The Winter Palace: A Novel of Catherine the Great
Eve Stachniak, 2012
Random House
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780553808124
Summary
From award-winning author Eva Stachniak comes this passionate novel that illuminates, as only fiction can, the early life of one of history’s boldest women. The Winter Palace tells the epic story of Catherine the Great’s improbable rise to power—as seen through the ever-watchful eyes of an all-but-invisible servant close to the throne.
Her name is Barbara—in Russian, Varvara. Nimble-witted and attentive, she’s allowed into the employ of the Empress Elizabeth, amid the glitter and cruelty of the world’s most eminent court. Under the tutelage of Count Bestuzhev, Chancellor and spymaster, Varvara will be educated in skills from lock picking to lovemaking, learning above all else to listen—and to wait for opportunity.
That opportunity arrives in a slender young princess from Zerbst named Sophie, a playful teenager destined to become the indomitable Catherine the Great. Sophie’s destiny at court is to marry the Empress’s nephew, but she has other, loftier, more dangerous ambitions, and she proves to be more guileful than she first appears.
What Sophie needs is an insider at court, a loyal pair of eyes and ears who knows the traps, the conspiracies, and the treacheries that surround her. Varvara will become Sophie’s confidante—and together the two young women will rise to the pinnacle of absolute power.
With dazzling details and intense drama, Eva Stachniak depicts Varvara’s secret alliance with Catherine as the princess grows into a legend—through an enforced marriage, illicit seductions, and, at last, the shocking coup to assume the throne of all of Russia.
Impeccably researched and magnificently written, The Winter Palace is an irresistible peek through the keyhole of one of history’s grandest tales. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1952
• Where—Wroclaw, Poland
• Education—University of Wroclaw, Ph.D., McGill
University
• Awards—Canada First Novel Award
• Currently—Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Eva Stachniak was born in Wroclaw, Poland. She moved to Canada in 1981 and has worked for Radio Canada International and Sheridan College, where she taught English and humanities.
Her first short story, “Marble Heroes,” was published by The Antigonish Review in 1994, and her debut novel, Necessary Lies, won the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award in 2000.
She is also the author of Garden of Venus, which has been translated into seven languages. Her third novel, The Winter Palace: A Novel of Catherine the Great, was published in 2012. She lives in Toronto. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
As told from the perspective of Varvara, a Polish servant girl in the 18th century Russian court, spies and lovers lurk everywhere, while brilliantly bedecked royals indulge their every whim. When readers first meet Catherine the Great, she is 14-year-old Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, brought by her mother to Empress Elizabeth as a potential wife for Elizabeth’s nephew and heir, the future Peter III. Sophie quickly realizes that to achieve her marital ambitions, she must please the empress more than her mother or even Peter, who is more interested in playing soldier than he is in Sophie. On advice from the conniving Chancellor Bestuzhev, Elizabeth engages 16-year-old Varvara, well-versed in languages, espionage, and storytelling, to befriend Sophie and spy on her. Varvara’s loyalties soon shift to Sophie. After she leaves the court to marry a palace guard, Varvara secretly keeps in touch with Sophie, who becomes Grand Duchess Catherine, despised by an increasingly petulant Peter and distrusted by the demanding Elizabeth. Since Stachniak (Necessary Lies) can’t invent anything more bizarre than actual czarist history, she wisely focuses on portraying the liaisons of Russian court life, with Varvara’s story paralleling Catherine’s before taking its own unique turn. A sequel about Catherine’s reign is already in the works.
Publishers Weekly
This first novel in a planned trilogy begins at the Russian court of Empress Elizabeth. Searching for a bride for her nephew, grandson of Peter the Great and designated heir to the throne, Elizabeth invites the Prussian Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbs to St. Petersburg. She also enlists Varvara, the novel's narrator and a bookbinder's daughter married to an esteemed member of the palace guard, to befriend and spy on the princess. Trading in secrets while trying to protect her new friend and advance her own position, Varvara follows the loves, disappointments, and successes of Princess Sophie, rebaptized as Catherine, through the last two decades of Elizabeth's rule and the dramatic coup that leads to Catherine's reign as empress. VERDICT Stachniak (Dancing with Kings) sets the scene extravagantly with details of sumptuous meals, elaborate wardrobes, and cunning palace politics. Longtime readers of English and French historical novels will delight in this relatively unsung dynasty and the familiar hallmarks of courtly intrigue. — Cathy Lantz, Morton Coll. Lib., Cicero
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Stachniak’s brilliant, bold historical novel of eighteenth-century Russia is a masterful account of one woman’s progress toward absolute monarchical rule. . . . This superb biographical epic proves the Tudors don’t have a monopoly on marital scandal, royal intrigue, or feminine triumph.
