The House at Tyneford
Natasha Solomons, 2011
Penguin Group USA
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780452297647
Summary
It's the spring of 1938 and no longer safe to be a Jew in Vienna. Nineteen-year-old Elise Landau is forced to leave her glittering life of parties and champagne to become a parlor maid in England.
She arrives at Tyneford, the great house on the bay, where servants polish silver and serve drinks on the lawn. But war is coming, and the world is changing. When the master of Tyneford's young son, Kit, returns home, he and Elise strike up an unlikely friendship that will transform Tyneford—and Elise—forever. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Natasha Solomons is a British screenwriter and author of several novels: The Song of Hartgrove (2015), The Gallery of Vanished Husbands (2013), The House at Tyneford (2011), and Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English (2010). She lives with her husband in Dorset, England. (From the publisher.)
See an interesting article on Solomon's dyslexia in London's Evening Standard.
Book Reviews
Both a love story set during the Second World War and an elegy to the English country house... the greatest pleasure of the novel is its stirring narrative and the constant sense of discovery.
Times Literary Supplement (UK)
In 1938 Vienna, where it's no longer safe to be Jewish, 19-year-old Elise Landau is forced to leave her family and her upper-class lifestyle. As her parents await a visa to travel to New York and her sister prepares for a new life in California with her husband, Elise ventures off to the English countryside to serve as a maid in Christopher Rivers's ancestral home. Finding it difficult to adapt to her new station, the naive Elise yearns at first to rejoin her family. But with no end to the war in sight, Elise soon grows to love the house and everyone in it, including Christopher's reckless, impulsive son, Kit. Her newfound happiness is spoiled only when she learns that her parents are still in Vienna and that the war might claim the lives of those she loves the most. Verdict: Although certain parts are overwritten and drag, Solomons's (Mr. Rosenblum's List) poignant tale provides richly textured details that hold the reader's interest. Fans of Ann Patchett will find Solomons's style similar and will appreciate how the subdued tone and the quiet of the countryside contrast with the roar of war. —Natasha Grant, New York
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. Elise points out how different Kit is from other boys she knows. What is your first impression of Kit? Are you drawn to him? How would you describe his relationship with his father, Mr. Rivers?
2. A confrontation with Diana inspires Elise to shock the partygoers during Kit’s birthday. What was your reaction to this moment? How did it affect Kit and Elise’s relationship? How did it change the way Mr. Rivers and the staff at Tyneford saw Elise?
3. What sacrifices does Mr. Rivers make to help Elise and her family? What did this tell you about Mr. Rivers? How would you describe his feelings toward Elise as the novel progresses?
4. Kit and Elise’s romance stirs up a great deal of emotion in and around Tyneford. What is your opinion of how Mr. Rivers receives the news of Kit’s love for Elise? What social and class challenges do you feel Kit and Elise faced?
5. What was your opinion of Kit’s decision regarding his involvement in the war? What do you feel motivated him in this decision? How did his relationships with Elise and his father affect his decision?
6. What happens to Kit? How does this affect Elise and Mr. Rivers? How does it affect the relationship between them?
7. The danger of war comes home when Elise spots a German fighter flying near Tyneford. What is significant about this event? What do you gather about Elise’s character from her reaction to this moment?
8. What does Elise discover about the novel Julian hid in the viola? What did you make of this turn of events? What impact does it have on Elise? What piece of work does the novel inspire and what significance does it have for Elise in the end?
9. What is your opinion of where Mr. Rivers and Elise’s relationship ends up? As you see it, what events led to Tyneford’s fate? What significance did Tyneford have to Elise, Kit, and Mr. Rivers? Can a place like Tyneford exist in today’s world?
10. Why do you think the novel in the viola blank?
11. The novel contains a concerto, and the viola contains a novel. What is the significance of music in the novel?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir
Elena Gorokhova, 2009
Simon & Schuster
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781439125687
Summary
Elena Gorokhova’s A Mountain of Crumbs is the moving story of a Soviet girl who discovers the truths adults are hiding from her and the lies her homeland lives by.
