat is off to those who can do both.
Like her first novel, her second, This Was Not the Plan, is also a setting familiar to Alger. The book follows the travails of an ambitious lawyer at a prestigious law firm who ends up unemployed and spending time with his young son for the first time. (Adapted from ibtimes.com.)
Book Reviews
Alger, who has worked at Goldman Sachs as well as at a white-shoe law firm, knows her way around 21st-century wealth and power, and she tells a suspenseful, twisty story.
Wall Street Journal
What happens to the Darling family in the course of a weekend is what carries this tale along, but it’s Alger’s description of quintessential New Yorkers, and how they survive, that adds the extra layer.... Alger has what it takes, in the best sense of the phrase.
USA Today
Penned by a former banker, this is a dishy yet thoughtful portrait of greed gone too far.... A page-turner.
Good Housekeeping
Forget Gossip Girl: If you really want a peek into the scandalous lives of New York City's elite upper class, Alger's debut novel—set during the financial downturn of 2008—gets you pretty close. The hedge funds, designer clothes, and lush Hamptons homes are all on display. But Alger also deftly juggles a complicated and myriad cast of characters who orbit around an It Family, the Darlings, who are at the center of a Madoff-like Ponzi scheme. The Darlings moves so fast that it feels more like a thriller than a social drama.
Entertainment Weekly
[S]ophisticated central characterizations make this novel well worth the time; Alger expertly evokes both sympathy and contempt for her characters and writes with a polished ease, telling the story of our time (or a particular glittery, corrupt corner of our time) with a mix of ruthlessness and sensitivity.
Publishers Weekly
Alger introduces us to flawed but sympathetically drawn characters and depicts socialite parties, luscious dinners, exquisite clothes, and holidays in the Hamptons.... [A] financial thriller with a tone that fits somewhere between the novels of Dominick Dunne (though not as flippant) and Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities (though not as serious). —Sheila Riley, Smithsonian Inst. Lib., Washington, DC
Library Journal
Probably the most compulsively readable fiction to come out of the Wall Steet financial scandal so far.... Alger knows the ins and outs of both Wall Street and an upscale NYC lifestyle, nailing all the details, from the plush, hushed atmosphere of high-end law firms to the right tennis togs for a "casual" weekend in the Hamptons. Delicious reading.
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. Explain what the author means by, “The Darlings were people of privilege, and people of privilege was what they would remain, no matter what the cost.” (p. 127) What do you think are the must–haves or must–dos for people like the Darlings? Which aspects of their privileged life sound alluring? Which don't?
2. Paul feels somewhat trapped in the life that he thought he wanted so badly when he married Merrill. In what ways has marrying into the Darling family been a blessing and a curse?
3. Describe the relationship—professional and socially—between Duncan and Marina. How is it mutually beneficial? How does their relationship change over the course of the novel?
4. Ines laments what her life will be like after the scandal: “She would make a lifetime of avoiding the people she had once worked so hard to befriend. Even getting coffee at the deli around the corner would be a gauntlet run. She would have to wear a hat and slip in and out, unnoticed.” (p. 217) Are Ines's fears of being ostracized well founded? Do you believe she had any inkling what her husband was up to? What are ways that she could have stopped things from getting out of hand?
5. Who is the hero in this novel? Why?
6. Lily has “accepted her mother's determination that Merrill was smart and Lily was pretty.” (p. 40) How has Ines's determination affected each of her daughters' lives? Compare their reactions to their family's tragedy.
7. Schadenfreude is the enjoyment we obtain from the troubles of others. The Darlings know their story will be a media sensation. Why do we love watching famous, wealthy, or powerful people fall from grace? What are some recent examples? How is the media helpful in scandals such as the one described here? How is it harmful?
8. Yvonne says, “They were willing to sell out family, to save themselves. That's a line that I just don't ever want to cross.” (p. 294) What do you think of her sentiment? How would your opinion of her change if Paul hadn't been implicated and she allowed someone else to take the fall? What were her true motives for giving information against her employer? Were her motives noble?
9. Denial is a theme that runs through The Darlings. Paul hoped that “with time and a little distance, the complications of the past might slip away.” (p. 78) At Thanksgiving dinner, they move Morty's empty chair “all the way down to the basement, completely out of sight” (p. 187). What are other instances in the novel where characters deny or avoid a problem? What are times when characters address problems head–on? How are the outcomes different?