Booklist
All this watchful waiting saps the novel of drama. Historically brilliant and erudite, Catherine comes off as a passive and needy whiner, dependent on others to mediate for her. Varvara is such a covert operator that her personality never emerges. Less a novel than a 400-plus-page prologue to an anticipated sequel.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The novel starts with a quotation from a letter the future Catherine the Great wrote to the British Ambassador, Sir Hanbury-Williams: Three people who never leave her room, and who do not know about one another, inform me of what is going on, and will not fail to acquaint me when the crucial moment arrives. What does this sentence tell us about the future empress of Russia?
2. Varvara is an immigrant to Russia. She is an outsider in many other ways, a tradesman’s daughter among aristocrats, a Roman Catholic among Orthodox Christians, a Polish wife of a Russian officer. How does she cope with the need to belong? How much is she willing to sacrifice for a sense of home?
3. Catherine too is an immigrant. In the 17th century Russia, keen on developing its national identity, her Prussian blood is suspect. How does Catherine cope with xenophobia? How does she turn it to her advantage?
4. Much of the novel is about power. The characters crave it, gain it, lose it. How are the principal women characters: Varvara, Catherine, and Elizabeth defined by their understanding of what power is? What in their background made them think that their definition of power is the right one? And what do men in the novel think of power? Powerful women? Their role in a country ruled by a woman?
5. Why is power so important to these three women? What do they wish to do with it? How much are they willing to sacrifice for it? And, when they finally have it, what do they actually do?
6. Motherhood is another pivotal issue in the novel. Elizabeth wishes to be a surrogate mother to her nephew, Peter, and later to Catherine’s son Paul. Catherine and Varvara give birth to their own children. What does motherhood mean to each of them? How does it transform them? Why?
7. Darya and Paul are two children whose birth we witness in the novel. How does their childhood differ? What is expected of them? What emotional future do envisage for them and why?
8. Love, lust and marriage are always present at the Winter Palace. How do the three principal characters, Varvara, Catherine and Elizabeth, understand them? How do they use love, lust, and marriage to further their own needs? Why?
9. The Russian court is the backdrop of the novel. Historical sources confirm that spying was ubiquitous there. How does being a spy affect Varvara? How does having spies affect Elizabeth and Catherine? How does being watched affect the lives of the courtiers?
10. Loyalty is another important theme in The Winter Palace, national, political, personal. How is each of the three main characters defining loyalty? How does this definition affect their actions?
11. Peter the Great has transformed Russia. Is his presence felt in the novel? In what ways? What is your sense of Russia under Elizabeth and later under Catherine? Why does the country feel snubbed by the rest of Europe? How is Catherine and Elizabeth play to this sense of rejection? What are their visions for Russia? Do they really differ that much?
12. Toward the end of the novel Catherine decides to reassess her own needs as an empress and her obligations as a friend and lover. Is she justified in this decision? How does she do it? What are Varvara’s expectations of their friendship and what is Catherine’s assessment of it?
13. The novel ends when the reign of Catherine II has just begun. How much has Catherine sacrificed for her position? Is it possible to predict from her behavior as Grand Duchess what kind of a ruler is she going to be? What are her best qualities? Her worst?
14. Varvara leaves Catherine’s court. In the last chapter of the novel she meets one of Catherine’s former lovers, recently elected the king of Poland. What are Varvara’s feelings about Stanislaw’s prospects? What does she fear? Why?
15. The novel ends with the image of Varvara beginning to tell Darya the story of her life in Russia. How much do you think she will tell her child? What will she keep to herself? Why?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
How It All Began
Penelope Lively, 2012
Penguin Group USA
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780670023448
Summary
When Charlotte Rainsford, a retired schoolteacher, is accosted by a petty thief on a London street, the consequences ripple across the lives of acquaintances and strangers alike.
A marriage unravels after an illicit love affair is revealed through an errant cell phone message; a posh yet financially strapped interior designer meets a business partner who might prove too good to be true; an old-guard historian tries to recapture his youthful vigor with an ill-conceived idea for a TV miniseries; and a middle-aged central European immigrant learns to speak English and reinvents his life with the assistance of some new friends.