Elena’s country is no longer the majestic Russia of literature or the tsars, but a nation struggling to retain its power and its pride. Born with a desire to explore the world beyond her borders, Elena finds her passion in the complexity of the English language—but in the Soviet Union of the 1960s such a passion verges on the subversive.
Elena is controlled by the state the same way she is controlled by her mother, a mirror image of her motherland: overbearing, protective, difficult to leave. In the battle between a strong-willed daughter and her authoritarian mother, the daughter, in the end, must break free and leave in order to survive.
Through Elena’s captivating voice, we learn not only the stories of Russian family life in the second half of the twentieth century, but also the story of one rebellious citizen whose curiosity and determination finally transport her to a new world. It is an elegy to the lost country of childhood, where those who leave can never return. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1955
• Where—St. Petersburg, Russia
• Education—University of Leningrad; Ph.D.,
Rutgers University (New Jersey)
• Currently—lives in Ridgewood, New Jersey, USA
Elena Gorokhova grew up in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, in a courtyard that became a more accurate emblem for the Soviet life than the ubiquitous hammer and sickle: a crumbling façade with locked doors and stinking garbage bins behind them. Like everyone else, when she was nine, Elena joined the Young Pioneers and had a red kerchief tied around her neck. A tiny cell in the body of a Leningrad school collective, she promised to live, study, and work as the great Lenin bequeathed every citizen to do.
But she harbored a passion that grew into an un-Soviet failing: at age ten she was seduced by the beauty of the English language and spent the next eight years deciphering its secrets at Leningrad English school # 238, to her mother’s bewilderment. Her mother—born three years before the Soviet state—became a mirror image of her Motherland: overbearing, protective, difficult to leave. A front-line surgeon during WWII, she wanted her daughter to be a doctor and a builder of communism, but Elena, in her mother’s words, was “stubborn as a goat.”
What followed was the English Department of Leningrad University, a marriage to a visiting American student, and a scandal, both public and private. After six months of official hurdles and family turmoil, Elena left for America, a ravaged suitcase on the KGB inspector’s table with twenty kilograms of what used to be her life. What followed was unknown, and frightening, and filled with mystery.
In the United States, Elena received a Doctorate in Language Education and has taught English as a Second Language, Linguistics, and Russian at various New Jersey colleges and universities. She is married (again) and has a daughter. After taking Frank McCourt’s memoir workshop in 2004, she recalibrated everything she’d written about her Soviet life and turned it into A Mountain of Crumbs.
Her mother now lives with her in New Jersey, just as she did in Leningrad. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Slight…but endearing, a collection of well-sculptured memories about the deprivations and joys of [Gorokhova's] childhood in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). It's a book about many things, notably class, politics, identity and sex, but one that circles around as often as not to the author's rumbling stomach.... A Mountain of Crumbs is a minor-key coming-of-age story, one that's tinged with real darkness around its edges.
Dwight Garner - New York Times
[Gorokhova's] exquisitely wrought, tender memoir of growing up in the Soviet Union…could be taught as a master class in memoir writing: the key is not to collect facts and recollections but to truthfully reimagine one's life…Gorokhova writes about her life with a novelist's gift for threading motives around the heart of a story, following its plot with a light touch and unwavering honesty. Each chapter distills a new revelation in poetic prose.
Elena Lappin - New York Times Book Review
Despite the feelings of claustrophobia and low-level menace conjured up, the portrait of a Soviet childhood is dreamily nostalgic.... [Yet] Sometimes it’s hard to believe how limited people’s lives were in Seventies Russia. Gorokhova finds herself, as a young woman, never having been inside a restaurant, not knowing what asparagus is when she reads about it in a book, used to eating all the stale food in the house before being allowed to eat anything fresh. ....In the end her escape is as unromantic as it is unexpected..... The overall result, though, is a stunning memoir: subtle, yet brimming with depth and detail. It leaves you wanting more. A sequel about life in America, please?