10. How do you think Carter's and Ines's descriptions of their marriage might differ? According to Ines, she stayed married to Carter so their daughters would grow up having everything she didn't. What are some other reasons she might have stayed in a failed marriage?
11. When she actually gets a chance to be a journalist, Marina finds new purpose and new energy. Who are some other characters who might have benefited from meaningful work? Who among the characters are the hardest workers?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
This Is How You Lose Her
Junot Diaz, 2012
Penguin Group USA
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594631771
Summary
Díaz turns his remarkable talent to the haunting, impossible power of love—obsessive love, illicit love, fading love, maternal love.
On a beach in the Dominican Republic, a doomed relationship flounders. In the heat of a hospital laundry room in New Jersey, a woman does her lover’s washing and thinks about his wife. In Boston, a man buys his love child, his only son, a first baseball bat and glove.
At the heart of these stories is the irrepressible, irresistible Yunior, a young hardhead whose longing for love is equaled only by his recklessness—and by the extraordinary women he loves and loses: artistic Alma; the aging Miss Lora; Magdalena, who thinks all Dominican men are cheaters; and the love of his life, whose heartbreak ultimately becomes his own.
In prose that is endlessly energetic, inventive, tender, and funny, the stories in This Is How You Lose Her lay bare the infinite longing and inevitable weakness of the human heart. They remind us that passion always triumphs over experience, and that “the half-life of love is forever.” (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 31, 1968
• Where—Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
• Reared—Parlin, New Jersey, USA
• Education—B.A., Rugters; M.F.A., Cornell
• Awards—Eugene McDermott Award, Guggenheim Fellowship,
National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, PEN/Malamud
Award, , Rome Prize from American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, National Book Critics Circle Award
• Currently—New York, New York and Boston, Massachusetts
Junot Díaz was born in Villa Juana, a barrio in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. He was the third child in a family of five. Throughout most of his early childhood he lived with his mother and grandparents while his father worked in the United States. In December, 1974, at the age of six, Díaz immigrated to Parlin, New Jersey, where he was re-united with his father.
He attended Kean College in Union, New Jersey for one year before transferring and ultimately completing his BA at Rutgers College in 1992, majoring in English; there he was involved in a creative-writing living-learning residence hall and in various student organizations and was exposed to the authors who would motivate him into becoming a writer: Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros. He worked his way through college: delivering pool tables, washing dishes, pumping gas and working at Raritan River Steel.
After graduating from Rutgers he was employed at Rutgers University Press as an editorial assistant. He earned his MFA from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York in 1995, where he wrote most of his first collection. Diaz has said he was stunned when he received an acceptance letter from Cornell because he had not applied there. Apparently his then-girlfriend applied on his behalf.
Díaz is active in Dominican community and teaches creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is also the fiction editor for the Boston Review. He is a founding member of the Voices of Writing Workshop, a writing workshop focused on writers of color.
His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker magazine which listed him as one of the 20 top writers for the 21st century. He has also been published in Story, Paris Review, and in the anthologies Best American Short Stories four times (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000), and African Voices. He is best known for his two major works: the short story collection Drown (1996) and the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Both were published to critical acclaim.
He has received a Eugene McDermott Award, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a Lila Acheson Wallace Readers Digest Award, the 2002 Pen/Malamud Award, the 2003 US-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He won the 2007 Sargant First Novel Prize and was selected as one of the 39 most important Latin American writers under the age of 39 by the Bogotá Book Capital of World and the Hay Festival. In September of 2007, Miramax acquired the rights for a film adaptation of The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
The stories in Drown focus on the teenage narrator's impoverished, fatherless youth in the Dominican Republic and his struggle adapting to his new life in New Jersey. Reviews were generally strong but not without numerous complaints.
The arrival of his novel (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) in 2007 prompted a minor re-appraisal of Diaz's earlier work. His first book "Drown" was now being widely recognized as an important landmark in contemporary literature—ten years after publication—even by critics who had either entirely ignored the book or had given it poor reviews.