Through a richly conceived and colorful cast of characters, Penelope Lively explores the powerful role of chance in people's lives and deftly illustrates how our paths can be altered irrevocably by someone we will never even meet. Brought to life in her hallmark graceful prose and full of keen insights into human nature, How It All Began is an engaging, contemporary tale that is sure to strike a chord with her legion of loyal fans as well as new readers.
A writer of rare wisdom, elegance, and humor, Lively is a consummate storyteller whose gifts are on full display in this masterful work. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 17, 1933
• Where—Cairo, Egypt
• Education—Oxford University
• Awards—Man Booker Prize; Carnegie
Medal; Whitbread Children's Book of
the Year.
• Currently—lives London, England, UK
Penelope Lively was born in Cairo, Egypt but settled in England after the war and took a degree in history at St Anne's College, Oxford. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a member of PEN and the Society of Authors. She was married to the late Professor Jack Lively, has a daughter, a son and four grandchildren, and lives in Oxfordshire and London.
Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize; once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark. She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger. Her novels include Passing On, City of the Mind, Cleopatra's Sister, and Heat Wave.
Penelope Lively has also written radio and television scripts and has acted as presenter for a BBC Radio 4 program on children's literature. She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
As she's done in so many earlier books, Ms. Lively writes with an astringent blend of sympathy and detachment, emotional wisdom and satiric wit, and the result, here, is a Chekhovian tale that's entertaining, even funny on the surface, but ultimately melancholy in its awareness of time and lost opportunities, its characters' apprehension of mortality and the limits to their dreams.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
One of our most talented writers has written an elegant, witty work of fiction, deceptively simple, emotionally and intellectually penetrating, the kind of novel that brings a plot to satisfying closure but whose questions linger long afterward in the reader's mind.
Susan Cokal - New York Times Book Review
How It All Began,..focuses on the significance of stories, showing how lives touch and tangle with one another....This densely patterned novel feels at once clever and contrived. Each character seems the reflection of another, and several display a similar helplessness....This novel shows that if minor events wreak major effects, so can grand systems shape our own small ends—and our beginnings, too.
Abigail Deutsch - San Francisco Chronicle
The ever-productive, ever-graceful Penelope Lively returns to several pet themes—memory, history and the powerful role of happenstance in reshaping lives—with a fresh and charming novel that could well be called "Chance." ...Lively has provided a golden passport that will sweep you through the border control of other people's lives.
Heller McAlpin - Denver Post
In her latest title, the Booker Prize-winning author of Moon Tiger explores the far-reaching effect of happenstance, as individual circumstances shift, lives change, and the known is perceived in an altogether new light. The novel opens with the mugging of retired schoolteacher Charlotte Rainsford on a London street. Subsequently, a diverse cast of richly embroidered acquaintances and strangers find their lives irrevocably altered by this event, which many of them haven't even heard about. We see how the mugging affects Charlotte's daughter Rose, who works for a historian desperate to return to the limelight, and the spillover to his niece Marion, a cash-poor interior designer hunting for a business partner while carrying on an affair eventually revealed through a stray cell-phone call. Lively delivers her story about these intertwined lives with faultless dexterity, sly humor, keen insight, and deft economy. Verdict: Lively's 12th novel is a feel-good masterpiece that will delight faithful fans as well as those new to the work of this consummate storyteller. —Joyce Townsend, Pittsburg, CA
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. How It All Began is a book about reading and writing. What does reading give to Lively’s more literate characters? What does the absence of reading deny to the others?
2. How might Lively’s application of chaos theory to human relations conflict with the idea of a divinely ordered universe? What quarrels might a religious person have with Lively’s representation of events and their causes?
3. Given the randomness of events in the world that Lively describes, where seemingly wicked events can produce unforeseen happy results, how is it possible to distinguish good from evil?
4. Lively is fond of inserting historians into her fiction. What precisely does a character like Lord Henry contribute to the mood and structure of How It All Began?
5. What are the differences in the ways in which Charlotte and Lord Henry confront old age? Which approach should we admire more?
6. Charlotte’s mugger notwithstanding, the characters who come closest to true evil in How It All Began are unscrupulous professional men like the grasping solicitor Paul Newsome and the amoral financier George Harrington. What does Lively appear to think about the ethics of powerful people in the modern age?