Viv Groskop - Telegraph (UK)
Like Angela’s Ashes, the memoir of her one-time teacher Frank McCourt, Gorokhova’s A Mountain of Crumbs opens with a wish that youth had been an easier enterprise.... [But] despite Gorokhova’s debts to McCourt...Gorokhova may lack McCourt’s lush storytelling skills, but her book is also free—thankfully—of his sugary sentiment. A Mountain of Crumbs is a straightforward account of Russia in the postwar decades, one that takes the reader confidently through the slow sinking of the Soviet ship.
Alexander Nazaryan - Christian Science Monitor.
Extraordinarily rich in sensory and emotional detail.... An engrossing portrait of a very lively, intelligent girl coming of emotional and intellectual age in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union.
Bookpage
Artful memoir about the angst and joys of growing up behind the Iron Curtain.... Articulate, touching and hopeful.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Explain the significance of the book title. Where did it originate? How does it keep recurring throughout the course of the book? In what way is a “mountain of crumbs” a metaphor for the failing Soviet Union?
2. Discuss the notion of vranyo. How does Elena first learn about vranyo? How do Russians play the game of vranyo in their daily lives? How is this game played in Elena’s family?
3. Elena believes her mother was once “cheerful and ironic, before she turned into a law-abiding citizen so much in need of order.” (p.99) Why do you think she changed? How did Elena avoid falling into the same trap?
4. Elena and her tutor cannot find the Russian equivalent of the English word “privacy.” What do you think this says about Russia?
5. How do Elena’s parents and grandparents represent the “old” Russia? What ideologies does Elena have trouble accepting? In what way does she voice her opposition to her mother and her beliefs in the old ways? Does she voice her opposition to anyone else?
6. What is the “secret” that Elena struggles to learn about during her teenage years? Why does she feel she cannot turn to her mother? How is her statement “There is a door between us, as always, and that’s where all important things are kept, behind closed doors” (p. 124) a metaphor for the current state of Russia and her desire to go to America?
7. After learning about what intelligentny means, who do you think best embodies it? Elena? Her sister? Her mother? Do you need to be intelligentny to decide if others are?
8. Recount the encounter between Elena and Kevin in the marketplace. How is it indicative of the differences between the East and the West?
9. Were you surprised when Elena accepted Robert’s offer of marriage? What does this say about Elena? Did your opinion of her change after learning this? If so, in what way?
10. Elena chooses to end her story with her departure to America, followed by a short epilogue about the present day. Why do you think she chose to end the story there? How would reading the story of her first few years in America impact the tone of the book for you?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Girls in White Dresses
Jennifer Close, 2011
Knopf Doubleday
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307596857
Summary
Wickedly hilarious and utterly recognizable, Girls in White Dresses tells the story of three women grappling with heartbreak and career change, family pressure and new love—all while suffering through an endless round of weddings and bridal showers.
Isabella, Mary, and Lauren feel like everyone they know is getting married. On Sunday after Sunday, at bridal shower after bridal shower, they coo over toasters, collect ribbons and wrapping paper, eat minuscule sandwiches and doll-sized cakes.
They wear pastel dresses and drink champagne by the case, but amid the celebration these women have their own lives to contend with: Isabella is working at a mailing-list company, dizzy with the mixed signals of a boss who claims she’s on a diet but has Isabella file all morning if she forgets to bring her a chocolate muffin.
Mary thinks she might cry with happiness when she finally meets a nice guy who loves his mother, only to realize he’ll never love Mary quite as much. And Lauren, a waitress at a Midtown bar, swears up and down she won’t fall for the sleazy bartender—a promise that his dirty blond curls and perfect vodka sodas make hard to keep.
With a wry sense of humor, Jennifer Close brings us through those thrilling, bewildering, what-on-earth-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life years of early adulthood. These are the years when everyone else seems to have a plan, a great job, and an appropriate boyfriend, while Isabella has a blind date with a gay man, Mary has a crush on her boss, and Lauren has a goldfish named Willard.