Díaz's first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was released in September 2007. (An excerpt from the novel had appeared previously in The New Yorker's 2007 Summer Fiction issue.) Writing in Time magazine critic Lev Grossman said that Díaz's novel was...
so astoundingly great that in a fall crowded with heavyweights—Richard Russo, Philip Roth—Díaz is a good bet to run away with the field. You could call The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao the saga of an immigrant family, but that wouldn't really be fair. It's an immigrant-family saga for people who don't read immigrant-family sagas. The family in question emigrated from the Dominican Republic and consists of a mother, a son and a daughter—the father having done a runner some years earlier.
The Brief Wondrous life of Oscar Wao was awarded the Sargent First Novel Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Novel of 2007. The novel was selected by Time and New York Magazine as the best novel of 2007. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Los Angeles Times, Village Voice, Christian Science Monitor, New Statesman, Washington Post and Publishers Weekly also placed the novel on their Best of 2007 lists. A poll by National Book Critics Circle ranked The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as the most recommended novel by their members.
His 2012 This Is How You Lose Her is a collection of nine short stories unified by a central character, Yunior, the narrator of several stories in Drown. The stories follow hardheaded Yunior, falling in out of relationships as he yearns for love. The book has earned Junot high praise.
About his own work and artistic outlook Diaz offered these insights...
Place was never something I took for granted, not when I had two geographies in my heart. I take special pleasure in naming things as well as I can, since all I was taught as a kid was to give things false names. Or to give them no name at all. I find these public/private discussions repressive whether they're being generated from within our community or without. How in the world can anyone form an authentic self when there are so many damn rules about how one should act in the world? Us writers, we're just throwing words up into the wind, hoping that they will carry, and someone, somewhere, sometime, will have a use for them. (Biography from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Junot Díaz has one of the most distinctive and magnetic voices in contemporary fiction: limber, streetwise, caffeinated and wonderfully eclectic.... The strongest tales are those fueled by the verbal energy and magpie language that made Brief Wondrous Life so memorable and that capture Yunior’s efforts to commute between two cultures, Dominican and American, while always remaining an outsider.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
Junot Díaz writes in an idiom so electrifying and distinct it’s practically an act of aggression, at once enthralling, even erotic in its assertion of sudden intimacy.... [It is] a syncopated swagger-step between opacity and transparency, exclusion and inclusion, defiance and desire.... His prose style is so irresistible, so sheerly entertaining, it risks blinding readers to its larger offerings. Yet he weds form so ideally to content that instead of blinding us, it becomes the very lens through which we can see the joy and suffering of the signature Díaz subject: what it means to belong to a diaspora, to live out the possibilities and ambiguities of perpetual insider/outsider status.
Leah Hager Cohen - New York Times Book Review
Drown, [Diaz's] 1996 collection of stories, was widely praised for its verve and searing honesty. Readers of that and [The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao] will find much to love in This Is How You Lose Her. Written in a singular idiom of Spanglish, hip-hop poetry and professorial erudition, it is comic in its mopiness, charming in its madness and irresistible in its heartfelt yearning.
Ron Hansen - Washington Post
In Diaz’s magisterial voice, the trials and tribulations of sex-obsessed objectifiers become a revelation.
Boston Globe
[A] propulsive new collection…[that] succeeds not only because of the author's gift for exploring the nuances of the male…but because of a writing style that moves with the rhythm and grace of a well-danced merengue.
Seattle Times
Díaz writes with subtle and sharp brilliance. … He dazzles us with his language skills and his story-making talents, bringing us a narrative that is starkly vernacular and sophisticated, stylistically complex and direct. ….A spectacular read.
Díaz writes with subtle and sharp brilliance. … He dazzles us with his language skills and his story-making talents, bringing us a narrative that is starkly vernacular and sophisticated, stylistically complex and direct. ….A spectacular read.
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
These stories...are virtuosic, command performances that mine the deceptive, lovelorn hearts of men with the blend of tenderness, comedy and vulgarity of early Philip Roth. It's Diaz's voice that's such a delight, and it is every bit his own, a melting-pot pastiche of Spanglish and street slang, pop culture and Dominican culture, and just devastating descriptive power, sometimes all in the same sentence.
USA Today
This collection of stories, like everything else [Díaz has] written, feels vital in the literal sense of the word. Tough, smart, unflinching, and exposed, This is How You Lose Her is the perfect reminder of why Junot Díaz won the Pulitzer Prize...[He] writes better about the rapid heartbeat of urban life than pretty much anyone else.