7. Lively shows us two married couples whose shared lives are endangered by infidelities, either real or contemplated. How might these two subplots be compared and contrasted?
8. How It All Began is acutely conscious of the European debt crisis. However, the novel’s embattled characters tend to have either marketable skills or salable property that they can eventually fall back on. How might How It All Began have been different if Lively had chosen to make her characters’ circumstances more dire?
9. What does How It All Began suggest about the effect of television on the intellectual culture of Britain? Does Lord Henry, for all of his dry pomposity, deserve more of a soapbox than electronic media are prepared to give him?
What characteristics does Lively seem to most admire in a woman?
10. What traits does she evidently most despise in a man?
11. Does Rose make the right choice between Gerry and Anton? What are the arguments on either side of this question?
12. Near the end of How It All Began, Lively gives us a glimpse of the baby who lives next door to Charlotte. How does this brief insertion fit in thematically with the rest of the novel?
13, Charlotte observes that the modern novel has tried to free itself of messages but that they still seem to “creep in here and there” (69). What messages do you think have crept into How It All Began, and did Lively really try all that hard to keep them out?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Flight of Gemma Hardy
Margot Livesey 2012
HarperCollins
447 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062064226
Summary
When her widower father drowns at sea, Gemma Hardy is taken from her native Iceland to Scotland to live with her kind uncle and his family. But the death of her doting guardian leaves Gemma under the care of her resentful aunt, and it soon becomes clear that she is nothing more than an unwelcome guest at Yew House.
When she receives a scholarship to a private school, ten-year-old Gemma believes she's found the perfect solution and eagerly sets out again to a new home. However, at Claypoole she finds herself treated as an unpaid servant.
To Gemma's delight, the school goes bankrupt, and she takes a job as an au pair on the Orkney Islands. The remote Blackbird Hall belongs to Mr. Sinclair, a London businessman; his eight-year-old niece is Gemma's charge. Even before their first meeting, Gemma is, like everyone on the island, intrigued by Mr. Sinclair. Rich (by Gemma's standards), single, flying in from London when he pleases, Hugh Sinclair fills the house with life. An unlikely couple, the two are drawn to each other, but Gemma's biggest trial is about to begin: a journey of passion and betrayal, redemption and discovery, that will lead her to a life of which she's never dreamed.
Set in Scotland and Iceland in the 1950s and '60s, The Flight of Gemma Hardy—a captivating homage to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre—is a sweeping saga that resurrects the timeless themes of the original but is destined to become a classic all its own. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 24, 1953
• Where—Perth, Scotland, UK
• Education—B.A., University of York, England
• Awards—L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award
• Currently—Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Margot Livesey is a Scottish born writer. She is the author of eight novels, numerous short stories, and essays on the craft of writing fiction.
Livesey came to North America during the 1970s where she worked to get her fiction published, reportedly because her boyfriend at the time was also a writer.
Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and a number of literary quarterlies. She is also the Fiction Editor at Ploughshares, a renowned literary journal. Livesey served as a judge for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction in 2012.
She currently lives in the Boston area and is the writer-in-residence at Emerson College and at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has formally served as a professor at Boston University, Bowdoin College, Tufts University, Carnegie Mellon University, Brandeis University, Cleveland State University, Williams College, and at the University of California, Irvine. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/16/2016.)
When asked by Barnes and Noble editors in 2004, what book influenced her the most, Livesey had this to say:
This sounds self-centered but the book that had the biggest impact on me as a writer was the novel I wrote when I was twenty-two and traveling around Europe and North Africa. When I reread it at the end of the year I was amazed at how completely I had failed to be influenced by the many wonderful books I'd read. My characters were unbelievable, their conversations preposterous, the plot simultaneously dull and far-fetched, etc., etc. Seeing the enormous gap between the books I loved and my own was what made me want to be a writer in a serious way.
Book Reviews
Livesey's appealing new novel, is, as she has explained, a kind of continued conversation, a "recasting" of both Jane Eyre and Livesey's own childhood…Livesey is drawn to literary gambles, and there's no question that modeling her new book on a classic is a risky move. For the most part, she succeeds. It's a delight to follow the careful dovetailing of the two novels…Livesey is a lovely, fluid writer.