Through boozy family holidays and disastrous ski vacations, relationships lost to politics and relationships found in pet stores, Girls in White Dresses pulls us deep inside the circle of these friends, perfectly capturing the wild frustrations and soaring joys of modern life. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1979
• Where—Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., Boston College; M.F.A., The New School
• Currently—lives in Washington, DC
Jennifer Close is the American author of four novels, including her well known 2011 debut, Girls in White Dresses.
Close was raised in Chicago, Illinois, and attended Boston College. After earning her B.A., she headed to New York to get her M.F.A. at The New School where, according to an interview in the Washington Post, she wrote in a male voice to "avoid being too revelatory."
After an internship at The New Yorker, she spent another year at Vogue, then landed a job with a startup magazine called Portfolio. She rose to become the assistant managing editor before the magazine closed in 2009. It was at Portfolio, while waiting for proofs to be delivered late at night, that she began typing stories about her life and the lives of her friends who found themselves on an endless cycle of weddings, showers, and bachelorette parties—events which left them exhausted and broke. Those stories eventually became the 2011 novel, Girls in White Dresses.
When her boyfriend and now husband, Tim Hartz, joined the Obama White House, Close moved to D.C. to be with him. That life has also proven a rich lode to mine—this time for her fourth book, The Hopefuls.
Novels
2011 - Girls in White Dresses
2013 - The Smart One
2013 - The Things We Need
2016 - The Hopefuls
Book Reviews
Close’s witty voice...charts the romantic shenanigans of a bevy of New York women in their 20s, before career success or Botoxed foreheads. Dating is a phenomenon to be analyzed in improvised group therapy over cocktails.
New York Times
Follows three women and peripheral friends as they alternately flounder and flourish through their 20s. Weddings provide the backdrop as the women feel their way in and out of inert relationships and crappy jobs, trying to figure out who they want to be.
Washington Post
Anyone who has seen The Sound of Music—that is, everyone—will likely recognize the title of Jennifer Close’s Girls in White Dresses as a certain Oscar Hammerstein lyric. But given the tone and tenor of this debut novel, it shouldn’t surprise that the reference isn’t particularly affectionate.... Close, who is 32, captures the extended post-collegiate ennui associated with her generation.... Quite endearing.
Elysa Gardner - USA Today
Close straddles the line between melancholy and breeziness as she chronicles the exploits of recent college grads trying to make it in New York City . . . Hints at something deeper and truer: not just the adventure of being young, but the unmooring of it, too.
Leah Greenblatt - Entertainment Weekly
Jennifer Close’s debut, Girls in White Dresses, follows a group of young women doing all the things they know they shouldn’t—falling for one’s boss, dating gay men—all while drinking far too many mimosas at other people’s weddings.
Vogue
Artfully spare prose adds a literary tinge to the chick lit staples—navigating relationships, bridesmaid duties, disappointing first jobs—explored in Close's debut collection. At their weakest, the stories owe too much to their predecessors: "The Showers," in which the recurring characters travel to a suburban bridal shower, is essentially a retelling of a snappier Sex and the City episode, and Isabella's boss in "Blind" has the dark shades of The Devil Wears Prada. The standout moments come in "The Peahens," when Abby reveals her unusual family and her struggle to fit in (she "studied hard, taking notes on the silver link bracelets all the girls wore"), and the sharp "Hope," when Shannon takes a backseat to her boyfriend's naïve political passion for "the Candidate" of a presidential campaign. Occasionally funny (as when Isabella refers to her dinner dates as "parallel eating"), but without the risk taking of The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing or the deeply explored emotion of Prep, these stories will resonate with readers in the throes of the quarter-life churn who can see themselves in the cast.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Isabella, Mary, and Lauren are three friends in New York City navigating relationships, careers, early adulthood, and other people's weddings. Lauren is a real-estate agent who meets a man who could be Mr. Right—or a sociopath. Isabella is an assistant at a publishing house who suffers through a bad relationship, then meets a man who seems perfect until he asks her to move to Boston with him. Mary is a serious lawyer, married with two kids, whose husband is a perennial mama's boy incapable of grocery shopping on his own. Mixed in with the trials and tribulations of the protagonists are humorous vignettes from the lives of some of their other friends and acquaintances—many of whom are on their way to the altar or trying to find a way to get there. Verdict: This series of linked short stories is reminiscent of Melissa Bank's The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing. It is modern and funny, with original, wry observations. Close's debut novel will appeal to both fans of contemporary women's fiction with a hip vibe and readers who enjoy old-school chick lit.