Christian Science Monitor
Exhibits the potent blend of literary eloquence and street cred that earned him a Pulitzer Prize…Diaz’s prose is vulgar, brave, and poetic.
O Magazine
Searing, irresistible new stories…It’s a harsh world Diaz conjures but one filled also with beauty and humor and buoyed by the stubborn resilience of the human spirit.
People
The centripetal force of Díaz’s sensibility and the slangy bar-stool confidentiality of his voice that he makes this hybridization feel not only natural and irresistible, but inevitable, the voice of the future…[This is How You Lose Her] manages to be achingly sad and joyful at the same time. Its heart is true, even if Yunior’s isn’t.
Salon
(Starred review.) Searing, sometimes hilarious, and always disarming.... Readers will remember why everyone wants to write like Díaz, bring him home, or both. Raw and honest, these stories pulsate with raspy ghetto hip-hop and the subtler yet more vital echo of the human heart.
Publishers Weekly
Díaz’s third book is as stunning as its predecessors. These stories are hard and sad, but in Díaz’s hands they also crackle.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Each taut tale of unrequited and betrayed love and family crises is electric with passionate observations and off-the-charts emotional and social intelligence.... Fast-paced, unflinching, complexly funny, street-talking tough...Díaz’s gripping stories unveil lives shadowed by prejudice and poverty and bereft of reliable love and trust. These are...lives in which intimacy is a lost art, masculinity a parody, and kindness, reason, and hope struggle to survive like seedlings in a war zone.
Booklist
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)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for This Is How You Lose Her:
1. What do you think of Yunior—how would you describe him? Do you find him sympathetic, exasperating, offensive, likable? Is it possible to create a likable character who is a compulsive womanizer?
2. Yunior says of himself, "I’m not a bad guy.... I’m like everybody else: weak, full of mistakes, but basically good." Do you agree with his self-assessment...or is he letting himself off the hook too easily? Isn't his description applicable to anyone?
3. Talk about the family's reaction to their new home in the U.S. What would it be like to find yourself in a totally new culture faced with an different language?
4. (Follow-up to Question 3) In "Invierno" Yunior and his brother, newly arrived in New Jersey, stare out the window. Talk about the literary symbolism of that act—what "staring out a window" might represent metaphorically for anyone new to this country.
5. What role in this book does the American Dream play in Yunior's and his family's new life in America?
6. What about Rafa—what do you think of him? Talk about the relationship between the two brothers and, especially, how Yunior relates to Rafa.
7. What does Yunior think—what do you think—of the way Rafa treats women? Does Yunor admire and envy his brother's treatment of women? Does he want to copy Rafa's behavior...or is he shocked by it?
8. (Follow-up to Question 7) A pattern of infidelity runs throughout the stories. Why is Yunior compulsively unfaithful to women? Consider the influences of his father and brother—are genetics destiny? Explore the idea of a deeper, metaphorical meaning of betrayal in these stories—a betrayal against the self? And why does Yunior leave a written record of his infidelities?
9. (Follow-up to Questions 7 & 8) What makes Yunior so compulsively self-destructive?
10. How does the author deal with Rafa's cancer? If you've read other works about cancer patients, does Diaz differ in the way he handles the illness in this book?
11. In "The Pura Principle," Mami, having not been particularly religious before, turns to Christianity to find solace during Rafa's illness. What is Yunior's attitude toward his mother's new-found devotion...and his attitude toward religion in general?
12. Talk about the final story of this book, "The Cheater's Guide to Love." What is Yunior coming to realize? In what way has he changed or matured?
13. Diaz uses two different points of view in his stories—the first-person "I" and second-person "you." At times he breaks out of the former to speak to readers directly. Any thought as to why—what is the effect of doing so? What about his use of the second-person perspective—is it clever, awkward, or off-putting?
14. Some have described Diaz's language as "Spanglish." But he also uses a healty dose of idioms from other parts of culture, from hip-hop to academia. What other cultural lingo does Diaz draw from, and what is the effect of his "multilingualism"? Does it make for greater realism...or humor...or what? Does it cause difficulties for you, the reader?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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