Sarah Towers - New York Times Book Review
Readers…will appreciate Livesey’s smooth and lucid prose. She’s a fine storyteller who can maintain the antique flavor of her tale with far simpler sentences and an updated vocabulary.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
The talented Livesey updates Jane Eyre...taking care to home in on the elements of this classic story that so resonate with readers.... Despite readers’ familiarity with the story line, they will be held rapt.... A sure bet for both book clubs and Bronte fans.
Booklist
“[An] original slant on a classic story.... Within the classic framework, Livesey molds a thoroughly modern character who learns to expect the best of herself and to forgive the missteps of others. The author has a gift for creating atmosphere.
Library Journal
A clever orphan girl, mistreated by relatives, then sent to suffer cruelly at boarding school, finds heartbreak and eventual heartsease with a brooding older man. Sound familiar? "Neither my autobiography nor a retelling of Jane Eyre," says Livesey (The House on Fortune Street, 2008, etc.) about her new novel in the foreword. However, this story bears more than a passing resemblance to Charlotte Brontë's immortal classic. Poignantly narrated, Livesey's tale opens in late-1950s Scotland where, after her uncle's death, harsh new conditions are imposed on 10-year-old Gemma by her cartoonishly callous aunt and cousins. Sent to horrible Claypoole School as a working pupil, Gemma becomes a lonely, bullied drudge until befriended by asthmatic Miriam, whose sad death gives Gemma the power to endure. After the school's closure she moves, now almost 18, to a remote Orkney island, to work as an au pair caring for Nell, the unruly niece of taciturn banker Hugh Sinclair. Love and a surprise proposal follow, and it's here the story parts company most noticeably and least convincingly from Jane Eyre. Shameful secrets, foreign travel and a quest fulfilled follow, before Gemma finally establishes a future on her own terms. Nicely, touchingly done, and the familiar story exerts its reliably magnetic pull, but fans of Jane Eyre will wonder why.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Did Gemma’s name take on new meanings for you in the course of the novel? What about the other names she uses at various points?
2. In the opening chapters, Gemma’s aunt is quite hardhearted, even cruel. Did your opinion of her change by the time you finished the novel?
3. How do you think the various landscapes that Gemma passes through help to change, or inform, her journey?
4. Gemma’s uncle is a devout Christian. Do you think Gemma minds losing her faith? Do her childhood values still govern her actions?
5. Throughout the novel there are various supernatural occurrences. How do you understand these?
6. How do Gemma’s relations with the various orphans she takes care of deepen your sense of her?
7. Gemma is at the mercy of chance but she also takes charge of her life and makes certain crucial decisions. How do you feel about those decisions?
8. What about the role of animals and birds in Gemma’s life?
9. If you’ve read Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, are there places in The Flight of Gemma Hardy where you find yourself remembering Jane particularly vividly? Do those memories change, or deepen, your reading?
10. Did The Flight of Gemma Hardy make you think of other orphan stories beyond Jane Eyre? Why are orphan stories so endlessly appealing?
(Questions developed by Margot Livesey and used with her kind permission.)
Five Quarters of the Orange
Joanne Harris, 2001
HarperCollins
307 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061214608
Summary
When Framboise Simon returns to a small village on the banks of the Loire, the locals do not recognize her as the daughter of the infamous woman they hold responsible for a tragedy during the German occupation years ago.
But the past and present are inextricably entwined, particularly in a scrapbook of recipes and memories that Framboise has inherited from her mother. And soon Framboise will realize that the journal also contains the key to the tragedy that indelibly marked that summer of her ninth year. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—Birth—July 3, 1964
• Where—Where—Barnsley, Yorkshire, England
• Education—B.A. and M.A., Cambridge University, England
• Currently—Currently—lives in Yorkshire, England
Joanne Harris, part French and part English, found the inspiration for her novel Chocolat in her own family history and folklore—herself having lived in a sweet-shop and being the great-granddaughter of a Frenchwoman known locally as a witch and a healer who once disguised herself as an apparition of the Virgin Mary to shock the local priest. Harris, who studied at St. Catharine's College in Cambridge where she received a BA and an MA in French and German, teaches French in an English school and lives in Yorkshire, England, with her husband and daughter. (From the publisher.)