Library Journal
With a light touch and utterly believable characters, Close’s...appealing debut manages to capture the humor, heartache and cautious optimism of her protagonists.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Which character did you relate to most closely, and why?
2. How does Close use humor to convey character? Are the women themselves funny, or the situations they find themselves in?
3. Ambivalence—toward jobs, men, apartments, and children—is a recurring theme in Girls in White Dresses. Why do you think that is?
4. What did Isabella learn from JonBenét?
5. Several of the characters keep some pretty big secrets, such as the way Abby keeps her friends away from her hippy parents. How does this affect Abby’s life? How do the book’s other secrets affect the characters?
6. What is the metaphor of the peahen?
7. On page 98, Isabella thinks about her young nephew, Connor, “All he wanted was to know what to expect. His world didn’t look like he’d thought it would, and she understood. How could he keep calm if he couldn’t see?” Who else does this describe?
8. Why does “the ham” become so significant for Lauren?
9. Mary wonders why nobody warned her that during her first year as a lawyer, “You will be constantly afraid.” (page 120) What role does fear play in the women’s lives?
10. “Kristi and Todd stood with their shoulders touching, wrapped in the cloth. It reminded Isabella of the way that Lauren and Kristi used to huddle together, whispering and laughing at jokes that only they understood.” (page 174) Why does Isabella get so emotional during the “chuppah within a chuppah” wedding scene?
11. Connect the dots between Shannon, Dan, Barack Obama, and the contestants on “The Biggest Loser.” Why is hope so important?
12. Throughout the book, questions of identity pop up. For example, when a friend gets divorced and decides to keep her married name, Isabella thinks it may be because, “She’s afraid no one will remember who she is.” (page 249) How do these characters determine who they are? By the end, who seems to have created the strongest sense of self?
13. What is the turning point for Isabella in her relationship with Harrison?
14. Why is Lauren ready to call the turtle Mark gives her Rudy, when she wouldn’t use that name for the goldfish?
15. Discuss the last scene. How have the women changed over the course of the book? Who is the most satisfied with her life?
16. Where do you imagine Isabella, Mary, and Lauren will be in five years?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Little Bride
Anna Solomon, 2011
Penguin Group USA
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594485350
Summary
When 16-year-old Minna Losk journeys from Odessa to America as a mail- order bride, she dreams of a young, wealthy husband, a handsome townhouse, and freedom from physical labor and pogroms. But her husband Max turns out to be twice her age, rigidly Orthodox, and living in a one-room sod hut in South Dakota with his two teenage sons. The country is desolate, the work treacherous.
Most troubling, Minna finds herself increasingly attracted to her older stepson. As a brutal winter closes in, the family's limits are tested, and Minna, drawing on strengths she barely knows she has, is forced to confront her despair, as well as her desire. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1976
• Raised—Gloucester, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Brown University; M.A., Iowa Writers' Workshop
• Awards—Pushcart Prize (twice); Missouri Review Editor Prize
• Currently—lives in Providence, Rhode Island
Anna Solomon is an American journalist and the author of two novels—The Little Bride (2011) and Leaving Lucy Pear (2016).
Raised in Gloucester, Massachusetts, Solomon received her B.A. from Brown University. After college, she moved back home to try her hand at writing, enrolling in workshops at GrubStreet writing center in Boston.
When her year at home was up, Solomon took an internship with National Public Radio's Living On Earth in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The position led to a full-time reporting job and eventually to radio producing, working both in Cambridge and Washington, D.C., on award-winning stories about environmental policy and politics. Although Solomon says she loved working in radio (and may some day return to it), she was still committed to becoming a novelist, so she used her commuting time to write fiction.