More
I’m a chocoholic! I admit it! I eat it all the time. Almost on a daily basis…but not quite.” Joanne Harris starts the day with drinking chocolate made from milk and proper chocolate. “It’s a stimulant. A bit like coffee. But it tastes better to me.” She doesn’t diet because “I’m not a nice person if I’m doing things like that.”Harris, who is half French, grew up in her grandparents’ corner sweetshop in Yorkshire, in the north of England. Her mother had just come over from France and didn’t speak English. Joanne grew up speaking French, and still speaks it with her own daughter at home. “Most of the family that I have contact with is French.... I’ve been more or less surrounded by French culture since I was born.” She associates chocolate with France, big family reunions and Easter parades. “A lot of members of my family ended up creeping into this story.”
She lives with her husband, small daughter and several cats in the small Yorkshire mining community of Barnsley where she grew up. Harris feels that small communities the world over have much in common, and Barnsley sometimes felt like Lansquenet in its suspicion of the outsider — “because we were a French family, because my mother moved to England without knowing any English and because we were always those funny people at end o’ t’road...." (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
The craftsmanship and emotional power of this novel...place Ms. Harris in the forefront of women writers.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
If Harris's previous novel, Chocolat, was an adorably sweet morsel of French village lore, then this, her third, is a richer, more complex dessert wine. Still using her arsenal of culinary metaphors, quirky characters and slightly surreal incidents, Harris presents a complicated but beautiful tale involving misfortune, mystery and intense family relations. Framboise Dartigen, a feisty yet sensitive girl, grew up in a gossip-ridden hamlet on the banks of the Loire called Les Laveuses. Striving for attention and power, nine-year-old Framboise (or Boise, to her family) took to playing nasty tricks on her headstrong, mentally vulnerable mother, Mirabelle, who had a weakness for oranges. And it was not the usual affliction Mirabelle actually experienced "spells" (akin to epileptic fits) if she even smelled the fruit. But despite Framboise's girlish pranks, Mirabelle's maternal instinct was strong. When her children befriended German soldiers who were in the village during the World War II occupation, things went awry, and mother and children were forced to flee. As Framboise tells the tale, she's in her 60s and has returned to Les Laveuses, posing as a widow named Fran oise Simon. When the caf she owns is reviewed in a national food magazine, her cover is blown and the past resurfaces. Harris has constructed a multilayered plot, punctuated with scrumptious descriptions of French delicacies and telling depictions of the war's jolting effects on one fragile family. This intense work brims with sensuality and sensitivity. (May) Forecast: Given Chocolat's brilliant success in print and on screen, this book will have no trouble attracting attention. Whether the previous book's readers are ready for this more serious novel is questionable, however..
Publishers Weekly
Tragedy, revenge, suspicion, and love are the ingredients for the latest offering from the author of the acclaimed Chocolat. Framboise Dartigen recounts what happened in her tiny village of Les Laveuses during the German occupation and why after carrying the secret for more than 55 years she hid her identity upon returning. Beset by wartime privations, the people of Les Laveuses were a mixture of resistance fighters, collaborators, and financial opportunists. When a German soldier died mysteriously, townspeople were executed, and Framboise's mother was tortured and driven out by her neighbors, who believed that she had collaborated. Only her children knew the truth, and now Framboise, the sole survivor, has come back to claim the family farm and run a little cr perie featuring her mother's recipes. In the album she inherited from her mother are not only her recipes and mementos but also clues to what really happened so long ago. Like the oranges whose fragrance so tortured Framboise's mother, the ending is bittersweet, and readers will love it. Highly recommended. —Susan Clifford Braun, Aerospace Corp., El Segundo, CA
Library Journal
An overwrought and often contrived tale with one too many characters named after food. When elderly widow Françoise Simon returns to the sleepy village on the Loire where she grew up, she's grateful that no one recognizes her after all these years as Framboise Dartigen, daughter of a woman suspected of collaboration during WWII. Framboise sets up a small crêperie and keeps her silence, whiling away the time by studying the immense scrapbook her mother, Mirabelle, left to her. This crumbling but fascinating volume is crammed with recipes, clippings, and handwritten notes in a peculiar code, which she gradually deciphers. Framboise is forced to relive her own central role in the long-ago scandal as the youngest of three children who eagerly take small luxuries like chocolate and silk stockings from the occupying German soldiers, offering in exchange information that can be used to blackmail the villagers. Framboise befriends Tomas Liebniz, youngest and best-looking of the soldiers, and confides her desire to catch Old Mother, an enormous pike lurking in the depths of the Loire. He provides fishing tackle and advice, as well as a means of getting around her disapproving mother. Mirabelle suffers from excruciatingly painful migraines, which can be triggered by the scent of oranges. Tomas gives one to the nasty little girl, who saves the peel and uses its pungent smell to repeatedly incapacitate her mother. Only morphine—now impossible to obtain—eases the pain, and despite her hatred for the Germans who shot and killed her husband, Mirabelle too turns to clever Tomas, who procures it for her. After his accidental death by drowning and a bloody shooting rampage byGerman soldiers, the Dartigens face the wrath of the townsfolk.... Harris (Chocolat, 1999) is capable of elegantly sensual writing, but Five Quarters degenerates into melodrama all too soon.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Framboise's mother loved all fruit—except for oranges, which gave her migraines. Young Framboise exploited this to her advantage. Discuss Framboise's motivations. Was she cruel, or just acting on the impulses that often drive adolescents to commit cruel acts?
2. How did you feel about the children's involvement with Tomas? Were they morally deficient? Do you think that the author judged the children's actions anywhere in the narrative? Discuss how the presence—or lack—of judgement affected the tone of the novel.
3. How is the title, Five Quarters of the Orange, manifested in the structure of the novel?
4, What do you think Old Mother symbolized? When Framboise finally caught Old Mother, what did she lose?
5. Why do you think Framboise returned to Les Laveuses? Was there a part of her that wanted the truth revealed?
6. "Food was her nostalgia, her celebration, its nurture and preparation the sole outlet for her creativity" (pg 4). Framboise said this about her mother's relationship with food. Discuss the many different roles food plays in Framboise's life.
7. How did you feel about the mixture of love and animosity that Framboise and Mirabelle feel for each other? And what about the relationship between Framboise and her own daughter? What do you think the novel says about mothers and daughters in general?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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A Good American
Alex George, 2012
Penguin Group USA
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780425253175
Summary
An uplifting novel about the families we create and the places we call home.
It is 1904. When Frederick and Jette must flee her disapproving mother, where better to go than America, the land of the new? Originally set to board a boat to New York, at the last minute, they take one destined for New Orleans instead ("What's the difference? They're both new"), and later find themselves, more by chance than by design, in the small town of Beatrice, Missouri. Not speaking a word of English, they embark on their new life together.
Beatrice is populated with unforgettable characters: a jazz trumpeter from the Big Easy who cooks a mean gumbo, a teenage boy trapped in the body of a giant, a pretty schoolteacher who helps the young men in town learn about a lot more than just music, a minister who believes he has witnessed the Second Coming of Christ, and a malevolent, bicycle-riding dwarf.
A Good American is narrated by Frederick and Jette's grandson, James, who, in telling his ancestors' story, comes to realize he doesn't know his own story at all. From bare-knuckle prizefighting and Prohibition to sweet barbershop harmonies, the Kennedy assassination, and beyond, James's family is caught up in the sweep of history. Each new generation discovers afresh what it means to be an American. And, in the process, Frederick and Jette's progeny sometimes discover more about themselves than they had bargained for.
Poignant, funny, and heartbreaking, A Good American is a novel about being an outsider—in your country, in your hometown, and sometimes even in your own family. It is a universal story about our search for home. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 27, 1970
• Where—England, UK
• Education—J.D., Oxford University
• Currently—lives in Columbia, Missouri, USA
Alex George is a writer and a lawyer. He was born in England, but presently lives in Columbia, Missouri.
His novel, A Good American, was published in 2012. He is now hard at work on his new novel, provisionally entitled A History of Flight.
Alex has been named as one of Britain’s top ten “thirtysomething” novelists by the Times of London, and was also named as the Independent on Sunday’s “face to watch” for fiction in its Fresh Talent feature.
Alex read law at Oxford University and worked for eight years as a corporate lawyer in London and Paris. He moved to the United States in 2003, and re-qualified as a US attorney. He now runs his own law firm in Columbia, Missouri.
Alex has two children, Hallam and Catherine. His hobbies include listening to obscure jazz albums, playing his saxophone, and cooking (and eating) complicated meals. He is proud to be President of the board of the Voluntary Action Center, a leading nonprofit organization in mid-Missouri. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Music is a hallmark of this novel, too — through the songs coming out of the radio, to the ballads and blues sung in the family restaurant, to the arias Frederick's son Joseph sings to woo his wife. Do you hear me, Broadway? This story would make a delightful musical. Readers also will be moved by this novelist's personal story. George was born in Great Britain but now lives in Missouri. Sometime soon, he'll be sworn in as a citizen of the United States of America.