An M.F.A. at Iowa Writers' Workshop came next. Needing steady income following her graduate work, Solomon turned to teaching. All the while, she continued writing—short stories and essays—for periodicals.
She also married a classmate from Brown, by then a professor in environmental climate law. The couple has two children.
In 2011 Solomon published her first novel, The Little Bride; five years later she released Leaving Lucy Pear. Both books have been well received.
Solomon’s short fiction has appeared in One Story, Georgia Review, Harvard Review, Missouri Review, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. Her stories have twice been awarded the Pushcart Prize, have won The Missouri Review Editor’s Prize, and have been nominated for a National Magazine Award.
Her essays have been published in the New York Times Magazine, Slate’s Double X, and Kveller. (Adapted from Wikipedia and Glen Urquhart School bio. Retrieved 9/20/2016.)
Also see Anna's interview with Erika Driefus.
Book Reviews
In her emotionally honest debut novel, The Little Bride, Anna Solomon draws on an 1880s U.S. homesteading movement called Am Olam. Jewish newcomers were encouraged to settle out west as pioneers. The result wasn't some cheerful "little shtetl on the prairie," as Solomon's heroine discovers. Impoverished Minna Losk is a 16-year-old Jewish mail- order bride from Odessa and one of the more realistic pioneers depicted in recent historical fiction. Suffering hasn't hewn her into a plucky stereotype. Instead, she is someone the reader instantly empathizes with. She wants love, and ends up with a husband twice her age. She craves comfort, and ends up in a South Dakota one-room sod hut. A fascinating if sometimes bleak page turner.
USA Today
An engrossing slice of history...[that] offers a precious glimpse of the wondrously strange story of Jewish immigration evoked by Anna Solomon in her debut novel. Like other talented young Jewish—American novelists Jonathan Safran Foer and Dara Horn, Solomon fruitfully imagines faraway times and climes in The Little Bride— Europe's Odessa and America's Dakota Territory in the late 19th century, specifically - and creates a winning 16-year-old heroine in Minna Losk.... [A] moving debut.
Miami Herald
(Staff pick.) A friend gave me Anna Solomon’s The Little Bride and I haven’t been able to put it down. It’s the story of a Russian mail-order bride who ends up in the American West with a rigidly Orthodox husband—but really, that’s just scratching the surface. Last week, we fielded an advice question from a woman wondering about “good reads” that also had literary merit—I wish I’d finished this one at the time, as it matches that description perfectly.
Sadie Stein - Paris Review
Solomon's intensely scripted debut was inspired by the Am Olam movement of the late 19th century in which hundreds of Jews fleeing persecution were drawn to a utopian vision of communal agrarian life across the United States. Unfortunately, Solomon abandons the fertile promise of the novel's Tolstoy-worthy premise, and limits the story's scope to one eccentric family in self-imposed exile from an Am Olam community in South Dakota, and tells the tale from the narrow point of view of a disgruntled mail-order bride.... Solomon does deliver plenty of atmosphere and crisis, if not a convincing story, and establishes herself as a writer to watch.
Publishers Weekly
Late 1880s Russia offers few choices for 16-year-old Minna Losk...[who] leaves the hopelessness, the pogroms, and the poverty for a farm in South Dakota, where, as a mail-order bride, she receives an unfriendly welcome from her husband-to-be.... Verdict: Solomon writes unsparingly of the harsh realities that women like Minna faced on the American frontier. Although the concluding chapters seem rushed, most readers will feel compelled to stay with this page-turner to its solemn finish. A strong debut novel, highly recommended for those who appreciate exceptional historical fiction.—Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Grand Junction, CO
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. What destiny is Minna trying to escape in fleeing Odessa? Do you think she'd have been better served by staying and marrying a man her aunts would have recommended over taking a blind leap of faith?
2. The author infuses The Little Bride with sweeping historical details and lush portraits of not only the teeming cities but the vast Western landscape. While reading the novel, did you feel as though you'd been transplanted to the great, vibrant plains of South Dakota? What was life like for these colonists? What challenges awaited them as they pulled away from the bigger cities, especially as the seasons changed?
3. Why do you think the mail-order bride business thrived and appealed to some participants? What reasons did Max have to summon Minna to South Dakota? What was he hoping for in his "little bride"? What role was Minna stepping into?
4. Minna undergoes many hardships during her journey to America. What life is she expecting there? What parts of herself did she want to leave behind?
5. How does working with the earth on Max's farm change Minna? What skills does she possess when she first arrives, and how does she build her self-reliance? How does being in survival mode cause her to mature?
6. How does the absence of Minna's mother echo throughout her life, and over the course of the novel? How is this loss—and the lessons and wisdom Minna would never receive from her—mirrored in Samuel and Jacob's lives, who also have had their mother leave them?
7. Think about the idea of faith. Max is ostensibly the most faithful character, but how is his faith a weakness? Which other characters exhibit faith? How does Minna have faith?
8. What similarities are there between Max and Minna's father? How are both marked by the grief of losing their wife, and how does each choose to live afterward?
9. How would you describe Minna's relationship to Jacob and Samuel? Do you believe Minna when she admits to coming to feel love for her husband and stepsons? What is the turning point for her, and does she later reverse this feeling?
10. How is a woman's worth tied into her fertility—then and even now? In the book, how is this demand heightened on the frontier versus in the more urban, settled cities? Why?
11. The idea of virtue is important throughout the novel. Which characters do you think are virtuous? How do they express their virtue? Is virtue always a good quality?
12. Minna makes a choice for herself at the end of the novel. Do you think this is a sign of maturity? What do you think she has learned from her experience?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Sisters
Nancy Jensen, 2011
St. Martin's Press
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312542702
Summary
Growing up in hardscrabble Kentucky in the 1920s, with their mother dead and their stepfather an ever-present threat, Bertie Fischer and her older sister Mabel have no one but each other—with perhaps a sweetheart for Bertie waiting in the wings. But on the day that Bertie receives her eighth-grade diploma, good intentions go terribly wrong. A choice made in desperate haste sets off a chain of misunderstandings that will divide the sisters and reverberate through three generations of women.
What happens when nothing turns out as you planned? From the Depression through World War II and Vietnam, and smaller events both tragic and joyful, Bertie and Mabel forge unexpected identities that are shaped by unspeakable secrets. As the sisters have daughters and granddaughters of their own, they discover that both love and betrayal are even more complicated than they seem.
Gorgeously written, with extraordinary insight and emotional truth, Nancy Jensen’s powerful debut novel illuminates the far-reaching power of family and family secrets.
In the tradition of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, a dazzling debut novel about the family bonds that remain even when they seem irretrievably torn apart. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Nancy Jensen is a graduate of the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College. Her short stories and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Northwest Review, Other Voices, Under the Sun, ACM: Another Chicago Magazine, and Louisville Review, as well as in the anthology I to I: Life-Writing by Kentucky Feminists.
Since 2007, her work has been honored with an Artist Enrichment Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, an Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council, and two nominations for the Pushcart Prize. She shares her home with ten rescued cats and her dog, Gordy, who is her partner on a pet-therapy team visiting hospitals, nursing homes, assisted-living facilities, and daycare centers. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Like so many painful family stories, this one begins with a miscommunication.... Engrossing though all this is, Jensen’s strenuous manipulations, all done to keep the estranged sisters apart, can be maddening.... Nonetheless, Jensen’s portraits of these women are richly alive.... As the sisters continue to orbit away from each other, a new generation of remarkable women “raised up on secrets” takes center stage.... Here The Sisters tells a bigger story. The women change in accordance with the times, captured in vivid details.