USA Today
George’s debut novel is a sentimental, lively, and sad family saga spanning four generations, from a couple’s flight out of Germany in 1904 to the hope that their great-grandchildren hold for the future. The story is told by James Martin Meisenheimer, the grandson of the original immigrant couple, the unusually tall Jette and the unabashedly rotund and red-bearded Frederick. This unlikely pair falls in love in Hanover and flees (a mother, not a war) to the U.S. with Jette pregnant. She gives birth to James’s father, Joseph, in Beatrice, Mo., a small town whose residents are capable of both kindness and hatred. Frederick opens a bar, then volunteers for the army and is killed in WWI. Jette turns the bar into a restaurant during Prohibition, a place that feeds the townspeople—with food, yes, but also music—for decades. When James calls his grandmother’s life “one long opera,” full of “love, great big waves of it, crashing ceaselessly against the rocks of life,” he is very much a mouthpiece for author George (and not unlike Styron’s Stingo), whose debut chronicles much of the 20th century through the eyes of one family. George, a British lawyer who has practiced law in London, Paris, and Columbia, Mo., where he now lives, evokes smalltown life lovingly, sometimes disturbingly, and examines the ties of family, the complications of home, and the moments of love and happiness that arrive no matter what.
Publishers Weekly
Despite some dark moments, the book's overall tone is warm and nostalgic as the couple's grandson tells his family's story. George's narrator is bland when compared with his more colorful relatives, and this causes the novel to lose steam once the focus is on his own experiences rather than those of his parents and grandparents. Nonetheless, this memorable and well-written exploration of one family's search for acceptance in America should strongly appeal to readers who enjoy family sagas and historical fiction. —Mara Bandy, Champaign P.L., IL
Library Journal
An attorney originally from England, first-time novelist George offers a love song to his adopted state of Missouri in this multigenerational saga of the Meisenheimers from their arrival as German immigrants in 1904 up to the present....The melodramas of James and his brothers' lives—sexual escapades, religious crises, even the big secret ultimately revealed—are more complicated but less compelling than his parents' and grandparents'. At times the novel feels like a fictionalized historical catalogue, but there are lovely moments of humor and pathos that show real promise.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Frederick is an uncritical lover of America, but Jette is not. What is it that Frederick loves most about America? What is it that Jette has reservations about? In what ways do you agree or disagree with each of them? Why does Frederick go off to war? Do you think it is selfish of him? Is he deserting his family?
2. One of the central paradoxes of the immigrant experience that the novel dramatizes is the desire to remain connected to the old country and yet become fully American. Do you think assimilation happens more quickly and fully in the United States than elsewhere? Do you think it is happening as rapidly with today’s immigrants as it did generations ago?
3. What does being a good American mean to you? Do you think Frederick ultimately is one?
4. Why does Jette make her protest when the war ends? Is it simply a way of mourning Frederick’s death?
5. Some of the citizens of Beatrice are offended by Jette’s antiwar protest. Are there limits to the principle of freedom of speech, and if so, where do those limits lie? Does Jette’s protest cross those limits?
6. Is Joseph’s quarrel with the Reverend Kellerman justified? Why do some people turn toward religion after times of crises, while others turn away?
7. William Henry Harris and Lomax are the only two African-American characters in the book, and both are treated fairly horribly by everyone other than the Meisenheimer family. Would you describe Beatrice as a racist town? Is it simply a product of its time?
8. The evolution of Beatrice in a way mirrors the nation’s transformation during the twentieth century. What did American towns and people gain, and lose, with modernization?
9. Are there parallels between the gradual metamorphosis of the restaurant and the family’s integration into American society?
10. Why does James stay in Beatrice? Do you think he really has a choice?
11. Some secrets are revealed at the end of the novel. Did you see these twists in the story coming? Does every family have secrets?
12. Why does Rosa never reveal to James their relationship?
13. The author is an Englishman who now lives in the United States. How might the book be different if it were written by an American?
14. There are many different kinds of music in the novel. Which was your favorite, and why?
(Questions issued by publisher.)