Caroline Leavitt - New York Times
This first novel from Nancy Jensen is an extremely ambitious effort to recount American history during the 20th century...through the experiences and perceptions of women. It’s an interesting idea, but Jensen sketches her characters primarily by what they do, rather than what they think or feel. And these women, in general, don’t do very much.... Jensen can’t seem to get the car jump-started. These characters never come to life. The author writes in a foreward that her story is based on a mysterious 50-year estrangement between her grandma and a long-dead sister. But in this narrative, events seem not just mysterious but intractably implausible.
Carolyn See - Washington Post
As the years pass, each [sister] nourishes a hidden sadness that reverberates through time as their daughters and granddaughters, "raised up on secrets," struggle with the deep-rooted consequences.... Jensen's likable story argues for openness and forgiveness between sisters, for their own sake and for the health of their families.
Anne Leslie - People
Fans of The Help will be beguiled by Jensen's debut novel. Set in rural Kentucky in the midst of the Depression, and inspired by Jensen's own family history, it centers on an incident that created a lifelong breach between two sisters, one that reverberates throughout three generations. It's a sweet but never saccharine tribute to the pull of family.
Whole Living
First-time novelist Jensen—tracing the lives of two sisters separated in their youth by a tragic misunderstanding—[has] an observant eye, adept characterization, and a keen grasp of social issues.
Publishers Weekly
All families have secrets, and those kept by the Fischer family are particularly shameful and life changing. In 1927, sisters Mabel and Bertie are separated for life when their stepfather commits suicide and Mabel runs off with Bertie's boyfriend.... Verdict: Set against the dramatic backdrop of American history from the Great Depression into the 21st century, this beautiful but disturbing debut novel, inspired partly by the author's own family history, will engage readers of well-written, thought-provoking women's fiction. —Andrea Kempf, formerly with Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, KS
Library Journal
(A Best Book of 2011.) A single tragic event shapes four generations of American women in this accomplished and poignant debut.... Encompassing the lives of women in the 20th century, this sprawling saga is tender and satisfying, with a heartbreaking end.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. There are many secrets in The Sisters, beginning with Mabel’s decision not to tell Bertie about Jim Butcher. In trying to understand her sister’s behavior, fourteen-year-old Bertie wonders if “the things she didn’t know were what kept her safe.” What secrets do other characters keep, and how do you think the secrets ultimately help or hurt their loved ones?
2. How does the period in which each woman comes of age affect her experience and shape her outlook on what is possible?
3. How do the main characters perceive loyalty? Betrayal? What do you think of their perceptions?
4. How do Bertie’s girlhood losses affect her daughters’ and granddaughters’ relationships with men?
5. Bertie, Alma, and Lynn are accused by other characters of being hard and cold. How do you see them? To what extent do you think they change in the course of the novel?
6. At the end of her life, Bertie struggles to cry out to Rainey and Lynn, “Forgive. Forgive.” Why do you believe some characters are able to forgive and others not? Do you believe everything can or should be forgiven?
7. What does the novel suggest about whether families are born or made?
8. When Daisy expresses her concern that Mabel is setting herself up for emotional pain by photographing young men bound for Vietnam, Mabel tells Daisy, “You can’t protect yourself from loss.” Do you think this is true? What happens to the characters in the novel, and to people in your experience, when they try?
9. In her interview with Ed Bradley, Mabel says, “I don’t think any real war [is ever over]—large, small, between countries, between people. Even the wars inside ourselves. Something always remains.” Do you agree—in the novel and/or in real life?
10. The Sisters is structured as a series of chronological, interlocking narratives, sometimes with strikingly different perspectives of the same events. In what ways does this structure reflect the experience of an individual within a family?
11. Bertie tells Grace, “Something can happen to change your life so sudden, you can’t get over it fast enough…And that changes things for them too, all in a line.” Do you think that happens in most people’s lives at one time or another? If so, is the chain reaction inevitable, or can someone choose to break the chain?
12. How were you affected when Bertie wrote Deceased on the letter from Mabel, and Mabel later decided not to follow up on Nick’s possible lead about Bertie’s whereabouts? Can you imagine either of them acting differently? Did you find the conclusion satisfying?
(Questions issued by publisher.)